OK, hello and welcome to UK Column News.
It's Monday the 25th of August 2025.
Welcome to UK Column News. Just after 1:00, I'm your host,
Mike Robinson. Joining me in the studio today
is Charles Mallett, Brian Gerrish, Diane Rasmussen,
McCarthy, Ben Ruben, and Patrick Henningson.
I got it. All right.
Massive thank you to everybody that's in the room and all the
people that are outside waiting to get into the room.
It's fantastic. We're going to begin with
Charles today. And Charles is talking about
something or other. What is it, Charles?
National security, Yes. OK.
Thank you very much, Charles. National security, of course,
concerning everybody, always, all the time.
Thank you very much. And I should just say, if you're
tuning into UK column News for the very first time and
wondering why we've overlaid this particular track onto our
news programme, we haven't. We're at a festival and there's
a music tent directly outside this one, so you'll just have to
bear with it. But national security coming
into the headlines at the moment from Hong Kong via the South
China Morning Post talking about the protracted trial of Jimmy
Lai, which I won't go into great detail on.
But suffice it to say that this is being documented at least in
the mainstream as being a pro democracy trial.
So we're just going to examine some of the things that have
fallen out from it and indeed some of the things that it's
pointing towards. But the situation in Hong Kong
at least, is that they're in the concluding phase of the trial
now in the United Kingdom. This is being something that's
reported going back to 2019, the protests which which were
apparently being supported by lies media organisation Apple
Daily subsequently having closed reported or reputed to have
links at least with the Pentagon and indeed with a number of
other organisations. But that will be something for
you perhaps to look into further.
The point I want to make in that the the government has put out a
document about this is that they have in here referred to what
China did in 20/20, which was to pass the national security law.
Now the way that's been written up as it were by both Hong Kong
and the United Kingdom is that Hong Kong lacked sufficient
political will to do it. So China stepped in and made it
happen, which was deemed to be a contradict, A contravention at
least of Hong Kong status as a special autonomous region.
So the point here to be drawn out is that the national
security law was being deemed to be inappropriate or indeed to
have been conducted in a manner that didn't fit the correct and
lawful system, rather than dealing with the content
therein. And that's the bit that I want
to concentrate on now. The fallout from this, as far as
the United Kingdom was concerned, was that as a result
of the apparently draconian national security law passed in
Hong Kong by the Chinese authorities, there was a
concession made by the United Kingdom under the British
National Overseas visa, which was effectively to grant status
of British nationality to people in Hong Kong that wanted to move
into this country. And just give you an idea of the
effect of that. We've got a government document
there talking about people coming via safe and legal
humanitarian routes, updated just two days ago, or if you're
watching on screen four days ago, no.
Oh good. This is the graph that shows
that effect. And I think it's worth pointing
out because not only does it deal with the Hong Kongers who
are at the lower end of the thing.
And if you're, if you're listening and not watching, then
I'm sharing a bar chart that has at June 2022, an enormous spike
in the number of people coming into this country described as
having safe and legal humanitarian passage.
And the top of the the bar is dominated by 179,000 people from
Ukraine and a slightly lesser figure from Hong Kong.
So with migration so much in the news at the moment, it is worth
looking back to this as it's described safe and legal route
and the hundreds of thousands of people that do come into the
United Kingdom that way. Now also recently, and this is
where the hypocrisy becomes most obvious, we have the what's
called the G7 rapid response mechanism, the RRM who've made a
statement on what they're describing as being
extraterritorial arrest warrants.
And the the crux of the statement here made by the
government and sponsored by other governments is that the
authorities have, this is Hong Kong authorities have put out
arrest warrants for bounties on individuals outside of Hong
Kong's borders, including in the G7 countries, for exercising
their freedom of expression. So that's what we are to take
away. We are to take away that because
of a law that China put in where Hong Kong lacked political will.
The consequence of this is that Hong Kong is now prohibiting
people from exercising their freedom of expression.
Now we will go to examine whether we think this is really
the case. They go on to say this form of
transnational repression undermines national security,
state sovereignty, human rights and the safety of communities.
So we've heard of all this. What we don't really get to hear
quite so much about is our own National Security Act which came
through in 2023, shown here on the the headline as it is on the
government page. I would just make the point that
in relation to part of the policy and indeed regulation
that's enabled by this, which is the Foreign influence
Registration Scheme, which you will have heard Dan Jarvis, the
security minister, talking about the entire time.
I would just like to point out the failure to use any sense of
objectivity when evaluating what might be constituted as undue
foreign influence or indeed foreign interference.
And I've got on screen a particular clause about there
being an enhanced tier where foreign influence is concerned.
There are only two countries in that enhanced tier at the moment
and you're probably already there, but they are Russia and
Iran. It is not substantiated as to
why they should be, but they are.
And this is all part of the way in which the narrative is
developed via means of the legislative tool that is there
to create that particular situation.
Now I've talked about the the the registration scheme furs as
it's abbreviated to. I just thought I would point
this out, which I have done before just to articulate really
the hypocrisy. It says that it requires the
registration of particular activities in order to
strengthen the integrity of UK politics and institutions and
protect the country from state threats.
Quite rich language, one would say in 2025.
Now additionally, they do go on to talk about freedom of
expression, which is exactly what the rapid response
mechanism has just been complaining about in terms of
extraterritorial warrants. And they say, no, absolutely,
this will not affect people's freedom of expression and nor
will it prevent anyone from engaging in political influence
activities. It simply requires openness and
transparency. Well, how much openness and
transparency really is there, because we are talking about the
situation of extraterritorial activities where criminal
proceedings are concerned. So I have on my UK column
clipboard the particular sections of the National
Security Act 2023, which causes the British law which has
extraterritorial powers. Section 1 concerning espionage.
Absolutely, the British government may do precisely what
they're accusing Hong Kong of doing now.
Section 2 concerning trade secrets.
Section 3 in terms of assisting a foreign intelligence service.
Section 35 to concerning bodies corporate.
And this of course, is the most explicit, which is Section 36,
specifically labelled offences committed outside the United
Kingdom. So the level of hypocrisy here
is absolutely spectacular. And I should also point out, as
has been referenced for those of you sitting in the talk tent
earlier today, I appreciate people, people watching the news
on the screen. This might not make much sense,
but we've talked about the, the way in which the Terrorism Act
2000 is used in a, in a absolute multitude of ways now
incorrectly. But of course one such would be
Section 1 of the Terrorism Act 2000 which includes action taken
outside the United Kingdom and of course stipulated in Section
1, including action taken for the benefit of a prescribed
organisation. Which takes us straight back to
the whole idea of freedom of expression.
And at the moment we are talking a lot about Palestine action and
its prescription. But what I'm getting to is that
if you were to express support for Palestine action from a
foreign country, then you would still be captured by both the
National Security Act and indeed the Terrorism Act 2000.
So what the government are putting out about the Hong Kong
authorities is absolutely disingenuous.
Now the reason I mention this is because as we all know, freedom
of expression is lumped into what's described loosely and
lazily as conspiracy theory and how that is taken on and used
and manipulated. And of course we are at Hope
Freedom being run by the Hope Sussex Community.
And I would just remind you, if you have not already aware that
they chose to speak to the BBC the other day and were, as you
might imagine, misrepresented to put it diplomatically.
But I think the key bit of text to draw out from the BBC sounds
advertisement is this bit of text here saying is a home
educating community really teaching children conspiracy
theories. Now the answer to that question
is neither here nor there. The point is really that the BBC
are conceding that they have an issue with children learning
anything that hasn't come from either the government or the
BBCI. Think that's the inference to be
drawn from that. And just to draw that point out
a little bit further, in terms of where one is meant to receive
information from, I would point you towards GCHQ, where on their
culture page they have a section about education and outreach,
which means they are running courses and classes for young
people during school holidays in order that their minds might be
set on the right path. So we go back to more or less
where we started, which is the National Security Strategy from
2025. And as it says in that document,
extremist ideologies are on the rise.
All of this has a link going right the way through it, and
you are in the middle of it here by being in this talk tent at
this magnificent Hope event. So that's where we go from the
trial of Jimmy Lai straight through to our own national
security strategy, with many gargantuan lies told upon the
way. Thank you, Charles.
Slight change of topic here. We're going to head over to
Ukraine issues and Nord Stream pipeline in particular with
Patrick. I suppose this has a national
security context as well. Pat Straight.
Away. Here we go.
Yes, Thank you, Charles. Thank you, Mike.
First thing I'm going to say is we have to get out of this
paradigm that we're stuck in. Extremism, Extremist ideologies.
There's nothing extreme about what we're talking about here.
They're the extremists, OK? They're the extremists.
What's going on at the the high echelons, The wealth gap that
we're seeing is just unbelievable.
Historically, that's extreme, OK?
This is not a counterculture event.
You got to get out of their framework, OK?
This is the culture. They're the counterculture.
Just understand that they try to disempower you.
This is one of the hangovers of the 60's.
The counterculture. No, no, we're the we're the
culture. McDonald's is the
counterculture. OK, Bank, the investment banks,
global transnational corporations.
That's the counterculture. OK, just want to get that
straight. I'll talk about the Nord Stream
pipeline a little bit. If you've watched the headlines
just to kind of, it's an interesting story.
It does have an effect on our lives, of course.
It affects our fuel bill. It affects the cost of heating
and powering our homes. And they, if you read, if you
read the news, there's been an arrest.
The Germans, the Germans are on the case.
Rest assured, they're going to get to the bottom of it.
They have their best people on it.
They've nabbed A Ukrainian named Sergei Kuznetsov.
OK rested in Italy on holiday with his family and they believe
he's one of the Nordstrom saboteurs connected to the crack
team of Ukrainian super soldiers that were seen drunk on the pier
in Poland with a cigarette hanging out of their mouth with
a 50 foot sailboat. Pretty plausible, isn't it?
That's that's the story they're going with.
That's the story they're going with.
So this is the biggest red herring story imaginable.
So what I'm going to say is pay attention to the timing.
Pay attention to the Tommy, Why have they arrested this guy?
All of a sudden, this Ukrainian, they're keeping the story alive.
There are political negotiations going on vis A vis Ukraine with
the United States and the European powers.
And trust me, the Russians have made Nordstrom an issue and they
made it known to the Americans and whoever their counterparts
are in negotiations that that is one of the chips in
negotiations. They want to have an independent
investigation as to who did it. Now, the Germans did an
investigation and they've been sitting on their findings for a
year and a half. And Sweden and Denmark, the
Nordstrom pipelines were blown up in their exclusive economic
zones, OK, They sent investigative teams and
reconnaissance teams immediately.
But Sweden can't release any of that information because of
sensitive national security concerns.
As far as the Danish go, a similar excuse.
So it is very likely that the Swedes know and it's very likely
that all of the NATO countries, in my opinion anyway, based on
the evidence that I've looked at exhaustively, some of which we
published and reported on at the UK column, that most of the NATO
countries that were involved in the drill which took place in
the Baltic Sea in July, I believe in June and July,
BALTOPS 22 in 2022. They know about the Nordstrom
sabotage, OK, at least at the higher echelons of the European
Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, Even so far as the Sakur
and NORTHCOM as well. All of these countries, United
States, Britain, Norway, Germany, would very likely have
been involved in this. That's that's my understanding
and I don't share that opinion alone.
Many top investigators agree with that and many mainstream
pundits are now saying the same thing.
But still, we have this Ukrainian story that's being
drifted out. So I think this is designed to
deflect and distract from the real saboteurs.
And that's all this story is. They're going to kick the can
down the road for another 10 years and we'll still be arguing
about it like JF KS assassination in 20 years.
If we're whoever's still around was saying did they did?
Did they not? Did they do it?
This is one of the biggest acts of industrial infrastructural
sabotage really in the modern era.
It's state terrorism and it's gone unpunished.
But the worst thing about it is you're not allowed to talk about
it. If you're in the mainstream
media. Imagine something that
significant and that consequential to the cost of
living in Europe and our economies.
You can't even talk about. It's verboten.
So that itself is incredible. It tells you the type of
situation, the type of time in history we're living in.
The other story which has come out is there was, there's been a
story. I've got a point to make on this
that is probably unexpected, but in terms of the deaths in Gaza,
officially 62,000, officially, not unofficially, officially
62,000. The number is quite likely
higher, which I'll show you in a minute.
But this was a story investigation done by the
Guardian in the UK and 972 magazine.
I think this is an Israeli publication. 85% of those died
are quote, civilians in Gaza. So Israel has been even by
mainstream standards has been under, has been playing down the
the amount of civilian casualties.
So now you have British and Israeli mainstream media
basically debunking the Israeli government.
OK, it's taking a long time, but they're doing it as well.
Harvard Dataverse and Ben Gurion University in Israel released a
report which we reported on a few months ago, the the true
number of casualties in Gaza that they pegged at 377,000,
dead or missing 377,000. Now some people would say, well,
that's the Guardian or it's an Israeli media outlet.
Why would you trust them? It's all lies.
The mainstream media is lying. And Harvard Dataverse.
I mean, Harvard must be. It's an elite institution.
Why would you listen to them? Ben Gurion University, it's an
Israeli institution. Why would you listen to them?
These are mainstream sources. And the point is, there are a
lot of lies in the mainstream media.
A lot. But not everything is a lie in
the mainstream media. And sometimes, and not everybody
in the mainstream media is evil. There are good journalists in
all of these institutions, and there are bad journalists and
corrupt editors and gatekeepers and men in black suits standing
off the camera directing and denotices issued.
OK, that happens. But belatedly, sometimes the
truth starts coming out and that is what's happening.
So when you see mainstream outlets and institutions telling
you something that sounds shocking and it's going against.
The government, your government's narrative and
against the, in this case, the Israeli government narrative,
you should take notice because that means the penny is finally
dropping. My opinion, way too late, way
too late. It's not going to save any of
those 377,000 dead or missing Palestinians.
And the other study that says 85% of civilians, what do they
mean by civilians? So in their own way they framed
it in in that sense, when I I would make an argument against
that is a is a, is an armed militia in an occupied
territory? Are they, is the militia part of
the civilian population? Some people would define it as
such, international law and the UN Charter defines it that way.
But our governments in the UK, in the United States and in G7
countries or EU countries, many of them will say no armed
resistance in Gaza is terror. Are they terrorist
organisations? We've prescribed them that's, I
love that word prescribed. We prescribe them as terrorist
organisations, but that goes against UN Charter.
International law says every country has the right to an
armed resistance struggle if they are being illegally
occupied and according to multiple UN resolutions that is
undoubtedly the case full. There's a massive body of
international law that supports that.
But our government in the United States, in Britain and in
European countries, they don't recognise that, that in their in
their mind and in their foreign policy, their proscription of
these groups, even though these groups have never attacked
America, have never attacked Britain, have never done any
Expeditionary terrorism at all. But because Israel says they're
terrorists, they have lobbied hard on our governments to label
them as terrorists. And not just those groups in
Gaza. There's many around the world
that fall into the exact same category.
Anybody that goes against the US foreign policy or against the
dictats of the US State Department most likely will be
labelled a terrorist organisation.
They will be proscribed. OK, is that fair?
Does that make any sense? Is that aligned with
international law? And somebody say, well, there's
no such thing as international law?
No, there's not, not here and not in America, but the other
90% of the globe actually follows it and has to follow it.
But our governments don't because we're we're special.
This is 2 tiers of geopolitics. That's the irony.
That's the dichotomy. And that's where the debate
needs to be. So I will just leave leave you
with those two things to think about.
And yeah, to my colleague Mike, thank you.
Thank you, Patrick. OK, let's let's move on to
online safety. And I just want to everybody
know what 4 Chan is. Yes, for for those that don't, 4
Chan is a, a discussion group, A forum based in the United
States. It has quite a reputation for
hosting pretty much any kind of content that possibly exists.
Some of it's very unpleasant, but nonetheless it's there
because apparently the United States has a constitutional
right to freedom of speech. But Ofcom, as we know, is the
body in the United Kingdom that is required to implement the
Online Safety Act and to act as the generator of government
censorship in the UK. And Ofcom has decided that it is
going to be a regulator of the entire Internet and on the
entire globe. So they have decided to open and
they decided in June actually to open an investigation into 4
Chan. And I'm sure you won't be able
to read that, but So what it says is we're initiating an
investigation to determine whether the online discussion
board, 4 Chan has failed or is currently failing to comply with
its obligations under the Online Safety Act.
Our investigation will focus on potential breaches in the
following areas. Failure to respond to statutory
information requests. Remember, they're based in the
United States. They're not here.
There is no statutory information request that applies
to them. Failure to complete and keep a
record of suitable and sufficient illegal content risk
assessment and non compliance with the safety duties about
illegal content. So that was in June and then ten
days ago or so they issued a notice to 4 Chan saying Ofcom is
satisfied that that there are reasonable grounds for believing
that the provider has contravened its duties under
Section 102 B of the Act to comply with two requests for
information. We'll consider any
representations provided in response.
Blahdy, blahdy blah. The Ofcom statement then doesn't
go on to define sanctions, but 4 Chan's lawyers are saying that
Ofcom has imposed a £20,000 fine with daily penalties after that.
And I'm pretty sure that they'll be interest applied to any
outstanding payments. That's what they're going to try
anyway, but unfortunately for Ofcom, the 4 Chan lawyers have
decided to reply with a statement which although it
appears quite long on screen, then there ends with the word
off. So you can imagine what that
said. Now, as I say 4 Chan
controversial because people are able to post just about anything
that they like. But of course, as we've seen
with the issue of age assurance and so called pornography or
pornography size, but I say so called because that's how it's
being presented in the media, that age assurance and the
requirement to identify yourself to websites.
Now it's just about pornography, when in fact it's about just
about every social media platform that's out there at the
moment. And of course, we've seen as a
result this massive rise in people getting interested in
VPNs, virtual private networks and the ability to to be
relatively anonymous in your Internet usage, but also to
appear to be coming upon these sites from a different country
and therefore not subject to the age assurance requirements.
Other related news then is that TikTok has decided that they now
just before we said, but this TikTok is the most censorious
social media platform that we have ever come across.
Kenny, if you speak to Kenny later, who's at the back of the
room will tell you that we are regularly having TikTok channels
shut down and he's regularly having to buy another SIM card,
get another mobile phone number and open it in order to open
another TikTok account. And but so they are the most
censorious. So you you perhaps understand
that I'm not terribly sad that they've decided to fire or at
least make redundant most of their moderation team.
Hundreds of hundreds of jobs being lost in the UK just at the
time that of course they're required to start implementing
an even more rigorous regime as a result of the Online Safety
Act. That's the good news.
The bad news is that the reason that they feel they can get rid
of all these people is they're going to be increasingly relying
on AI to make these decisions. OK, good news.
Yeah. It's perhaps a a bit ironic then
that they have decided to update their terms and conditions and
their their policies in this area.
So this is safety and civility. And so that's as you can see at
the top there in the pink area, that is basically saying that as
from the 15th of September, the rules are changing and that the
new rules are going to be implemented.
So let's just have a look at the new rules here and let me just
find this here. So the ones that I want to
highlight hate speech and hateful behaviour, we don't
allow content that provokes hate or attacks people based on
protected attributes like race, religion, gender or sexual
orientation. OK, Violent and hateful
organisations and individuals, we don't allow people or groups.
Now, I'd, I'd advise you just to sit carefully in your chair
because you may fall off as I, as I read this, violent and
hateful organisations and individuals.
We don't allow people or groups that promote violence or hate,
including violent extremists, criminal organisations or those
responsible for mass violence, right.
If we post anything to TikTok about Israel, it's taken down
immediately, am I right, Kenny Right.
OK, so that's that's why we haven't posted in TikTok for a
while. It's it's taken down
immediately. Any criticism of Israel?
And yet in their terms and conditions, it says including
those responsible for mass violence.
Is Israel not responsible for mass violence?
OK, that's what's the next one. Then the next one is integrity
and authority. Misinformation.
We don't allow misinformation that could cause significant
harm to individuals or society. Define it, please.
Right. What is the definition?
It's what they decide and it's completely arbitrary.
And of course, this is a reflection of the legislation.
It is undefined in the legislation.
It's undefined in their terms and conditions.
They make it up as they go along.
But more importantly, government, UK government is
sending little hints. Maybe UK columns shouldn't be on
this platform. Maybe 21st Century Wire
shouldn't be on this platform, this kind of thing, right?
So, so I just want to finish this segment then with a report
that's appeared in the Register entitled.
It's not a report, it's an opinion piece.
I should say it's entitled. The Online Safety Act is about
censorship and not safety. Patrick, how many years have we
been saying this? 7-8 years we've been saying
this. The Online Safety Act was never
about safety, never about the safety of children.
It's only about censorship. But I just want to highlight a
few of the things that this guy says.
Now this is a guy called Paige Collins, he's from the
Electronic Frontier Foundation. This is a a campaign group based
in the United States that that tries to make sure that the
Internet is is open and free and non censorious and non
surveillance as possible. And he's saying here,
implementation of the UK Online Safety Act is giving Internet
users around the globe, including those in the United
States moving to enact their own age verification laws, real time
proof that such laws impinge on everyone's rights to speak, read
and view freely. I'll just make the point that
that's not my mistake in the text there that was just copied
and pasted from his article. So he did say U.S. states.
So anyway, it goes on to say the new USA rules require all online
services accessible in the UK, social media, search engines,
music sites and adult content providers to enforce age cheques
and keep children from saying quotes harmful content.
Social media platforms Reddit, Blue Sky, Discord and X all
introduced age cheques. Spotify are requiring users to
submit face scans to a third party digital identity company,
Yoda to access content labelled 18 Plus.
Now the point here is he again is falling into this trap of
yes, OK, he's recognising that, that the legislation is pushing
at the moment to verify that somebody is over the age of 18
before they get access to certain content.
I'm not aware that anybody except the UK column has been
pointing out that, yeah, that's fine, but nobody is doing
anything to assure the age of an adult who's using a child
orientated website and pretending to be a child.
Children are not required to age to verify that they are under 18
for those platforms and therefore adults are still able
to access those platforms. And the numbers of cases that
are reported to social media platforms of adults grooming
children on, you know, platforms that are age appropriate for
children is through the roof and nobody's looking at this.
Ofcom is not really too concerned about it.
They're saying, well, age assurance is going to deal with
it. It is not going to deal with it
anyway. Page goes on to say the scope of
so called harmful content is subjective and arbitrary and
often sweeps up content that governments and CEOs of online
services might not want, regardless of whether it's legal
content or not. That is a fair comment.
But you know, he's still not not grasping the full nettle here.
And there's, there's much more to this act we've got to
remember. So far we've only had two
aspects of the Online Safety Act actually published by Ofcom that
is so called illegal harms, again, not fully defined, and
the age assurance thing. The age assurance thing is the
thing which has caused this to happen.
It is that is the the aspect of the act that has caused that to
happen. But these are only two of a wide
ranging and really unpleasantly draconian act.
And there will be more to come on this.
But again, just to reiterate, we need this number to be around
the 2,000,000 mark as as a goal. Because once we start getting it
to that level, then more and more people are starting to get
some kind of oversight of what this is.
And we need to start talking about the other aspects of it
that are coming. And one that I just want to
briefly mention once again before I finish is this issue of
protecting so called journalistic content from
recognised news publishers. And that is the mainstream media
mainly that's who they have in mind for this.
So that most people who are commenting social media can have
their content arbitrarily removed.
But the mainstream media, the aim of the ACT is to make sure
the mainstream media that their content is retained and is there
for everybody. So, so that's that's where I
want to leave that for today. Now add break.
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speakers in the coming week. Brian, you're next.
Well, it's a pleasure to see a live audience because normally
we look at a a camera screen or a computer screen and that's the
audience and I'm talking to a black screen.
So it's great to see faces. Now we've done a lot of
geopolitical stuff. We've done a lot on law and
legislation, and the message in today's news has overwhelmingly
been something is closing in on our society.
It's designed to silence us. It's designed to restrict what
we can do. It's designed to change us in
all sorts of different ways. But I just want to bring in
another layer, hopefully, which of these is going to do it.
I seem to have this problem when I there we are.
OK, It's gone now. Little things make a big
difference. So this is an email that came in
to me a couple of days ago and it just said, dear Brian, the
church is trying to destroy itself.
There can be no doubt. Please do as you wish with the
information below. And that came from Auk column
supporter in Cornwall. Now I knew the context of this
because unknown to quite a few people, there is a massive
attack going on at the moment against not only Christianity
but churches, and this is happening all across the
country. It's very pernicious.
Many people can't see it, except the people who are still active
in the Church of England and are still going to their local
church because they are seeing things happening.
Now, one of the groups that set itself up in Cornwall is called
Save the Parish. And this is just a local group
and they are fighting. They are really trying to fight.
And what are they seeing happen? Well, they're seeing the Church
of England deciding that basically they can't afford
vicars. Church of England doesn't have
any money. We'll challenge that a bit, a
little bit later in this news segment.
But, and so what's going to happen is that vicars are going
to retire, leaving fewer vicars. And then the vicars that remain
are going to be asked to look after more than one church, 2
churches, three churches, 4 churches, 6 churches.
And when you look at this plan of action, of course, it's
totally untenable. It's impossible for one vicar to
do the proper job of not only looking after the church and
running Christianity in his his, his or her parish, but also the
pastoral care, getting round and visiting people in need and
doing things which perhaps good Christians should be doing.
So this is a a created protest group in Cornwall and they've
been starting to push back now. I was given a little heads up
that this man is retired Admiral called Sir James, Sir James
Burnell Nugent and he he was former commander in Chief fleet.
So this is a man of some of some substance.
He has actually been involved with this group challenging what
the Church of England is doing. And I take a lot of comfort for
this because very often, and I've been very frustrated in the
past that we've never seen senior military officers having
the guts to stand up and be counted on a number of issues.
But here, very quietly, this man has been standing up to
challenge what's been happening with the church.
This is a little bit of of his CV, if you like, in relation to
this. So he's been a church warden and
he's been a member of the Bishops, Diocesan Council, the
Deanery Synod and the local worship leader.
And his objective at the moment is to persuade the Church of
England in its various forms to place parishes higher in their
priorities rather than seeing them a source of resources.
Now that's very polite language, and I'd expect nothing less from
a senior officer because they will always go for the polite
language. I can read through this and say
this man is actually starting to wake up and he's seeing
something. So this is a bit more.
Has that changed? Yeah, what he said here is if
you have experience of being in a large benefits with few clergy
where there's limited pastoral care and much reduced regular
Sunday services, especially Holy Communion, then please make a
representation explaining why these large groupings do not
work. That's the the amount of the
grouping up of churches he's talking about.
Then he goes on to say there's a growing body of evidence that
these amalgamations lead to quote a doom loop of reducing
church attendance, decline in pastoral care and deteriorating
finances. And if this machine will work
for me, let's bring this in. This is a Christian saying.
I can see doom, death, destruction coming into the
church system. I am looking at the church
system itself, the Christian Church being undermined and
destroyed and who is doing it? The Church of England itself,
the highest authorities in the Church of England.
So the final part of what he what he states publicly in this
group is that they failed to deliver the Church of England
strap line of a Christian presence in every community.
So instead of the Christian Church trying to expand and win
over people and convince people that perhaps in faith and the
Christian faith there's something to be gained, they are
looking at the policies coming from the top of the Church of
England are actually destroying the very church and faith system
itself. He says that many diocese,
including Truro, are ignoring this evidence and pressing on
with large parish groupings of churches.
If you can add evidence of your own experience that these large
groupings do not work, it would be extremely helpful to any
parish unhappily facing the prospect of a merger,
particularly those in the Lizard Peninsula.
Now if you think this is localised to Cornwall, it's
absolutely not because this is centralised Church of England
policy which is happening across UK and there's been some
disastrous examples of how this policy has been unfolded in the
Midlands, which is absolutely devastated the remaining Church
for communities. So how can we show what's really
happening? Well the UK column about a year
ago now focused in on this man who was at the time the Bishop
of Truro. And it was his policies that was
bringing in this grouping up of churches, getting rid of vicars
and increasingly increasing the number of staff who had nothing
to do with faith or pastoral care.
And we were very taken with this image because it was the image
used in a talk that he gave over what he was trying to achieve.
But the words were there will be no return to the way things
were. So not only is the church
destroying itself from the inside, there's the warning.
Don't even think that you are going to do something to stop it
because there's no way back now. What he didn't anticipate was
that in Cornwall at least a group of people would stand up
and say no, we're fighting back. And as a result, when he left
his post as Bishop to move on to a a new, a new site, I think he
went to Winchester, he went under a very big black cloud and
his reputation was in a bad place.
And what am I talking about here?
Really, this is people power in action.
So if we look at him, what he said, Bishop Philip has said in
a publicly available, sorry, publicly available video, there
will be no going back. The change will take place.
Things are not to remain the same.
And he claims to be guided in this destruction of the
Christian Church by God. This is fantastic, absolutely
incredible arrogance. He claims to be guided in this
by God in response to the dire financial shortages in the
county's bishopric, the Diocese of Truro.
This is another lie because the Church of England is not short
of money. It's just where it chooses to
use money. All the while, he's being
assisted by external advisors and facilitators who must be
paid money sucked away from pastoral care to a big corporate
machine. Truro diocese already employs 38
permanent staff compared to 64 clergy.
So the Church of England is becoming a corporation, a
corporate body which is destroying the faith which is
supposed to be promoting. And this is a very big attack on
what remains of our culture. And lastly, it says here it
spends 30, sorry, 350,000 lbs annually on net zero climate
change work. Never mind supporting the poor,
the ill, the sick, the suffering.
We're going to get into climate change, right?
This is deliberate policy. The beast is in the church and
it wants to destroy it and it wants to destroy Christianity.
Now UK Column has reported this is one of the articles you can
find on the website Welbeys Church of England 2021.
Trillions for guy. Agreed, but peanuts for the
peasants. Why do we, why did we use
trillions? Well, because when you get into
what is known as the Church of England's Transition Pathway
Initiative, in the centre of the description of what it's about,
this was Wellby, Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, boasting
that he was interacting with global bankers and investors,
huge hedge hedge funds, and that they had already raised 10.1
trillion in order to progress climate change.
So the head of the Church of England was not doing anything
to repair the roofs of the churches.
He was not doing anything to pay the wages of the vicars.
He was doing nothing to help the poor and the needy, but
supposedly as a Christian he was interfacing with those bankers
like Christine Lagarde for example, and they had already
raised 10.1 trillion. Right now two things are going
on here. They want to destroy the
Christian Church. I'll just bring in some more
articles from UK column. Let's put them up on the screen.
So this is the one where we were talking about what was happening
with Truro and what was taking in place in Cornwall.
If I bring up the second one here, this was Christians in
Cornwall speaking out and I was able to do an anonymous
interview with somebody in Cornwall who was prepared to
talk about what was happening in the church.
Why was it anonymous? Because they are frightened of
the backlash from within the church.
And indeed, the Bishop of Truro had built himself up a
reputation that people who went to him to remonstrate against
these packaging up of the churches, He was very abrupt,
abusive, particularly to women in the discussions.
And he was incredibly arrogant. And so it took somebody to come
and see me to do an interview anonymously.
Now Charles is Charles Mallett has also been digging into
what's been happening with the church.
And of course, here he's flagging up the no prayer laws.
And I'd say to you, just think about this.
What is the state frightened of? It's frightened of you speaking
your mind. It's frightened of you doing
what you think is right, but it is frightened of prayer.
There's a reason for this. When I get the opportunity to
talk to you at the end of the day, we'll discuss it a bit
more, but that's another one of the articles up on the website.
We've also got another one there where's where will be no prayer
zones, a challenge to the churches.
And finally this one back to where we started, which is about
well be and the fact that he can raise 10.1 trillion for climate
change, but he can't solve the problems inside the Church of
England. If I sum this up, this is an
immense attack on culture in this country.
As we came here, Ben and I drove through a really lovely little
village, can't remember the name, but it was a postcard with
a beautiful church. I would guess Norman, I may be
wrong. You might not be a churchgoer,
but you can appreciate the architecture and beauty of the
churches in this country. This is all to be destroyed, as
is any real engagement with faith, because they regard
people of faith as being too strong to stand up against these
draconian laws, which the start of the UK column News has talked
about. So I'm going to end there.
And I'm going to say it's beautiful to see your faces
instead of that camera. We've got more time today, so
today, happily, we'll be able to discuss some more of the subject
matter, perhaps in extra time, but also at the end of the day.
Thank you. Thank you, Brian.
And you know, we criticised the British government for not
defining terms in legislation, but I did notice that when you
were talking about Welby and Lagarde, you left the term
interfaced undefined. I'll leave you to think about
that now, Diane. Hello everyone, thanks Mike.
Can I go back to the outbreak for just a moment please?
Just to let everyone know, the interview going out on Tuesday
is Louise Payton. She is a a former NHS nurse,
trained in the NHS, still is a nurse.
However, she has been deemed non compliant by the NHS since 2001
because she refused taking jabs far back as 25 years.
So she has an amazing story to tell about her career and her
new role as a holistic healer. And I met her at the Thetford
Truth and Freedom Festival that I went to you a few weeks ago.
So please join us Tuesday at 1:00 or streaming afterward.
I have some different topics I'm going to talk about today that
relate mostly to libraries and education as you might expect
from me. If you watch UK, call them
regularly. I do first have a bit of
breaking news that I do not have in the slides.
For those of you who have been following the Fernethi
Residential School case that we've been following since what
about over three years now. Colin Smith MSP who was the the
the MSP who has led the the petition for their their fight
to justice. These were young girls at the
time who were badly abused and always possible as young girls
from Glasgow at Fernethi Residential School from
approximately 1960 to 1991. Colin Smith got this all the way
to the debate on the floor of the Scottish Parliament like I
believe it was last month. It was just announced this week
by the BBC and other mainstream outlets that Colin Smith, who is
who was a member of the Labor Party until this week, has been
suspended from Labour for possession of indecent images of
children. And he's the one who's been
fighting for the sexual abuse of these girls that happened for
all of this time. So I just want you to be aware
that even if we think that it's somebody that seems trustworthy,
we have to watch everyone because chances are they might
not be. So what I want to talk to you
today about specifically in today's news is this was a tweet
that I saw that actually UK Column Viewer shared with me a
few days ago. This is a man called Luke
Glowacki. He is a PhD from end
anthropology from America. He is an anthropologist at
Boston University. He's done some really amazing
work. I believe he's still rising up
in his career. He's currently an assistant
professor, but over the years he's been doing a lot of work in
Ethiopia in in truly disadvantaged areas and trying
to make things truly better for people in that part of the
world. This is just part of his CV
thing. You know, he was educated at
from Harvard. He's working at Penn State
University, Boston University, some of the top universities, as
we call the Ivy League schools in America for the last several
years. And he did his training there.
So here's here he is out in the field in Ethiopia, truly making
connections with people in the field, trying to understand how
to create relationships. And really, I, I looked into
what he's done quite a bit. And as a, you know, as a
cancelled academic myself, I, I do truly respect his work.
And I can't say that for a lot of academics anymore in the
field. So what happened to him this
week? He shared this tweet.
It's had over 600,000 views and thousands of shares.
He, as you all know, or you know if you watch me at all, I'm a
cancelled librarian as well as a cancelled academic for trying to
speak out in favour of children and against ideology taking over
the university libraries in this country and throughout the West.
He shared this information saying that he, his university
librarian, so again at Boston University, just reached out to
faculty members asking us to sign a quote citation justice
pledge. So now we don't just have social
justice, we don't just have climate justice.
We now have citations justice, right?
So what are citations? Just as a reminder as UK columns
librarian, that when you write a paper, you have to put your
citations at the end, just as we do in show notes, right?
Those are citations to link back to the original sources that we
used. So now we have to have citation
justice. And so he's shared photos of all
this and he, I'll show this to you in just a minute.
He said I was quiet for years in the face of Allison Anity,
looking for a job, didn't have tenure, etcetera.
But after seeing how our universities have been rocked,
if we are to have any hope of fixing them, we have to speak up
more, much more. Let's give Doctor Luke a round
of applause, please. It takes a lot to speak out.
So the citation Justice pledge, which his faculty was asked to
sign up for, I'll just, I'll just share a bit of it.
They have a big impact apparently on scholars and their
successes. Citation Justice allows us to
use the power of citations to address historical and
continuing under citation of certain groups by being
intentional with our citation practises.
This fall, your Librarian is launching A Citation Justice
Pledge to encourage all of us at Boston University to commit to
intentionally uplifting and centering the scholarship of
individuals who, because of our systems and the legacy of
historic system, which means Western universities, even
though they're in the West as I'll be here, have not been
centred in publishing and research.
This includes authors who are Black, Indigenous, persons of
colour, of varied abilities and part of the two SL, GB, TQIA
Plus community. Can't say that after a beer.
Can you commit to being intentional with your citations
this semester? By signing up, you could receive
a sticker. Wow.
One person will win a Boston University Libraries tote bag,
mug and T shirt. Wow, I'm excited.
So we go on into a little bit more of what this means.
We need to recognise what sources we cite are a reflection
of our own identity and positionality and understanding
our own identity and bias, we can seek to integrate other
perspectives. Nick was on and on basically.
So who are you citing? So for those of you who don't
know the story of what happened to me, this, this tide, This is
why I'm so passionate about this.
The first thing that started the route to my cancellation as a
librarian and as an academic was because I spoke out at a panel
session about whether or not the act of citing, referencing was
actually a racist and oppressive practise.
And I said no, you just have to cite the thing so people can
find the thing, right? No, that was not the case.
I got a letter saying I violated the conference code of conduct
and two years later I'm not working full time for UK.
Call them. So it all worked out in the end.
So anyways, Doctor Luke replied to the librarian, he said thank
you for your email and I'm very glad to know that we have these
resources available. Thank you because she listed all
these resources to find citations that are from these
different communities, he said. I'm writing because of your
encouragement that we signed a pledge for citation justice.
I know citation is a citation justice.
Sorry, not citations. It's a relatively new effort,
but it's one that many, including myself, find
belittling and discriminatory. Further, I don't think asking
faculty to sign a pledge has any place in an email introducing
yourself and your services to faculty.
I'm disappointed that this is how the library has decided to
spend its time and resources. I'm happy to discuss more with
you or any of the faculty on this list.
Now, it's quite possible that he will be looking for an
alternative news outlet to work for in a couple of years after
he sent this back to the librarian.
But I just want to show you, like how infiltrated
universities and libraries have become, which goes throughout
all of the different institutions that we talked
about at UK column, of course, because here you see the
replies. Anytime you see someone on X who
has a blue sky profile, you know, to watch out for that
person because they're the ones that are putting all this into
place. And so she was basically
questioning him, saying, so are you basically all these people
calling him the discriminatory bigot?
Even though, as I said in the beginning, he does his field
work in Ethiopia and has done so for years, He's now bigoted.
Now I'd like to see how these people are spending years in
Ethiopia living in the field helping those communities.
But he's the one who's the racist bigot, right?
So here's what we're supposed to be doing.
What is citation justice? I didn't know I had to look it
up. Cite black women.
It is the site of active citing authors based on identity,
although they wrote identify as they had a typo to uplift
marginalised voices with the knowledge that citation is used
as a form of power in a patriarchal society based on
white supremacy. Again, this is what I was
counselled over. The University of Birmingham
says that Citation Justice is using the power of citations to
address the historical and persistent under citation of
certain groups by changing citation practises.
As Preena Vaya Gopal puts it, a largely white or largely male
curriculum is not politically incorrect and is often believed,
but intellectually unsound. So all of you straight mind
white men out there, you're intellectually unsound,
including all my colleagues up here today, guys.
Monocultures do not produce good thinking and are in themselves a
lethal form of unmarked, narrow identity politics.
So this woman, Professor Gopal that they cited, that's her
work. She's professor in the Faculty
of English at the University of Cambridge, and she talks a lot
about all these issues. She wrote a very long article in
2021 called on decolonization, and the university basically
saying that everything needed to be decolonized, which of course
means destroyed, destroying Western culture, destroying
Western heritage. Everything that the University
of Cambridge has held for hundreds of years needs to be
put aside for things that are not British, essentially, right?
Or English or Scottish or whatever you want to say.
So here's some more recent articles from other people
talking about the issues of citation bias and diversity.
That we are not being diverse, we are not being proper
academics if we are not including a range of sources and
that we are being biassed if we are using sources that come from
the own country where we are choosing to work and educate
people. Now we have to have a citation
diversity statement as well. So we have to put, well I don't
have to anymore because I'm free of the system.
Thankfully we are, we are supposed to now if we are
academics put a statement and do a search and determine the
percentage of women, the percentage of non binary, the
percentage of etcetera that we have cited.
And they've got a specific statement here in this one paper
that I chose this from our references contain 30% woman
first name. They're basing on names, which
is a lot of assumptions, right? Woman last name 11% man stroke
woman, 15% woman stroke man and 40% man stroke man.
This method is limited in that names, pronouns, and social
media profiles used to construct the database may not in every
case be indicative of gender identity.
And B cannot account for intersex done by new or
transgender people. We look forward to future work
that could help us to better understand how to support
equitable practises in science. The diversity conclusion
statement. So these are just some, this is
from the journal. You see the rainbow cake.
You anybody want a slice of the rainbow cake?
So this is from one of those journals saying this is how we
have talked about inclusion and diversity from a particular
journal. That last one was from a certain
paper. So we're seeing this everywhere.
However, it's not very inclusive that in order to view that
paper, you have to pay £48 just to download the PDF.
That's not very inclusive and diverse to me.
Or if you want to purchase the entire issue, it's 485 lbs.
So Nature have used bioengineering, which is that I,
I did a report on UK column news on Monday about Nature, Springer
Nature, which is one of the biggest academic publishing
areas in the world companies. And this is saying we encourage
citation diversity statements to put those into their articles.
So again, we're seeing this all over and we're here.
We're talking about first basing it on 1st and last names,
looking at pronouns, self attested race or ethnicity on
professional websites. So of course if I were to
identify as a black man, you couldn't tell that without
asking me. So that may create some
inaccuracies and that they have these tools that they've that
they've started promoting where you can actually download
people's names of the citations that you have created to try to
predict whether or not they are male or female or, or black or,
or British or whatever they are. So now we're getting really
technical about it and nature portfolio once again, here's the
more information about the citations.
And this is what I'm going to be talking about at 3:00, if you're
around, is the Sustainable Development Goals, because what
they're saying is that citation diversity relates to Sustainable
Development Goal 5, gender equality.
So if you want to hear more about my talk at 3:00, it's
called How to How to be a Globalist Librarian.
Please join me then or otherwise later if you're at home.
Thanks very much. Thank you, Dan.
We'll just mention that Diane left home at 3:00 this morning
to get here for this. So thank you, Dan, very much.
And finally, let me welcome Ben. And, well, we're talking about
design councils. Good afternoon.
I'm going to define some terms. Firstly, justice the the
maintenance or administration of what is just and morally
correct. You don't need to play around
with that too much. And people who are playing
around with words like justice are not interested in justice,
they're interested in the opposite.
And extracting revenge a lot of the time for perceived slights
and things that may have or may not have happened through
history. It's a very dangerous game that
they're playing, unfortunately. And that Lady from Cambridge, I
think I heard recently that Cambridge University have said
that just the very idea that there is a distinct Anglo Saxon
ethnicity is itself racist essentially, you know, so
they're trying to destroy the culture, they're trying to
destroy the physical infrastructure of the church,
which has been taken over by the beast.
And actually I'm going to talk a bit about the beast because
whether I realised it or not, for most of my adult life, I
chose to and was trained to serve the beast system,
specifically the right wing of the beast system, also known as
international capital, with the left wing being global
governance. And what I'm going to take you
through now in a slightly technical and perhaps autistic
way, is how international capital and global governance
are harnessing the generative power of humanity in order to
affect the transformation of the global system, right.
And I'm going to explain where those tools came from that they
that they're using to do that. And a really good place to start
is the Design Council, which is a, a British organisation
started in 1944 by 33rd degree Freemason Winston Churchill to
look at options for the reconstruction of the country
economically, politically, socially in the wake of the
Second World War. Right.
So this is where that organisation came from.
And earlier this year they issued this framework.
This is the doubled Blimey, the double diamond.
It's what they call it. And to cut a Long story short,
this is about setting challenges in order to deliver outcomes and
getting creative teams to redesign the system.
So what this is about, it's about telling people what we
need to happen and then unlocking their creative
potential to get them to build that thing for you, right?
That's how global governance gets things to happen around the
system everywhere on Earth, right?
So I've already mentioned that I'm going to get quite specific
about terms, right? So I talked about international
capital, but the capital doesn't just mean money.
It's part of the equation. The way I think about it is the
coordination of knowledge, assets and capabilities for the
purpose of creating and extracting value, right?
And we create and create value for and extract value from
citizens. And citizens are people owing
loyalty to and entitled by birth or naturalisation to the
protections or privileges of a nation or state.
As all of us, we're all citizens of somewhere, OK.
And capital is coordinated by the chief is an individual
leading coordination of knowledge, effort and ability
and assets to deliver value to citizens, to deliver value to
and extract value from. Actually, as I'll get into quite
importantly. And the chief runs an entity,
it's a discrete operating unit in the system.
And our system is divided into 3 parts.
We have the public, private in the third sector, the charity
sector also previously in centuries part known as the
church, right? But that's kind of been done
away with. We then had charities.
We've now got something called civil society, right?
So there's been a transformation that's happened over decades
there that we can see. And the discreet operating unit,
the entity can be tiny, could be a little organisation, it could
be the health hub up there, that's a discreet operating unit
where I had some breakfast earlier on.
It could be a big international corporation like Google.
It could be the UN, right, top to bottom.
They all have someone leading them.
That's the chief, importantly. And what's the chief doing?
He's trying to engage in a transaction with the citizen.
They're trying to deliver value to and extract value from the
citizens. So to go back to the example of
the health hub earlier, I went in there and I said, can I have
a cup of tea, please? And they delivered that value to
me and they gave me a cup of tea.
And in exchange for that, I gave them one of these nice tokens
that someone gave me when I got here.
Yeah. So that was the value exchange.
They gave me a cup of tea, I gave them something back.
And that's actually how it's supposed to work.
Like if you've got a healthy system that's working properly,
then capital delivers value to the citizen, citizen gives some
value back, and then there's some leftover afterwards and
capital gets to keep that. And then essentially it's how
the system operates, Right. But they're, they're playing
around with it and doing all sorts of bad things.
I haven't got time to go into now.
But I mean, if you watch the UK column on a weekly basis, then
you'll hear about those things. And essentially what what what
should be happening is that when this transaction takes place,
capital and citizen, the chief and the citizen enter into a
state of symbiosis with each other.
You know, so this is mutual dependency essentially, because
I need as a citizen, the health hub as capital to give me a cup
of tea and they need me to give them something back, right?
I mean, it should have a symbiotic, mutually beneficial,
mutually respectful relationship with each other.
A lot of the problems that we got right now are to do with
this being degraded. So capital isn't behaving in a
symbiotic fashion with the citizen, is behaving in an
abusive and an extractive in fashion with the citizen.
That's a lot of what we're experiencing.
Yeah. And, and, and, and a lot of the
organisations that I was working for, as I, as I came to realise,
are the ones that are the the most responsible for that
actually now in this framework, which is something I've
developed myself by the way. But this just kind of helps me
explain a bit about my world view and how I look at the look
at the world. We then have things that are out
and in so out there visible to the citizen.
So again, to go back to the cafe, this is the seating area
where we can all go and sit down and there's something to eat.
And that's the kitchen. Yeah, out in.
And also, these are the things that are externally visible to
and experienced by the citizen. And these are the things that
are invisible and inside and hidden away.
And this is where things get interesting, right?
Because the international capital and global governance
are particularly playing around with this bit, the internal.
And this also maps quite neatly to the kind of left brain, right
brain idea. Because the value that you
deliver to the citizen is expressive and experiential and
the way that you do it is linear and predictable and scientific.
And I won't read all of this stuff out, but this actually
links to the thoughts of Ian Gilchrist.
So there's probably some people here who've been reading in the
Gilchrist. He's become quite prominent
recently, right? So this idea of left and right
brain, analytical and creative, it's not strictly art and
science, right? Those two things are linked to
each other. And this bit here, top right,
the, the expressive, external, outward facing, valuable thing
that can be delivered to the citizen is what I call magic.
It's about creativity, it's about stories, it's about
experiences, it's about the value that we deliver.
And if you look at an organisation like Google, so
we've talked about the, the, the health hub, let's put it a kind
of big international corporation level, this is the magic that
they deliver. And you may or may not like
this, right? But this is actually, if you
think about it in a historical context, astonishing, Yeah, that
something like this exists. They have these stores, they
have this technology that they communicate.
They're offered to us. They can arrest our attention
through visual creativity. They can articulate all of the
different complexities of the proposition that they can
actually do, like what value they can actually deliver to us
these incredible devices, you know, which themselves or you
show that to someone from 100 years ago, they wouldn't believe
that it existed, right? You know, it is
indistinguishable from magic in a sense, right?
So this is the the front end stuff that we're talking that
the the corporations think about.
And then the internal stuff is what I call money, logic,
process, technology, how value is delivered, the stuff that
goes on behind the scenes. This is Google's European
headquarters in in Kings Cross. There's a fascinating stuff
going on in Kings Cross, by the way.
They're basically built a completely new city around
King's Cross in Houston and Camden.
And it's it's like the old city's been pushed to the side
and this new global, international corporate thing
has just been layered in over the top of it.
We've got a friend who's been doing some research on this.
It's really interesting to look at, probably share more of that
over the next couple of months. And then this is what happens
behind the scenes. So it's about people, of course,
in offices playing computer games because like it's a lot of
what you see in these tech companies, right?
Like it's work, but it's also kind of not work as well.
You know, it's, you know, this, they're not getting their hands
dirty, let's put it like that. And then also crucially for
organisations like this, and increasingly so, it's about this
hardware, physical infrastructure, data centres,
algorithms and the the people are becoming less of a component
of the system, right? And those two things together
are how I and actually, frankly, how they might use slightly
different language. But this is how international
capital, global governance, people at the top level of the
system think about things, think about magic, think about money.
You could also call that creativity and commerce.
This is also in some sense the feminine and the masculine.
Yeah. And actually from the Masonic
sense, this is the compass and the square.
Importantly, I mentioned Churchill earlier, right?
It's very similar stuff. And when you get into the top
level of those organisations, what they do is they bring these
things together because if you understand the way our, our
education system is, is built, people are either creative or
they're analytical, right? We get sort of hired off in
different directions quite early in our education.
That's deliberate because they don't want us being able to
bring those two things together effectively unlocking our
generative potential ourselves, right?
Really importantly. And the bit in the middle ties
it all together to bring it back to design.
Is, is design, right? So actually, when you want to
think about how to take a structured approach to complex
problem solving and organisational transformation,
which is what they are attempting to affect globally
across every single area of the system, from the the top biggest
international corporations to the smallest companies through
things like the B the B Corp scheme.
Then you use design to do that. And this framework has been
around for quite a while, probably 20 years in, in, in,
in, in this form. So this double diamonds been
around for quite a long time. But earlier this year they
introduced an expanded version, which crucially includes the
word stakeholders, which you didn't before, right?
So you can see how they're trying to engineer a situation
where stakeholders, an additional layer of participants
in this generative process need to be involved.
And also the idea of collaboration, Co creation,
creating things together, IE with them, in order to align to
the challenges that they're setting in order to unlock the
outcomes that they're looking for.
And who's behind the design council these days?
Bunch of people essentially representing the combined
interests of the United Nations and the World Economic Forum in
order to bring those two things back together.
Money and power. Magic.
And what was it? Magic and money, creativity and
commerce. The feminine and the masculine,
the compass and the square at the top level in order to bring
forth that change that they're trying to unlock across the
global system. Thank you.
Thank you, Ben. And that brings us to the end of
today's UK Column News. Thank you to everybody that's
joined us. Thank you to everybody that's
taken part. We will have a 5 minute break
and then we'll be starting UK Column News Extra.
So stick around for that. We'll be back in 5 minutes.
Thank you.