None. Well, I grew up in Belfast.
I was pretty much born the year that the so called Troubles
started there and lived there until that all ended.
I think I left more. It wasn't long after it finished
that that I left for various reasons.
And I mean, I go back there a couple of times a year at the
moment, but after my my sort of professional background was was
technology and worked in a whole bunch of different industries,
ended up working in the financial industry for a hedge
fund. And, and then at the end of that
five year stint, I decided to, they did a little bit of a
break. So I went and lived in France
for a couple of years. And then we, when we decided to
come back to the UK, we thought ourselves where we going to go.
And well, around that same time I met Brian Gerrish.
And so we decided to come to Plymouth for our sins and we've
been here since. And so I was already
typesetting, laying out the the UK called newspaper, newspaper
looking after the website and so on while I was still in France.
When we came back to to Plymouth, I more or less joined
full time and took on a couple of other sort of professional
contracts to sort of fund the thing for the first few years.
But January is our 20th anniversary and that's going to
be, it's going to be quite a, quite a celebration next year.
That's phenomenal, 20 years in the alternative independence
base. Right, right.
And, and, you know, the story began really with, with Brian,
just when he left the, when he left the Navy, he, he came to
Plymouth, was working in the business sector and just began
to see the sheer corruption and then came up against the old,
our old friend common purpose. And, you know, from that point,
he just started being contacted with people that were
experiencing the same types of things that he was experiencing.
So, you know, corruption at local level was certainly how
the column got started. And, and then of course, since
then we've, we've appreciated that a lot of the corruption
that's seen at a local level has, has a foundation in global
politics and international politics, geopolitics.
And, and we start to see the, the local effects of, of the
sort of more globalist World Economic Forum types of policies
rippling down to local level. So what he was experiencing at
that point certainly involved a lot of EU funding and, and, and
money coming from, you know, tax exempt foundations and these
types of things. And that's that's really what
we've been covering ever since mainly.
Is that why UK column has lasted?
I think UK column has lasted because we appreciated from the
beginning that this was not going to be a 5 minute deal,
that there are no quick fixes to to the wrongs of the world that
we had to make a commitment and and he certainly had made a
commitment. I made that commitment.
Everybody else that's come to work with us has made similar
commitments. And we we recognise that, that,
you know, it's easy to fall into the trap of demoralisation and
and getting bored and, and getting the idea that this is
that this is all unfightable. But the fact of the matter is
there have been numerous wins over the years.
And I would say that the other thing to keep in mind is that,
that when we look at the documentation that that
globalists, policy makers have set, have have written over the
years, they have set deadlines for themselves and they have
they have not met any of those deadlines.
And, and the main reason for that, I believe is because of
the push back from ordinary people.
And so, you know, when I see people saying, well, there's no
point doing this, there's no point doing that because it
doesn't really happen. It absolutely has an effect.
And, and, and now that there is a slight downside to this and
that is that just speaking purely personally, I believe
that that this, what we're facing, the corruption that
we're seeing only is dealt with when it becomes obvious to the,
to the most unwilling participant.
And we saw that during COVID, for example, because, because
that was, that was the lockdown to the vaccine policies.
These were in everybody's faces. They couldn't avoid it.
It was affecting them all personally.
And, and so everybody got, you know, lots and lots of people
got engaged. And since then, we have seen a
massive fall off in the number of people getting engaged or
staying engaged because because they see that that threat has
disappeared. And in fact, it hasn't
disappeared because the policies that brought us COVID were there
before. They're there since nothing has
changed. And so, you know, I think one of
the one of the messages that we have always tried to keep
pushing out there is that, you know, everybody needs to be
making the long term commitment and sticking with it because
that's the only way that we can succeed.
Yeah, that's something, you know, I spoke about a few weeks
ago. This, this, this, I this
tendency of people to, quote unquote, go back to sleep.
It's very strange, you know, Covid's over now.
There we go. It's all back to normal.
But the the irony is that it absolutely isn't.
No, it isn't that that particular gambit has has been
played and and I believe it failed spectacularly, but what
it absolutely demonstrated was the willingness of the the
national governments right across the Western world, at
least the the willingness of national governments to to treat
their populations extremely badly.
But you know, we see the same policy in the Assisted dying
Bill that's going through Parliament at the moment.
We, we in the UK, we see that the World Economic Forum hasn't
gone any, gone anywhere. Agenda 21 and Agenda 2030
haven't gone anywhere. Net zero policy is being pushed
forward as the war policy. You know, the, the, the, the
absolute insanity that's being displayed by Western leaders at
the moment where, where they on one hand are saying we've got to
build a war machine to take on Russia.
And on the other hand, we've got the United States Navy being
beaten by Yemenis who have who Yemen, which is the poorest
country in the world. And, and are we seriously trying
to persuade ourselves that we could take on Russia or China or
both? It's, it's insane.
So, you know, we, the first thing we've got to recognise is
that, that our political leaders are basically unhinged at the
moment. I think part of this is because
the the policy agenda has not progressed at the speed that it
was supposed to have the deadlines to be missed and
they're coming under massive pressure.
That's a good point. So a lot of people who look at
these big pictures tend to assume that it's all a well
oiled machine and it really isn't.
There's a lot of infighting, there's a lot of competing
happening at the at the highest levels, which also adds to to
the failures. That's absolutely correct.
And we've got to appreciate that, you know, human beings are
human beings. Some of them display slightly
more psychopath psychopathic traits than others, but you
know, when you get groups of people together, uh, there is
inevitably, umm, differences of opinion.
Uh, sometimes this can lead to significant conflict within
groups. Uh, and uh, the power, so called
power elites are no different to anybody else.
So if anybody's worked in a group and campaigning or any
kind of activism, we all, we all have experienced breakdowns
within as different opinions come in and different views
about which direction to go. And that's this is all normal in
a sense, but but for them that of course if they have deadlines
to meet causes them problems as well.
Yeah. I mean, if you look at Agenda
2030, I mean the deadline is obviously 20-30, but it's very
clear that a bunch of those ambitions are just not going to
be met. And that is because of the
extreme complexity of of human nature.
It's also because they, I, I think they have a, a fairly
arrogant view of humanity. I think that they look down on
humanity as being, you know, parasitic and not very clever
and so on. But in fact, they're not the
sharpest tools in the box either.
And you know, they, although the, although the main focus of
their, of their play acting changes, you know, one day it's
COVID, next day it's war policy. If you look at at the events,
the big events that have been there created in order to drive
change in society, 91177 the whole terrorism thing, COVID
doesn't matter what it is, they're, they're modus operandi
are the same. You know, it's the, the way that
they structure these operations is the same.
And people recognise this and they know when they're being
played. A lot of people do.
And, and so, and so you know that a lot of people may not be
willing to openly say things the way you and I might openly say
things. And I've, you know, I, I've,
I've had people say to me in the past, you know, your views are
extreme, but actually people recognise when they're being
played and, and, and so they do resist in a certain sense.
And that undoubtedly has happened time and time again.
I've had that same accusation that my views are extreme, but
that doesn't make any sense because what are the metrics?
People only say that when it's outside of their own comfort
zone. Oh well, that person's extreme,
but it's never them who's extreme.
So like, I don't think that means anything.
I think that if, if you're perceived to be presenting
something which is not reality yet, then that is perceived as
being extreme. So, so you know that comment,
I'm going to say that comment was made to me for the first
time probably in 2008 or 2009 when we were saying things like
this is what's coming. And, and that was that was
viewed by some people as being extreme.
Of course, you look back at what was said in 2008 and 2009, in
2020 and 2021, and actually what was said then isn't extreme
anymore because it's actually happened, right?
Yes, so, so, so the, the, the perception of extreme views is
something which as, as the activities of the political
class becomes more and more extreme and, and it, it
absolutely has become more and more extreme than than of
course, what was perceived as extreme by by us at one point is
no longer perceived that way. How did COVID impact your your
world view? Your paradigm.
It didn't impact it at all because it was not a surprise.
I mean, you know, when was the first SARS 2000 and.
Three, I think, yeah. What was a surprise was wasn't a
surprise, but it shouldn't have been a surprise.
So if it if it was a surprise, it was the fact that that, or
maybe it was no, it was swine flu.
It was swine flu. They tried.
They tried the same gag with swine flu in 2010.
Ten I. Think wasn't it?
Yeah. Some sometime around then and
and just to give one example, Channel 4 News, which is, you
know, a, a, a public service pro Channel 4 is a public service
broadcaster in the UK, the BBC is the main public service
broadcaster and of course it's funded by taxpayer money,
effectively through the so called licence fee.
But Channel 4 News Channel 4 is a commercial channel, which is
but it's also a public service broadcaster.
And so it has certain rules that it has to follow.
And for many years it probably ran the best mainstream news
programme for many years. That I'm not saying was good,
I'm just saying it was better than all the others, Right.
So, so it's all relative. That started to change when the
proxy war in Syria began. So that started to change in
2011 and over the subsequent years Channel 4 News began
working directly with terrorists in, in Syria and so on and, and,
and we started to see the the standard of the output from
Channel 4 becoming much more propagandist.
So, so when the when the swine flu thing hit, they actually
produced some really good reports on how the
Pharmaceutical industry was attempting to to generate fear
within society and, and create a situation where they could sell
their products. And then when COVID hit, despite
the fact that it was exactly the same playbook, exactly the same
playbook that was being used, Channel 4 News completely
flipped and went the other way and got right behind the
narrative. So I'm going to say that that
when when the COVID thing began, it was, you know, December 2019,
we started to hear this, the sort of the first hints of it.
And January, February, March, it was starting to build.
It was probably late April before UK column was really
engaging with that topic. And, and, and this is one of the
things that some of the criticism we get from, from
sometimes, you know, you haven't commented on XY or Z.
And one of the things that we prefer to do is to actually get
a better, no knee jerk reactions to stuff we want to, we want to
actually analyse and get a better view of what, of what's
going on around us before we comment on something.
So it took us a little bit to start get commenting on, on, on
COVID. But and, and certainly, you
know, when we did, when we did start commenting on that, I was
getting, you know, my, my, my father, for example, was saying
you sure about this? You sure you're right about
this. It could go, it could go wrong
for you if you're not and this kind of thing.
But but actually, I think we, we, we more or less had it
understood from the beginning. How do you think?
Let me rephrase that. Why do you think that there are
people like us who are willing to engage in in these streams of
thought? I think.
You've got, I think you've got people that play in the game and
you've got people that don't and the vast majority of people
don't. But why I'm not, I don't know
that I have an answer to that. I think that, I think that
everybody that I mean, I think that, that on the on in the
political elites, you certainly have a proportion of the
population who are inclined to desire power and desire
influence and and that's that's what drives them on our side of
the argument. I think that most people have
experienced something in their lives which, which has triggered
some kind of reaction, you know, whether that's, I mean, Northern
Ireland was I, I, I, I don't want to underplay what, what it
was because of some real brutality happened on both sides
in that conflict. But you know, at the same time,
in terms of, of global conflicts, you've got to put it
into perspective, 30 years of conflict and 3 1/2 thousand
deaths. Well, there's, you know, there's
been days in Gaza where there's been 3 1/2 thousand people
killed in a day or in a, in a couple of days, you know, so, so
in Syria the same. So, you know, we got to keep the
thing. It was a low intensity
operation, that whole thing. But just to just to give an idea
of, of what sort of, again, I don't like to use the term woke
me up because I don't think I don't, I don't, I just don't
like that that entire concept. But but when I was quite young,
my father started a business. He got himself some premises in
on a, on an industrial estate. And he'd been at it for about
less than a year and it was blown up by the IRA and not
because it was an industrial estate.
There was no, there was no, there was no political reason
to, to attack that particular location.
But the reason was that in fact most of the most of the
paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland were were using were
basically running a mafia operation.
So they, they were splitting Belfast up into sections and,
and this was your section to run their protection racket.
And the, and the landlord of the, or the owner of the
industrial estate hadn't paid their protection money.
So the place was blown up, right.
But the thing about it was we, we knew some people in the
police and, and a friend of ours told us that that his colleague
had watched the bomb being placed in the car and watched
being driven down the road, had watched being left at the
location and had been told to leave it alone.
And, and you say to yourself, well, hold on a second, this is
through the Royal Ulster Constabulary.
This is, they're supposed to be fighting that the IRA, why are
they being told to leave an explosive device alone and
allowing a bomb to go off and, and something which is not
involved in the conflict. And, and it became absolutely
declared to us that that people within the police force in
Northern Ireland were being handed brown envelopes.
And so then it's, it's not a, then you've got a situation
where where people that are supposed to be fighting for
political ideals are in fact compromising those ideals by, by
directly paying off and engaging with the people on the other
side. So, so there's, there's
therefore more to this conflict than meets the eye.
And that's not just that just was the trigger that got me
asking questions. And then I started, I started
looking into other areas and so on.
So, you know, other, for other people, they have a much harder
time and for other people, it's because of being subject to some
form of abuse, for example, or it's because they've come into
contact with common purpose or it's because they've come, come
into contact with, I mean, come into contact with some kind of
diversity training or something. Something has triggered them.
And, and, and all it takes is for that trigger to happen and
the questions start being asked. And then before you know it, you
actually want to try to do something about what's going on
around you. Mathias Desmet says
approximately 30% of people have those experiences where they
will kind of see through things. But at at any given stage around
70% will will will not necessarily well about 30% will
just simply be switched off. But then around that middle
section, so you got 3030 on either side and then that middle
section, which which is the largest will tend to be either
aware but not really say anything.
Not they don't want to rock the boat or anything like that.
So I, I think that's fairly accurate from my own experience
over the last few years. If I think about 2020 when this
whole thing started, I immediately, immediately thought
something's wrong. Yeah, this doesn't make sense.
But the majority of people around me, you know, believed
it. This is serious.
Hold on. We need to, we need to stay away
from our folks. You know, we don't want to kill
them. That that kind of thing.
And, and I felt like I was one of the very few who was either
off my head or, or I saw something that that others
didn't. And I and I could never
understand why it was like that. Yes, I mean, I, I can't give any
great insight other than, you know, I can't get into come on,
Mike, to why to why the average person just sits there and does
nothing. I I don't but, but you know, it
has to be said that, you know, a big proportion of the people
that consider themselves awake are happy to just sit there and
do nothing. They consume content, they
consume the fair porn and they're particularly engaged
with the fair porn, but they don't want to actually get
involved in doing anything about it because that that is actually
scary for people that. Is a really big issue for me.
It is this idea that people are consumers of sensation and fear.
They will rather share hysterical stories than say
something that is a solution. It's, it's one of the reasons
that, you know, the, the column is, has a lot of support, but we
also have a lot of people that don't consider us to be serious
or we, they consider us to be a, some kind of limited hangout or
they consider us to be shells of some kind.
And, and part of the reason for that is that we don't jump on
the sensationalist fear porn bandwagons.
We try to be as level headed about what's going on around us
as we can. And we're, we're trying to
minimise the, the impact of the, of the scariness of everything
and try to be, you know, as, as I say, as level about things as,
as we can. We, you can't, you can't talk
about the topics that we talked about and, and make them, you
know, soft and fluffy that, that, that isn't possible
because actually what's happening is, is pretty
unpleasant in, in a lot of cases.
We've got to recognise and be realistic about what's going on.
But the, the, the sensationalism doesn't help.
And and but I do, you know, but unfortunately it's that kind of
content that tends to get the real traffic.
It's it's akin to driving past an accident that's just
occurred. Everybody will slow down to have
a look to see the carnage. Well, they'll, they'll have a
look, but they will it's, it's very rare that somebody will
stop. I mean, just to give a practical
example of this, Charles was was driving up the waterway some
time ago and somebody had fallen or jumped off a motorway bridge.
He was lying on the side of the road and everybody was just
driving past. He was the only person to stop.
What? Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, it was quite, quite incredible.
And, and, you know, really, we've got to, we do have to
start asking some serious questions of ourselves.
I think now you know, what, what is, what is it actually going to
take to, to, to sort problems out?
Well, one thing is just to make, as I say, to make a commitment
to not walk past, to actually find a way to, to resist.
And and that my opinion that begins with ourselves, that
begins with our lifestyles, that begins with our choices for
where we put our money. It's and that that just
something as simple as not shopping in a supermarket, as as
buying stuff from a local provider, a local farmer,
whatever it is looking after our own health.
So we're not in the care system in any shape, in any way, shape
or form. And and then once we have sorted
ourselves out to a certain degree, then maybe looking at
what we can do outside of ourselves.
But it starts with ourselves. I mean one of the things.
Yeah. And one of the things that I,
that I was really surprised about was, you know, last at the
end of September last year, my father passed away.
And, and in the year up to the point, he had a good life.
He had a healthy life up until about a year before he went and
in that year he unfortunately had to engage with the the care
system and he never he didn't have to go into a care home.
He was able to stay at home until until he died, which was
lovely. But with the best will in the
world, the carers that came to look after him didn't have time
to be loving or gentle or they, they just didn't have time.
They were under pressure. They had to be there.
They had to get the jobs done. They had they were, they were
with them twice a day. They had to be there.
They get the jobs done, they get to the next place.
And and so if he was not in the mood or or was just being
difficult, they that that became they were reacting badly to that
and so on just because they didn't have the time, right.
And I said to myself, I'm not going to end up now.
Of course you can't make any guarantees in life, but I said
to myself, I'm not going to end up needing care.
Now, a lot of people will have noticed that if you look back at
UK column news a year or two ago, I was significantly carried
more weight than I am at the moment.
And that's because I decided that I was going to do something
about my health. And I have decided to do
something about my health and my fitness.
And my goal in life is to know, in terms of my own part, my own
personal fitness, is to attempt to live for as long as I can, as
fit as I can, and basically keel over dead at some point, right?
I do not want to be reliant on a cursor now.
So that's one part of the story. The other part of the story is
that my wife works with primary school children.
She works with special needs kids mainly, but but she's
working in increasingly in the UK, special needs kids are being
put into mainstream primary school.
So she's working in a mainstream primary school and she's working
in a challenging part of the city where where the kids are
from, poor backgrounds and so on.
But nonetheless, these kids are some of them are still needing
to be how they're still wearing nappies at 7 and 8 years old in
some cases right now, this young generation of kids that's coming
up are going to be the the kids. Some of them are going to be the
kids that are going to be manning the care homes and
providing the care for old age care.
When you and I are needing that. And I'm saying to myself, if you
think things are bad with that situation now, I just wait 20
years, 30 years, right? So, so anyway, I decided I would
because I had a good friend, a guy I've known for many, many
years who's been working on this himself.
He's a few years older than I am.
And, and so I had him, a guy called David Siegel, I had him
on the UK column a couple of times for an interview to talk
about longevity, not in the sense of living longer, but
living healthy longer and fitness and, and the types of,
as you know, if you're over 50 years old, what types of
exercise do you need to do because you've got to avoid
injury and these kinds of things and so on.
And those interviews probably had the lowest engagement of
anything. And I just thought it was, well,
hold on a second, guys. We're talking about stuff that
actually should be important to all of us.
And it's not about, we weren't trying to sell anything.
We were just giving advice and and I couldn't work out why, why
that that had low engagement. It was it was I, I don't quite
get it to to this point. I have to admit I.
I have exactly the same thought process.
It's something that has fascinated fascinated me for a
while. Why?
Solutions based, or shall we say white pull conversations just
seem to get no traction. That's where it begins.
It begins with ourselves and, and, and the problem, you know,
one of the problems is that that I see so many people saying,
well, what can we do about it? And they're looking for some
big, high level answer that's going to immediately.
So this is part of the reason why everybody's been so
enthusiastic about Donald Trump, for example, or Nigel Farage or
these types of characters, because they think that these
people are going to come and solve the issues for everybody.
Ain't going to happen. I'm sorry, saviour.
Right. And you know, for example, just
another quick example, in 2018 when the when the Brexit
referendum result came in, we got on the UK column news the
following day, the following morning and lunchtime and said,
look, guys, this isn't what it seems.
This is Brexit without the exit. We're not leaving.
Don't believe a word of it. And the number of people that
that wrote in and said you're horrible people because could
you not have given us at least one day of celebration?
No, no, sorry. It's a symbol of Trump.
This is this is not the answer. This is not the answer.
The answer is going to come bottom up.
It's not going to come top down. And but unless we are healthy in
every way within ourselves, we're not going to find the
solutions. It's because.
People are wanting a saviour, yes.
Yeah, yeah. But it's, it's also, it's also,
I'm going to say it's also because a saviour means that we
don't have to do it for ourselves, correct?
But that is an issue I've had with I, I call it the
personality cult of Trump. And it's not Trump's fault.
He's clearly very good at, at, you know, at, at populism.
But for example, something that's bugged me a lot, I've
spent the last few years trying to dismantle the COVID
narrative. Trump comes in and suddenly says
there was a lab leak. And now millions of people are
back where they were three years ago.
Because if you believe there was a lab leak, then you therefore
are legitimising the claim that there was a pandemic.
I don't believe that there was a pandemic or that there was a lab
leak. But now how do you fight that?
Because this is, this is the machine, you know, and, and now,
and now you've got all the people who love him and they
don't want to disagree with him. So they kick the can down the
road. So this is a great example in a
lot of the, the in a lot of the the stuff that I see being
shared in social media, there is no internal consistency in the
argument, right? So it was a lab leak but nobody
died? Well if it was a lab leak and it
was a bio weapon, it wasn't a very effective bio weapon if
nobody died. So who gives a damn It was a if
it was a lab leak. The lab leak story then becomes
a non story right? Because there was no there was
no bio weapon if nobody died from it.
So what are you saying? What is your argument?
Are you now saying that that that all the people that died in
2020 and 2021 died of SARS COV 2?
Because those same people will probably say on a different
occasion that there's no such thing as a virus?
Well, if there's no such thing as a virus, how can there be a
lab leak? So, you know, there's, there's
some very bad thinking going on within the community in many
ways. And, and this is this again,
comes back to the point of we've got to sort ourselves out first.
We've got to, we've, we've got to develop and, you know,
actually analyse what's being said to us and what we're
sharing. And, and yes, today it might be
convenient to believe that there was a lab leak because I but,
and the other aspect of this, by the way, is when we look at
who's actually pushing the lab leak story, I'm not talking
about Trump or at the political level.
I'm talking about at the deep state level, the likes of
Richard Dearlove, for example. Well, have we forgotten that
Richard Dearlove was the same man who pushed the yellow cake
story that brought us into the war in Iraq, right.
So, so the same man is now pushing the lab leak story.
Why is he doing that? Is it because he actually
believes that there was a leak from a lab and or is it because
he's, you know, OK, he's retired head of MI 6, but in fact, he's
still a deep state actor. Is it because he's pushing for
war with China, which is what I believe he's absolutely doing?
Right. So so, you know, we've we've got
to get our story straight and try to get some, some
consistency in the arguments that we're making.
Yeah. And.
Also the the lab leak narrative as you just pointed out feeds
the anti China narrative which is very much in the cross hairs
now of the US. So look, no matter what you
think about Donald Trump as he is, he is one person, and around
them is the biggest deep state operation on the entire planet,
right? And he is going to be no matter,
no matter what he is, he's got to be influenced by the people
that are, that are around him. And many, many of those people
believe that China is the biggest threat to their way of
life. No, what is their way of life?
The, the first thing we've got to recognise that their way of
life is not our way of life, because what we're talking about
here is people that are, you know, from the billionaire
class. And So what they're saying is
that they're, they're cushy number that they've been on for
the last several decades is a lot of that revenue is, is
disappearing into other countries like Russia and China
and which they aren't getting the benefit of.
So, so of course they're going to start pushing against that
now. The fact that they created the,
the, you know, by exporting the, the jobs and the, and the
technology to China in the 1st place, that, that, that irony
that, you know, that we can just set that aside as far as they're
concerned. But China has become the enemy
because it can't be exploited anymore in the way that it was
20 or 30 years ago. It's actually really interesting
because on the one hand we want to talk about Trump and Putin
and Xi Jinping, right? And these are powerful leaders,
but they're only powerful within certain parameters that are
given to them. And because you talk about the
deep state, the DoD, the CIA are exceptionally powerful.
And then, of course, the central bankers are are even more
powerful. Yes, but again, it's clear that,
you know, you know, a lot of people have have a world view
that, that, that, you know, what we're facing is some kind of
cohesive, some kind of cohesive thing that that is, is
controlling everything. No, it's quite disjointed.
Yes, I don't see it that way at all.
I, I see, I see utter chaos actually on the other side.
And and although they're, you know, and I, I don't see a huge
amount of agreement about exactly, you know, they, they
may have some basic agreement on general, general direction.
But but yeah, but you know, we, we all know that the deep state
exists. You know, we've UK columns just
run a conference in Cheltenham on this topic and, and we gave
some insight into what, you know, the bits of the deep state
that we can see. And we had some people talking
there that that had have worked for the deep state in the, in
the past, like Catherine Gunn, for example, who most people
will know blew the whistle on, on the attempts by the deep
state to get us into war with Iraq and, and ended up, well,
watch, watch her and watch her film and watch, read her book
and so on and get an idea for that because I absolutely
recommend that everybody does that.
But you know that even within the intelligence agencies, there
is competition and, and I don't think there is a cohesive
control mechanism. That isn't the point it was
going to make. The point is that that is at a
certain level of society and, and, and in, in general, we
can't engage directly with it, But we've, we've always got to
keep in mind that the deep state, whatever, whatever your
view of the deep state may be, does not have its fingers on at
ground level. That there there's a middle
management structure and, and politics is part of that.
And think tanks and and so on are another part of that and,
and, and other policy making organisations.
These things we can see and these things we can disrupt.
And if we can disrupt that level?
And keep disrupting that level of it, then then of course they
can't pursue their, their agenda.
And, and that's, that's what we have been doing and that's what
we got to keep doing. Unfortunately, some people have
taken that to to an extreme where where basically they they
have come to the conclusion that anything that is said by any
kind of mainstream source, whether it's be a scientific
source, a medical source, a political source, a media
source, if it's come from the mainstream, it's a lie.
Yeah. And of course that that isn't
true either, right? No, exactly.
So it's too simple. It's.
Too, Yes, it, it is a massive oversimplification and even
even, you know, taking the view, for example, that that Xi
Jinping and Vladimir Putin are just the other side of the same
coin because they're also pursuing CBDC and and digital ID
and these kinds of things. Yes, these, this is true to a
certain degree. I, I think there's it just just
making, simplifying it to that degree misses a huge amount of
nuance and, and, and direction of travel plays a big part in
this as well. So, you know, for example, I was
in China a couple of weeks ago and I'm not going to say too
much about being in China a couple of weeks ago because I've
just done an interview with Kazaa and I don't want to, I
don't want to completely subvert that one.
But what I what I will say is that that, you know, people's
view of this type of technology and people's view of even the
state and the government is much more positive and optimistic
than ours is of our equivalent. And I think I think that part of
a reason for that is because, you know, famously China has
lifted 800 million people out of poverty.
The direction of travel is from relative poverty.
And now people are relatively well off and they're still
heading in a much better direction as general.
And they perceive that that a lot of this technology has
facilitated that. In our case, we have, we have,
we are going from a position of relative comfortable, you know,
being relatively comfortably off and our we're what we're
witnessing our infrastructure collapse, we're witnessing our
society's collapse, we're witnessing the effects of
immigration, the effects of just non investment in in our
societies. And so we're going in the
opposite direction. And as a result, we are actually
naturally significantly more pessimistic about about our
governments and so on. And as a result, we are choosing
to elect people who are are less than equipped to solve these
problems. So, so in a sense we're we're,
we're living our own demise. Mike, that's also again, a very
good point that you're making. It's and it's a conversation
I've been having for quite a long time now.
For example, let's just you, you mentioned China, so let's talk
about China for a second. It's, it's strange, but it plays
into that oversimplification. You, you have people in the West
going, oh, but they're just commies.
And so because of the word communist, the whole country of
1 1/2 billion people cannot in any possible shape or form be a
success. But the reality is that they're
applying a single word to a highly complex society that has
existed for thousands of years. It's quite possible that these
single word definitions are actually relevant and, and we
need to, we need to actually, as you did, go there and see for
ourselves and realise that we're actually just talking nonsense.
So the, the, the second interview that the, the second
UK column interview that I did with Carl.
Now this, this latest 1 update is for his podcast.
But the, the second one that I did with Carl as Auk column
interview, the first question I asked him was, is China still a
communist country? And that was having not been
there. And he, and he said basically
not. And I'm going to say that having
been there, that China is not a communist country.
Now, it may be run it, it may be run by the Chinese Communist
Party, but everybody there is, is running their own business or
they're they're they're earning a living.
They are, they, this is not, you know, the old sort of Soviet
system of, of everybody being allocated a job sort of thing.
They're they're they're doing exactly the same types of
commercial activities that you could call it capitalism.
Yeah, but. That we're doing.
That's the point I'm. Trying to make Mike, people are
caught up in these words, these the, these single, the single
descriptors. It doesn't matter, you know, it
doesn't matter. Is China a communist or not?
It doesn't matter. It's a success.
Whatever they're doing is working.
And on top of that, you'll notice that they are very
community driven. That was, I mean, so like I say,
I don't want to go too far into this because I've covered a lot
of this with Carl. But but yes, frankly, the, the
scale of the population is something that that unless
you've been there, you cannot get to grips with.
But Despite that, you go to, there's, there's, you know, in
the, in the cities, there's parks everywhere and you go to
the parks and there's, there's groups of people all playing Tai
Chi and, and they're playing go where they're playing chess.
And you just see community everywhere.
And, and, and I look at Plymouth, you know, a small, a
small city in, in China's 4 or 5 million people.
And, and Plymouth, which is a small city in the UK is 250,000
people. And there's very little sense of
community here, very little. And, and most people don't know
who their neighbours are and this type of thing.
So, you know, it's, it is, it was something that was quite
amazing to me that, that people are so that that sense of
community is, is there despite the sheer numbers of people.
I saw when I was in Amsterdam about a year and a half ago,
loads and loads and loads of hype, individualism, you know,
people just walking around in the city with headphones on
looking at their cell phones, completely disconnected from
everything around them. It was.
It was really eye opening. When I was applying for the visa
to go to, to go to China, I was, I went back to London because
you have to go to London to the the visa centre and I had a
little bit of time my hands. It was a lovely day.
So I just sat outside the Bank of England and watched the
drones go past with their phones in their hands.
And, and they're, you know, they, they just, they have no
interest in what's going around them.
They're just totally focused on that tiny little screen.
And, and I'm just thinking himself, well, maybe that's the
we'll come back to the earlier point.
Maybe that's the explanation for why people people aren't engaged
anymore. They're caught.
They're caught in this drug. It's it's it really?
Yeah, I mean, it really is, because it again also feeds into
what you said earlier about personal well being and health.
These are the things that matter the most, so.
A lot of years ago a doctor friend of mine said to me, you
know, giving a smartphone or a tablet to a child, it's the
worst thing you can possibly do because it actually physically
rewires the brain. The brain develops in a
different way and the wiring of the brain is different in that
individual than compared to someone who hasn't had that.
Now we're recording this news programme on a Thursday or the,
sorry, this programme on a Thursday.
And yesterday's news programme. I was talking about the latest
report from Ofcom looking at media consumption in, in
children. And they're making the point
that in 2024 there was yet another increase in the number
of children aged 3 to 5 who are on a daily basis using
smartphones, 3 to 5 year olds using social media, three to
five year olds, some of them having profiles on social media,
right. And I'm thinking, you know, what
kind of generation this is, This is our future.
What kind of generation are we growing at the moment?
You know, my, my kids are both adults now.
They didn't have smartphones or tablets until they were 1617.
And even that was too early in my opinion.
But but the, that without now, we didn't force them on that.
We, we, we just talked to them about it and they took the
decision themselves. And they, I'm not going to deny
that they came under massive peer pressure to have a phone
from a very young age. And they, they both said through
their own choice, they both said no and they chose not to.
And I think that it has served them well actually, compared to
a lot of their other school friends who ended up with gender
confusion and all the usual kinds of stuff.
And, and, you know, I, I think that they, they grew up with
none of those issues. Now, I can't say for sure that
that was, that that was because they didn't have a smartphone,
but, but because there may have been other, other influences at
play there. But but I I think that it
certainly helped. What do you think the world is
going to look like 100 years from now?
I don't think I can even guess at that because because it could
go, it could go so many different ways, couldn't it?
I mean, we, we could, humanity could absolutely destroy itself.
I think we absolutely have that capacity or, or we could decide
that this is not the way forward.
What we're doing is not the way forward.
So, you know, it, it really depends on, on whether people
come to their senses, if they accept, if they, if, if we avoid
killing ourselves through global conflict, then the next, I
suppose at this point, looking at things as they are at the
moment, the next most likely scenario is that we build
ourselves this Uber controlled dystopia with CBDC and digital
ID and the rest of it. And, and, and, and we've, we've
turned ourselves into some kind of transhumanist nightmare by
merging with the machine. Or we, we could actually have
decided that this is not the way forward.
And, and we reject all that. And, but I think we absolutely
have a couple of really major problems to solve.
And one of those is birth rates because because we are without
question, building a real nightmare for ourselves in terms
of how we look after older people.
And, and I have, I have a fear that we have decided that older
people are useless, that they don't provide anything to
society, that they're a burden in society and so on.
I think this is a message that's being delivered to children and
younger people very strongly. And, and again, you know, if
we're looking at at who's going to be looking after the elderly
whenever, whenever you and I are getting to that point, without
question, we will be at a stage where the younger generations
are going to say probably easier just to bump them off I.
Look back with fondness. I, I, I look, let's say the last
100 years and I and I think to myself, they made a lot of good
calls. They made a lot of bad calls
too. But 100 years from now, I wonder
if they're going to look back at us and go, yeah, what a bunch of
idiots. Yes, yes, I, I think, I think
if, if humanity survives, I think that is, I think that is
very much what's going to happen.
I think this is a dark age in terms of of our our attitudes,
our attitudes to ourselves, our attitudes to each other, our
attitudes to society. I think I think we have
absolutely have the capacity to come out of that in a very
positive way. But it's it's for sure requires
some real they're going to. Yeah.
I mean, they're going to look at photographs of masses of people
in the year 20, 21 lining up like cattle to get an injection
in the arm while wearing a mask over their face, and they're
going to be laughing at us. Yeah.
Because because there was never a gun pointed at our heads in
this, in a real sense, we volunteered as, as, as this
population. We volunteered And and that's,
that's the bit, that's the bit that still kills me, you know,
with, with a few exceptions, we volunteered and we went out
every Thursday night in the UK and banged our pots together for
the NHS and all this kind of stuff.
Yeah. So is there?
Is there moral of the story? Is there a moral of the story?
I mean, if you look back now, you don't think.
I think we have. I think, I think the moral
hasn't become clear yet. I think we, I think we, this,
this might be worrying to some people, but I, I have always
held the view that things have to get worse before they're
going to get better. Because this comes back to what
I was saying earlier on it, you know, what we're facing has to
be, has to be in the faces of and obvious to the majority of
people and not just obvious to a minority of people.
I think we've got to, we've got to, it's got to be.
You know why do what happened? Yuri Beswanov in his interview
with who interviewed him in 1983.
Jared Gryphon, Jared. Gryphon.
Interviewed him and Yuri, Beswanov said.
You can take people to the gulags and they still won't
believe it. They'll only believe it when the
foot of a soldier is on their head, pushed to the ground.
I'm going to say yes, I'll take that point.
But we don't have to have everybody.
We just have to have enough and critical, you know what?
What? Yeah.
And what I think that what I think that COVID did demonstrate
is that there were enough people called BS on it that in fact, at
the end of the day, the whole thing has been a failure.
So I'm going to say I'm not quite as pessimistic as that
because I don't think it requires everybody.
It's just it. But I think it requires more
than there are. It certainly requires more than
there are today. It requires more than there were
in 2020 and 2021, but not massively more.
I don't think it requires massively more.
How can? I follow you.
Well, ukcolumn.org is the website and that is the place to
go. And you know, we are on various
platforms. We are often off various
platforms and Kenny has to recreate new channels from
scratch. So we're regularly off YouTube.
We're the the platform we're most regularly off is TikTok
because that is the most censorious.
TikTok, ironically, is the most censorious platform of them all.
We're on Facebook, we're on all the, we're on sub Stack, we're
all on all the platforms. But actually we prefer if people
are sharing our material that they share it from ukcolumn.org
because that is where we will always be.
And you know, when we got in 2021, when we got kicked off
YouTube, so many people didn't even know we had a website
because they weren't, even though we mentioned that every
time we do the news programme, they didn't even know we had a
website. So, so, so that, that is, that
is the place to go. And, and we do still need, we do
absolutely need support. So, so if if anybody's willing
to join as a member, that that that helps us greatly.
Well, I. Will echo that as a contributor
to UK column I'm very, very proud to be part of the team.
I would also say please support UK Column by becoming a member
because it is member funded. It is member funded yes, that
that is something that we decided right from the beginning
on the basis that, you know, relying on on advertising didn't
seem like to us like the best model because first of all, we
what was what was obvious from the very beginning was that we
had no control over what advertisements that people saw.
And sometimes people were getting in contact with us and
saying, why are you showing an advertisement for for this back
when we were dabbling with this stuff and and we said, well, we
that's not our choice. So, so we decided in 20, 14 or
something that that memberships were, were the way and
subscriptions were the way to go.
And that, that that has done has, you know, worked well for
us so far. Well, on that note, Mike
Robertson, thank you for joining me in the trenches and thank.
You and welcome to the UK Column Journal, because it is fantastic
having you here. And I'll just end by saying
thank you to everyone who has supported us over the years and
continues to do so.