Good afternoon. Today is Monday, the 9th of June
2025, just after 1:00. Welcome to UK column News.
I'm your host, Brian Gerrish, Delighted to have Ben Rubin with
me here in the studio. And we'll also be joined by
Diane Rasmussen. Mcaddy from the North East of
England. Well here we are, it's Monday.
I hope everyone had a good weekend.
I had a fascinating weekend because I got invited to
breakfast which led to a very interesting conversation with
some very kind gentlemen. Perhaps more on that in extra
time, but here we are. We are in UK.
If we look at the media, it is absolute chaos.
We're just going to talk about that chaos very briefly, but we
really want to move people's attention past the chaos and the
confusion and the anxiety, and we want to get people actually
looking at what is the real threat to the United Kingdom.
So we are moving away from what everybody else is reporting, at
least today, and we're going to have a look at what we think the
threat is and why people need to understand what's happening and
how indeed we are being attacked by our own government.
So Ben, you're going to be looking at Mindspace, Oxford
Theory of Change, amongst other things.
We're going to be having a little look at local authority
change in England with a particular focus on Plymouth.
Ben, you're going to be having a look at the building of a
collaborative society. This is all tied in together,
and we're going to take our audience through this really
critical little journey as to how this this thing works.
And Diane, you've been interacting with the University
of York, which is very special, of course, because we have our
events planned for October in York.
But what have you been having a look at?
Well, I believe it's making waves.
It is disinformation. It's the new world order and
it's also whether Europe will be safe.
So let's have a look at the meat.
And of course, many people at the moment distracted with Los
Angeles. We've got a little clip here,
which if we just bring on screen now, essentially this is what
the media is drowning in at the moment.
This is the BBC, apparently filming from Los Angeles,
although it says this video only has partial sound.
You'll see the police at one stage in this video clip beating
protesters with battens. What is it all about?
It's about getting rid of illegal migrants in America at
least. But there's some pretty
unpleasant scenes. And what's caused it?
Well, we're showing it just to reflect what the media is
talking about. Here's the BBC.
And if we look at their front page from earlier this morning,
it's chaos, it's unrest, it's a breakdown, it's the Brit Awards
and generally it's supporting dross.
The newspapers are as bad. We've got everything from hotter
than Morocco to the policing is broken that we've then got the
insanity, Sorry, we've got delays over winter fuel and then
we've got insanity over migration, more chaos, breakdown
and confusion, more from the mail to do with Los Angeles, Los
Angeles Burns. Is it reality or is it a film?
And Daily Mail is obviously not quite sure.
But the media, Oh my goodness, they love it because there's
violence and breakdown occurring in the states over migration.
But the Telegraph over the over the weekend came out with this
headline which I found critical concern over mass migration.
It's terrorist ideology. And if you add a little bit of
text here, mass migration or criticism of mass migration is
terrorist ideology that requires intervention by the government's
anti radicalization prevent programme.
So this is the smoke and mirrors, the fear, the anxiety
which the UK public are being taken through.
We are now going to delve into the real danger lurking behind
the scenes. Ben, what have you got?
Well, it's chaos out there, isn't it Brian?
Everything's breaking down. But don't worry, there's a
lovely bunch of people up in Oxford building a new world
order. Let's hear a little bit about
Makespace. Makespace Oxford was set up for
and by a coalition of local community groups and enterprises
who are being priced out of one of the least affordable cities
in the UK and one of the most unequal and Makespace.
We believe the most sustainable building is the one you don't
have to build, and that all the skills and creativity we need to
build vibrant, thriving places already exists locally,
everywhere and it just needs the conditions to grow.
We witnessed the rising number of vacant buildings on our high
streets and began unlocking these on a temporary meanwhile
basis, transforming spaces into affordable, community driven
places, nurturing connection and support, making a home for
creatives, makers, doers, fixers and dreamers.
And we use meanwhile as a catalyst to build towards
community ownership and wider systemic change.
We're locally rooted in place based but developing approach is
relevant at a global scale. In the last five years we've
scaled our model to bring back into use 30 vacant buildings,
establishing hubs across Oxfordshire and making space for
nearly 200 purpose driven groups, artists, tailors,
weavers, makers, architects, community cafes, restaurants,
dance theatres, roasters and organisers, all who want to
build a mutually supportive community and prototype new
forms of civic and social infrastructure.
And we're now adapting and replicating this model with
local groups across the country, with the ambition to transform
our declining town centres into places owned and managed by the
people that live there, building community wealth, climate
resilience and fostering cultures of care and connection.
So I'll just say, if I may, Ben police and military on the
streets with batons beating people.
That's very engaging news. It's dangerous, of course, but
what we are showing you in these soft videos equally if not more
dangerous. Well, indeed, because that's
what they're driving people towards.
So the breakdown of the current system is designed to
necessitate the creation of a new one.
And this is the kind of location and innovation hub where this is
happening basically. So the thing that really strikes
me about that video is that on on the surface it sounds lovely
and touchy feely and friendly and nice.
But then you actually breakdown what they've said and what
they're doing and it becomes quite terrifying actually.
So let's just have a little look at this.
What are they doing? They're taking over post
industrial and retail spaces and what they call a meanwhile
basis, right? So this is a consequence of the
deliberate deindustrialisation of the country over the past
four or 50 years. And the the High Street has been
decimated by the Internet, right.
Primarily. Right.
So this is moving into the vacuum that's been created by
industrial policy in the UK over the past 50 years that has
basically destroyed the country. Yeah.
We have no wealth creating capacity.
We have no communal spaces. It's been a radical
transformation. It's been done deliberately in
order to drive people towards this.
Yeah, they are prototyping new forms of civic and social
infrastructure. They're creating community
wealth, right. Really importantly, this is
about climate resilience. So climate change is driving
this cultures of care and connection across the whole of
Oxfordshire. They're adapting and replicating
this across the country and they're also developing
approaches that are relevant at a global scale, right?
So this is something that looks like it's just going on at a
local level, organically popping up in Oxfordshire.
But actually this is operating in a global ecosystem and it is
speaking to that ecosystem and that message is going up and
it's also coming back down again as well.
Importantly now let's have a little look at the blueprint for
this thing, right? Because they actually published
this and this, this post you can see on the right hand side,
which we're going to going to talk it through because it has
some very revealing language on here.
And it basically describes how these innovation hubs work.
So we can start in the bottom right hand corner and we can
see. The first thing to notice is
that this is a theory of change. Note that language, any
organisation has got a theory of change, is a progressive
organisation driving towards this transformation of the
system. Absolutely crucial, right?
And they have an approach that they use in this theory of
change, which is about, amongst other things, embracing
complexity, solidarity over charity.
That's an important one because that essentially means it's
state versus charity. There's a lot of stuff loaded
into this and being transformational and doing it
with an understanding of what they call these root problems.
Now, the root problems they've identified at the top level
there you can see on the left hand side are underused spaces
again. So this is post industrial, post
retail spaces that should be being used properly, frankly,
but they're not. But these people moving into it
on what they call a meanwhile basis, which basically means
temporary, but they have to invent new words for everything.
Apparently this, these buildings apparently are climate unsafe.
They lack community knowledge and imagination.
And importantly, they're built on a substructure of dark
matter, right? Get used to this language.
You're going to be talking about this a lot.
Dark matter, the bottom 3 levels that you can see there, These
are the things that exist beneath the surface that drive
what happens in observed reality, right?
There's a lot of theory behind this.
It's actually something that I used to, I used to work with
this stuff professionally for many years, right?
And the few things that they've identified as being dark matter
issues include things like imperialist and extractivist
mindset, right? They're talking about our
current culture. Private individualised
ownership, that's a problem, apparently.
Private ownership's problem. Supremacy culture, that's a
problem. Private intellectual property,
antiquated exclusive property rights.
These are things that these people want to want to get get
away from, right? And they're going to do it using
this programme and they're going to introduce learning.
You can see that's just come in. The little green stripe is
coming in from the side there. So these are new ideas coming in
from their network and coming from case studies from other
countries, other locations, from research, from storytelling.
They love, love a bit of storytelling and they're going
to use that learning to unlock a new reality.
And so we saw in the bottom left hand corner the root problems
that under used space. And they're now going to create
that, turn that into a learning space, A creative space that is
people and climate safe and connected and is a storytelling
and a platforming space for people to build this new reality
from, right. And then there's a whole bunch
of transformation again going on underneath in the dark matter.
And ultimately what that's going to drive is new ideas, new
culture, new ways of doing things into what they call a
dream space. You can see that there.
That's the kind of slightly translucent hexagonal cloud
thing. And in there it says
transforming systems. They are transforming the
system. New ownership models, decolonial
futures, solidarity networks, a new economy.
Essentially that's what they are prototyping and building and
scaling in Makespace in Oxford. That stuff's getting pushed out
into the town, then into the county and then importantly it's
being used to influence national policy.
You can see in the top right hand corner there across the
country, and then also global policy.
And those things then come back down into this physical and
virtual location in order to drive change across Oxford,
Oxfordshire, UK, and then internationally and back down
again, right? This is a network.
They've just decided to do this themselves.
You know, there's been no discussion about this whatsoever
and it's being driven by these people.
So interesting bunch of funders. So the first one step change
fund is a debt to charities, but it's very extremely high powered
finance and civil service people here, including the former head
of the Pensions Regulator that deserves more scrutiny because I
don't know what they're up to and I don't like it.
But also the National Lottery Fund, the Community Fund,
they're always in the mix in these programmes, right?
So essentially what you have is people playing the playing the
lottery generally indexed towards working class people,
people on lower incomes essentially funding their own
destruction. That's what my interpretation of
National Lottery is. What else have we got there?
We've got this thing called Enterprise Oxfordshire which
issued something called the Oxfordshire Internationalisation
Plan to 2025 in 2020, right? So this is a great reset
organisation which is actually using funding from the Getting
Building Fund, which was launched in 2020.
It was £900 million fund, part of the COVID legacy essentially,
right? So this is all about the
transformation of the system. We're now in five years into
this. And this is what these people
have been doing with this money. And this is all coming out of
central government, right? Absolutely crucially because the
chair of this, this lady as Shufta Alam is a deputy director
in the civil service who also overseas £2.5 billion of
international climate investments and it essentially
is applying an International Development methodology here to
the UK, right. So the the the British civil
service, which is supposed to be sitting in the background
running the country, is actually engaged in a radical
transformation programme to completely rethink and re
engineer our economy, our social systems, governance and to hook
us up to this global network, all being funded by taxpayers
who've never been asked about this once.
Thank you very much, Ben. This is very, very serious stuff
we're giving you today and we're going to say this is unique.
What UK column is delivering today is a unique look into the
future, the governance of this country.
You haven't been asked about it, you haven't voted on it.
It is already being put into place and it needs people to
wake up very quickly. Let's take what Ben has
described in Oxford and bring it home to Plymouth Now.
Over the weekend a little magazine dropped through my
door, a very small magazine, but one of the headlines caught my
eye. Let's see if we can highlight
that. Here we are.
And basically it says local council reorganisation.
And when I got inside the magazine, I had to search for
it. A tiny, tiny little article
talking about Plymouth expansion plans.
Have your say, it said, Now remember that.
Have your say. So when we tied the whole thing
up together or I did some work over the over the weekend.
This is Plymouth City Council's big community conversation page.
And what is it telling you? Very, very quickly?
It's telling you that this is about bringing power closer to
the people. This is bringing centralised
government control alongside every man, woman and child.
There's no ifs or buts about it. It is bringing power to a
controlling level alongside everybody in the community.
If we look at some of the details in there, they run some
questions. So here we have why can't things
stay the same as they are? Well, actually what they're
really telling you is all of this is going to happen whether
you like it or not because the government has decided without
bothering to consult anybody in this country.
We know that some people don't like change and we understand
it's difficult for those working at the councils that will no
longer exist. There's a lot of jobs are going
as a result of this programme at work.
And then the killer statement here, it is a fact that local
government reorganisation is going to happen.
Therefore doing nothing is not an option.
Well, this is a, a bizarre statement.
If it's going to happen and you don't have any say in it, doing
nothing is, is not an option. Doing something is an option.
But what are they telling you? It's telling us that Devon
County Council, as one of many county councils and a District
Council, S hams council, will cease to exist after this
process. So as we see the world's that
they're building, Ben's just covered that What's happening at
the same time is the existing structure of governance in this
country is being destroyed. And if we go on to the last one,
the big lie, the financial position in local government is
not great and hasn't been good for some time.
It's therefore essential that the model of local government is
reformed. But if we listen to the news
about Ukraine, for example, the government has unlimited
billions to prosecute that proxy war in Ukraine.
But apparently we haven't got money to look after people in
local communities through their councils.
So I'm going to say this document, to me at least, is a
lie from start to finish. It's propaganda.
Another question, isn't this a takeover?
No, no, no, they say this isn't about taking over, it's about
the running of services with less duplication.
But many people would say that Plymouth City Council can't run
the services in Plymouth, so how are they going to expand it?
So I'm going to add this, to me it certainly looks like this is
a takeover of the smaller units of governance by Plymouth as
what been a city state. Certainly sounds like it, yeah.
And if we continue here, is this a land grab?
Well, Plymouth City Council says it isn't.
The new council would deliver services but not change land
ownership. But Plymouth City Council is the
very council that imposes its plan for the city on on people
living in Plymouth. And of course that impacts on
people around it. So you don't elect or people
outside the city don't elect the councillors, but they're going
to plan our our own smaller communities.
And if I just bring the big conversation back on screen
again, let's remember what they tell you at least honestly early
on in this document. And that is that it is bringing
power closer to the people. So a new system of control and
governance has already been built in UK.
Ben has given you a lot of the details of 1 model in
Oxfordshire. But of course, what we know is,
or what we can safely assume is going to happen, is that now
this new model of governance has been built, the old model of
governance is going to be collapsed.
Take us on Ben. That's.
What they're doing and actually that, that last slide there
bringing power closer to the people, right.
This, I hear this line all of the time and the people in this
system, by the way, there are some good, well meaning people
in that system. But the, the, what do they say
about the road to hell being paved with good intentions,
right. There's a lot of good intentions
here. I will, I will, I will give
people that. But this idea that bringing
power closer to people is good for the people is completely
untrue, right? This is very much about
totalitarian authority getting its arms around the population
in order to force them into doing the things that the state
wants them to do. That's what this is all about
right now. One of the organisations, and
there is a whole ecosystem around this.
We're going to talk about this a lot over the coming months.
This is the direction of travel. This is the agenda.
This one organisation, right? Slap bang in the middle of it
all. Collaborate CIC Yeah, Community
Interest Company. Importantly, that's a new type
of structure, which I'll come back to a bit later on.
But Collaborate is apparently about building a collaborative
society. This is a communitarian neo
Marxist Fabian. Whatever term you want to use
society, it's not based around individual liberty, freedom of
expression, private enterprise, natural law, any of the things
that are the foundations of our nation that are being eroded and
destroyed by organisations like this.
Quite frankly, just have a little bit more of a look at who
they are. So they're apparently for social
change. Whenever you hear that social
change, social innovation, social transformation, you know
they're up to no good. Collaborate is an innovative
social consultancy, pioneering collaborative thinking and
practise to tackle complex challenges across the UK.
They say this on their website. We are, we are living in a time
of transition, a fate accompli, A bit like your communication
from Plymouth Council there, right?
This is happening. We are reimagining public
services. So this is all about I'm putting
more power and control into the hands of the state.
They've actually written their own manifesto for a
collaborative society. We'll provide a link to that.
Go and read it. And as I said, they're a
community interest company. And this CIC thing is going to
come up a lot. Interestingly, it was
introduced, introduced by Blair in his second term in around
2005. So I think this new structure,
communitarian structure has actually been introduced 20
years ago to come to fruition now, right?
This is the kind of planning that we're seeing.
From that period and I'll just I'll just add to that, Ben.
Of course it was in the Blair era that the change charity
Common Purpose was being run from the office of the Deputy
Prime Minister. So all of these things coming
now to the fore and we can see what what's been put in place.
Yeah, exactly. Very similar methods, culture,
the whole tone a bit very similar to Common Purpose.
This was founded in 2012, this organisation, Collaborate, and
he was founded by this guy, Lord Victor Adabawali, so very
prominent man. He's also got CBE by the way,
but I couldn't fit it on the top line there.
But sorry to undersell you, Lord Victor, but he was a Blair
appointee to the House of Lords, one of the first people's peers
back in 2001. So this was the transformation
to the upper chamber. This guy was at the vanguard of
that. He's the founder and the chair
of Collaborate, this organisation that we're talking
about. He's also, importantly, chair of
the NHS Confederate and that is a membership organisation that
brings together all of the healthcare system for England,
Wales and Northern Ireland, right?
This guy's extremely central to what's happening in healthcare
and the NHS is a crucial component, part of this whole
agenda. I essentially see it as a state
within a state, right, in terms of its culture.
Good description. Yeah, I think, I think it's the
way that we have to understand it.
He's also a non executive Co op, Co op heavily into this stuff.
And he was named according to his LinkedIn profile.
He's on he's been on the Black Power list every year since
2013. You know, whatever you want to
make of that. Now he's also on the the board
or actually up until a couple of months ago he was on the board
with this guy Axel Heitmula. And so he was a non exec
collaborate until last year for 10 years.
Concurrently he was and still he is a senior associate fellow at
the Tony Bear Institute for Global Change, specifically
focused on healthcare and he was the CEO of Imperial College
HealthPartners. So that's Gates Foundation money
right there. Yeah.
And he was also the director of strategy for the NHS Test and
Trace programme in 2020. All right, So these these are
the people who are driving the collaboration agenda.
And last week, couple of weeks ago, I think he was, they put
out this, what they call the building blocks of place based
learning. And they say we're at the brink
of a once in the lifetime opportunity to re examine and
reshape how local government operates in England.
Exactly what we just heard from Plymouth.
We know what works and we can see a better way, but we also
know it can be hard to make a shift.
So how do we make the shift? Well, we've thought it, we've
thought it through, and they've developed this thing.
So these are the building blocks, and we're going to look
from the bottom to the top and just examine their methodology,
their framework for understanding society and how
they're going to get their hands around it.
Right. So we'll start at the bottom.
We'll wait. There we go.
Lovely. So there are some systemic
conditions in place. These are things that need to be
in place in order for them to do their work.
So you have to take a strategic, intentional approach to
partnership across a place. Apologies for the appalling
language by the way, but this is how these people speak, right?
So this is basically you've got to be conniving and cunning and
thinking this thing through. The second point is trusted
collaborative relationships and behaviours.
So you need a network of people who are going to comply with
you. You need a culture of learning
that enables adaptation, which is actually true because things
are never exactly the same in every single location.
So you've got to test and learn and and and and and work out the
best approach based on exactly where you are.
And you need bold enabling place leadership, which means you need
leadership on the ground who are going to let you do the things
that you want to do right, really crucially.
And you need people on the ground who are able to
influence. You need opportunities for
people to come together. You need a real focus on
voluntary community and faith organisations.
Those are key systemic partners for collaborating.
The people that are trying to progress this agenda towards
collaborative working towards a communitarian system, right?
And they look at the system as a totality.
So interestingly, we normally talk about global, national down
to regional. They've actually got got rid of
the the global and the national. They started straightening at
regional and then counties, towns, cities and districts
you're building from the bottom up basically.
So neighbourhoods is at the top. And that's the most important
part of this for them. And a lot of this is to do with
the NHS, right? So they're using NHS language.
So a locality is aligned with APCN, that's a primary care
network, right? So they're already thinking,
probably because of Lord Victor's role with the NHS
Confederation, about how to zone out the country based on the NHS
and how it's organised, right? And then they're looking at
London boroughs, it's about 100,000 people in NHS
neighbourhood, which is the new organisational model for the
NHS, 30,000 to 50,000 people. And they're looking at
introducing, well, look, citizens assemblies.
We can see their participatory democracy.
We can see their community wealth building, which is about
basically the destruction of private wealth.
Everything becomes owned by the community, ergo the state.
Ultimately, it's what they're doing here.
And parish councils, I can see up there Ben.
Paris parish councils top left. So actually, yeah, that's, if
you're reading the document from the top down, that's the first
thing that they noticed in the neighbourhood section, right.
And this is the the we're talking hyperlocal.
Look at the top line there, underlined in red.
Hyperlocal decision making, 150 to 1500 people.
They're going extremely granular here.
And what they're doing is thinking through all of the
different component parts of society that they want to
influence and get their arms around in order to force us, the
whole society, every single member of the population into
compliance with their new collaborative, communitarian,
globalised system. Right?
That's what this document is explaining to us.
OK. And there's a bunch of things in
there. So we talked about parish
council. We just get that back on screen
quickly. I'm going to talk through just a
few more. So community asset transfer.
So they're going to change the nature of ownership for existing
community assets. They're going to pump money into
into the into local communities using grants.
They're going to introduce things called community
businesses. You won't just have a business
anymore. It's a community business and
you can work for it, but you can never actually own it properly.
And also crucially, you can never establish generational
wealth over decades or centuries or even longer because
everything's owned centrally by the community and not by you as
an individual, right? You've got community champions,
community anchors, counsellors as community activists.
That's a big one there slap bang in the middle to this idea that
counsellors, you're not a counsellor anymore.
You're some kind of change agent who has to galvanised activists
and make things happen. You can't just do your job and,
you know, administer the, the, the really simple basic things
that we need going on in society.
You have to, you have to be constantly pushing towards a, a
new world order ultimately, right.
And then this, all of this is going to deliver the, the most.
I won't read all of these out because there's a lot in here.
We'll provide a link to it though, and I'd suggest
downloading it and having your own copyright because this is
these, this is the game plan for these people.
But you can see there in the bottom left, civic participation
and trust people with the power to change what happens in their
community. Power to change.
There's actually a charity called Power to Change that is
in this ecosystem and it's got people working right next to
Keir Starmer. And you know, this, this is
absolutely embedded into the whole, the whole of the whole of
the system and it's critical to Mission delivery, right?
So we talked about this organisation icon, the
Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods back in March
this year, I believe it was. They say there is no pathway to
Mission delivery without putting neighbourhoods front and centre.
And this is what David happened from the Behavioural Insights
team is spending his time working on right now.
This is his his project. They've also mapped out, I
showed this as well at the time, the entire UK looking at what
they call deprived neighbourhoods that they're
going to focus on for state intervention.
Yes, so they've got the whole country scoped out for being
brought into this new system. And as I said, this, this is
absolutely reflected in language and policy in the NHS, the right
centre in this. So we've got the neighbourhood
health guidelines saying that there's an urgent need to
transform the health and care system to a neighbourhood health
service, which again is about bringing power closer to the
people. It's not about people having
more power. And actually they're already
pouring billions of pounds into making this happen inside the
NHS, including this £1.5 billion programme for the plan for
neighbourhoods with 75 areas they've already identified.
And this whole thing is is already hit the road basically.
It's already hit the road, the organisation been set up, yeah,
across the whole of the UK and buildings have been built to
bring in this new system of governance.
So it's. It's real IRL.
Physical infrastructure is there.
It's happening, Yeah, crucially. OK, so you heard it on UK Column
News. We're going to do more of
course, on subsequent news episodes.
Just be aware while you get focused on what's happening
overseas or the dross of the BBC.
This is the real threat to people in this country.
A government which doesn't like us, doesn't want to help us and
it's going to bring in a new system of government.
But we know how it's being done. What are we going to do?
Well, the key thing is to get people together and make them
aware of what's happening. So that's a good time to remind
people that on the 18th of October we'll be having our UK
column on location in York. Absolutely fantastic venue.
We'll be well up country. And so Diane, we're very much
hoping that people in your locality and across the border
into Scotland will be able to join us.
So that's going to be fantastic. Now tomorrow at 1:00, it's not
an interview, it's a discussion. But I was, together with Gemma
Cooper, we are discussing in a very relaxed way the very
serious issue of the conference we'd attended back last Friday
and Friday week, if I've got my days right, And that was about
mothers who'd lost children to social services.
So very, very interesting discussion and very nice to see
Gemma Cooper on camera with us for that.
So do TuneIn tomorrow at 1:00. We've also got Germ tonight at
7:00. He's going to be having a look
at women's liberation, enslaved women.
So that will be a very interesting interview with
Rachel Wilson. What else have we got coming up?
We've got the Irish Medical Council, they've got a meeting.
So that's tomorrow, Tuesday, the 10th of June at 1:00 PM, our
Irish Medical Council, Kingdom House, Dublin.
And after essentially after three years of vindication, but
independent medical regulators are still being sanctioned and
Irish doctors are still being persecuted and and censored.
Sorry, medical regulators are still sanctioning the doctors.
Irish doctors are still being persecuted and censored.
So this is the opportunity to stand up with people in the
medical profession in Ireland. Now, Diane, let's bring you on
screen. You've been very patient.
We've had a lot to cover today. And I know that in extra time, a
team of three of us here going to be talking a lot more about
what's happening in the country. But you've been out and about
and you've also been really doing some great work to
increase the amount of material on UK column website.
What have you got? Yeah.
Thanks, Brian. Hello, Ben.
It's great to be here today. I just want to go through a few
things first. So before I get into what I was
up to over the weekend, just just a reminder, and I've
mentioned this the last few weeks.
On Thursday I will be speaking in Defensive libraries.
This is sponsored by the Buckingham Academic Academic
Freedom taking place at the University of Buckingham.
It is a free event. If you're able to join us, I
would love to see you there. I've I've heard some rumours
that there are some local UK column viewers who will be
joining me as well as the Macademics, which should be a
great event. Please join us for that.
What else do we have here that I've got going on?
Got for the Finetti Residential School Scottish Parliament
debate, which is actually a very serious and important event.
I covered this a couple of weeks ago the, the updates on the sort
of the legislative side in, in Scottish Parliament.
I, I mentioned a debate would be happening and it is happening.
I've confirmed it's this Thursday the 12th, 12:45 PM and
you can either watch it online at scottishparliament.tv or if
you're able to go and get a ticket to go to the public
gallery, you can try that as well.
I would like to note that because of all of the work that
UK column has been doing for for the past three years is the
reason directly that I believe that it's made it to the floor.
This is in in relation to Alex Cole Hamilton, who's one of the
MSPs who have been supporting Fanethi from the beginning, and
Colin Smith, who's one of the constituent MSPs of one of the
Fanethi survivors. And his statement, which got us
a floor debate is based on the evidence that I submitted
directly to Scottish Parliament in support of the petition to
get the ladies justice. So I, I just want to thank
everyone who's been helping us for the past three years to get
it to this point. From here, I wanted to talk
about some of the material that we have published in the past
week as our commissioning editor.
This one is by a member who actually I met in our recent
event, Dan Cheltenham. Her name is Hayla Bolchowski.
She wrote this called whose dreams, the LGBTQ plus
Manchester housing scheme. It's a, it's a local thing in
Manchester, but you can see very clearly some of these bigger
things that they're talking about and how it's happening in
one particular locale. Got a few more articles to look
at here. This is by Doctor Pierce
Robinson. From stand nerve agent attacks
to chlorine gas, the Syria chemical weapons storytelling
continues. This is part of the series that
Pierce has been writing for us around the, the, the chemical
weapons narrative and serious and very obviously serious
information. And that piece as well.
I've got another one here by Andrea also, who is this is the
second piece she's written for us.
Again, another member that I met in Cheltenham.
This is an issue around the tariffs, looking at the Trump
tariff policy and free trade and some really interesting things
to think about in this article. So and what else do we have
here? This is the one by Doctor
Yopzlan Friva. This is Part 2 of his three part
series looking at the banking and financial system.
The first one was about how central banks operate.
This one is about CBDC, central bank digital currency, which I
know is of particular interest to a lot of UK column viewers.
This series is only available to members, so you need to be
subscribers of UK column to view the content by by you.
So please do look, think about signing up and and looking at
these articles because they're very important.
Excellent. Thank.
Thank you very much Diane. And I'll say to our viewers that
of course, we can only do what we do with your financial
support. So if you're not a paid up
member of UK column, please join the UK column because it's all
our paying members that allow us to do what we do.
And as you are about to to show us, Diane, the attack on any
form of free media is about to skyrocket.
So if you value the UK column, please, please do support us.
Sign up, become a member for that very modest monthly
subscription. We need more members if we're to
whether the storms coming and those storms are coming without
any doubt. Now the other thing I just
wanted to say this is a little bit unusual.
I'm going to do it because we had such a nice email.
I can't promise it to everyone, but Craig's mum Margaret is 80
years old today so we wanted to wish her a happy birthday.
So there we are, special birthday.
Happy birthday, Margaret. Well done.
OK, now Diane, you've been out and about and it's been quite
incredible that in going to some academic events you have
stumbled really into the belly of the beast which would silence
alternative media. And also it's working hard to
create waves of change in our society.
Tell us about where you've been and what you've discovered.
Yes. So yesterday I was at an event,
a whole day of events actually, at the University of York.
So they have a yearly event which is called the York
Festival of Ideas, which is kind of a range of things that sort
of go on for in this case it was from the 31st of May to the 13th
of June. I think there's, it says over
150 free events to educate, entertain and inspire.
Now you might wonder why they would offer 150 free events.
And so I decided it was a really important thing to look at how
they're actually funding these. So if we look at these are a
couple of pages directly from the official programme for the
entire event. So the University of York is
obviously the main sponsor. They get their money through
research funding. I'll look at in just a minute
just the Brown Tree Foundation and the train service L and ER,
which is part of a major train operator up here in the North.
So if we look at some of these fundings, in particular the
Higher Education Innovation funding is the particular
funding scheme from the UK Government's Research
innovation, part of the UK Research Councils that funds
these kinds of programmes. And this has a budget overall of
£260 million. Obviously not all of this meant
to the University of York, but a lot of it did go to funding
these events. And the what the point of this
type of innovation funding is what universities called
knowledge exchange, which basically means that the
universities feel that they have a responsibility to share
whatever their work is at the university with the wider
public. Which then invites people from
the public to be able to do things like this and come into
the university for free and see what they've been doing.
Another funder that was listed on that page from the programme
is also, if we can put that up up here is another foundation
which is called the Joseph Brontree Foundation.
And Joseph Brontree was an important person in the history
of York. You can look him up if you're
interested. But he was known at the time as
a philanthropist. And so several of these trust
related organisations that he created have really evolved over
time. And now he's, it says their
motion is that they are a social change organisation.
So going back to what Ben was saying earlier about social
change not being up to any goods, it says that this part of
their mission as well is to speed up the transition to a
more equitable and just future where people and planet can
flourish. So we're seeing once again
sustainable development level language Agenda 2030, UN
language built into this sort of local charity that has been a
major funder for the festival of ideas.
And we can also see that part of the programme, the, the overall
the programme was called making waves for this entire two week
period. So this was this year was the
anniversary of Joseph death. And so they've got 2 programmes
that have been particular to honour him. 1 is about benefits
of economic growth and 1 is about sustainable futures
through regional growth. So again, we're seeing this
globalist language coming straight through into this
particular event. Now, what I went to on Sunday in
particular was, again, there were so many things.
You can't go to all of them. But if we go into what I was
actually attending on Sunday was this series of three panels.
So I've got just some photos here to kind of show just what
it was like on the day. You can see there's kind of a
big open area where there were several exhibitions and a lot of
these were for children, which was kind of at odds with the the
panels that I attended. But anyway, here's I'll just
take you through some photos of what they were doing for
children. I can talk about this a little
bit more in extra as well. So if we go through these
photos, different academic departments, the research
programmes, the ancient crops featured food, plants and
prehistory. So there were things on history
and archaeology. We can go through these fairly
quickly. We can just go 1 by 1, some
robots. They invited me to come play
with the robots, the remote controlled robots that I was
allowed to spin around on the floor a little bit.
I don't know the purpose of them, but there they were.
We have, what else do we have? L And ER, so again, the train
service, whether it's one of the sponsors of the festival of
ideas, they have a set up for children building wooden trains
and, and, and you can do have sheets for colouring on trains
that coloured pencils out for the children to play with.
This was from archaeology, so pieces of ancient buildings and
stone walls and so on from around Yorkshire in the area.
So some little bit of archaeology research for
children. Originally I thought this was
part of an art department, but it was actually maths and
physics looking at different structures and how pieces fit
together in nature. And they wanted to know if these
actually occurring crystals or other natural materials.
And so they were having the children try to play with those.
We have some bones from animals. So again, the archaeology
department allowing children to see these things and, and, and
put their hands on things directly.
We have what's the next one we have here the history archive.
Yes. So this was all about looking at
the archives and trying to get children to challenge them to
see if they could read very old handwriting to understand if it
was possible for them to see what the words were at different
levels of, of complexity at the ancient DNA lab.
This actually was was encouraging children to sort of
share their DNA, which is a little bit scary considering
what we know about some of the genetics programmes that have
been going on recently. But that was part of the the fun
apparently. And there's the zoo archaeology
lab. So once again, looking at, you
know, sort of animals from history and, and kind of what
this meant for science. So not all terribly bad, but
again, really different from what I would have expected from
the panels that I was attending. Here's one more from the stable
isotope lab next to the ancient DNA lab.
So getting children, I guess, trying to get them interested,
science, engineering and all these different disciplines that
they offer at the university. Now to go to the grown up part
of the day, which took place in the same location, the same
venue. This was the series of three
panels that I attended. The entire day of panels was
called A World in Crisis question mark, asking questions
about democracy and so on. So this was, there were three
panels that I attended throughout the day.
I will, if we go on to the funding, I'll come back to the
panels in just a minute. The the funder, the major funder
for this organisation was the Merrill Centre for Legal and
Political Philosophy at the University of York.
They used to be called the Morrell Centre for Tolerance.
So you could go into a long sort of academic rabbit hole to
figure out what tolerance actually means.
You can see at the top it used to be the morale centre for
toleration. Their website has not been
updated for about 10 years as far as I could tell, but they
have changed their name in recent times to legal and
political philosophy. So there are again three panels,
the the, the 2nd and the third one I will talk about an extra.
So there's some interesting and very alarming to you political
discussions that took place in those.
So I've just got photos of those two for now.
Here's a panel called a New World Order question mark and
some of the people included, Evie Espinal, for example, used
to work with UN Women UK and there's some academics on the
panel. And the other one that I was at
the end of the day was the next one was is Europe safe question
mark. And again, we have some
academics and a lot of the media people that were part of these
panels were contributes to Guardian and and other very
mainstream sources. The one that I want to focus on
the main news because there's so much here to talk about and
hopefully I can get some reaction from Ben and Brian at
the end of this was this one called, and this is the
particular one that I was the most interested in is the first
one in the morning called Disinformation, Polarisation and
the Future of Democracy. So there was a, in their
opinion, a particularly illustrious panel and what they
were doing, the splitting themselves up into presenting us
with the problems that they see and then from there trying to
give us solutions about what they see are the problems.
So let's break this down a little bit more.
If we go into the people that are participating in the panel.
So the chair of the panel was this lady called Joan Concannon.
She is the director of external relations for York University,
which is a quite high up position in any university.
Looking at you see here that part of her job is supporting
delivery of institutional objectives, income generation,
advocacy, reputation, global and local partnership and
stakeholder engagement. So at any UK university this is
a very important role, very strategic role for a number of
reasons that I can go into another time.
The two panellists that presented us with explaining
what the problems are. The first one was Doctor
Christopher Featherstone, who's an associate lecturer at the
University of York in the the politics department.
He's been a contributor to The Conversation, which is sort of
an academic propaganda website if you ask me.
France 24, LBC, he had a lot to say about Trump, as all of these
people did, actually for the whole day.
So positioning himself as an expert on foreign policy in the
US and the UK. Professor Aurelian Mundone, I
hope I'm saying that correctly. It's professor at the University
of Bath. He talked about reactionary
politics used a lot of, in my opinion, rather polarising
language, which I thought the point of the panel was to
overcome polarisation. But anyway, if we go to the the
next slide, I've got a photo here of a book that he Co
authored just a couple of years ago called Reactionary
democracy, How racism and the populist far right became
mainstream. So he is the first author on
that book and we can also see that his publisher, Verse of
Books is advertising, just by coincidence, the top of the page
that they are celebrating Pride Month with 30% off their Pride
Month reading list. And so those were the first two
panellists and they presented what they saw are the problems.
So let's take a look at what they said the problems were.
This is a very quick summary. This isn't everything, but here
are the main things that I took away from it.
These are direct quotes. The problem is that people are
believing different sets of facts.
So they're not saying that every set of fact is wrong.
They're just saying that there are sets of facts and some of us
are believing the wrong. There was a lot of criticism
about Trump being the problem. One of them called him an empty
core and they made jokes about the quote rubbish.
He says. They said Trump lacked an
ideology, and this is part of what leads to disinformation,
that other American presidents before him had an ideology,
which I guess somehow may have stopped disinformation.
They talked quite a bit over and over and over again about the
rise of the far right, the problems with populism.
Nigel Farage has mentioned, of course, the rise of inequalities
and the climate crisis are all part of the problems that we
need to solve. So we've got all these terrible
problems. OK, So what do we do to solve
it? So who was going to tell us
about this? Well, now we have Alexander
Hurst, who is an American who has lived in Paris for a very
long time, a Guardian contributor.
He has, he looks like he's, you know, maybe about, I don't know
how old he is, but he doesn't look old enough to have a memoir
anyway. He has one coming in 2026, which
is called Generation Desperation.
And the main part of the story is that he has basically won and
lost $1.2 million trading at mean stocks during 2020.
But so he goes, I, I don't know, the book isn't out yet, but he
talked about desperation, capitalism and all of the other
Main Street sources that he was sort of supporting.
So, so the, the the highlight of the panel, I guess we could say
was this lady herself. Her name is Jessica Cecil.
She is the non executive director of Digital Catapult,
but she is much more than that. She has a 30 year career in her
past being BBC veteran and working in a number of roles.
She positions herself as a media industry leader and an expert in
the field of disinformation. Now if you look back at UK
column reports from I think one or two years ago, you will see
the the Trusted News Initiative. And Jessica was responsible for
founding and creating this Trusted News Initiative, which
of course is founded by the BBC. She's got a whole of other list
of things on her CV, but let's take a look at the Trusted News
Initiative very quickly beyond fake news, BBC trusted news
initiatives. So it tells us exactly that this
is who we're supposed to trust. And don't worry, the BBC and the
partners along with them are going to be the ones to make
sure that we're all doing the right things.
So this is just a screenshot of just some of the many partners
that are part of this trusted news initiative.
So we see the major Associated Press, CBC, which is the BBC
equivalent in Canada. We see the tech companies like
Meta, Google, Financial Times, Twitter, which of course needs
to be updated. They haven't changed that to X.
That's, that's a little bit old now.
Reuters, Microsoft, the Washington Post also of our
favourites that are that are part of these trusted parts that
are under her trusted news initiative.
So what do they have to say about how what the solutions
are? Well, let's look at what I
again, these are just a quick takeaways from yesterday.
Basically, a lot of this came from Jessica saying that one
piece of legislation is not enough.
We need a much, much bigger plan to combat what she calls
disinformation. And she says, well, of course,
because it's her organisation, the Trusted News Initiative has
defined for the good of the people, a subset of
disinformation that poses an immediate threat.
And she gave election results as an example of what can happen
that could go terribly wrong if there is disinformation that's
being spread out there without their permission.
And then they can alert the big tech companies like Meta and,
and supposedly, I guess X now maybe in TikTok, all the major
social media platforms. And the other person who was the
other respondent to express the solutions, the, the one who's
the, the guardian writer and so on.
He said that the intervention and regulation need to be things
that set the culture. And here was the really scariest
part for me of one of the scariest parts out of all of it
that we really need to pay attention to is that he said
that that social media private companies such as X and TikTok
should be banned. X and TikTok should be banned
completely and that media media to be the only sources for media
content in Europe and the UK. Because it's to him it's
overwhelmingly obvious that the information that comes from
public media is so much more trustworthy than anything that
any other private organisation could possibly find out on its
own. So that is particularly of
interest. Now what happened from here was
I decided, of course I had to ask the question in the the
question national session. So I asked and I, I was just, I
was taking a lot of notes and paying very close attention.
And I asked why they said far right several times throughout
the panel as being the problem. Never once did I hear the terms
far left. And I asked, well, how can we
solve with polarisation if this is supposed to be a panel on
polarisation of the future of democracy, that maybe we
shouldn't be talking about far left or far right at all.
And that maybe we should just return to having civil debate in
our society to figure out what the problems are and what to do
about them and how to save democracy.
They had a very, very defensive response to my question.
One of them told me the far left doesn't matter because the far
right is in power, so we don't even need to talk about the far
left. Jessica herself, the the Trusted
Youth Initiative lady looks me in the eye, which is a big
lecture hall and she still looked at me directly from on
the bottom of the floor. And she said she did not use the
term far right. So maybe she didn't, but the
rest of them certainly did several times.
And there was then the conversation kind of drifted a
bit talking about building local trusted media sources.
So I guess I don't know, but maybe some of these new
government structures that been covered will be providing our
media in the future. There was also it drifted to why
there was so much panic about a trans girl in Florida who wanted
to play sports on the girls teams.
I don't know where that came from, but the the really, the
really interesting, exciting and I want to stay a good part of it
all was that several people came up to me after the session after
I asked my question and thanked me because they said you got it
right on. Because nobody was talking about
this. Nobody was talking about the
fact that they spent the whole time attacking far right and far
right populism. And the question of whether left
and right actually exists is a really good question, especially
because if we were trying to look at the future of democracy
and how to fight polarisation. But actually all it turned into
was them talking a lot about the far right and and fighting
disinformation. And saying that these sources,
including the BBC and all of their trusted partners are the
ones who are going to be telling us the right things.
That everything else needs to be stopped through government
control and shutting down private companies in any sort of
competition. So with all that, Ben and Brian,
I would love to hear your response to any of this.
Well, Diane, the first thing for me to say is thank you so much
for attending that event because this is a brilliant intelligence
as to what the other side are thinking and doing.
And you've also demonstrated by asking some, some good
questions, the panic that then ensues amongst these people when
you challenge them in the right way, reasonable direct
questions, this throws them into no man's land because nobody is
supposed to challenge them. So 1 you attended, you learnt
what they're, what they're up to and we've shared that with our
audience today. But then you've gone further and
demonstrated the panic that when you challenged them and then
what happened, you got support from people there.
So in one event, Diane, you're demonstrating all the things
which UK column would love all of our members to be doing,
which is getting out there, finding out what's happening,
getting amongst it and challenging it.
Because I, I'll just end really this segment on the parish
councils, which Ben pointed out they are targeting parish
councils because they're very worried about bodies that
control and support local communities.
So the power of the Roundtree organisation or any of these
other big organisations, they are huge.
They're very powerful in political sense, in a social
change sense, but who do they need to control?
Individual people at the bottom of the pile, at local community
level. So when people say we know what
you're doing and we're not having it, this is a huge
problem for them. I'll just let you respond to
that briefly, Diane, but I am clock watching.
Yeah, No, I just wanted to say that I, I think it's a perfect
example of how we do have the power to take back the power
that belongs to us as the people.
And I'm really happy, especially after such such an interesting
event yesterday that we will be having our next live event in
York on the 18th of October. Because it's pretty clear by
some of the local people that were there that see what's going
on. And I think it will be a
perfect, perfect opportunity hopefully for them to come and
and attend our event and get to meet other people and then we
can all kind of work against this together.
So I think it's not not all entirely a bad thing.
And have fun, work together and have fun.
Now I'm just going to end and say our message is clearly
beginning to resonate with the UK column audience.
Because over the weekend, I think it was, I had an email,
yes, it was on Saturday, I had an email come in where somebody
said is I've found this organisation, they're part of
it, aren't they? Well, I had a quick look.
Here's Neon. What a lovely group of people.
So a big thank you to the UK column viewer for supplying
this. And they are clearly seeing what
we're seeing this this organisation believes that
building movements, these are change movements, is central to
winning social justice. That's social justice for them,
not us. And if you have a look at the
funders, the one that should jump out immediately is the Open
Society Foundation. So Mr Soros has got his
tentacles in here, plus many of these other organisations.
So let's end there on a very positive note that it's clear
that UK column viewers at least are now seeing what's really
attacking them in this country. Yes, we should be worried and
concerned for people overseas in Gaza or Ukraine or America, even
as their societies come under attack.
But if we're going to stay safe in this country, we need to see
the threat that our own government is building with our
money, our own money. We'll be doing a lot more on
this. And I just want to thank you,
Diane, and you, Ben, for such a comprehensive news today.
Now, if you're a UK column member, you'll be able to join
us for extra time in a few minutes where we're going to go
through some of these issues at a slower, more jovial pace.
And that's one of the big advantages of being signed up to
the UK column. You can enjoy UK Column extra
where we cover a whole variety of issues in a very different
style, but lots of good information.
That's it for all today's news. Thank you very much everybody
for joining us wherever you are in the world.
We'll be back for another UK column on Wednesday at 1:00.
See you then. Bye bye.