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.
