UK Column News - 6th June 2025

Good afternoon. It's Friday the 6th of June 2025, just after 1:00. Welcome to UK Call News. I'm your host, Mike Robinson. Joining me in the studio today is Patrick Henningson. Welcome to the programme, Patrick. Great to be with you, Mike. And by video link, we have Mark Anderson and we're delighted to also have Kate Clarenberg with us as well. Now we're going to begin with Ukraine, Patrick, and the claim from the BBC that will seek revenge.

And that's typically a mode of language from the Babe. Well, atypical in fact, sounds more like the News of the World. If you read the other mainstream media, they say Putin will respond or retaliate. But the BB CS taking a little feather out of Rupert Murdoch's gap there. So there's the revenge is coming, apparently. Now listen to this comment from Trump in the White House.

So what do you consider to put? More sanctions on Russia because this discussion is going on now for weeks and months and you tweeted about it once but then nothing. Happens yeah when I see when I see the moment when we're not going to make a deal when this thing won't stop at that moment yeah it's in my my brain, the deadline we're not when I see the moment where it's not going to stop and I'm sure you're. Going to do the same thing. We'll be very, very, very tough.

And it could be on both countries, to be honest. You know, it takes 2 to tango, but they'll be we're going to be very tough, whether it's Russia or anybody else, we're going to be very tough that. So the peace negotiations don't like that they're they're going so well here.

So and look, the, the problem is and we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll play some a little, little bit of footage here, but Trump's basically saying that there's going to be some kind of response from from Russia. He's acknowledging that this was a very from a public relations point of view, this is a very successful operation for Ukraine and for the fundraising operation that Zelensky is running with the West as it stands on the ground in terms of material differences on the

battlefield. Doesn't look like it's that consequential, but huge in terms of public relations in places like Westminster, Brussels and Washington, DC. But you know, how long can Trump carry on with this aloof approach to foreign policy where he says, I had no idea that they tried to assassinate Putin in his helicopter. I had no idea about this massive drone strike hitting their nuclear long range nuclear deterrent.

And this is the same president that says this war would never have happened if I was president. Well, he is president and we now have a major nuclear potential provocation. So this whole aloof shtick is just getting long in the tooth with Trump. So I I really, I'm not buying it, quite frankly. And I don't know anybody who actually is. So this is this is one of the problems here. So Trump is, I think who knows? Somebody could have just told him, well, this is what we're going to do.

And he telegraphs these vague signals. He's constantly doing this and you're just left to interpret what he says. Meanwhile, Lindsey Graham is gallivanting around Kiev and Mike Pompeo is in Odessa meeting the leader of the trades massacre in Odessa, who is one of the more unsavoury characters in the Ukrainian parliament.

So that's what's going on. And meanwhile, they're trying to conduct negotiations which look like they're kind of dead in the water at Istanbul with attack like an attack like this coming before it, Mike. So right, this is this is the problem that we're facing here. So we'll, we'll take a look at just just to review here, this was the operation.

We'll bring this up on screen. If you if you remember how this went down, these were basically container trucks that were disguised as, who knows, mobile sort of homes or something like that, but contained sort of autonomous drones, probably using the Russian telecom system, but maybe using Starlink satellites. It's not certain how this was organised. And these were deployed.

This was 15 months in the making and supposedly Trump didn't know about it. I highly doubt that if he, if he is, if he if he is true and he is honest and he didn't know about it, he's not in charge. And that's a whole another conversation as well. So, but this is a level of asymmetric warfare, Mike. The potential for this is hugely disruptive for any country, especially Russia, who is exposed because it doesn't have like the United States and ocean

on each side. As a world superpower, it has to guard a lot of border and territory and it's a bigger problem. So this is, I think, the future of warfare. They're calling it Mike, and this is hugely dangerous. If this is what NATO is is planning a relentless waves of these types of swarms, then we could be in for a very long and tedious conflict.

So last week we reported that the UK Government had announced the Killweb as part of the Strategic Defence Review, or Digital Targeting Web as they like to call it now. This is said to enable quick fire targeting of enemy assets, including through offensive cyber operations. And they're saying that this kill web is going to be based at the new cyber and electronic actual magnetic command, which they're establishing at the same time.

And that's going to lead, these are their words, defensive cyber operations and coordinate offensive cyber operations with the National Cyber Force. And so the question is, is it a coincidence that the the drone operation, the Ukrainian drone operation is called Spider's web? Is this an allusion to the to the kill web idea? I don't believe in coincidences, especially 2 that appear in the same week. Mike and the announcement

preceded the operation. So obviously they're, you know, they're patting each other on the back in the halls of Westminster on this. Right. So, well, why don't I welcome Kit Klarenberg to the programme? Kit, welcome to the programme. Is it a coincidence that these two terms sound similar? No, I mean, much like Patrick, I'm no believer in coincidences. I mean, I think that I actually respectfully disagree potentially that Trump wasn't in

the loop on this. I do err on the side of him actually having been kept out of this and this having been a British operation which was planned without, perhaps with CIA knowledge, but without their oversight. We at the Grey Zones ever since, ever since the proxy war erupted in February 2022, have been systematically documenting how it is Britain that is leading escalatory actions, concocting all sorts of wild schemes to up the ante in the proxy war.

With the ultimate objective of keeping the US invested in this and embroiled in this and trying to prevent them from withdrawing. Which I do think there is a significant strain of sentiment within the US public, within the US government, within, within the Pentagon and the CIA that they realise that this is a very costly, unwinnable quagmire. That is the, the, the cost benefit ratio is not in their favour at this point for a variety of reasons.

Now, what I think is, is quite interesting as well is when this attack happened. And then there were subsequent strikes such as underwater attacks on Kerch Bridge and the blowing up of bridges in, in Kirk and Briansk. You know, all of these actions were advocated in leaked British intelligence files that we've reported on at the Grey Zone. So no prizes for guessing who came up with these ideas and and encouraged the Ukrainians to go ahead with them.

Is that initially there was this flurry of intense media hype about these strikes. The The Daily Telegraph rather bombastically reported Trump said Ukraine held no cards. Well, they just proved that they hold many cards, the BBC said. Tub thumpingly. Ukraine has just sent a very powerful message to Russia and the West. And then we Fast forward only a few days. You know, this is less than a week ago now.

And Politico acknowledges that the military, yeah, utility of these attacks was actually very limited. And it's had absolutely no impact whatsoever on the frontline reality, which is that Russia is advancing at a ever increasing rate and scale. They are seizing new territory every single day, inflicting vast casualties on Ukraine every

step of the way. Reuters has also acknowledged that there is no evidence that anywhere near the amount of strategic bombers that Ukraine claimed to have damaged or destroyed. I think they're, they, they initially claimed it was 40. There was the Reuters admits there's no evidence to support this. I think that the true number is probably a 10th of that.

Yeah. I mean, this was a much needed propaganda victory at a time that Ukraine is on the brink of collapse on the frontline and that initial burst of exuberance

has rather rather faded. I mean, there were numerous politicians, including Boris Johnson, who we know sabotaged personally the peace talks in Istanbul in April 2022 between Russia and Ukraine by flying to Kiev and offering Zelensky the blankets, the blank cheques to keep going when they were a signature away from a rather equitable peace deal. That he stated this shows how inventive and intelligent and resourceful the Ukrainians are. It's time to ratchet up the

sanctions. It's time to finish this and end Putin's reign of terror, Karl Bildt, the former Swedish Prime Minister and latter day EU apparatchik, said. This is like something out of a 007 novel, which I think was probably the inspiration and point behind this as we've again

at the Grey zone delved into. A lot of the British military and intelligence planners who are behind Ukraine's daring operations, which almost invariably end in total failure, are quite clearly informed heavily by Hollywood readings of World War Two. There. There was, for instance, the attempt to capture a beachheading Krinky which lasted. This is in Russian. Russian occupied cursing was an operation that lasted for nine months.

Wave after wave of British trained Ukrainian marines were sent on high speed boat Ribs across the Denipro River without any air cover whatsoever. It was hoped by the British they could recreate D Day and March from Crinkie on Crimea, an outright victory. In reality most marines were killed on route due to relentless Russian fire. Many people who actually met the The Who made it there were killed immediately upon arrival by Russian artillery and glide

bombs and drones. And you know, this is just one of many total disasters, including the Kirk incursion and the 2023 counter offensive, which we now know and has been confirmed in the mainstream media were plotted by the British, apparently with the the US not being overly happy about these things, about these operations going ahead and being sceptical of their their chances of success. OK. Well, thank you very much for that. Great, great.

A couple of points just to underline what Kitt says, he's really demonstrated there that every single major negotiation of threshold point of Britain has been there probably behind the scenes working with Ukraine to basically sabotage any potential advance in bilateral or multilateral negotiations. So I mean, that's a pattern that's pretty well established going back for the duration of this conflict.

Right, right. OK, Well, something else I'm really keen to get Kitt's view on is this, because as Charles mentioned during his report on Keir Starmer's shiny new strategic defence review on Wednesday's programme, we need to have a look at the authors. He did suggest that I was going to do that today, so let's have a look at them now. The primary authors where these 3 Lord Robertson, General Sir Richard Barons and Fiona Hill. That's Doctor Hill.

That's Doctor Hill. Now, as I mentioned on Monday's programme, Robertson is a former Labour Secretary of State for Defence and later served as Secretary general of NATO. Now, he also served as Scottish Secretary at one point. He is from Scotland, he lived in Dunblane and he successfully sued the sundry Sunday Herald over a post on the Herald's

reader forum that he had helped. The accusation in the post was that he'd helped secure a gun licence for Thomas Hamilton, the man who carried out the Dunblane massacre. Now, I mention this because it's related to the online safety report that I'm going to make later on in the programme. But he successfully sued over that, and that made a difference to what people could post on forums subsequently.

But coming back to the other characters in this play, General Sir Richard Barons is the next on the list. Former commander of Joint Forces Command, a rabid Russophobe. And, well, here's a clip of what Barons had to say during a 2029, sorry, a 2019 interview that David Ellis ran with him, which you can find on the UK column website. If you're going to build armies, navies and air forces that are different, they're built around manned, unmanned and autonomous

capability. UK industry can make this. So this has to be good for prosperity because for the first time, for a long time, UK industry at scale will be making things that other people around the world need to buy. And so this is good for export prosperity. And so if our politics gets this right, we can fix our defence, we can influence our friends. We can deter our enemies and we can boost our industry, I mean. This for me is in the no brainer

territory. Yeah, and that's absolutely part of the theme of the Strategic Defence review, that that war and death around the world can be used as a driver for industry in the UK and create jobs. Fantastic. It's. Definitely in the no brainer territory. Absolutely in the no brainer territory, but we've got to remember if we put this on screen that he is a close friend of Chris Donnelly, founder of the Institute for Statecraft and it's Russophobic Integrity

Initiative project. And Chris Donnelly himself was a special advisor to four NATO Secretaries General over 13 years, including Robertson. And now this is a quote from Donnelly during a defence committee hearing that I attended in 2019. In hybrid warfare, everything is a weapon. And that is basically the theme of of Barron's opinion, but also Donnelly's opinion as well. And the third person finally we have here is Doctor Fiona Hill, a British born American foreign affairs.

Well, she describes herself as a specialist. I, I don't know, we may have different opinions of that who's also a total Russophobe. And her Russophobia is totally focused on the person of Vladimir Putin himself, with analysis such as Putin's personality disorder. And what if Putin disappeared for real?

Now she's a spook. She became an intelligence analyst under George W Bush and Barack Obama at the National Intelligence Council. And she where she was a senior expert on Russia and the former Soviet republics, including Ukraine. And then in between stints at Brookings Institute, she was also deputy assistant to the president and senior director of European and Russian affairs on Trump's during Trump's first term. And she when she was on the National Security Council.

So she's quite a woman. So Kit, let me ask you, what are your thoughts on these three? Well, I mean it's difficult to know where to begin, although I mean just as a preface, you meant you mentioned barons connections to Donnelly.

In 2014 there was a British Parliamentary Defence Select Committee hearing on the future of Britain and NATO, and Donnelly explicitly stated that Britain should take a lead on arming and training Ukrainian forces in their brutal crackdown on the civilian population in Donbas because this would encourage the US to refocus on Europe at a time it was pivoting under Obama to Asia. And Obama also explicitly stated that Ukraine is not a core interest of the US, but it is of

Russia, therefore we shouldn't interfere. So he has played a significant role in getting us to where we are now. And he is overseeing Britain's contributions to the proxy war in secret. But yes, I mean, Lord Robertson was, I believe he was Blair's defence secretary and he is in 1998, he initiated another strategic defence review which set out a very bold vision for creating British Empire 2.0. And it called for the creation

of British aircraft carriers. You know, Fast forward to today and those aircraft carriers were which took many, many, well, decades in, in the making and billions in the making are now scheduled for scrap because they've been found to be completely useless, which is, you know, quite, quite ironic. But Barons is a very interesting character.

Again, you mentioned the Institute for Statecraft in 2016, Barons gave a talk at the at the Institute which was rather incendiary, and it effectively laid the foundations for the Ukraine proxy war. And he talked about how due to the rising power of China and Russia, global engagement is no longer on the West terms. The West power is waning and there is a risk that the US can no longer protect us.

And he stated that we need to deal with Russia by doing things that are serious and if no catastrophe happens, to wake people up and demand a response. It was necessary to manufacture such catastrophes. And then you have the launch of Integrity Initiative and all of these stories about Russian meddling, which, you know, were black propaganda, laying the foundations for war against Russia, which served to turn European governments and populations against Russia.

But yeah, I mean, he is in that same talk, he explicitly stated that, well, we need to spend be spending billions more on on defence and we need to seriously beef up Britain's military capabilities in terms of, you know, concrete ideas in this strategic defence review for doing that. Their only answer is spend more money. Well, I mean, the obvious problem with that is you can print money, but you can't print bullets or tanks or soldiers.

And on all three fronts the UK is significantly lacking, not least because it doesn't have a defence industrial base anymore or any or much in the way of of industry. So I, I strongly suspect that those calls will come to nothing. Fiona Hill, as you mentioned, she is a. Absolutely lunatic Russophobe of some standing. I don't think that she can even speak Russian, but she is frequently cited as a expert on Putin, Russia, and yes, takes a typically very hawkish line.

In a bizarre coincidence she happened to know Christopher Steele personally the disgraced former MI 6 operative who was behind the Trump Russia dossier and she introduced steel to eager eagle Danchenko, who was steel source for all of the dubious claims in that dossier. So she she may well have played a played some kind of of role in its couldn't in its fabrication. So yeah, I mean the the the contents of the review are kind

of unsurprising. They talk about how Russia is the gravest threat to Britain and that it we that Britain needs to to undertake significant measures to counter this. I I mean this is the the product of enduring post imperial delusions about Britains importance and power on the world stage. You know, Britain wants to believe that it is a major global power. I think they're just seen as a source of major annoyance and nuisance by the Russians.

I don't think they're taken particularly seriously. And I think that that attitude extends to most European countries at this stage. They've disarmed themselves by sending all of their weapons to Ukraine. They have bankrupted themselves by sending money to Ukraine. And they've also cut themselves off from electively cut themselves off from Russian energy supplies, which has, you know, just deindustrialized the entire continent.

You know, I think we've kind of we've, we've hit the brick wall of illusions here for a lot of for a lot of Western powers, although it may well take quite some time for the reality to catch up with them. Yeah. Yeah, and and staying on this subject of the UK and their role behind the scenes in some of these conflict zones, this is an interesting story which has come up here. This is the cradle, obviously one of the the best English language Middle East news outlets here.

But more signs of Britain grooming serious Al Qaeda rooted government. And you can see there the new president sporting a salvo row. Look there. And you're talking about here, the rise of a London born Muslim Brotherhood act to the heart of the Damascus politics reveals an even deeper layers of the UK's long war to rebrand Al Qaeda its power and legitimise it as the Syrian government here.

And they go on. And basically, this basically summarises Britain's outsized role in shaping the conflict, bringing Al Qaeda to power, whitewashing its leadership, and embedding UK operatives within the political infrastructure in

that country. And this brings us to a great article here by Kit Klarenberg. This is up on his Substack Global Delinquents, the column, and how MI 6 helped HTS seize Syria. Now, there's a lot of familiar faces in this article, Mike, including perhaps the person who recommended the Salvaro Taylor for Al Jilani Hamish to Bretton Gordon. But look at these two likely

fellows. These are the new Chuckle Brothers. Mike, this is Alistair Campbell, Rory Stewart giving a warm welcome to the new self appointed president of Syria, the former al Qaeda leader in Syria, Al Baghdadi's deputy at ISIS. They're platforming him, legitimising him. It is a quite an extraordinary thing there. So we can get into that. I want to bring Kit in here right now. Kit, great article.

Obviously if there's a lot of familiar names and all of the theatre that we've seen over the last 15 years to destabilise Syria, you can see how it all fits together here. But your your thoughts on this? Yeah, sure.

So the there there was at the start of May, or it might have been mid May, there was the the US ambassador to Syria 2011 to 2014, Robert Ford. He gave a talk during which he acknowledged that in 2023 a British non governmental organisation had approached him and sought his personal assistance in transforming HTS and Shara or Iolani into politicians, rebranding them in advance of their seizure of power in Damascus. Now this that firm was revealed

by the Independent Arabia. I didn't know the Independent had an Arabic language outlet, but apparently it does. These comments it was revealed to be the firm was revealed by Independent Arabia to be Intermediate, which was set up by Jonathan Powell, who was a key adviser to the to Tony Blair's government. He was chief of staff throughout

Tony Blair's ten years in power. He was one of the key architects of Iraq who knew that that Saddam Hussein didn't have weapons of mass destruction and wasn't a threat, but thought that it was good to get rid of him anyway because he bought into this humanitarian interventionism nonsense preached by Blair and the Neo Con Gallery.

That report in independent Arabia was kind of kind of was missed by the the English language media, including the independent media, with the notable exception of Vanessa Beeley who wrote an excellent article for UK column I believe, which is well worth checking out. But yeah, there is a there has been a in the manner of a kind of low grade theatre production in which you have a small cast playing different roles at different times.

You know, the same names keep cropping up and up and up. And yes, as you mentioned, Hamish to Bretton Gordon, who was on the front line of propaganda operations in Syria, also was an MI 6 agent staging chemical weapons attacks to blame Assad's, sorry, the Assad's forces for for, you know, breaching the U SS red lines and trying to encourage US

intervention. And he also set up a bunch of bogus humanitarian groups that that again, you know, were part of a wider propaganda effort to demonise Syria and Russia. He recently went to Damascus and met with HTS and gave a rather bombastic interview to an outlet called The National, where he said, well, you know, the Syrians that I know say that

these guys are the real deal. And, you know, Britain is uniquely placed to make a real difference in, in, in post Assad Syria. And we can give them advice. OK, welcome back. Sorry for the technical problem that knocked us out for a couple of minutes. Kent, let's come back to you. You were just starting to talk about Hamish to Brett and Gordon.

Yeah, well, no, I was saying that I mean, Hamish to Bretton Gordon, he, he, he was heavily involved in regime change operations and was, among other things, smuggling soil samples out of Syria to prove that Assad's forces employed chemical weapons. It is clear from mainstream media reporting on these operations that the purpose was to trigger something like either the destruction of Libya, you know, like a saturation bombing campaign or even a Iraq style or

all out invasion. They didn't succeed in that.

There is a number of other British intelligence cutouts that I mean, I've reported extensively on the operations of Arc, which is run by a veteran MI six officer called Alistair Alistair Harris. And it's quite clear from their, their leaked internal files that they were preparing in 2013 for a major escalation and intervention by the US, which never materialised, but their, their covert operations and that their creation of bogus humanitarian groups like the

White Helmets, you know, that endured and they endured to this day. So they might not have the Britain might not have gotten the the intervention it hoped for, but it's hand picked puppets are now in power in Damascus. Their hold on power is questionable. We had Marco Rubio saying the country could descend into civil war, which is, you know, a, a certainly a possibility given that the central government does

not have popular legitimacy. Gilani was a largely unknown figure in Syria before taking power. You still have elements of Syrian society, including people who are armed, who remain loyal to Assad and Baathism. You have the Kurds who want to carve out their own state in, oh, God, sorry, it escaped Rojava. Rojava. Rojava, Yeah, which is a, you know, a key kind of CI AM I6 base of operations in the region. So, you know, and then you have Turkey wants to chip away at Syrian territory.

Israel wants a chunk of the Golan Heights, if not more. They, Israel are worried about other powers encroaching on this to the extent that they, it's been reported that they've asked U.S. officials to to implore the Russians not to leave because they they think that might affect the balance of power. So it's quite a mess that they've created for themselves.

But you know, and you know, as in the meantime, British officials are meeting with high ranking HTS officials, which even the British media admits is completely illegal under British law because they're a prescribed terrorist group. But you know, such as the topsy turvy world that we live in, they're not going to be prosecuted, whereas people wearing Palestine solidarity badges are.

Yes, and date. Well, I think it just goes to show Mike, you know, the level of this is another level of soft power. This is really weaponized levels of sub diffusion soft power. And what Kit is outlined in his article is a fantastic details and great research, great reading, great journalism. Kit Klarenberg, editor of The Grey Zone UK, is also publishing at Substack as well as on Mint Press news. He writes for a number of different outlets as well. All excellent outlets.

Kit, thank you very much for joining us on the UK column. Yes, thank you, Kit. Thank you very much. And and all those links to Kit's work will be in the show notes of course on the UK column website. So look, look there for them. Thank you, kit. Now, let's move on. Mark, to you and the situation

with tariffs and Trump. And, well, the Bank of England has been making some comments about this. Indeed, yeah. Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England. A lot of a lot of things happened on the 3rd of June. By the way, there was the Bank of England monetary policy report to a parliamentary committee in the UK that day, and around that same time the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development issued a report. Anyway, Andrew Bailey had a

number of things to say. What's interesting is that he's not the only one saying that whatever the discomfort and disruption that Trump's tariffs and trade policies may be playing, whatever the pros and cons may be, there is a disruption in the post World War 2 rules based world order that was created to a large extent at Bretton Woods. As we know that created the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the Gatt that became the WTO.

So that is the globalist one world order system that a lot of the globalists, including Mr Bailey are worried about. Now we have some quotes from him taken from his testimony. The overall picture on trade now I'm afraid he said is 1, where the rules based system is sort of dead. A rather dramatic statement, He he continued. That has very serious consequences for the global

economy. So there's there's a lot of worry here that that system that was so carefully put into place after World War 2 is beginning to seriously erode. And again, that is the globalist system that many analysts in the alternative media have been very critical of over the recent decades. Anyway, he also had this to say. The system, the post World War 2 rules based multilateral trade system based on Gatt, WTO has now really been blown up to a considerable degree by all of this.

Repeating that has now been really blown up to a considerable degree by all of this. Blown up are pretty dramatic words. Maybe he's engaging in a little hyperbole just to dramatise his points, but it's all very interesting. He gave some other sundry remarks to the committee on interest rates that are are rather dry. We can maybe look at those another time. It's kind of like listening to the Federal Reserve testimony to Congress. It is a cure for insomnia.

But Mr Bailey went on and had one more thing to say to kind of round out his comments that focused those comments that focused on trade and tariffs and Trump. Not all of it was about that, of course. But he said we can't say the US administration is just wrong headed. There are things that have gone on in this whole trade picture which I think do point to the stress that that system has been under. And he did acknowledge that the rules based system has a number

of flaws. He pledged to fix those flaws. He doesn't want to abandon the system. A no good globalist would want to do that. He said. Also we have to come back to the international table. Yes, the system has problems. If we abandoned it, however, we'll, we'll be living in a much more difficult world in his point of view. So those are the core things that he had to say. Gentlemen. The committee, of course asked him a lot of pretty good questions.

It's a rather long thing. We'll have the links to anyone that wants to watch the whole interview. We'll have the links in the show notes. Now, as I mentioned, the OECD brought out right around the same time, it's Economic Outlook. It, it's a very long tome. Printed page wise. It's, it's over 200 pages, so I relied mostly on a basic summary of it. And that summary I believe is reflected in the next slide. This is the headline to the

summary. Global economic outlook shifts as trade policy uncertainty weakens growth also on the 3rd of June from the OECD and among other things, I scribbled down some things here. The outlook projects global growth slowing. That's global growth from 3.3% going out, you know, starting from last year as a baseline to 2.9% in both this year, 2025 and next year.

The slowdown is expected to be the most concentrated in the US, Canada, Mexico and China. And then it went out to say that GDP growth in the US is projected to decline from 2.8% to 1.6% and then another 1.5% decline in 2026. I don't know how realistic those figures are. I tend to doubt them a little bit on that one.

It it went on to say the the OEOECD summary of its large report that governments need to engage with each other to address any issues of the global trading system positively and constructively through dialogue, keeping markets open and preserving what they call the economic benefits of the rules based global trade for competition, innovation,

productivity, etcetera. And this OECD outlook goes on to say it, it highlights a range of risks that is starting with the concern that further trade fragmentation as they call it, including new tariff hikes and retaliatory actions could intensify the global the growth slowdown and trigger significant disruptions in the global supply chain.

Of course the the length of the supply chains under the globalist system that has been set up, the very idea of the very structure that is of them and how long they are makes them inherently vulnerable. We found that out during the COVID ocracy that the longer the supply chains and the more complex everything is it it works in a lot of ways, but that

also makes it highly vulnerable. So Trump may be thinking that a more nationalistic approach where you bring more manufacturing home, if tariffs are used correctly that is, would shorten supply change and overtime raise national income, more jobs, and lower the vulnerability of the overall system. But of course it takes a lot of effort and a bumpy Rd to get there.

But anyway, I also noted, and I just found this last night, there's an article on the UK column website Tariffs, Trade or Structural Change and this is very, very well done. I read through most of it and it really gives a good balanced view of the pros and cons of the current trade policy of the US and across the world. Taking a look at tariffs, it does make the important note that often times the world system, the trade system, has been seen as sort of a economic

religion of sorts. That you need a lot of faith to believe in it for it to work, and that national economies have been sacrificed at the altar of the globalist free trade system. That's reflected in this article. That's a point of view I've often heard looking at this issue over the over the years. But at any rate, the OECD and the governor of the Bank of England do make some salient

points. But you know, we have to look at whether Trump's policies will erode a global system that many of us have been critical of and maybe point us at a different direction and a better one eventually. And I'm not wearing rose coloured glasses when I say this. Or they may be more correct than I realise and and perhaps Trump is doing the right thing in the wrong way there. There's a lot you could unpack in in such complex trade systems. Again, the OECD reports over 200 pages.

I'll probably look into it more in a couple of weeks as I read through it more. But those are the key highlights right now as Bilderberg approaches and the G7 approaches in the middle of month. OK, we'll come on to that in a second. Thank you very much, Mark.

Now, if you like what the UK column does, you'd like to support us, please do consider it. You can make a donation on the support page. You could join as a UK column member and of course if you join as a member, the various membership levels, you get access to UK column News Extra and other members on the

content. You can pick something up with the UK column shop and if you would like to get some supplements from Clive to carl.com, if you use the link on this page, we do get a small Commission for that, although it doesn't cost you any more to do that. If you can't support us financially then please do at least support us by sharing our content and there are share links provided on on the various articles, blogs and videos and

so on on the UK column website. Tonight at 7:00 PM Charles and I are speaking to Jerem for the Weekly Banter. Join us at 7:00 PM for that. And yesterday's interview with Vicky Baggett of the World Library Association is is on the website now as an on demand version.

Now a date for your diary, then please join us on Saturday the 18th of October. This year in New York for the next UK column on location event, we are not yet certain exactly what the what The Who the speakers are going to be, but we're just giving you a heads up that this is going to be the date and the and the location in the country.

So anybody that was sad that they had to travel halfway across the country to get to Cheltenham or last year to Bristol, we are heading north and we hope to see you there and it's going to be a fun day and we'll have more details in next week and in the following weeks. Preaching the red wall. Preaching the Red Wall. Yes indeed. A reminder of the Science Beautiful festival which we will be attending June the 26th and 29th in Wimborne and Dorset.

Now, a bit of an announcement on this because we were running a competition for two free tickets to that and well, it turned out this person who won that competition wasn't able to go after all. And so we're actually rerunning the competition at the moment. If you'd like to take part in that, head over to the UK column extract Facebook page and the instructions for entering that are there. Next, Peaceful Assembly for Medical freedom.

This is in Dublin at King Graham House and Doctor McCluskey is going to be speaking there amongst a bunch of other fantastic speakers. It's Tuesday the 10th of June at 1:00 PM. If you could possibly get to that, do so. And also to remind you that the Thetford Truth and Freedom Beer Festival is taking place July 18th, 19th in the Angel in in, in Larling, and that is going to have Diane Rasmussen McKay and Sandy Adams speaking at it. So, so get along to that if you possibly can.

OK, let's move on then to censorship and Ofcom and so on.

And on Wednesday this week, Ofcom held a day long seminar to explain the regulations which platforms are going to have to comply with in order to meet their obligations under the Online Safety Act for the so called protection of children. I'll explain why I say so called in a second. Ofcom refused to give any specific guidance on how platforms should implement the regime that they want to see.

They said that this is on the basis that they if they give specific advice, it may restrict their ability to take enforcement action later on. So it's up to the platforms to interpret the extremely complex and vaguely defined requirements and to impose a regime which Ofcom will find acceptable. I have to say it was pretty clear from the Q&A sessions that some of the pretty big platforms that were on that were really struggling with this whole thing.

So I would suggest that the inevitable outcome of this is that platforms will err on the side of caution and bearing that's particularly bearing in mind the potential penalties. And now many will say that this is good, children should be protected. And of course the second part of that is true, but the way this is being done won't protect children. And we'll discuss that in a minute. Instead, it's going to result in many more topic areas following below the censorship threshold.

Now let's just have a look at the main categories of content, which Ofcom says children should not be exposed to. The first is what they call primary priority content, or PPC, and this includes contact content related to suicide, self harm, eating disorders, pornography. And Ofcom says that children should be blocked from seeing

any of this content. The second is what they're calling priority content, and that includes content which they call abuse and hate, what are undefined bullying and violent content, and content related to harmful substances and dangerous stunts. And then they have what they

call non designated content. This is just a fantastic term because they define non designated content as content that isn't considered primary content or priority content, but still presents quotes a material risk of significant harm to an appreciable number of children in the UK. In other words, everything else because it's no, it's, it's not defined any better than that. It's basically, if it's not the first category, it's not the second category that it's this.

So no definition of any meaningful kind. So unsurprisingly, the main that technique that Ofcom, or at least unsurprisingly if you've been paying attention to the UK column anyway, the main technique that Ofcom is putting forward for preventing children accessing these types of content is what they call highly effective age assurance. The types of technologies would say consider highly effective are listed on the right hand side of the slide here.

So we've got credit card cheques, open banking, which allows consumers and businesses to securely share the financial data with third party service providers. Through what? Through an application programming interface, photo ID matching, facial age estimation, mobile network operator age cheques, digital ID is another option and email based age estimation.

So these are all the options that they seem to be putting on the table at the moment as being services or systems that they would find acceptable for age verification. They say that this age verification will need to take place within the remit of the Data Protection Act. But of course, the data protection regime is about to be massively relaxed with with with new legislation that's on its way through Parliament at the moment.

So all the focus from Ofcom was in verifying that someone is over the age of sorry is verifying that someone is over the age of 18 if they want to access certain content. At no point did they comment on any requirement to make sure that someone was under the age of 18 for access to a site which is aimed specifically at children. And that seemed like a pretty serious item missing there.

And just one final point on this Ofcom began the day with a little propaganda video, so let's just have a look at it. My son's into gaming and football, so why are you showing him content that tells him to hate and mystery women? When my little boy is safe at home, why are strangers asking him for topless photos? Why did you let people share nudes of my 14 year old daughter? What if it was your daughter? Why is my? Daughter being targeted with clips of kids.

In our area being violently attacked. Why are you allowing your platform to be a playground for paedophiles to groom children? My teenage daughter's hair fell out because she was bullied on your. Platform. How can you let dealers put strokes to my 14 year old on your side? How can you let my child that's 14 years old? Receive. Photos of child pornography you allowing your. Black kids. Most of. Suicide hunter, which is what

you want to do? So at no point in the discussion was there any suggestion that parents might have a role in keeping their children safe. There's nothing about the tool, about any kinds of tools to enable parents to make decisions about what is or what is not appropriate content for their

children to see. It's just about making moving these decisions to the platforms and to imposing some kind of digital ID. So this isn't about keeping children safe, it's only about normalising state enabled content control and digital identity. That's the argument that I'm putting forward here anyway. I don't know if you've got any thoughts on this, Patrick. Well, you're just making like I think a classic utilitarian

argument. If the problem is, you know, all of these so called risks to children and so forth, how can you impose a broad censorship regime that covers adults in order to allegedly protect children? It doesn't even stand up to basic common sense from from a classic English liberal argument. And that's how our whole legal system has been built on top of. So why not? Let's say I got a radical idea. Why not restrict access to smartphones for children below

the age of 15? If this is going to be a big problem? Can you give them a Nokia banana and be done with it? And when they get it home, the parents can be responsible while they're at home under parental supervision? You can't. There is no perfect system. Children will get drugs pushed on them on their way to school, in school, in the bathrooms at school. Okay, and then what? Should we shut the school down? Should we take this?

Should we shut the schools down and have the kids homeschooled or in some kind of 6 foot by 6 foot government kind of sell to learn or something? It's ridiculous once you go down this road. Absolutely. And I mean, you know, the fight between YouTube and the YouTube download applications, the fight between the big corporate media companies and the piracy demonstrates that these types of approaches don't work. They never have worked in the past, and they're not going to work in the future.

But in a related topic then, a week or two ago, Patrick, you

were talking about the Amnesty Media Awards. Yeah, the Amnesty Media Awards, and if you remember that story here, we'll bring that up on screen. We were, we were recommending that everyone vote for Jonathan Cook because we believed he was the most true independent journalist here. Well, they announced the awards. Unfortunately, Jonathan Cook did not win, but it's been awards been given to People's Choice for UK journalism has been given to Owen Jones here. So that's up on Amnesty's

website. Not our first choice, not our second or third either. But Jonathan Cook actually weighed in on this and I thought we'd just show this up on screen as well. And here he is. He actually attended the awards because he was one of the nominees in London here, I assume he says. Many thanks to all of supported my nomination at Amnesty and he goes on here and this just shows you what a class act Jonathan Cook is and this is what he said.

I took with me to the ceremony the investigative journalist ASA Winstanley. ASA Winstanley at Electronic Intifada Had I won and had a chance to make an acceptance speech, I wanted to highlight his case. He, along with other independent journalists, including Kit Clarenberg, who we had on the programme earlier, have been targeted for persecution by the police, doubtless under political direction, for his work on Gaza. And he continues just rounding this off.

The police have been using the most expansive interpretation possible of the UK's draconian terrorism laws. Last month, the courts ruled that the police had illegally seized his electronic devices. He's talking about ASA Winstanley just there on the left hand side.

Incredibly, no media outlet in the UK has thought it worth reporting either the dawn raid on his home last year or the courts subsequent findings of the law breaking by police and seizing electronic devices of an accredited journalist. So, you know, Jonathan Cooks going to use his platform if he won the award to campaign and support another journalist. I mean that that kind of proves that he deserves the award more than anybody. I mean, a real class act.

And I also want to point people again to Jonathan's sub stack here. This is actually a fantastic story. Why is the UK sheltering Israel's genocide inciting ambassador? And there she is, Zippy Hotolovi, who got absolutely lambasted on a number of talk shows. I think she was even on Piers Morgan. But terrible, terrible reputation. She's really made a fool out of herself in front of the global media. And, you know, it's proven to be

a very unsavoury individual. So this is a great piece by Cook here. And you know, where is the UK government on some of these individuals making these public genocidal statements, these Israeli officials. It's just incredible. Since when is this acceptable and is there going to be any recourse for it?

Meanwhile, they're just arresting journalists under the ever expansive, elastic interpretation of the Terrorism Act. It is quite a hypocritical situation and you know, Mark was talking about trade and the the situation with the so called rules based international order. It seems to me a big part of the reason that the so called rules based international order is collapsing is because the proponents of it, the West, are increasingly just abandoning

their own rules. Well, it's not just that. It's also because they've abandoned actual international law and actual justice. The the whole idea of the rules based international order was to supplant actual international law. So the superpowers decided they, United States being the lead, that they no longer had to comply with international law. And as soon as they established that precedent, all the other countries, Britain and all the others basically piled in behind them.

And then basically then they lost their rules based order as well as the international legal system. So it all went to pot basically. And Mark, you know a couple of

the bastions of the rules based international order. Well, let's start with one of them, the G7. They are meeting soon. Indeed, gentlemen, as we know, the G7 tends to kind of orbit around Bilderberg. It kind of commingles timing wise, often times each year with Bilderberg. This time, as this title page from the G7 website shows, they're going to meet in Kananaskis, AB, Canada, June 15th through 17, Bilderberg meeting June 12th through 15th. So they're, you know, kind of

contiguous with one another. And I did a little reading up on the G7. Of course, Trump's trade policies are going to be probably front and centre and I think they'll definitely be at Bilderberg because Bilderberg, well, they'll release a topics list, but they discuss things beyond that official list, as we know. But I would think it would make the official list. But at the G7, Canada is the host nation.

As we know. There was a meeting of the G7 finance ministers and central bank governors already preceding this leaders summit coming up in in Canada. And at that preliminary meeting, there were concerns among many members like Japan Central Bank chief, that the potential effects of Trump, sweeping tariffs and the continuing economic uncertainty they create could be a very big problem from their point of view. So at any rate, it's going to be

a major topic unavoidably. This is just from the Bilderberg website itself, the official Bilderberg website, thebilderbergmeetings.org. And I just put a notation in there. It'll be the 71st meeting in 71 years, taking place, of course, at the Wallenberg Families posh Grand Hotel, the 12th through the 15th of June in Stockholm, Sweden. I was, I managed to get those dates, even though Bilderberg hasn't announced them. It'll be the fifth meeting in Sweden.

They've met there in 627384, 2001 and now. And the Trilateral Commission meeting that I covered last week in April in Washington gives us some idea, along with the obvious thing, Trump's trade agenda in terms of the upcoming

Bilderberg topics. Those trilateral topics having been, among others, dramatic geopolitical shifts, a major reordering across the Middle East, tensions in North America that could very well be the border, as well as economic matters, rising US, China, cooperation, the trilaterals,

trilateralists are saying. And they also discussed a couple of other things in April that very well could show up at Bilderberg, North America on the Rocks, which is very similar to the other one I just mentioned, neurotechnologies and the battle for your brain. I've seen those kind of topics come up before at these highfalutin meetings.

Also, just to get an idea of the Bilderberg machinations for the last two years, and this is one example, I've done pretty in depth articles on the commingling of the Bilderberg attendees and the deals they make and the way they intersect with one another. This is from just less than a year ago. Bilderberg Beyond the meetings Part 2. The secret of gatherings are collusive conduit for an AI big media marriage.

I did one the year before that and I plan to do one this summer as well fairly soon to look beyond just the the splash in the pan of the meetings and look at the in depth. Take an in depth look at the topics that are raised and, and how they enter, how they interact and how the attendees

interact with one another. The apparent deal making and where they're going with it. You know, what projected out and what they may be doing with it. So that that's very important to do. And so we'll, you know, be covering that very shortly as these things transpire. Thank you, Mark. Thank you. Now let's end the programme, perhaps with a little bit of

comedy, Patrick, because, well, Elon and Donald seem to have fallen out. It is comedy, but it's also kind of dead serious on the level which we'll get into. But we'll bring this up on screen here. And I think it's pretty clear here there there is the Dodge, the Dodge father and the 47th president Donald Trump. And it looks looks like Mike the honeymoon as well. And truly over it really is it it appears like that anyway, if they kiss and make up after this, I will be incredibly

surprised and impressed. But this is basically we we talked about this last week that Elon sort of having, you know, buyer's remorse on doge and the big beautiful bill. It's running a huge budget deficit and apparently Elon's taking huge umbrage to this here. And this is kind of escalated. We'll bring up some of the escalation. So this was basically what

happened this morning. There is a Elon Musk and so Ian Miles Truong who's like a surrogate on on X of of Musk said president versus Elon, who wins? My money's on Elon. Trump should be impeached and JD Vance should replace him. Yes, says Elon Musk. So that was basically war. That's a declaration of war on the part of Musk and we'll get into that little bit below that. Elon basically said time bomb. Time to drop the big bomb. Donald Trump is in the Epstein files.

That is the real reason they have not made the files public. Have a nice day DJT says Musk. So real heavy swipe at the president here so you get an idea of the galactic fallout that you're witnessing right now. So not to be outdone, Trump is basically hit back at Musk. Elon was wearing thin. I asked him to leave.

I took away his EV mandate, electric vehicle mandate that forced everyone to buy electric cars that nobody else wanted, that he knew for months I was going to do and he just went crazy claims Donald Trump. Turns out that's not actually true. But anyway, it doesn't matter with Trump. That's what he said and he goes here. This is where things are getting actually pretty dicey, Mike, and have huge implications. Trump says the easiest way to save money in our budget,

Billions and billions. Of dollars is to terminate Elon Musks government subsidies and contracts, including SpaceX. I was always surprised that Biden didn't do it, says Trump. So this is war talk. This is fighting talk here and so we go. So now here we go, Elon Musk replies quote tweets. In light of the present statement about the cancellation of my government contract, SpaceX will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately. This is the new launch.

And that's massive because of course NASA relies on Dragon spacecraft to get people up and down the International Space Station and so on. Otherwise. Cargo. Without Dragon X, who does the taxi again? It's Russia, right? Right. Russia with the soy heads. They do the taxi back and forth to International Space Station. So I guess you could call Putin. Trump could call Putin and have Vladimir take the astronauts like they did for decades

before. Not a Musk. So is that where we're heading here? And Elon comes back, basically, Yeah, that's the Epstein thing. Now look on the Epstein files. We'll just say we know Trump's in the Epstein. Everyone knows Trump's in the Epstein files. He's in the flight logs. We've got video footage here. I think we'll bring up on screen. Yeah. I mean, this is this is from 1992. This is going on heavy rotation right now on U.S. media.

But it's Donald Trump partying it up at 1 of Jeff Epstein's Suarez at his mansion or I'm not sure where this particular one is. But so you'll see Jeff Epstein appears in, in, in these this archive footage of Trump and Epstein. So there, there is a relationship there, although Trump denies having any, you know, serious relationship with Jeff Epstein. But he has been on the plane like 7 times.

We don't know if he's been to the Epstein's Love Island, but you know, he does and has attended the parties there. There he is. There's Jeff in the background there in the sort of there he is with Trump, that's Epstein. So I mean, that's kind of where what things are at on this. So this has huge implications, Mike, in terms of fallout, OK. Aside from SpaceX, the other question is about Starlink, because Starlink has been absolutely key to the Ukraine

conflict. And the question then is, if they withdraw that contract, where does that leave Ukraine? Well, where does that leave Ukraine? Starlink has become a basic, a pivotal tool for empire in all, all conflict zones. Sudan, the Middle East, Yemen, all the subterfusion behind the line sabotage, it's all dependent on Starlink. The entire Ukrainian army, as Elon Musk himself has admitted, is based on Starlink.

So bring that. We'll take that footage off the screen for a moment, Mike, but it's all based on Starlink and this operation that we saw of these drone attacks by Ukraine with the help of Western intelligence. How did they do the link up on that? Was it Starlink? We don't know. Is that classified? We're not sure. But these are dual use technologies, these satellite arrays. So this, this has huge

implications. If they fall out, then, you know, this is, I think going to potentially hobble the Western imperial machinations as far as the US are concerned. And it might even open up the door for another competitor or two or three competitors or a Chinese competitor. So we'll see. But the, the, the fallout potential is massive on this, not just the share price of Tesla, which tanked I, I, I heard it tanked last night and a whole bunch of other potential things.

Trade is already being restricted. We've already got stagnation economically because of the tariff wars, and so this isn't necessarily going to help either. So this is clash of the Titans. We'll see how how many dead bodies end up on the pitch by Monday. Yes, indeed. OK, look, we're going to have to leave it there for today. I'm going to say thank you very much to Mark, to Patrick, especially to Klareberg for joining us today.

Thank you all for watching. Join us in a few minutes for some UK column news extra if you're AUK column member. If you're not, please consider joining us. Thanks to everybody that does support us in that way. Have a great weekend. We'll be back at 1:00 PM as usual on Monday. See you then. Bye bye.