A councillor revealed he was baffled when he unwittingly became a hate figure for conspiracy theorists over his traffic filters scheme for Oxford.

Duncan Enright, cabinet member for travel and development strategy at Oxfordshire County Council, appeared on podcast Things Fell Apart with journalist Jon Ronson.

The award-winning podcast, re-broadcast on Radio 4 today, discusses how conspiracy theories snowballed during the Covid lockdowns.

Mr Enright, said he was shouted at a town hall meeting and received death threats over the filters, which will be potentially introduced this autumn.

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Mr Enright said he brought forward the idea to solve the problem of congestion and "in order to make sure the buses got through quick but also because they are very attractive compared to cars."

It was unusual that a community meeting at Chipping Norton Town Hall drew a full house of 150 people, but he said: "We probably talked about things like the leisure centre in Chipping Norton which needs a new roof and is getting one that kind of thing.

"Then halfway through the meeting several people stood up and started shouting and there was a real hubbub, and they were talking about The Great Reset.

"I’d never heard of it before that point."

The Great Reset was a book written in 2020 by Prof Klaus Schwab, head of the World Economic Forum (WEF), explaining how the pandemic was a chance to create "a healthier, more equitable, and more prosperous future."

However, its alarming language and lack of clarity led to it being hijacked by conspiracy theorists.

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Mr Enright said: "They were talking about this Klaus Schwab – never heard of it – they were talking about the World Economic Forum. 

"I have heard of that, but I thought it was this meeting of business leaders and government leaders in Davos.

"That was the only time I’d come across it, and they were saying you want to stop us going more than 15 minutes from our homes."

Death threats 'poured in' after US conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and right-wing professor Jordan Peterson specifically criticised the Oxford plan.

Prof Peterson had posted the traffic proposal on Twitter calling Mr Enright and his colleagues 'idiot tryrannical bureaucrats' in a tweet viewed seven and a half million times.

"I hadn’t really come across Jordan Peterson before this whole episode and yet I understand that he was one of the sort of things that brought me to attention," said Mr Enright, adding he had a death threat "from someone I don’t know at all that said ‘your time will come sunshine’."

And he said: "It’s weird that something as mundane and rather dull as traffic management should be dragged into this."