The Transition

Ben, thank you very much for joining me in UK column studio #2. So this is a special afternoon for us, but place is not totally complete yet, but it's looking interesting. Yes, it's great to be here. Good. It's nice to finally be in a proper studio too. I know we've we've been talking about this for quite a long time and there was some debate about how it should be set up. Obviously in in the footage, we are going to record the video, we're going to record this

afternoon. The audience will see a little bit of how it looks, but there's still quite a bit of tidying to do, a little bit more to be done to assist the audio. But I think it's going to give us the opportunity for some different styles. Both of us are sitting here very

relaxed today. No doubt I will be told off because I haven't got a tie on. So we can be relaxed, we can do more spontaneous discussions, whether it's you and me or other members of the UK column team and I, I think this is going to be very nice. We've got the formality of the Plymouth Hoe backdrop in the main studio, which everybody likes. And this one more relaxed, little bit funky. Am I allowed to use that word? Might be old fashioned. And yeah, I, I think it's, it's

going to go well. Yes, it'd be great. And we're allowed a cup of tea. And we're allowed a cup of tea in here, yes? So we thought we would discuss with our audience a little bit about cities and and what is going to be happening with cities. And we're prompted to do this because a little while ago a little magazine popped through my door. At least I need my glasses on to read this.

And there was a little article and it said Plymouth expansion plans have your say, the plans for a large part of the South hams to be swallowed up in a greater Plymouth. Now I'll just say for the audience who don't know, to the eastern side of Plymouth, the District Council area along the coastal belt is called S Hams. I live in that area and that is one of the ones which Plymouth is going to take over. They say swallowed up to form a greater Plymouth.

And they are going to have a debate about, well, no, they're not going to have a debate about it. They're going to consult the public about their plans on Wednesday evening. So I'm going to be going along to a church hall to hear what they have to say. Plymouth City Council's already qualified the meeting by saying that there isn't really any debate because the government has said these changes to local authorities are going to happen.

So I'm going to be very interested to see what the Plymouth City Council team have to say. And I've already seen online in their general blurb that they are saying it's not a power grab and there's not going to be huge changes simply because they've got control over all of this beautiful countryside. And probably I'd like to say to the audience straight away, I'm not sure I believe them.

But that's the thing. Wednesday evening I'm going to get the opportunity to be absolutely on the shop floor as a city. And Plymouth is the major city in the southwest short of Bristol anyway. Plymouth is going to be talking about expanding into the countryside areas around Plymouth. And why don't I just list the areas they're going to be looking at Sparkwell, Cornwood, Halford, Aggbra, Ivy Bridge, Yelpton, Ermington. So those are the local areas.

They're all village areas largely, with the exception of Ivy Bridge, which was a, it was a village originally, but it had a huge expansion in the very early 2000s, probably a bit before that, late late 1990s. It was growing incredibly quickly. So there's a lot of new houses. So it's a bit more of an urban area, but there's a lot of a lot of countryside. Would you trust Plymouth when they say it's not a power grab? I don't trust any political bodies or administrative bodies of the state.

Yeah, about anything that they say on any topic, Brian. So no, I don't trust Plymouth Council and they say it's not a power grab. I, I thought you'd probably say that we had a, a little bit of interesting research going on a while ago because you are very keen on paper and, and drawing pictures of diagrams of how you see the system. And that was certainly something that I used to do. But you'd been working and looking at quite well, probably

at the highest level. Because if I remember correctly on your diagrams, you were definitely into things like the United Nations and the World Economic Forum. And some of these are the big political bodies. But what you were demonstrating was that you could see their policy influence coming right down to city street level.

Yes. And in one of your diagrams, you, you said to me. And down here in Plymouth, we've got all these funny organizations, and one of them was called Octopus, if I remember correctly. Plymouth Octopus. Plymouth Octopus. And I said that's funny because when I was researching back in 2005, I had also been drawing some diagrams where I came across these funny little organizations, of which Octopus was 1 we had. Zebra Collective.

Zebra Collective, we had one called Eye Contact and I was always fascinated by these little organisations, where they'd come from and what they were actually doing. And it's been the discussions with you that's really started to fill in some big holes because these huge changes to our cities and county councils and district councils, these are not small local plans that are unfolding. This is big stuff. This is well, the local level is where the the shovels meet the ground.

Basically, you know, if if all of the policy stays up in the stratosphere, internationally, in the UN, in the World Economic Forum, then it doesn't actually have any impact. It has to ground itself in a local area in order for change

to actually take place. And yeah, so I've, I've spent a lot of time looking at, well, first of all, for me trying to understand the UN system and what it was doing, because actually until I started working at UK column, I'd never even really encountered the UN system. I knew that it, the UN existed. I knew that politicians went along to New York and sat in the UN building.

And obviously you'd see the Security Council on the news and you know, the kind of the, the, the, the basic functions of what the UN publicly communicates. You would hear about it, right? But I, I had no idea really the, it was this huge international network and all of the different bodies that it encompasses and the agenda it's set for itself basically, which is an agenda of, of total wholesale global transformation.

I'd never really understood that because professionally I'd always been more on the the market side of things. Just just qualify that. Ben, when you say professionally, you're referring back to your time with the consultancy Ernst and Young? Well, not just Ernst and Young.

So I worked in, I worked in the consulting industry and was advising companies, mainly bits of government work, but mainly working with brands in international corporations to help them improve their performance, I guess would be a very short way of, of describing it. And then latterly a lot of that was was to do with using new

technologies. So this process of digitisation that the whole of society has been going through for the past, I mean, probably 40 years now actually, maybe even slightly longer if you think back to the early days of Silicon Valley in the 70s, when organizations like IBM has actually been around for over a century now. But certainly Microsoft, when that appeared, Apple appeared in the mid to late 70s.

You know, this process of, of computer technologies coming in is, has been going on for quite a long time now. I was obviously very young back then. I was only born in 81. So professionally, I kind of entered the workforce in 2004 and then sort of rode that wave of mobile devices, the iPhone in particular, the app ecosystem.

So everything becomes about digital applications running on a mobile device and then basically how you collapse industries ultimately into the technology so that that becomes your primary interface point for how you interact with a company. It's now a lot of the time it's done through through the phone. And you know, there's been huge ramifications to that in terms of how cities are are built and particularly around things like

the High Street, for example. So the the the death is a High Street, you can pretty much come down down completely to to the Internet, in particular mobile telecommunications. Everyone just buys things on Amazon now. Exactly buy it, they buy it online now. So you, you end up with, you know, a few very small, sorry, not very small, a small number of very large dominant players in areas of the economic system where you used to have huge diversity. And you know, the high street's

a really good example of that. And that's, that's been particularly and that, and it's particularly important for the way that this sort of this transformation of, of, of cities and transformation of governance is playing out because in the vacuum that's been created the, the, the physical vacuum, literally we've got empty shops everywhere. You've now got these new types of organizations, local government organizations, but these new they're not quite

businesses. So you hear this term social enterprise a lot or community interest company. And these organizations are now filling up those those spaces actually. And and that's sort of presented as this sort of nice friendly, organic progression of of the way that society is structured and how it and how it's run.

But actually when you go and look at what's driving that and where the money's coming into that system in order to enable it and how it links directly to UN policy in particular, then you can begin to understand how that top level bit of the system, which to most people feels very sort of abstract and distant and above their head and, and democratically unaccountable. And, you know, we'd never vote. We don't vote for people to go to the UN.

You know, we don't any of these sort of supranational bodies. You know, no one voted for Ursula von der Leyen, but apparently she's the, you know, she's running Europe at the moment. No one voted for Antonio Guterres, but he's running the UN and apparently speaking on behalf of the holy humanity, Right. And, and, and the things that they talk about are so kind of sort of lofty and theoretical. A lot of people would say it's

nonsense. They hear the language that they nonsense, yeah, they can hear them talking about ideas and things they're doing. A lot of a lot of people will often say, oh, this is just nonsense. And I, I find this quite frustrating because you sense that people without any understanding of what these individuals are doing or planning or dismissing it.

No, it's not nonsense. We not only need to pay attention to what they're talking about, we need to actually understand the language they used. Sorry, they used because very often you've got to get into the language to fully understand what they're talking about. Yes. Well, because, because it's, it's how the, it's how bureaucrats talk to each other. Ultimately, it's all very procedural and rigid and loaded

with propaganda buzzwords. And, you know, you get things like diversity and inclusivity and sustainability and all this stuff that, you know, it's superficially, it sounds to some people, it sounds like rubbish. To some people it sounds reassuring and, you know, and, and, and like a positive thing.

But actually when you sort of dig just very, very, you know, one or two layers beneath the surface, there's actually a lot of, a lot of meaning buried in this language that is having direct effects on the whole of the whole of our society. You know, and, and, and it's, it's literally the physical

environment in your town. You know, we talk about Plymouth. You walk down Union Street in Plymouth. Now there are buildings along that stretch that are part of redevelopment programmes directly aligned to United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Yeah, absolutely, 100%, yeah. And that's just in Plymouth. This is going on in every major town around the UK. Yeah, as as you said, Union Street, I thought let's let's describe that a bit for our

viewers and listeners. It's quite interesting. Little bit of Plymouth history, but originally when Plymouth developed as a port, the first port development was in Devonport, which is the area to the West of what is now the main city of Plymouth and the Devonport naval base is on the River Tamar to the to the West side of the city. Southwest, southwest side of the city.

And in days gone by that was the predominant area because obviously ships came in and that's where cargoes were landed and that's how the trade built up. And it was only when the expansion started, the Plymouth as a city began to grow. And the other thing that happened was that Plimpton, which is an area to the North East of the city, which until about 100 years ago, 150 years ago did have a just navigable river. So that actually formed, if my memory serves me right, one of

the Stannery ports. So you did have another port area to the eastern side of Plymouth. But when the river silted up the the strength of that side of the city reduced and most of the maritime side went to the to the Devonport side. And Devonport was connected to Plymouth by one St. which was Union Street. And originally that street was a very busy hub of everything.

So it had shops. But in later years, because in particular of the number of sailors who were ashore from a very big military base, naval base in Plymouth, that that street was full of pubs and clubs. Music halls. Music halls and it was a very, very lively environment and I found it very sad to see these parts of Plymouth absolutely fall into disrepair.

And I know that you're thinking one particular building down that direction, which should be an absolutely phenomenal Victorian theatre, but is in fact sitting there as a derelict building. Yeah, right. So we've we've seen. It's a whole strip. It's probably about the, the main bit is, is about 200 metres of what you can still see used to be real Victorian grandeur actually, you know, but with a kind of burlesque sort of edge to it as well. Actually, you know, like these

ornate buildings. And you can kind of sense the, the life that would have been pulsing through that place right when it was an entertainment destination for, for, for the poor and, and, and a cultural destination. And and it's clearly just sort of been let left to rots over decades. This becomes very interesting for me because my my time in Plymouth, I have watched the decline of the city. And so, so you have the basic neglect of areas. You had the demise of the naval

base. So from being a huge employer just after the Second World War, I think there was about 55,000 people employed just in the dockyard alone. And then Plymouth had inside the city and on the city periphery a lot of of industry and small businesses often connected to the dockyard. So a lot of a lot of business and industry in Plymouth Dockyard starts to reduce. And then you saw these companies disappear one by one on the periphery of Plymouth and you say, well, how are people going

to earn their money? Then when we ended up with in the Devonport area, so that naval base area, a large part of the community unemployed and some of them have been unemployed for three generations. But what we saw Plymouth City Council start to do was

regeneration projects. And this is where I got interested because these weren't home grown regeneration projects, they were all regeneration projects which were either funded by or themselves targeting European regeneration grant money from the European Investment Bank, from the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development. And then what you started to see happen was a style of regeneration which to my mind completely destroyed the

historical look of the city. So cities, so streets were going to be pedestrian eyes, they were going to be paved over in a particular way. A certain style of St. furniture, lampposts and benches and bollards would come in and that was very quickly followed by the fact that that the shopping area had a very high percentage of charity shops, all the same shops. And I was interested to see that happen in Plymouth. But at the same time, I could

travel to another city. I could go to Liverpool or Sheffield or Manchester and see exactly the same style of regeneration. And what it actually did is is gave a a uniform look to the cities and they became slightly unbritish. Sometimes the architecture, you'd say, yeah, this looks a bit like you might see it on the continent. And very often attracted, but attracted but slightly dilapidated buildings were disappearing to be replaced by very unattractive modern

concrete structures. And I was very, I was always very interested in that process. Right, Well, yeah, the, the, all of the, the personality, yeah, was being stripped out of the, of the country. And I, I remember this in so this is pre financial crash. So I think I was while I was at university or just after I'd graduated from university. So I graduated in 2004. I, I remember Nottingham, which was my hometown, bits of it were completely transformed.

So like areas of the Lace Market, which was all beautiful old Victorian buildings were being taken down and they were putting up these new flats and they were concrete, but also a lot of glass. There was this sort of new glass and sort of ugly boxy, nondescript modern new build apartments with some retail underneath them. And as you say, this was the, it was the same look that you were getting in Nottingham as you were getting in Plymouth or any other bit of the country basically.

Like so actually the personality and character of the place and like local materials, for example, which is, yeah, we just wasn't there anymore. And, and you, you referenced the, the EU money, which is interesting, right? And, and the fact that a lot of this is grant based, right?

And, and, and to me, this is deliberate disruption from the bureaucratic centre in order to essentially reset the, the, the social and the economic and the cultural structures in towns around the UK. And this was happening, of course, the whole of Europe as well, right? It's not just in this country. It's hasn't been happening everywhere and, and basically creating a false economy because our industrial capacity had been wound down over decades.

You know, So if you go to Nottingham, for example, I just mentioned the Lace market. The wealth of Nottingham through the 17 and the 1800s came from lace. Yeah. And so the work's no longer made in Nottingham, but a lot of the built physical infrastructure and the wealth and heritage of the town is, is tied up with

that. But they haven't made lace there industrially in probably a couple of 100 years now, you know, and, and there are other things that have that have happened there in, in terms of industrial output. So Boots was a big employer in the city, but a lot of that has been sent overseas now. And you know, it's, it's a cover over the cracks in the decline in our wealth creating capacity

as a nation. You have these slugs, huge slugs, billions of of, of EUR coming in from these grant systems to give people employment, but in order to do what? To tear down the the their own. Infrastructure. Their own infrastructure, you know which, which should have been maintained.

Aside from watching this in the city, the other thing I started to be able to see is the documents that the local authority and also some of the government agencies, the government office of the Southwest, Southwest of England, regeneration agencies. So these are government constructs. How the government would be helping local businesses grow, I don't know, but so these agencies came along and predominantly they then followed the requirements of the sources of the funding.

So if you were going to take EBRD European Banker Reconstruction and Development grants for you to get that money, you would have to agree that in your plans you were going to do XY and Z, which is what the bank wanted.

And so through the money they controlled the type of development, the style of it. And, and essentially that's when I started to see the the European purse holding cities in this country to account because the focus of the city areas instantly went away from national government to the European Union because the European Union was dangling all the pots of money. It was, it was really interesting to watch, but. It's usually a total manipulation of of the the economic system basically.

Yeah, so I say. So at that time everything I was watching happen for me was linking back to the European Union. But now we've moved on because we've got other things which have sort of come to the surface. And Mark Anderson, who is with us at the UK columns often talking about the rise of the the global cities and the global mayor system.

And so it was later that I started to realise that, OK, well, the European Union was building and destroying was all on the path to a much bigger control coming in. And that's really dovetails with what you started to say just now, Ben. The people sense that there's something higher than them, there's power being enacted, but they can't see that so easily is now some of that is breaking

surface, isn't it? Because we can look at the the UN Sustainable Development Goals, we can see their documentation and what it's talking about. We can have a look at web websites which are talking about the the global city and the global mayor system and the overwhelming model coming through is that they are creating city states of immense power. Yes, which are not independent city states, which is how

they're being positioned. So this drive towards this metro mayor system, which is already happening by the way, right? So let's, one of the most important things for people to take away from this, I think, right, is that they've actually already doing this. There's no proper consultation about it at all. The system's already in place, They are implementing it and they're effectively bulldozing the existing system out of the way with almost no discussion at

all. And it's just, and it's just happening, right? And, and they've lined up every single component part of the system in order for them to, to, to, to enable that transition ultimately. And they talk about it as a transition, a great global

transition. And it's not just political system, it's the whole economic system, It's the energy grid, it's the, the telecommunications infrastructure, the Internet, it's the artificial intelligence platforms that they're developing that are going to be absolutely cool to this governance. And it's basically a re platforming of Everything Everywhere to a single integrated system that is consistent across the whole world. And the, the, the mayors is how

is being implemented. And they'll, they'll, they allow devolution to the level of mayor because it gives people the sense, you know, the, the false hope ultimately that there's that there is some accountability or that you can exert a little bit of control and have some democratic representation because there's someone from your local area who you can at least vote for. And that might help you to exert some influence over the system, right?

But actually that's, that's not what they're for, right? So this devolution to this mayor based system is actually they're, they're little fiefdoms. It's like a franchise model. It's actually, it's probably a really good way of describing it, right? It's like every restaurant that you can go into is now a McDonald's. It might have different people behind the counter and the manager might be a different person from one to the next, but ultimately they're all just McDonald's. Yeah.

And that's basically the model that they're moving towards. And actually they learnt the lessons of global corporatisation of, of industry is they've actually learnt a lot of stuff from the way that these big international companies have run and then deploy it back into the political system. Yeah, yeah. This, this is fascinating and, and for me, this is where people need to pay attention because as you say, this bit has been put in place very quickly.

So they've built a new system of governance, just reminds people what what they had. We had parish councils, so representation at down to the smallest village or hamlet, just a few people in the parish. And of course that's also connected to the churches. Parish is usually regarded as the area connected to a particular church. We had the district councils which were locally based, not even at community level. They, they were geographic areas

within a county. So they're, they're a division of the county level. And, and then yes, it was sensible. I would agree that when you had the biggest cities forming, they obviously need to, needed to become a, a unit in their own right. So then we had Plymouth City Council and Manchester City Council and Greater London Council as it, it was.

So that made sense. But nevertheless, that was a system where you you had a breakdown in levels and you knew if you were at the bottom of the chain, you're always dealing with somebody bigger but still local in order to represent you. Now, what's been built on the side to one side, a parallel system is nothing to do with that at all. And this, this is where people really got to pay attention because we've got district councils have gone.

A lot of that happened after lockdown because during lockdown, a lot of the district councils simply abandoned their businesses and said you can work from home, from home. And then, and then once COVID was over, people never went back to work in the, in the district councils. And so now that's being used as an excuse that we don't really need the district councils and we're going to get rid of them.

So there's a grouping up of the county structure whilst at the same time we're building these city states fiefdoms. It is what they are. And the other person of power in them of course is the police commissioner who who was introduced as a person who the public could trust to regulate the police because they elected them. But everywhere I've come across police commissioners, they're actually working hand in glove with with the police and the local authorities themselves. So.

Certainly are, yeah. Yeah. And we've talked about this particularly in relation to Greater Manchester and a lot of the issues around investigations and into an accountability for grooming gangs issue and what's been going on in Alderman Rotherham. And it's been a pack of trouble. And that's we're not here to talk about that necessarily, right? But ultimately these things are all interlink with each other.

And if that's an exemplar of what, of how this thing's going to operate, then I think it's fairly damning, I would say. So your city franchise idea this, this is brilliant because this really brings it home. You're going to be in a city, so you'll drive along the road and you'll come to a sign and it will say you're you're entering Manchester or Newcastle and you think you've entered a different city.

But actually the whole structure is going to be franchise model and it will be exactly the same as Glasgow or Manchester or Sheffield or Leeds, wherever it. Is, yeah. And it won't be running on the same governance, the same technological systems. Everything will be integrated in the background. They'll have, they'll have the same surveillance technologies. They're driving people towards urbanisation because they want people to be. This is part of this idea of inclusivity, right?

They want, they don't want anyone living outside of the system. That's what inclusive means. It means that you can only exist within the system that they're developing. So the level of every man, woman and child. Alive on Earth yes exactly because this is not what's happening in the UK.

It's happening everywhere. So we talked about this global mares C40 mares is is one of the sort of leading examples of this Sadiq Khan is the Co president alongside a woman forget her name from Sierra Leone. I believe it is right. So you've got these kind of diverse groups, internationalist promoting the same agenda, running on the same, the same, the same platform, same technology, the same system ultimately which is alien to the nation state and.

National cultures. It is essentially anti nationalist, right? And these, this is a, this is a globalised system. And you can see this manifesting in right down to the level of you want to know why they're not paving the roads properly out in the counties? Because they want to make those areas unlivable so that people leave them, won't live there and they'll move into the urban centers where all of the investment is being put right.

You know, you hear a lot of one of the one of these issues that people get quite upset about is, is, is potholes in the roads. Well, that's not a mistake. That's a deliberate move to drive people, nudge people towards urban centres. And and and the new system which is where you know, the the cities is where is where this new system is, is focused on

ultimately. Before it, before it goes out of my mind just coming back to Plymouth specifically when you when you read the blurb from Plymouth City Council about these new plans, one of the things they said is that, well, first of all, they emphasized that Plymouth was a an important

global city. This always makes me smile because Plymouth has trouble operating as a city in UK but apparently is an important global city and the also the Plymouth feels that it needs to increase its population to 300,000. Now I can imagine for others city dwellers across UK they're going to be thinking well that's not much but Plymouth has just about held its own as a city with a population I think around about 200 and 32140 thousand.

I think it's up to about 250,000 now, so they are proposing another 50 that let's say another 50,000 people coming into Plymouth. Where are they going to work? Where are they going to live? Well, we know what's going to happen with the living problem because just outside of Plymouth they decided to create a new town called Sheerford.

It's on green fields and although the excuse used was that it was low grade agricultural space, since we can't feed ourselves as a nation, perhaps we ought to be very careful of what we designate low grade agricultural space. But they built a new city or a new big new housing development with no new link to the main highway. So the M5A38 coming down into Plymouth, there is no new junction to take you into this vast new urban area. There are virtually no shops.

They have got a school there now I think. But you, you just drive into this slightly to me, spooky urban area, which is there are some nice buildings, but it's all a bit uniform and it's very wide space and open. Inorganic and they feel a bit fake, right, because actually, if you in any city proper cities, you know, certainly in this country and and other ancient, ancient civilisations, Britain is an ancient culture, right? We've got cities that have that have built up over thousands of

years. They, they build up over thousands of years, right? It's in, it's, it's, it's a process of, of, of development. And, and that takes time and it happens in a, in a, in, in a kind of, in a very natural and, and, and, and organic way. And you know a 50,000 person town essentially what that is, right? We're talking about 50,000 people or actually how many people in this new. Year. Well, I'm, I'm saying they're going to take on another 50.

I'm not sure what the population of Sherford is now. It's, it's nowhere near 50,000. But nevertheless, they've built a lot of houses and it's still expanding. Right. But it's all but. It's all just come at once. So it's not. Just something that's that's developed over time, incrementally over decades. It's just lump it in but. When they went to develop it, it was we had to have it how we need it. We need, we need all this space for new homes and they never said where people were coming

from. But now, of course, we get a little bit of a clue because if we dip our toes into a delicate area, any place around UK can now see that a significant proportion of the population is is coming in with migration. And that is also part of the plan to breakdown national identity not only in UK but across Europe. And so PP so we're in here to the UNS migration plans impacting on how how somewhere like Plymouth builds itself. It's it's it's. Fascinating.

No, it is fascinating, right. And that's, and yes, so you know, another example of of where the the global strategy, the global plan. Begins to impact on the physical and the cultural space in your immediate vicinity. Ultimately, and I forget the name, was it Peter Sutherland? Was that the guard? Yes. Peter Sutherland. Yes. So was he Irish? Am I? Am I getting? That right. I think possibly, possibly he was. You might, yeah. Yeah, but he was a top top UN

official. Ambassador on Migration. Right. And this was probably knocking on 20 years ago. I think he died around 2010 if I'm correct. Maybe it was more recent. A few years ago, yeah. But he was basically saying that, well, we need mass migration in all this breakdown in the nation States and this is the direction of travel that we've taken and that's what we're going to do.

And that's a very cruel agenda because yes, if people are feeling pressurised as a result of newcomers coming into the country, the people who are being displaced from their own country or leaving their own country, a lot of them are under stress themselves. Absolutely. And I have never forgotten driving home one night from the UK column. Very rarely listen to it now.

But I had Radio 4 on and at one point they were talking about the fact that if you were a social worker in UK, you should seriously think about having a look for a job in Poland. Because Poland was desperately short of social workers and care workers. Why? Because all the young people had migrated into Western Europe and UK, right, Leaving the elderly people, particularly in the farming areas in Poland with no young people to support them.

So very cruel on the elderly people in Poland, cruel on the young people that have been lured to a new nation state thinking that they're, you know, the grass is greener on the other side. And then we are pressurised as a result of that migration. And, and it's a, it's a completely ludicrous and illogical policy, right? So the, the young people who've come from Poland to work in jobs here, but then we've got to send people from here over to parliament to work in jobs there.

What on, why on earth would we need to do that? Why doesn't everyone just stay where they are? Well, because. And we can fill the positions that are required. We can't have happy people living in their own states, enjoying their own culture and their own identity. That's all. All got to be broken up. Exactly. Which is what Peter Sutherland said. We need more mass migration to break down the homogeneity of

the nation state. Exactly, which is ultimately, but it's not just it's, it's, it's a, it's a direct attack on the people, right. So when we talk about the nation state and why that's important, it's because it's constituted of individual human beings with lives and, and ambitions. And, and, and this is actually a direct attack on them, right? Importantly, and, and these and the mayors, they, they're ultimately driving this agenda now, right.

So there's there's one example that I've been looking at for the past few days, which is the new mayor of, let me get this absolutely correct, got it in front of me here. So this lady is Helen Goodwin and she's the mayor of the West of England Combined Authority, Bristol and associated areas around there. And she's only been in position for a couple of months and just yesterday, I think it was no one did this come out on the 18th of of June.

We'll provide a link to this. You can go and have a read of it. But it talks about the fact that she's going to be using a citizens assembly, which is one of these democratic innovations that we've been talking about, these new democratic models. And she's going to use that to reshape culture in the West of England with a people powered vision, apparently. So the mayor is going to micromanage culture in Bristol and Avon and that whole area.

And they're talking about this as a democratic experiment, which will put cultural decision making in the hands of 52 citizens. So they're going to select. That's that's the keyword, isn't it? These are not elected citizens, these are going to be selected citizens. So they send out letters to 15,000 households, apparently randomly chosen.

But you know, I'm, I'm, I would question how random that actually is. And if the, the, the letters going out as random, then I'm sure that there's some screening going on in the selection process. Of course there will be. And then they're going to run this series of assemblies to make decisions about culture in the Bristol region. Well, why does the mayor have anything to say about culture? Culture comes from the people, it comes from the whole population engaging in.

No, that that's where it came from. Well. That's where it used to come from. That's where it used to come. Now we we have a group of individuals who've been told cultures to change and they are now starting the path to changing the culture to a culture that we can suspect. We know what it is. We can, we can guess by looking at indicators, but ultimately this is going to be a culture which is alien to anything that we've lived with if we still have a national identity of any type.

Exactly. It's, it's going to, it's, it's imposed, it's artificial culture, it's these decisions, they're all ultimately going to be about the allocation of, of, of tax revenue because that's all politicians do, right? They don't actually understand anything other than how to dole out other people's money. That's literally the job that they have. And so that's interesting in its

own right, right. And and, and, and, but, but beyond that, the two other things that I think that really stood out at me about this was first of all, this lady Helen Godwin has most recently she's, she's a, she, she was a, a, a councillor in Bristol for, for a few years. She also worked professionally as, as a director at Hayes, which is a big recruitment company.

But most recently she was in the local government consulting team at PwC, spent three years at Pricewalterhouse Coopers who are a strategic partner in the World Economic Forum. So they are actively engaged in the the Great Reset and the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals. So this is the the market side that the UN represents the state. Ultimately the power structure dictates the direction of travel terms of engagement.

But then the market, the World Economic Forum side, the corporations are engaged in, in the implementation of that in the profit seeking marketplace that's been constructed around this whole transformation program. So she spent three years doing this and so that you have to question her, her, her, her motives and ultimately her mindset around this. You know, she's she's, she's been put in there to. Change. Where has she come from? How?

How is it that she's now in this very interesting position? Yeah, that's the first question I'd ask. Exactly. And and then the other thing is, is when you look at where the money is is coming in from to support this cultural transformation program, and some of it's from the Arts Council, you're right.

So again, this is central state money being pushed into transformation of city regions across the UK, But then also importantly, the Kaloust Golbenkian Foundation and the Paul Hamlin Foundation. So these supposedly philanthropic charitable foundations who have all made it their, their, their mission to break down and reshape and

reform the the donation state. And these two are particularly active in, in the Uki think Kalusko Bankian is, is, is Turkish, but I think Paul Hamlin is based out of London, right? So we've got international capital coming from the richest families in the world, flooding into these cultural and economic and political. Change, change, change. Programs and this is now being presented back to the British people as a fait accompli and inevitability.

And with the deceitful line that it oh this is just government, UK government, reorganisation of local government, when in fact what the government is doing is following this higher level international agenda. So there is a huge amount to discuss about this. Just coming back to Plymouth, we'll say to the audience that this meeting's coming up this

week. I will attend, I will make sure I pay attention and we'll see whether we can get some interesting material to run a follow up on what was discussed in the meeting. What did Plymouth City Council say it was going to do in these expansion plans? I think we might be able to challenge them a little bit. So that'll be fun, but we've got a huge amount of material. You've done a really brilliant amount of research looking at these change agents, the bodies, the the policies, the people,

the funding streams. It's a vast network. It's almost like a virus descending over culture in UKI. Think it's a cancer? Cancer. Yeah, it's like a cancerous growth actually, which is attached itself to the host nation and and he's slowly killing it ultimately. And that's that's the closest analogy I can think of. So to deal with this disease, we we need to be able to see it, recognise it for what it is. Yeah, we need to be having a look at what what we can do to heal society in UK. Yes.

And I think the most upbeat thing which I could possibly end on is the fact that when you and that when you analyse the control structure that these powers and these bodies and these funding streams are implementing, they only get control when people at the lowest level agree to be

controlled. And more and more I see that if you have people at the local level, parish level, communities on a street, every time they say no, we are not having this, it causes eruptions further up the chain because these powerful people have no power unless they can control the individual. That's how I see it. It's completely, completely true. Yeah, yeah. And, and actually, they've, they have massively underestimated

the, the, the fight. I think I would say that, that there is still in the hearts and minds of, of the British people, but also, you know, internationally they're struggling to implement this system. But I'll talk to talk to Britain because that's where we are. And that's, you know, my, my main focus. But they've also massively overestimated their own ability

to implement this. You got a lot of very arrogant people in these systems who seem to think that because they've done a good job of elevating themselves up the corrupt hierarchy, that gives them some kind of power over others, whereas actually it doesn't and they're beginning to really understand that. I think so. I think that's true, Yeah. OK, Well, Ben, it's been a fascinating conversation, a little teaser for our viewers

and listeners. And that is the UK economy is planning another written reports along the lines of your life in their hands. We are going to specifically look at this issue of, of control over the nations and the city States and some of these power systems. And I, I think, I think there's a very good glossy UK column production coming and we'll keep people informed as to the final published date. But we are working on it. You're certainly working on it. So that's good.

OK. Thanks very much, Ben. Thank you, Brian, it's a pleasure. Here's to many more in the new studio.