Why Did Covid Officials Target the 'White Van Man'?

Together with the other 'targets' the conclusion is obvious

A tranche of documents recently published by the UK Covid inquiry included a number of emails, some of which discussed pandemic messaging.

In one email, sent on 26 July 2020, Alex Aiken from the Cabinet Office wrote to Simon Case, the UK’s senior civil servant and copied in Lee Cain, the No 10 communications director during the pandemic. This followed a meeting that the Covid team had had, where they had produced a summary of advice “to simplify and dramatize the fight against Covid to provide clarity and greater impact”.

If Covid was as deadly as they were making out, why the need to dramatize the fight? The very definition of the word dramatize is to exaggerate the seriousness or importance of an incidence or situation. They are telling us in the first line of their email that they want to exaggerate the fight against Covid.

Aiken wanted everyone to unite behind a single objective “by consistently following understandable and actionable behaviours, which if not followed will have serious consequences for our friends, family and fellow citizens”.

To do this Aiken wanted very specific audience targeting. Their analysis suggested that specific groups believed that the threat was exaggerated which undermined “the required behaviour, particularly as now Covid feels like a more theoretical risk for many people”.

The audiences they wanted to target included:

• BME (Black & Minority Ethnic) communities;

• Young people who were in contact with older people; and

• “White Van Man”.

These groups were selected because “these are groups who have a reduced fear of the virus”.

Aiken and his team wanted to show this target audience the “consequences of not complying”. They favoured a “much starker approach of warning of the risk of non-compliance”.

Note that the warning was of the risk of non-compliance, not of the risk of getting ill or dying from Covid.

To target these groups they proposed a number of actions including:

• Partnering with BME radio stations;

• Asking the Football Association to hold a minute silence to remember those who have died during the cup final;

• Getting the BBC to produce films showing the risks and consequences of not complying;

• Asking digital platforms (Netflix, Amazon) for ways to reach specific audiences. Furthermore, they wanted to bring all the broadcast and newspaper editors in to brief them; and

• Increasing the use of BAME (Black, Asian & Minority Ethnic) medics within the media.

They also considered having a national day to remember those who died, equivalent to WWI & II Remembrance Sunday in every town and village.

If all those ideas did not work, as a last resort, they suggested appointing street or local wardens to monitor compliance.

War level propaganda. And as they admit, propaganda for compliance, not because those people were ever at risk from Covid.

So let’s take a look at the target audience and discuss why they were chosen.

BME communities. These tend to be more distrustful of governments and so are more likely to go ahead with their normal day to day lives. In doing so, it became quite obvious, quite quickly, that Covid wasn’t killing everybody. Supermarkets were packed with people and nobody ever heard of a checkout assistant who died from Covid, even though they were being exposed to germs for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.

Furthermore, many of these communities live in bigger households. So, once again, they would have had more exposure to people living normal lives or talking to people who hadn’t locked themselves down. They would have probably known a lot of people who had had Covid, had a bit of a cough and were barely ill.

The next group - ‘young people who were in contact with older people’ - would have again realised that Covid had been massively exaggerated. They would have seen old people getting Covid and, in many cases, just brushing it off. Why are we having lockdowns if these elderly people aren’t dying, they would have asked.

They may have even noticed that the elderly people who were dying were those who weren’t having visitors. It would have been quite obvious how quickly some people deteriorated without human contact.

And finally the ‘white van man’. As I found out earlier, a ‘white van man’ means different things around the world but in the UK a white van man generally means a tradesman. The label conjures images of a cheeky chappie driving around with his arm out of the window, shouting ‘oi oi’ at all the scantily dressed women in the summer. But in reality, a ‘white van man’ is a hard working plumber, builder, electrician or carpenter, the van being perfect transportation for all his tools.

Now that I’ve successfully offended every white van man, back to the serious point, why target him? Because, like the other two groups, his life would have continued as normal. He would have been in and out of people’s houses in order to earn a living. Even when we were in the strictest lockdowns I know most tradesmen continued to work for cash (so as to be off the books) because people were still having floods and electrical faults etc.

I also know of many tradesmen who were raking in furlough money whilst continuing to work for cash but that’s for another post.

The reason BME communities, young people who visited the elderly and white van men were all put into the same group to target with propaganda is because they were seeing through the BS. They were continuing with their normal lives, some barely locking down at all and most importantly, they would have seen that everybody wasn’t dying. They would have watched the TV, read the headlines and realised that what they were being told didn’t match with their reality.

I’ll finish with a quote from C.S. Lewis to highlight this point.

“Why you fool, it's the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything.”