Incidents of racist violence during Covid-19 were encouraged and exacerbated by a proliferation of online racism in the form of hate speech, anti-Asian memes, images, videos and cartoons, and conspiracy theories.12 The overall intention was to blame, shame and degrade individuals and communities, implicating victims (and members of East Asian and Southeast Asian communities in general) as dirty or unhygienic spreaders of contagion. In predominantly white nations and communities, racist language and violence have always been methods of policing white supremacy, of communicating to ethnic minorities that hard-won civil rights and safeties are fragile and easily set aside. They have always been about degradation, humiliation and shame.

Shame is a common response to racism, where the feeling arises not because someone has done something wrong, or necessarily feels flawed or at fault in some way; instead, racism-induced shame is intimately related to social power.13 As the philosopher Aness Webster notes, shame arises because an individual experiences a 'loss of power over when her stigmatised racialised identity is made salient'.14 A common harm of racism, she argues, is the 'emotional cost of feeling shame… and an ongoing vulnerability to shame'.15 In this way, racist violence and verbal abuse frequently result in shame, fear and insecurity, not just for direct victims but for members of the targeted group as a whole. The taunts that Mok and the takeaway owner endured rehearsed well-travelled cultural tropes over migration and contagion, brought out even more forcefully in the whispered invective to Sheen. The reference to 'filth' collapsed fears over viral transmission with racist intimations of dirtiness and poor hygiene, keying into widespread speculation and scapegoating over the origins of the virus in a Wuhan wet market.

Indeed, one of the more publicized examples in the early pandemic was the case of 'Bat Soup Girl'. *Russia Today* and *The Daily Mail* found footage of a Chinese woman eating a bat, publicizing it as 'disturbing' and 'revolting' evidence of eating habits in Wuhan.16 As the video gained traction, the woman, travel vlogger Wang Mengyun, came forward to apologize for eating the bat. Explaining that the video was filmed as part of a travel segment on Palau, Micronesia, in 2017, she detailed the online abuse she had received, including phrases like 'You're abnormal' and 'You're disgusting'. Although Wang was undoubtedly the direct victim of the abuse, commentators like James Palmer have noted how 'the Palau video has been deployed in the United States and Europe to renew an old narrative about the supposedly disgusting eating habits of foreigners'.17 Despite working from incompatible theories, narratives on the genesis of Covid-19 in Wuhan wet market or secret government laboratory share a consistent internal logic, drawing a clear conceptual line between a healthy and hygienic West and a polluting and infectious East, with disease 'coded as a foreign invasion'.18

There is a serious historical question playing counterpoint to these shaming causative stories. What is historically specific about anti-Chinese racism in the UK, and the way it relates to contagion, conspiracy and shame? As an extensive literature of scholarship attests, real or manufactured anxieties over disease have long been a feature of anti-immigration rhetoric in the global West.19 With both the UK government and the Opposition attempting to outdo one another on border policing as a technique of virus management, imagined dichotomies between a healthy polity and a diseased and dangerous other are very much here to stay.20

When Sarah Owen spoke in parliament on anti-Asian racism, she criticized the Metropolitan Police's continued use of the term 'oriental people': 'we do not have enough time in this debate to unpack what is wrong with that term, but it is 2020, not 1920'.21 Owen's reference to 1920 was astute, gesturing to particularly pervasive patterns of anti-Chinese racism around the turn of – and well into – the twentieth century. Anti-Semitic and Sinophobic propaganda framed Jewish and Chinese migrants as 'carriers of "foreign" diseases', a characterization rooted in a visceral and shaming language of illness and dirt. The pamphleteer Joseph Banister, for example, intentionally blurred the boundaries between the two, describing Jews as an 'Asiatic' and 'Oriental' presence whose blood was 'loaded with scrofula'.22 In his 2020 essay on 'The Chinese Virus', Roger Luckhurst explores the Gothic literary traditions that drew from and fed into political anxieties over Eastern contagion in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including fictional depictions of exotic plagues ravaging Britain, allegorical writing on vampirism (with identical tropes of infection and pollution) and literatures preoccupied with Chinese and Japanese expansionism.23 Other contemporaries tapped into an overlapping characterization of Chinese migrants and nationals as insidious conspirators and 'puppet masters', degrading and debauching Western society from within. The General Secretary of the National Union of Dock Labourers, for example, warned in 1906 that the Chinese labourer 'comes here like an international octopus spreading its tentacles everywhere'.24 Although carrying no obvious connotations of dirt and disease, the imagery of the octopus is relatively easy to parse: fluid, alien, manipulative, strangling and impossible to pin down.25

After 1913, Sax Rohmer's famous supervillain, Dr Fu Manchu, simultaneously drew on and sustained the racialized image of shadowy and malevolent criminal networks, and evil masterminds bent on world domination.26 As Luckhurst puts it, Manchu is tentacular, 'always slithering his arms around Western interests'.27 In the first of Rohmer's prolific canon, *The Mystery of Dr. Fu Manchu* (published in the United States as *The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu*), the antagonist reveals himself as an expert in the deadly application of animal and biological agents:

'One of my pets, Mr. Smith,' he said, suddenly opening his eyes fully so that they blazed like green lamps. 'I have others, equally useful. My scorpions – have you met my scorpions? No? My pythons and hamadryads? Then there are my fungi and my tiny allies, the bacilli. I have a collection in my laboratory quite unique. Have you ever visited Molokai, the leper island, Doctor? No?'28

In this striking passage, Chinese culpability for the spread of disease is reconfigured – not as a concomitant of poor hygiene and dirtiness, or even an innate racial affliction, but as an esoteric and deliberate biological weapon. Manchu's reference to the leper colony on the Hawaiian island Moloka'i played into widespread beliefs that Hansen's disease had been introduced to Hawaii by Chinese immigrants in the 1830s and 1840s, in the context of wider associations between the disease and Chinese migration.29 Given Manchu's unnaturally long life and professed mastery over bacterial technologies, this reads as a boast as well as a threat. A later iteration of the arch-villain (in the 1950s television series *The Adventures of Fu Manchu*) also has him threaten America with a deadly plague.30

Drawing an uncomplicated line from Rohmer to conspiracy theories over a Wuhan lab leak in 2019 would be a mistake, but they both drink deep from the same well. Despite the cosmetic point that official languages around race are supposed to have shifted, it is difficult to interpret the Metropolitan police's designation of victims of racist violence as 'oriental' as somehow discordant or out of step with the events of 2020. When Edward Said's *Orientalism* was published in 1978, he described a long tradition of looking at the global east from the global west, with an exoticizing, shaming, imperialistic gaze.31 During Covid-19, this gaze resulted in significant violence and harm. As the pandemic wore on, however, it was by no means the only way that racialized bodies were subjected to damaging scrutiny and shame.

#### The lepers of Leicester

When Manchu taunted the protagonist of *The Mystery of Dr Fu Manchu,* Dr Petrie, with his knowledge of the leper colony on Molokaʻi, the implication – that he could, himself, effectively induce leprosy – promised both bodily sickness and social death. On 2 July 2020, the UK government announced the trial of a new public health approach to local and regional restrictions, based on numbers of cases and rates of infection. The announcement of the first 'local lockdown' in the city of Leicester followed from the new policy of identifying and policing specific viral 'hotspots'. As the Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours – a sub-group of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) – later reflected, this strategy of identification and isolation allowed shame to accrue around distinct and identifiable cities, towns, neighbourhoods and postcodes.32 Shame here was the by-product of public health policies which drew national attention to specific places, spotlighting the people who lived there as vectors for disease and raising questions over differences in behaviour as causes for higher rates of transmission.

Like Leicester, these 'hotspots' were frequently places with histories of spatial stigma, or concentrations of communities with long experiences of shaming and racialization.33 In journalistic and social media discourses, particularly around the city of Leicester, leprosy surfaced as a metaphor for the pariah status that residents were made to endure. National news outlets, for example, reported the experience of a woman from West Knighton,

Tracy Jebbett, who felt that she had been branded a 'Leicester leper' after a holiday park in Cornwall closed its gates to holidaymakers from the city and some of its surrounding areas.34 Inhabitants of the city felt simultaneously abandoned and hyper-visible, a combination with a heightened potential for shame. Ashamed that they were unable to relax restrictions alongside most of the rest of the country on 4 July 2020, they also believed they were being singled out and punished unfairly.35 In their dissection of the shaming effect of 'local lockdowns', the SAGE sub-group speculated on the long-term effects of designating areas as Covid-19 'hotspots'; referring specifically to areas in Leicester, they suggested that they could potentially 'become known as a place to avoid for fear of contracting COVID-19', setting patterns of avoidance and disinvestment in process which, if economic decline results, can become self-perpetuating: 'an area that people do not want to visit will become an area in which people do not want to live'.36

The local lockdown in Leicester drew together a series of pressure points on shame, racialization and pandemic behaviour. Two studies from the COVID and Care Research Group (CCRG) at the London School of Economics engage extensively with stigma, race and place, taking Leicester as a specific case study and analysing testimony from residents.37 In their nuanced and detailed work, the CCRG identify overlapping layers of potentially shaming discourses on ethnic minorities and Covid-19. Shame, they argue, is coded into public health vocabularies which attempt to present as innocuous or value-neutral:

Moral languages of pollution, hygiene and recklessness have been used to apportion blame to certain groups. Avoidance of stigmatised populations is often articulated through the oblique language of safety and protection, rather than illness or infection. Conversations about safety are used as a proxy for conversations about transmission and epidemiology; where the language of protection takes the place of the language of illness and infection.38

In Leicester, media narratives on multi-generational households, overcrowding, labour conditions and religious observance were used as a proxy to lay the blame for viral transmission at the door of racialized communities, misunderstanding and neglecting important needs, complexities and cultural practices.39 This resulted in an 'acute legacy' of stigma, with the centre of Leicester City acquiring a lasting reputation as the 'hotzone' or 'dangerzone'.40 The CCRG conclude that people of colour

#### Coughing While Asian: Shame and Racialized Bodies

across the UK have faced a double burden of stigma during Covid-19; a transmission stigma connected with high rates of infection among their communities, and an intensification of 'existing experiences of stigma and racism caused by histories of exclusion, discrimination, and colonialism', with particular groups 'blamed for non-compliance with COVID-19 restrictions'.41 In a phone-in to the radio station LBC on 31 July, for example, the Conservative MP for Calder Valley, Craig Whittaker, blamed increased restrictions in his constituency on 'the BAME communities that are not taking this seriously enough'.42

While Whittaker was condemned for his comments (although not by Boris Johnson), he was only saying the quiet part loud; by announcing a last-minute escalation of quarantine measures on the eve of Eid al-Adha, the Muslim religious festival, Matt Hancock was widely interpreted as implying that Muslim communities in particular were not abiding by social distancing guidelines.43 Examining anti-Muslim racism in the pandemic, Elizabeth Poole and Milly Williamson situate heightened anxieties around Muslim behaviour and religious observance as an example of how racism 'adapts and stretches over new situations', with old tropes of social threat and lack of integration repackaged for the Covid-19 context.44

#### Race and Covid-19 health inequalities

As early as spring 2020, evidence pointed to the uneven number of Covid-19 infections among ethnic minorities in the UK; in addition, members of racialized communities who contracted the virus were consistently found to be at greater risk of serious symptoms, hospitalization and death than white people of similar age and gender.45 During the early months of the pandemic, shocking racial disparities in the deaths of doctors and other healthcare workers in the UK gave the first indication that mortality rates might also be skewed at a national level. In March and April 2020, 64 per cent of all nurses and 95 per cent of all doctors who died of Covid-19 were ethnic minorities.46 The reasons behind these findings are multi-layered, intersecting with other complicated causal relationships between health and structural racism. In terms of infection rates, a number of factors can help to explain the evidence. A disproportionately high presence in the healthcare professions among particular groups – such as Black women from African backgrounds or men from Indian backgrounds – probably results in increased rates of occupational exposure.47 In the case of healthcare workers, individuals

from ethnic minority backgrounds reported higher rates of bullying and harassment during the pandemic, and felt less confident and safe in reporting PPE shortages, with the result that they were more likely than white coworkers to be exposed to the virus.48 Indeed, some nurses and healthcare assistants from ethnic minority backgrounds felt they were being 'targeted' to work on Covid-19 wards.49

In the broader community, minoritised groups generally have higher levels of risk as a result of 'inequalities in exposure to the social determinants of health' where the environments and conditions within which individuals live, work, grow and age – such as their place of employment, housing, their access to goods and services, access to healthcare, and food scarcity or security – cause inequalities in chronic conditions. These in turn increase the severity of Covid-19 infection.50 Within the UK, ethnic minorities are more likely to live in urban areas, where infection has been higher and social distancing more difficult to achieve. They have been less likely to be able to stop working or work from home, disproportionately making up the workforce in service and frontline positions, directly placing them at higher risk, sometimes even in comparison with white co-workers in the same job. Public health edicts around staying at home, moreover, work from a white middle-class imagining of domestic space which ethnic minorities are frequently excluded from.51 Even non-compliance with public health guidance, where it actually occurs, has to be understood in the context of historic and understandable mistrust of medical and state authority, and the less than proactive approach taken by the UK government to communicate information in diverse cultural and linguistic contexts.52

This phenomenon, in which shame was adroitly shifted away from structural factors and placed squarely with racialized communities, was reproduced even more insidiously in the lack of a sincere public reckoning with the relationship between racism and reduced health outcomes. Literatures on minority stress, the psychological and physical burden of racism, and significant and pervasive health inequalities among racialized groups are well evidenced and well established.53 While heightened hospitalization and mortality rates among ethnic minorities with Covid-19 had genuine public visibility and cut-through, politicians, media outlets and prominent health advisors largely abdicated responsibility for explaining where and how these disparities originated. Despite good, early evidence on why infection, morbidity and mortality rates might be higher among particular communities, there was a comprehensive political failure to engage publicly with structural racism as a causative factor for health inequalities in Covid-19. The publication of the Sewell Report (the findings of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities) in March 2021, a document which has been described by the Runnymede Trust as 'frankly disturbing' in its suggestion that 'institutional racism does not exist', represented the culmination of a long refusal on the part of conservative politicians to acknowledge that racism in the UK exceeds the isolated behaviour of individual bad actors.54 In the deliberate fixation on individual responsibility and behaviour in public health, media and political rhetoric (see Chapters 1 and 5 of this volume), racist anxieties about disease transmission, culturally contingent living arrangements and the misuse of public and private space were allowed to fill a discursive gap between undeniable facts and figures (in the form of publicly visible epidemiological data on inequalities in Covid outcomes) and the uncomfortable and jarring context required to make them explicable. As Vanessa Apea and Yize Wan point out in their response to the Sewell Report, the Covid-19 pandemic has in fact been a peerless illustration of the existence of structural racism, with the accompanying denial acting as an important component of its perpetuation.55

Although sometimes complicated, structural narratives on Covid-19, systemic racism and health inequality are by no means impossible to publicly communicate. In terms of public health evidence, homogenizing categories such as BAME have limited explanatory value. Granular, intersectional work on how members of particular groups are subject to structural racism in specific places and contexts is necessary to fully illuminate the myriad pathways to poorer health outcomes, both in Covid-19 and in general. Data on outcome disparities within these loose categories, however, could have been accompanied by a broad-strokes, unequivocal analysis of the entrenched structures of exclusion and oppression which frame the health and illness experiences of racialized people in the UK.

In simplistic and general terms, racism impacts health in three ways. It directly erodes physical and mental health through long processes of attrition, particularly through the stress and shame of racialization, discrimination and overt prejudice.56 This includes the fear or experience of racist violence, over-policing, public scrutiny and stigmatizing medical and public health interventions. Structural racism also frequently results in poor living and working conditions, material poverty and deprivation, and reduced educational opportunities. These social and economic determinants of health impose an additional physical, psychological and relational burden, deepening and complicating other experiences of ill-health.57 In both instances, a cyclical relationship between physical and mental

comorbidities, and between health and environment, can decrease healthseeking behaviour; it can also contribute to premature ageing, or 'weathering', through the sustained application of psychosocial, physical and chemical stressors.58 Structural racism further affects how and whether racialized people engage with healthcare services and public health messaging, how they are treated in clinical encounters, and which kinds of health conditions are prioritized within NHS planning and resource allocation.59

Particularly in the context of a government committed to denying the structural nature of racism, its indisputable inscription on the minds and bodies of British citizens is a profoundly shaming and exposing legacy. As with inequalities in infection rates, this deliberate omission deflected shame from institutions, ideologies and structures, allowing it to attach to individual factors and decisions. This can be read as a cynical and complicit exercise in saving face. Presented with decontextualized data on disparities in morbidity and mortality, different communities were left to speculate on what might explain them. Some placed in the 'BAME' category attributed their 'clinical vulnerability' to genetic predispositions, or to long-standing chronic diseases caused by 'lifestyle and diet'.60 This internalization of deflected shame over Covid-19 entrenches and deepens the cyclical burden of structural racism and health inequality, afflicting populations which have already been rendered shame-prone by long experiences of social shaming.

# Coughing while Asian

'Coughing while Asian' brought acute bodily shame over the potential transmission of disease into close proximity with deeper structures of racialized shaming. Tow and Arboleda's film actively set out to satirize and subvert these shame dynamics; T-shirts bearing the legend 'Lestah Lepers', featuring the city's fox mascot in a gas mask, can be found for sale online. These attempts at levity, however, were tangled up with real suffering and stress. The Mass Observation respondent who wrote that she felt 'very Asian in public' recounted that she began online therapy after these experiences, joining a growing population of service users across the global West seeking urgent psychological support for race-based trauma during the pandemic.61 Direct experiences of overt racism and violence are significant life events, with serious consequences for emotional, physiological and relational health. They cast a long shadow, introducing damaging patterns of fear and shame which can be difficult to break out of. For members of racialized groups routinely (or acutely) subject to violence and abuse, anticipated experiences and the experiences of others can be a persistent source of anxiety and collective pain.62 Far from trivial, social slights, microaggressions, hypervisibility and exaggerated physical avoidance also take a cumulative toll. The 'new' body language of social distancing reproduces and reformulates the 'old' body language of stigma and suspicion, with different consequences for communities with long experiences of being avoided or snubbed by white people.63 Although there are rapidly emerging literatures on anti-Asian racism, health inequalities and Covid-19, our analysis suggests an ongoing need to engage with literatures on shame. Shame is an under-recognized and under-explored component of acute and structural racism, and chronic shame is an important theoretical device in understanding how processes of exclusion and stigmatization actively translate into poor health.64

Attempts to shame people of East and Southeast Asian backgrounds with culpability for the transmission and origins of Covid-19 tapped into older and deeper structures of racialized shaming, following cultural scripts which have been well-established for over a century. Likewise, with a political, media and scientific establishment largely unprepared to acknowledge structural racism and its effects on health, shaming narratives on individual responsibility, behaviour and choice were allowed to fill the information gap accompanying 'BAME' mortality and morbidity data. The most comprehensive failure, a recent study of ethnic disparities in Covid-19 suggests, is our systemic cultural and political refusal to confront shameful histories: 'Many high income countries with legacies of slavery, imperialism and colonialism have a moral duty to reckon with the past. We know the problems, and the solutions are mostly in front of us.'65 Predictably, attempts to do precisely that, in the form of the Black Lives Matter protests prompted by the murder of George Floyd on 25 May 2020 – as well as the police taking no further action in the case of Belly Mujinga, a transport worker who died in April after alleging that a man who claimed to have Covid had spat on her in her place of work – were subject to extensive criticism and censure for spreading the virus, including by Matt Hancock. Critics of Black Lives Matter deliberately sidestepped the question of precisely what kinds of survival were at stake in the 'twin pandemics' of Covid-19 and racism.66

In disowning that moral duty, the UK government knowingly increased the burden of shame on ethnic minorities, rendering them publicly culpable both for their own bodies and behaviour, and for a civic imagining of collective health which had always excluded and neglected them. As the following chapter explores, racialized bodies were not alone in subjection

to alienating and intrusive systems of policing, surveillance and shame, with neoliberal languages of individual responsibility and choice eliding and obscuring important social, economic and relational determinants of health. Nor were they the only context in which significant evidence on shame in public health was comprehensively ignored, or where long histories of medical and cultural humiliation and disgust culminated in poorer outcomes for chronically shamed populations.

# Notes

### Coughing While Asian: Shame and Racialized Bodies

# Coughing While Asian: Shame and Racialized Bodies

# CHAPTER 4 I WAS TOO FAT: BORIS JOHNSON AND THE FAT PANIC

27 March 2020. Boris Johnson is in self-isolation after testing positive for Covid-19. Rumours circulate that he is seriously ill, but the official message from Number 10 Downing Street remains that his symptoms are mild. What follows is a national 'emotional rollercoaster'.1 At first, the public are reassured that all is well. Johnson himself appears on video eight days into his self-isolation. 'Although I'm feeling better', he confides, 'alas I still have… a minor symptom… I still have a temperature'.2 The press are assured that Johnson is likely to emerge from isolation the following day. Behind the scenes, however, a very different picture is forming. St Thomas' hospital has already begun preparations to admit him, as it seems increasingly likely Johnson will need oxygen support. The prime minister is very unwell and deteriorating rapidly.

Over the weekend of the 4th and 5th of April, the government continued to insist that Johnson was only mildly ill, with the health secretary Matt Hancock claiming on Sunday that Johnson was still 'working away' with his 'hand on the tiller'.3 Later that day, Johnson was admitted to hospital and Number 10 didn't deny that he was immediately given oxygen.4 Despite the obvious seriousness of the prime minister's condition, there was a continued insistence that Johnson was fine. For example, the foreign secretary Dominic Raab stated at the 5pm daily press briefing for Monday the 6th of April that Johnson was 'admitted to hospital for tests as a precaution only' and that 'he remains in charge of the government'.5

For journalists and the public, it remained unclear to what extent the government was conspiring to cover up the seriousness of Johnson's illness. 'Things took an almost Soviet turn', as one journalist put it, as the government kept insisting on the farce that Johnson was fine, when he so clearly wasn't. Indeed, on Monday a few hours after Raab's declaration that Johnson was still 'in charge', Johnson was transferred to St Thomas's intensive care unit, where beds were generally reserved for patients needing to be put on ventilators. Raab later claimed that he had no idea about the sudden worsening of Johnson's condition and hadn't spoken to Johnson since Saturday.

Johnson remained in the intensive care unit for three nights; although he received oxygen support, he was never put on mechanical ventilation. Johnson's health began to improve, and he was eventually discharged after seven nights in hospital, returning to Chequers, his official country residence, on Sunday the 12th of April. Although his father, Stanley, claimed that Boris 'almost took one for the Team',6 the prime minister went on to make a full recovery and his personal experience of contracting Covid-19 and falling seriously ill went on to shape government policy.

On 27 July 2020, just over three months later, the UK government launched the 'Better Health' campaign, a public health initiative marketed explicitly as related to Boris Johnson's experience of having Covid-19. To coincide with the launch of this campaign, Number 10 released a social media video of Johnson walking his dog Dilyn in the park and speaking candidly about his own experience: 'When I went into ICU, when I was really ill, I was way overweight.' The inspirational music builds as Johnson eventually declares, 'you know, I was too fat'.7 Johnson elaborated this message during his speech at the virtual Conservative Party conference in October: 'The reason I had such a nasty experience with the disease is that although I was superficially in the pink of health when I caught it, I had a very common underlying condition.' After a three second pause, he drives it home with a smirk: 'My friends, I was too fat.'8

At this stage, the links between obesity and mortality rates from Covid-19 had been emphasized by the government for months, with a Public Health England Report released on 25 July 2020, just days before the launch of the Tackling Obesity strategy. This report outlined evidence that the risk of hospitalization, intensive care admission and death from Covid-19 was greater for those who were severely overweight, with the risk growing substantially as BMI increased.9 Statistics showed that while 7.9 per cent of critically ill Covid-19 patients in intensive care in the UK had been classified as morbidly obese (where one is at least 100 pounds over 'ideal' body weight), the number in the general population was only 2.9 per cent.10 The reasons for this were both physiological and psycho-social, as Public Health England summarized:

Excess fat can affect the respiratory system and is likely to affect inflammatory and immune function. This can impact people's response to infection and increase vulnerability to severe symptoms of COVID-19. Obese people may be less likely to access healthcare and support, and it is also thought that COVID-19 affects other diseases associated with obesity.11

The correlation between being overweight and the risk of ending up in an NHS hospital because of Covid-19 was undeniable. In Number 10's social media video, the message from the prime minister on this point is explicit. As the music swells, Johnson outlines some of the personal benefits to weight loss and exercise: 'you feel much better… you feel more full of energy', finally adding offhandedly, and almost apologetically: 'And you know, the other thing, obviously is that if you can get your weight down a bit, and then protect your health, you'll also be protecting the NHS.'12

In this chapter, we examine how the government's response to excess weight and obesity during Covid-19 followed the discourse espoused by the prime minister after his own experience of contracting Covid-19, recovering and losing weight. The official public health policy was underscored by an emphasis on the 'costs' of obesity, particularly to the NHS, and an insistence that individuals' 'choices' could offer a solution. This explicit public health strategy positioned individuals living with excess weight as recipients of shame, blame and moral outrage, not only for their own failures to lose weight but also for putting undue strain on the NHS and its resources. Fuelled by a Covid-19 related 'fat panic',13 we argue, fat shaming became an implicit, and sometimes explicit, public health strategy during 2020. This approach seemed to ignore both the context within which anti-obesity policies were developed and the public health evidence demonstrating that obesity and excess weight are deeply correlated with complex social issues such as food insecurity, poverty, inequality and social deprivation, all of which have been largely exacerbated during Covid-19 as a result of lockdowns and other restrictions.

#### Post-war approaches to obesity

In the UK, post-war approaches to obesity were conditioned by a series of contexts: experiences and memories of rationing and austerity; pre-existing welfarist concerns around diet, hunger and malnutrition; and the creation of the NHS.14 Under rationing, excess weight acted as a potential signifier of over-consumption of – and therefore unfair access to – food, isolating specific kinds of bodies from the kinship of shared struggle.15 As weight gain

became more common during 1950s affluence, the causes and consequences of obesity were largely individualized; literatures on diet proliferated, but discussions of the 'cost' revolved mostly around personal inability to participate in a particular kind of carefree and attractive sociality.

If not exactly representing a critique of affluence, this lens on obesity sought to draw out the unintended consequences of choice; with consumption no longer regulated by the state, individuals were 'free' to pursue diets which could be inimical to individual and family health. According to Martha Kirby, the tenor of debate shifted decisively in the years following the publication of the 'Build and Blood Pressure Study' by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in 1959.16 In relating obesity to heart disease, the problem was re-framed in terms of extra-individual cost, with the NHS and the economy as public victims of private choices.

Relating private choices to public costs created ample room for shame and shaming. Kirby cites the 1967 public information film *A Cruel Kindness*, issued by the British Medical Association and the British Life Assurance Trust for Health Education. The film discusses one character as a 'fat, breathless woman' who makes 'matters worse by stuffing her family with a stodgy meal'.17 In her work on quantification, obesity and the cultural history of the NHS, Roberta Bivins quotes the Greenwich Medical Officer for Health, J. Kerr Brown, as follows: 'the aim of health education is to achieve a climate of opinion where indulgence in anti-health activities is viewed with the same distaste as infrequent bathing, spitting, etc.'.18 In short, the aim of public health communication is to use shame and disgust as affective drivers to 'motivate' individuals to avoid certain lifestyle choices, like excessive 'indulgence', which could lead to health complications like excess weight or heart disease.

Simultaneously, counter-narratives emerged which attempted to sensitize policymakers to the political, economic, environmental and social contexts of excess weight, and which laid the foundations for the structural approach to obesity in which our critique is situated. Unfortunately, as the historian Jane Hand explores, interventions on health inequalities (such as the Black Report in 1980) were limited in their influence on policy, as subsequent governments framed disparities, including around health, as 'not inherently structural but rather the outcome of personal choice, which could therefore be overcome by individual commitment, skill, and motivation'.19 This is not a side-product of neoliberal politics but a governing logic. A partial re-investment in understanding and addressing complex determinants of health under New Labour (1997–2010) had not been able to – and was not necessarily intended to – sufficiently trouble an ingrained cultural conflation of excess weight with greed or lack of self-restraint, although it may have allowed for a more nuanced media discussion of obesity than has subsequently been the case. Research into the framing of the obesity 'problem' in UK newspapers between 2008 and 2017 has demonstrated that references to the responsibilities of government or the food industry have decreased over time.20

Threaded throughout the question of responsibility (or blame) for obesity, the problem of cost to the NHS has been used as a central basis for shaming fat bodies. Bivins locates the beginnings of this process in debates about the high cost of 'slimming drugs' in the late 1970s, resurfacing in perennial anxieties about resource scarcity, system failure, and the NHS as 'under threat' from citizens' unnecessary and irresponsible health choices. Journalistic expositions on obesity, through the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, were frequently accompanied by quantifications of the financial costs.21 In their examination of changing media scripts on obesity, Baker et al. reproduce a relatively representative passage from *The Daily Telegraph* in 2014: 'the obese are gobbling up limited NHS services and costing taxpayers more than 55 million a year'.22 This imposed a further dimension to weight shame, with the harms of obesity redistributed to 'good' citizens who had to shoulder the burden of those who, unlike themselves, were unwilling to regulate their appetites and manage their health. The 2020 Tackling Obesity initiative reconfigured this shaming and dehumanizing narrative, but the building blocks are the same: the NHS as under threat, and people with excess weight as complicit, selfish and worthy of shame.23

# Neoliberalism and fat shaming

The assumptions guiding anti-obesity public health strategies since the 1980s in the UK have been broadly underpinned and guided by a neoliberal ideological framework, a framework that has increasingly infiltrated healthcare services in many Western countries where reforms are focused on privatization resulting in the dismantling and weakening of nationally funded healthcare systems.24 Throughout the late 1980s and the 1990s, healthcare reform followed neoliberal principles of providing greater competition and consumer power for patients, which led to the significant privatization of NHS services.25 These market reforms have, David Sturgeon argues, 'transformed the NHS from a single national healthcare provider to a fragmented conglomeration of competing services delivering healthcare under the umbrella of the NHS brand'.26 Not only has a neoliberal framework dominated the way that publicly funded healthcare is delivered and organized, it has also reshaped the way we generally consider the achievement of 'health' and 'wellbeing' to come about. Through neoliberal logics, 'health' and 'wellbeing' have become pursuits and achievements of individuals, where the responsibility for good health is placed firmly on an individual's ability to regulate, manage and invest in their own lifestyle, body and health-related activities.27 This individualization of responsibility means that poor health and other social ills, like poverty and unemployment, are often seen as an individual shortcoming and the result of poor lifestyle choices.28

The neoliberal emphasis on individual self-management, self-control and self-actualization has led to, as Hannele Harjunen argues, body size and the economy becoming 'closely intertwined with each other'.29 The good neoliberal citizen has a particular body type: they are attractive, affluent, stylish, in good shape and, of course, slender. A very visible marker of what is commonly thought of as a 'bad' or 'failed' neoliberal citizen is being overweight or obese, where, as Tanisha Spratt notes, 'their excess weight [is] seen as an external marker and/or signifier of their presumed lack of self-control and self-discipline when it comes to food intake and exercise'.30 Portrayed as lazy, greedy and irresponsible in the dominant cultural imaginary, individuals living with excess weight are routinely positioned in a way that results in routine experiences of shame and shaming.

 Because of this assumption, 'the fat body is constructed as a kind of "anti-neoliberal" body that is unproductive, ineffective and unprofitable'.32 In this way, body size has become an immediate and 'crucial marker of social status', and a means through which to measure 'one's suitability for the privileges and power of full citizenship' in the dominant economic and social order.33 Evidence shows that people who live with excess weight or obesity can have more difficulty achieving employment, promotion and acceptance into university when compared to people who are considered to be slender.34

As a result, in our dominant cultural order, being obese or overweight immediately marks an individual as 'inferior', somehow 'less than' optimal. They are a citizen who has failed to live up to societal expectations, who is not only failing themselves but also failing others and society. As *The Daily Telegraph* quote above demonstrates, these individuals are often blamed for putting strain on public health systems, 'gobbling up limited NHS services', while also putting a large strain on the public purse, 'costing taxpayers more than 55 million a year'. Individuals who are overweight or obese are portrayed as selfishly hogging resources that could benefit others. These 'others' are seen as more deserving, as they are not to blame for their illnesses or conditions. As Harjunen notes:

The assumed 'choice' to be fat (out of moral incompetence) is then used to justify the discrimination and shaming of fat people… the stigmatisation of fatness [is] more widespread, public and socially acceptable. Public monitoring, surveillance and outright 'policing' of (fat) bodies by the media, health professionals and even the general public is pervasive.35

Fat shaming, Spratt writes, 'is a practice where people living with overweight or obesity are purposefully stigmatized and made to feel ashamed because of their body size'.36 In the UK, people living with overweight and obesity routinely experience fat shaming; it is used as a 'tool', Spratt notes, to both communicate the risks associated with obesity and also to motivate people to lose weight.37 People living with excess weight or obesity are both *shamed* and *blamed.* They are believed to have directly caused their body size, along with any related health conditions, through poor lifestyle choices.38 This moral deficit, worthy of blame, is presumed to be caused by an individual's intrinsically flawed character, which signals an ontological deficit that is worthy of shame. Hence, contemporary fat shaming is intrinsically bound up with neoliberal logics which claim that each individual is responsible for their own self-making, their own success and, as a result, their position in the social order. Any failure or lack of success is shamefully *one's own fault*.

# The Tackling Obesity campaign

Not surprisingly, the logics of fat shaming and neoliberalism dominated the UK government's response to obesity during the Covid-19 pandemic.39 As evidence emerged from the UK and France that a disproportionate number of patients admitted to intensive care units with Covid-19 were obese,40 a 'fat

panic' took hold in the UK's public health agenda. Within six months of the start of the pandemic, an explicit campaign to reduce obesity levels in the UK, the Tackling Obesity strategy, was launched.41 The campaign focused on 'tackling obesity', with the overt aims to 'improve the health of the nation', 'offer greater protection against the impact of COVID-19' and 'protect the NHS from being overwhelmed' in the event of a second wave, or subsequent waves, of the virus.42

This campaign was explicitly linked to Boris Johnson's own experience of contracting Covid-19 and being 'too fat'.43 In the social media video released by Number 10 to coincide with the launch of the campaign, Johnson confesses, 'I've always wanted to lose weight for ages and ages… and like… many people, I struggle with my weight'.44 Johnson goes on to describe how, after recovering from his illness, he started jogging in the morning and lost weight as a result of changes to his routine and lifestyle.45 Modelling Johnson's own approach to weight loss following his illness, the UK's new obesity strategy targets change and choice on an individual level, promoting healthy eating, physical activity and weight loss.

Endorsing the Tackling Obesity campaign is a remarkable change of tack for a prime minister well known for his outspoken views regarding the right to unfettered food choices and his opposition to 'nanny state' government interventions that promote healthy eating. In 2006, he is reported as commenting the following on Jamie Oliver's well-known campaign for healthy school meals: 'If I was in charge I would get rid of Jamie Oliver and tell people to eat what they like…  Why shouldn't they push pies through [school] railings… this pressure to bring in healthy food is too much.'46 In stark contrast to his previous position, now that Johnson *is* in charge, he has sanctioned and supported a national health campaign with a central goal of encouraging healthier food choices made by individuals.

This approach of targeting change and choice on an individual level is not new. In fact, the Tackling Obesity campaign is a further iteration of antiobesity public health policies that have been in place in the UK for over a decade, starting with the Change4Life anti-obesity campaign, launched in 2009, where individuals were encouraged to make 'smart swaps' to cut sugar and fat from their diets through simple substitutions.47 The policy paper outlining the details of Tackling Obesity states that it aims to 'empower people to make the healthier choices they want to make'.48 The 'Better Health' campaign's tagline is the injunction 'Let's do this!' suggesting individual actions to achieve a collective goal. These injunctions to individual-level change regarding exercise and food choices are coupled with measures that address some societal-level issues, such as ensuring calorie counts are included on some restaurant menus, limiting the advertisement and promotion of unhealthy food in shops and on television, and expanding weight management services. However, it should be noted that even these supposedly 'societal-level' changes come down to individual choices regarding which foods to consume, along with which health services to engage with.

While the goals of encouraging healthy eating and improving general population health are admirable, the Tackling Obesity campaign highlights some of the problematic conceptions of health and agency that arise from neoliberal rationalities within health discourses, showing how these conceptions can lead to shame, blame and moral outrage. The campaign closely follows a neoliberal conception of health and citizenship, where individuals are positioned as self-actualizing with the unfettered capacity to make rational 'choices' about their behaviour and lifestyle, and are rendered personally responsible for their health status and body size as a result. Rather than recognizing 'the complex underlying causes of obesity [including] patho-physiological processes or a historical lack of effective public health policies… [or] genetic, environmental or socio-economic factors' that cause or contribute to obesity rates, the Tackling Obesity campaign individualizes the burden of blame, both in terms of who is responsible for a 'burden' on the health service and in terms of who should make more sensible 'choices' and 'swaps'.49 Solving 'problems' related to obesity or excess weight is framed as simply 'a matter of future-oriented individual risk management'.50

One advertisement for the campaign shows an older man wearing hivis gear eating chopped fruit from a plastic tub, beside the tagline 'Healthy eating starts with simple swaps'. The idea, presumably, is that this individual has simply swapped an unhealthy snack for this healthier option. A new iteration of the Change4Life 'smart swap' campaign, these sorts of 'small changes' that individuals can make are at the heart of the new Tackling Obesity strategy. Boris Johnson is quoted as saying in the press release: 'Losing weight is hard but with some small changes we can all feel fitter and healthier.'51 In reality, the 'simple swaps' that the campaign encourages are scaffolded by a range of socio-economic contingencies. Most people simply cannot afford to routinely buy the prohibitively expensive tubs of pre-chopped fruit that serve as the visual paradigm for a 'simple swap'.52 By framing obesity as merely the result of an individual's 'choices', the Tackling Obesity campaign ignores the realities of those living with eating disorders or who have socio-economic or psycho-social constraints regarding the sorts of choices they can make about what foods to eat and when and where to exercise. Instead, the message is clear: not making the 'right' choices and swaps will in turn 'cost' others. Boris Johnson, again quoted in the press release, says, 'If we all do our bit, we can reduce our health risks and protect ourselves against coronavirus – as well as take pressure off the NHS.'53

In fact, the campaign explicitly and repeatedly emphasizes the *cost* associated with bodies with excess weight, reinforcing the idea that fat bodies are 'expensive', and, as a result, inherently unprofitable and unproductive.54 The Tackling Obesity government strategy document states: *'*tackling obesity would reduce pressure on doctors and nurses in the NHS, and free up their time to treat other sick and vulnerable patients'. It continues: 'we owe it to the NHS to move towards a healthier weight. Obesity puts pressure on our health service… If all people who are overweight or living with obesity in the population lost just 2.5kg (one-third of a stone), it could save the NHS £105 million over the next 5 years'. It concludes: 'going into this winter, you can play your part to protect the NHS and save lives'.55 In this way, individuals are exhorted to regulate their weight not only to benefit their own health but also, crucially, to minimize any 'burden' or 'cost' that they might pose to their healthcare systems as a result. This discourse positions individuals with excess weight as 'irresponsible' and 'inconsiderate'56; not only do their 'choices' negatively affect their individual health but they threaten the NHS, directly putting 'pressure' on doctors and taking resources away from 'sick and vulnerable patients'. Identifying those with a particular body size as putting a financial strain on the NHS, and potentially causing harm to others by taking up resources during the pandemic, immediately divides people into those who are deserving and those who are not, or those who should be 'praised' and those who can be stigmatized, shunned, shamed or 'mocked'.57 Indeed, as a review of the campaign in *Nature Reviews* notes, the 'choice of language' in the Tackling Obesity Policy documents 'could be damaging as it encourages the blaming and shaming of people with overweight and obesity'.58

In fact, the campaign concretely demonstrates how implicit fat shaming – where 'heaping blame on shame' as a 'wilful political strategy' – is being operationalized within this public health effort. Not only are individuals with excess weight positioned in the discourse as blameworthy for being inconsiderate and irresponsible, literally *costing others*, they are also positioned as shame-worthy for seemingly lacking the willpower, rationality or social grace to make the right food and exercise choices, the 'simple swaps' or morning jogs, that will lead to weight loss. This shaming and blaming strategy is disappointing in light of the significant evidence in the public health literature showing that a focus on individual choices and using shame and blame strategies, whether implicit or explicit, in obesity campaigns is ineffective.59 It is even more jarring considering the context within which the campaign was launched – immediately after a lengthy national lockdown, where most individuals were housebound, with both physical activity and food choices profoundly affected. Significant amounts of people reported weight gain during lockdown as a result of factors such as increased snacking, increased alcohol consumption, emotional eating to cope with stress and anxiety, difficulty getting to shops to get healthy food, less opportunity to exercise and being more sedentary in general.60 In their report following a consultation with people living with obesity, Le Brocq et al. note:

Lockdown presents substantial challenges to maintaining healthy behaviours for anyone; however, people living with obesity have often had years of battling with weight and experiencing feelings of guilt from perceived failure. Representatives in our consultation reported having a fear of weight gain during lockdown, related to the effect of anxiety on eating behaviours (often compounded by scrutiny from family members). For many, this fear related to stigma or shame and prevented them from exercising or shopping for food in ways that did not make them feel self-conscious. Lockdown has had a profound influence on self-efficacy, and increased episodes of secret eating or binge eating have been commonly reported within the Obesity UK support groups during this time.61

The idea in the Tackling Obesity campaign that individuals can simply 'choose' their food and exercise regimes is immediately undermined by the public health intervention (lockdown) which was rolled out to tackle the very impetus for the campaign (Covid-19). Participants in Grannell et al.'s study on the lived experience of people with obesity during Covid-19 reported how lockdown restrictions drastically curtailed opportunities for exercise, and that the fear of being more vulnerable to Covid-19 led to a significant psycho-social burden, while also limiting opportunities for exercise and having a negative impact on decision-making around food.62

The focus on individual choice and the 'cost' of excess weight, especially during a pandemic where many people are struggling with issues around health, stress and finances, sends a message which is largely counterproductive, leading to feelings of failure and shame related to weight stigma. In addition, these messages were not merely counterproductive but were possibly '*detrimental* for mental health, particularly for those with eating disorders', as Talbot and Branley-Bell note.63 In their research, they show that social media users experienced the Tackling Obesity campaign as triggering 'disordered eating behaviours because of its fat-shaming approach, and focus on lower weight and calorie intake as equating to health'.64 As Le Brocq et al. note, many people living with obesity experienced 'feelings of shame, a perception of being "less of a priority than any other condition", and a reluctance to seek help'.65

In addition, the roll-out of the Tackling Obesity initiative coincided exactly with the 'Eat Out to Help Out' initiative to stimulate economic growth, leading to inconsistent government messaging widely interpreted as 'hypocritical' and 'contradictory'.66 Under this government scheme, members of the public were entitled to a 50 per cent discount, up to a value of £10, in restaurants during August 2020, and individuals were actively encouraged to eat out during the month, in order to boost the economy by supporting hospitality businesses. Many of the restaurants that signed up to take part were fast-food chains, such as KFC and McDonalds, which are directly implicated in weight gain and increases in obesity rates.67 This mixed messaging further undermined public health efforts, leaving individuals feeling blameworthy and ashamed.

Despite public health evidence demonstrating that behaviour change approaches in health campaigns are not effective, the UK government's Tackling Obesity campaign emphasizes weight loss through individual responsibility, casting those who remain overweight as failures within a neoliberal framework that conceptualizes self-help as a choice that all can make to promote better overall health. Unsurprisingly, a recent study conducted by the Social Market Foundation has shown that the Tackling Obesity strategy has been 'largely ineffective'. The study stated that ministers placed too much emphasis on 'individual willpower and not enough on the environmental and economic aspects of obesity'.68 Not only is the Tackling Obesity campaign both unproductive and ineffective, it is irresponsible in light of the available public health evidence on obesity and anti-obesity campaigns. Also irresponsible are official statements from the country's prime minister which suggest that 'small changes' are all that is needed for weight loss. Not only does this claim not match public health evidence, it creates a ripe atmosphere for government-sanctioned shame and blame for those who are not able to affect those 'changes' or for whom those 'changes' do not lead to perceptible weight loss. While Johnson boasted at the Conservative Party conference that he had lost the equivalent of twentysix bags of sugar in weight,69 many people living with obesity reported significant psycho-social harm as a result of the shaming and blaming rhetoric that was directed to those whose body size deemed them a potential 'cost' and 'burden' to others.

Despite claiming to be 'led by the science', a phrase used so often as to outgrow the meaning of its most frequent context (in debates over restrictions to everyday life), the UK government's interventions on obesity and Covid-19 went against the grain of the vast majority of credible research on shame, stigma and public health design, as well as how members of targeted populations frequently report that campaigns which simplify and individualize the challenge make them feel. The government-led Foresight report, for example, highlighted in 2007 that obesity is complex, multifaceted and not reducible to simple solutions or representations as a matter of individual willpower.70 Criticisms of past campaigns have asserted that they actively cause harm (and do little or no good) by stigmatizing the intended recipients of their messaging, and WHO guidelines on weight bias and obesity stigma clearly state that 'narratives around obesity may contribute to weight bias by oversimplifying the causes of obesity and implying that easy solutions will lead to quick and sustainable results ("eat less, be more active"), thereby setting unrealistic expectations and masking the difficult challenges people with obesity can face in changing behaviour'.71

More important to the UK government than getting this response 'right', that is, by absorbing insights from research and activism on shame and stigma in public health and building them into their pandemic messaging, their shaming focus on individual choice reaffirmed a series of logics which are crucial to the stories they want to tell about inequality, responsibility, health and citizenship. Thus, fat shaming becomes a knowing political act which continually asserts a neoliberal understanding of health and success as the result of competitive choices and acts of consumption, to which everyone, in theory, has access.72 Roberta Bivins notes how, in the 'common sense' of post-war Britain, 'only individuals could control their weight'; this is the common sense that present-day policy promotes, with overweight people as its intentional victims.73 In the following chapter, we explore how a frequent emphasis on common sense in government rhetoric made further space for shame, reducing complex experiences and contexts to simplified equations of individual 'sense' and choice.

# Notes

https://doi.org/10.1177/1359105321999705; World Health Organisation Regional Office for Europe, *Weight Bias and Obesity Stigma: Considerations for the WHO European Region* (Copenhagen: WHO, 2017). https://www.euro.who. int/\_\_data/assets/pdf\_file/0017/351026/WeightBias.pdf.

# CHAPTER 5 GOOD SOLID BRITISH COMMON SENSE: SHAME AND SURVEILLANCE IN EVERYDAY LIFE

11 May 2020. Boris Johnson stands up in House of Commons to give a statement on the government's ongoing Covid-19 strategy. He advocates strongly for a change in guidance, from the 'stay at home' message pursued through lockdown to a more abstract injunction, 'stay alert'. Members of Parliament quiz him on the reasons for the change, whether it is informed by scientific evidence, indeed what the new command even means. Blustering that the new guidance is 'perfectly obvious', that the public 'understand exactly what we are trying to do', Johnson's responses return, time and again, to the idea of 'common sense'. Indeed, in the course of his statement he offers perhaps the best-known (and most widely critiqued) example of what the Government meant by common sense:

But let us be clear: everybody understands what we are trying to do together. We are working together as a country to obey the social distancing rules, which everybody understands. The British people understand that this is the moment for the whole country to come together, obey those rules, and apply common sense in their application of them… I know that the British public will continue to help the police, and everybody, to enforce the rules, get the reproduction rate down, and get this disease even further under control, by continuing to apply good, solid, British common sense.1

In the government's messaging on public behaviour during the pandemic, the grey areas between law and advice were frequently regulated by appeals to common sense.2 Johnson's emphasis on common sense – and the partial de-escalation of quarantine measures it sought to clarify – was met with a range of criticisms, some of which set out to unpick common sense as a rhetorical device and political idea.3 These critiques drew largely on pre-existing philosophical and sociological reckonings with common sense, at times highlighting the role that common sense discourses play in the continuation of neoliberal logics and anti-expert populism.4 Johnson prefixed 'common sense' with anchoring or 'guiding' words such as 'good', 'solid', and 'British'; these have long been observed as key to the ways that common sense is framed and naturalized in a misleading language of instinct, popular knowledge, and authenticity.5

In the context of new admonitions to 'stay alert', Johnson's words were also interpreted as an exercise in deflecting shame and saving face. Both in contemporary political and academic criticism, and in what could be described as the 'good sense' observations of some 'ordinary' members of the public, they seemed to represent a deliberate slippage of responsibility for the course of the pandemic away from the decisions and shortcomings of the state, and towards individual behaviour, perception and reasoning. While common sense itself is usually defined as a collective social and cultural achievement, its absence or lack is figured as a personal failing, and a potential source of blame and shame.6 Johnson's invocation of common sense helped to reproduce an imagined community with longer historical roots, deferring expertise to an implicitly nationalistic popular wisdom; simultaneously, it framed the public it sought to flatter for the foreseeably negative outcomes of a market-driven return to business as usual.7 It perpetuated, therefore, what Stuart Hall and Alan O'Shea describe as the 'structural consequences' of common-sense neoliberalism: 'the individualisation of everyone, the privatisation of public troubles and the requirement to make competitive choices at every turn'.8 When he stated 'that the British public will continue to help the police, and everybody, to enforce the rules', Johnson gestured to the raised public stakes of pandemic common sense, as a matter of both individual and collective vigilance. At a moment where expected behaviour was particularly unclear, members of the public were invited to apply the nebulous and subjective principles of common sense not just in their own decision-making but to the actions of relatives, friends, neighbours, acquaintances, colleagues and strangers.9

This chapter interrogates common sense as public health policy, situating the individualization of responsibility for Covid-19 within longer and deeper critiques of common sense as a political and cultural idea. In the process, it draws focus to an under-acknowledged consequence of poor public health policy: the increased burden of shame. Making use of Mass Observation testimonies from the spring and summer of 2020, the chapter explores how respondents deployed and contested government narratives on common sense, and how public health messaging which sought to save face for the government made unnecessary space for guilt, blame and shame. Applying common sense to each other's actions erases the complex histories and contexts which frame and condition behaviour, knowledge and 'choice', privileging a shaming accountability to a conceptual phantom which, as one Mass Observer noted, 'varies from one person to another and means completely different things and behaviour'.10 As an emotion with extensive consequences for behaviour, shame can also prompt people to act in ways which seem counter to common sense, but which are consistent with logics of avoidance or concealment.11 What seems like common sense is frequently incompatible with the lived realities of inequality, poverty or suffering, failing to reckon with other kinds of survival made necessary by a structural inattention to the economic, psychological and relational fallout of the virus.12

# Common sense

Mass Observation participants interpreted 'stay alert' and 'good solid British common sense' in different ways. For respondents who were already broadly critical of the government, these pronouncements felt like a 'dangerous blame game', a means to 'blame the public for any problems' or, in a different formulation, of 'blaming others for failures'.13 Others were less critical of intention but sceptical of common sense as a public health response, and anxious about the consequences. Presciently, one seventy-year-old former secretary observed that the country had entered a 'dangerous situation where eventually the public was just told to "use your common sense." This, I am sure, will lead to a further spike in the numbers of positive tests and deaths when presumably everything will be locked down again.'14 The respondent who complained that common sense 'varies from one person to another and means completely different things and behaviour' concluded that 'we really can't be trusted at the moment to get it right'.15 These two responses probed the limitations of common sense as a strategy for viral containment, but they leaned on relatively predictable and well-trodden observations – what we might term common sense about common sense – at the same time; the flaw in the government's approach, implicitly, is that common sense is 'in reality' neither commonly held (widely and evenly dispersed among the population) nor held in common (the consistent product of genuine consensus). This mode of critique leaves the category of common sense

conceptually intact; in this respect, it echoes the philosopher Stanley Rosen's aphorism that 'common sense is not honoured but betrayed when we assign it a task which it cannot fulfil'.16

In other Mass Observation testimonies, common sense was a straightforward and meaningful resource, a practical set of principles which was made use of (usually by the writer), or ignored (usually by the subject of the writer's judgement, ire, or scorn). Some respondents broadly accepted the government's individualization of blame, complaining that 'it has taken a while for everyone to apply common sense', or asserting that 'people should take responsibility for themselves and have some common sense'.17 Common sense could also be repurposed as a mode of political critique. Across her responses to two directives, one Mass Observer painted a vivid and familiar picture of pandemic television viewing:

'It seems that we have all been shouting at our TV's going "NO, we need to do X Y Z." Things that seem obvious common sense were just not applied.'18

'We watch the news a lot and shout at the telly because what seems common sense to us (face masks and quarantine for people arriving in the country) are simply not happening.'19

While the second comment clearly described the behaviour of the respondent and her household, the 'we' in 'it seems that we have all been shouting' is far more encompassing, setting a broad popular common sense in tension with the actions of the government. For all of the evidence and expertise available to them, they were failing to take measures which were 'obvious' to the public at large.20

The UK government's framing of pandemic behaviour in terms of common sense – and the clear diversity of public responses even among a handful of testimonies – raises vital questions over what common sense is, where it comes from and how it works. For the sake of brevity, we divide literatures on common sense into two loose camps. On the one hand, we have scholarship which takes the fundamental idea of common sense at face value, and attempts to define and understand it as a knowable cultural and social resource. On the other – and particularly in literature which responds politically to ideological changes in the UK, America and Western Europe in the final decades of the twentieth century – we have a reckoning with common sense as a means of shaping and policing the boundaries of what is or isn't 'possible', 'reasonable' or 'sane', of imposing a particular set of (more recently, neoliberal) logics on political (and personal) behaviour and attributing them to the wisdom and sense of 'common' people. Each of these lenses on common sense can help us to understand why it failed as a public health response, resulting in increased transmission, higher mortality and morbidity rates, prolonged periods of quarantine, and unnecessary and preventable experiences of shame.

If we approach common sense – as the government has repeatedly invited the public to – as both a tangible individual characteristic and a universally accessible fund, then what is the shared (or common) meaning of the term? According to the historian Sophia Rosenfeld, a (relatively) recognizable iteration of common sense emerged from philosophical debates on perception and realism in the eighteenth century, as part of the scientific and intellectual flourishing collectively known as the Scottish Enlightenment. In the specific political context of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, common sense was increasingly valorized as 'a new "epistemic authority" with the potential to go head to head with considerably more established forms of authority, including history, law, custom, faith, logic, and reason, especially when it came to matters of social or moral life'.21 In theory, common sense is common because it is available to everyone, whether they use it or not.22 For Pierre Bourdieu, common sense is 'a stock of self-evidences shared by all, which, within the limits of a social universe, ensures a primordial consensus on the meaning of the world, a set of tacitly accepted commonplaces which make confrontation, dialogue, competition and even conflict possible'.23 Bourdieu explains how common sense structures a collective frame of reference to 'think the world', even as subjective valuations of agreed-on terms diverge: 'thus the same freedom of manners may be seen by some as "shameless", impolite, rude, and by others as "unaffected", simple, unpretentious, natural'.24

Explicitly lacking in intellectual sophistication or complexity, the 'stock of self-evidences' which comprise common sense concern themselves specifically with what Anna Wierzbicka terms 'the question of what to think in a particular situation so as to know – and know quickly – what to do and what not to do there and then'.25 In her work on the historical origins of common sense, Rosenfeld sets up a long historical tension between this supposedly 'infallible, instinctive sense of what is right and true, born of or nurtured by day-to-day experience in the world', and the 'judgements and knowledge of a minority of establishment insiders', expanded in the recent past 'to include, varyingly, intellectuals, scientists, financiers, lawyers, journalists, power brokers, politicians, and other overeducated,

elite pretenders, as well as foreigners and outliers of different kinds'.26 She reads it, therefore, as organizing and subsuming many of the same kinds of anti-establishment anger which would later be harnessed and directed by populist political projects.

By invoking a broad, anti-expert populism, the rhetoric of common sense seems to distance it from technical evidence and expertise, while using these as important sources of practical knowledge, which sediment down into culturally, historically, and politically inflected insights and impressions about 'how the world works'.27 Every institution involved in the reproduction and transmission of knowledge plays a part in these processes, with the media as particularly significant intermediaries and gatekeepers.28 Common sense and diffused or disseminated expertise, however, are not the same. Even if we take common sense as a meaningful and internally consistent idea, there are deep fissures between how it is purported to operate and how it has been deployed as a public health measure during Covid-19. Probing the boundaries of common sense in the mid-1960s, Rosen described it as 'the capacity to deal successfully with the commonly accessible world'. Common sense is limited in its capacity to offer universal answers, he argued, because 'the world of common experience is not an objective, fully defined entity', but 'murky and ambiguous' instead.29

During Covid-19, a 'commonly accessible world' of pandemic common sense was unavailable for three reasons. In the first instance, as Rosen implied, such a resource is probably always elusive, whatever the context or subject of application. In the second instance, the rapid and shifting flow of events, information, advice and legal requirements has been far too frenetic and uneven to allow anything resembling common sense to emerge. Discussing Bourdieu's understanding of common sense, Robert Holton explains how an 'objective social crisis' can 'put the practices of common sense into question, thereby undermining its self-evidence… the common sense of yesterday becomes inapplicable today'. The historical and social production of common sense responds to alterations in conditions and contexts, but this is not an immediate or uniform process.30 If something like pandemic common sense is possible, therefore, it might be produced by long social and cultural experiences of quarantine, distancing, maskwearing and handwashing, for example, but not by expectations about when or why these measures should be introduced or discontinued, or how policy and scientific data should be interpreted. What stands in for common sense instead is a loose and disparate series of personal judgements, impressions and apprehensions, framed by a subjective emotional and intellectual digestion of evidence on risk, and filtered in turn through pre-existing prejudices, tendencies and feelings over personal and collective safety and responsibility. Applying common sense, here, is reduced to individualized decisions over whether or not to abide by earlier public health instructions and injunctions, newly tempered into guidelines and advice. With parallels to the discussion of pandemic shaming in Chapter 1, injunctions to use 'common sense' replaced a formal disciplinary system (police action, legal sanction) with an informal one (shared responsibility for the course of the pandemic and the potential for public or interpersonal shame).

In the third instance, the inaccessibility and unevenness of public health communication across the pandemic has further militated against the emergence of anything like common sense as a viable collective resource. Other chapters in this book have discussed how specific groups and communities were targeted with campaigns that increased their burden of shame, making them less likely to engage with public health messaging (see Chapter 4), or how longer cycles of shame and abandonment were reproduced by conscious decisions over where, how and what to communicate, with the myth of 'hard to reach' populations deflecting shame from institutions to the people they fail to successfully engage (see Chapter 3). Research into the pandemic experiences of people with dementia, for example, further punctures the suggestion of a 'commonly accessible' sense, with unclear and confusing guidance limiting respondents' participation in society and 'contributing to their shrinking worlds'.31 As one testimony put it, 'if I was living on my own, I would have no idea what was going on because it was so airy-fairy and common sense here'.32

These experiences support Rosenfeld's observation that common sense 'works in practice to create new forms of exclusion', constructing imagined communities defined by common sense at the expense of specific outgroups. These include people with views considered 'superstitious, marginal, or deluded', or 'overly abstract, specialized, or dogmatic', as well as people whose ability to navigate the world in ways consistent with the logic of common sense is hindered by structural ableism or inequality.33 There are compelling reasons to approach the counterintuitive divisiveness of common sense as a deliberate political aim, and mistrust its rhetorical deployment in the context of Covid-19 as a sincere policy which – for the reasons detailed above – happened to fail. As a cynical exercise in delegitimizing public health expertise, it shifted culpability away from the state and nourished an idea which serves specific political purposes in the way that it shapes and conditions ideological discourses.34 As Holton puts it:

The world's meaning must continually be reaffirmed and/or reconstructed as common sense precisely because it is a historical world constantly open to challenge and to struggle, because the possibility continues to exist that its meaning may slip away, because it is in the interest of some that certain aspects of its meaning should slip away and be replaced with other meanings.35

The meanings that slip away, in this context, relate to how government decisions and omissions have resulted in catastrophic outcomes for the UK population, and the well-evidenced fact that these have not been equally borne or distributed. Reconfiguring public health as common sense replaces these inconvenient and shameful meanings with a neoliberal emphasis on individual agency and culpability, removing shame from state harms and relocating it to the victims.36

Even before neoliberalism fell into widespread use as a term of critique, common sense had been identified as an idea consistent with the logics of me-first individualism. For Rosen, common sense imposes a hierarchy of outcomes, 'in which self-preservation, and then a secure and even comfortable self-preservation, predominate'. Injunctions to use common sense, therefore, become 'do what is best for you', which in turn becomes 'protect yourself ' or 'get what you can'.37 Through this logical creep, common sense actively works against notions of communal solidarity and safety, both in response to the pandemic and in wider ideological terms. Critics of the government's recent uses of common sense trace a line in conservative rhetoric from William Hague's 'Common Sense Revolution' in 2001, through David Cameron's justification of austerity policies as 'common sense for the common good' in the early 2010s, and Jacob Rees-Mogg's speculation over whether common sense might have saved the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire, to 'common sense' criticisms of (often invented) EU restrictions, and the earthy pragmatism of pronouncements on 'getting Brexit done'.38 A political and social world organized by common sense, in short, is one which suits a specific Conservative ideological and electoral agenda.39

In the Covid-19 pandemic, the politicized invocation of common sense is one of many indications that this agenda is prioritized above positive epidemiological outcomes. Even when common sense was used to critique the state – as was the case in some of the Mass Observation testimonies discussed above – this does not necessarily imply a break with government intentions. A long ambivalence in the Conservative Party's relationship with expertise has frequently allowed for the representation of particular politicians as soothsayers of a broadly defined popular will; appeals to common sense help destabilize rival sources of narrative authority, in a way that permits dissent within distinct and manageable parameters.40 Public uses of common sense as a basis to dispute government decisions, lapses or missteps, therefore, are an acceptable side product of a calculating political project. The stickiness or slipperiness of shame in relation to power differentials ensures that shame over shortfalls in common sense primarily lands in ways that burden 'common' people rather than politicians (see Chapter 1).

#### Common shame

In one Mass Observation day diary for 12 May 2020, the day after Johnson's reference to 'good British common sense', the author brought common sense and potential shame into close proximity: 'me and my husband have been out and about as normal – though you have to lie to friends as they wouldn't approve at all. We've just used common sense rather than blindly follow what the government says'.41 The government's use of common sense as a device to shift responsibility for the pandemic onto individual behaviour contained a clear invitation for members of the public to police the actions of others. This was formalized in new infrastructures of reporting, for example through the creation of an online portal on www.police.uk to 'tell us about a possible breach of coronavirus (Covid-19) measures'.42 In September 2020, the Home Office minister Kit Malthouse made it clear that people should call a nonemergency police number if they witnessed others gathering in groups of more than six, with the home secretary, Priti Patel, emphasizing that she would personally report her own neighbours if they broke with government guidance.43 While many doubtless felt less comfortable resorting to the apparatus of criminal justice than Patel, this encouragement of mutual surveillance, regulated by common sense, resulted in an informal – but no less affecting – atmosphere of judgement and shame.

Mass Observers frequently reproduced shaming narratives over 'idiotic' behaviour. Only one of hundreds of testimonies openly admitted to having potentially caused shame, and discussed stigma (around failing to wear masks) as a favourable outcome; even though the immediate impetus to cause shame is usually self-righteous, practices of shaming can be shameful (and themselves targets of shame backlashes) on later reflection.44 Discussing the behaviour of other shoppers, the author wrote that:

the front of the queue were so close to each other they could have cuddled. In my bit of the queue I had to ask the person behind me to move to 2 metres away. She did comply but looked angry (or maybe shamed?) Why are people behaving so badly?

Relieved that indoor face masks were about to become compulsory, they noted, 'I guess we have to wait for it [not wearing a mask] to be as socially stigmatising as smoking in public places? What a shame.'45

Other testimonies merely confirmed the mind-set which underpinned rarer instances of direct confrontation. People who failed to follow guidelines or apply common sense were 'covidiots', a 'Covid idiot' (see Chapter 1), or 'gross idiots'.46 Only one testimony implied any real disquiet at public shaming as a widespread social practice during the pandemic:

One of the weirdest things about Lockdown is how much certain people seemed to be enjoying it. I had people on Facebook taking videos of people walking down the street and in the park and ranting about how dreadful these people were for going outside.  There was a thread on Mumsnet which basically consisted of a bunch of women moaning about how much we hated Lockdown and every so often someone would come onto it to tell everybody how Wrong and Selfish we were to complain.47

The effects of these processes are legible in other Mass Observation testimonies. In detailing their everyday lives during the pandemic, some respondents discussed acute experiences of shame, instances where they felt hyper-visible and vulnerable to judgement. In the words of Mass Observers, we can read how guilt and shame actively narrowed social and relational worlds, and created logics of shame-avoidance which frequently went against the grain of both 'common sense' and different kinds of pandemic survival. Some responses described how guilt altered and compromised experiences of being out in public, which can be lifelines for many even under non-pandemic circumstances:

'These days, I try to not to go out at all if I can help it. I can't stand all the social judgement about where we should stand.'

'Queues felt as though there was an atmosphere of collective guilt at being out of the house - nobody spoke to one another.'48

Particularly for people with long experiences of loneliness, brief exchanges with familiar faces or friendly strangers can be a vital source of relational sustenance, often overlooked by an emphasis on deep and confiding relationships in academic literatures.49 Freighted with guilt and the potential for shaming transgression, these small but significant connections are more or less impossible to replace, in the way that established relationships can be sustained online or over the telephone. Apprehension over shame in public spaces, therefore, can be understood as an important determinant of pandemic isolation, with overlapping physical and mental consequences. Acting here in opposition to relational health, shame could also interfere with measures aimed at disrupting viral transmission; one Mass Observer wrote about a loaded cultural valuation of face masks as signifiers of illness rather than prevention, at least in the early days of the pandemic; in this context, her mother had written 'that she does not want me to wear a mask for fear that the neighbours will think she has the virus'.50

Two more responses bear repeating at length, for their close and nuanced representation of difficult experiences of shame and surveillance. In the first, a day diary from 12 May 2020, a runner recalls a jarring encounter with two older walkers:

I go to pass by them, and momentarily catch onto their eyes. They both throw me quick glances as they hastily shuffle onto the side of the pavement away from me, despite already having enough room to pass by. Then they are behind me, gone. I try to place my focus back onto my breathing as I continue forward but that image of those two pairs of judging eyes imprints itself onto my vision. "Is what I'm doing wrong?" I think to myself… I have been so used to passers-by ignoring me, so used to them pretending that I'm just not there, that it is astonishingly weird to see them react to my presence as I run past them, for them to simply acknowledge my existence. In this strange era of suspicion and sensitivity, it seems that no one is invisible, not even the runners.51

Shame, in this instance, was located in the 'astonishingly weird' transformation from an implicitly welcome invisibility to unwished-for and uncomfortable scrutiny and judgement, a transformation which left an emotional 'imprint' far outlasting the fleeting temporality of the physical encounter. Their common sense interpretation of what they should and shouldn't do had come into dissonant conflict with that of the two walkers; the runner felt judged, and this led them to a shamed reconsideration of behaviour which was legal and responsible, and which had positive consequences for their physical and mental wellbeing.

In the second response, a justified feeling of being surveilled by neighbours caused one respondent to retreat from his garden, fall into 'odd' habits, and reproduce the same kinds of judgemental behaviour which had led to his own distress:

During the early days of lockdown a friend wanted to come round, I thought it would be ok, as I have a big garden, she could keep her distance, I provided anti bacteria gel, when my neighbour climbed up on his small roof where his twin six year olds normally sit, and he challenged me about the rules and did they not apply to me? My friend left quietly, I was stunned by this, these are people I have known for nine years…  I found my own behaviour became odd, watching them from the top front window, breaking rules, not keeping the social distance, I realized this craziness, it was sending me bonkers, as now I wasn't able to really be who I am.52

While the respondent makes no explicit mention of common sense, its logic is threaded through the first part of his testimony; in his admission that he 'thought it would be ok', and in his subsequent list of mitigating circumstances to an imagined reader. This way of framing the episode is a clear appeal to common sense, uniting us in the judgement that his behaviour was safe – if not legal – and that his neighbours' reaction was irrational, absurd, and over the top. What emerges from this account is an unsettling description of alienation and estrangement, both from his neighbours and from an abstract notion of an authentic self. Even more strikingly, he situated a new and uncharacteristic tendency to watch and judge as a crucial component of these broken relational bonds. His neighbours' attempts to shame him simultaneously dissipated his trust, and held them (as potential hypocrites) to pristine and impossible standards of behaviour, which of course they could never live up to.

In this testimony, the respondent begins to judge others for their transgression of public health advice, not from a position of selfrighteousness or relative power but from an abject position of vulnerability, unwanted visibility and shame. The sudden and painful discovery that his common sense was not common at all but subject instead to shaming scrutiny and confrontation caused him to temporarily become someone who might in turn cast shame: a subjectivity he found difficult and unrecognizable. Bringing important questions of structural harm into sharp relief, his testimony – and many of the others discussed here – marks some of the serious relational consequences of policies which made needless room for shame rather than addressing it as a serious barrier to collective health.

This chapter has focused in part on 'common shame', instances of shame around Covid-19 made possible by lack of clarity on government guidelines and an emphasis on applying common sense to the behaviour of others. These are the consequences of deliberate political choices. In order to arrest and contain the virus, considerable sacrifices have been asked of the UK public – largely without any of the scaffolding which might have supported them to make those sacrifices with the minimum possible harm. With loneliness an endemic public health problem for at least a century, many of the expectations placed on people have been emotionally unbearable, creating impossible conflicts between different kinds of survival. Without any serious acknowledgement of – or support for – these challenges, many have acted in ways which run counter to a specific public imagining of pandemic common sense, but not to their own pressing social and relational needs. Common sense is at root an invitation to judge, not to empathize or contextualize. Hiding behind a seemingly unifying language of confidence in the ability of the public to follow a particular set of standards, 'good solid British common sense' allowed shame to flourish, sowing division and dissent, and eroding the health of relationships and communities at a time where they were profoundly necessary.

As the following chapter explores, this is not the only instance in which a public rhetoric of positivity has been inextricably tangled with shame and the impulse to save face. As the government's doomed exercise in mass testing, 'Operation Moonshot', demonstrates, attempts

to define public policy in proactive terms frequently resulted in the development of shame atmospheres: situations whose predication upon shame avoidance meant that shame, even when absent, remained a guiding force. As government policy was guided by efforts to save face, so too did management of the virus devolve to a politics of prestige, whose unspoken acceptance can be understood as a material consequence of common sense.

# Notes

#### Good Solid British Common Sense

People with Early to Middle Stage Dementia', *Age and Ageing* vol. 50:3 (May 2021), 657–63, 660. https://doi.org/10.1093/ageing/afab012.

# CHAPTER 6 OPERATION MOONSHOT: NOTES ON SAVING FACE

9 September 2020. At his Coronavirus Press Briefing, Boris Johnson announces 'an alternative plan' to return life 'closer to normality'.1 The plan he proposes will use 'testing to identify people who are negative – who don't have coronavirus and who are not infectious – so we can allow them to behave in a more normal way, in the knowledge they cannot infect anyone else with the virus'. 'Our plan', Johnson continues, 'this moonshot that I am describing – will require a giant, collaborative effort from government, business, public health professionals, scientists, logistics experts and many, many more'. Criticized at the time for being 'devoid of any contribution from scientists, clinicians, and public health and testing and screening experts', and 'disregarding the enormous problems with the existing testing and tracing programme', Johnson's plan will ultimately disappear from the government's agenda, relegated to the dustbin of history.2 However, it serves as a useful reminder of the way that the UK government's rhetoric consistently encouraged expectations vastly in excess of their capacity to deliver.

In this chapter, we argue that this mismatch provided ideal conditions for a shame environment, manifested in the numerous face-saving strategies employed by the government and their defenders to avoid public rebuke and a concomitant avoidance of responsibility. In what follows, we discuss what, exactly, was meant by Operation Moonshot, the role it played in developing unrealistic expectations, the way these expectations frequently led to public calls for accountability, and the face-saving and reputation management the government developed in response.

The effort to name and promote Operation Moonshot make it a particularly apt example for examining the UK government's efforts to save face. By September 2020, there had been numerous proposals for mass testing in the form of declared daily targets. When the targets were eventually met, the government would use these successes to mock its critics, seemingly forgetting that targets were achieved weeks, even months, after the stated

deadline.3 Importantly, these red lines were not a single occurrence but a recurrent feature of government briefings.4 Rather than acknowledge the flaws in decision-making that raised expectations, the government would frequently cover over past failures with larger, ever more ambitious testing aims: 100,000 a day, 250,000 a day, 500,000 a day and, eventually, 10,000,000 a day. Often these announcements appeared to offset the criticisms of NHS Test and Trace, the contact tracing programme led by Dido Harding until April 2021.5 In this context, saving face emerged as a repeated strategy to offset failures to meet the lines they had set for themselves – lines, moreover, that were set in an effort to save face.

# Operation Moonshot

Moonshots, writes Gemma Milne, are 'big, ambitious, expensive projects which are hard to do and – by most measures – not all that sensible; "a crazy idea" if you will'.6 They are 'singular', 'ego-boosting' 'and, in the long run, really not all that useful'. They are also, Milne continues, often 'used as a stand-in for solving something so complicated that any reasonable proposal for change would be seen as boring, too long-term and not at all beneficial for winning in political cycles'. Johnson's moonshot, she suggests, can be interpreted in two possible ways:

Either [Dominic] Cummings and Johnson don't realise that using the term and approach to describe their pandemic plans is old hat, naive, and destined, in its narrowness, to not work – which suggests they have no clue what they're doing. Or they know that this narrative will add to the misinformation and confusion, picking up easy excited headlines from their champions in the press – which suggests they don't care that their plan is operationally lacking if it serves the rhetorical purpose of fooling some.7

These are both disturbingly viable explanations. Still, a third, less 'old hat' possibility was that they were trading on the traction that moonshot has developed in policy discussions of recent years, not least the missionoriented approach advocated by the economist Mariana Mazzucato.

For Mazzucato, missions provide innovation with direction: 'they can provide the means to focus our research, innovation and investments on solving critical problems, while also spurring growth, jobs and resulting in positive spillovers across many sectors'.8 The moonshot was paradigmatic of this. During his 25 May 1961 'Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs', John F. Kennedy famously declared, 'I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth'.9 He reaffirmed this commitment at Rice University in September 1962, stating:

We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.10

For Mazzucato, this mission-oriented thinking 'galvanized one of the most innovative feats in human history', where 'cost was not the issue: the point was to get the job done'.11 The ancillary benefits, or 'spillovers', were 'technological and organization innovations that could never have been predicted at the beginning'.12 It demonstrates how 'wicked problems' can be solved by 'getting the public and private sectors to truly collaborate on investing in solutions, having a long-run view, and governing the process to make sure it is done in the public interest'.13

It is worth noting that the original moonshot was also a face-saving exercise. By 1961, the USSR had launched Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin, the first artificial satellite and first human to orbit the earth, respectively. By proposing to land a man on the moon, Kennedy was hoping to rewrite the narrative of space exploration with the United States occupying 'a position of pre-eminence'.14 Taking exception to Mazzucato's guiding example, Diane Coyle observes that 'the moonshot was not JFK's mission at all – but rather an intermediate "target"; the wider "mission" was "beat the Russians"'.15 The realities of both moonshots come closer than the outcomes of their rhetoric might suggest.

Both Kennedy and Johnson hoped their respective moonshots would produce a wave of nationalistic support against an external antagonist. For Kennedy, a competitive space race with the Soviets provided 'an overall image' that would, in Linda Krug's words, 'transform us from a nation of losers into a nation of winners'.16 For Johnson, the prospect of delivering more tests 'than any other country in Europe' would ratify his support for the Leave Campaign during the Brexit Referendum in 2016 and confirm the success of his subsequent 2019 campaign, run on the slogan 'Get Brexit

Done'.17 Less apparent in this rhetoric are those citizens that moonshots implicitly exclude. Gil Scott-Heron's acerbic spoken word poem 'Whitey on the Moon', recorded in 1970 after the moon landing, recalls the travails facing Black and poor Americans at the same time that enormous resources were poured into Kennedy's moonshot.18 Johnson's emphasis on testing as the route to 'more normal lives' contained a comparable absence: people with underlying health conditions, whose vulnerability made even regular testing an extremely risky operation. Still, even when thought of as a face-saving exercise, Kennedy's moonshot proved remarkably successful. Working out why may help us understand why Johnson's own face-saving exercise was not.

Kennedy's speech at Rice uses 'a transcendent rhetoric' built on three strategies: 'a characterization of space as a beckoning frontier; an articulation of time that locates the endeavor within a historical moment of urgency and plausibility; and a final, cumulative strategy that invites audience members to live up to their pioneering heritage by going to the moon'.19 Space presented an unprecedented situation for *not* pursuing the exigencies of war and international competition. Although the space race was intended to be an opportunity to 'beat the Russians', it was framed as an opportunity to transcend such petty rivalries. It offered the opportunity to save face, while claiming to transcend the dynamics which made face-saving desirable.

The historical context and conditions of the original moonshot highlight many of the problems that manifested in Johnson's imitation. Whereas the figure of a man on the moon gave people a clear and intuitively understandable target, to be achieved in a short, but not impossible, time frame, the notion that 10 million tests a day would be rolled out by early 2021, from an existing capacity of 200,000 tests a day in September, seemed both too complicated an idea and too short a period of time in which to achieve it. As implausible as a man on the moon may have appeared, it was, at least, an easily visualized image. Johnson's moonshot relied on people imagining the difference between two impossibly large numbers. As difficult as it might have been for experts to imagine a moon landing in less than ten years, Kennedy made it easy for a lay audience, who, in the fifteen years previously, had seen the emergence of penicillin, television and nuclear power, to conceive of it.20 The successive failures of Johnson's government to meet previously set targets made it unlikely and implausible that they would achieve this much larger one.

The success of Kennedy's moonshot was predicated on the people of the United States feeling like they had a stake in the achievement, and framing a manifestly nationalist project focused on competing with another sovereign power as if it were a noble mission for the betterment of humanity.21 Despite its material exclusions of Black and poor Americans, it was remarkably successful as a piece of rhetoric. A 1963 Gallup poll showed 69 per cent of the population supported 'either maintaining or increasing the pace of the lunar program', against 33 per cent from a poll before Kennedy's intervention.22 By contrast, the swiftness with which the Johnson government abandoned the moonshot suggests that British people felt less confident that 10 million tests a day would seriously 'allow life to return closer to normality'.23 If developing a collective response to Covid-19 provides a far more legitimate claim to greater human purpose than landing a man on the moon, the great irony was that Johnson's moonshot seemed simply to fit into a tendency, on the part of the UK government, to compare their own achievements with those of other nations. The facesaving exercise had failed.

# Saving face

We have suggested that both moonshots turned on questions of saving face. But what is 'face', and what does it mean to save it? In his essay 'On Face-Work', Erving Goffman defines face as 'the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact'.24 The line is understood to be the views a person expresses to others, consciously or not, through a pattern of verbal and nonverbal acts. For Goffman, people 'have', 'are in' or 'maintain face' when the line they take is internally consistent with their self-image, and is supported by the judgements and evidence of others. When information about social worth cannot be integrated with this line, a person is in 'wrong face', while a person is 'out of face' when their line is not the one expected of a particular situation. When this leads one's manner and bearing to falter, collapse and crumble, Goffman refers to the ensuing embarrassment as becoming shamefaced: 'the feeling, whether warranted or not, that he is perceived in a flustered state by others, and that he is presenting no usable line, may add further injuries to his feelings'.25 'To lose face', Goffman continues, 'seems to mean to be in wrong face, to be out of face, or to be shamefaced. The phrase "to save one's face" appears to refer to the process by which the person sustains an impression for others that he has not lost face'.26 We save face when people choose to accept the line we take despite external challenges to it.

Face is fundamentally social: however much we value it personally, face 'is only on loan to [us] from society; it will be withdrawn unless [we] conduct [ourselves] in a way that is worthy of it'.27 Face therefore has a certain fragility. It must be shored up by rules of conduct. For the self, the rule of self-respect demands that one 'abjure certain actions because they are above or beneath [them], while forcing [themselves] to perform others even though they cost [them] dearly'.28 When treating others, the rule of considerateness demands one to 'go to certain lengths to save the feelings and the face of others present, and … do this willingly and spontaneously because of emotional identification with the others and with their feelings'.29 Someone who fails to live up to the rule of considerateness is considered 'heartless' and someone who fails to live up to the rule of self-respect is considered 'shameless'. While maintaining face is usually 'a condition of interaction, not its objective', under certain circumstances the actions taken to make what someone is doing consistent with their 'face', or 'face-work', prioritize saving face over the explicit reason for the intervention. It is our contention that Operation Moonshot cannot simply be considered as a technoscientific plan of great ambition, but that it also had as one of its objectives the aim of maintaining and saving face.

When Matt Hancock, then Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, presented Operation Moonshot to the House of Commons on the 10th of September 2020, he found himself subjected to laughter and heckles. These arose in response to his declaration that, once the new approach to mass testing was piloted and the technology was verified, it could be 'rolled out nationwide'.30 Although the laughter may be understood as simply a feature of the systematic impoliteness that characterizes the Commons' adversarial political discourse, Hancock's reaction made it appear something more.31 Hancock's own response was to 'depart from his script' and rebuke 'the nay-sayers' who complained 'that we will never get testing going… They are against everything that is needed to sort this problem for this country, and they would do far better to support their constituents and get with the programme.'32 By announcing his departure from his script and then devoting some time to 'dressing down' his opponents, Hancock marked the laughter as 'an incident', an event 'expressively incompatible' with his line, and therefore in need of a corrective process.33 Rather than use this process to offer redress, Hancock adopted an aggressive approach to 'introduce favourable facts about himself and unfavourable facts about the others' for the sake of his audience: Conservative MPs and, we can assume, watchers of Parliamentary Live.34 The overwhelmingly negative response, evidenced by Twitter interactions with the announcement, suggests that this approach failed. In Goffman's words, 'he is made to look foolish; he loses face'.35

This anecdote tells us something about Hancock's personal efforts to maintain and save face. To argue it illustrates a general government strategy, however, we need to show how 'saving face', although a particular form of interpersonal social interaction, comes to be a material factor in matters of policy, and how Hancock's particular performance of 'saving face' fits in a longer sequence of encounters that sedimented as a collective action by the UK government. In considering the way such micro-level mechanisms for avoiding embarrassment 'produce international institutions like diplomacy', Deepak Nair argues that 'face-saving enables the performance of sovereign equality on the back of status equality; fosters in-group identity and cohesion; and serves as a micro-foundation for conflict avoidance in interactions among diplomats and statesmen'.36 Importantly, 'saving face' for Nair does not need to be linked to culturally essentialist ideas like 'shame cultures' or 'face cultures'; instead, it can be understood as a practice, arising from social interactions, 'by which actors avoid conflict and manage contention'.37 'Variation in face saving is explained not by essentialist group traits', he explains, 'but how power is ordered in a given social context'.38 Different personalities representing the UK government, like Boris Johnson or Matt Hancock, had their own techniques for saving face, reflecting their personal style and different public positions. But by both resorting to facesaving, they highlight a governmental strategy for avoiding embarrassment. Their efforts were not merely personal endeavours but aimed to order power in given social contexts.

Nair's work argues that saving face can be a legitimate technique for thinking about the impact of interpersonal dynamics in larger political contexts. But can we take Hancock's face-saving to be part of a collective action by the UK government? The first hint that we can emerges when he lays claim to this collectivism more or less explicitly by using the first person plural. Mocking the inconsistencies of the Opposition, Hancock declared: 'I have heard Opposition Members complain that we will never get testing going. They are the same old voices. They opposed the 100,000 tests, and did we deliver that? Yes, we did. They say, "What about testing in care homes?" Well, we delivered the tests to care homes earlier this week.'39 Like attacks on the Opposition, the first person plural is a standard rhetorical feature of government. Nevertheless, three features make this 'we' particularly noteworthy.

First, the 'we' clearly refers to the government, rather than, say, other, greater polities, like 'the British People', which were typically invoked in more public updates on the crisis. This suggests that the defense of 'face', offered by Hancock, is a defense of the collective face of the government. Second, the criticisms followed a general tendency in the rhetoric of the Johnson government to present ostensibly true statements that dissimulated about context. When the government promised to deliver 100,000 tests by the end of April 2020, they met the target by including mailout tests (test sent to individuals at home or in hospitals) in the count of tests already completed.40 Likewise, when Vic Rayner, executive director of the National Care Forum, called for a so-called 'ring of steel' around care homes in April 2020, the government promised testing for all residents and staff throughout the summer.41 In August, they backtracked, citing 'unexpected delays', and only delivered, as Hancock said, in early September.42 As Opposition MPs were quick to point out, the government's delivery came weeks, even months after the promised deadline. Importantly, the government used the truth of delivery to dissimulate over its failure to meet its own deadlines. Third, Hancock's response demonstrates the general tendency to use comparatives and superlatives as a way of deflecting attention away from their failure to maintain their 'line'. Here, Hancock simply compared criticisms to purported performance. Boris Johnson would present much clearer examples of these strategies during his appearances at Prime Minister's Questions over the next two weeks.

On 16 September, the Deputy Leader of the UK Labour Party Angela Rayner jibed that 'the Prime Minister has put his faith in Operation Moonshot, but, meanwhile, on planet Earth, there were no NHS tests available for several high-infection areas'.43 In his response, Johnson defends the ambition of the plan as a matter of comparative record:

We want to get up to 500,000 tests per day by the end of October. As I have said, that is a huge, huge number. I really do pay tribute to all those who are delivering it. I know that Opposition Members like to make these international comparisons, so I will just repeat that we are testing more than any other European country.44

His insistence on the 'huge number' of tests sets a numerical value and makes that value a defining quality of success. It establishes a line on the matter of testing. This line, however, is intimately connected to his desire to present a favourable comparison with Europe, a concern pronounced enough that he would return to it again in response to another of Rayner's questions:

I think that most people looking at the record of this country in delivering tests across the nation will see that that compares extremely well with any other European country. We have conducted more testing than any other European country, and that is why we are able to deliver tests and results.45

On 23 September, he would return to this line of defence in his ripostes to the Leader of the Opposition, Keir Starmer:

We are not only at a record high today, testing more people than any other European country, but that, to get to the point that the right hon. and learned Gentleman raises, we are going to go up to 500,000 tests by the end of October.46

There are other, more salacious examples of the government insisting on their absolute success, but this particular line is useful because it introduces a tendency towards the superlative and the hyperbolic, observable across claims about Operation Moonshot.

Superlatives express the very highest degree of a quality. Hyperbole describes expressions where claims, whether superlative or not, are more extreme than the object discussed can justify.47 Now, comparing the performance of the UK government to other countries is not, strictly speaking, a grammatical instance of the superlative, and, when the claim can be justified, neither is it hyperbolic. But their empirical validity seems secondary to their symbolic importance. We are, after all, not as interested in whether the UK government produced more tests than other countries in Europe, as we are in why telling people matters.

Commenting on the way that urban theorists use superlatives and 'firsts' to frame their work, Robert A. Beauregard noted how the tendency led to claims being extracted from their original context, while also implying 'a hierarchy of values… that is hardly ever revealed'.48 For Beauregard, this meant that the theoretical implications of the claims remained unaddressed. Moreover, '[t]he deployment of superlatives and "firsts" disorients the reader by blurring the distinctions among different types of texts and interpretive stances. This, in turn, weakens our ability to evaluate the texts'.49 Beauregard

was complaining about forms of 'boosterism' in academic writing, and so his comments may not appear immediately relevant. However, he usefully points to the way that boosterism directs attention to one area, while deflecting it away from another. In the immediate context, superlatives about testing replaced superlatives about the 'worst death toll in Europe'. But it also justified Brexit to those who had voted to leave the European Union in the 2016 referendum and those who had voted for the Conservative Party in the 2019 general election so they could 'Get Brexit Done'.

By making favourable comparisons with the rest of Europe, Johnson could emphasize the successes of the UK after it left the EU on the 31st of January 2020. These claims were abstracted from a context in which other comparisons – the overall death rate, hospital beds per 100,000 – presented the UK in a much poorer light. They insisted on prioritizing particular forms of performance – expense, numerical superiority – over other, potentially more important metrics. One moment the government would discuss capacity; the next, it would be tests delivered. Neither were so significant as the number being touted: frequently in the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions, the only ambition seemed to be to make these numbers grow and grow. The aim was to present the UK's response as paradigmatic and 'world-leading', even if only its own citizens would ever believe that.

There were significant substantive and material reasons for presenting Brexit as a successful policy decision. But the personal commitment to leaving the EU, made by Johnson and many of the senior figures in his government, suggests that the need for it to succeed relied in no small way on saving face. A successful Brexit was a line, in Goffman's terms, on which face might be made, maintained or lost. Performance during the pandemic provided the means of establishing that success, through direct comparison with the UK's most immediate neighbours. Therefore, to save face in the pandemic demanded a correspondent loss of face on the part of EU member nations.

There is a further reason for thinking of Operation Moonshot as reflecting a broader concern with saving face: the ease with which both Johnson and Hancock were, even when they introduced the name, attempting to distance themselves from it. Johnson presents it as 'our plan, this moonshot that I am describing'.50 Hancock refers to it as 'so-called Operation Moonshot'.51 In both cases, the qualification of the moonshot, either as 'this' or 'so-called', undercuts the magnitude of the allusion by making it generic, rather than singular, or suggesting it is 'just' a name. There were good reasons for their reservations. By the time they announced it, crucial planning documents related to Operation Moonshot had already been leaked to the *British Medical Journal*. In the article that broke the story on 9 September 2020, public health experts were cited as having 'already rounded on the plans'.52 The line that Operation Moonshot was designed to establish had already crumbled. Johnson and Hancock's efforts to dismiss the name as comparatively insignificant seems part of a general effort to restate the line in the numbers of tests, rather than the grandiose posturing of the moonshot itself.

#### Shame avoidance

According to Goffman, saving face means to avoid losing face or becoming shamefaced. In other words, saving face is, in part, a tactic developed to avoid shame and favourably manage one's reputation. In our introduction, we argued that shame avoidance plays a crucial role in creating shame dynamics, even when no direct shame response seems to be in evidence. People will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid feeling shame and to avoid shameful exposure.53 Ironically, boosterism, even as it appears at first to present opportunities for shame's opposite, pride, creates greater risk of shame, especially if and when the claims it makes are proven to be overblown or unrealistic.

In the UK government's case, this seems to have led to a form of 'gambler's ruin', where, in a bid to overcome the shame and reputation damage of prior bad claims, the government made successive bids to more and more impressive targets. This strategy may be explained by two needs. There was a short-term need to displace unfavourable superlatives about high numbers of excess deaths with more favourable superlatives about high numbers of daily tests. There was also a longer-term need to portray Brexit as the 'right' decision, by comparing the performance of EU countries unfavourably to that of the UK. Certainly, the government, as a whole, had a shared interest in responding to both these needs. In this regard, more abstract considerations like reputation, status and culture do have some traction in trying to explain why they went to such lengths to avoid losing face, even when this strategy was almost certain to come back to haunt them (the clearest example being the line the government took in defending Dominic Cummings's ill-fated trips to Durham and Barnard Castle).

Still, what became policy often seemed to be galvanized by the social dynamics of certain high-profile individuals, when called upon by the

Opposition, the press or the country to defend their line. The easiest analytic move would be to use shame avoidance to explain certain declarations as made 'on the hoof ', or in response to challenges to the line, combine that with the individual's official standing, and claim that the need to turn the former into actual policy developed from the influence of the latter. Rather than approach it via this psychologizing route, which is largely circumstantial, evidence from Mass Observation demonstrates that members of the public thought the policies were attempts to hold a line and that, as attempts, they had failed.

Consider, from the 2020 Spring Directive, how one retired local government officer castigates the line taken by the government:

Further the government have lied – not spoken in error, but actually lied – about how well things were going. Statements were made that our systems were world-beating when they were not; that we were testing x number of people a day when we were doing less than half that, etc. I know of no-one who is a medical scientist or a senior doctor who is not appalled and ashamed of this. Even radiographers have been reporting that they are fed up of seeing scans where the virus is all over lungs when the patient had received a false negative test result (they are c. 30% false negative). The government failed to shield and protect the most at risk (the old, those in care homes, those with serious medical problems) though they kept stating they were doing so. I am ashamed of being British now, whereas I was brought up to be proud. We may have 'saved the NHS' but we have not saved countless thousands of lives which would otherwise not have happened, and that was the fault of the government.54

This rich account illustrates a number of key themes that emerge in responses selected for their direct engagement with shame. Respondents repeatedly raised their own feelings of shame about being British, complained that the behaviour of the government was shameful and pointed out inconsistencies between what was said and what was done. These concerns obviously coincide in important ways. The mismatch between the statements and the truth create a 'shameful' failure to maintain the line. For some respondents, this made them 'ashamed of being British'. For others, it provoked them to call the government's decision-making 'shambolic, incompetent and shameful'.55 We might think of the tendency to assign shame, whether to the self or to the government, as an unanswered call: an attempt to fill in the gap where some recognition of failure was felt to be needed, but remained lacking. By avoiding an honest and truthful admission of the facts, the government in effect created a shame vacuum, into which such accusations were hurled as a last ditch effort to assign blame somewhere.

People recognized that these efforts to ascribe shame were risky. Although certain figures emerged as particularly shame worthy – Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and Matt Hancock – this was coupled with the realization that they could not be held solely responsible. As another Mass Observation respondent put it,

I have developed a particular disdain for Matt Hancock, which I sense I share with quite a lot of people. I've really resented his reprimanding tone which he's maintained consistently throughout the crisis, from criticising members of the public for not following social distancing measures when it was unclear both as to what the measures actually were and whether people were truly disregarding them, to attempting to scapegoat footballers. His tough language appears as nothing more than a front to cover how woefully inept he is in his role, but I hope he doesn't become the sole scapegoat, if and when proper scrutiny is placed on the government's handling of the crisis.56

On the one hand, Matt Hancock's reprimanding tone, referred to earlier in the chapter, appears to be 'a front' (a 'line') to disguise his inadequacies. On the other, this personal disdain risks occluding the blame that needs to be placed on the whole government. Whether or not the behaviour of the UK government, or certain individuals representing it, was or wasn't shameful, these accounts demonstrate that collective strategies of establishing or maintaining the line were taken by their intended audience to be shameful, even when their content seemingly had nothing to do with shame or shaming. In retrospect, the decisions of the government demonstrate a structural tendency towards shame avoidance, irrespective of the actual feelings of the individuals involved. Importantly, structural shame avoidance emerges out of the collective behaviour of these individuals, as a succession of face-saving efforts that were seen and judged by the general public. For this reason, we argue that a shame dynamic pervaded even those areas where shame seemed least applicable: the provision of mass testing that culminated in Operation Moonshot.

Operation Moonshot was not a resounding success. Although the government managed to increase its testing capacity to over 500,000 tests a