Ben, thank you very much for joining me in UK column studio
#2. So this is a special afternoon
for us, but place is not totally complete yet, but it's looking
interesting. Yes, it's great to be here.
Good. It's nice to finally be in a
proper studio too. I know we've we've been talking
about this for quite a long time and there was some debate about
how it should be set up. Obviously in in the footage, we
are going to record the video, we're going to record this
afternoon. The audience will see a little
bit of how it looks, but there's still quite a bit of tidying to
do, a little bit more to be done to assist the audio.
But I think it's going to give us the opportunity for some
different styles. Both of us are sitting here very
relaxed today. No doubt I will be told off
because I haven't got a tie on. So we can be relaxed, we can do
more spontaneous discussions, whether it's you and me or other
members of the UK column team and I, I think this is going to
be very nice. We've got the formality of the
Plymouth Hoe backdrop in the main studio, which everybody
likes. And this one more relaxed,
little bit funky. Am I allowed to use that word?
Might be old fashioned. And yeah, I, I think it's, it's
going to go well. Yes, it'd be great.
And we're allowed a cup of tea. And we're allowed a cup of tea
in here, yes? So we thought we would discuss
with our audience a little bit about cities and and what is
going to be happening with cities.
And we're prompted to do this because a little while ago a
little magazine popped through my door.
At least I need my glasses on to read this.
And there was a little article and it said Plymouth expansion
plans have your say, the plans for a large part of the South
hams to be swallowed up in a greater Plymouth.
Now I'll just say for the audience who don't know, to the
eastern side of Plymouth, the District Council area along the
coastal belt is called S Hams. I live in that area and that is
one of the ones which Plymouth is going to take over.
They say swallowed up to form a greater Plymouth.
And they are going to have a debate about, well, no, they're
not going to have a debate about it.
They're going to consult the public about their plans on
Wednesday evening. So I'm going to be going along
to a church hall to hear what they have to say.
Plymouth City Council's already qualified the meeting by saying
that there isn't really any debate because the government
has said these changes to local authorities are going to happen.
So I'm going to be very interested to see what the
Plymouth City Council team have to say.
And I've already seen online in their general blurb that they
are saying it's not a power grab and there's not going to be huge
changes simply because they've got control over all of this
beautiful countryside. And probably I'd like to say to
the audience straight away, I'm not sure I believe them.
But that's the thing. Wednesday evening I'm going to
get the opportunity to be absolutely on the shop floor as
a city. And Plymouth is the major city
in the southwest short of Bristol anyway.
Plymouth is going to be talking about expanding into the
countryside areas around Plymouth.
And why don't I just list the areas they're going to be
looking at Sparkwell, Cornwood, Halford, Aggbra, Ivy Bridge,
Yelpton, Ermington. So those are the local areas.
They're all village areas largely, with the exception of
Ivy Bridge, which was a, it was a village originally, but it had
a huge expansion in the very early 2000s, probably a bit
before that, late late 1990s. It was growing incredibly
quickly. So there's a lot of new houses.
So it's a bit more of an urban area, but there's a lot of a lot
of countryside. Would you trust Plymouth when
they say it's not a power grab? I don't trust any political
bodies or administrative bodies of the state.
Yeah, about anything that they say on any topic, Brian.
So no, I don't trust Plymouth Council and they say it's not a
power grab. I, I thought you'd probably say
that we had a, a little bit of interesting research going on a
while ago because you are very keen on paper and, and drawing
pictures of diagrams of how you see the system.
And that was certainly something that I used to do.
But you'd been working and looking at quite well, probably
at the highest level. Because if I remember correctly
on your diagrams, you were definitely into things like the
United Nations and the World Economic Forum.
And some of these are the big political bodies.
But what you were demonstrating was that you could see their
policy influence coming right down to city street level.
Yes. And in one of your diagrams,
you, you said to me. And down here in Plymouth, we've
got all these funny organizations, and one of them
was called Octopus, if I remember correctly.
Plymouth Octopus. Plymouth Octopus.
And I said that's funny because when I was researching back in
2005, I had also been drawing some diagrams where I came
across these funny little organizations, of which Octopus
was 1 we had. Zebra Collective.
Zebra Collective, we had one called Eye Contact and I was
always fascinated by these little organisations, where
they'd come from and what they were actually doing.
And it's been the discussions with you that's really started
to fill in some big holes because these huge changes to
our cities and county councils and district councils, these are
not small local plans that are unfolding.
This is big stuff. This is well, the local level is
where the the shovels meet the ground.
Basically, you know, if if all of the policy stays up in the
stratosphere, internationally, in the UN, in the World Economic
Forum, then it doesn't actually have any impact.
It has to ground itself in a local area in order for change
to actually take place. And yeah, so I've, I've spent a
lot of time looking at, well, first of all, for me trying to
understand the UN system and what it was doing, because
actually until I started working at UK column, I'd never even
really encountered the UN system.
I knew that it, the UN existed. I knew that politicians went
along to New York and sat in the UN building.
And obviously you'd see the Security Council on the news and
you know, the kind of the, the, the, the basic functions of what
the UN publicly communicates. You would hear about it, right?
But I, I had no idea really the, it was this huge international
network and all of the different bodies that it encompasses and
the agenda it's set for itself basically, which is an agenda
of, of total wholesale global transformation.
I'd never really understood that because professionally I'd
always been more on the the market side of things.
Just just qualify that. Ben, when you say
professionally, you're referring back to your time with the
consultancy Ernst and Young? Well, not just Ernst and Young.
So I worked in, I worked in the consulting industry and was
advising companies, mainly bits of government work, but mainly
working with brands in international corporations to
help them improve their performance, I guess would be a
very short way of, of describing it.
And then latterly a lot of that was was to do with using new
technologies. So this process of digitisation
that the whole of society has been going through for the past,
I mean, probably 40 years now actually, maybe even slightly
longer if you think back to the early days of Silicon Valley in
the 70s, when organizations like IBM has actually been around for
over a century now. But certainly Microsoft, when
that appeared, Apple appeared in the mid to late 70s.
You know, this process of, of computer technologies coming in
is, has been going on for quite a long time now.
I was obviously very young back then.
I was only born in 81. So professionally, I kind of
entered the workforce in 2004 and then sort of rode that wave
of mobile devices, the iPhone in particular, the app ecosystem.
So everything becomes about digital applications running on
a mobile device and then basically how you collapse
industries ultimately into the technology so that that becomes
your primary interface point for how you interact with a company.
It's now a lot of the time it's done through through the phone.
And you know, there's been huge ramifications to that in terms
of how cities are are built and particularly around things like
the High Street, for example. So the the the death is a High
Street, you can pretty much come down down completely to to the
Internet, in particular mobile telecommunications.
Everyone just buys things on Amazon now.
Exactly buy it, they buy it online now.
So you, you end up with, you know, a few very small, sorry,
not very small, a small number of very large dominant players
in areas of the economic system where you used to have huge
diversity. And you know, the high street's
a really good example of that. And that's, that's been
particularly and that, and it's particularly important for the
way that this sort of this transformation of, of, of cities
and transformation of governance is playing out because in the
vacuum that's been created the, the, the physical vacuum,
literally we've got empty shops everywhere.
You've now got these new types of organizations, local
government organizations, but these new they're not quite
businesses. So you hear this term social
enterprise a lot or community interest company.
And these organizations are now filling up those those spaces
actually. And and that's sort of presented
as this sort of nice friendly, organic progression of of the
way that society is structured and how it and how it's run.
But actually when you go and look at what's driving that and
where the money's coming into that system in order to enable
it and how it links directly to UN policy in particular, then
you can begin to understand how that top level bit of the
system, which to most people feels very sort of abstract and
distant and above their head and, and democratically
unaccountable. And, you know, we'd never vote.
We don't vote for people to go to the UN.
You know, we don't any of these sort of supranational bodies.
You know, no one voted for Ursula von der Leyen, but
apparently she's the, you know, she's running Europe at the
moment. No one voted for Antonio
Guterres, but he's running the UN and apparently speaking on
behalf of the holy humanity, Right.
And, and, and the things that they talk about are so kind of
sort of lofty and theoretical. A lot of people would say it's
nonsense. They hear the language that they
nonsense, yeah, they can hear them talking about ideas and
things they're doing. A lot of a lot of people will
often say, oh, this is just nonsense.
And I, I find this quite frustrating because you sense
that people without any understanding of what these
individuals are doing or planning or dismissing it.
No, it's not nonsense. We not only need to pay
attention to what they're talking about, we need to
actually understand the language they used.
Sorry, they used because very often you've got to get into the
language to fully understand what they're talking about.
Yes. Well, because, because it's,
it's how the, it's how bureaucrats talk to each other.
Ultimately, it's all very procedural and rigid and loaded
with propaganda buzzwords. And, you know, you get things
like diversity and inclusivity and sustainability and all this
stuff that, you know, it's superficially, it sounds to some
people, it sounds like rubbish. To some people it sounds
reassuring and, you know, and, and, and like a positive thing.
But actually when you sort of dig just very, very, you know,
one or two layers beneath the surface, there's actually a lot
of, a lot of meaning buried in this language that is having
direct effects on the whole of the whole of our society.
You know, and, and, and it's, it's literally the physical
environment in your town. You know, we talk about
Plymouth. You walk down Union Street in
Plymouth. Now there are buildings along
that stretch that are part of redevelopment programmes
directly aligned to United Nations Sustainable Development
Goals. Yeah, absolutely, 100%, yeah.
And that's just in Plymouth. This is going on in every major
town around the UK. Yeah, as as you said, Union
Street, I thought let's let's describe that a bit for our
viewers and listeners. It's quite interesting.
Little bit of Plymouth history, but originally when Plymouth
developed as a port, the first port development was in
Devonport, which is the area to the West of what is now the main
city of Plymouth and the Devonport naval base is on the
River Tamar to the to the West side of the city.
Southwest, southwest side of the city.
And in days gone by that was the predominant area because
obviously ships came in and that's where cargoes were landed
and that's how the trade built up.
And it was only when the expansion started, the Plymouth
as a city began to grow. And the other thing that
happened was that Plimpton, which is an area to the North
East of the city, which until about 100 years ago, 150 years
ago did have a just navigable river.
So that actually formed, if my memory serves me right, one of
the Stannery ports. So you did have another port
area to the eastern side of Plymouth.
But when the river silted up the the strength of that side of the
city reduced and most of the maritime side went to the to the
Devonport side. And Devonport was connected to
Plymouth by one St. which was Union Street.
And originally that street was a very busy hub of everything.
So it had shops. But in later years, because in
particular of the number of sailors who were ashore from a
very big military base, naval base in Plymouth, that that
street was full of pubs and clubs.
Music halls. Music halls and it was a very,
very lively environment and I found it very sad to see these
parts of Plymouth absolutely fall into disrepair.
And I know that you're thinking one particular building down
that direction, which should be an absolutely phenomenal
Victorian theatre, but is in fact sitting there as a derelict
building. Yeah, right.
So we've we've seen. It's a whole strip.
It's probably about the, the main bit is, is about 200 metres
of what you can still see used to be real Victorian grandeur
actually, you know, but with a kind of burlesque sort of edge
to it as well. Actually, you know, like these
ornate buildings. And you can kind of sense the,
the life that would have been pulsing through that place right
when it was an entertainment destination for, for, for the
poor and, and, and a cultural destination.
And and it's clearly just sort of been let left to rots over
decades. This becomes very interesting
for me because my my time in Plymouth, I have watched the
decline of the city. And so, so you have the basic
neglect of areas. You had the demise of the naval
base. So from being a huge employer
just after the Second World War, I think there was about 55,000
people employed just in the dockyard alone.
And then Plymouth had inside the city and on the city periphery a
lot of of industry and small businesses often connected to
the dockyard. So a lot of a lot of business
and industry in Plymouth Dockyard starts to reduce.
And then you saw these companies disappear one by one on the
periphery of Plymouth and you say, well, how are people going
to earn their money? Then when we ended up with in
the Devonport area, so that naval base area, a large part of
the community unemployed and some of them have been
unemployed for three generations.
But what we saw Plymouth City Council start to do was
regeneration projects. And this is where I got
interested because these weren't home grown regeneration
projects, they were all regeneration projects which were
either funded by or themselves targeting European regeneration
grant money from the European Investment Bank, from the
European Bank of Reconstruction and Development.
And then what you started to see happen was a style of
regeneration which to my mind completely destroyed the
historical look of the city. So cities, so streets were going
to be pedestrian eyes, they were going to be paved over in a
particular way. A certain style of St.
furniture, lampposts and benches and bollards would come in and
that was very quickly followed by the fact that that the
shopping area had a very high percentage of charity shops, all
the same shops. And I was interested to see that
happen in Plymouth. But at the same time, I could
travel to another city. I could go to Liverpool or
Sheffield or Manchester and see exactly the same style of
regeneration. And what it actually did is is
gave a a uniform look to the cities and they became slightly
unbritish. Sometimes the architecture,
you'd say, yeah, this looks a bit like you might see it on the
continent. And very often attracted, but
attracted but slightly dilapidated buildings were
disappearing to be replaced by very unattractive modern
concrete structures. And I was very, I was always
very interested in that process. Right, Well, yeah, the, the, all
of the, the personality, yeah, was being stripped out of the,
of the country. And I, I remember this in so
this is pre financial crash. So I think I was while I was at
university or just after I'd graduated from university.
So I graduated in 2004. I, I remember Nottingham, which
was my hometown, bits of it were completely transformed.
So like areas of the Lace Market, which was all beautiful
old Victorian buildings were being taken down and they were
putting up these new flats and they were concrete, but also a
lot of glass. There was this sort of new glass
and sort of ugly boxy, nondescript modern new build
apartments with some retail underneath them.
And as you say, this was the, it was the same look that you were
getting in Nottingham as you were getting in Plymouth or any
other bit of the country basically.
Like so actually the personality and character of the place and
like local materials, for example, which is, yeah, we just
wasn't there anymore. And, and you, you referenced
the, the EU money, which is interesting, right?
And, and the fact that a lot of this is grant based, right?
And, and, and to me, this is deliberate disruption from the
bureaucratic centre in order to essentially reset the, the, the
social and the economic and the cultural structures in towns
around the UK. And this was happening, of
course, the whole of Europe as well, right?
It's not just in this country. It's hasn't been happening
everywhere and, and basically creating a false economy because
our industrial capacity had been wound down over decades.
You know, So if you go to Nottingham, for example, I just
mentioned the Lace market. The wealth of Nottingham through
the 17 and the 1800s came from lace.
Yeah. And so the work's no longer made
in Nottingham, but a lot of the built physical infrastructure
and the wealth and heritage of the town is, is tied up with
that. But they haven't made lace there
industrially in probably a couple of 100 years now, you
know, and, and there are other things that have that have
happened there in, in terms of industrial output.
So Boots was a big employer in the city, but a lot of that has
been sent overseas now. And you know, it's, it's a cover
over the cracks in the decline in our wealth creating capacity
as a nation. You have these slugs, huge
slugs, billions of of, of EUR coming in from these grant
systems to give people employment, but in order to do
what? To tear down the the their own.
Infrastructure. Their own infrastructure, you
know which, which should have been maintained.
Aside from watching this in the city, the other thing I started
to be able to see is the documents that the local
authority and also some of the government agencies, the
government office of the Southwest, Southwest of England,
regeneration agencies. So these are government
constructs. How the government would be
helping local businesses grow, I don't know, but so these
agencies came along and predominantly they then followed
the requirements of the sources of the funding.
So if you were going to take EBRD European Banker
Reconstruction and Development grants for you to get that
money, you would have to agree that in your plans you were
going to do XY and Z, which is what the bank wanted.
And so through the money they controlled the type of
development, the style of it. And, and essentially that's when
I started to see the the European purse holding cities in
this country to account because the focus of the city areas
instantly went away from national government to the
European Union because the European Union was dangling all
the pots of money. It was, it was really
interesting to watch, but. It's usually a total
manipulation of of the the economic system basically.
Yeah, so I say. So at that time everything I was
watching happen for me was linking back to the European
Union. But now we've moved on because
we've got other things which have sort of come to the
surface. And Mark Anderson, who is with
us at the UK columns often talking about the rise of the
the global cities and the global mayor system.
And so it was later that I started to realise that, OK,
well, the European Union was building and destroying was all
on the path to a much bigger control coming in.
And that's really dovetails with what you started to say just
now, Ben. The people sense that there's
something higher than them, there's power being enacted, but
they can't see that so easily is now some of that is breaking
surface, isn't it? Because we can look at the the
UN Sustainable Development Goals, we can see their
documentation and what it's talking about.
We can have a look at web websites which are talking about
the the global city and the global mayor system and the
overwhelming model coming through is that they are
creating city states of immense power.
Yes, which are not independent city states, which is how
they're being positioned. So this drive towards this metro
mayor system, which is already happening by the way, right?
So let's, one of the most important things for people to
take away from this, I think, right, is that they've actually
already doing this. There's no proper consultation
about it at all. The system's already in place,
They are implementing it and they're effectively bulldozing
the existing system out of the way with almost no discussion at
all. And it's just, and it's just
happening, right? And, and they've lined up every
single component part of the system in order for them to, to,
to, to enable that transition ultimately.
And they talk about it as a transition, a great global
transition. And it's not just political
system, it's the whole economic system, It's the energy grid,
it's the, the telecommunications infrastructure, the Internet,
it's the artificial intelligence platforms that they're
developing that are going to be absolutely cool to this
governance. And it's basically a re
platforming of Everything Everywhere to a single
integrated system that is consistent across the whole
world. And the, the, the mayors is how
is being implemented. And they'll, they'll, they allow
devolution to the level of mayor because it gives people the
sense, you know, the, the false hope ultimately that there's
that there is some accountability or that you can
exert a little bit of control and have some democratic
representation because there's someone from your local area who
you can at least vote for. And that might help you to exert
some influence over the system, right?
But actually that's, that's not what they're for, right?
So this devolution to this mayor based system is actually
they're, they're little fiefdoms.
It's like a franchise model. It's actually, it's probably a
really good way of describing it, right?
It's like every restaurant that you can go into is now a
McDonald's. It might have different people
behind the counter and the manager might be a different
person from one to the next, but ultimately they're all just
McDonald's. Yeah.
And that's basically the model that they're moving towards.
And actually they learnt the lessons of global
corporatisation of, of industry is they've actually learnt a lot
of stuff from the way that these big international companies have
run and then deploy it back into the political system.
Yeah, yeah. This, this is fascinating and,
and for me, this is where people need to pay attention because as
you say, this bit has been put in place very quickly.
So they've built a new system of governance, just reminds people
what what they had. We had parish councils, so
representation at down to the smallest village or hamlet, just
a few people in the parish. And of course that's also
connected to the churches. Parish is usually regarded as
the area connected to a particular church.
We had the district councils which were locally based, not
even at community level. They, they were geographic areas
within a county. So they're, they're a division
of the county level. And, and then yes, it was
sensible. I would agree that when you had
the biggest cities forming, they obviously need to, needed to
become a, a unit in their own right.
So then we had Plymouth City Council and Manchester City
Council and Greater London Council as it, it was.
So that made sense. But nevertheless, that was a
system where you you had a breakdown in levels and you knew
if you were at the bottom of the chain, you're always dealing
with somebody bigger but still local in order to represent you.
Now, what's been built on the side to one side, a parallel
system is nothing to do with that at all.
And this, this is where people really got to pay attention
because we've got district councils have gone.
A lot of that happened after lockdown because during
lockdown, a lot of the district councils simply abandoned their
businesses and said you can work from home, from home.
And then, and then once COVID was over, people never went back
to work in the, in the district councils.
And so now that's being used as an excuse that we don't really
need the district councils and we're going to get rid of them.
So there's a grouping up of the county structure whilst at the
same time we're building these city states fiefdoms.
It is what they are. And the other person of power in
them of course is the police commissioner who who was
introduced as a person who the public could trust to regulate
the police because they elected them.
But everywhere I've come across police commissioners, they're
actually working hand in glove with with the police and the
local authorities themselves. So.
Certainly are, yeah. Yeah.
And we've talked about this particularly in relation to
Greater Manchester and a lot of the issues around investigations
and into an accountability for grooming gangs issue and what's
been going on in Alderman Rotherham.
And it's been a pack of trouble. And that's we're not here to
talk about that necessarily, right?
But ultimately these things are all interlink with each other.
And if that's an exemplar of what, of how this thing's going
to operate, then I think it's fairly damning, I would say.
So your city franchise idea this, this is brilliant because
this really brings it home. You're going to be in a city, so
you'll drive along the road and you'll come to a sign and it
will say you're you're entering Manchester or Newcastle and you
think you've entered a different city.
But actually the whole structure is going to be franchise model
and it will be exactly the same as Glasgow or Manchester or
Sheffield or Leeds, wherever it. Is, yeah.
And it won't be running on the same governance, the same
technological systems. Everything will be integrated in
the background. They'll have, they'll have the
same surveillance technologies. They're driving people towards
urbanisation because they want people to be.
This is part of this idea of inclusivity, right?
They want, they don't want anyone living outside of the
system. That's what inclusive means.
It means that you can only exist within the system that they're
developing. So the level of every man, woman
and child. Alive on Earth yes exactly
because this is not what's happening in the UK.
It's happening everywhere. So we talked about this global
mares C40 mares is is one of the sort of leading examples of this
Sadiq Khan is the Co president alongside a woman forget her
name from Sierra Leone. I believe it is right.
So you've got these kind of diverse groups, internationalist
promoting the same agenda, running on the same, the same,
the same platform, same technology, the same system
ultimately which is alien to the nation state and.
National cultures. It is essentially anti
nationalist, right? And these, this is a, this is a
globalised system. And you can see this manifesting
in right down to the level of you want to know why they're not
paving the roads properly out in the counties?
Because they want to make those areas unlivable so that people
leave them, won't live there and they'll move into the urban
centers where all of the investment is being put right.
You know, you hear a lot of one of the one of these issues that
people get quite upset about is, is, is potholes in the roads.
Well, that's not a mistake. That's a deliberate move to
drive people, nudge people towards urban centres.
And and and the new system which is where you know, the the
cities is where is where this new system is, is focused on
ultimately. Before it, before it goes out of
my mind just coming back to Plymouth specifically when you
when you read the blurb from Plymouth City Council about
these new plans, one of the things they said is that, well,
first of all, they emphasized that Plymouth was a an important
global city. This always makes me smile
because Plymouth has trouble operating as a city in UK but
apparently is an important global city and the also the
Plymouth feels that it needs to increase its population to
300,000. Now I can imagine for others
city dwellers across UK they're going to be thinking well that's
not much but Plymouth has just about held its own as a city
with a population I think around about 200 and 32140 thousand.
I think it's up to about 250,000 now, so they are proposing
another 50 that let's say another 50,000 people coming
into Plymouth. Where are they going to work?
Where are they going to live? Well, we know what's going to
happen with the living problem because just outside of Plymouth
they decided to create a new town called Sheerford.
It's on green fields and although the excuse used was
that it was low grade agricultural space, since we
can't feed ourselves as a nation, perhaps we ought to be
very careful of what we designate low grade agricultural
space. But they built a new city or a
new big new housing development with no new link to the main
highway. So the M5A38 coming down into
Plymouth, there is no new junction to take you into this
vast new urban area. There are virtually no shops.
They have got a school there now I think.
But you, you just drive into this slightly to me, spooky
urban area, which is there are some nice buildings, but it's
all a bit uniform and it's very wide space and open.
Inorganic and they feel a bit fake, right, because actually,
if you in any city proper cities, you know, certainly in
this country and and other ancient, ancient civilisations,
Britain is an ancient culture, right?
We've got cities that have that have built up over thousands of
years. They, they build up over
thousands of years, right? It's in, it's, it's, it's a
process of, of, of development. And, and that takes time and it
happens in a, in a, in, in a kind of, in a very natural and,
and, and, and organic way. And you know a 50,000 person
town essentially what that is, right?
We're talking about 50,000 people or actually how many
people in this new. Year.
Well, I'm, I'm saying they're going to take on another 50.
I'm not sure what the population of Sherford is now.
It's, it's nowhere near 50,000. But nevertheless, they've built
a lot of houses and it's still expanding.
Right. But it's all but.
It's all just come at once. So it's not.
Just something that's that's developed over time,
incrementally over decades. It's just lump it in but.
When they went to develop it, it was we had to have it how we
need it. We need, we need all this space
for new homes and they never said where people were coming
from. But now, of course, we get a
little bit of a clue because if we dip our toes into a delicate
area, any place around UK can now see that a significant
proportion of the population is is coming in with migration.
And that is also part of the plan to breakdown national
identity not only in UK but across Europe.
And so PP so we're in here to the UNS migration plans
impacting on how how somewhere like Plymouth builds itself.
It's it's it's. Fascinating.
No, it is fascinating, right. And that's, and yes, so you
know, another example of of where the the global strategy,
the global plan. Begins to impact on the physical
and the cultural space in your immediate vicinity.
Ultimately, and I forget the name, was it Peter Sutherland?
Was that the guard? Yes.
Peter Sutherland. Yes.
So was he Irish? Am I?
Am I getting? That right.
I think possibly, possibly he was.
You might, yeah. Yeah, but he was a top top UN
official. Ambassador on Migration.
Right. And this was probably knocking
on 20 years ago. I think he died around 2010 if
I'm correct. Maybe it was more recent.
A few years ago, yeah. But he was basically saying
that, well, we need mass migration in all this breakdown
in the nation States and this is the direction of travel that
we've taken and that's what we're going to do.
And that's a very cruel agenda because yes, if people are
feeling pressurised as a result of newcomers coming into the
country, the people who are being displaced from their own
country or leaving their own country, a lot of them are under
stress themselves. Absolutely.
And I have never forgotten driving home one night from the
UK column. Very rarely listen to it now.
But I had Radio 4 on and at one point they were talking about
the fact that if you were a social worker in UK, you should
seriously think about having a look for a job in Poland.
Because Poland was desperately short of social workers and care
workers. Why?
Because all the young people had migrated into Western Europe and
UK, right, Leaving the elderly people, particularly in the
farming areas in Poland with no young people to support them.
So very cruel on the elderly people in Poland, cruel on the
young people that have been lured to a new nation state
thinking that they're, you know, the grass is greener on the
other side. And then we are pressurised as a
result of that migration. And, and it's a, it's a
completely ludicrous and illogical policy, right?
So the, the young people who've come from Poland to work in jobs
here, but then we've got to send people from here over to
parliament to work in jobs there.
What on, why on earth would we need to do that?
Why doesn't everyone just stay where they are?
Well, because. And we can fill the positions
that are required. We can't have happy people
living in their own states, enjoying their own culture and
their own identity. That's all.
All got to be broken up. Exactly.
Which is what Peter Sutherland said.
We need more mass migration to break down the homogeneity of
the nation state. Exactly, which is ultimately,
but it's not just it's, it's, it's a, it's a direct attack on
the people, right. So when we talk about the nation
state and why that's important, it's because it's constituted of
individual human beings with lives and, and ambitions.
And, and, and this is actually a direct attack on them, right?
Importantly, and, and these and the mayors, they, they're
ultimately driving this agenda now, right.
So there's there's one example that I've been looking at for
the past few days, which is the new mayor of, let me get this
absolutely correct, got it in front of me here.
So this lady is Helen Goodwin and she's the mayor of the West
of England Combined Authority, Bristol and associated areas
around there. And she's only been in position
for a couple of months and just yesterday, I think it was no one
did this come out on the 18th of of June.
We'll provide a link to this. You can go and have a read of
it. But it talks about the fact that
she's going to be using a citizens assembly, which is one
of these democratic innovations that we've been talking about,
these new democratic models. And she's going to use that to
reshape culture in the West of England with a people powered
vision, apparently. So the mayor is going to
micromanage culture in Bristol and Avon and that whole area.
And they're talking about this as a democratic experiment,
which will put cultural decision making in the hands of 52
citizens. So they're going to select.
That's that's the keyword, isn't it?
These are not elected citizens, these are going to be selected
citizens. So they send out letters to
15,000 households, apparently randomly chosen.
But you know, I'm, I'm, I would question how random that
actually is. And if the, the, the letters
going out as random, then I'm sure that there's some screening
going on in the selection process.
Of course there will be. And then they're going to run
this series of assemblies to make decisions about culture in
the Bristol region. Well, why does the mayor have
anything to say about culture? Culture comes from the people,
it comes from the whole population engaging in.
No, that that's where it came from.
Well. That's where it used to come
from. That's where it used to come.
Now we we have a group of individuals who've been told
cultures to change and they are now starting the path to
changing the culture to a culture that we can suspect.
We know what it is. We can, we can guess by looking
at indicators, but ultimately this is going to be a culture
which is alien to anything that we've lived with if we still
have a national identity of any type.
Exactly. It's, it's going to, it's, it's
imposed, it's artificial culture, it's these decisions,
they're all ultimately going to be about the allocation of, of,
of tax revenue because that's all politicians do, right?
They don't actually understand anything other than how to dole
out other people's money. That's literally the job that
they have. And so that's interesting in its
own right, right. And and, and, and, but, but
beyond that, the two other things that I think that really
stood out at me about this was first of all, this lady Helen
Godwin has most recently she's, she's a, she, she was a, a, a
councillor in Bristol for, for a few years.
She also worked professionally as, as a director at Hayes,
which is a big recruitment company.
But most recently she was in the local government consulting team
at PwC, spent three years at Pricewalterhouse Coopers who are
a strategic partner in the World Economic Forum.
So they are actively engaged in the the Great Reset and the
implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals.
So this is the the market side that the UN represents the
state. Ultimately the power structure
dictates the direction of travel terms of engagement.
But then the market, the World Economic Forum side, the
corporations are engaged in, in the implementation of that in
the profit seeking marketplace that's been constructed around
this whole transformation program.
So she spent three years doing this and so that you have to
question her, her, her, her motives and ultimately her
mindset around this. You know, she's she's, she's
been put in there to. Change.
Where has she come from? How?
How is it that she's now in this very interesting position?
Yeah, that's the first question I'd ask.
Exactly. And and then the other thing is,
is when you look at where the money is is coming in from to
support this cultural transformation program, and some
of it's from the Arts Council, you're right.
So again, this is central state money being pushed into
transformation of city regions across the UK, But then also
importantly, the Kaloust Golbenkian Foundation and the
Paul Hamlin Foundation. So these supposedly
philanthropic charitable foundations who have all made it
their, their, their mission to break down and reshape and
reform the the donation state. And these two are particularly
active in, in the Uki think Kalusko Bankian is, is, is
Turkish, but I think Paul Hamlin is based out of London, right?
So we've got international capital coming from the richest
families in the world, flooding into these cultural and economic
and political. Change, change, change.
Programs and this is now being presented back to the British
people as a fait accompli and inevitability.
And with the deceitful line that it oh this is just government,
UK government, reorganisation of local government, when in fact
what the government is doing is following this higher level
international agenda. So there is a huge amount to
discuss about this. Just coming back to Plymouth,
we'll say to the audience that this meeting's coming up this
week. I will attend, I will make sure
I pay attention and we'll see whether we can get some
interesting material to run a follow up on what was discussed
in the meeting. What did Plymouth City Council
say it was going to do in these expansion plans?
I think we might be able to challenge them a little bit.
So that'll be fun, but we've got a huge amount of material.
You've done a really brilliant amount of research looking at
these change agents, the bodies, the the policies, the people,
the funding streams. It's a vast network.
It's almost like a virus descending over culture in UKI.
Think it's a cancer? Cancer.
Yeah, it's like a cancerous growth actually, which is
attached itself to the host nation and and he's slowly
killing it ultimately. And that's that's the closest
analogy I can think of. So to deal with this disease, we
we need to be able to see it, recognise it for what it is.
Yeah, we need to be having a look at what what we can do to
heal society in UK. Yes.
And I think the most upbeat thing which I could possibly end
on is the fact that when you and that when you analyse the
control structure that these powers and these bodies and
these funding streams are implementing, they only get
control when people at the lowest level agree to be
controlled. And more and more I see that if
you have people at the local level, parish level, communities
on a street, every time they say no, we are not having this, it
causes eruptions further up the chain because these powerful
people have no power unless they can control the individual.
That's how I see it. It's completely, completely
true. Yeah, yeah.
And, and actually, they've, they have massively underestimated
the, the, the fight. I think I would say that, that
there is still in the hearts and minds of, of the British people,
but also, you know, internationally they're
struggling to implement this system.
But I'll talk to talk to Britain because that's where we are.
And that's, you know, my, my main focus.
But they've also massively overestimated their own ability
to implement this. You got a lot of very arrogant
people in these systems who seem to think that because they've
done a good job of elevating themselves up the corrupt
hierarchy, that gives them some kind of power over others,
whereas actually it doesn't and they're beginning to really
understand that. I think so.
I think that's true, Yeah. OK, Well, Ben, it's been a
fascinating conversation, a little teaser for our viewers
and listeners. And that is the UK economy is
planning another written reports along the lines of your life in
their hands. We are going to specifically
look at this issue of, of control over the nations and the
city States and some of these power systems.
And I, I think, I think there's a very good glossy UK column
production coming and we'll keep people informed as to the final
published date. But we are working on it.
You're certainly working on it. So that's good.
OK. Thanks very much, Ben.
Thank you, Brian, it's a pleasure.
Here's to many more in the new studio.