We need to set the scene as to why we're here, of course, don't
we? Well.
Mike Mike's working in the studio and we haven't got Studio
2 set up yet. That's why we're here.
We are. So we are here on the edge of
Dartmoor, in case you're wondering about the clothes
since June and it's pretty cold and it was raining heavily here
in Plymouth, Devon. So we're we're dressed for the
winter again. It's a very British summer's
day, isn't it? So where where exactly are we
then? You said Dartmoor, but like,
what's? What's this locale?
Like what? Well, we're on, we're on the
southern edge of of Dartmoor, the very southern edge.
We've just come up from Plymouth, past what used to be
Rowborough, the old. In its day it was one of the
World War 2 airports and this road takes us up to Yelverton,
which is the first major town on the Moor, which is it's about
Yelverton's about 5 miles north. Right.
If the weather's nice and it's clear then you get a fantastic
view back over Plymouth but also southwest into into Cornwall.
So it's it's a pretty lovely spot just on the edge of the
Moor. And Plymouth's quite isolated in
that real regard, isn't it, because you've got more land to
the north of it? And then, and then how far does
this run run on this expanse here, Dartmoor?
Well, it's all to the all to the north of us.
So you're, you're right. Plymouth is trapped against the
sea on the Sotherly side, the Tamar River to the West and then
Dartmoor to the north. Dartmoor is, you can call it a
circle, more or less. That's about 30 miles across.
Right, OK. Circular area of of park.
Now it's a very good National Park.
Yeah, beautiful, isn't it? And you, you, you are from this
area, right? Plymouth Dartmoor.
This is where you grew. Up not, not quite.
I actually grew up in Gloucestershire.
I went went to school at a place called Thornberry, which is
about 8 miles north of Bristol. That's where I went to school.
But it was when I joined the Navy initially I moved down here
because I was at, at Dartmouth Naval College and then for my
whole naval career we've we've been here since then.
So I'm allowed to have been in the area about 40 years now.
OK. Don't quote me on that though.
You've been naturalised. Indeed.
Yeah, yeah. You've been integrated.
And it is a lovely place. It is, yeah.
It's fantastic, Fantastic city. Yeah.
And I'm getting to know a little bit more of the surrounding
areas. But yeah, spending a bit too
much time in front of the laptop at the minute, unfortunately.
So hopefully we'll have to change that.
We all do. Yeah, right, exactly, exactly.
So we're going to talk a bit about the where the UK columns
started and, and how it's developed over the years.
And what is quite well established, I think is that you
were in the Navy for many years and then when you left the Navy,
you came back to Plymouth. But it'd be great to just
understand a bit about what you were doing in the Navy 1st and
then maybe how that LED into what you've been doing.
Because there's, there's, I'd imagine there's some parallels
between your earlier career and then what you've done since.
Well, I've certainly used some of what I learnt in the in the
Navy, Yeah, naval career was I went to the Naval College at
Dartmouth, that's for officer training.
And so I did all of the basic training.
Once you've done your basic training, you go out and join
one of the ships of frigate, normally where you are a
trainee. Watch keeper, bridge watch
keeper and you essentially work in the initial part of your
career in order to get your bridge watch keeping ticket.
So you're, you're learning your trade in navigation, but you
also have to get a qualification in the Navy in order to be a
bridge watch keeper and hold watches on your own.
This is this is the key thing. So I did that initially.
Then I I went from that to being involved in the mine warfare
side of the Navy, which are all much smaller ships.
And I was a navigator of one of those.
And then I was a squadron navigator.
And then I was at the age where they start pulling you into the
warfare training. And actually I just started the
warfare course when the Falklands War started and very
quickly they needed more people at sea.
So I did not finish the full warfare course.
I was pulled off to join a ship, a frigate, which then went S to
the Falklands. I have.
You left the course and you just went into the straight into the
warfare. Well, I didn't do that because
the Armistice was signed two days before we actually arrived
down, right? So I have to be grateful for
that because people died down there.
But on the other hand, it was a bit tough getting down and
hearing all the stories from everybody else and you were just
there to do a patrol for six months with nothing happening
very much. But when I came back, the most
interesting part of my career started and that was I
specialised in anti submarine warfare.
And I have to say I was not a submariner, I was a surface ship
man. But we, we, we took out what was
then a very new sonar system and our job was to find the Russian
submarines that you hear so much about in the, in the press and
media in the present times. OK.
And and this. Is height of the Cold War
basically? This was height of the Cold War,
Yeah. But what was I found really good
about what we were doing Instead of going out on a NATO exercise,
when we went to see, we were always doing the real job.
And it was us looking for the Russian submarines and finding
them and tracking them. And even if an exercise was
going on, you still had the real job to do it it.
It was fascinating and and in as much as you say warfare is
enjoyable, but it was a enjoyable job at sea.
Yes. And very technically
sophisticated, right, Because you're dealing with basically
the most advanced technologies of the time, I would imagine.
Out of the time and this is I'm talking about passive sonar.
So this is this is towing a a mile long listening device
behind the ship and, and essentially analysing all of the
acoustic frequencies in order to just, you know, detect Russian
submarines. Same systems are still used
today. But of course the signal
processing is so much better. I suspect the the phone which is
recording us how does has as much processing power as sort of
three fridges stood together which would have been the size
of the equipment that did the processing in my day.
Yeah, with that question, yeah. Absolutely.
Yeah, I remember going to visit my dad in his office.
He used to work in the Pharmaceutical industry back in
the mid 80s. And they had these
supercomputers in a separate room.
Yeah, with sort of these dials and reel to reel things playing.
Around, yeah. It's a completely different
world, you know, and. It's now been taken over by one
chip. I know it's incredible, isn't
it? And you know, kids are walking
around with them in their pockets.
It's unbelievable. You use the word right at the
start there, which I think is very informative actually, of
what's happened subsequently. And it was the watchman.
You were keeping watch. Yes.
And is that something that you were particularly suited to or
does everybody do that when they get in the Navy?
Like how does that? Well, one branch because you
you've got different specialist branches.
So you could have gone into, you could have gone into naval
aircrew. You could be an engineering
officer or a supply officer. Yeah, logistics officer.
If if you go through the sea seaman branch, then you are
you're going to be watch keeping and navigating and then you go
onto the navigate onto the warfare side.
But but Even so, standing watch at sea is something that is a
fascinating job. And the other bit of course that
goes with it. It's not only to do with the
ship and the organisation of the ship.
It's to do with what the weather's like.
And it's absolutely true that a powerful storm at sea changes
your whole perspective of the world because you realise how
insignificant you are. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But a lot, a lot of happy memories actually out of that.
I'm sure, yeah. And that's, and it's a big
responsibility as well, right? The idea because you're keeping
watch for. For the whole ship, right, For
the whole ship. And it is a big responsibility,
and it's pretty tragic when people get it wrong because,
yeah, collisions often do a lot of damage and very often they
injure people. So, yeah.
And we could have a whole discussion about that.
Because I would say that one of the things that Mariners are
facing at the moment is that is that the link between people and
the sea and the elements is reducing and people are a lot
more dependent on digital systems in order to navigate and
collision avoidance. Yes.
And they've lost the intuition. It was there previously when
people were doing it by it was, it was, you know, it was a cross
between professional skill and how do you describe it?
Gut. Instinct.
Gut instinct. Yeah, yeah.
Your intuition. Yeah, yes, that's really
interesting because I noticed the similar thing when my my
girlfriend at the time, her younger sister started driving.
This was 20 years ago now. And and these Tom Toms had just
started, the GPS systems had just appeared.
And you realise that people, the, the, the, this young woman
in particular, this is not just constrained to her or young
women either, right? I think this is true with a lot,
a lot of people is that they, she didn't actually know where
she was. She was just looking at the
thing and waiting for that to tell her where to go.
And there was never a moment where she was developing an
understanding of the landscape that she was navigating.
It was all being delivered through this little screen.
And this, this same thing, this is a big problem, a big problem
at sea, not only in merchant navies, but also in the military
as well, because people are getting too drawn into these,
you know, systems and navigating is what the computer screen
tells you. But actually now navigating is
not only knowing where you are, the most important thing is
knowing where you will be in 15 minutes time, 20 minutes time.
And, and the the if if you look on YouTube, there's some really
interesting video, some of them pretty tragic, where in
particular people in very big yachts have ended up in really
dire situations. And the more they talk about
their stories, the more you say to yourself, yeah, that's
because you were too busy playing around with the SAP
satellite NAV system. You weren't actually looking out
with a feel for where you. Were yes, yes and and and the
technology was governing you. You weren't using the
technologies at all. Correct.
To elevate your own skill set, essentially.
You see that everywhere. There's another bit that goes
with it, and that is that although it's catching up
overwhelmingly anytime you see information depicting a marine
chart. So if it's a digital picture of
the English Channel or the North Sea or the Pacific, that digital
picture has overwhelmingly been compiled from the original paper
charts which were put together by people using a sextant to
locate the geographical position and using some form of sounding
line to tell you what the depth of the water is.
And people have a mistaken belief that because it's a they
now see a digital picture. This picture is incredibly
accurate. But in fact, a lot of the places
in the world, it's still certainly true, we'll say around
some areas of New Zealand, the information you see on your 2025
digital screen was actually put together in, you know, the 1820s
or the 1830s. And and so it's only as accurate
as the work they did then, not what you see on the screen.
And there are warnings about this, but of course, nobody pays
attention to the war. They just follow the SAT NAV,
the SAT NAV told me and off they go.
Right. Isn't that incredible?
Yeah. And you were based out of
Plymouth that entire time. Were you at sea quite a bit or?
Were you? No, I, I spent some time at
Portsmouth. I spent a lot of time up in
Rosyth in Scotland. Yeah, because that's where all
the mine Wharf, most of the mine warfare ships were based.
Well, Portsmouth and Rosyth. And then when I started the
Todoray work, that's when I came to, that's when it came to
Plymouth. The what works.
Alright, Toad array. That's the Toad sonar system.
Right, OK. Bit of jargon for you.
Yes, very good. Yeah.
OK. And then and then that was you
until when when you said 2021 years was.
It Yeah. So I left in 93.
What? OK.
It's a real struggle to talk about this, Ben, because it you
say where did that time go? Where did the time go from 1993
to 2025? Yeah.
Well, where did it go? What have you been doing?
Well, something captured my life and and I've been battling ever
since. But I will say my life has been
interesting and fun with some ups and downs in it.
But yeah, out of the Navy. What?
Was your plan when you left? Well, just, yeah, my plan was to
follow one of the reasons that I left, which is that you spend a
lot of time away from your family.
And I'd got to the point where I thought 21 years was enough.
And if you want to go climbing the promotion ladder, actually
you, you then get less and less time with your family.
And so I didn't want to be doing a job with the Ministry of
Defence in London and coming home every weekend.
That seemed to me and so I'd left for more time with my
family and also more time to enjoy life.
And so I just wanted to achieve a job that I enjoyed and to
start having some proper, you know, I didn't.
Well, if I say quality of life, there was quality of life in the
military, but it, it is different.
I wanted some normal life and so I just tried my best to get
established in the civilian world and I did that quite
happily and until I discovered stuff in Plymouth which was
clearly fraud and corruption, right, so and so.
Describe that then, like what? What was it that you were
beginning to see? I, I it all of it centred around
grant money that Plymouth City Council and indeed city councils
across UK, they were all beginning to feed not only off
central government grant money, they were also feeding off
European regeneration money. And so Plymouth, like many other
cities made applications for millions of European money.
And what I discovered is that much of that money was being
used fraudulently. The the, the funding package was
being broken up into small financial packages that were
then effectively disappearing. And when I felt I had enough
knowledge to talk on it, I thought mistakenly it would be
good to talk to the Chamber of Commerce.
I felt this because it was public money overwhelmingly, and
I thought therefore private businesses in the Chamber of
Commerce would be interested, but literally it was the
opposite. And what I came to realise was
of course many of the companies, people were actually feeding off
this money themselves. And so I became really unpopular
really quickly. Really unpopular.
And and and where were you seeing this grant?
Like what were you actually seeing that was drawing your
attention to this in the first instance?
Well, I, I was working in a project management building
surveying, well, project management building surveying
company. And we've been able to build up
some links with the work that was going on to do with
regeneration in the Devonport area of Plymouth.
And that's the largely historic area around the old naval base.
And it also brought me in contact with the community,
people themselves. And I just, I started to be able
to see some of the regeneration plans and I started to
understand how this funding stream worked.
But when you started to ask where were the accounts, it all
got pretty woolly pretty quickly.
And I think the other bit I would add is that there was some
major central government changes at the time where they brought
in the government offices of the region.
So we had the government office of the southwest, we had the
southwest of England regional development agencies.
And I, I I'll sit here and say my view.
They were corrupt before they started.
Right. I mean, it's why they were they,
why they were established essentially.
Well, you could look back and say instead of regenerating and
and building things in a positive way, actually they
destroyed things. They certainly destroyed a lot
of historic infrastructure and and this, this of course was
where you started to see the what was called the regeneration
of inner cities that has resulted in our cities all
looking the same. They've all got the same
pedestrianised centres with block Pavia roads and no
pavements, the same black bins, the same benches.
Yes, ugly flats. Ugly flats, yeah.
Inexplicable designs to buildings.
Yeah, right. And so this is late 90s getting
into the early 2000s. Yes, absolutely, yeah.
Yeah. So this is basically Blair 1/2,
right? Those those 2 terms.
And I, I have a, a story, it's a true story about Blair coming to
Plymouth. And he had a meeting with
Plymouth City Council. A local journalist who'd
attended the meeting, who I was very friendly with, called me at
about 4:00 one afternoon, say he'd been in the meeting.
And he said, Brian, they were discussing things I found scary.
They were using military language about the city in the
future having zones and what what class of people would be
living in which zone. And the waterfront area was all
going to go to the better class of people.
And, and yeah, other communities would would have much higher
density development in other parts of the city.
And he actually used the word scary.
I found it very scary and when the then chief executive said to
Tony Blair that Plymouth City Council were having some
problems in persuading some of the communities to adopt the
regeneration strategy, Tony Blair turned to the chief
executive and said you've been given special powers and you
should use them. And what he was referring to was
the recently, the then recently enacted Communities Bill, I
can't remember the exact name of it, but this is where you saw
that this was central government policy through the through the
Blair government being enacted out on the ground by what was
then a labour control council. Fascinating and creating and
embedding a class structure into.
Absolutely. The city, right, Coming from a
Labour Prime Minister. I mean, obviously now in
hindsight people would look at Blair and say this man was not
really working for the working classes or, you know, by any
stretch of the imagination. But to hear it that explicitly,
even even today, is quite amazing.
Well, and the the other bit that I particularly saw because I was
interested in helping this Devonport community, this in
it's heyday, it was such a special area because every trade
and skill base associated with the dockyard was there.
So you, you had ship rights, you had metallurgists, you had
lagers, you had any job in this huge dockyard complex.
The people live locally and that skill base had been in the
families for generations. Right.
Because. This is the central, this is the
centre of shipbuilding for the British Navy, yes.
Yes, in it's day, yeah. Right.
And so I've, I've been exploring this a little bit recently.
And for me, this is almost like the Silicon Valley of its era.
Right, this is true. Because this is the most the
ships were the most advanced technology that we had in our
civilization and and, and Britain was the dominant global
empire of the time with the most advanced technology.
So it's it's reasonable to say that this was the most
technologically sophisticated place on Earth for probably a
couple of centuries. It's.
It's not, it's not far off that, yeah, due due to the all of the
industry and the skill base around we're we're talking late
1700s into the well, in fact, it went from the from the 1700s and
the square rigged warships right the way through to probably the
late 50's. The late 50s is when decline
started. But but all through that time,
yeah, Plymouth was a was a very special place.
And you say decline, deliberate decline, manage decline.
Initially, I would say an inevitable decline because of
course, by the time the Second World War was happening or had
just finished, we, we ended up with a vast Navy, far too many
naval vessels that we could use and support and fund in the
future. So at the end of the Second
World War, I mean, it's a story my father tells me because he
was involved in the dockyard in his life.
Was that basically at one point at the end of the war, there
were so many ships in the harbour at Plymouth, you could
almost walk from one side to the other on ships and of course
they had to go. So immediately after the war
they, the Navy was cut and a lot of ships and, and men went and
then infrastructure went. And then increasingly these
defence reviews came up where they said there's not enough
money for us to have military forces of this side so size.
So everything was cut, the Air Force, the Army and the Navy.
And by the time you got into the, I suppose by the time you
got into the 70s, which is when I joined 72 people were already
getting very worried about ongoing cuts.
I'll, I'll stick with the Navy because I know the Navy cuts in
the Navy that people said we, we can't, we can't sort of
guarantee a defence if these cuts continue.
But of course they did continue. I think there was a reason for
that. Right.
And now we're in a situation where we've got more, more
Admirals than ships, very famously.
Yes, I know. Yes.
She's ludicrous. It's incredible, isn't it?
Yeah. Right.
And this is all. All of these things are
interlink with each other ultimately, I think it's fair to
say. It's, it seems to me when when
you're living it, you can't put all the pieces back.
But particularly when you can look back.
There's a lot of hindsight. And to me, a lot of the cuts I
am sure were because they were already planning one unified
European Union military system and therefore they wanted parity
between the respective military forces.
Because actually you will this, this, this, this parallels
perfectly with European economic integration in the Common market
and then political integration through the 80s and the 90s and
then through to, well, when we, we spoilt everything by deciding
to leave, you know, But you know, the actual block itself is
constantly pushing towards greater integration.
Yeah, and and military UK columns always called it
military unification. So yes.
But don't forget it's Brexit without the exit.
There was never any Brexit. No, that's fair to say.
And they're trying to drag us straight back in again now.
Anyway, we're getting slightly ahead of ourselves.
So we're in the early 2000s and cities around the UK are being
regenerated. Slash.
Destroyed and I was in Nottingham at the time and I
remember the, the, the old lace market buildings getting pulled
down and these new things going up.
And you know, everything's a shopping centre now.
And you know, the, and actually the, the damage that was done.
You can still see when you walk around the centre of with our
cities, you know what was done by by those regeneration
programmes. So you decide to start reporting
on this in some fashion. Like, was it was was it always
your idea or your ambition to have a newspaper?
No, absolutely not. It was.
I have to use the we word straight away because there was
a little group of us who had been active in getting involved
with the Devonport community. So there was myself, there was
another retired Navy guy a bit younger than me.
There was a wonderful guy who ran a little printing shop.
And there was some of the community people.
And the more we discovered the corruption, the more we felt we
should do something about it. And I can't remember where there
was somebody else. There was definitely three of us
in a car. We, we had a car journey and we
were talking about this and I think it was the man from the
print shop who said I think we should produce a, a little
leaflet and push it out there and see what happens.
And he actually then of his own accord drafted 1.
And we looked at it and thought it was so excellent.
We said yeah, let's do it. And that was the first of 500
copies went out of what we call then the Devonport column.
And we, we, we just, it was a bit Private Eye ish because we
tried to keep it humorous. But we were talking about stuff
going on, fraud and corruption and dodgy deals.
And we pushed them, pushed 500 copies out for three months with
not a lot happening. And then suddenly it was like
these things must have spread a bit and people, I will either
would speak to us personally or they'd phone us and tell us more
stuff. And so we took the bold step of
going from an A4 sheet to a an A3 sheet.
So we got 4 pages of fine information and we, you know, we
as seriously as we could because factually we had to be accurate
because we were stepping on some big toes.
We started to report what was happening and shortly after that
I, we had a website set up which was the Devon Port column
website. And then I started to be
contacted by other people around the country who, who recognise
the problems we were talking about.
And so that man from Sheffield got in touch and he said
everything you were describing in Plymouth is happening in
Sheffield. And then somebody in Liverpool,
somebody in Glasgow, Newcastle, London, and then we realised
that what we were seeing wasn't just a Plymouth problem, it was
bigger. Right.
So that that's essentially how we got started and and.
Were you selling these leaflets or?
No, we were handing them out but saying if you want to give us a
donation that would be nice. And I watched the Light
newspaper with interest now because I'm, I'm really pleased
it's there. It's lovely to see all the good
work they're doing. But back in our day that's what
the UK column was doing. So the leaflet eventually got
into a proper size newspaper and we decided to call it UK column
to give it some wider. How do you describe it?
Scope. Scope.
Yeah, yeah. But how many of the how many of
the Devonport ones did you do? And then how long did that
process take of, of, of it of, of the the dots being connected
between the different cities? Oh, I, I, no, I, I reckon, I
reckon nine months. Oh wow.
OK, yeah, Short, short time. This is something that really
surprised me when when suddenly people are contacting me and you
then learnt that somebody in Plymouth had sent their little
Devonport column to a brother or a sister in South Wales.
Yeah. And yeah.
So it was very interesting. It seemed to spread pretty
quickly. Right.
And then and then you became the UK column.
So it was, it was a Devonport national interest and then you
become the UK column and around the same time that the website
goes live is it that's. Yeah.
And the other thing was that we had, we had some very generous
people who, one man, a great guy, did a lot of work for us.
Unfortunately, he's no longer with us.
I mean that. And he died, which was very sad,
but he paid for us to have a little office, tiny, tiny
office. And we were given chairs and
tables and computers and things. And so we set ourselves up
there. And then eventually it was a
little group of retired people, retired professional people.
So, you know, they were comfortably off and several of
them made some quite generous donations, few 1000 lbs.
And this helped us get to the point where we thought we'd try
and print a newspaper properly. And then once we did that on a
donation basis, we were able to fund it for several years.
OK, So that that's how the UK column started and the newspaper
got going and that's when Mike came and joined the team.
And that was a major boost because Mike was very clever at
lots of things. Indeed he is.
And, and so the UK column expanded and in the time we
published it, we, we didn't quite make a million copies, but
we were up at about 940,000 per total.
Total, total total. Yeah.
So, you know, we did try and do one a month and sometimes we
couldn't and it was a bit intermittent, but I can't even
remember how many years that. So that was probably over about
five years, that number of copies.
OK, so, so you're doing, so you're doing 3040 thousand
copies per addition then. Yeah, Right.
OK, this is, I mean, that's actually, that's probably about
the same as the Guardians doing today, to be honest with you.
You know they they don't. Seem that many copies monthly as
not damage, of course, Yeah, sure, yeah.
But it was pretty incredible. It seemed we touched a note and
people got in touch with us and then of course stories came in
and and information and and the thing began to grow.
And how did the editorial process expanded during that
time? Is it quite, quite organic
because you start off with a very specific slice of
corruption that you're seeing around these regeneration
programmes, but then when you start to pull on the thread of
these things and you know, it all just expands out.
Was it just, were you just following where the story?
Was following our noses. And of course, the other thing
is all of us were researching to try and understand what we could
see happening. And then I'd I'd say it's true
that when Mike came on board, Mike had got a lot of interest,
but he still has in the geopolitical stuff.
And so that was a natural expansion.
And we did a lot of work with people who were particularly
concerned about what they saw as a major attack on the
constitution. And we were, well, we helped set
up a group called the British Constitution Group, which did a
lot of public talks about the Constitution and our law, our
system of law and common law. And then each time you did one
of those events or we gave public talks, people just pumped
us full of information about another subject.
So it was all an organic sort of growth.
Yeah. Yeah.
And what, what else was going on around in this space at the
time? Was there anyone else doing
reporting because you've mentioned the light?
The lights come along more recently.
Yeah, much more recently to give them credit.
And we should give them credit. As we began to research, of
course, what we came across is, is quite a lot of older or quite
elderly people who'd actually been producing pamphlets and
writing and even giving talks warning about what was starting
to happen in the country. And a lot of those interfaced
with us, and some of the better ones did some really good talks
for us or wrote articles. And then then the sort of social
scene sort of started very slowly with one or two
individuals who got a name for themselves.
There was a very interesting young guy called John Harris who
suddenly called me one day. He wouldn't want me saying this,
so no disrespect, but you know, he was quite happy that he'd
been a well, he wasn't happy because he'd changed, but he'd
be happy if I said, well, of course he was a football
hooligan in his early days. But he then got interested in
what the police were up to and that had led him to look at the
law and he'd started to research how the law in this country
worked and in particular definitions of the law.
So here was this ex football hooligan who started to know
incredible things because he'd taken the trouble to study
Black's Law Dictionary, which is a big fat book and.
Law Fair. And what words meant and the
fact that when people are in court, they think they
understand words that are being used around them.
But Black's Law Dictionary proved that there was a
completely different meaning to the word.
So people like him came along. And the other thing that came
along were people who were distressed because they'd been
bullied by the system. They might have lost their house
due to a regeneration programme, or they'd been harassed by the
police, or they'd challenged their local council and then
there'd been a backlash. So, so a lot of people who who
were hurting came to us with their stories and they were
invariably campaigners in their own right.
So yeah. So it it, it has been a pretty
interesting 30 years really. I'm sure you've seen it all
World amazing in that time. Can't say all but quite a lot.
I think there's some more we've got to see which we haven't seen
yet. Yeah, that's that's, that's,
that's that's certainly true. So it's one of the things that
column is very well known for and you personally are very well
known for is the focus on issues of child abuse and abuse by the
state and rich individuals and all the different permutations
that that take. When did that appear in on your
radar? In the mix very, very early,
right? Certainly in the first couple of
years that we when when we've got a presence putting out this
little leaflet. I got a call one morning from a
family in Cornwall and their story was that social services
were taking their daughter's baby and they were all
incredibly distressed. This was completely new
territory to me, but we got involved actually.
David Noakes was working with us then at that stage and he he did
a lot of work around this particular case, including
including going into court with a mum.
And what we learnt was that a baby was being taken away from
the mother rather than that mother getting a little bit of
help in order to get over a difficult period.
And it was just alien to us. And then it got a little bit
dark really quickly when one day the grandfather and he was very
distressed and he said the social workers were at the
house. And one of them said to me as if
it was a casual comment, well, you know, if we get the baby, I
get a new kitchen. Wow.
And he said so. Said that to the grandfather.
Yeah. And he said The thing is, was
the lady having some sort of black humour joke?
If if it was a joke, it was bad enough.
But actually he believed, he believed that she was being
serious, that she was going to get some sort of bonus if they
could get the baby. And they did take the baby.
And then we we reported on that case.
And then, of course, a few more cases came out of the woodwork.
But the key one was the lady in South Wales who told me that a
young daughter, 10 or 11, can't remember quite how it was taken
at gunpoint by Neath Port Talbot social services and the American
police in Florida. That's what she told me on the
phone and it she probably spoke to me on the phone for an hour
and a half. It was such a bizarre story.
And and I said, well, what's the evidence?
And she said, I'll, I'll bring you the evidence.
And she came to see me with a big suitcase full of court
documents. And I spent several days working
through those documents with her.
And at the end of the time, I was convinced that the story she
gave was correct. And the story was her daughter
had become I'll. There was no diagnosis.
The GPM got one. The hospital hadn't got one
older. Hey, hospital hadn't got it.
She went to a number of hospitals and then eventually
the girl's so I'll she can't go to school and as the mother
fights to try and find out what's the matter with her
daughter and she's got the daughter at home because the
girl was too I'll to be at school.
She was accused by social services of having Munch house
and by proxy and making the whole thing up and eventually
she got the opportunity to Fascinating little bee.
If people are wondering why I'm twitching, this little bee is
come and see us. He likes your jacket.
Yeah, it's probably what it is, actually.
Yeah, trying to work it out. I'll take it off.
Actually, I think summer's arrived.
It's wormed up a lot. Something's breaking through,
yeah. Sorry.
So she was accused of Munchausen.
My proxy, a daughter was seriously ill and, and in a lot
of pain and eventually the mother discovered that there was
a specialist hospital for children with, with gut problems
in, in Florida. She flew the daughter over
there. Her, her, the grandfather went
with them. They were fully entitled to do
this because at that stage there was no restriction or court
orders from the social services. The little girl was in hospital,
I think for three days. And at the end of that time they
diagnosed that she had Solinger disease, which is multiple
ulceration of the gut. It's intensely painful, but it
relatively easily treatable. So mother and her father, the
grandfather, are there. The little girl is due out of
hospital that day. And Neath Port Talbot Social
Services turned up with an American policeman with a court
order to take the girl. And the grandfather got a bit
agitated and the American policeman did actually draw his
gun and the girl was taken away from mum and the grandfather,
she was put on a plane with the social workers, flown back to UK
on a false passport. All of this all provable.
And they put her in a psychiatric, the little girl in
the psychiatric unit and told her that her pain was imaginary.
And when the mother got back to UK and was able to communicate,
thinking that everything was going to be OK because she had
the diagnosis, the social workers took the diagnosis,
treated the girl for Zollinger but never gave her back to the
mother. Unbelievable.
And that was the story. And the family, who were utterly
lovely people and their friends and supporters.
I came into contact. But the big thing was that the
mother was so emotionally distressed she couldn't give a
presentation herself. So I ended up giving the
presentation and, and the next stepping stone was I can't
remember when, but probably 18 months after that.
Somewhere around there I was invited by a gentleman called
Ian Crane to give a talk at his alternative view.
I think it was AV2IN Bristol. And I gave an hour's talk on
what was called child stealing by the state, what I called
Charles stealing by the state. It was live streamed.
And when I walked out of the room into the foyer, the hotel,
my phone rang. And that was the first call of
another parent saying I've just watched your interview and can I
talk to you because they took my child and that was 2006.
And it's it's never stopped since then.
Wow. Yeah, so as a military man, this
was new territory, but I was very quickly struck by the sheer
maliciousness and brutality of the system.
Well, that's that's that's what I think people will.
Going to take take my jacket off if I may.
The audience will. Don't get too excited, it's only
the jacket. Start swinging it around his
head in a minute. A lot of people will hear that
what you've just described and not be able to understand it
because it sounds insane. You've got a system that is
completely out of control. What was actually going on back
there inside the bureaucracy for it to behave in that fashion
because you've it's completely callous.
It believes it has the right to travel internationally to take a
child from its mother when it, when it's demonstrated that it
did that for the wrong reasons, Not that you should have done it
anyway, right? But it's saying that the, the,
the mother is, is misdiagnosing an illness.
But then it turns out the child does have the illness.
And when it's proven and, and the child is treated, they still
keep the child. I mean, what's happening here,
like this isn't just an institutional failure.
This is that's that's. It's orchestrated.
Right. You could say it's an
orchestrated failure and I could agree with that, but I think the
system is, is more devious and pernicious than that.
So I, I think the system is created to do what it does.
But it, it took me a long time to get my head around it.
And as these cases came in, the, the key thing for me was so it's
different parents might be a mum or a dad or a couple, and
they're from different parts of the country.
So the people would say this happened to me in Cornwall or it
happened in London and in the London borough or it happened in
Scotland or Northern Ireland. And also we did come across
cases affecting Ireland itself and, and even France and
Germany. And when parents talked about
what had happened, inevitably it was like they described a
template, this happened, that happened, they said this, they
did that. And the end result was this, a
key bit being that the moment it got near the family courts, this
is a closed court. There's no jury, there's no
press. There still isn't any proper
press. And, and those courts seem to
make unbelievably cruel judgements which very often
meant the fact that children were taken away from the the
parents. My conclusion in 2025, after
seeing a lot of these cases and in in a number of them working
alongside the parents in order to learn, my conclusion is that
we have a a system which it with the child protection system,
which is being used and abused in order to steal children who
have a financial value. That's so to take the children
with the added bonus around a child is a big package of money
circulating. And the other one is to
breakdown stable family relationships.
It's actually to destroy the family.
And I'll add, and I think it's important to add that some
people would say, well, you know, my daughter's works in
social services and she's a nice person and she wouldn't do this.
And I would say I'd totally accept that.
But we have a system where there are a lot of good people working
in that system. But inside the system is another
system operating, and that is malicious.
And one of the things that happens from time to time, which
is very important, is you get whistleblowers from inside
social services blowing the whistle on exactly the abuses
that I'm talking about and trying to report these days.
Yes, now I hear that a lot from people working in, people who
know people in newspapers or in bits of the government.
And you tell them about some of the things that we report on and
they say, wow, that can't be true because I've got a friend
who's on the editorial team at the Times for.
Example. You know, and they wouldn't do
this. And it's like, OK, you don't
they they can't necessarily see what's going on around them
properly. Yeah, I, I used to find this
very frustrating, this sort of attitude, but I've got, I've got
used to it now and I'm a lot softer in replying it.
The basic problem is most people, for all their faults and
foibles are good. They're basically decent people.
They're not going to do anything nasty to another person, almost
certainly not going to do anything nasty to a child.
And therefore they find it very hard to understand people who
can do nasty things to families and to children.
And, and they will tend to defend, you know, put up
shutters at a subject which is very hard for them to, to
actually understand. And so you, they deflect it.
Oh, well, you know, my brother is a social worker and he's a
nice guy and he's, he's not talking about this.
Well, he probably isn't, because maybe he hasn't come across it,
but it's there and it's real and it's affecting thousands and
thousands of families. And people will put things down
to incompetence or. Yes, cooker.
Oh, it's just, it was a mistake, you know, an inexplicable
mistake, but a mistake nonetheless, right.
But, but actually, they don't understand that.
Actually, no. That's the system doing what
it's supposed to do. Yeah, this is, this is where for
me, key evidence, I call it evidence coming in, was that you
had different parents, different social backgrounds, poor, rich,
different parts of the country telling you that stuff happened
to a template. That's the bit that says to me
this isn't a cock up, this is an incompetence.
This is calculated. Is that camera still going?
Indeed it is. Well, that's really good.
Yeah, all. And the sun's out.
I know, I know. We're still rolling, don't
worry. We're talking serious subjects
and, and we're also laughing. And Ben, you said to me earlier
when we were being a little bit jovial in the rain, we're going
to talk about a serious subject. But I, I'm going to say to you
that it is important to keep a sense of humour about this
because very dark subject and it can pull you into a really bad
place. And also for the families who've
been through it, it's also very important that they somehow keep
a sense of humour about things. And I will be talking more about
this, but a couple of days ago I was able to be with a group of
women who've lost their children, had their children
taken away from them. And although over the years I
have got to know quite a few, I should add up because how many
is it? But it's a lot of mums who've
lost their children. This was the first opportunity
for me to be with with quite a big group of them and in the
first hour, hour and a half, unbelievable stress and anxiety
and tension in the room. And it was almost like the newer
mums had to get through that before they were relaxed enough
to be able to sit and listen and engage with what what was being
discussed, where people were discussing.
How do we expose and solve this problem?
And we specifically talked about the power of laughter and that
whatever was happening to these families and whatever they've
been through, the ability to take themselves somewhere and
get into a much lighter environment and change the
mindset was important. So we're not going to apologise
for laughing. Laughing is a very powerful
weapon. And the other thing which the
irony here has made some of the mums laugh is I did give a
little talk to them and I said if you really want to get back
at the people who are doing these horrible things, you
should be upbeat and smiling because the happier you are, the
more they hate it. They want you in the gutter.
And if you show that you're fighting and you're not in the
gutter, they get very disturbed. They don't know how to deal
with. It they don't know how to deal
with it. And this brought a smile to the
faces of several of the mums who were present in that room.
So that was very good. No, I.
Completely agree with that. So this is so, so 2006 then You
said the first instance of this came across your across your
desk and, and, and it's been just an ongoing process since
then. So it's nearly 20 years.
Yeah, because every time you report, more people come
forward. But the, the thing which makes
it challenging is that you are, you know, I've never been a
normal reporter, but if you, I can imagine you reporter for a
local paper and you want to get whatever the story is, you go
and see the people and you discuss it and you get the
evidence and then you print your story.
But when you engage with people who've had their children
stolen, these are people who are often struggling to keep
themselves together because the experience has been so
shattering. And therefore to engage with
them and get them to trust you to be able to sit down and let
them tell their own story in their their own time frame.
This requires a lot of time. And so to even get the
information to report on it requires you to give a lot of of
time with people who've been traumatised.
And so it's a much longer, slower process.
And so whilst you would think you just sort of get out there
and go and speak to thousands of them, it's not that easy because
every person you speak to, they've got to trust you before
they'll talk to you. And that trust only comes from
building up a rapport and a relationship.
However, I will say that what seems to have happened this year
is that the numbers of mums and dads is, is increasingly now
whether this is the success of things circulating on the
Internet, I don't know. But I, I think that's part of
it. But I, I have been contacted by
a lot of mothers over the last six months and interestingly,
the first thing they've seen of me is on TikTok.
And I say I don't post a TikTok. But apparently another mum has
watched the UK column reports and interviews and started to
cut them up and put them out as TikTok clips and then other
mothers have picked up on this. So something is is happening.
It's beginning to spread. Yes, yeah, so awareness.
But then I thought, you know, I've heard that one of the one
of the many consequences of the lockdowns was and, and the whole
kind of COVID era was, was the the greater levels of
destruction of particularly working class families and the
family courts went into OverDrive.
With that process and probably. More of this is happening as
well, right? So it's a combination of of a
few things. That, that's, that's, that's an
astute observation because a significant, there was a
significant increase in the number of children that went
into care during the lockdown period.
I think we're up at over 100,000 now.
And if people picked up when I mentioned money, the simple
thing to realise is that the moment and authority touches a
child, that money, that, that child is generating a flow of
money. So social services are involved
then, then legal teams get involved, then specialists get
involved, clinical psychologists or psychologists, guardian and
lit in all sorts of support workers and even foster carers.
And This is Money circulating. And many years ago I would talk
about my estimate of one court case for a child where I said
roughly 200,000 lbs circulates fees for everybody, the judge,
court, social workers, the experts for expert reports,
£10,000 a pop depending on who's writing it.
So the moment they touch a child, that's 200,000 through a
court case. And then if the child goes into
the care system, somebody's being paid either either as a
foster care carer or in a children's home.
And if the child is a normal child, maybe you're talking £500
a week, but if the child's got any form of special needs, mild
special needs, you're probably talking 1000 lbs a week fees
being paid. If you've got a child with
severe special needs, you might be the sum might be five 6000
lbs a week. So if there's 100,000 children
who've been through one court hearing, you're into a multi
billion # industry before the next level of nastiness has
started, which is that children in care have disappeared from
sight. And so these are easy pickings
for the for the sex abusers and the people who will make money
out of the abuse of children. Yes, that's unbelievable.
That is how the system is working.
And at that point I will when people are listening to this and
say no, this can't be true. At the gathering I was at a
couple of days ago with with the mums, I showed the clip of the
former. I don't know whether he's alive
still, but he was a Tory whip called Tim Fortescue and he is
on YouTube speaking to BBC Camera and in it he says they,
the MPs, would come to us with problems.
It could be anything, it could be money, it could be, it could
be little boys and we would fix it for them because, and you
might find this a little bit hard, we would fix it for them
because if we did they would do as we asked.
So what you had is an MP working as a whip openly admitting to
ABBC camera that when politicians MPs were abusing
little boys it was covered up so they could be blackmailed into
following the party policy. So and that was then broadcast
on the BBC. It's on the BBC, the clip clip
still up. On well, it's, it's, it's the,
you know, to our shame really the, a lot of this stuff has
just become understood as part of the course in the country.
You know this idea of bishops and choir boys and people make
jokes out of this stuff and it's nothing funny about it at all.
There is nothing funny about it, but it's it's dismissed when you
point a finger at the establishment, the political
establishment or the, you know, the true establishment figures.
If you point a finger and you say this organ, this
establishment, this system is not only breaking families apart
to steal their children, many of those children are then being
trafficked into an abuse system. You are Pooh poohed.
The BBC laughs at you. And then the latest gimmick is
that we're to believe that the only people abusing children are
the are the Asian grooming gangs.
Now, are there Asian grooming gangs out there?
Absolutely. Have they been operating for
years? Yes.
But there's also Italian gangs, there's Bangladeshi gangs,
There's all sorts of people abusing children because one,
some people get a kick out of it, but also there's a lot of
money circulates around it. But for some remarkable reason,
at the moment the country is being pumped full of the idea
that the only people abusing children are Asian grooming
gangs. And this of course is incorrect.
And it also means that the people who are really in control
of the system, including the family court system, are are
they must be laughing their socks off because they can do
what they like while everybody else is focusing on the Asians.
Yes, limited hangout. You know you can get angry about
this. Career.
But while you're angry about that, you're ignoring the fact
that actually the whole political system runs on this,
and it has done for that's going to say decades.
It's probably longer than decades.
Well, this is the key thing. If you, if you say, how long has
this been running? It's actually been running.
It's we could say it's been running for thousands years, but
let's keep it. It's been running for hundreds
of years and it's across the abuse of children is across all
sectors of society. It it isn't dirty old men in
raincoats, it can be judges, it can be politicians, it can be, I
believe, members of the royalty. It, it can be anybody who's got
a predilection for this, this horrible abuse.
But if you if you have that as an accepted part of the system,
whereas Tim Fortescue says we'll cover it up, then it's
completely logical to me that you're going to be running
systems which say they're there to protect children and in fact
they're doing the exact opposite.
So why was nothing done with the Asian grooming gangs?
Well, they didn't want to do anything with the Asian grooming
gangs because if they'd fully investigated that, it would have
led them on to the other grooming gangs, including the
political grooming gangs, including, you know, people who
were involved with King Korra, Boys Home and all this stuff
where we're getting to the highest levels of the state,
including the security services. So they didn't want to
investigate what the Asians were doing because it's the old
dominoes lined up. They start investigating too
deep into the Asians and who was facilitating the Asian abuse.
And then the next minute, Oh dear, the police are implicated.
And then when the police are implicated, well, you've got to
start looking at the security services because if you say MI 5
did not know that this form of criminality was going on and we
also know politicians are involved, then we say beginning
to look like the security services are implicated as well
and. Beginning to look like the
entire structure has been set up to enable it.
And every single. Component part of it.
Can we just talk quickly about common purpose because you
started off seeing corruption around the way money was flowing
in from the EU and into construction projects and the
council and local businesses in Plymouth.
And then the, the, this child abuse issue came up very early
on in the process of you beginning to report on that.
But these, these, they're not distinct things, they are
intrinsically linked to each other, right?
They are. It's basically one seam of
corruption. You're just seeing it from
different angles. Well, that's exactly how I did
see it because I I couldn't put these things together initially.
I right, I found that in Plymouth when I went to look at
things that were going clearly wrong or shouldn't have been
happening around the regeneration thing, particularly
where European grant money was concerned.
It was as though people were communicating and operating
together, but I couldn't understand what was uniting and
what was bringing them together. And it was only one day when I'd
been talking to a group of local people in Devonport about, about
this, what I was seeing. And, and I said, there's
something which is, it's like a Jelly that a gel that holds it
all together. And this man said to me very
quietly, well, I, I think it's common purpose.
And I said, what's that? And he said, well, it's a, it's
a really weird charity. And I eventually persuaded him
to meet me. Was it later that evening or the
next day? I think it was the next day.
And I, I said, tell, tell me about this thing.
What is it? And he said, well, it's, it's
really weird. It's, it's, it's, it's this
organisation and they say they're training future leaders
and, and they're all over the city, but you never actually
know who they are. And, and I say, well, what do
they do? When he said, well, they're
training future leaders, but they also, and they run courses
for people. But you also find they're
working as a little club to get the, excuse me, their agenda
moving. And it was a really weird story.
Well, when I pushed him at one point and said, will you tell me
more? He, he said I'd rather not.
And I came to the conclusion that he was scared.
And I went home and I went online and very quickly you can
find a, a common purpose website.
And I'll say it looked completely different from the
one now. It was very dark, very dark
website and it was talking about training these future leaders
and I still really couldn't work out what it was doing, but it
was all about future society and you know, the world was going to
be better. We're training all these leaders
to work together and, and then the next.
Breaking down silos and were they using that kind of
language? There well, I came across that
later when I started to look at Julia Middleton, It was the the
then chief executive and she, she wrote a book called Beyond
Authority in which not only did she talk about breaking down
silos, she she also described how common purpose would work.
It would, it would build networks and it would
steamroller over people who challenged it.
It was brutal language and I was fascinated by it.
But then a certain gentleman sent me a very interesting
envelope one day and it was lists of common purpose
graduates. And subsequently it emerged that
common purpose trained people and they could then go on to a
common purpose database so that they could, if you trained in
Plymouth and you you were doing whatever you were doing in
Liverpool, you could have a look on their database and see who
the common purpose graduates were in Liverpool.
It's like a quasi secret society.
And eventually one of the very kind Common Purpose graduates
who was not convinced by what they were doing, shared the
database. And then, and then it was just
phenomenal because I discovered that lots of people who I'd
been, who'd worked around me in Plymouth, were involved with
Common Purpose but had never mentioned it, never declared it.
And then you could see how as an organisation it was manipulating
people across society, getting them to believe that by becoming
a Common Purpose leader, you were going to be some special
person who was going to change the world.
And eventually when I started to do a lot of Freedom of
Information requests, I, I was able to show documents where
police chiefs, police chiefs themselves who'd been recruited
by Common Purpose were then holding internal meetings in
police time where they were recruiting other people to be
involved in common purpose work. And where to my analysis, much
of that work was in breach of all forms of separation of
powers and and this sort of thing and the.
That's the key from the separation of powers from.
The we can put up a link to this, but I'll, I'll mention it
to camera because we have a very old website which is called CP
exposed.com, cpexposed.com. And if you go on that website,
it's very old. It's a little bit, what's the
word rustic? But essentially it is full of
documents, real documents, genuine documents about common
purpose and it's even still got that original database there.
But you can see how an inappropriate dialogue was
engineered between professionals, the police, fire
service, NHS, universities, local authorities, where common
Purpose was not only installing a highly political agenda for
change it it was also it was also encouraging professional
people to have an allegiance to common purpose and its change
agenda over and above what they should have been doing as their
proper formal job. Very pernicious, nasty
organisation and. And, and, and, and UK column
research over the years has revealed the where we've seen
issues around care homes, children being taken, that
they're very often in the immediate vicinity, people
who've come out of these programmes.
I I'm going to have to say there, because I've got to be
honest about this. I couldn't say it as tightly as
that. Yeah.
I think what I would say is that where we could see breakdown as
a result of manipulation by common purpose, you were very
often looking at the same authorities.
Right. Where a lot of dirty stuff was
going on. And to me this makes sense
because if you know, if you've got a professional working
inside a local council and they believe doing a professional job
is, is the right thing and telling the truth and, and, and,
you know, having a morality about their professional work.
If you start to interfere with that and breakdown that, that
professional moral basis, all sorts of stuff is going to start
happening anywhere from bullying to theft to ultimately
interfering with children. If that's your if you know, if
that's your thing. But what what I what I would not
say is that because somebody that you know has been involved
with common purpose or trained by them, that automatically
means that they've done something nasty with children.
Because that's not true in my in my book.
So here we are in 2025, sat on the edge of Dartmoor.
It's very cloudy, but the sun. There's sun coming from
somewhere I can't quite work out where from.
And I will say that for me, people are really going to wake
up, never mind what's happening in the UK, what's happening in
out in the Middle East or what they think is happening, you
know, in UK. If you really want to know what
the danger it is, the danger is that the state is attacking
every single family. If it isn't the fact people have
lost jobs and they're poor, it's attacking the identity of men
and women. So they didn't even know if
they're a man or a woman anymore.
And we've got a state that if it can, we'll steal your children.
And if you think that because you're a professional, you're
you're academic or you're intellectual, you're safe,
you're absolutely not. Because they've demonstrated
they will go for any child that they take a particular fancy to.
So in my book, you know, a key part of the work I do with with
UK column is to expose and ultimately to stop state
stealing of children. And I'm going to say to you,
Ben, I'm not going to stop doing this because the more I'm in
contact with these families, the more I know that you can't just
walk away from them. Lots done, lots done, lots to
do. Indeed.
Yeah, very good. Well, thank you for the
conversation, Brian. I really appreciate it.
Well, I'm going to thank you Ben, actually, because it's
quite therapeutic for me to do this because although people
have done interviews about with me on certain subjects you've
taken me through, it's a bit of this is your life, isn't it?
You've taken me through a big chunk of my life, yes.
And I, I like where we began, which is that you're a watchman.
And I think that's what you're still doing today.
I think that's the job that you're playing.
This has been suggested to me before, Ben, so maybe there's
some truth in that. Yeah, maybe very good.
Thank you very much. Thank you.
Cheers Brian all. Right.