The Lockdown Files Psyop: A Fairy Tale Spun by the UK Government and Its Propaganda Arm, the Mainstream Media
“As British people continue to die in unprecedented numbers, the Lockdown Files have been released to shift the entire blame for increased mortality to “failures” and “errors” in public health policy. It is an attempt to avert any exploration of the apparent role that the Covid–19 jabs have also played in killing people.
As G3P “partners,” both the UK Government and its propaganda arm, the mainstream media, have colluded to manipulate public opinion and control the British people once again. The whole Lockdown File narrative is just another mainstream media deceit.”
The Lockdown Files Psyop
by Iain Davis, UK Column
March 29, 2023
The whole point of the recent Lockdown Files media storm is to wage psychological war on the public. The Lockdown Files “story,” carefully managed as mainstream media propaganda, is designed to convince you of a series of fundamental falsehoods.
The MSM and its government partners want you to believe that you still have a free and pluralistic mainstream media that take their duty to question power seriously. This controlled release of information, already extensively and comprehensively exposed by the so-called “alternative media,” is, in part, a mainstream media cover-up to obscure their own role as the state propagandists that misled the public throughout the pseudopandemic.
The mainstream media themselves are culpable for the harm caused to the British people by the British state, as they unquestioningly assisted the UK Government’s attack on the public. The mainstream media rarely, if ever, question power and they are neither independent nor objective.
The intention behind seemingly exposing government “failings” is to persuade you that catastrophic government policies and legislation were politically motivated mistakes. While they were certainly politically motivated, the policy decisions were deliberate. There were no “mistakes.” The assault on the public was intentional.
The Lockdown File fairy tale has been spun to deny both the Government’s intent to cause harm and to divert attention away from its real motivations. The pseudopandemic was a hybrid warfare operation undertaken by a global public-private partnership (G3P) to accelerate the transformation of society and the global economy.
As British people continue to die in unprecedented numbers, the Lockdown Files have been released to shift the entire blame for increased mortality to “failures” and “errors” in public health policy. It is an attempt to avert any exploration of the apparent role that the Covid–19 jabs have also played in killing people.
As G3P “partners,” both the UK Government and its propaganda arm, the mainstream media, have colluded to manipulate public opinion and control the British people once again. The whole Lockdown File narrative is just another mainstream media deceit.
The Story We Are Supposed To Believe
The journalist, editor, author and media commentator, Isabel Oakeshott, a biographical ghostwriter for David Cameron, Matt Hancock and other political heavyweights, was given access to Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp messages while she wrote his Pandemic Diaries for him. Oakeshott, ostensibly a fierce critic of lockdown policies, then divulged these messages to the Daily Telegraph, thus establishing the basis for the raft of Lockdown Files-related stories.
According to the Daily Telegraph, the Lockdown Files supposedly reveal that the UK Government did not “follow the science” but instead “key decisions were made on the fly for political reasons.” The Telegraph claims that 40,000 vulnerable adults “died of the virus” in the spring of 2020 because Matt Hancock, then health secretary, ignored then chief medical officer Chris Whitty’s advice to test all residents before allowing them to be discharged from hospital into care homes.
A string of similar allegations have flowed from the Lockdown Files. The files intimate that key decisions regarding when and whom to lockdown were made in response to polling rather than scientific advice. Scientific data analysis reports on mortality risks and infection rates were ignored as Hancock used his media connections to push jab targets regardless.
Supposedly, the decision to enforce mask-wearing upon schoolchildren was taken to avoid a Westminster spat with the Scottish Government. We are told that Hancock didn’t loosen lockdown restrictions when advised to do so, because he didn’t want to give the impression that the decision to prolong them was wrong.
The Lockdown Files also supposedly reveal that the Cabinet was misled by Hancock and his team as vital information was withheld. We are reliably informed that the current prime minister, Rishi Sunak, then serving as Chancellor of the Exchequer, fought hard against Hancock’s excesses as the two were pitted against each other.
Matt Hancock was, we are led to believe, drunk with power as he pressurised the police to enforce his erroneous lockdown restrictions. But it seems his greatest sin is that he decided to engage in “Project Fear.” It was Hancock who supposedly led his team to weaponise and “deploy” the release of information about Covid–19 variants to “scare the pants off everyone”, in the most memorable quotation to have emerged from the Lockdown Files, and to make them comply with his misplaced policy decisions.
While this does reveal the depth of the manipulation which the state used to convince the British people that they should take the “pandemic” seriously, the Lockdown Files stories declare that political desperation and errors of judgement were the drivers. While acknowledging the damage caused by these supposed mistakes, the Lockdown Files narrative blames supposedly rogue policymakers who got aspects of the lockdowns wrong.
The Lockdown Files narrative spins the yarn of a string of policy failures made during the panic and fear caused by a deadly virus. Some politicians—most notably Matt Hancock, ably assisted by politicised civil servants right up to the nation’s top bureaucrat, Sir Simon Case, who chuckled along with him in the WhatsApp group—overstepped the bounds of their authority and used the “deadly pandemic” as a platform to advance personal political agendas.
The narrative would have it that the Cabinet was deceived at times, as Matt Hancock occasionally placed political expediency over his duty to protect public health and inform Cabinet colleagues. Other supposedly conscientious ministers, such as the current prime minister, Rishi Sunak, fell victim to his machinations, despite their innate sense that the Government shouldn’t abuse its power.
The Lockdown Files reportedly reveal that Hancock desperately tried to salvage his career after footage, leaked by someone inside the House of Commons, exposed his affair with his parliamentary aide. He resigned as health secretary—jumping before he would have been pushed—but soon managed to get his political career back on track. Yet, just a few months later, Hancock suddenly lost all interest in his own advancement and effectively ended his political career by agreeing to participate in a reality TV programme.
The Lockdown Files squarely point the finger at Matt Hancock. It is primarily he who is left carrying the can for the lockdown “mistakes”. So it is incredibly fortuitous for the current government, nominally led by Hancock’s alleged adversary Rishi Sunak, that Hancock had the whip withdrawn for going on dross TV and now sits as an independent MP, somewhat distanced from the current ruling Conservative Party government.
But we don’t need to think about any of this, because other sections of the mainstream media have already told us what the Lockdown Files are all about. According to the Wall Street Journal, the mainstream media always knew that “the science about Covid was confused” and that “policy mistakes were inevitable”.
Sure, “the expansive powers that governments exercised in that period bled into the personal ambitions of the politicians making the rules”, but this is to be expected. “Expansive powers” were unavoidably necessary and some politicians are ruthless self promoters. It’s just the nature of adversarial politics.
The Spectator tells us more about how we should perceive the Lockdown Files. It spells out that it is “the role of journalism in a democracy is to cast light where politicians would prefer there to be darkness.” The Daily Telegraph was committed to illuminating the darkness, the Spectator claims in collegiality, and was tenacious in its efforts to ensure whatever it published about the Lockdown Files “had the full context.”
The Spectator maintains that the Lockdown Files are really important because they are about “how we are governed.” Thankfully, the Spectator‘s fellow mainstream journalists over at the Daily Telegraph will help us to appreciate “how we can learn from mistakes to better protect society next time.”
This sentiment is echoed by the supposedly politically oppositional Guardian, which tells us:
The balance of evidence shows that government-imposed restrictions [. . .] cut infection rates and saved lives. [. . .] Countries that acted more quickly to impose social restrictions did a better job of protecting the economy. Allowing the virus to spread uncontrolled would have incurred substantial economic costs.
The Guardian continues to claim that the Lockdown Files are “important for learning lessons from the pandemic” and that we all “urgently need a rational assessment of what the government got right and wrong”.
Also from what passes for the Left, the Fabian-founded New Statesman tells us that the Lockdown Files simply confirm what we, and the mainstream media, already knew:
To some extent, they show cabinet government working properly[.] [. . .] Everyone involved is exactly who you thought they were; everyone cares about the things you thought they did. [. . .] We should be appalled by the lockdown files, I know: by the failure of our government [. . .] But after years of this government, and austerity and Brexit and decline and pandemic and two and a half lockdowns and two lost Christmases, none of this comes as a surprise[.]
In summary: the Lockdown Files narrative is propaganda.
The Lockdown Files have been used to construct another pandemic myth and all they “reveal” is that the mainstream media continue to act as the propaganda wing of the state.
The Lockdown Files Cover-Up
The mainstream media are obsessed with maintaining our “trust”. The Trusted News Initiative has been created specifically “to protect audiences and users from disinformation, particularly around moments of jeopardy[.]” While the mainstream media expect to command our trust, they do not trust us. We might believe the wrong things if we don’t “trust” whatever the mainstream media tell us. Only the mainstream media can determine what constitutes the truth. We are, apparently, incapable of doing so.
If the Lockdown Files reveal anything, it is that the mainstream media are the greatest purveyor of “disinformation”, utterly unworthy of our “trust”. But, for propaganda to succeed in the future, we must continue to trust the propagandists.
While the Lockdown Files “investigations” concede that the mainstream media disseminated little other than disinformation during the pseudopandemic, they also insist this was all the result of mistakes that weren’t identified at the time. The release of the Lockdown Files is an attempt to reassert that the mainstream media are, and always were, willing to question power and are trustworthy, despite their having admittedly misled the public for more than two years. The Lockdown Files are subtle and intricate propaganda. Unfortunately, this is often the most successful kind.
The Covid–19 narrative is scrupulously maintained by the Lockdown Files. The Lockdown Files story promotes the notion of a devastating pandemic in which people died in unprecedented numbers from a dangerous disease. It reinforces the idea that lockdowns were necessary—but concedes that the policy was possibly mismanaged. Lessons can be learned from the alleged “failures”.
The policy decisions made were not errors. Legislation was created, and regulations enforced, in the full and certain knowledge that the threat they supposedly mitigated did not exist.
The evidence does not prove that a disease-driven pandemic ever occurred. Consequently, nor is there anything to suggest that a political response of any kind was warranted.
The observed “pandemic” mortality patterns appeared to be the product of government policy. Every related policy decision increased the mortality risk for the most vulnerable, who were the only people apparently at any risk from the so-called “disease”.
As yet, not a single laboratory anywhere in the world has produced a physically isolated sample of the alleged SARS–CoV–2 virus. There is no physical evidence that SARS–CoV–2 exists, and the alleged “science” of virology, the whole basis for the pandemic mythos, appears to be highly questionable.
Covid–19 symptoms were indistinguishable from other influenza-like illnesses. The only way to allegedly identify Covid–19 was with the use of tests that were specifically “non-diagnostic”. Positive tests were misleadingly called “cases”, despite there being no symptoms to evidence the presence of any disease in test subjects, let alone Covid–19.
Lockdowns were never considered to be an appropriate response to a pandemic. In 2019, just a few months prior to the “pandemic,” the World Health Organisation published its report on the use of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) for managing influenza pandemics. It specifically ruled out lockdowns and social isolation because there was “no obvious rationale for this measure.”
Social distancing, which became the idea of reducing the spread of a “viral” respiratory disease with lockdowns, was the original idea of a fourteen-year-old Albuquerque schoolgirl. As politicians started eyeing “confinement by quarantine” as an enticing tool for population control, so incensed were epidemiologists that one of the disciplines leading lights, Professor Donald A. Henderson, published a withering criticism of “lockdowns” entitled Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza:
There are no historical observations or scientific studies that support the confinement by quarantine of groups of possibly infected people for extended periods. [. . .] The societal costs involved in interrupting all air or train travel would be extreme. [. . . ] It might mean closing theatres, restaurants, malls, large stores, and bars. [. . . ] Implementing such measures would have seriously disruptive consequences [. . .] a manageable epidemic could move toward catastrophe.
Professor Knut Wittkowski, the epidemiologist who originally defined the reproduction number or “R number” we heard so much about, said:
With all respiratory diseases, the only thing that stops the disease is herd immunity. About 80% of the people need to have had contact with the virus. [. . .] So, it’s very important to keep the schools open and kids mingling to spread the virus to get herd immunity as fast as possible. [. . .] We are experiencing all sorts of counterproductive consequences of not well-thought-through policy [. . .] We will see more death because the school children don’t die, it’s the elderly people who die, we will see more death because of this social distancing.
The UK Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) knew that lockdowns and social isolation would increase the “infection” risk. SAGE published minutes of a meeting it held on 16 March 2020, in which its members concluded:
The risk of one person within a household passing the infection to others within the household is estimated to increase during household isolation, from 50% to 70%.
Epidemiology—”the science”—was absolutely clear. Lockdowns were never considered a sensible response to pandemics unless the disease was incredibly severe, and the UK Government knew that Covid–19 certainly wasn’t.
The WHO declared a global pandemic on 11 March 2020. By 19 March 2020, the UK Government was undeniably aware that there was no pandemic risk: the Government’s own High Consequence Infectious Disease (HCID) group stated that Covid–19 was not an HCID because it had a “low overall” mortality rate.
By this point, contrary to all the prevailing epidemiology, the UK Government had already committed itself to “Project Fear”. Speaking on 13 March 2020, then prime minister Boris Johnson said:
I must level with the British public: many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time.
This was not, as the Lockdown Files story suggests, Matt Hancock’s personal fault. He was certainly culpable for spreading anxiety inducing propaganda, but the UK Government has long been misusing applied psychology and behavioural change techniques to manipulate the public, as UK Column was the first platform to report on systematically.
It was the technocrat scientists at SAGE who suggested that the Government should “use media” to increase the “perceived level of personal threat”, not Matt Hancock. He is the patsy for the Lockdown Files cover up. Whether he is a willing patsy or not is hard to say, though his behaviour suggests that possibility.
The UK Government was never “led by science”. It deliberately ignored the epidemiology that was inconvenient, but readily exploited the behavioural psychology that it abused to convince millions to believe in its policies. The Government was able to make its claims about “following the science” because certain “scientists”, such as the Government’s chief scientific officer Patrick Vallance, were also willing to cherry-pick science to suit the Government’s policy agenda.
Knowing full well that lockdowns would be likely to move “a manageable epidemic [. . .] toward catastrophe”, and presumably understanding that the country would “see more death because of this social distancing”, Vallance endorsed the prime ministers baseless alarm. While claiming that his role was to “speak scientific truth to power,” he seemingly reneged on that responsibility entirely and defended Johnson, saying lockdowns would mean “a large number of people at home being isolated”, noting that such a policy would have “quite a big impact”. Indeed so: far more people would die as a result.
It wasn’t a “mistake” that Hancock guaranteed an inordinate supply of life ending drugs during the spring 2020 “outbreak”; the NHS instructions not to convey vulnerable patients to hospital was not made by accident; the removal of NHS mortality safeguards, only brought in in the first place in very recent years as a result of the Harold Shipman and Mid Staffordshire scandals, was not an oversight; the automatic discharge of tens of thousands of the most vulnerable patients from hospital into poorly staffed, under equipped and isolated care homes wasn’t a mishap; enforcing Do Not Resuscitate orders, to be combined with prescribing of a dangerous cocktail of respiratory suppressing drugs, on an industrial scale, wasn’t a slip; and rolling out experimental jabs that hadn’t completed any clinical trials was not an error.
The Daily Telegraph‘s Lockdown Files psyop would have you believe that they all were. That the mainstream media continue to cover for the Government’s assault on the British people is unconscionable.
Reason to Doubt the Mainstream Media’s Lockdown Files Story
Throughout the pseudopandemic, the Government was the mainstream media’s biggest advertising partner. As the pandemic strategy unfolded, the Government ploughed billions into mainstream media fear campaigns, which mainstream journalists published and broadcast without hesitation. “Project Fear” was, in accordance with scientific advice—which the Lockdown Files now attempt to blame on faulty politicians—enabled by the mainstream media, who ran whatever “hard-hitting messaging” the Government wanted to use to spread terror.
But the mainstream media went much further than simply running government-approved scare stories. When scientists and doctors questioned the lockdowns, the mainstream media viciously attacked them. When doctors expressed concerns about the treatments offered to patients, it was the mainstream media that bayed for them to be punished.
The mainstream media labelled people sceptical about vaccines refuseniks, a term hideously misappropriated from the Soviet persecution of Jews, and much worse. Mainstream media Coryphaeuses lied about the scale, conduct and purpose of large-scale peaceful demonstration and “othered” those who actually did question the lockdown measures.
The mainstream media acted as a single, unified propaganda organisation for the duration of the pseudopandemic. Not only did they never question the state’s evidence-free pandemic proclamations, they went so far as to marginalise, ridicule, smear and target anyone who did.
Yet, according to the “journalists” who have interpreted the the Lockdown Files for us, the mainstream media knew the lockdown rationale was “confused” all along. They simply didn’t see fit to report it at the time. We might consider whether some “journalists” knew a lot more than that.
With the publication of the Lockdown Files stories, we are now expected to believe that, having slavishly propagandised on behalf of the state throughout the pseudopandemic, the mainstream media are now ready fearlessly to question power. This improbable Damascus Road moment alone might give us reason for doubt, but the fact that the Lockdown Files have been propagated by the Daily Telegraph and Isabel Oakeshott adds further reason still.
There were a tiny number of mainstream media journalists, such as Isabel Oakeshott and Peter Hitchens, who did question the Government’s lockdown policies and its fearmongering. Their voices were swamped under the amassed weight of mainstream media propaganda that steadfastly terrorised the public.
For example, appearing as a talking head on Sky News, Oakeshott defended the Great Barrington Declaration that advocated the herd immunity approach. But Oakeshott never questioned the premise of the pandemic itself, despite acting as if there wasn’t one.
When the Partygate scandal broke, all mainstream media criticism was restricted to discussing the fact that the Conservative Party leading figures who set the rules, broke the rules. Only the misnamed “alternative media” highlighted the obvious point that these social gatherings demonstrated that the attendees did not behave as if there was a “pandemic” health risk.
Oakeshott seemingly shared this perspective. She was among a throng of partygoers who attended a similar knees-up during the height of the lockdown restrictions. Again, the Westminster festive crowd was evidently unconcerned about facing any risk from a supposed pandemic of deadly disease.
Yet none of the mainstream media “lockdown sceptic” journalists, including Oakeshott and Hitchens, exposed the most telling and damaging aspect of Partygate. They all maintained the “dangerous pandemic” myth.
The Lockdown Files story promotes the notion that dispassionate scientists, such as Chris Whitty, were ignored by the political class, thus insinuating that it might be better if the politicians were removed from decision-making during a crisis of “pandemic” magnitude. Perhaps lives could be saved if a technocracy of scientists and other experts were in charge?
The Lockdown Files narrative certainly appears to support the currently-drafted International Health Regulations amendments and the World Health Organisation’s proposed Pandemic Preparedness Treaty, which urges the formation of such a technocracy. This is something that all G3P “partners”, such as the World Economic Forum, are eager to promote. The UK Government is among the Pandemic Preparedness Treaty’s staunchest advocates.
The Daily Telegraph has long been known as the go-to propaganda outlet for British intelligence and the UK state. When Tony Blair’s Labour Government concocted its dodgy dossier, falsely claiming that Iraq’s Ba’athist government could launch “weapons of mass destruction” within 45 minutes, it was the Telegraph that first published the story.
Other notorious examples include the Telegraph‘s security and defence editor, Con Coughlin, publishing a “fake news” story attempting to link Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda. Prior to this, the Telegraph had alleged that Saif al-Islam Gaddafi was working a European money-laundering and counterfeiting scam with Iranian officials. Gaddafi issued a libel writ and the subsequent judgement revealed that Coughlin and the Telegraph had been taking stories directly from British intelligence and government officials for years. The Telegraph would then publish the propaganda verbatim, passing it off as journalism.
Until 1977, the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department (IRD) worked with media organisations to spread state propaganda, masquerading as journalism. Since then, a number of other organisations have sprung up around and beyond Whitehall to perform essentially the same role.
Among these are the Integrity Initiative. Acting under the UK Government’s Counter Disinformation and Media Development Programme, the Integrity Initiative is a mainstream media propaganda “partner”. It took its website down and “went dark” after its exposure in 2018, in which UK Column had a substantial role.
Isabel Oakeshott was listed as an invitee to an Integrity Initiative seminar where it seems she was being considered as a potential “journalist” for what the Integrity Initiative called its defence reform lobby. Whether Oakeshott took up the offered propaganda role or not, or even attended the seminar, is unknown. Coincidentally, in 2018, Oakeshott, and her fellow Integrity Initiative invitee and mentor Lord Ashcroft, co-wrote and published White Flag?—An Examination of the UK’s Defence Capability, which argued for defence reform without tackling European military unification.
The Lockdown Files narrative is a limited hangout. The deliberate, controlled release of information is designed to alleviate pressure, as the weight of evidence increasingly exposes the Covid–19 scam.
The story primes the public to expect future disclosures that certain policy decisions were “errors of judgement” and should not be imputed to the state. The Lockdown Files restricts criticism of the state’s role during the pseudopandemic to softball questions about the effectiveness of its response, or lack thereof, and to trite remarks about the individual foibles of all-too-human politicians.
The underlying assumptions promoted by the Lockdown Files are all falsehoods. The “full context” of the Lockdown Files story, carefully crafted by the Daily Telegraph, is state disinformation from top to bottom. There was no pandemic.
The Lockdown Files story, broken by the Telegraph and formulated by Oakeshott, serves the same limited hangout purpose as the “lab leak” revelations, which are also being pushed by the mainstream media. The Daily Telegraph is among the mainstream media outlets that would now like you to entertain the possibility that some aspects of the “pandemic” were the result deliberate acts.
The Lockdown Files and the “lab leak” stories establish their respective Overton windows. The Lockdown Files strictly confine any discussion of culpability to policy “mistakes” and human error, and the lab leak tale is ascribed to similar “oversights” and suggested “enemy actions”.
In truth, the evidence suggests that the entire so-called “pandemic” was a fabrication on a global scale and, therefore, the whole escapade was a “deliberate act”. The mainstream media do not want you to know this and it will never discuss it.
The mainstream media have to account for emerging evidence somehow, and have prepared the narratives designed to do so. The Lockdown Files psyop is currently being deployed to that end.
Iain Davis is an author, blogger, researcher and short film maker. You can read more of Iain’s work at his blog IainDavis.com.
Cover image credit: Palácio do Planalto on flickr.com, licence CC BY 2.0
Truth Comes to Light highlights writers and video creators who ask the difficult questions while sharing their unique insights and visions.
Everything posted on this site is done in the spirit of conversation. Please do your own research and trust yourself when reading and giving consideration to anything that appears here or anywhere else.
