Good afternoon. Today is Monday, the 22nd of
September 2025, just after 1:00. Welcome to UK column News.
I'm your host, Brian Garish, Delighted to have Ben Rubin with
me in the studio. And we'll also be joined by
Sandy Adams today on Live Link. Now, we've got a pretty heavy
news because a lot of the information coming into the
public domain is by its very nature, it's subject heavy.
And we do need to cut to cover that.
But we will try and lighten the mood as we progress through
today's news. We're going to start off by
having a look at really is, oh, what a wonderful war.
It's very clear that the British government is now very, very
excited at the possibility it can help engineer a war between
NATO and Russia and there's unlimited money for new military
projects. And don't worry, because the
country is going to be saved by using war as the opportunity to
improve our business and trading situation.
But on top of that, we've got in the background the risk of
casualties, of course, from any conflict.
But if that isn't enough to deal with the population, the
Assisted Dying Bill is coming along quite nicely and Sandy's
going to be having a look at that.
She'll also be having a look at the Corporate Transparency Act,
where every detail of you has to be known by the government
before you're going to be allowed to run a business of any
sort. And Ben, you've already got the
lion's share today, which is having a look at the propaganda
and mind control through the government.
Interestingly enough, some of that takes us back to UK column
printed edition in 2011. And finally, we're going to end
with a little bit of black humour on BBC Shorts.
So let's kick off with with Ukraine and the ramping up for
war. And it's pretty obvious if we go
to Defence HQ, we've got tweet after tweet or X post if you
prefer. Talking about jobs, 1000 jobs in
helping to ramp up the drone industry.
We've got building military aircraft for the US Air Force.
That'll be with Boeing, an American company, but apparently
that's good for the UK. We've got 200 million
transformation fund for the military construction facilities
in Barrow in Finesse. We've got another 1 1/2 billion
pounds for Palantir Tech. And we are going to be, quote,
accelerating UK defence towards war fighting readiness.
So they're not messing around, Ben.
They're using the terms we're going to war and what better way
to help the process than for people to be spreading this kind
of material. So a little video clip that
Philip Ingram, who's very big with the Times posted showing
flight paths of those nasty Russians because Russia dead
sent a few jets down to Kaliningrad and also there were
some overflights. Of course, NATO has never been
guilty of this at all. Well, apart from Reaper drones
entering Russian airspace over the Black Sea during the
conflict that's been ongoing. But little clips like this all
designed to ramp up fear in people and of course move us
even closer towards a proper full blown war with the
Russians. Now on one hand you might be
relieved to know that UK sent jets into Poland to fire a
warning shot to Putin to stay out of NATO territory.
So the text was pretty clear. John Healey said that he was
giving a clear signal to Russia that NATO airspace will be
defended. And how many British jets went
into the area? Well, it was the sum of 2.
So with no doubt Ben, the Russians were quaking in their
boots. But if we want to see how the UK
manipulates the agenda with regard to the Russians, no
better place to go than the Times Radio.
So let's have a look at this podcast.
John Killett, your first question comes in and says since
NATO is a defensive organization, why and how does
Putin think it's an offensive organization?
That is a very simple question asking a very complex, a very
complex question, and it is one that you have to put yourself
into Vladimir Putin's perspective.
Putin wants an enemy. And if we go from, you know, the
end of the Second World War through the Cold War, who was
the Soviet Union's enemy and who does Putin see as the enemy in
the future? Well, the Soviet Union's enemy
was what became NATO, and then Putin has taken that up and
continued saying NATO was an enemy, and there's no point in
trying to persuade your people that your enemy is only there to
defend. If you attack, you want to make
it the big bad wolf. And that's what Putin has been
doing the whole way through. In fact, that's what the Soviet
Union did the whole way through. NATO was the big bad wolf.
And of course, whenever you look at it in the cold light of day,
on paper, NATO has expanded, it's grown, and it's grown E
into a lot of the countries that were former members of the
Warsaw Pact. And Putin has seen that
expansionism as something that is designed, in his words, to be
an aggressive look against Russia and therefore suggesting
that it is a threat against Russia.
He doesn't care about the reality of what NATO is or the
NATO's constitution or, or anything else.
And of course, we've had Russians up until just before
their invasion, full scale invasion of Ukraine, Russians
were embedded in the NATO headquarters.
They've been working with NATO for many years.
Russians have deployed under the command of NATO LED operations
in the Balkans. And they haven't complained
before. So Putin knows exactly what NATO
is, but NATO's expanded. For those that don't know, NATO
doesn't expand by going out to different countries and saying,
hey, you know, we see that you're butting up against a
potential enemy. Would you like to come and join
us? Here's our help to get you over
the line to come and join. Now NATO sits and waits.
It waits for countries to turn around and say, can we join?
You have to apply to join. And then whenever they apply to
join, they have to meet quite a large number of political and
military standards before they are accepted into the the
overall NATO framework. So truly incredible little clip
because in in in attempting to spin the propaganda against
Putin, what he does is actually describes the very mechanism by
which NATO has conducted an aggressive movement, E contrary
to all the promises to the Russians.
And it's coming out as this man gives the little clips of how
things go. But of course, his initial
history, he doesn't tell the audience that immediately after
the defeat of Germany, the Russians moved two million men
from Western Europe all the way across Russia in order to fight
the Japanese and kick them out of China.
He doesn't mention that. He doesn't mention Operation
Unthinkable, which is Churchill's plans for the
Western allies to actually attack the Russians in order to
claim more of all of more of European territory.
So he seems pretty weak on that. But nevertheless, he's put up as
Times newspapers an expert. But if we have a look at his,
sorry, let's say we go, if we have a look at his Twitter
account X, he's describes himself as an ex military spook
and planner. And then he says specialized,
let's bring that up on screen. Specialized in taking over
countries, tongue in cheek. Then why would you make a
comment like that unless you'd actually been engaged in that
very thing, getting inside countries, breaking down the
bona fide political system in order to insert the EU agenda or
the NATO agenda. This man is effectively boasting
that, boasting that he's been in the game in order to inflamed
the situation in the Eastern Europe while saying well no NATO
of course is there to just protect the West as a defensive
organization. Propaganda.
Quite unbelievable. But the other place we need to
go with propaganda is Defence HQ.
This is from their Twitter page itself and what we've got is a
commentary supposedly on what's happening in Ukraine itself.
It says here the logistics hub of Krosk remains the focal point
for the Russian offensive operations.
And this is absolutely true. But of course Defence
Intelligence doesn't give the UK Cup public the truth that the
city is operationally encircled and the Russian forces have
already taken key parts of the southern city's defences.
If we go on through, it's talking about major elements of
Russia's naval infantry being transferred from the Kursk
region to Perkovsk. But of course it's then saying
to start offensive activity in small groups.
Well, the truth is that the Russian troops have successfully
used small groups of men to break fortified positions and
take territory for months at a time.
And if we deal with the second point that they make is that
Russians have also taken the Sebriansk Forest, which is a
massive area, and they've successfully taken that by
massive use of bombs, rockets and artillery, which the
Ukrainians don't have, supported by small groups of men.
So it's basically propaganda by a mission from Defence HQ, but
we need to identify it. And if we go on to the last
point here, where it's saying that the Russian forces have
consolidated control over sectors of the areas ordering
Janitra, Petrovsk and the Donetsk Oblast.
However, many of these are still contested in.
In reality, the Russians are continuing to breakthrough
Ukrainian front lines largely across the whole length of the
front line, and they are advancing into rare areas,
taking more ground. And This is why NATO is getting
so spooked at the moment, because having denied the
Russians were moving forward, that's exactly what they're
doing. And so if we analyse what
Defence HQ has been doing, this is deliberately misleading
propaganda which is designed to ramp up fear of Russia and to
hide the truth about the war in Ukraine.
Now, instead of going to this despicable UK government
organization for information, there are many extremely good
online analysts of the war. We've supported a whole range of
them over the time that the war has been in place.
And if we have a look at Petrovsk here, which they've
been talking about, the first thing to understand is that the
area itself is encircled by the Russians.
And although they haven't, if you like, joined the full
circle, they have fire control over the Western Rd. into this
area. So there's no doubt that
Minograd and Petrovsk are both now in circles.
And if we just show the two areas, we've got 2 city, well,
small town, large towns, small city areas together.
And both of these are now held in the Russian encirclement.
And you can see by the extensive area in pink around it the size
of the Russian progress. I'm just going to say this has
come from the military summary channel.
So credit for this excellent analysis.
And if we have looked in a bit more detail, we can see the
yellow arrows there, which is showing the likely Ukrainian
escape routes for their forces that are being encircled.
And you can see the formation of the Russian pincer which is
going, which is ultimately going to take the city.
And there's no question that this is going to happen.
If we have a look at Kupiansk, we can see this, a similar
encirclement happening, Russians in this case approaching from
the north, northwest. And the flags with the sorry,
the areas with the Ukrainian flags on showing largely the the
strongholds of the Ukrainians which are left in Kupiansk, but
the Russians are steadily encircling these.
And if we translate this into reality, this is a description
here or photos showing high rise buildings in Copiand.
And this is really giving you the key visual for how difficult
this terrain is for the Russians to fight because you've got very
flat landscape. And if you have strong multi
Storey buildings, these inevitably form very difficult
strong points. So credit to both sides.
This is brutal urban warfare. But the facts are that the
Russians are steady steadily defeating the Ukrainians in
these areas and these are ultimately strategic defeats.
Now, if we just come back to UK briefly, something which caught
my attention and Charles Malit at the end of last week was this
report talking about the role of women in the UK armed forces.
And if we've got somewhere about 11%, maybe more, up to 15% women
in the reserve forces, well, the future is very different because
the intention is that as we ramp up for war with the Russians,
we're going to ramp up to get 30% women in our armed forces.
And that has all sorts of ramifications because if we look
worldwide, women are not being put onto the battlefield to
fight. Although there's much talk about
this, when the chips are down, it's invariably the men that
come forward. We'll talk about this a bit a
bit more in extra time, but let's move on from there.
And welcome to you, Sandy. And if we're going to kill
people on the battlefield in very large numbers, we're also
targeting our elderly via the assisted dying bill.
Indeed. And and not just the elderly.
It's yeah, it, it had its, its second reading this week on last
Friday, on the 19th of September in in the Lords.
And they set up a special Select Committee to take detailed
evidence and to scrutinize the bill.
The bill was formerly the terminally ill adults end of
life Bill. And it it cleared its second
reading, so it remains on the statute book track and proceeds
through the Lord's stages. Obviously, due to much
opposition from some peers, rather than moving immediately
to normal committee report stages, the House agreed to
appoint a Select Committee to gather evidence from
professional bodies, coroners, ministers and other bodies
involved. The committee will publish the
evidence it hears, but unusually, it's not being asked
to make amendment recommendations, which makes me
feel that it, you know, they are going to try and push this
through without a doubt. The committee was given a
reporting headline deadline, so they've been asked to report
back by the 7th of November, which is quite soon.
Ministers such as the Health and Justice secretaries are expected
to give evidence. So you know, it's, it's going
to, it's, it's pushing its way through.
So if the Lord's bill is amended, it will return to the
House of Commons for consideration of those
amendments. If no blocking amendments pass,
the bill can proceed through both houses towards Royal
Assent. So there we have it now there's,
there's, there was a lot of opposition.
I don't know, you know, many people may have watched the
Hansard on, on all this, but Baroness Finley and Lord Daniel
Moylan had something to say about this.
And we've got some, we've got some footage of both of those
now. So if we could roll that
footage. The bill doesn't require any
attempt to relieve pain or suffering, even if they're
present. It puts the power in the hands
of the two assessing doctors who may know.
Nothing about the conditions of the person who cannot detect
undue influence or coercion and whose motivation may be opaque.
Prognosis is a guess, and diagnostic errors are common.
They do. These doctors do not need to be
certain. Only on the balance of
probabilities do they need to believe the criteria are met
with no oversight of their assessment.
How can a panel approve the death with any certainty when
there is no ability to appeal against a panel approval and no
coroner oversight? How many wrongful deaths a year
is acceptable? No system can be 100% safe
providing massive. Drug overdoses in an unlicensed
way to end life is not a therapeutic act.
It's notable that the words death and dying hardly appear,
that the poison to be used is described as an approved
substance. The still mysterious contraption
by which it is to be administered is called an
approved device and the business itself.
When you get to Clause 25, you'll find it's headed
administration of assistance, provision of assistance.
Assistance, in fact, is the term used throughout the whole of the
Bill. Is this something that's going
to become part of our daily language?
Have you considered assistance, Mrs. Smith?
My Lords, we know what this is. It is euphemism an an old
ancient Greek device for hiding from the gods through the use of
flowery language, something of which you are ashamed.
And that's what the language of this bill is constantly
expressing at every turn. My Lords, I think we are right
to be ashamed of what is in this Bill.
I think he spoke very eloquently.
So yeah, there's definitely, definitely something very shady
about all of this. And obviously Lord Falconer is
the, is the person pushing this alongside Esther Ranson.
And he's a major player in pushing this bill through.
Now it's interesting. He's he did have to make an
admission in, in the House of Lords.
And I think we have some footage of that admission about the
funding of, you know, towards the assisted dying bill.
And it there's some shady things going on.
So I'll let you make your own minds up.
My Lords, I draw. Attention to my entry in the
Register of Members interest, which refers to the fact that I
have an assistant funded by Bernard Lewis to assist me in
the conduct of this Bill, and Dignity in Dying funded the
printing of literature which I sent to your Lordships in
connection. With the Bill, I apologize for
not mentioning this in my opening speech.
My Lords, this has been a debate.
So he admitted that actually the, that some of the literature
was funded by Dignity and Dying. And these two, there's 2, two
companies that are intrinsically linked, it's Dignity and Dying.
And the other one is the, I think it's called the
Compassionate dying organization.
Now both of these are linked to the Bernard Lewis Trust who were
funding a lot of the assisted by dying bill.
So so who owns that trust? It's the the the Lewis family
trust, the Bernard Lewis family trust.
And they're part of the river, the River Island fame.
That's where they made their money.
Like most corporate capitalists, the family has its fingers in
multi, multi nefarious pies. The founder, Bernard Lewis, is
responsible for the family's fortunes.
The company's house lists him alone as an active director of
no fewer than I think it's 20 corporations.
And another company called Cavendish Square Secretariat
acts as secretary for 52 other companies.
It's owned by the Lewis Trust Group.
The group's portfolio spans various investment companies in
England, property development in Poland and a chain of hotels in
Israel and the US. And if the company it keeps, or
rather the other organization it donates to is anything to go by,
it seems it's, it's very comfortably a missed a missed
amongst neoliberal circles. So let's look at some of these
organisations that receive funding from Bernard Lewis Trust
Dignity in Dying and it's it's got a sister company called
Compassion in Dying. Now Dignity in Dying had an
income of 2.6 million in 2023, up from 1.7 million in 2022 / 2
million was spent on lobbying, PR, media, research and funding
to push the assisted dying bill. Crucially, the accounts do not
disclose who the high value donors are.
Compassion in dying charity, they show a clearer donor
information. In 2023, it owed 139,000 to
Dignity in dying for staffing and overheads, meaning its
donors are indirectly funding lobbying and they are very
linked to these two, these two companies now, Oh, oh the, the
trust, the Bernard Lewis Trust donated well over 1.8 million in
documented donations to dignity and dying and compassionate
dying are the recipients of the Lewis Trust's money where the
Conservative Party and from Bernard Lewis personally, he
donated, I think it was 46,000 to, to, you know, personally to
the Conservative Party as well as 52,000,000 between 2008 and
2010. And then a network of nefarious
think tank, you know, sort of dark think tanks, the Henry
Jackson Society, the Centre for Social Justice Policy Exchange
Demos, as well as Zionist organisations such as the
Community Security Trust, so and the Jewish Leadership Council.
So all of this is, is being funded by many, many
organisations that we have nothing, we we don't, we know
nothing about. They're they're just pushing
money into this. So it's heavily funded by
million billionaire capitalists and opaque trusts, not
grassroots donations. And the same back as also Bank,
pro neoliberal and Zionist organization raising concerns
that the push for assisted dying aligns with ideological and
economic agendas, but that devalue vulnerable lives both
here in the UK and abroad. So let's look at the hypocrisy.
Of the funding, 8.12 million has been spent by lobbyists and
wealthy donors to promote assisted dying over roughly A
decade. Meanwhile, the annual funding
gap for palliative care is is in the hundreds of millions.
The government has reduced its funding of Hospice and
palliative care by 47 million in the last 18 months, with
hospices forced to run cakes, stalls, sales, charity shops and
marathons to stay stay afloat. In other words, just a fraction
of the private money poured into lobbying for assisted dying
could have transformed palliative provision for
thousands of dying people, providing pain relief, hospital
beds and support for families. It's clear that wealthy donors
have chosen to bankroll campaigns that make death more
accessible, yet those same resources are not being directed
towards making life until natural death more comfortable.
Society is left in a position where it's easier and cheaper to
promote a lethal injection than to guarantee proper palliative
care, not because of public will, but because lobbying is
better funded than compassion. This is deeply concerning.
And I think we have a a video now from I think his name's he's
Doctor Miller and he's he kind of puts it into perspective.
And I think we should listen to this.
It kind of puts it all in one place.
Make your own minds up. Thank you.
That's a minor change compared with the this century's growth
in the world population from 6.1 billion to 8.2 billion, a 25%
increase in 25 years. But just think what the 202 five
numbers would be if abortion had not been legalized or there had
not been white skilled usage and advocacy of contraception.
And indeed the growth of homosexuality throughout society
has reduced the number of children we would have had at
the churches. Had their way, we would have had
a very much bigger population than we presently have.
Basically, the difficulties we have with climate change.
Well, Sandy, thank you very much for that.
It's it's a very, very serious and as you say, dark agenda.
And it's also deeply disturbing that there's huge amounts of
money coming in in order effectively to lobby and
manipulate the government into going down this path when the
same money spent could have a a very much more human and
compassionate outcome if it was put towards caring for people
who were heading in or heading towards terminal illness.
So lots of questions to be asked.
We we a little bit uncertain about the name of the gentleman
speaking there in the House of Lords.
We'll check that out and we'll make sure we've got that correct
in you in extra today. But a lot to be discussed.
And Ben, this is more manipulation of politics, isn't
it? And you, you've come in on the
topic of mind control, which is is the government's main agenda,
it appears at the moment it. Certainly is, yes.
Well, I think that's what government is, isn't it?
If we just flag this up, government, what does that mean?
Mind control, that's what it's all about.
Before I progress, let me just say that was an amazing report,
Sandy, and that speech at the end there just took my breath
away. I can't believe that we have to
talk about that more in Extra and also particularly the Henry
Jackson Society because I've been looking at them over the
past week or two. So anyway, we'll come back to
it. Mind control, government, what
are they up to, what they're planning next.
There is no better place to go to find that out than Policy
Live, which happened 10 days ago, week before last, and it's
powered by Nestor and the Behavioural Insights Team.
Nestor, the UK's social innovation agency who are
manipulating the social fabric and the Behavioural Insights
Team, AKA the Nudge Unit who are manipulating our minds.
Before I get into this, I'm just going to draw your attention to
this organisation as well as a sidebar, but I'm going to come
back to these these lot over the coming weeks.
This is Flint Global which is a strategic consulting business
which advises international businesses and investors on
policy, politics, regulation and competition.
So very expensive polished advice from people with very
privileged positions in the establishment, not least the Co
founders. So first of all, this guy says
Sir Simon Fraser, who as well as being a Co founder of Flint,
spent a long time in the in the Foreign Office.
It was the head of the UK Foreign Office and diplomatic
Service. We ran the whole embassy network
for the British government. And he's also now currently the
chair of Chatham House. So he has a dual role here,
making a lot of money with Flint while also enormously
influencing policy at Chatham House.
And then more pertinent to today's presentation, Ed
Richards, who is also a Co founder of Flint whilst being
chair at Nestor and the Behavioural Insights team.
So between these two, that is an extraordinary amount of
influence coalesced into one place, one organization.
You've got the kind of blue blooded establishment of Chatham
House and the neo liberal progressives of the Behavioural
Insights team together in one place.
And as I say, we'll come back to Flint Globe.
I just wanted to register that with you because that'll give
you a little bit more context. What we're going to talk about
is it as it relates to Nestor Live.
Let's hear now from Ed Richards, Chair of Nestor and the
Behavioural Insights Team, talking about the challenges
facing the political classes in the UK in 2025.
Firstly, there is a frustration in the country so that we can't
somehow quite agree how to tackle the important problems of
the age. That is partly a problem of the
polarized politics of the age, but it is certainly a problem
the second. Would be that there seems to me
to be a widespread concern that somehow some challenges are now
almost insoluble, that they're just almost too difficult for us
to solve. The third.
Would be a concern, a worry that somehow government itself can't
effect change in the way that it once could.
It seems to find it harder and harder to address some of the
complex challenges. That we face.
And fourthly, that the state itself, the state writ large,
struggles to implement quickly and efficiently policy, even
when policy objectives are in fact agreed and clear.
I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday in France and she
said to me that France is in fact now almost ungovernable,
and it reminded. Me for a moment.
Of the debates in the 70s about the UK being ungovernable, some
of you will remember them. I don't think you could say that
about the UK, not with the government, with such a clear
and strong majority, but there is a.
Concern, I think, about the degree to which government can
govern in a way that meets the challenges of our age.
Government can't govern. Some challenges are insoluble,
we cannot solve them. Government can't affect change.
The state can't even implement policy when it's got a clear
mandate to do so. Apparently he thinks that the UK
should be governable because Labour has a mandate,
apparently, even though they got about 20% of the vote or
something like that. And I'm rather jealous of the
French actually, because apparently France is
ungovernable and I think that's probably something that we
should aspire to. I don't know.
I think it's got a lot to be said for it and it shows that
the French spirit is causing problems.
Yeah, we tend to be more dose of.
I think we do, yeah. Problem.
Absolutely. So anyway, they're gonna,
they're gonna try though, right? So they're gonna try and govern
us and we'll have a little look at some of the ways in which
they're going to do that. Up on stage next.
We had this crowd, Heather Stewart on the left there,
economics editor of The Guardian, David Halpin, very
familiar to regular viewers. The UK column, the guy that
started the nudge unit for David Cameron back in 2010, Polly
Curtis from Demos, Interesting to see Demos in Sandy's segment
there. Again, we have to come back to
that in Extra. And then this chap on the right
hand side there, that's Antonio Silva from Nestor, and he's
there to talk about something called social capital.
And essentially see what they're doing here is saying, well, if
the government can't fix things, which is what Ed Richards just
said, then maybe society can fix things.
But we've still got to justify our existence in our fancy
office in central London with our well paid jobs.
So let's run this big survey to go and see if we can understand
the UK society from an anthropological perspective.
And this is all done in the context of essentially cultural
Marxism. So he talks about these three
forms of capital, economic capital, what you have, human
capital, what you know, and social capital, this new thing
you're introducing, which is all about who you know and looking
at social networks and his kick off point now on the left hand
side you can see his desk Capital by Marks, right?
So these are Marxists in London developing government policy,
running. With huge amounts of money.
Huge. Huge, huge, huge.
Amounts of money. I mean, we talked.
I think Nestor's got in the region of half a billion pounds
in its endowment, hugely wealthy, traveling an office
right next to JP Morgan's office on the Embankment in central
London. And this is what they spend
their time doing, right? And what do they run?
They run a national study to look at 6 billion friendships in
the UK and look at this social capital.
Reading from the top lines, they looked at social networks of 58%
of the UK population. So it's 20 and a half million
anonymised Facebook users. Well, will they?
Well, I mean, Facebook has been quite public about the fact that
it doesn't know what it does with your data.
They didn't build that platform for privacy and they're
allowing, this is a formal partnership with Facebook, by
the way, I'll come on to that in a minute.
They're allowing this organization access to 20
million user profiles to look at relationships between all these
different people, focusing on what they call economic
connectedness, so looking at high income friends that low
income people have and trying to understand the connection
between different strata and society.
They're also looking at things like social mobility, which
comes from a different data set. And then they ran a survey
looking at well-being, which is about satisfaction, life
satisfaction, how much people trust each other.
That comes from a separate survey.
And actually it's quite entertaining because he was
rather disappointed that actually in the UK, friendships
do bridge economic divides significantly more so than in
other countries, which I don't think is what he was expecting
to find out. There's enormous diversity in
the population. The class divide is actually
much less entrenched than people think.
People from the lower levels of society have lots of friends in
the upper levels of society. We're certainly the higher
earning levels of society, I think we should probably say.
And, and the, the, the entertaining thing for, for me
about this is what you get with these studies is that it's all
done on data and they never actually say we went out and
spoke to some people. It's all just, it's all
spreadsheet based basically. And we didn't find an issue, but
we're still going to make a load of interventions.
So we then end up with, oh, we're going to redraw the school
catchment areas and we've got to create a new community ownership
fund and we've got to get government investment for
socially mixed sports facilities.
Even though there's not really anything particularly wrong in
the country, we've got to intervene in it anyway because
obviously we need to, as I said before, justify our resistance.
And obviously this guy is he's not he's not English.
So his name is Antonio Silva. So I'm guessing he's Spanish or
Portuguese potentially, I'm not sure.
Martin vessel was the guy he worked with.
Sounds like a German name to me. And actually Halpern in the
response to this makes some comment about not liking the way
that Anglo Saxon's positioned park benches and actually
thinking that he would need to intervene to change that, which
is, you know, just kind of astonishing really.
And given the fact that they haven't found an issue with the
class divide, I think they kind of got down to business and
really opened up what this was all about when they started to
talk about immigration. Let's have a little listen to
this. There's this also.
Part of the recipe for dealing with absorbing quite large scale
immigration in the way that we've had and, you know, forming
more cohesive groups or not dividing or, you know, dealing
with some of the issues that Polly was sort of gesturing up
there that you know is this is this part of the recipe for for,
you know, forming closer connections, whatever your
background, whatever your. It can be.
It has been historically. There's another Commission,
several running at the moment, but one on community cohesion
which is looking at some of those issues more broadly.
And it took its first evidence session and obviously it was a
fantastic presentation. Somebody reasonably well known
figure who grew up in the East Standard web, but was
contrasting about how, you know, you look about it, his father's
generation or whatever. If you're in East End.
It was a kind of, it was a melting pot for lots of reasons.
You know, he rather elegantly put it, you know, we all learn a
bit of Yiddish and we smoke a bit of pot and you know, it's
like shit happening. But then in contrast, what also
happened in a lot of those periods, if you go back, you
know, to three generations, you get a lot of areas which are
actually white only in other parts of the country.
And actually, they're the ones that are really most worried
normally about immigration where you don't see those populations.
So it's not just sort of a contact hypothesis writ large.
But it looks a lot like it, right?
Yeah. It's it's not a real world
example, but we're running a big program on deliberative policy
making around immigration at the moment.
And all the evidence shows that if you bring people with very
broad opinions together in a safe space and a really powerful
deliberative process, there is a natural moderation that happens
in those processes and people find kind of compromises and
ways through. And the it's what we talk about
kind of like a Mimby majority kind of effect that actually at
the moment our kind of public debate has been so driven by the
extremes when you. Bring people together without
those kind of like extreme drivers in the room.
People find kind of ways through those very kind of seemingly
toxic debates. Arrogance is what I pick up,
Ben. Unbelievable arrogance.
They are the intellect and those other people are not capable of
making sensible decisions. That have been managed and
cajoled and moved around. And it's really the white only
areas that are the problem. But if you get your hands around
them and kind of force them into it, then ultimately then the
whole thing kind of moves along, right?
Really, really. It's not just arrogant, it's
actually destructive, right? And I use this term.
Where has it gone? Oh, hang on a minute, There we
are. This cultural genocide.
It's actually what we're talking about here, right?
It's ethnicide. It refers to the deliberate and
systematic destruction of a group's cultural religion and
identity. That's what they're doing.
Right. And it gets delivered in this
kind of glib, air conditioned, well upholstered, metropolitan
elitist fashion. But that's actually what's
happening behind the scenes, right?
What these people are up to. And let's have a quick look at
the civil service. I'm completely blown the clock,
I'm afraid. So I don't know if we're still
if we're still doing the castle prod, I'm probably going to get
it. But it's definitely worth having
a look at really kind of an All Star cast actually for this this
session, which ran in the afternoon.
So this is about the civil service of the future.
You have the various perm sex secretaries.
So I just flick on. We can see Ed Richards comes
back. He's hosting the thing on the
left hand side there. We then have Gus O'Donnell,
formerly known as God, who was the Cabinet secretary under
Cameron, I believe it was for many years.
And then Dame Tamara Finkelstein on the end there, who's just
left Defra, where she was permanent permanent secretary.
And then Susan Ackland Hood in the middle, who's the permanent
secretary of the Department for Education.
This is really interesting, actually.
I've got to say, like kind of glimpse into what's going on in
the civil service. Gus O'Donnell was quite
forthright. We're going to run a clip of him
in a moment, but basically he said that we were at a stage
where more, more than ever before, people want the
government to do things but they don't trust the government.
And I actually think that this is an issue.
They they want stuff done, they're looking around and the
government is the thing that's there.
What they don't realise is actually we need to sort of
stuff out for ourselves. Government should have nothing
to do with most of the issues that it's getting involved in.
Ackland Hoods delivered a classic civil service line,
which she said. The civil service is getting
better, but the world is getting worse faster.
It's not our fault. And then Finkelstein, she's
concerned about change, actually, and this idea that
maybe we they might be bringing political appointees in to run
civil service departments like they do in the US.
And she was kind of terrified, actually, that someone like
Farage might come in and start messing around with the top
levels of the civil service. But Gus O'Donnell delivered some
rather brutally honest thoughts about what change actually means
when proposed by politicians. Let's have a listen.
What does structural change mean in the context of that kind of
challenge from the political leadership?
I, I would say I'd start by saying the prime ministers, when
they'd say those sorts of things, have absolutely no idea
the answer to that question. When they talk about rewiring
the state, they, they honestly don't know what they mean.
You know, they, it's OK. So you know, how, how do you
want to do this? You know what, what are you
thinking about? Nothing so you you do need to
realize that as a civil servant that and and this sometimes
people forget it's an incredibly political job, right.
You do have to understand the way in which politicians work
for what matters to them and how to think about, you know, for
example, on delivery, how to get them interested in delivery.
You know, like, it's every Prime Minister I've ever worked with.
He's like, oh, another foreign trip.
Oh, this is good. They treat me really well.
The foreign press asked me proper questions about policy.
That's great. And I've left behind all those
fights about, Oh my God, the internal party fights, you know,
so you can understand why they get really attracted to doing
foreign policy and you have to drag them back to the domestic
stuff. I just say I enjoyed that
because he's clearly been out of office for quite some time
because he was very honest about his interactions with prime
ministers. You basically don't know
anything. Sounds about right.
This is true. While that video was playing I
was having a look at Auk column printed newspaper from 2011
where we were warning that the Cabinet Office was working with
the French to implement political applied psychology to
change the way people thought and behaved.
And of course Gus O'Donnell was one of the key attendees in that
17th of December meeting. The meeting was actually
December 2010, but UK column reported on it 2011.
Dangerous stuff. Absolutely.
And so many of the same characters have just been there
consistently through the piece. I'll just wrap up very quickly
with what came up at the end of the day, this is very important.
We're hearing a lot of talk over the past few days about digital
ID schemes and the, the kind of the, the blockbuster one that's
always held up is the, the Indian one.
And they, they had this guy, Doctor Praman Varma, who
presented, he was the chief architect for the digital ID
scheme in India. It's a huge programme.
They've built the social credit system in their enormous
country, 1.4 billion people, 22 languages, 12 religions and and
they've transformed it through what they call formalisation,
especially bringing people formally into the economy.
They've got a billion people into the economy that weren't
recognised, like they didn't know who these people were at
all. And then having brought in,
obviously this is presented as a good thing.
So they can now participate in the marketplace and be given
lots of money through digital payments and government benefits
and that kind of thing. But ultimately a lot of it is
about what you can see on the right hand side there, taxation.
And now we know you, we can tax you and we can exert influence
and power. Overview.
It's a big part of it. They developed the whole
technical architecture. It's been successful, it's been
implemented. It's public private partnership.
They're rolling out to the entire society essentially.
And this is right at the top of the agenda for UK government.
And they're certain they're looking at India to help them
implement this. So that was an important part of
the day that I thought I'd just end on.
Thank you very much for that Ben, and lots to talk about in
UK Column extra. After today's news, let's just
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Now you want a little bit of comment on full fact.
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We encourage people to join that.
OK, Sandy, let's bring you back in and tell us a bit about this
Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act.
Yeah, I mean, I, this was flagged up to me.
I, I didn't know anything about it really, because all this
legislation goes through our, through our parliament and
there's so much of it. How can you keep up?
So, uh, a couple got in touch with me, their, their UK column.
Um, they, they follow UK column and they, they, they've got 2
businesses and they received a letter from their, from their,
from, from Companies House. And it's, it's explaining the
Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act.
And they were quite shocked because the letter from
Companies House said Companies House are imposing a new legal
requirement that all directors and PSCS, persons with
significant control verify they aren't their identity.
This is being transitioned in grad in in in sort of a gradual
way, starting with directors and companies directors are required
to obtain a unique identifier known as Companies House
personal code. The Companies House personal
code code will be used when setting up directors on
companies company in corporations and adding
directors to Companies House. Companies House also needs to
gather the company's House personal code for all existing
directorships, this being done via the company's confirmation
statement. Confirmation statement confirms
in part that the list of directors stored at Companies
House is correct. The company's House personal
code for each director will be submitted with the confirmation
statement and the requirement starts for all confirmation
statements submitted on or after the 18th of November 2025.
So this is really rolling out from November the 18th.
We're willing to write to you as our main contact for the company
so, so that you can provide us with the company's house
personal code for all directors of the company.
Without the personal code, all directors will not be able to
submit any confirmation statement on or after the 18th
of November 2025. Now this, you know, they're
saying that it's all for your benefit to stop fraud and, and,
and, and, and all sorts of corruption, but actually it
feeds right into the whole digital ID that we, we
understand, you know the, the reasons behind that.
And then he got a, a, a reply from his accountant because he
gave it to his accountant. And it says The Economic Crime
and Corporate Transparency Act became law by passing through
both the UK Parliament and the House of Lords, receiving Royal
Assent from King on 26/20/23. This legislative process
involved the government introducing the Bill, followed
by extensive debate, review and amendments by Parliament for its
final approvement and enactment into law.
More importantly, the position procedurally, as a result of the
provisions of the Act is that over the next two years, any
company that has any director who does not have a personal
Companies House identity code will be automatically closed by
Companies House. Currently, company directors
therefore appear to have four choices.
One, do nothing and let all the companies they are director of
be closed. 2 resign their directorships. 3, close the
companies they they're a director of and trade as
individuals, or 4, get their personal ID code and continue as
normal. We will obviously support you as
best we can, whatever you choose to do.
So you know, he's between a rock and a hard place, This bloke,
because he's saying I, I don't, I really don't agree to, to, to
doing this, this ID verification.
He, he's quite rightly knows it's feeding into the whole, you
know, digital ID, but he he's, he wants to carry on running his
company. So it's be interesting to see if
anybody else gets in touch in the same position.
And what we really need is a mass non compliance of all this,
obviously with everything to do with digital ID.
Yeah, correct, Sandy. And yes, it's very, it's onerous
the speed that this is coming in and it's going to affect any,
any and everybody in business. So it's time to stand up and
challenge it. Ben, let's bring you back in.
And you've been looking at the creation of rage in society.
Yeah, this is all we look at, isn't it?
Yes. Rage bait.
Take a deep breath everyone. We're under attack online.
Tread carefully, Give it 24 hours, 48 hours.
Find out what the full story is before you get too triggered by
things like I did yesterday. There was this video going
around and I should say we're going to run it, but it's been
edited and that's important, which I'll come back to.
But let's have a little look at this video over supposedly a
police visit in the West Midlands sometime in the past
few days. OK, what were you?
What was it? Sorry, I I don't like the
camera. You have a body Cam.
I could exhibit that to you. I just don't like the camera.
Really. OK, well, I'm doing this because
this is my own house and I am telling you why I'm.
So I just need to know why. Why?
Why would she? She's basically viewed a post
which is not a an arrestable offence.
Yeah, OK. Happened in May and you'll be
fine. The only thing is, yeah, we need
to seize the phone at this current moment.
Yeah, the phone needs to get seized from us, otherwise we
will escalate this fibre. So.
But with a voluntary. So have you seized anyone else?
Is she the only child you're picking on?
Have you spoken to anyone else? No, We'll, we'll come to the
station now. Do you mind letting her finish
her sentence before? Yeah, have to get further
escalation, unfortunately. That's fine.
We'll come to the snow show now. The phone isn't seized right now
and we're not able to basically get the phone.
We'd have to escalate this further, which means your
daughter will get arrested for what are you in the social media
post? Is that I need to go with that
in order to No, absolutely not. Shall we do to prevent
description of evidence? I'm sorry.
That's fine. I would like you to leave now.
I'd like you to leave. OK.
I have nothing more to say to you.
A social media post. I've got nothing more to say.
I'd like you to leave. You've harassed this child
enough. I'd like you to leave.
That's no worries. How do you feel, Brian?
Well, I can imagine that most the triggering thinking people
would would be, would be incensed by that.
And what's actually happening. The look of the two police
women, they're not dressed properly.
They are apparently chasing a child.
They're trying to demand a phone, They're invading
somebody's house. There's a lot.
There's a lot of components. So viewing a social media post
and I particularly like the bit right at the start where she
says I don't like having the camera on me, even though they
both stood there with cameras on right.
So that's that's got that's done the rounds on Twitter.
A lot of people getting very annoyed about that actually.
But it's not all is not as it seems because it was heavily
edited. And actually all credit, I must
say, to Alex from Thinking Coalition regular guest on the
UK column, who pointed out that this is all a bit odd.
Really, isn't it kind of odd watching everyone filming at the
mouth about this clip, which is the 100% predictable reaction,
that nobody seems to wonder why it's heavily edited, which it
was, and what it's all about, giving that viewing things
online isn't an offence. This seems to be a narrative
play. Free speech has become the
battleground issue. That's what Tommy Robinson's
March was about last week, for example.
And then lo and behold, within an hour or two, apparently it's
so. Predictably the heavily edited
viral clip for two police officers asking for access to a
mobile phone is completely misleading.
W Midlands Police come out and say we've seen reports that
we're investigating a child for viewing a social media post.
This is completely false. We're investigating the creation
of a fake social media account which has been used to send
indecent images and apparently what we were looking at there is
an edit down from 10 minutes. Now I don't think for a second
that all of it was was was was perfect and the tone of the
interaction was not good. But actually, all I'm saying is,
and this is a note to self as much as anyone else is, just
take a deep breath and wait and see how things develop before
getting too wound up, because it's entirely possible that was
put there. I pick nefarious actors, shall
we say, in order to get a reaction.
So yeah. Yeah, we all need to be aware of
this. Yes, Sandy, let's just bring you
back because very quickly you had a little bit of an update on
digitalization in the NHS. Yes, I mean it's, it's just an
update really, because last week I, I, I spoke about how NHS
improvement NHS digital NHS, what's the other One X They've
they've all amalgamated to bring in this predictive,
preventative, personalized and participatory medicine.
So, you know, at its core, it's all working around genetics and
disease and reaching into the DNA of every, every person, but
also gathering the data of your fitness and everything else that
goes with it. Now what they've, they've done
recently is they've, they've employed the, the help from
companies like Anima and Anima. It's a digital triage and
workflow management platform that's been rolled about across
the GP practices in the UK. And its function is to
streamline how patient requests are received, prioritised and,
and managed. So they will be collecting all
your data for your GP surgery. Now Anima, I own a huge company,
a huge corporation. It was founded in 2021 by
Shanika Sharma, ex McKinsey and Sean Pang, ex Palantir Engineer.
So that you know, we know what they're, what they're up to.
But why I'm coming back to this is that one of our our viewers
went into her local GP service to register.
She's going through some health problems and she went to just
register with her GP as normal and they wouldn't let her.
They said you have to do it through Anima.
And she, she said, well, I don't know who anima are.
And she did a quick search I think and had a look and she
said, no, why would I, Why would I share my personal data with a
third party? I, I share my, my data with my
GP And she refused. And it caused a big stir in the,
in the, in the, in the surgery. And they, they, they eventually
they were arguing with her for quite a long time and eventually
they gave up and they allowed her to.
To do her own registration through the GP surgery.
So this is a lesson to all of us to if we don't want to go along
with all this nonsense, we can refuse.
Just say no. Sandy Brilliant.
That's absolutely right. And if more people did that,
that would be excellent. People can also make a
difference by supporting people who are doing the right thing.
And both the lady and the gentleman that spoke out in the
House of Lords against the Assisted Dying Bill, they need
your support. They need our support because if
they're heading down the right path, knowing that large numbers
of people are supporting, what are they doing is going to
increase their confidence and they're going to do more and
bring more people on board. So if you're thinking what can I
do, two options there. One is say no when you get the
opportunity and the other one is to support people who are doing
the right thing. Now we did promise with a little
bit of uplifting black humour we would end on having a little
look at BBC Shorts. This is just one that caught my
eye. Let's have a look at the BBC
giving the public serious information.
I went to San Francisco, Silicon Valley and I, I shadowed this
incredible founder and just spent all day sort of walking
around in his meetings, his hands on.
And it was fascinating how quick decisions are made and actioned.
And you know, what impact that's going to have in tech.
You know, it's, it's quite profound.
And so it was really interesting.
Whitney is a legendary entrepreneur.
She truly helped completely change the world of dating apps.
Knowing what you know now about them behind the scenes, do you
see them as a force for good or the opposite or in in the
middle? Well, I see them as a my brother
met his wife on a dating app. So so I'll be forever grateful
for my sister-in-law, Stacy. And also what Winnie did was so
key because she re engineered these dating apps to put women
in the driver's seat, you know, empower and protect women.
So you know that is a definitely a force for good.
Well, there we are. I don't know what our audience
thinks of this, but of course this is dross to be pumped into
the heads of youngsters, young teenagers.
I think it relates to an article which the BBC posted back in
2023. Whitney Wolf heard how the
Bumble boss changed the dating scene, and apparently this has
changed the dating scene to make it much better for women.
Interestingly enough, if you look at information on the
dating scene online, particularly in the States,
women are having more and more more difficulty finding a male
partner because the men are showing away from the dating
apps and the dating scenes because of the way the women are
behaving and looking for a male partner.
And I think it'll be very interesting to get into what's
actually happening between men and women in more detail in
forthcoming not only UK column news, but some of our interviews
because it's a very hot topic. But there we are, a giggly end
to the news provided by the BBC. Ben, thank you very much for
joining me. Sandy, huge thank you.
And thank you for that very concise update on the dangers of
the assisted dying. Bill.
Thank you to everybody who's joined us today.
We must end there. If you're a member of UK column,
join us for UK column extra shortly.
See you then. Bye bye.