Lockdown, furlough, vaccine... and Matt: the language of pandemic politics

Coronavirus didn’t just disrupt our daily lives – it changed the vocabulary of public debate. Can the words of politicians and experts on BBC Question Time help track the public's concerns in 2020?

“It's like a plague, it seems,” Jennifer Murphy tells the Question Time panel. “I don't know the severity or the mortality rate - does it kill everyone who's affected? I don't know.” The date is 30 January 2020 – the day, we would later find out, of the first recorded death from Covid-19 in the UK.

Murphy, a member of the audience in Buxton, Derbyshire, is the first person on the BBC’s weekly political debate programme to mention the word that would come to dominate our lives. Just a week earlier, the then health secretary, Matt Hancock, had been the first to say it in parliament: “coronavirus”.

But the virus was not the most important topic on the show that week – Murphy's question on whether it was safe to evacuate British people from the Chinese city of Wuhan to the UK (she thought it wasn’t) came 22 minutes into the programme, after two questions on the state of the railways in Britain.

Over the coming weeks, the threat from Covid would push its way up the political agenda. By analysing almost half a million words from transcripts of Question Time in 2020, we can track how coronavirus became more prominent, squeezing out debate on other issues, and creating its own lexicon.

Displaced: Brexit, Megxit and Corbyn’s exit

In January 2020, the aftermath of the general election held the previous month was still being discussed. Jeremy Corbyn had announced his resignation as Labour leader, and the debate over the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union – which would officially take effect at the end of the month – rumbled on.

Pre-pandemic episodes of Question Time also included discussion of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex stepping back from royal duties (dubbed ‘Megxit’), and sporadic debates over drug policy. As the significance of Covid became more apparent, many of these issues would recede into the background, as analysis of the transcripts shows.

How we track the subjects discussed

We track the relative prominence of subjects by counting the number of times keywords relating to the topic were mentioned in each programme.

Transcriptions are based on the live subtitles generated at the time of transmission and vary in length, both because of the differing duration of the episodes and the introduction of some repeated words during the subtitling process. As a result, the most consistent way to compare across programmes is by using a rate per 1,000 words.

The most commonly used word in the English language, “the”, is mentioned around 49 times per 1,000 words in the Question Time transcripts. The most common noun in the transcripts, “people”, is mentioned around 8 times per 1,000 words.

The language of lockdown

As the pandemic progressed, the politicians, commentators and experts on Question Time started to use certain words a lot more frequently than before, and some that had previously been unknown or obscure became common parlance.

“Lockdown” first appeared on 30 January 2020, in relation to the restrictions being imposed by the Chinese authorities in Wuhan. When it was next mentioned on 19 March, the UK was four days away from a lockdown of its own. Question Time was being broadcast without a studio audience for the first time, and panellists were positioned two metres apart on the stage to maintain social distancing. The word would subsequently be mentioned in every episode until the end of the year.

Other words that did not appear until the pandemic hit include “furlough”, “PPE” (personal protective equipment), and the first name of the Secretary of State for Health, Matt [Hancock].

The top ten words that were not mentioned, or mentioned only once, in January and February’s episodes, and subsequently came up a lot (11 times or more) during the rest of 2020, all have a distinctly pandemic flavour:

• lockdown
• testing
• pandemic
• workers
• vaccine
• contact
• trace
• tests
• capacity
• restrictions

On the other hand, the words that stopped appearing as often from March onwards relate to pre-Covid concerns. As well as “Corbyn” and “drugs”, these include “trains”, “win” (referring to the 2019 general election) and [Sajid] “Javid”, the former Chancellor who resigned in February 2020.

The one word that came up in every pre-pandemic episode, but was not mentioned at all after mid-March, reflects the changes the BBC had to make to Question Time’s format due to Covid restrictions: “glasses”.

When the programme still had a studio audience, presenter Fiona Bruce would regularly invite audience members to speak by referring to “the man at the back with the glasses”, or “the woman in the glasses there”. With no in-person crowd, and later with the audience invited to join via video call, the presenter could simply refer to people by name, so identifying them using physical characteristics like “glasses” wasn’t needed.

In spring 2020, lockdown and testing were the focus

By grouping together related words that appeared around the same time, we can delve deeper into the coronavirus topic and chart how public debate shifted throughout 2020.

It was on 27 February that the significance of Covid started to be reflected on the Question Time agenda. For the first time, the virus was the subject of the first question on the programme, with audience member Dawn Galloway asking the panel in Middlesbrough: “Given the current strains on the NHS, is the government prepared for a coronavirus pandemic?”

During March, as the UK-wide lockdown on the 23rd approached, mentions of words relating to restrictions like “lockdown”, “guidance” and “distancing”, as well as those about possible support measures for people affected such as “furlough”, “workers” and “self-employed”, increased rapidly. The topic would remain high on the agenda for several months.

A more short-lived talking point was concern around the availability of coronavirus testing, discussion of which peaked around the end of April 2020 – co-inciding with Matt Hancock’s self-imposed deadline for carrying out 100,000 tests per day.

By early June 2020, the focus of the Question Time debate had moved on to isolation and contact tracing, as the government tried to get NHS Track and Trace functioning effectively before the re-opening of non-essential retail in England on the 15th.

As the programme approached its summer break at the end of June, discussion of coronavirus subsided as panellists debated the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests and the dismantling of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol.

After a dozen consecutive episodes that had opened with questions about Covid-19, these issues were the first to displace the pandemic from the programme’s lead slot.

Restrictions still debated in the autumn, with vaccines in sight

As Question Time resumed in mid-September 2020, the UK was entering its second wave of coronavirus, with case rates rising again and the government bringing in various sets of restrictions, both regionally and nationally, throughout the autumn.

These measures, and when and how to implement them, fuelled much debate during Question Time episodes in October and November, with talk of “circuit-breaker” lockdowns, differences between the nations and regions of the UK, and whether a Scotch egg constituted a “substantial meal”.

But from mid-November a more optimistic topic started to receive more attention on the show, in the wake of Pfizer announcing that its vaccine was more than 90% effective. Mentions of vaccination peaked on 3 December, the day after the Pfizer jab was approved for use in Britain.

Debate in a crisis

As the pandemic has extended into 2021, beyond the scope of our analysis, new Covid-related phrases have continued to emerge, from “pingdemic” to “double-jabbing” and “vaccine passport”.

The live studio audience has not yet returned, but people from across the UK are still invited to ask politicians, experts and commentators about the issues that concern them.

For Question Time’s executive producer, Nicolai Gentchev, this remains a vital part of the programme’s remit – especially in a crisis. In the very early days of lockdown, Gentchev told Deadline:

“We’re trying to find a way to keep the essence of Question Time, which is people scrutinising policy and the way it’s communicated... The thing that we can do that’s a bit different to news programmes is not just to communicate information but to interrogate it, and allow people to ask questions.”