Covid lockdown: I am not a 'murderer' for questioning the restrictions and highlighting the damage done to mental health – Michelle Ballantyne MSP

I have been thinking about fear a lot recently and the power that it has to alter and control people’s behaviour.

Michelle Ballantyne, who was told of three suicides on the same day recently, is concerned about the effect of the Covid lockdown on people's mental health (Picture: PA Archive/PA Images)

One recent morning, when I switched on my phone, the first message I saw was from a colleague advising that one of their apprentices had taken his own life, he was 21.

That is the second time I have woken up to the news of the suicide of a young person since the lockdowns began. By 11am another two suicides of family friends had been communicated. I feel numb with despair for what is happening. Fear without hope is overwhelming and for young people we are seeing a rise in mental health problems that is unprecedented.

The Princes Trust reported that over 40 per cent of young people are reporting they do not see any future for themselves. Childline says its calls are inundated with teenagers who are suffering from anxiety and depression.

And all of this is in response to a virus that we know is not especially dangerous to young people. However, it is the young that are paying the price and they are being told they must sacrifice their futures to protect the NHS and save the lives of their grandparents.

Strangely one of the strongest protective factors in human beings is that of a parent for their child. So why suddenly are we standing back and accepting that we deprive our children of their education, the ability to socialise with friends, the right to be outside playing sport, dancing and making music?

For nearly a year now we have issued the messages “stay home”, “cover your face”, “keep your distance from others”; never before in my lifetime have I seen the population controlled in such an effective way.

Never would I have believed that we would be willing to destroy people’s jobs, education and mental health, to separate us from our terminally ill relatives and prevent us from saying goodbye – and then argue that it was for our own good. It has been a phenomenally successful campaign of fear. The fear of the one thing we all have in common, death.

Such is the use of behavioural psychology that the population has been subdued into submission. Anyone who cries foul or questions the logic of the approach is immediately attacked as being an extremist, a Covid-denier, an anti-vaxxer, a lockdown-sceptic or, even worse, a “murderer”.

Yes, I have received messages saying I am a murderer because I expressed concern at governments’ unwillingness to look at any science other than the vision of their own advisers.

Worryingly those advisers have focused on lockdown as the only solution to suppressing (and even suggested last year that they could eradicate) the Covid-19 virus. Despite numerous academic and scientific studies to the contrary, lockdown has become the global response to dealing with this pandemic.

Professor Neil Ferguson was interviewed in the Times on 26 December 2020 and spoke about the UK government’s Sage advisers’ reaction to China’s use of lockdowns saying, “it’s a Communist one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought… and then Italy did it. And we realised we could”.

And they have. By using everything they know about behavioural psychology. The very knowledge that has been accumulated to help people overcome their fears and rational or irrational physical responses has now been weaponised to manage a population and bring it to compliance. We have become lambs prepared to sacrifice everything on the alter of suppressing a virus.

And now normality seems distant, our thoughts and hopes have been reprogrammed like the man in solitary confinement who, on being given an hour’s exercise in the yard, feels gratitude for the freedom. The things we took for granted, seeing our families, singing in praise, playing sport or just enjoying the company of friends.

These are simple pleasures that we dream of and will congratulate the government on returning to us. We are forgetting we are free, we are forgetting that our homes were once our castles, we are forgetting to question the governments’ decisions, we are forgetting to protect our young and put their futures first.

Warm weather will bring some relief as the summer will exercise its natural virus suppression, and the vaccine rollout is being presented as the way out. But what of next year and the next virus? What have we learnt?

The NHS has structural weaknesses that sees it under pressure every winter as a result of challenges from influenza and winter vomiting. Add on a pandemic virus and it is not hard to understand the stress experienced.

So, we need to make changes, we proved that we can build bed capacity by constructing temporary hospitals but we still had a staffing problem. We need to increase training and flexibility in our staff so we can adapt service delivery and quickly have a larger number of intensive care staff to meet need.

We need to consider the idea of a reserve force so when you leave the NHS or retire you give two to three years’ retained service and can be called upon in times of emergency. Training days would be paid to keep you ready and responsive to backfill as staff are moved forwards to the intensive front line. We need to have effective separation between pandemic treatment and the continuation of priority healthcare.

We need to understand the epidemiology of virus, protecting the vulnerable without harming those who are not vulnerable to death.

But most of all we must never again blind ourselves to the collateral damage to our children and young people by using behavioural approaches based on fear.

Michelle Ballantyne MSP is leader of Reform UK Scotland in the Scottish Parliament

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