One of the things I found most striking in the early days of The Skeptic was the number of British people I met who viewed their country as far less gullible than the United States. Numerous beliefs popping up in the United States—at least, according to the press—were described to me as the sort of thing Britons were far too sensible to adopt.
“No one here would believe in alien abductions,” Hilary Evans told me confidently, for example. Evans and his wife, Mary, founded the Mary Evans Picture Library, which culled images from out-of-copyright books and supplied illustrations in physical and (later) digital formats to all parts of the British media, including, for decades, The Skeptic (for which we couldn’t be more grateful). On his own hook, Evans wrote numerous books about apparitions and “intrusions.” He was definitely chagrined when the daytime talk shows began featuring real, live British people who believed they had been abducted. He may have been even more appalled when belief in angels began turning up on the United Kingdom’s daytime talk shows.
I heard similar comments about creationism; if you asked people here about it in the 1990s, they’d tell you there was a brief flirtation with it in the 1980s but that it “just disappeared.” It turned out the real story most people didn’t see was a concerted campaign by Mike Howgate, who, under the aegis of the two-person Association to Protect Evolution (APE), deliberately disrupted the promotion of creationism as much as he could. There was a second brief flirtation with it in the early 2000s during Tony Blair’s premiership, but even Blair denied he supported it. It appears to be a non-issue now, as are several other issues that loom large in the United States.
In one sense, this is just a nation-level variation on the familiar reality that most people believe they can’t be fooled—but others can be. As the late, great Nora Ephron put it in When Harry met Sally …, “Everybody thinks they have good taste and a sense of humor but they couldn’t possibly all have good taste.”
At the same time, it also reminds us that there are national trends in beliefs that don’t always cross borders. My favorite example of that is the German belief in dangerous “earth rays,” which German skeptical leader Amardeo Sarma has talked about since the group’s founding in 1987 but appears never to have extended beyond the borders of the German-speaking world. Along that line, Britain seems to have a long history of deep suspicion of new wireless technologies in particular. Twenty-five years ago, the arrival of 3G was accompanied with deep suspicion that the mobile masts being erected were dangerous to human health. At a town meeting called by our local member of parliament, she was barraged with hostility about proposals to put up masts in our area. Eventually, I interrupted with this: “How many of you are carrying mobile phones right now?” Near universally, hands went up. “Well, do you want them to work?”
The incoming wireless generation, 5G, has attracted a much higher level of conspiracy theory, largely because it has had the bad luck to be arriving at the same time as the coronavirus. A BBC program in July (available within the United Kingdom for eight months from its broadcast date) found strong links between belief that the virus is a hoax and fears that 5G is being installed to kill, or at least control, us all. The influence of the internet is stamped all over this, as these beliefs, along with the depiction of Bill Gates as a vaccine-mad mogul bent on depopulating the world, are not unique to Britain. More specific was the BBC’s report that more than 100 telephone masts—many of them not 5G at all—were set on fire, a number well ahead of other European countries. A July BBC report found telecoms engineers reporting they’d been attacked while on the job. Fortunately, this all seems to have quieted down since the spring.
YouTube has also helped turn at least one local British product into an international peddler of conspiracy theories: David Icke. Icke got famous as a professional soccer player (“footballer”); he moved on to sports broadcasting after his professional career. So far, so normal. Then, around 1990, he visited a psychic, announced he was a “Son of the Godhead,” predicted various global catastrophes culminating in the world ending in 1997, began wearing all turquoise, and showed up on talk shows with his wife and girlfriend to explain why their relationship was a religious experience. I don’t think anyone took him seriously, but bonkers was good for ratings. Then he found a home on the web, where he promoted his books, and then social media. His Twitter feed is full-on conspiracy: lizard aliens, there is no proof the coronavirus exists, mask mandates and lockdowns are fascism, and Bill Gates owns “technocrat” Antony Fauci. It shouldn’t, therefore, have been a surprise when media photographs showed that sprouting sparsely amid a September anti-lockdown protest in Trafalgar Square were a few QAnon signs.
Nonetheless, it was. I may have been here too long.