Of course, what they don't realize is that they could be next, because if you endorse a system that works that way, then nobody's safe.

Hello and welcome to Marshall Matters with me, Winston Marshall at The Spectator.

Today, I have the pleasure of being joined by Laura Dodsworth, who's a journalist, political commentator, author for several books,

including a state of fear how the UK government weaponised fear during the COVID-19 pandemic

and free your mind a new world of manipulation and how to resist it, which she co-authored with Patrick.

Fagan, Laura, thank you so much for joining me today.

Oh, thanks for having me. And you know, you also might really enjoy a state of fear once you read it.

I can't wait to read it. I might ask you to sell it to me today.

Oh, okay. Compel me to read it, although I'm pretty sure I'm going to do it straight away anyway.

But let's get into Free Your Mind. It's a wonderful book that not only

sort of paints a picture of the web of propaganda instruments, governments associated and

non-government organizations, mainly in the UK, but also a bit in America, and then incorporating

history, deep psychology, literature, you tell the reader how to deal with it, how to shield

yourself from it. And I wanted to, if we may, get into the web of propaganda,

because this is something I'm seeing all over the place. Not only are we seeing BBC verify,

various disinformation journalists. You get into some of this. And I thought perhaps we could start with that. And

you could talk to me a bit about the Nudge unit, which is the behavioral insights team that the

cabinet office set up. And perhaps this is also something that you go into in a state of fear.

I imagine it is. But what is the Nudge unit?

Well, I'm not quite sure how they would describe themselves. They'd have a really nice,

soft, public, friendly, sounding description on their website, I'm sure. So the Nudge Unit is the Pavell For Insights Team. So what they do is they work with policy makers to nudge people, gently incline people towards the so-called

right outcomes to make us model citizens. And they do this mainly using behavioural science,

...