Good afternoon. It's Monday the 17th of November
2025, just after 1:00. Welcome to UK column News.
I'm your host, Mike Robinson, and my host in studio today is
Ben Rubin. Welcome to the program, Ben.
Thank you, Mike. And joining us by video link are
Sandy Adams and Diane Rasmussen. Later in the program, we'll be
looking at how impact investing is being used as well government
takeover effectively. And we're also going to look at
assisted dying and how that's going in Canada, concerns from
the climate lobby about disinformation and the latest on
the roll out of 5G in the UK. But we're going to begin today
with the with the UK Health Security Agency and links
between excess deaths and COVID shots.
Because on Saturday, the Telegraph put out this article,
which many may have seen headlined government withholding
data that may link COVID jobs to excess deaths, as if that should
come as a surprise to anyone but the UK.
The the argue, sorry, the article says.
The UK Health Security Agency argued that releasing the data
would lead to distress or anger if bereaved relatives, so a link
were to be discovered. They said public health
officials also argued that publishing the data risked
damaging the well-being and mental health of the families
and friends of people who died. Now if you remember what the ONS
graph looked like at the time, it was clear that there was
something pretty nasty going on. So we just put it on screen
there. Now this is largely ignored by
politicians and journalists everywhere.
And now the Telegraph is doing what?
Trying to cover their tracks? What's, what's going on here,
Ben? I'd say so, yeah.
I mean, it's quite amazing that they, they don't want to release
it because they want to spare us.
You see, it's all about us. It's not about escaping
accountability. Indeed, We'll, we'll come up,
we'll come on to that in a second.
Now the campaign to have the data released has been led by
this campaign group US for them who requested the data via
Freedom of Information requests. The refusal from the UKHSA said
nothing at all about distress or anger when they were answering
these Freedom of Information requests, but instead said that
publishing the data could quotes could lead to misinformation.
It would have an adverse impact on vaccine uptake in in the
public. So the question is, which was
it? Was it they were worried about
the alarm and distress that it might cause the public or was it
because they were worried about vaccine uptake?
The UK Health Security Agency also claimed that the data
released could carry a risk of individuals being identified
despite data being anonymised. But hold on, the same people
tell us regularly that it's OK to collect bulk data on all of
us on on all of us NHS users because it's perfectly safe as
the data is anonymised. So I'm not sure they can have it
both ways. They're going to try.
Well, let's just have a look at
this quick quote here from them because they said protecting
patient confidentially confidentiality is of critical
importance. Releasing this data presented a
real possibility that it could be used to identify individuals
which could result in significant distress.
So that's that was their position.
And that's pretty hilarious, bearing in mind they didn't
really worry too much about causing distress in 2020 when
Spy B, for example, put this in their minutes.
A substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently
personally threatened. The perceived level of personal
threat needs to be increased amongst those who are
complacent, using hard hitting emotional messaging and saying
that social disapproval from one's community can play an
important role in preventing anti social behaviour or
discouraging failure to enact pro social behaviour.
So they didn't seem too worried about causing alarm and distress
at that point in time. Just including the UKHSA in the
whole covidocracy that that existed at that point.
It wasn't them specifically they were making those statements,
but they were part parcel of this, or at least the precursors
were. We're part and parcel of of this
entire regime. So it.
Was formed in that period as well.
It was absolutely Khsa was was an outcrop of that early.
Absolutely. Covidocracy.
Yes, absolutely. And that security word that they
introduced, that's very much aligned to this stuff.
Yes. So anyway, I, I think, you know,
I applaud the organization help, you know, attempt to get this
information out in the public and it's supposed to be public
data. And and the campaign group was
busy was was pointing out that of course, this data has been
shared with pharmaceutical companies already, but it has
not yet been shared with the public.
So I think it's about time it was.
I couldn't agree more. So Ben, let's come on to the
issue of impact economy. We've talked about this quite a
bit over the last couple of months, but what's what's it
doing with respect to government?
Was completely transforming government.
And actually what you've just talked about is a really good
example of the impact economy in action because we don't really
have a government anymore. We have a public private
marketplace designed to deliver a global agenda handed down by
the UN in the World Economic Forum in a manner that is
designed to maximize profits to international capital investors.
That's what it's all about. I've talked about this a lot
previously. I've used this term before woke
corporatism, which I'm just going to going to drag back in.
Essentially this is the, the, the model of governance that
we're currently being subjected to.
And it's a combination of intersectional Marxism, which is
the, the woke bit, the kind of DEI side of things, combined
with the corporatism, the integration of the, the, the
market in the state, which is also the definition of fascism.
I call this an unholy alliance between power and money.
And this to me is basically what Fabianism is.
No, the Fabian Society, we've got a Fabian government at the
moment. This is Fabianism.
It's also stakeholder capitalism, Same thing.
It's also the third way like you were talking about last week.
And it's also impact investment. That's ultimately what this is
all about. And the impact investment market
is in the ascendant. And who better to describe that
to us than Kieran Boyle, the chair of the Impact Investing
Institute? At the moment, governments
everywhere are facing a challenge.
They're all really ambitious to what they want to achieve, but
they're all facing increasingly tight financial environments and
impact investing can play a really important role because
when governments are tight on finances, they need to find
alternate sources of capital, people that they can partner
with. But it really matters about who
you partner with, what their incentives are.
Are they aligned and? What you have in in impact
investors is partners who can bring capital, solution focused
capital, but focus on the same sorts of things that governments
care about, improved social outcomes improved.
Environmental Outcomes. He seems like a lovely man,
doesn't he? Delightful.
A delightful man. What could possibly go wrong?
That was Kieran Boyle, the chair of the Impact Investing
Institute. And I'm going to say, and I'll
be careful so that the lawyers don't get on the phone, that he
looks like a SPIV. Are you familiar with the term
SPIV? I've certainly are.
A dodgy geezer who makes his money in dishonest ways just
looks like one. I'm not saying he is a spiv, I'm
just saying that he looks like one.
It's the little Tash that he's got going on there.
Yeah, quite a quite a thing. Anyway.
Who is he? Well, we said he's the chair of
the Impact Investing Institute, which is actually a public
private partnership in itself. So that was set up between the
City of London and the Department of Culture, Media and
Sport, DCMS. It's backed by BlackRock and
bunch of other people like that. Boyle is also the director of
the Marshall Institute at the LSE.
That's Paul Marshall, the backer of GB News.
So if any GB News fans out there or people that you know that
like watching GB News, this guy works for Paul Marshall.
So this is ultimately Paul Marshall's agenda that we're
talking about here. He's also the chief executive of
the 100 X Impact Accelerator. We can get that back on screen
and have a little look at the logo there, which is embedded
into the LSC. Very influential guy this by the
way, better bet. He's also a non executive,
better society capital, formerly big society capital.
He's been there for nearly ten years now.
And before that he was a director in the Government
Innovation Group from 2008 to 2009.
So he straddled Blair, Brown and Cameron working in the Cabinet
Office, the Foreign Office, at Downing St. various other
places. And during that time he became a
young global leader of the World Economic Forum in 2014.
I say this guy here, this individual bundles together the
collected interest of all of those different groups and those
different organisations, and he's right in the mix of this
process of transformation of the British state.
Now let's hear a little bit more about impact investment from
Stephen Merse, who is the chief executive of Better Society
Capital. The government should really
start to build stronger relationships that impact
investors. The government has a really
significant mission around turning the UK into a clean
energy superpower and bringing communities and local people as
into part of that. And we've recently committed
significant capital into a new community energy investment
facility to support that and build on past successful
investments in community energy. You've also got really strong
track record of impact investment in the health sphere,
which is another one of the government's key missions, both
looking at prevention through community based initiatives such
as the very successful Thrive initiative in North East
Lincolnshire that helps people with long term conditions stay
out of hospital and and succeed in their lives without so much
health intervention. Yeah.
So that's Stephen Mirrors from Better Society Capital, the
chief executive, you know, say of Better Society Capital, who
absolutely reeks of civil service.
That guy. It was in the civil service for
about 20 years before heading over to Better Society Capital,
which is basically the extension of the civil service.
It was spun out of Cabinet Office by Cameron back in 2012,
and it was the precursor to the impact investment marketplace
that we're talking about today. All of this completely hand in
glove with the city. So those two videos I just
showed came from a short series that came out earlier this year
from the City of London. They're presenting themselves as
the global city. They want to help deliver
government using impact LED venture capital and private
equity so that they can make loads of money.
And they want to do this internationally importantly, so
that the UK is a test case for this stuff.
We talked about this quite a bit recently.
They're, they're trying, they're experimenting here, they're
building out the models for how they're going to deploy this
elsewhere and then they want to export that internationally.
And they're talking about this being a £1.9 trillion a year
global marketplace. That's ultimately what the city
and these investors are sniffing around and that's ultimately
what our government is becoming. It's what it's being set up to
enable and these organisations, we talked about the city, we
talked about the Impact Investing Institute, which as I
said, was set up by the city with the government.
So that's public private partnership right there, the
British Venture Capital Association, BCVA and Better
Society Capital. These are the people that are
really driving this forward, right?
And there was a big announcement on this front.
As I said, it's been going on for for quite some time now, but
there's been some really big developments over the past week.
Let's hear now from Darren Jones, the private secretary to
Keir Starmer. So can I start by saying thank
you for everything you've done and for the impact you've had on
so many local organisations and through them, the lives of the
people they serve. Because for all the good work
over many years, the community I now represent in Parliament
still has far too few young people being given the chance to
succeed in whichever way they wish to.
I feel lucky to represent my home in Parliament, but I do not
want my story to be exceptional. I want it to be normal.
And so my pledge to all of you this evening is I will use what
power I have for whatever time I have it to make sure that that's
the case in every part. Of our nation because we all
know that when governments empower communities,
specifically those who know the local area, the people, the
problems and the opportunities inside and out people like.
You that that's when truly transformative and long lasting
change can happen. So last year I set up the Social
Impact Investment Advisory Group and that it has today published
its report on what government can do to help more.
I can assure you that will be taking these recommendations
seriously and acting on them within a matter of weeks.
So it was Darren Jones, I said private secretary to Keir
Starmer, he's actually, sorry, chief secretary to the Prime
Minister. He's also the chancellor of the
duty of Lancaster. He's had those positions for the
past three months. You've been thrust right to the
forefront, doing a lot of communication work for the
government at the moment. They've got to put him out front
because no one wants to see the others talking about anything.
So this guy's been leading the charge.
He's the MP for Bristol Northwest, been in that position
since 2017. Background as a solicitor, when
he was at BT as a solicitor, he was on their smart Cities team.
Tells you quite a lot about where this is all going to.
He's also been receiving quite a bit of impact investing of his
own. So if you go to look at the
register of interests on the The Gov website, you can see that he
just received 44 and a bit grand from Lord Sainsbury, who's been
splurging huge amounts of cash on progressive political issues
quite some time now. That event, by the way, at
Downing St. was running partnership with this
organization. She's UK Community Foundations
in around for quite a long time, about 50 years.
And just worth noting that their president is this guy, Lord
Michael Hastings, former top brass at KPMG, World Economic
foreign strategic partner, wearing a UNSDG pin in the image
there on the right hand side of screen.
So again, just tying all these things together, separate
organisations, same agenda. This is what's driving state
policy right now. Now that event that Darren Jones
is speaking out was the launch of this report.
So this is mobilising the impact economy as partners in national
renewals based on three pillars, organising to mobilise and
support the impact economy, embedding the mobilisation
mindset into the government and then unlocking resources and
participation at scale. This is the total transformation
of the state essentially into what they call a market enabler.
That's what the government is becoming, a market enabler.
Still a regulator, a grant maker, a commissioner, A
guarantor. So they're actually going to
underwrite private sector risk. That's interesting, isn't it?
They even wrote that down. And then finally, an issuer.
So they're going to be raising capital through public debt
instruments. So this is just PFI spending
writ large across the whole of government.
Printing money. Printing money, I mean.
Yeah. And, and lumbering the tax payer
with extraordinary amounts of debt that never gets paid down,
overcoming barriers to this new model, whether those are
cultural barriers inside the civil service or other bits of
government or importantly, just just writing new laws.
So if the regulatory environment doesn't allow for it, well,
we'll change it, right? We've got to encourage
partnerships, not discourage partnerships.
This is already a huge business ultimately inside of the state.
They've done some work mapping out different levels of
investment across the five missions, whether that's kick
starting growth, clean energy, safer streets, the NHS, breaking
down barriers to opportunity. And that's coming from
philanthropy, social investment, institutional impact investment.
And they're actually explaining in quite some detail where these
funds are coming from and what they're all about.
They've developed this model for how they're going to, they call
it the staircase model. They're going to go to plant,
nurture, establish, grow and mature these initiatives across
the whole of government. They've got ways of different
ways of cutting up risk and return, different types of
financial financial instruments that they're going to use,
different participants in the marketplace from ventures to
private equity, everything in between different types of
support required from government.
And all of this is, is based on outcomes.
So they'll talk about outcomes based contracts so people can
extract value only when they actually deliver the outcome
they've signed up for. But what that necessitates is
Sandy talked about a couple of months ago actually is total
surveillance. So in order to know if they've
delivered an outcome, they have to surveil you in order to
understand if you can actually then trigger the payment, right?
So this is where a lot of that stuff comes in.
They're already acting on it. It's rushing ahead.
One of the recommendations that was in the report was to set up
listing the office for the impact economy.
This is housed in the Cabinet Office.
You can see at the bottom there, Darren Jones is going to be
running it. He's the ministerial lead.
And ultimately this is about cross government collaboration.
So cutting across all departmental divisions and silos
as they talk about them being a front door for institutional
capital to come into government to coordinate those
relationships, to build capacity and extend the government's
ability to to engage with this stuff.
While at the same time identifying and supporting new
partnerships, building the marketplace proactively for
these investors to come in and stop stripping profits out of of
government. And importantly, this is a said,
this is being run out of Cabinet Office.
They have what they call a hub and spoke model.
The DCMS are absolutely in the picture.
Treasury #10 partnerships, Union unit, the Department of the
Business and Trade. They're going to work openly and
collaboratively with stakeholders, obviously.
And this is about doing government differently, total
transformation of the state. This is what the change agenda
is all about, impact. Impact and no change actually,
because because this is a great example of the Unit party in
action. We're talking about the same
organizations that were established under the Cameron
Tory government. It's being absolutely pursued as
hard as it can be by the current Labour regime.
What's the difference between them?
Nothing. And would it be any different
under reform? Absolutely not.
Because Paul Marshall is. For for his words, for the, for
his words for the city. Yes.
And the city's is shaping this, so yeah.
OK, Thank you, Ben. OK, let's welcome sadly to the
program. And Sunday, of course, the
assisted dying bill continues to deliver its way through, excuse
the pun, through Parliament at the moment.
It's always good to look at what's happening in countries
where this policy has been implemented for a number of
years and see what's happening there.
So bring us up to speed with what's going on in Canada.
Yeah, yeah. Good afternoon, Mike and and Ben
and indeed everyone. Now, with the research we've all
been doing over the last decade or so, we've known that there's
been a depopulation agenda ongoing since around the 1970s
with the Club of Rome reports and the likes of Bill Gates and
Yuval Harari, Klaus Schwab, they've all spoken about it.
And also there was the Deagle population forecast for 2025
published by the CIA from 2014 to 2020, which I'm sure all of
you will know about. Umm, we've, if not, I'll put
them in the show notes. We've hoped that this would
never happen, but umm, we have to, we have to call it out
nonetheless. But according to a recent piece
in in the Sage Journal of Death and Dying published by the
Health Canada, umm, they now lay bare a cost saving exercise and
it's so cold and extreme. It's really hard to believe that
they published it openly, to be honest.
Umm as Canadian veteran Kelsey Sharon highlighted, the analysis
claims that. From uh 2027 to 2047, the
Canadian government will save 1273 trillion not through
breakthroughs in medicine or better care, but by ending
lives. More than 14,000,000 Canadians
at their own data, you know, as their own data shows, are
expected to be disposed of through medical assistance in
dying or made as they call it, rather than receiving palliative
care, mental health support or actual help.
So that's, you know, the, the staggering amount is 14.7
million human beings killed by the state.
Now let's hear what Kelsey Sharon, she's a veteran
campaigner in Canada and she what she says about this.
So the Journal of Death and Dying recently this year of
2025, came out and expressed what Health Canada's plans look
like to do to save money. They are on track starting 2027
to 2047 to save $1.273 trillion by providing 14.7 million
Canadians with MAID rather than palliative care.
What was that #14.7 million Canadians?
Over 9 million of those are projected to be elderly.
Over 4 million of those are projected to be the mentally ill
and suicidal. Over 300,000 of those are
projected to be the indigenous population and then everyone
else, addicts, homeless and otherwise.
So Canada's running eugenics program and they're planning to
expand that with the start of mentally ill only qualification
in 2027. And for those that are find
those stats as disgusting as I do, you can go check out the on
the Sage Journal or the Death Journal of Death and Dying.
They break it all down for you. They go through the numbers.
We've also done it on the series as well. 9 million of these
deaths are forecast to be the elderly, the people who built
the country, parents, grandparents.
Another 4 million of people suffering from mental illness,
depression or suicidal thoughts. Exactly the people who need
compassion and treatment. 300,000 are projected to be
indigenous and the rest are discarded.
Discarded of society, the poor, the addicts and the homeless.
This depopulation agenda is wearing it's, it's kind of
wearing the the mask of being somehow health reform.
It's also the same ideology that drove the last century's
euthanasia programmes and the belief that some lives cost too
much and aren't worth living. And it's funded by the taxpayer.
I mean, I can't believe they've got it all sewn up.
It isn't stopping at Canada's borders either.
The same conversation is unfolding across the rest of the
Western world from the UKNH processes build their End of
Life Cost Management Bill is openly discussed and the US
think tanks pushing optimised death as a budget strategy.
A narrative is being seeded everywhere that euthanasia is
empowerment or some form of dignity, when in fact it's a
system itself that created the despair and the poverty and the
mental illness. The powerful have effectively
declared open season on on the vulnerable.
Our UK assisted dying bill reached its committee stage in
Parliament last week, Friday the 14th of November.
Will we go the same direction as Canada where it appears to be an
open movement to kill people? It's up to us to campaign our
local MPs and make a noise about this.
So I really think our MPs don't understand what's going on at
all. Now we've, we've also got coming
up this at the moment is the Public Authorities Fraud, Error
and Recovery Bill, which also also moved to the committee
stage last week where it's sort of ping pongs around before it
goes to Royal Assent. Now this is all linked.
There's been some opposition to this by MPs where there's,
there's a Lib Dem MP called John Miller who, who's the, I think
he's the MP for Horsham and what he has to say about, about
what's what's going on. And he says, yeah, he said
everyone accepts that we need to keep a handle on fraud, but the
powers being taken in the bill gives the DWP access to people's
private bank accounts. Now what he's worried about is
that this could actually 'cause people to take their own lives
and it has done in the past. So what, what he's what he's
saying is, is, is, is he's got very grave concerns and a lot of
the MPs do. And I think we really have to
push this, that in fact this is this, this is a bit, you know,
this is definitely dodgy. Umm, so the government repeats
the same lines. We're only targeting benefit
fraudsters. That's nonsense.
The bill covers fraud, error, debt and overpayments, which
usually is errors by the DWP. Yet banks will be forced to hand
over people's financial data to simply check avail, you know,
sort of the eligibility. Now, once that precedence in
place, once banks and government systems are wired together, it
never goes away. And then comes the most chilling
part, direct deduction payments. The government will be able to
reach into your bank account and take money if you dispute the
debt. We already know where this
leads. Disabled people who've been
hounded over DWP errors in the past and push deeper into
despair. Coroners have explicitly linked
DWP actions to suicides. Now there's a campaigner called
Liz Liz and she's campaigns for the disabled and she warned MPs
and peers that the care funding crisis will create pressure to
those to who might want to choose assisted suicide as a as
a way of getting out of it. And I think we could listen to
her now what she says about all this.
DPAC and every other disability rights organization says no to
assisted dying, or as we call it, assisted suicide.
We live in a world that sees disabled people as better off
dead than disabled. When you're living in a world
with attitudes like that, it is not safe to legalize making it
easier for certain groups of people to have a medically
assisted death. Until our demands are met, our
core demands for an inclusive and Equitable Life for all
disabled, ill, and older people, for all people, in fact, we
can't even consider legalizing assisted suicide.
It is not safe. This is not, by the way, a bunch
of religious people saying let's not change the law.
This is a group of disabled people, many of us, who've
considered this subject with great concern.
And we know it is dangerous to legalize and change the law and
to remove the legal protection that currently exists around
assisted suicide. We demand this government does
not legalize assisted suicide. For terminally ill people, ill
people, disabled people. Now we only need to look at
Canada to see the end game. Disabled people quietly steered
towards state approved death because they've been deemed too
costly to support. And that's what happens when
governments governments begin to weigh human life in purely
financial terms. Benefit claimants are simply the
testing ground. Once this system is operational,
it will expand to taxes, fines, carbon rationing, energy use and
whatever future governments consider necessary.
This is the thin end of the wedge.
If we don't stop it now, the vulnerable will suffer first and
the rest of us will wake up to a world where the state access our
finances. And it isn't, you know,
exceptional or limited. It's permanent.
All the details of of this will be in the show notes back to
you. Sandy, thank you very much for
that. OK, let's move on.
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And of course, we'll be back for the news on Wednesday as well,
1:00 PM as usual. But in the meantime, let's get
on with some other matters. And well, Diane, over the last
couple of weeks, we've been talking about the increasing,
how do we describe it, desperation among certain people
that they're not being believed and their agendas are not being
accepted by people. And this applies equally within
the climate science community. And they're very concerned, it
seems, about disinformation. Yes, Mike.
Hello Ben, Sandy and everyone. Glad to be here.
Glad to be here today to give you this report on what's been
going on at COP 30, which is still ongoing.
This actually follows up a little bit, starting with the
disinformation segment that Mike and Charles did back on the 7th
of November, talking about the UK statements at the UN 4th
Committee by Letitia Loonen when she said that the UK is indeed
deeply concerned by the growing threats to information
integrity. Now, first of all, let's define
what information integrity means according to the UN.
It's not my definition necessarily as a librarian of 25
years, but the UN defined it last year as existing.
Quote. Where freedom of expression is
fully enjoyed and where accurate, reliable information
free from discrimination and hate is available to all in an
open, inclusive, safe and secure information environment.
So at COP 30 last Wednesday, the 12th of November was Information
Integrity Day and let's watch this lightheart YouTube video
that was played through to show what they think they mean by
information integrity. What is the most absurd thing
that you've ever heard on social media about climate change?
That the ice in the Antarctic and Arc is not decreasing but
increasing. I think that the most crazy
thing I've ever heard is that it's OK that our plan is dying
because there's other plans that we can live.
Today is Information Integrity Day here at COP.
This information about climate change is spreading faster than
ever, fueling myths and misconceptions about the climate
crisis and the solutions to address it.
Because tackling climate disinformation has never been
more important, and to learn how to address it, we asked
Charlotte Skadden to share her insights.
I'm Charlotte Skadden, and I'm Senior Advisor on Information
Integrity at the United Nations. We're all targeted.
By climate disinformation in one way or another and anyone who
uses online spaces has come across climate disinformation
there are many different tactics used to try and undermine
climate action in information spaces and they range.
From. Classic disinformation, denial
of climate change to disinformation around solutions.
So we need all hands on deck to address climate information and
threats to climate information integrity.
And that includes governments, it includes tech platforms and
companies, it includes civil society, it includes
advertisers. It's really important that we
try and empower ourselves to recognise it when we see it and
to share that information with others.
You might also be targeted by it.
Fighting climate disinformation starts with knowing the facts
and sharing them. Together, we can make truth go
viral. So great to make truth go viral.
All right, well, we like you look at a range of press
releases related to what they said at the UN.
But first let's look at this ex post where basically they're
saying this is what they're going to be doing.
This is a landmark declaration. All of the press releases and
tweets. And so that I've seen about this
has been saying that essentially this is the first time that this
has been an important thing at COP at a COP conference, The
very first time actually for information integrity at any COP
conference. Some of the other press releases
that the UN has put out about this has said this is the age of
disinformation, which I would probably agree with in certain
ways. This again saying about the wave
of truth, the COP of truth, which is on the the next press
release, which is again from the UN saying that it is now
targeting disinformation as a threat to climate action.
So again, obviously the science is out.
The consensus all says, well, it's all just, you know, we need
this information because we all now know that we have to do
absolutely everything apparently according to all scientists
everywhere. So let's look at this next
video, which was part of that ex post pay potential.
If you look at the tie on the the first person that appears,
you'll see a very sustainable development pattern on the tie.
Let's take a look at this. For a few years now, several
global risk reports, for example, the Davos World
Economic Forum Global reports of risks.
They put as global risk number one in this planet, not climate
change or climate disasters, but disinformation, Global risk
number one and global risk number 2 is actually climate
change. Purveyors of climate
disinformation don't simply deny climate change.
They undermine climate action by attacking researchers,
scientists and journalists personally by questioning the
scientific consensus around climate change and creating
false narratives around climate solutions.
And and they're also seeking to skew the perceptions of policy
makers of of the people here negotiating.
So for many years we have been trying to raise awareness or
sound the alarms that this interaction between information
integrity and climate change is absolutely vital for both
fields, for the field of information integrity, but also
for the field of climate change and those two crucial issues,
they depend on each other, they need to interact more.
So you can see the full press conference that some of that was
based on, including the the lady wearing the Sustainable
Development Goals pin Charlotte and some of the other people in
that press conference said things like, quote,
disinformation and denialism undermine trust in science and
institutions. It feeds and fuels hate speech
and extremism. Some of the questions that came
up in the full press conference, I watched the whole thing so
that the viewers don't have to, but some of the questions came
from example from the Guardian who when a reporter asked why
are the fossil fuel lobbyists present and basically what can
we do about these lobbyists that have been present here at this
particular COP conference. It's important to note as well
that this all goes back to the UN Global Digital Compact, which
was released in September of 2024.
Paragraph 35 E states quote encourage United Nations
entities in collaboration with governments and relevant
stakeholders to assess the impact of misinformation and
disinformation on the achievement of the Sustainable
Development Goals or SGG 17. SGG 17 is partnerships for the
goals, and this basically talks about how the goals are
accomplished through various sources of funding and
organizations. I'll come back to how this is
done at the end of my report, but I just want to remind
viewers that essentially, if you hear the word sustainable within
the context of the Sustainable Development Goals, it really
means unsustainable. It's all an inversion of
language. Now, how is this done,
particularly through UNESCO and other organizations?
UNESCO is the one who has published what they've called
the Global Initiative for Information Integrity on Climate
Change. So what we see here is from
their website talking about COP 30 in particular, they have
several documents. This COP 30 document talks about
exactly what they're going to be doing here and how it's going to
be done. That basically they have signed
this declaration, which I'm going to cover here in just a
minute. It's all about how to fight the,
as they're calling it, catastrophic global heating.
And this is being sabotaged the by a surge of climate
disinformation. And so these falsehoods are
getting in the way of stopping all this apparent global boiling
that is going on. So before November this year,
earlier this summer, they put out a call to action for this
initiative for information integrity and climate change,
asking for individuals and organizations to come forward to
come up with solutions on how to fight this apparent problem.
It says through a global fund and through various ways of
getting this funded and sourced that this is what we need.
So they're looking for organizations are looking for
money, they're looking for various things and how they can
get this actually going into play.
And once again, you could apply to, to contribute to this.
Apparently the, the applications are not closed.
So I wasn't able to see what it was that they were actually
looking for. I would have loved to see the
application form, but unfortunately that's no longer
available on that website as well.
They, they talked about this initiative at the COP of Truth,
which was directly from this taken from this website.
And this was really interesting because it said you can read
more about the unprecedented prominence of IT information
integrity at COP 30. Now, apparently before Cop 30, I
don't know if the first 29 Cops did not care about integral
information, but this is now a a very important point here in Cop
30. So we can't really speak exactly
to what was going on there. But the call to action again is
talking about here's what we have to do, here's what we need,
here are the people that we need to have to be able to
contribute. So what happened at the November
conference last week? Well, we now, as a result of the
call to action and as a result of this now being the cop of
truth, there was an open letter signed talking about this
declaration on information integrity.
So the open letter was signed by 134 organizations, including the
Club of Rome at the University of Leeds, for an example of an
academic partner, Extinction Rebellion, and 127 individuals,
which of course included Sandrine Dixon, exactly the
president of the Club of Rome, and many others.
And this information about the declaration was saying,
basically here are here are the ways that we're going to do it.
We are going to do research. We are going to share practical
tools, policies, communications, advertising campaigns.
Of course, we have to have the the propaganda campaigns,
trusted voices and influencers, media sustainability, protecting
journalists, activists, communicators, scientists,
protecting data, data sets, transparency of placement data
information, digital literacy related to climate change in
particular, and of course, donating financial resources to
UNESCO's Global Fund for Information Integrity on Climate
Change. And according to this, Antonio
Guterres, the UN Secretary General, said that, quote, we
must fight the coordinated disinformation campaigns
impeding global progress on climate change.
So that's the open letter, if we go into the actual declaration
statements. And it says it's drafted by the
members of the committee of this initiative for information
integrity on climate change. And it basically says, well, as
a result of the Global Digital Compact from 2024 Summit of the
future and looking at these global principles for
information integrity, we now, quote, reaffirm our shared
responsibility to ensure that societies around the world are
empowered with the knowledge and information they need to act
urgently and decisively in the face of the climate crisis.
So I went to look at this global Fund to see exactly how much
they were looking to fund and what they were going to do about
it. So this is from one of the UN
websites saying that since their launch in June 2025, they had
received 447 proposals from nearly 100 countries.
So this might not be entirely up to date.
It could be more by now. And they're saying that the role
of the funding is to uphold the integrity of information related
to climate change and calls on funders to donate this fund and
support projects that promote information integrity locally,
nationally and internationally. And it will contribute again, as
I said, through search funding, investigative journalism,
strategic work, communications, advocacy, cooperation with
organizations, carrying out related activities, which of
course goes back to SDG 17 partnerships for the goals.
This is how it's all going to be done.
So I'd like to say as UK columns, librarian and
information correspondence, that after 25 years in the library
field, I, I was, you know, I was really important to me to hold
the line to make sure that the basic principles of
librarianship and information access were provided.
Everything is available. But what they're doing here is
obviously only pushing the things that the UN wants them to
push. And so if we look here at what
they have been doing in the Internet International
Federation for Library Associations and Institutions,
which is an organization I used to belong to, I used to have an
elected role in this organization.
Actually, their press release from the 10th of November said
COP 30 begins. Culture adaptation and
information integrity are key themes for the library field.
So how are they contributing according to this press release?
Well, one is the state of library engagement and climate
communication and education. This report was funded by the
Gates Foundation. It basically said that now
libraries are contributing more to sustainability event, to
climate action, and so they need to be doing more on the climate
side. They said they would be
contributing to the global goal on adaptation.
So specifically here around how the cultural heritage sector
contributes to sustainable development goals, the Paris
Agreement, and of course, as always, the importance of equity
and inclusion. And so this is how it's going to
be done through the Action Agenda, which is one of the top
30 documents which we've talked about as well.
And they're contributing to this in different ways, including
contributing to a collaborative plan to accelerate solutions
that will explore narratives and storytelling as catalyst for
climate action. So that's the way I guess
libraries can contribute and helping libraries around the
world adapt and build resilience to the changing climate.
Now, they did also contribute to the UN global Principles for
Information Integrity, which they were very proud of.
And they said that these principles quote responded to
concerns about governments themselves sharing
misinformation. The quote info Demic experienced
during the COVID-19 quote pandemic.
Those are my quotes. Why are worries about how the
way Internet platforms themselves risked accelerating
the spread of fake news and growing awareness to the real
world impacts of online hate speech.
Now the human global principles themselves for information
integrity are is another document and these will all be
available in the show notes. But basically there are five
points that they are using that are these principles.
So one is societal trust and resilience.
You'll get the role of platforms and acting in trustworthy ways,
healthy incentives, looking at business models that favour
click bait, public empowerment with some references to digital
literacy and enabling people to exercise choice when choosing
platforms. Which is great news for UK
column to have Choice, Transparency in research.
And finally, Independent, Free and Pluralistic Media, which
discusses the need to resist restrictions to press freedom,
support independent journalism and the need for ethical conduct
within the press. So Mike, maybe this is some good
news for UK column after all. Perhaps so.
OK, Well, thank you for that,
Diane. Ben, let's move on then for the
capture of young minds. And maybe that's a related topic
actually. It's absolutely a related topic
because even with infinite wealth and power, their
narrative is falling to pieces it would seem.
So the last roll of the dice is to get hold of the minds of
young people and make sure that they don't listen to
disinformation and they are democratically resilient in all
of these awful terms that we keep hearing from these people.
But let's hear quickly now about a new report from Demos looking
inside the mind of a 16 year old.
From Manchester. They're both with me now and
what they find out may surprise you.
So can I start with you, this great odyssey?
What did you learn that surprised you?
The biggest surprise was the difference between the moral
panic that we see online and what we did that we saw during
our DES research phase, and the reality the moral panic around
young people not believing in democracy is simply not true.
They do believe in democracy. And they want to preserve it,
but they're looking for powerful messages that I've done
correctly. But the fact that they're
brainwashed by Andrew Tate, simply not true.
Every time we mention Andrew Tate's name in a classroom, they
laughed us off. They're not.
They're aware of some of his messages, but they know the hard
reality. This fact that they're
brainwashed by the algorithm, They're impacted by it, but
they're curious and they're thoughtful and they know what
they want and they know what they want to hear, and they'll
look for good voices. This is remarkably cheering.
I wasn't expecting a cheerful conversation at this time in the
evening. What kinds of things do you if
you're a politician, what kinds of things should you be thinking
about more when you focus on younger people?
Be honest, be direct and cut the BS essentially, and meet them
where they are. If you do meet them where they
are, you can, you'll see incredible.
Like what Zach Polanski is doing right now is incredibly
interesting. He's got a podcast, he's really
active on TikTok, he's bringing on really interesting American
names like Hassan Abbey, who's very popular on the left, left
side of American politics. And we need to see something
similar like that from, in my personal opinion, from Labour
and, and yeah, and just clearly show your values and clearly
tell a story. I will just say then the lip
sync there was was their issue, not ours.
That was their issue, yes. I accept no responsibility for
that. So, but we thought we wanted
people to hear the clip. Actually, it's quite interesting
to get a sense of what the liberal progressive political
classes inside the M25 are desperately trying to find out
about, which is what's going on with 16 year olds.
Obviously they've just been given the vote that's kind of
forthcoming. So this is a crucial
constituency and it was all relating to this report.
We can get that on screen inside the mind of a 16 year old.
From Andrew Tate to Bonnie Blue to Nigel Farage, what the first
time voters think about social media, politics, the state of
Britain and their futures. The references here are just so
obvious. Andrew Tate, Bonnie Blue, Nigel
Farage, what do you think of these things?
And actually, it turns out the 16 year olds are not idiots.
They're not idiots Like the people who work at Demos are
clearly idiots and the people that go to Demos events are
idiots, right? They're much more sophisticated
than people. Give me credit for this report.
We just nip it to look at Polly Curtis, the the chief executive
of Demos, talking about the fact he came from Peter Hyman, who
was a political strategist for Tony Blair and Keir Starmer.
So gives you a sense of where this is coming from.
He didn't speak in that video. That was the chap Shuab Gamotti,
who she just calls us black. I hate racial categorisation.
It's just so crude, right? But that's what these people are
like. They go Gen.
Z, you all think this and black, you all think this.
And then when it doesn't turn out to be the case, they they
don't know what's going on, right?
And this is all about power ultimately and building
democratic resilience in this age group to make sure that they
don't fall out of this democratic system that people
like Polly Curtis are really keen on.
And I'd actually recommend going to have a read of the report is
quite well done piece of work. My main takeaways from me were
the first of all, there's no such thing as Gen.
Z. Like it's obviously a lot more
complicated than that. You're talking about that two or
three generations of people right now, as I said, 16 year
olds are not idiots. Some young women are very
disengaged. Some other young women are
completely terrorised by the world at the moment and they
want to burn the whole thing down, start again.
And they they they in brutalised and misinformed in a really
malicious way. And young men in particular are
questioning the narrative. And they're doing that with
various levels of varying levels of patriotism, which was quite
encouraging, to be honest with you, which tells me that Demos
and this crowd have got a big problem on their hands.
And just a very final quick note about the provenance of the
reporting, That chap that was speaking just there, Shurab
Gamotti, he actually is employed by this organization, which is
the Future Governance Forum, whose job they see is reforming
the state. And again, this links directly
back to what I was talking about earlier in my first report.
And they are backed by, amongst others, Amazon, the British
Venture Capital Association, who I did speak about earlier,
William Perrin and Francesca Sainsbury.
So the Sainsbury's family, again, they're all over this
space at the moment. And then also Vanguard, one of
the biggest asset managers in the world.
So these are the people funding this activity in order to
understand what 16 year olds are thinking about so that they can
sneak whatever their agenda items are on any particularly
given day pass and when it comes to the next election.
Yeah, OK. Thanks and for that.
Now let's move on then to to 5G. Now as some may be aware,
there's still no real 5G infrastructure rolled out in the
UK yet. What we have at this point is an
enhancement of 4G which is branded as 5G.
This is because very major part of the 5G roll out wasn't yet
licensed. I'm referring to the really high
frequency component of the technology known as millimetre
wave spectrum. And before any of the telecoms
companies could begin building out this capability, they have
to pay money. Or they had to pay money via an
auction process run by Ofcom, which aside from being the chief
sensor here in the UK, is also regulating the telecoms
industry, including who can use which frequencies on the radio
spectrum. So Ofcom announced the final
auction results on the 24th of October this year were three
winners, EO 2 and Vodafone 3 each paid Ofcom 13,000,000 lbs
for the right to use 800 megabytes, 800 megahertz bands
of the 26 gigahertz band and 800, I'm sorry, one gigahertz of
the 40 gigahertz band. So Virgin Media O2 already has
2000 small cells deployed, but not none of these have this
capability yet. They can be have have millimetre
wave technology deployed on them.
Now they are going to be aiming to get those into stadiums,
arenas, transport hubs, it's all mainly towns and cities related
what they call high density populations and so on.
EE has around just over 1000 small cells so far which they
can deploy this in and they're also looking at the same types
of venues for their infrastructure and so on.
And so it goes on. They Ofcom themselves in this
technical frequency assessment criteria for shared access radio
services, which is one of the documents that governs this roll
out. I said that the license terms
and conditions will have a requirement for equipment to
start transmitting within six months of the license being
issued and continue to be operational afterwards.
The spectrum is not used in this time frame.
Ofcom. Ofcom may revoke the licence
within one month's notice. So that'd be great.
You paid £13 million and if you don't manage to get your gear
rolled out quickly enough, they can revoke the licence
afterwards. Now Open Signal here is
commenting on this and they're saying 5G millimetre wave.
The UK auction is over, but where's the action?
And they're making the point that actually even in countries
where that are much further ahead than Britain is, the
amount of millimetre wave technology that's been rolled
out so far is extremely small. So in the in Australia it's 0.1%
of all the mobile telecoms gear. In Japan it's 0.7% and in the
USA it's 0.3%. And they're asking why is that?
And one of the key reasons is because none of the telephone
manufacturers have really rolled this out in their handset yet
because this is quite a a step up from the current radio
equipment that they have in their telephones.
So not even high end iPhones in many countries have this.
Only in the United States and one or two other sales regions
do they have this this technology at this point.
So anyway, we're at the beginning of this, at this of
this situation. Just want to remind everybody
that some time ago we held a symposium, an expose on 5G, if
you haven't seen this on the UK column website, if you want more
background on this, please do go and have a look at the various
presentations there. It was very interesting and it's
worth your effort if you want to oppose this.
But obviously, we are at the beginning of a process.
Now that the auction is complete, we're going to see
this gear starting to be rolled out because the companies have
to roll it out in some capacity over the next six months.
So keep an eye out for that. OK, let's come back then to
Sandy. And what's the latest Sandy on
solar farms in the UK? I was I want to thank a
gentleman called Mark Saxby from Wiltshire, who sent me this this
campaign. You know, that's a stop the line
down solar farm in Wiltshire. And actually if if we could have
the the slide just. Before that, sorry, that's
that's that's my mistake, Sandy, you'll get you'll get that at
the end. So.
We'll get that at the end. No, that's great.
No, that's good. Yeah.
I mean this. I couldn't believe the size of
this thing. I mean, it's absolutely huge.
It's a 3 3000 acre facility and it's proposed by Island Green
Power, a Bermuda registered company 100% owned by an
Australian venture Capital Group called Macquarie.
That's MAQUARIE, which I I will be looking into, but I didn't
quite have time to do it today. But this solar farm is massive.
I mean, it's so huge. And if we just move on, I want
to go through these slides. Yeah, obviously they've got a
barrister on it. They think they'll probably get
it turned down. But the trouble is that that
this bonkers Ed Miliband could override it with his bonkers
renewable acceleration programme because that's what's happening.
You know, this has happened with with several of these solar farm
applications. They've been turned down, but
he's been able to override it. Now these solar farms are, this
isn't an isolated incident. There's huge ones being prepared
all over our country, all the planning applications.
Now they're huge. The tracking panels have motors
which allow them to follow the sun and they make a noise, so
they need deep foundations. These things, umm, and if we
just keep moving, moving on through, and I'll just comment
in each one because I know we're short of time E umm, each of
these, umm, they have the battery energy storage as well,
which is a huge fire hazard Chief, uh, fire chiefs all over
the country are really worried about these because when they do
burst into flames, which they do quite frequently, it take they,
they actually can't put the fires out.
So, uh, and, and each one is 4 times the size of a shipping
container. And they've also got these
enormous, umm, uh, these, this infrastructure that's going in,
uh, one of these is a place called Hullavington, which is
right next to the solar panel farm.
But the, the amount of infrastructure, as you can see,
is absolutely enormous. So if we just keep going through
the slides, yeah. Now this is interesting.
This is the international comparisons.
The UK is the world's third largest food importer after
China and Japan. We import 46% of our food.
Other European countries take more care of their agricultural
land. Now this is the worry.
It's actually taking up prime agricultural land.
No, in France, no solar panels on agricultural land for export
to the grid. That all the large car parks are
covered with the solar panels so they're using built existing
buildings. In Germany, solar panels are
strictly controlled and limited. And in Italy large scale solar
on agricultural, agricultural land is prohibited.
But we're just using up all our wonderful agricultural land with
all this stuff. Now what's interesting is I, I
want to thank Bannerman for this particular slide and Cassie from
the Residents Association, the National Residents Association,
because it, it really makes you see how much of our land is
being taken up by all this, all this infrastructure.
And the yellow ones are the solar panels, the blue ones are
the wind panels, and the purple ones are the battery energy,
energy storage facilities. Now, all this is, is going to
take up vast amounts of energy, vast amounts of water, and it's
going to destroy our, our, our farmland.
So I've put in the show notes, you know, ways to, you know, the
whole campaign and how you can, how you can oppose it.
So we need to fight about this because this is our food
security. Thank you.
Thanks, Sandy. And we'll just we'll just very
quickly put the the slide up for stop lying down the campaign
here so that people can see that we'll talk a lot about that and
extra. I'm quite sure we've got lots of
other stuff to talk about as well.
So well, that's it for today. I'm going to say thank you very
much to Diane, Sandy and Ben for joining me today and for you for
watching. We'll be back in a few minutes
If you UK column member for some UK column News Extra.
If you're not a member, maybe you'd like to join us and then
you can join us in the chat box and so on as we discussed in
more detail some of the topics we've covered today.
Don't forget Jerem and Carl's tonight and Brian's presentation
going out at 1:00 PM tomorrow. We'll see you again on at 1:00
PM on Wednesday for another news programme.
See you then. Thanks for joining us.
Bye bye.