Description
In the context of the ongoing global pandemic and recurring imposed restrictions, the UK is an extreme case study: it ‘closed’ last and ‘reopened’ first. July 19 2021 – dubbed ‘Freedom Day’ in a 5-month-long roadmap to phased ‘reopening’ – marked the lifting of the last mandated health measures in England. However, despite declining numbers of COVID-19 cases, hospitalisations and deaths, an admittedly successful vaccine rollout national programme, and signs of increasing ‘compliance fatigue’, the British public was, in the first instance, not persuaded by the government’s decision to ‘reopen’ the country. This paper employs mixed methods to explain the public’s resistance to the UK government’s desecuritisation of the pandemic. We use thematic analysis of public discourse to map the main frames that guided the government’s strategy to, initially, securitise and, finally, desecuritise the pandemic in 2020 and 2021 respectively. We then assess the extent to which these key frames had an impact on public attitudes and explore the different ‘audiences’ they appealed to through an analysis of original and pertinent two-wave survey panel data of the UK population, administered online in April 2020 and 2021.
