The Lockdown Files: Episode 4, Project Fear
Chopper's Politics
The Telegraph
4.2 • 864 Ratings
🗓️ 11 August 2023
⏱️ 35 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Is it ever ok to scare the public?
In this episode, the reporters dig into leaked messages which show a discussion between Matt Hancock and one of his team. They say “We frighten the pants off everyone with the new strain” and “When do we deploy the new variant”.
The exchanges speak to a so-called “Project Fear”, which prompts the team to ask government ministers about whether decisions made were the right ones…
We also speak to the adviser behind some of the government's messaging…
And to a mum whose children are still dealing with the fall out tells her family’s story.
Read more about the Lockdown Files here: www.telegraph.co.uk/news/lockdown-files |
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Some of her first anxiety in year six started around health anxiety. |
| 0:05.2 | When we got the leak, there was a line in one of the messages that jumped out at us. |
| 0:10.0 | Matt Hancock wrote he wanted to frighten the pants of the public. |
| 0:15.0 | She was terrified that there was going to be another pandemic and this time it's going to |
| 0:21.0 | kill everyone and what will happen then. |
| 0:24.0 | The idea of scaring people was something the government denied, |
| 0:29.0 | and yet people were still scared by the messaging which bombarded them through the pandemic. |
| 0:35.0 | One of these people is Amber. |
| 0:36.7 | She's 10 years old. |
| 0:37.7 | They've been reading a book that mentioned The Plague. |
| 0:40.6 | And that's her mother, Liz, you're hearing. She had real panic attacks about it, real imaging that the plague was going to come back and it was going to spread and there were going to be more and more pandemics. |
| 0:52.0 | She was worried about dying and about people dying and she had the real proper panic attacks that I had to kind of do slow breathing with her about it. |
| 1:01.0 | Is it ever justified to frighten the population and how is that played out in people's lives? |
| 1:07.0 | I remember reading about the plague when I was a kid and it obviously it didn't impact me in that way |
| 1:11.0 | because I suppose I'd never had a realistic version of it |
| 1:14.7 | happening in my lifetime. |
| 1:16.7 | This is the Lockdown Files Podcast. |
| 1:21.7 | Episode 4, Project Fear. |
| 1:25.0 | By August 2020, the country was almost free from lockdown. |
| 1:30.0 | Do you remember we were all seeing our friends and doing eat out to help out? |
| 1:35.0 | 50% off 10 pounds per head for everyone. |
| 1:39.0 | We were hoping that the virus and the countless restrictions which came with it were behind us. |
... |
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