UK Column News Podcast 14th April 2025

Good afternoon, it's just gone. 1:00 on Monday the 14th of April 2025. Welcome to UK column News. I'm your host, Charles Mannett. Joining me in the studio today is Ben Rubin. Welcome to the programme, Ben. Thank you, Charles. And via video link, Diane Rasmussen Mcaddy from Edinburgh and Alex Creel from Moscow. Now, among the topics to be discussed today are geoengineering, Russia, local media and plenty besides.

But we're going to begin the programme with steel and the state of emergency that the government have described around the situation concerning the Jingyi Steel Company that released British Steel, as it's been known, having taken it over from Tata Steel in 2020. And the emergency measures that the government have taken to ensure. So they say, that the blast furnaces will keep burning in Scunthorpe and that there will be the saving of 3000 jobs.

Now the government have put out a statement, as I say, to confer upon us the idea that they, they are the salvation in this particular circumstance, a statement from the Prime Minister in which he concludes by saying a secure future, a Britain rebuilt with British steel in the national interest. We'll, we'll go on to qualify exactly what it is he might mean

by the national interest. But I think it's worth harking back to the manifesto that they put out last year and to ask what effect the committed £2.5 billion to steel has actually had and whether this apparent crisis could have been averted. But also, when considering the numbers on the very next line of the manifesto was the commitment to the most pointless exercise yet described by government, which of course was a £1 billion commitment to the capture of carbon dioxide.

Now, the business Secretary, Jonathan Reynolds has conducted many interviews, of course, in the wake of this. And I'm just going to play a short clip from his interview on Sky News with Trevor Phillips, which gives us a bit more of an insight into what might really be at play here. Can't. I wouldn't. I wouldn't personally bring a Chinese company into our steel sector. You would not bring a Chinese. I wouldn't. I think steel is a very

sensitive area. I, I don't know the Boris Johnson government when they did this, what, what exactly the situation was, but I, I think it's a sensitive area. Areas. Sensitive areas? What about nuclear power, for example? I wouldn't want to on an interview make that kind of specific determination. But I, I think we can't ignore China. I mean, China's fifth of the global economy, you know, what they do has an impact on us and where we can have areas where we can cooperate in our mutual

interest. I I think that is a. Good, but but there's a high trust bar now, isn't there? Yes. So he was pushed further and further during that interview, in effect to call out China as being in some way a state threat to the United Kingdom and indeed to the steel industry and how critical steel is as an overall part of industry in the UK and a lot else besides.

Now, in order to qualify all this, I think it's worth referring back to what Labour government put out last year when they described their steel strategy, the plan for steel, which was in the form of a consultation.

But within that, they said that as well as supporting our mission of making the UK a clean energy superpower, steel is a fundamental component in activities such as the construction of wind turbines, manufacturing the next generation of electric or autonomous vehicles, or building the infrastructure needed to sustain our digital economy.

Now each of those things I think bears a little bit more scrutiny and that's why we will go to UK Steel who have published a great many documents on the steel industry of the United Kingdom in the last few years. And in particular they refer to the description of the offshore, what's called the offshore wind

boom. So it's interesting to note then that they say in the last five years, admittedly of course four of those have not been under a Labour government, but nonetheless, in the last five years, less than 2% of steel used in UK wind farms was fabricated in the UK and almost none made using UK, sorry, using UK made steel. Now that's just part of the story of course.

The other bit of it is that this has by and large come from China. And again, there is this enormous discrepancy between what the various government organisations say and what they do. And we refer back to the OFT quoted Richard Dearlove saying that China presents state threat via these sorts of means. And yet of course wind is never one area in which we're to consider that China does in fact pose such a threat. We go on to look further at UK Steel and indeed on the

electricity prices. And this is where we get perhaps closer to the heart of it. And this this is a comparison there with the UK circled on the right, showing that the cost of energy in order to produce steel in this country is significantly higher than France and Germany. And of course, this goes back to

the net zero agenda. And if anyone was in any doubt as to its purpose, it seems now beyond any sort of contradiction really, that the agenda play with net zero is to destroy the means by which industry, economy and indeed the whole country can run in a sensible manner. And we see this time and again.

So not only are we looking at an industry that relies on the production of steel by the use of cooking coal, which of course is something that the government shut down by not giving the go ahead to a mine in Whitehaven which would have produced fuel with which to run this plant because of net zero. The government say they're still committed to net zero, but in a

worldwide sense. So whilst they can say that we won't do it here, we will absolutely have to do it elsewhere in order that we get put in such a vulnerable position as this with of course a large quantity of coke and coal having to come in from Japan as part of what's being described as a rescue package. Now we'll just have a quick look at the, the legislation itself because it is perfectly

extraordinary. As I say, the House Commons, both Houses of Parliament met on Saturday, which hasn't happened since April 1982 with the the, the, the then emergency relating to the Falklands. Now I would like to draw attention to this particular clause which gives powers to the Minister of entering using force if necessary. The premises were the specific assets are situated. So effectively this is granting control of any assets pertaining

to steel. It also suggests in terms of the intervention that this these assets are either to be used or not to be used in a particular way, and indeed the consequences are spelt out too. If these not adhered to, then the person committing the offence is liable to be proceeded against and punished accordingly.

Seems unnecessarily strong language when we're talking about trying to rescue a business one step short of of nationalising it. And this was articulated in fact, or at least pushed back against by many people, particularly in the House of Lords. We've got Lord Moylan here who said that it is not in fact nationalisation. It is in some ways almost worse. It is the confiscation and control of a private company with no safeguard guards and no sunset clause.

The other point made in the House of Lords, among among many was why steel, steel industry, which has failed time and again, Why should steel be propped up? And the reason I asked that question, or at least amplify that question from the House of Lords, is that of course, steel is certainly on the way. And again, going back to the net zero agenda, the production of electric vehicles use increasing amounts of aluminium as opposed

to steel. There's no, there's no evidence really to support the fact that steel should be supported over any other industry than than any other sorry industry. Just to qualify that. The the other point to make is in terms of jobs, we're looking at electricity and indeed why electricity is not going to be more widely available in this course to support the the constant roll out of artificial intelligence and the need to support that.

And of course, we look at the Institute for Public Policy Research, citing the fact that possible 8 million UK jobs are likely to be lost in pursuing this agenda, which makes one wonder just speculatively, whether we are looking towards the state control of industries as a precedent in order to be able to do things like introduce digital wages.

But I think there's a lot more to come out about this and it certainly looks like it could be a SOP to America, with whom we've been in lockstep for many months now since the Trump re election and inauguration. And of course, to be seen to be bashing China in order to attain perhaps more favourable conditions than the 10% tariff that we have been given could also be a large factor. There'll be a lot more to come out on this and we're now going to go across to Diane to look at

behavioural change. Yes, hello, Charles. Hello, Ben. Hello, everyone. Today, it's great to be here. So last week was the United

Nations Behavioural Science Week. If you It took place across 46 UN entities and there were 15

events throughout the week. Behavioural science, if you haven't heard of it, if you actually can call them, you've heard about it several times because of Brian's wonderful coverage about applied behavioural psychology, which is an example of behavioural science is part of what is called UN version 2 point O. This was originally covered on the 20 sorry the 31st of July 2023 edition of UK Column News. If you would like to go back and get the basics.

But essentially the policy, according to the website of you even 2.0 says that halfway to 2030 the world is not on track to achieve the SDG. To accelerate progress, everyone needs to rethink, refocus and recharge. UN 2 Point O is a vision of a modernised UN system, cutting edge skills and forward thinking culture that enable UN entities to better contribute to the quest for the SDGS. These ongoing internal transformations are designed

around a quintet of change. Now personally, I love music. This is not a musical quintet, but the quintet that it defines that are 5 steps to this change are Innovation Data Digital, which includes helping with inclusive online education platforms, foresight and finally of course behavioural science enabling better choices. They call it Besci BESCI and they have a hashtag that they use that's kind of their shortcut. So what happened in Behavioural

Science Week? Well, they were all webinars from as far as I could tell. I watched some of them just so that you don't have to. I don't like to do that to the viewers, but there will be a link in the show notes if you would like to see some things. I've got a short clip from one of the sessions that was called Getting Started with Behavioural Science. This took place on Wednesday

last week. The speaker here is Sonia Guerrero and she said she works in the education sector at UNESCO, so let's hear what she had to say. But we think that the behavioural science approach can improve the uptake of data and scientific evidence for decision making in education and we think that. But we think that one of the first things we need to do is to

sensitise colleagues about this. So to get started, what we decided to do was to begin with a landscape review of how the behavioural sciences have been formed, the work of other international organisations such as UNICEF, the World Health Organisation and the World Bank. A very preliminary scan is showing that behavioural sciences have been used within education projects but used primarily for health

interventions. Still, this is this shows potential that we can in fact use behavioural sciences and education projects in particular around getting teachers to change their teaching practises, which is a major challenge. So for example, teachers might still be using some outdated teaching practises such as asking kids to memorise content

which would appear in an exam. So what we're seeing here is the use of applied behavioural psychology to change how teachers teach, taking away the inspiration and the past that they might have had up from teaching in the past, but they're going to teach them how they should be teaching instead. And also to make sure that students don't have to do things like take exams because that's not fair to students, right? We wouldn't want to make sure that they knew anything.

Another example of the use of behavioural science in human 2 point O is a behavioural change service called Verified. Apparently this is quote, delivering science based information in times of crises in an era of prolific miss and disinformation. There's a bit of information on the quintet of change website. It is UN initiative, but as I said, it's it's got a part UN but also part this organisation

called purpose. And we can put a screenshot of purposes hope page on the on the screen here. It is apparently working hard to cut through the noise around global crises and deliver critical fact based and information. As they say here on the very obvious black and white home page. They use creative storytelling and campaigns to move people to remake the world. Don't forget it.

Very large letters. Other partners of purpose include the Bill Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. Of course, as I was looking into Behavioural Science Week, I ended up coming across something that I had never heard of before, which is the United Nations University, or as I'll call it, You and Uni. As a former professor who now watches what globalists do instead of teaching at a university, I was surprised to find out that You and Uni existed, so I decided to look

into it a bit more. Their homepage says they work on evidence based solutions for a sustainable future, because of course they do. Looking into a little bit more, I found that the university encompasses 13 institutes located in 12 countries around the world. Their research and academic activities are aligned with every sustainable development goal, which are people, planet, prosperity, peace and partnerships.

So of course, this is all starting to sound familiar because they say the same thing everywhere. Their their headquarters is based in Tokyo. They have institutes in 11 other countries. Of course it's global students. If you want to be a student at this university, you can undertake research that links directly with the work of the UN and its agencies. For example, you can get a PhD in sustainability science.

You can do a part time PhD in the Netherlands, you can get a PhD in Innovation, economics and governance for sustainable development and you can also get an MSC in Sustainability or public policy and human development or the geography of Environmental risks and human security. And there are also non degree courses and other training. If you want to know how much you would have to pay to do this, it

varies by institute. So just like me, you and uni is celebrating its 50th birthday this year. Here's a quote from the US Secretary General Antonio Guterres, who's celebrating the birthday and on his website.

He said For half a century, university leaders, staff, students and alumni have driven peace progress by bridging the world's of education research and policy, by acting as a trusted source for evidence based policy making, and by uniting the world through knowledge and partnerships that address our most pressing global challenges. The United Nations University is truly multilateralism in action.

So I found this you, you, this you and you merit, which is one of the institutes talking about their contribution to the behavioural change week last week. And that's how I found out about what was going on at the UN Uni. So just to see what it would be like if you wanted to be a student at UN Uni, I've got a couple of clips from their YouTube channel. This one is called from a lecture called A Cup of tea for the SDGS.

So let's learn from this lady. So how the SDC could help navigate these complex TT range and actually the SDG could help T tells its story. They are the impact. The SDGS are the impact that the tea industries and we as a tea

consumer working to achieve. So the success of achieving A sustainable tea sectors actually hinge on our ability to balance SCG 12, which is responsible consumption and productions and in our effort to enable economic development or SCG 8 for the T small holders and in a way that can conserve the life on land which is SCG 15. So all of this effort should be done within the effort to alleviate property SCG 1 and to achieve food security and SEC 2 and to combat climate change

with this SEC 13. So there's your lecture. If you wanted to know what kind of research they do before you decided to apply, here's a video from February explaining a new report called Disaster Risks 2025, Turning Over a New Leaf, which was written by you and Uni's Institute for Environment and Human Security. And it found that redefining what we value is one of five fundamental changes that humanity needs to make to shift towards a more sustainable and

resilient world. So let's watch this summary video. The world faces many serious threats. Climate change, pollution, biodiversity loss, and inequalities, to name a few. We know what needs to be done to change course. So why aren't we doing it? The answer lies in society's deeper structures and assumptions that create the outcomes we see all around us. Take, for instance, spraying aerosols into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight back to

space. This attempt to limit global warming is called solar geoengineering. Some governments and companies are exploring it as a way to combat climate change, but the actions of a few could lead to negative impacts for others around the world. Unpredictable weather patterns, food and water insecurity. It's also a superficial fix that fails to address the underlying causes of climate change. We prioritise our own benefits, willing to accept negative impacts elsewhere.

To truly solve the problem, we need to look at how we interact with each other across the globe. When we move beyond self serving solutions and recognise our own responsibility, the real solution is clear, batting out emissions directly. By phasing out fossil fuels, we have the power to change the world for the better. Let's turn over a new leaf. So apparently we're going to spray the skies eventually, and we're also going to phase out

fossil fuels, which we know. Kirstamer announced that last week. I have a little bit more later on in the news on geoengineering. But right now, Charles, what do you think? Would you go to you and Uni? Will have recruited to the university in that segment down I'm, I'm guessing probably not that many, but thank you very much nonetheless.

Now, Ben, you're going to take us down to the sort of local level on a on a related note. Absolutely. And the directly related note. Thanks for that, Diane. That was fascinating. And I talk a lot about this interplay between money and power, power and money, which is what is projecting itself across us at the moment. And the UN is all about power. And that word was actually used several times in that video that you ended up on.

They're talking about power and essentially these tools, these psychological tools, these propaganda tools that they've developed around behavioural psychology. Behavioural economics are lots of different terms for it. Nudging essentially is the one that I think has probably got most understanding across the the broader population.

They're all about projecting power and they're all about ultimately transforming humanity to fit into their very, very narrow understanding of what the world should be like, right? And what you end up with these bureaucrats in an office in New York, like the woman in the first film that you showed, you think that they've got the the right and the capacity to transform Everything Everywhere. It's really astonishing when you get into it and it's actually Orwellian.

That's a great quote from George Orwell 1984, which is power is tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. And I think there's a perfect summary of what we're looking at here with these applied psychology approaches. And this quote always reminds me of this fella, David Halpin, CBE, who was one of Blair's top aides during his pomp.

Really, the Blair years, 2001 to 2007 and then also the founder and CEO of the Behavioural Insights team, the nudge Unit, which is where all most of this stuff came from, was certainly where it was brought into broader use across government and elsewhere. He's an interesting character help. And I don't use that quote from all well lightly, right? Because actually I've done some deep digging on Halpern and one of the things you find out was that he's a an amateur artist, a painter.

And these are the the types of things that he's producing. You can see there at the bottom as an example of one of his artwork. So he's very clearly into tearing humanity to pieces and putting us together again in new shapes of his own choosing, right? You know, you know, he's a psychologist. Maybe you should psychoanalyse yourself, Mr Halpern. It's kind of terrifying, that image. He also mentions in that same interview. We'll put a link to that as you can go and watch it.

I'd highly recommend it. He mentions the debt that he has to Cass Sunstein. He says that nudge is really related and built on the ideas of Cass Sunstein, who is the author of, amongst other things, Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas and Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech, which will become particularly pertinent when I come on to the media in this segment later on in the news. So this stuff's got absolutely everywhere. The UN have clearly got their hands on it.

Alpen has been bragging recently. This from the Haywood Quarterly, which I'll put again provide a link to. I'd suggest going to read why government needs a fresh nudge. So how happens really resurfacing this stuff needs to double down on it and it shows the enormous success of this initiative and how far these ideas have spread across global government. So not but, but primarily in the UK.

And actually, you can see at the top there, the UK has, to my count, 83 separate nudge units running across various different departments, including HMRC, Defra, Ofcom, HMCTS, the court system. And this just demonstrates the influence and power of this stuff ultimately, and the influence and power of Halpern in particular. He's highly active today. He put this out in January via demos. Our old friends at Demos. I think I've spoken about them every week for the past month.

Social Capital 2025, The Hidden Wealth of Nations, written alongside Andy Haldane, former Bank of England chief economist, and then he was the chief executive of the Royal Site of the Arts, but he got booted out at the start of the year. There was a total meltdown at the RSA. Won't go into that right now, but I'd suggest going to have a

look at this. You probably don't want to read all of it because essentially you've got 2 technocrats trying to intellectualise and quantitatively measure something which any normal human being would understand intuitively and without explanation. Right? This idea of social capital, the fact that we have a reputation and that we interact with each other as human beings and that trust is important. Apparently they need to write a long report to understand that, right?

And this is slap bang in the middle of the current Labor Party agenda. It builds around some ideas around the preventative state, which come from demos a couple of years ago now, actually came out during the Tory government, the last Tory government, which basically is just promoting this idea that the state needs to be involved in absolutely every part of your life. It's LinkedIn. If we could just flash that back up on screen quickly.

If you see on the, the, the the cover page on the left, in the bottom right hand corner of that, you can see local trust, right. Interesting. They've got to get local trust and also something called the National Network for Neighbourhood Improvement, which is a new initiative, a bit like 3 CI. This is 3NI3CI in in in the climate arena.

This is, this is a counterpart, but it's all about social innovation and it's also linked into, they love this sort of this multiple of different organisations. This is all linked into the same thing, right? But they need lots of different things to make it look like there's, there isn't a kind of monopoly on how this thing's

being pushed forward. It actually ladders up to this, which is ICON, the Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods, and they're reviewing the current state of neighbourhoods across England. This was launched in September last year and essentially going out and asking a bunch of questions. Again, I won't read them out in their totality just to kind of with an eye on time, but essentially what they're trying to do is to understand why

neighbourhoods are important. And in order to do that, again, this is this kind of technocratic never leaves the M25 kind of worldview, which is that, well, why do we need to write 100 page report with a load of graphs in it to explain why neighbourhoods are important? Surely that's just blindingly obvious to anyone with a soul, You know, like this is, is this, is this what we're looking at here? Soulless technocrats running the country? I think it might be who's in

charge of icon, right. So this is Baroness Hilary Armstrong. She was a minister under the Blair government's, so first for housing and planning, then local government, then social exclusion. She was also chief whip as well. So top Blair age, she's running this, a bunch of other people in there with demos links. So again, this is a demos proxy what we're looking at here. And you can see on that image David Halpern in the far left and also Sarah, dare I say far left politically as well.

And you can see on the sign in the background that you are in a big local area. So this is another initiative called Big Local, which is a continuation of the Big Society agenda, which was based on the ideas of Saul Alinsky. This is neo Marxist communist essentially, and they've mapped out the whole country and there are a bunch of neighbourhoods, schools of neighbourhoods that they've identified as being of particular interest and these are the people that help and is

targeting. He is walking amongst them. He has gone out into the field and he is exploring how he can apply his ideas for reengineering humanity on the poorest people in the country. Yeah, that's what these people are doing. Yeah. And really getting a grip around the nation. And it's all about delivering the missions. So there is no pathway to mission delivery without putting neighbourhoods front and centre. Yeah, this is absolutely crucial to the implementation of the change agenda.

They've got to get everyone in the country caught up in this thing. It's a total centralised control of our society, driven by Halpin and these organisations here. Lots of talk of reform is in the political party which is essentially A proxy for people who don't like what the states doing. They talk about reform and needing to combat it and control it, which is really odd given this is supposed to be an impartial Commission.

NHS obviously. Front and Centre article here which will link to the BBC which talks about an English neighbourhood that claims to hold the secret to fixing the NHS. And actually W Streeting has come out and promised to turn the NHS into a neighbourhood health service. So we're going to start hearing this term a lot again for all the reasons that I've

identified. Interestingly, the neighbourhood that they reference is in Birmingham where they can't even collect the bins at the moment, which is posing a public health issue. But apparently we've got to go to Birmingham to find out what the future of the NHS is all about. And ultimately for me, this really ladders up to to some really hideous people and some

hideous ideas. And actually the best place to go to understand it, I think, is this podcast which came from Marta made, she's called the Anti Humans, which is a harrowing listen. It's about 3 hours long and it describes what the communists did in Romania, some of the most violent and destructive actions in human history, where they really were tearing human minds and bodies to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of their own choosing.

And that's what I think that we can see here, playing out with these behavioural insights, techniques and this desire to radically transform humanity. Yeah. Radical it absolutely is. I hope we'll have time to talk about that in extra. Thank you very much, Ben.

Now as you'll know, the UK column is funded solely by ITS members and viewers and so if you are in a position to be able to support that then you can either make a donation or you can join as a monthly member or an annual member or indeed as a lifetime member. We also get a small percentage of sales of client cars products which are available on the website. And indeed, sorry, I've got that back to front our merchandise in the shop. So please do go and have a look there.

Also, we'd encourage you please to not just engage with but also to share our material as widely as you possibly can because we are heavily censored elsewhere Now. Ben, you have something coming up. Indeed, this is my side hustle, what I do in my evenings and on The Saturdays. It's called Pattern. We're building parallel systems of culture, governance and economy, which means new businesses, new charities, new campaigns. And I'm running an incubator

programme over 10 weeks. It's a structured process. It's about unlocking growth. People who are launching new things and want to participate in creating different options for society. Come on down. It starts on the 26th of April and it, as I say, runs for 10 weeks. I'm running the programme. If it sounds like your bag or it might relate to someone that you know who'd be interested, then you can find out more by going to pattern18.substack.com and then also be a link in the show

notes. Great. Thank you, Ben and Diane. A bit more on Dan Kleiman, please. Yes, thanks, Charles. I know we've mentioned this on the news a couple of times last week, but since I'm here today, I want to specifically do a particular kind of focus message about the importance of this case. Dan Kleinman, I've interviewed previously on UK column. He's being sued by the same woman called Amanda Jones, who was the school librarian in two

different states for defamation. And Amanda Jones, some of you might remember previously I did a review of her book called That Librarian, which was her basically ranting about how awful it was to have been attacked by these people, in her words of that because they don't want these inappropriate books put into school libraries. And, and so she's fighting everything that she can possible and that is included. She's sued more than one person now.

So Dan's legal fees he estimates will be approximately $200,000 because he's having to fight the same case in two different states. And just to let you know, this is not just AUS problem. We need to do more in the UK, which I'm actively trying to do myself. Here's one example of a book from the UK. This is a book, if we can put this on the screen holding up

called Granddad's pride. Granddad and Gramps once meant went to many pride parades and what happens when they bring this little grandchild to the pride parade? And that's a story about that. This book has won the British book award and Waterstones children's book prize and it's got protesters holding up signs inside this picture book for very young children saying things like LGB with the T and protect trans kids. So just to let you know, I could go into much more, but I won't do it.

But just please, if you can at all, give at least a prayer request which Dan's asked for on his on his page or some money please. Great, Diane, thank you very much indeed. And now an investment for Standing the Light, which is coming up the end of next month, the bank holiday weekend, 23rd to 26th up in Cumbria. It's a fantastic festival last year attended by UK column and we will indeed be there this year.

So please do look out a ticket for Stand in the Light and also a reminder that our event from the 5th of April is still available. The wall to buy at the shop. You can buy the recording of the live stream, which I really would encourage you to do. An absolutely fantastic

selection of talks. And tomorrow going out at 1:00, an interview I've recorded with Doctor Sam Bailey, a New Zealander who has been persecuted by the Medical Council of New Zealand and is now being asked for 150,000 New Zealand dollars in effect as a means of attempting to censor her. So that will be a very wide ranging and fascinating interview. I really would encourage you to take a look at that. Now we are going to move to Russia, Ukraine, of course,

there's been an awful lot of talk controversy about the Trump tariff sort of merry go round. And a part of that narrative is that both China and Russia can indeed be dealt with by economic means. And I think this is something that we want to look more closely at.

Of course, this is on the heels of the report yesterday of an attack in Sumi in North East Ukraine, which Donald Trump has is seen to be speaking out, you know, very much as a as a horrific and and regressable incident, always a bit unclear as to sort of how it happened or or what happened.

And then we've got the sort of Witkoff and Kellogg duo making overtures about how things could be resolved with rewriting the the map and all the rest of it. But ultimately they keep coming back to the idea that the the art of the deal is such that there may be financial control exerted over both China and Russia, either together or separately in order to bring

about the right outcome. Now, just that's a prefix to that, I'm just going to show the map of government debt that the International Monetary Fund puts up, just because it's fairly stark that shown in orange is the United States and the United Kingdom both with a debt of over 100%. And with that in mind, we're now going to go to Moscow where we're going to hear from Alex Creel, who has been digging into this. And, and I think my my question, first of all, welcome to the programme, Alex.

But my question to you is, with this backdrop, what exactly is the likely effect on Russia of any sort of financial or economic play from in particular, the United States? Thanks, Charles. So right at the moment, there are 38,000 sanctions against individuals and corporates in Russia. That's a figure calculated by the Kremlin. These sanctions have been in place now for about over three years.

And in terms of, you know, export performance of Russia, the effect has been essentially 0 and it's been 0 in dollar terms. But what, what it's done is it's

just shifted trade. All of the trade that went from Russia to Europe is now going from Russia to India, Russia to Turkey and Russia to China. So I, I don't know if it's possible to put the chart up, but even without the chart, you can see, yeah, you can see just the contraction in the red, which is the reduction in trade with Europe has been completely compensated for by incremental exports to those three countries

I mentioned. So net, net, there's been no impact really on exports from Russia. So at this stage, I, I think it's fair to say that those, those things have not worked. And of course, the Russian economy on a GDP level continues to grow the, the revising the number upwards and downwards, but it's somewhere about 4% GDP growth in 2024. So, so far that hasn't worked. And then also in, in the other charts shows the leaks in the,

in the, in the importing system. So this is a just a example where you have Estonia, which is one of the most that at least they're political leaders are the most pro war and anti peace in Europe. And while they're out sort of war mongering, Estonian businesses are quadrupling the exports that they're making to Russia's neighbours in the CIS

countries. So they're now exporting 4 times more to sort of Kazakhstan as Pakistan, Armenia than they were before the special military operations started in 2022. So you have another, you know, you have a, a porous system of, of tariffs of, of sanctions over imports and, and there are ways around it. So in dollar terms, those are not big numbers going from €5 million a month to €20 million a month. But again, it indicates the way that the sanctions regime can be bypassed or evaded.

So I think there's going to be no, there won't be taken seriously more threats of sanctions inside Russia, although Russia is also working on trying to undo some of those sanctions. Because in, in, in any one of these transactions, the buyer is also benefiting. So, you know, in the example of Europe, Europe now no longer has access to cheap piped pipeline, Russian gas, and is now buying expensive LNG imports from the United States.

So, you know, in every one of those transactions, the other side is also losing. So Russia is trying to unfreeze some sanctions on agricultural exports. And that is something that's going to help a lot of countries around the world if that's achieved, to get Russia back onto the SWIFT system for a limited set of transactions. Yeah, I mean, fascinating. And I think, you know, it sort of harks back in in a way to the the opening report today about

steel. Because obviously it seems that there's a very sort of clumsy effort by the British government to demonise China in some way, even though in actual fact we import over 60% of our of our own steel. But nonetheless, there there is this sense of trying to apply some sort of pressure on China. To to what extent do you think these policies, discussions, all the rest of it are, are actually pushing Russia and China towards one another?

Well, they, they clearly have done over the since 2022. They're they're now joined at the hip, which was of course always the sort of Geo geostrategic nightmare of, of that union happening. And now they're very closely put together. And I and I think, I guess the rare earth minerals. Issue is, is now brought that into focus because China dominates that sector.

And if you're fighting with China and with Russia, I mean fighting politically and economically, then then you're also in trouble with, with things like rare earth minerals. So maybe the, the idea is to, to, to try and split them again or at least put a little bit of distance between them. It's it's possible, but I don't think it's going to work at this

stage. And in terms of the the United States sort of approach this, do you think that there is naivety or ignorance or sort of a combination or or something entirely different? I think, I think it's just an overhang of of imperial sort of obsession with imperialism. I think in the early 90s, America decided they are the single hegemon and they can dictate all the rules everywhere, all around the world. And I think, you know, things have moved on since then.

You know that, as you said, the, the debt charts, the differential GDP levels, you know, economic power and vulnerabilities are shifting, but they're still stuck in this single. We are the hegemon and we can dictate terms everywhere to everyone. And at some point that's going to stop working. And I think that's what the last, you know, 20 years has been all about really probably be what the next 20 years is about as well. Yeah, well, obviously we will.

We will wait and see. Alex, thank you very much indeed. Joining us, if you'd like to follow more of what Alex does, then the best place to go I would say is, is Substack be a link to his Substack Thinking Coalition in the show notes and we'll come back to discuss that more in extra. Now, Ben, we're going to go to

Charitable journalism. Indeed, local journalism, this is the big focus. We talked about neighbourhoods earlier. I've talked about local journalism for the past couple of weeks and this really is going to be a big focus for the next year or two, I think.

So just to remind you, we spoke about this report last week, Public Interest News Foundation, Regenerating local news in the UK. They see the current ecosystem of news as delivering fragile communities victimised by disinformation, leading to a withering democracy. Democracy is dying, but we're going to move to this new model with community newsrooms, whatever that is.

A new type of local council has to transform the state, right and an empowered community, flourishing democracy, Big tech much more tightly controlled through legislation and importantly actually in the centre there as we'll get into the involvement of philanthropy, rich people injecting money into the media ecosystem. What could possibly go wrong? Now I wanted to understand a bit more about where this report came from and this entire agenda basically, and I've landed on

this organisation. She's the Charitable Journalism project launched in 2022 and it describes itself as delivering policy and evidence to protect and develop public interest journalism. They love that term public interest, which basically means for your own good. I think actually they've sort of re engineered that to their own

ends. So this is newsrooms reading from the bottom that work in the public interest needs support, easier access to charitable status, importantly would help them secure a sustainable future. So this is a group of journalists, lawyers, funders, academics and media people working together to protect apparently and develop public interest journalism. A few people just to show you what we're looking at here. So William Perrin is involved now.

I've spoken about you for the past three weeks, William. You're getting absolutely everywhere there. This is the guy that was boasting about being instrumental in establishing off COM. He's absolutely involved in this still. Samir Padania, who again I spoke about last week, he's on Perrins Foundation and he's also linked into Open Societies, Nestor, the International Fund for Public Interest Media.

Fascinating guy. Probably going to have to do a bit more of an exploration on him over the coming weeks because he's a big thinker in this area, really driving the agenda. And then this woman on the right, Kitty von Bertel, who is a trustee of the charity and she is Co founder of Multitudes Foundation who I've spoken about a lot previously, which is a political organisation. It's funded by Daniel Sachs and Open Societies.

It's part of the apolitical network and it's express purpose is to break existing power structures. That's what Multitudes Foundation says that it's there to do, to break existing power structures. She's also involved in this organisation which is illuminate. Well, she was involved at the time that this charity was founded.

Right now, this is established by a guy called Pierre Armadillo. He was one of the founders of eBay, so French billionaire, and he envisions a future where everyone has power to shape society against about transformation of society. They're there to ensure that people have the information rights and power to drive change. They're involving themselves in information ecosystems, promoting participation and dissent importantly, but only dissent that serves their

purposes. And it's working across Africa, Asia, Latin America. And actually, I thought that this fund was only working across what they would probably call the global S, but actually it is one of the vehicles for CJP. Apologies, jumping ahead there.

And which is interesting shows they're working on the ground in the UK. Importantly, right now we're going to hear from George Brock, who is the chairman of the Charitable Journalism Project, talking back in 2022 to the DCMS committee Local News Inquiry. Why is it philanthropic funding of journalism is less prevalent in the UK than other countries

like the US? Charitable Journalism Project works on exactly this issue and we've we would like to see more organisations, more local newsrooms to apply and succeed as and registering as charities, which would give them a great advantage. There is perhaps more money sloshing around in the American system than may ever slosh around in the British system. But if they're registered as charities, they can take donations large and small.

There's a tax break and there's a reputational gain as well. If you're a registered charity, obviously you look. You're you're regulated. As far as I know, the Burngreve Messenger is the only local news provider registered as a charity. There's been some shift of attitude on the part of the Charity Commission recently. They've publicised the decision to register as a charity, the Public Interest News Foundation, and they registered charitable

journalism projects as well. And we think that they are starting to think more flexibly about this, but we would like to see this opening wider and more publications go through. It not wouldn't suit every local publication to do that, but we think there are really quite a lot and our next project will probably be to look at exactly what this number is.

We think there are quite a few local news projects which we've gained from this and could you know strengthen that evidently often or often very ropey finances. There were more local newsrooms registering as charities. Apparently news is not an industry anymore. It's charitable. And this is a total inversion of what it's supposed to be, right? Supposed to operate in a marketplace and not be owned and controlled by philanthropic

wealth. Ultimately, the people that these titles are supposed to be investigating and holding to account, right? It's not just the state that's the issue, it's the money side of the power money equation as well. What else does charitable status do? Well, first of all, it makes them subject to greater regulation. As we talked about Ofcom over the past few weeks, the Charity Commission will also now be in the mix as well, right?

So that again is the method through which greater and tighter control is going to be applied. It's going to give you access supposedly to to free money. So make it possible for big funds like Illuminate to inject money into this ecosystem so that they can strengthen their ropy finances, which was quite an interesting term that he ended up, which is really the point here, right? Which is why are their finances ropy?

It needs to do with this, right? It's the destruction of Western economies in order to place more power and wealth into the hands of a global 1%. That's the problem. Yeah. And, and getting that global 1% that has engineered this situation deliberately to start giving money to local newspapers, it's not going to fix the issue. It's going to exacerbate the issue, isn't it? That's what's going to happen. All right. And what else has been going on?

Well, Big Tech's entered the mix really importantly. So here's some statistics looking at the advertising revenues globally of publishers, TV channels, and Meta, AKA Facebook. All right, so we can see that TV has gone down about 25% since 2016. These numbers run up to 2023. So it's a seven year period. It's gone from 200 billion to around 150 billion big drop. Publishing's even worse. It's gone from just under 100 billion global revenues to just over 50.

There's nearly a 50% drop in the publishing space. And who's in the ascendant tech exemplified here by Meta. You've gone from things around 25 billion revenue in 2016 to nearly nearly 150 in 2023. And actually, it's surpassed Meta's ad revenues, surpass the whole of the global fixed linear television industry, all TV advertising. Meta surpassed it in 2024, and it surpassed the publishing industry in 2019. And what was the big driver that

really pushed it over the edge? It was COVID, wasn't it? That's what happened. And what does your man George Brock have to say about this from the Charity Journalism Project? Well, he says in this article from The Conversation, coronavirus is killing quality journalism. Here's one possible lifeline. He says the coronavirus crash should impel us as never before, to look for new models, both editorial and commercial, and to drive innovation, new ways of doing thing and imagination.

Upper gear. Never, as the saying goes, let a really good crisis go to waste. That's a really interesting term there from George Brooke. Sorry, not Greg Brock. Look at me. I made a mistake on the slide. And ultimately, I think this is, and I've used this term before, I'm going to use it again. I think that this is what we're

looking at, right? The side effect is the intention to COVID lockdown amongst everything else, by the way, because I think the big tech was ultimately a way of destroying the media ecosystem. COVID was a way of accelerating that destruction and that was deliberate. The side effect is the intention. Yeah, CT, thank you very much, Michael Driver for that. So much more to come on local media.

This really is the battleground where the the global agenda and local people are going to have to have to slug it out. So yeah. Absolutely. And I mean, it's so stark on that graph, you know, seeing that that leap up in 2020. Thank you very much, Ben.

Now, Diane, geoengineering, they will say they're not going to do it. They don't plan to do it. What are they planning to do? Well, I think we have some very solid evidence of what they are planning to do and what they are doing already. I want to start out by introducing this by talking about a UKRI, which is the UK Research and Innovation. It's a quango that controls the majority of the public research funding in the UK.

UKR is non departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. It is the largest research funder for public funding and universities in UK. As I said, they ensure public funding is invested in research that apparently will benefit the whole of the UK and provide a clear return on investment for hard working taxpayers. At least that's what they say on their website. They have 9 different research councils, mostly organised by subject areas.

They have one area that's called Innovate UK, which sounds like one for been some of their recent funding and it's you know, it's a lot of money, but some of the biggest projects in recent years has been for example, the COVID AstraZeneca, COVID jabs, clear energy projects, AI development and a lot of work projects as well. So for example, one called the Europe that gay porn built 1945 to 2000 that was awarded to Birmingham City University for almost 850,000 lbs.

On the 4th of April there was a press release coming out that said that £13.9 billion of research and development funding had been unveiled to both in A to boost innovation and jobs and growth and 8.8 billion of this was going to go to UKRI for distribution to these 9 councils.

The Science and Technology Secretary Peter Kyle was quoted in this press release and he said, quote, R&D research and development is essential to fulfilling this government's plan for change, whether in improving lives across the UK and beyond through new life saving drugs, helping us build a cleaner, greener future, or in exploring beyond our planet to unlock new discoveries that keep us healthy, safe and prosperous

and much more besides. But actually, if you look at the real numbers, the government has cut the funding for UKRI in the new budget allocation with £300 million less than in the last budget. And considering inflation, that's actually a significant amount. So that makes it interesting that in the Government announced back in February that Professor Sir Ian Chapman had been appointed the next CEO of UK RI with a renewed focus on economic

growth. Lord Balance, the Science Minister, said that Sir Ian the new CE OS leadership experience, scientific expertise and academic achievements make him an exceptionally strong candidate to lead UKRI in pursuing ambitious curiosity driven research as well as innovations that will unlock new benefits for the UK's people and

drive our plan for change. We also thank Dame Adeline Leiser, I'm hope I'm saying that correctly ahead of her stepping down this summer, recognising her pivotal work in guiding UKR I3 challenging times, notably during the COVID pandemic and through the U KS return to participation in Horizon Europe.

So Horizon Europe is European wide public research funding scheme that we had been taken out of for a few years because of Brexit. Dame Leiser as we can see here on the slide is predictably a World Economic Forum contributor and her most popular piece for the WEF is called What should motivate scientific research. Going back to 12th of March 2025 and UK Column news, Charles presented a really interesting segment called the Net Zero Scam, now involves planetary

solvency and geoengineering. It started looking into the Centre for Climate Repair at the University of Cambridge and I had a feeling that this would be a good start to help look at what actually gets funded by UKRI. And of course view engineering is a topic of great interest to our viewers. So as I said, there are 9 research councils within UKRI. One of them is called the Natural Environment Research Council or I'll call it Nerk. It funds a lot of climate change research at universities.

It announced last year that it would it would be funding for £10.5 million from 2025 to 2030, a project called Modelling Environmental Responses to Solar Radiation Management or SRM. So that means blocking out the sun to keep temperature down like we need at lower temperatures here in the UK. These specific points under the funding would include climate impacts of stratospheric aerosol intervention, which is spraying

with skies. I guess you could say that climate effects of marine cap lab brightening using natural analogues and mining of existing data to understand SRM and the climate impacts of other novel or lesser studied SRM techniques. So essentially they are going to measure the cooling potential of these different options so that we have a better idea of which, if any, should be explored further. They said that they would only be doing modelling and not actually applying techniques

with this funding. So talking to Professor Sean Fitzgerald, who is the director of the Centre for Climate Repair at the University of Cambridge, I really like this quote. If we if those of us who actually know what decarbonization might apply, he actually said in relation to this funded project, I'll be so happy if we've decarbonized so quickly that we don't need to apply this research. So the Centre for Climate Repair is one of the major recipients of this £10.5 million of funding.

So it's worth noting as well to go back into looking at the history of where this all came from. There are some government statements that we can see. So these will links will be in the show notes. Under the Coalition government a few years ago, there was a policy paper published stating the government's view on greenhouse gas removal technologies, which is really what they're saying this all does.

And solar radiation management, it's said, quote, greenhouse gas removal and solar radiation management are terms describing a range of technologies that aim to counteract human caused climate change by deliberate large scale intervention in the Earth's natural systems. They are sometimes referred to as geoengineering or climate engineering.

And they said in order to deliver on the commitment that was made by the UK by signing the Paris Agreements, the UK has legislated for net 0 emissions by 2050. As we know, the Committee on Climate Change have made it clear that greenhouse gas removal will be essential to realising this target. So they think that they will be having to use these techniques to offset remaining emissions in the sectors where it is most difficult to cut them.

Specifically, the Comedian Climate Change Report, which was published in 2016, talks about what need what need to be done specifically, and it said that solar geoengineering proposals include spraying reflective particles into the upper atmosphere, stratospheric aerosols that again spraying us. This process occurs naturally during very large volcanic eruptions such as Mount Pinatubo in 1991. Now I have a video clip here that mentions this Mount

Pinatubo eruption. It's from a seminar by the Centre for Climate Repair, which is the organisation we're talking about that received part of this 10 minute 10 and a half 1,000,000 lbs of funding at Cambridge University. This talk was given on by birthday the 28th of March 2025. The seminar was called Climate Interventions. Colon a distraction or in a necessity question mark. This portion that we're going to see was from Hugh Hunt.

Hugh is the deputy director of the Centre for Climate Repair and a professor in the Department of Engineering at Cambridge. He starts here talking about another scientist called John Shepherds. Let's hear what he had to say about John and about spraying. Sadly I never met him but he he died a while ago. John. 'S not dead. Just point of information. John's not dead, he's happily living in Snape. Well, that's news to me, really. Oh, sorry, John, can we edit that up?

Oh, really? OK, fine. Well, that's a bit embarrassing. Oh well, John. OK, well, so John famously wrote at A at a conference this thing which has become known as the napkin diagram. And I've got a napkin here and I drew it out. The napkin diagram. Funny, if you Google napkin diagram this is what you get. You know you get this thing about geoengineering. Napkin diagram says that temperature on the left hand side, time on the horizontal axis. Business as usual, BAU.

We're going to, things are going to get pretty bad pretty quick. Emissions reductions alone, as Oliver was saying, is not going to happen quickly. Carbon dioxide removal, you know, again, that's going to take a bit of time to. To to get going, but we're going to need to do it. But whatever happens, we're left with this, this hump, this overshoot as it's called, where we want to be able to do something like solar radiation management to keep the

temperatures down. Emissions reductions alone is not enough. Now I was involved in this SPICE project, as Sean said, stratospheric particle injection for climate engineering. Where we learnt from 1991, Mount Pinatubo erupted in the. In the Philippines and caused a degree of cooling or thereabouts for a year or thereabouts. Could we imitate that in some way?

And so our spice project was looking at how we might use a, a tethered balloon, perhaps to put some stuff into the stratosphere to, to imitate the, the active effect of the volcano. So the good news is John is dead. The bad news is that he was involved in a project called stratospheric particle injection for climate engineering. But as I said, they're only apparently only doing modelling of blocking out the sun with this particular project.

But what would it be look like to apply this actual research? So I've got another final short flip here from Douglas Mcmartin at Cornell University talking about blocking out the sun and spraying the skies. In principle, you could do something in space that's prohibitively expensive. Almost certainly marine cloud brightening is the next most frequently discussed idea. The picture here is of ship tracks off of Europe's Atlantic Coast.

So that's formed by the pollution from a ship interacting with water vapour in the atmosphere to form a cloud. And you could. In principle, do that with by spraying salt water into the clouds as well. The this is less well understood. It's actually one of the biggest uncertainties in climate science is how clouds and aerosols interact. Stratospheric aerosols spread globally, so it's inherently a

global solution. Marine cloud brightening is a little different in that you could do it in a much more targeted regime. That doesn't mean the effects would stay in a specific local area, but they could certainly be focused there. And in fact, Australia is looking at this right now for cooling the Great Barrier Reef. There's a third idea, which is cirrus cloud thinning that's not actually reflecting sunlight, but avoiding trapping more heat.

Cirrus clouds actually trap heat, so they warm the planet. And if you could thin them, that would allow more heat to escape. That's currently very uncertain, but it has similar governance issues. I don't think we need to say just look up to see that they're spraying the skies because we actually don't have evidence that ever whatever we see above us is actual spraying the skies. But we can see that there are

plans for this. And in case of interest, the Centre for Climate Repair is having a big conference on the 26th to the 28th of June this year called Arctic Repair 2025. The main topics will be who decides, ethics, governance and public perceptions. Above the clouds, stratospheric aerosol injections. So there it is, the way ahead, the future of Arctic repair, bright ideas, marine cloud brightening and other interventions. So I'm wondering what those other interventions will be.

I don't know, Charles. Maybe I should go to the conference and find out. Do you think they would let me in? That sounds a very good idea and that will be a fine note to finish the news on today. We have run out of time, but it does seem an awful lot of time, effort and money to throw out something that the government insists it's not going to do. But we will have this and plenty of sides to talk about an extra. So if you are a member, please

do stay on to join us for extra. Also, if you are able, please tune into the interview with Sam Bailey tomorrow at 1:00 because that really will be of great insight into an extraordinary situation. And otherwise, it just remains for me to thank Ben. Thank you very much indeed for joining me in the studio. Diane and Alex by video link and you will all remain on the line for extra. So please join us again and otherwise we will see you for the news on Wednesday. Thanks very much indeed.

Bye bye.