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Quiet hospitals? False PCR tests? Nafeez Ahmed reports on how the British commentator Toby Young is using COVID-19 disinformation to radicalise conservatives
COVID-19 disinformation has become the new frontline for far-right entryism. As the UK Government has stumbled from crisis to crisis, its mishandling of the pandemic response has stoked fear, anxiety and anger that has provided ample fuel for dangerous conspiracy theories to be widely disseminated – not by fringe voices, but by influencers with significant ties to the US and UK governments.
To be sure, as I have previously reported, draconian lockdowns have always been avoidable; catastrophic Government failures worsened both the first and second waves; and the best solutions to transition out of the crisis to near normal are being overlooked. Yet such failures, along with the devastating impact of both the pandemic and the lockdowns on ordinary citizens (especially the most vulnerable), have empowered fringe voices and speculative theories that have increasingly reached mainstream audiences.
One epicentre of this new disinformation nexus is British right-wing commentator Toby Young, who has become a top publisher of demonstrably false and scientifically illiterate COVID-19 misinformation. Yet Young was recently featured in the Financial Times for his COVID-19 publishing, and has ties to some of the most influential figures in British establishment conservatism across policy, media and parliament – raising questions about how fringe pseudo-science is attempting to influence public discourse through the prism of ‘free speech’.
Free Speech or Fake Speech
Toby Young – the London associate editor of Quillette magazine – founded the Free Speech Union (FSU) in late February 2020 to defend the free speech rights of its members. The FSU’s advisory council includes several well-known right-wing media personalities such as Julia Hartley-Brewer of talkRADIO, Allison Pearson of the Telegraph, David Rose of the Daily Mail, and Paul Staines of Guido Fawkes. This means that Young’s work has extensive reach among mainstream conservative influencers.
Toby Young’s other FSU advisors include a number of senior academics and public figures: Baroness Claire Fox; Policy Exchange integration chief David Goodhart, appointed by Liz Truss as a Commissioner at the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC); Professor Matthew Goodwin of the University of Kent; David Green of Civitas; Professor Eric Kaufmann of Birkbeck; Mark Littlewood, the director general of the hard-Brexit lobby group the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA); Lord Matt Ridley, the climate-denying Conservative coal baron; world-renowned bestselling author Lionel Shriver – to name just a few.
Young’s admirable ability to gather this network of powerful voices across the spectrum of right-wing punditry, academia, and policy is striking evidence of the extent to which his work infiltrates public discourse. It also goes some way towards explaining the penetration of pseudo-scientific COVID-19 disinformation into the mainstream media.
In April, Young launched the website LockdownSceptics.org where he has published and promoted ‘scepticism’ toward public health responses to COVID-19, with a particular focus on the UK.
For all intents and purposes, though, Lockdown Sceptics is essentially a front for Toby Young’s FSU. The FSU logo is stamped on every page of the website, and the platform is designed and maintained by Ian Rons, FSU co-founder and company secretary.
Despite Young’s claim to want to “avoid conspiracy theories”, LockdownSceptics.org has rapidly become a hotbed of pseudo-scientific conspiracy theories, fake news, and disinformation.
Among the most egregious pieces of disinformation, Young has published on Lockdown Sceptics is an unverified and unverifiable ‘investigative report’ claiming to interview a registered nurse whistleblowing on how she has spent five months during the COVID-19 crisis working at an empty 800-capacity hospital where she spent all day doing nothing. The implication of the piece, as illustrated by how it was interpreted on social media and Lockdown Sceptics commenters, was that the pandemic was being deliberately exaggerated as part of a wider unexplained conspiracy.
Fake News and Fear Mongering
The empty hospital story created a narrative that would tend to undermine public trust and create a climate of paranoia.
The author of that piece, Gavin Phillips, is not a journalist but described himself to Byline Times as a businessman who sells Photoshop plugins.
His only relevant qualification for writing the article is that he is a proud COVID denier who runs a Twitter account spreading conspiracy theories about the pandemic. Among them, Phillips repeatedly promotes a website called ‘Stop World Control’ which claims COVID-19 is a planned hoax to impose world government and surveillance microchips.
Phillips explained to Byline Times that he made up his mind very early during the pandemic, believing that it was a fake crisis manufactured by governments.
“When Boris Johnson declared the lockdown on 23 March I was quite shocked. I did not believe such measures were necessary,” he told me. “As we progressed into April it became abundantly clear to me that there was no pandemic. I used Twitter as a very useful research tool. It’s like a newswire service with people posting useful articles and opinions you won’t see in the mainstream media. I have learned long ago never to trust the mainstream media, and I did not believe any of their fear-mongering about their ‘millions will die’ nonsense… As we went into June, I could not believe that the Government was still pushing the lies about the so-called massive COVID-19 deaths.”
Having publicised these views on Twitter since the crisis began, Phillips said the alleged nurse saw his tweets and got in touch; he had put out a specific call to healthcare workers for “inside information”. The article describes the nurse saying: “I did not think this was a pandemic from the start. I think people were being intentionally frightened and this is what captured my attention.” The piece was pitched to several other publications – UnHerd, the Telegraph, OffGuardian – who all turned it down, before Toby Young took an interest.
Phillips said that he had verified the nurse’s license number to check that she did indeed work in the profession, but acknowledged failing to fact-check any of her claims. He didn’t even ask her which hospital she was working at, and did not attempt to verify any of her allegations about the said hospital himself: “I did not ask her which hospital it was. I did not want to push it further. She was quite nervous about it all, because if her identity is exposed, her life will be hell,” Phillips said. “Even if I knew which hospital it was, I could never gain access to it. Even if you could bluff your way into the hospital, you would never be allowed to wander around it. So what possible evidence could you collect?”
In short, Phillips took her claims on faith. When asked if I could verify her identity in confidence to fact-check the story, Phillips claimed that the nurse had refused. He also said that Lockdown Sceptics did nothing to verify or fact-check the accuracy of any of the assertions in the interview.
Byline Times asked Toby Young about these claims, but he chose not to reply to my request for comment.
Forgetting to Fact-Check
As for Phillips, he was reluctant to give away the regional location of the alleged hospital. But, with some prodding, he eventually said that it was somewhere further south of London, not far from Epsom. He remarked that the nurse’s own colleagues at the hospital did not agree with her views – and that attendance at the hospital appeared to now be returning to normal. “If they find out, well, her colleagues will say to her why have you been saying all this.”
While there is no reason to assume the story’s validity, it is not inconsistent with what we already know. It’s no big revelation that some hospitals in the south of England had fewer patients overall during the peak of the pandemic due to the success of rapid NHS preparations. Data between April and June (within the period described by the alleged nurse) shows that the average number of occupied beds at hospitals in Surrey declined by 37% compared to the same period the preceding year. This was because frantic NHS efforts to increase capacity led to an increase in bed availability along with the cancellation of elective operations, and earlier discharges.
In other words, the reality is the complete opposite of LockdownSceptics.org’s scientifically fraudulent claims
“While more beds were made available, there were actually fewer people in hospital as elective care was cancelled”, reported SurreyLive a month before Lockdown Sceptics’ article. It is, therefore, no surprise that some hospital staff in these areas experienced far less than the usual workload for a limited period of time.