UK Column News - 9th June 2025

Good afternoon. Today is Monday, the 9th of June 2025, just after 1:00. Welcome to UK column News. I'm your host, Brian Gerrish, Delighted to have Ben Rubin with me here in the studio. And we'll also be joined by Diane Rasmussen. Mcaddy from the North East of England. Well here we are, it's Monday. I hope everyone had a good weekend. I had a fascinating weekend because I got invited to breakfast which led to a very interesting conversation with

some very kind gentlemen. Perhaps more on that in extra time, but here we are. We are in UK. If we look at the media, it is absolute chaos. We're just going to talk about that chaos very briefly, but we really want to move people's attention past the chaos and the confusion and the anxiety, and we want to get people actually looking at what is the real threat to the United Kingdom.

So we are moving away from what everybody else is reporting, at least today, and we're going to have a look at what we think the threat is and why people need to understand what's happening and how indeed we are being attacked by our own government. So Ben, you're going to be looking at Mindspace, Oxford Theory of Change, amongst other things. We're going to be having a little look at local authority change in England with a particular focus on Plymouth.

Ben, you're going to be having a look at the building of a collaborative society. This is all tied in together, and we're going to take our audience through this really critical little journey as to how this this thing works. And Diane, you've been interacting with the University of York, which is very special, of course, because we have our events planned for October in York. But what have you been having a look at? Well, I believe it's making waves.

It is disinformation. It's the new world order and it's also whether Europe will be safe. So let's have a look at the meat. And of course, many people at the moment distracted with Los Angeles. We've got a little clip here, which if we just bring on screen now, essentially this is what the media is drowning in at the moment. This is the BBC, apparently filming from Los Angeles, although it says this video only has partial sound.

You'll see the police at one stage in this video clip beating protesters with battens. What is it all about? It's about getting rid of illegal migrants in America at least. But there's some pretty unpleasant scenes. And what's caused it? Well, we're showing it just to reflect what the media is talking about. Here's the BBC. And if we look at their front page from earlier this morning, it's chaos, it's unrest, it's a breakdown, it's the Brit Awards and generally it's supporting dross.

The newspapers are as bad. We've got everything from hotter than Morocco to the policing is broken that we've then got the insanity, Sorry, we've got delays over winter fuel and then we've got insanity over migration, more chaos, breakdown and confusion, more from the mail to do with Los Angeles, Los Angeles Burns. Is it reality or is it a film? And Daily Mail is obviously not quite sure.

But the media, Oh my goodness, they love it because there's violence and breakdown occurring in the states over migration. But the Telegraph over the over the weekend came out with this headline which I found critical concern over mass migration. It's terrorist ideology. And if you add a little bit of text here, mass migration or criticism of mass migration is terrorist ideology that requires intervention by the government's anti radicalization prevent programme.

So this is the smoke and mirrors, the fear, the anxiety which the UK public are being taken through. We are now going to delve into the real danger lurking behind the scenes. Ben, what have you got?

Well, it's chaos out there, isn't it Brian? Everything's breaking down. But don't worry, there's a lovely bunch of people up in Oxford building a new world order. Let's hear a little bit about Makespace. Makespace Oxford was set up for and by a coalition of local community groups and enterprises who are being priced out of one of the least affordable cities in the UK and one of the most unequal and Makespace.

We believe the most sustainable building is the one you don't have to build, and that all the skills and creativity we need to build vibrant, thriving places already exists locally, everywhere and it just needs the conditions to grow.

We witnessed the rising number of vacant buildings on our high streets and began unlocking these on a temporary meanwhile basis, transforming spaces into affordable, community driven places, nurturing connection and support, making a home for creatives, makers, doers, fixers and dreamers. And we use meanwhile as a catalyst to build towards community ownership and wider systemic change. We're locally rooted in place based but developing approach is

relevant at a global scale. In the last five years we've scaled our model to bring back into use 30 vacant buildings, establishing hubs across Oxfordshire and making space for nearly 200 purpose driven groups, artists, tailors, weavers, makers, architects, community cafes, restaurants, dance theatres, roasters and organisers, all who want to build a mutually supportive community and prototype new forms of civic and social infrastructure.

And we're now adapting and replicating this model with local groups across the country, with the ambition to transform our declining town centres into places owned and managed by the people that live there, building community wealth, climate resilience and fostering cultures of care and connection. So I'll just say, if I may, Ben police and military on the streets with batons beating people.

That's very engaging news. It's dangerous, of course, but what we are showing you in these soft videos equally if not more dangerous. Well, indeed, because that's what they're driving people towards. So the breakdown of the current system is designed to necessitate the creation of a new one. And this is the kind of location and innovation hub where this is

happening basically. So the thing that really strikes me about that video is that on on the surface it sounds lovely and touchy feely and friendly and nice. But then you actually breakdown what they've said and what they're doing and it becomes quite terrifying actually. So let's just have a little look at this. What are they doing? They're taking over post industrial and retail spaces and what they call a meanwhile

basis, right? So this is a consequence of the deliberate deindustrialisation of the country over the past four or 50 years. And the the High Street has been decimated by the Internet, right. Primarily. Right. So this is moving into the vacuum that's been created by industrial policy in the UK over the past 50 years that has basically destroyed the country. Yeah. We have no wealth creating capacity. We have no communal spaces. It's been a radical

transformation. It's been done deliberately in order to drive people towards this. Yeah, they are prototyping new forms of civic and social infrastructure. They're creating community wealth, right. Really importantly, this is about climate resilience. So climate change is driving this cultures of care and connection across the whole of Oxfordshire. They're adapting and replicating this across the country and they're also developing approaches that are relevant at a global scale, right?

So this is something that looks like it's just going on at a local level, organically popping up in Oxfordshire. But actually this is operating in a global ecosystem and it is speaking to that ecosystem and that message is going up and it's also coming back down again as well. Importantly now let's have a little look at the blueprint for

this thing, right? Because they actually published this and this, this post you can see on the right hand side, which we're going to going to talk it through because it has some very revealing language on here. And it basically describes how these innovation hubs work. So we can start in the bottom right hand corner and we can see. The first thing to notice is

that this is a theory of change. Note that language, any organisation has got a theory of change, is a progressive organisation driving towards this transformation of the system. Absolutely crucial, right? And they have an approach that they use in this theory of change, which is about, amongst other things, embracing complexity, solidarity over charity. That's an important one because that essentially means it's

state versus charity. There's a lot of stuff loaded into this and being transformational and doing it with an understanding of what they call these root problems. Now, the root problems they've identified at the top level there you can see on the left hand side are underused spaces again. So this is post industrial, post retail spaces that should be being used properly, frankly,

but they're not. But these people moving into it on what they call a meanwhile basis, which basically means temporary, but they have to invent new words for everything. Apparently this, these buildings apparently are climate unsafe. They lack community knowledge and imagination. And importantly, they're built on a substructure of dark matter, right? Get used to this language. You're going to be talking about this a lot.

Dark matter, the bottom 3 levels that you can see there, These are the things that exist beneath the surface that drive what happens in observed reality, right? There's a lot of theory behind this. It's actually something that I used to, I used to work with this stuff professionally for many years, right? And the few things that they've identified as being dark matter issues include things like imperialist and extractivist mindset, right? They're talking about our

current culture. Private individualised ownership, that's a problem, apparently. Private ownership's problem. Supremacy culture, that's a problem. Private intellectual property, antiquated exclusive property rights. These are things that these people want to want to get get away from, right? And they're going to do it using this programme and they're going to introduce learning. You can see that's just come in. The little green stripe is

coming in from the side there. So these are new ideas coming in from their network and coming from case studies from other countries, other locations, from research, from storytelling. They love, love a bit of storytelling and they're going to use that learning to unlock a new reality. And so we saw in the bottom left hand corner the root problems

that under used space. And they're now going to create that, turn that into a learning space, A creative space that is people and climate safe and connected and is a storytelling and a platforming space for people to build this new reality from, right. And then there's a whole bunch of transformation again going on underneath in the dark matter. And ultimately what that's going to drive is new ideas, new culture, new ways of doing things into what they call a

dream space. You can see that there. That's the kind of slightly translucent hexagonal cloud thing. And in there it says transforming systems. They are transforming the system. New ownership models, decolonial futures, solidarity networks, a new economy. Essentially that's what they are prototyping and building and scaling in Makespace in Oxford. That stuff's getting pushed out into the town, then into the county and then importantly it's being used to influence national policy.

You can see in the top right hand corner there across the country, and then also global policy. And those things then come back down into this physical and virtual location in order to drive change across Oxford, Oxfordshire, UK, and then internationally and back down again, right? This is a network. They've just decided to do this themselves. You know, there's been no discussion about this whatsoever and it's being driven by these people.

So interesting bunch of funders. So the first one step change fund is a debt to charities, but it's very extremely high powered finance and civil service people here, including the former head of the Pensions Regulator that deserves more scrutiny because I don't know what they're up to and I don't like it. But also the National Lottery Fund, the Community Fund, they're always in the mix in these programmes, right?

So essentially what you have is people playing the playing the lottery generally indexed towards working class people, people on lower incomes essentially funding their own destruction. That's what my interpretation of National Lottery is. What else have we got there? We've got this thing called Enterprise Oxfordshire which issued something called the Oxfordshire Internationalisation

Plan to 2025 in 2020, right? So this is a great reset organisation which is actually using funding from the Getting Building Fund, which was launched in 2020. It was £900 million fund, part of the COVID legacy essentially, right? So this is all about the transformation of the system. We're now in five years into this. And this is what these people have been doing with this money. And this is all coming out of

central government, right? Absolutely crucially because the chair of this, this lady as Shufta Alam is a deputy director in the civil service who also overseas £2.5 billion of international climate investments and it essentially is applying an International Development methodology here to

the UK, right. So the the the British civil service, which is supposed to be sitting in the background running the country, is actually engaged in a radical transformation programme to completely rethink and re engineer our economy, our social systems, governance and to hook us up to this global network, all being funded by taxpayers who've never been asked about this once.

Thank you very much, Ben. This is very, very serious stuff we're giving you today and we're going to say this is unique. What UK column is delivering today is a unique look into the future, the governance of this country. You haven't been asked about it, you haven't voted on it. It is already being put into place and it needs people to wake up very quickly. Let's take what Ben has

described in Oxford and bring it home to Plymouth Now. Over the weekend a little magazine dropped through my door, a very small magazine, but one of the headlines caught my eye. Let's see if we can highlight that. Here we are. And basically it says local council reorganisation. And when I got inside the magazine, I had to search for it. A tiny, tiny little article talking about Plymouth expansion plans. Have your say, it said, Now remember that.

Have your say. So when we tied the whole thing up together or I did some work over the over the weekend. This is Plymouth City Council's big community conversation page. And what is it telling you? Very, very quickly? It's telling you that this is about bringing power closer to the people. This is bringing centralised government control alongside every man, woman and child. There's no ifs or buts about it. It is bringing power to a controlling level alongside everybody in the community.

If we look at some of the details in there, they run some questions. So here we have why can't things stay the same as they are? Well, actually what they're really telling you is all of this is going to happen whether you like it or not because the government has decided without bothering to consult anybody in this country. We know that some people don't like change and we understand it's difficult for those working at the councils that will no

longer exist. There's a lot of jobs are going as a result of this programme at work. And then the killer statement here, it is a fact that local government reorganisation is going to happen. Therefore doing nothing is not an option. Well, this is a, a bizarre statement. If it's going to happen and you don't have any say in it, doing nothing is, is not an option. Doing something is an option.

But what are they telling you? It's telling us that Devon County Council, as one of many county councils and a District Council, S hams council, will cease to exist after this process. So as we see the world's that they're building, Ben's just covered that What's happening at the same time is the existing structure of governance in this

country is being destroyed. And if we go on to the last one, the big lie, the financial position in local government is not great and hasn't been good for some time. It's therefore essential that the model of local government is reformed. But if we listen to the news about Ukraine, for example, the government has unlimited billions to prosecute that proxy war in Ukraine. But apparently we haven't got money to look after people in local communities through their councils.

So I'm going to say this document, to me at least, is a lie from start to finish. It's propaganda. Another question, isn't this a takeover? No, no, no, they say this isn't about taking over, it's about the running of services with less duplication. But many people would say that Plymouth City Council can't run the services in Plymouth, so how are they going to expand it?

So I'm going to add this, to me it certainly looks like this is a takeover of the smaller units of governance by Plymouth as what been a city state. Certainly sounds like it, yeah. And if we continue here, is this a land grab? Well, Plymouth City Council says it isn't. The new council would deliver services but not change land

ownership. But Plymouth City Council is the very council that imposes its plan for the city on on people living in Plymouth. And of course that impacts on people around it. So you don't elect or people outside the city don't elect the councillors, but they're going to plan our our own smaller communities. And if I just bring the big conversation back on screen again, let's remember what they tell you at least honestly early on in this document. And that is that it is bringing

power closer to the people. So a new system of control and governance has already been built in UK. Ben has given you a lot of the details of 1 model in Oxfordshire. But of course, what we know is, or what we can safely assume is going to happen, is that now this new model of governance has been built, the old model of governance is going to be collapsed. Take us on Ben. That's. What they're doing and actually that, that last slide there bringing power closer to the people, right.

This, I hear this line all of the time and the people in this system, by the way, there are some good, well meaning people in that system. But the, the, what do they say about the road to hell being paved with good intentions, right. There's a lot of good intentions here. I will, I will, I will give people that. But this idea that bringing

power closer to people is good for the people is completely untrue, right? This is very much about totalitarian authority getting its arms around the population in order to force them into doing the things that the state wants them to do. That's what this is all about right now. One of the organisations, and there is a whole ecosystem around this. We're going to talk about this a lot over the coming months. This is the direction of travel. This is the agenda.

This one organisation, right? Slap bang in the middle of it all. Collaborate CIC Yeah, Community Interest Company. Importantly, that's a new type of structure, which I'll come back to a bit later on. But Collaborate is apparently about building a collaborative

society. This is a communitarian neo Marxist Fabian. Whatever term you want to use society, it's not based around individual liberty, freedom of expression, private enterprise, natural law, any of the things that are the foundations of our nation that are being eroded and destroyed by organisations like this. Quite frankly, just have a little bit more of a look at who they are. So they're apparently for social

change. Whenever you hear that social change, social innovation, social transformation, you know they're up to no good. Collaborate is an innovative social consultancy, pioneering collaborative thinking and practise to tackle complex challenges across the UK. They say this on their website. We are, we are living in a time of transition, a fate accompli, A bit like your communication from Plymouth Council there, right? This is happening. We are reimagining public

services. So this is all about I'm putting more power and control into the hands of the state. They've actually written their own manifesto for a collaborative society. We'll provide a link to that. Go and read it. And as I said, they're a community interest company. And this CIC thing is going to

come up a lot. Interestingly, it was introduced, introduced by Blair in his second term in around 2005. So I think this new structure, communitarian structure has actually been introduced 20 years ago to come to fruition now, right? This is the kind of planning that we're seeing. From that period and I'll just I'll just add to that, Ben.

Of course it was in the Blair era that the change charity Common Purpose was being run from the office of the Deputy Prime Minister. So all of these things coming now to the fore and we can see what what's been put in place. Yeah, exactly. Very similar methods, culture, the whole tone a bit very similar to Common Purpose. This was founded in 2012, this organisation, Collaborate, and he was founded by this guy, Lord Victor Adabawali, so very

prominent man. He's also got CBE by the way, but I couldn't fit it on the top line there. But sorry to undersell you, Lord Victor, but he was a Blair appointee to the House of Lords, one of the first people's peers back in 2001. So this was the transformation to the upper chamber. This guy was at the vanguard of that. He's the founder and the chair of Collaborate, this organisation that we're talking

about. He's also, importantly, chair of the NHS Confederate and that is a membership organisation that brings together all of the healthcare system for England, Wales and Northern Ireland, right? This guy's extremely central to what's happening in healthcare and the NHS is a crucial component, part of this whole agenda. I essentially see it as a state within a state, right, in terms of its culture. Good description. Yeah, I think, I think it's the way that we have to understand it.

He's also a non executive Co op, Co op heavily into this stuff. And he was named according to his LinkedIn profile. He's on he's been on the Black Power list every year since 2013. You know, whatever you want to make of that. Now he's also on the the board or actually up until a couple of months ago he was on the board with this guy Axel Heitmula. And so he was a non exec collaborate until last year for 10 years.

Concurrently he was and still he is a senior associate fellow at the Tony Bear Institute for Global Change, specifically focused on healthcare and he was the CEO of Imperial College HealthPartners. So that's Gates Foundation money right there. Yeah. And he was also the director of strategy for the NHS Test and Trace programme in 2020. All right, So these these are the people who are driving the collaboration agenda.

And last week, couple of weeks ago, I think he was, they put out this, what they call the building blocks of place based learning. And they say we're at the brink of a once in the lifetime opportunity to re examine and reshape how local government operates in England. Exactly what we just heard from Plymouth. We know what works and we can see a better way, but we also know it can be hard to make a shift.

So how do we make the shift? Well, we've thought it, we've thought it through, and they've developed this thing. So these are the building blocks, and we're going to look from the bottom to the top and just examine their methodology, their framework for understanding society and how they're going to get their hands around it. Right. So we'll start at the bottom. We'll wait. There we go. Lovely. So there are some systemic

conditions in place. These are things that need to be in place in order for them to do their work. So you have to take a strategic, intentional approach to partnership across a place. Apologies for the appalling language by the way, but this is how these people speak, right? So this is basically you've got to be conniving and cunning and thinking this thing through. The second point is trusted collaborative relationships and behaviours.

So you need a network of people who are going to comply with you. You need a culture of learning that enables adaptation, which is actually true because things are never exactly the same in every single location. So you've got to test and learn and and and and and work out the best approach based on exactly where you are.

And you need bold enabling place leadership, which means you need leadership on the ground who are going to let you do the things that you want to do right, really crucially. And you need people on the ground who are able to influence. You need opportunities for people to come together. You need a real focus on voluntary community and faith organisations. Those are key systemic partners for collaborating.

The people that are trying to progress this agenda towards collaborative working towards a communitarian system, right? And they look at the system as a totality. So interestingly, we normally talk about global, national down to regional. They've actually got got rid of the the global and the national. They started straightening at regional and then counties, towns, cities and districts you're building from the bottom up basically.

So neighbourhoods is at the top. And that's the most important part of this for them. And a lot of this is to do with the NHS, right? So they're using NHS language. So a locality is aligned with APCN, that's a primary care network, right? So they're already thinking, probably because of Lord Victor's role with the NHS Confederation, about how to zone out the country based on the NHS

and how it's organised, right? And then they're looking at London boroughs, it's about 100,000 people in NHS neighbourhood, which is the new organisational model for the NHS, 30,000 to 50,000 people. And they're looking at introducing, well, look, citizens assemblies. We can see their participatory democracy. We can see their community wealth building, which is about basically the destruction of private wealth. Everything becomes owned by the community, ergo the state.

Ultimately, it's what they're doing here. And parish councils, I can see up there Ben. Paris parish councils top left. So actually, yeah, that's, if you're reading the document from the top down, that's the first thing that they noticed in the neighbourhood section, right. And this is the the we're talking hyperlocal. Look at the top line there, underlined in red. Hyperlocal decision making, 150 to 1500 people. They're going extremely granular here.

And what they're doing is thinking through all of the different component parts of society that they want to influence and get their arms around in order to force us, the whole society, every single member of the population into compliance with their new collaborative, communitarian, globalised system. Right? That's what this document is explaining to us. OK. And there's a bunch of things in there. So we talked about parish council. We just get that back on screen

quickly. I'm going to talk through just a few more. So community asset transfer. So they're going to change the nature of ownership for existing community assets. They're going to pump money into into the into local communities using grants. They're going to introduce things called community businesses. You won't just have a business anymore. It's a community business and you can work for it, but you can never actually own it properly.

And also crucially, you can never establish generational wealth over decades or centuries or even longer because everything's owned centrally by the community and not by you as an individual, right? You've got community champions, community anchors, counsellors as community activists. That's a big one there slap bang in the middle to this idea that counsellors, you're not a counsellor anymore. You're some kind of change agent who has to galvanised activists

and make things happen. You can't just do your job and, you know, administer the, the, the really simple basic things that we need going on in society. You have to, you have to be constantly pushing towards a, a new world order ultimately, right. And then this, all of this is going to deliver the, the most. I won't read all of these out because there's a lot in here.

We'll provide a link to it though, and I'd suggest downloading it and having your own copyright because this is these, this is the game plan for these people. But you can see there in the bottom left, civic participation and trust people with the power to change what happens in their community. Power to change.

There's actually a charity called Power to Change that is in this ecosystem and it's got people working right next to Keir Starmer. And you know, this, this is absolutely embedded into the whole, the whole of the whole of the system and it's critical to Mission delivery, right? So we talked about this organisation icon, the Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods back in March

this year, I believe it was. They say there is no pathway to Mission delivery without putting neighbourhoods front and centre. And this is what David happened from the Behavioural Insights team is spending his time working on right now. This is his his project. They've also mapped out, I showed this as well at the time, the entire UK looking at what they call deprived neighbourhoods that they're going to focus on for state intervention.

Yes, so they've got the whole country scoped out for being brought into this new system. And as I said, this, this is absolutely reflected in language and policy in the NHS, the right centre in this. So we've got the neighbourhood health guidelines saying that there's an urgent need to transform the health and care system to a neighbourhood health service, which again is about bringing power closer to the people. It's not about people having

more power. And actually they're already pouring billions of pounds into making this happen inside the NHS, including this £1.5 billion programme for the plan for neighbourhoods with 75 areas they've already identified. And this whole thing is is already hit the road basically. It's already hit the road, the organisation been set up, yeah, across the whole of the UK and buildings have been built to bring in this new system of governance. So it's. It's real IRL.

Physical infrastructure is there. It's happening, Yeah, crucially. OK, so you heard it on UK Column News. We're going to do more of course, on subsequent news episodes. Just be aware while you get focused on what's happening overseas or the dross of the BBC. This is the real threat to people in this country. A government which doesn't like us, doesn't want to help us and it's going to bring in a new system of government. But we know how it's being done. What are we going to do?

Well, the key thing is to get people together and make them aware of what's happening. So that's a good time to remind

people that on the 18th of October we'll be having our UK column on location in York. Absolutely fantastic venue. We'll be well up country. And so Diane, we're very much hoping that people in your locality and across the border into Scotland will be able to join us. So that's going to be fantastic. Now tomorrow at 1:00, it's not

an interview, it's a discussion. But I was, together with Gemma Cooper, we are discussing in a very relaxed way the very serious issue of the conference we'd attended back last Friday and Friday week, if I've got my days right, And that was about mothers who'd lost children to social services. So very, very interesting discussion and very nice to see Gemma Cooper on camera with us for that. So do TuneIn tomorrow at 1:00. We've also got Germ tonight at

7:00. He's going to be having a look at women's liberation, enslaved women. So that will be a very interesting interview with Rachel Wilson. What else have we got coming up? We've got the Irish Medical Council, they've got a meeting. So that's tomorrow, Tuesday, the 10th of June at 1:00 PM, our Irish Medical Council, Kingdom House, Dublin.

And after essentially after three years of vindication, but independent medical regulators are still being sanctioned and Irish doctors are still being persecuted and and censored. Sorry, medical regulators are still sanctioning the doctors. Irish doctors are still being persecuted and censored. So this is the opportunity to stand up with people in the medical profession in Ireland. Now, Diane, let's bring you on screen. You've been very patient.

We've had a lot to cover today. And I know that in extra time, a team of three of us here going to be talking a lot more about what's happening in the country. But you've been out and about and you've also been really doing some great work to increase the amount of material on UK column website. What have you got? Yeah. Thanks, Brian. Hello, Ben. It's great to be here today. I just want to go through a few

things first. So before I get into what I was up to over the weekend, just just a reminder, and I've mentioned this the last few weeks. On Thursday I will be speaking in Defensive libraries. This is sponsored by the Buckingham Academic Academic Freedom taking place at the University of Buckingham. It is a free event. If you're able to join us, I

would love to see you there. I've I've heard some rumours that there are some local UK column viewers who will be joining me as well as the Macademics, which should be a great event. Please join us for that. What else do we have here that I've got going on? Got for the Finetti Residential School Scottish Parliament debate, which is actually a very serious and important event.

I covered this a couple of weeks ago the, the updates on the sort of the legislative side in, in Scottish Parliament. I, I mentioned a debate would be happening and it is happening. I've confirmed it's this Thursday the 12th, 12:45 PM and you can either watch it online at scottishparliament.tv or if you're able to go and get a ticket to go to the public gallery, you can try that as well.

I would like to note that because of all of the work that UK column has been doing for for the past three years is the reason directly that I believe that it's made it to the floor. This is in in relation to Alex Cole Hamilton, who's one of the MSPs who have been supporting Fanethi from the beginning, and Colin Smith, who's one of the constituent MSPs of one of the

Fanethi survivors. And his statement, which got us a floor debate is based on the evidence that I submitted directly to Scottish Parliament in support of the petition to get the ladies justice. So I, I just want to thank everyone who's been helping us for the past three years to get it to this point. From here, I wanted to talk about some of the material that we have published in the past week as our commissioning editor.

This one is by a member who actually I met in our recent event, Dan Cheltenham. Her name is Hayla Bolchowski. She wrote this called whose dreams, the LGBTQ plus Manchester housing scheme. It's a, it's a local thing in Manchester, but you can see very clearly some of these bigger things that they're talking about and how it's happening in one particular locale. Got a few more articles to look

at here. This is by Doctor Pierce Robinson. From stand nerve agent attacks to chlorine gas, the Syria chemical weapons storytelling continues. This is part of the series that Pierce has been writing for us around the, the, the chemical weapons narrative and serious and very obviously serious information. And that piece as well. I've got another one here by Andrea also, who is this is the second piece she's written for us. Again, another member that I met in Cheltenham.

This is an issue around the tariffs, looking at the Trump tariff policy and free trade and some really interesting things to think about in this article. So and what else do we have here? This is the one by Doctor Yopzlan Friva. This is Part 2 of his three part series looking at the banking and financial system. The first one was about how central banks operate. This one is about CBDC, central bank digital currency, which I know is of particular interest to a lot of UK column viewers.

This series is only available to members, so you need to be subscribers of UK column to view the content by by you. So please do look, think about signing up and and looking at these articles because they're very important. Excellent. Thank. Thank you very much Diane. And I'll say to our viewers that of course, we can only do what we do with your financial

support. So if you're not a paid up member of UK column, please join the UK column because it's all our paying members that allow us to do what we do. And as you are about to to show us, Diane, the attack on any form of free media is about to skyrocket. So if you value the UK column, please, please do support us. Sign up, become a member for that very modest monthly subscription. We need more members if we're to whether the storms coming and those storms are coming without

any doubt. Now the other thing I just wanted to say this is a little bit unusual. I'm going to do it because we had such a nice email. I can't promise it to everyone, but Craig's mum Margaret is 80 years old today so we wanted to wish her a happy birthday. So there we are, special birthday. Happy birthday, Margaret. Well done.

OK, now Diane, you've been out and about and it's been quite incredible that in going to some academic events you have stumbled really into the belly of the beast which would silence alternative media. And also it's working hard to create waves of change in our society. Tell us about where you've been and what you've discovered. Yes. So yesterday I was at an event, a whole day of events actually, at the University of York.

So they have a yearly event which is called the York Festival of Ideas, which is kind of a range of things that sort of go on for in this case it was from the 31st of May to the 13th of June. I think there's, it says over 150 free events to educate, entertain and inspire. Now you might wonder why they would offer 150 free events. And so I decided it was a really important thing to look at how

they're actually funding these. So if we look at these are a couple of pages directly from the official programme for the entire event. So the University of York is obviously the main sponsor. They get their money through research funding. I'll look at in just a minute just the Brown Tree Foundation and the train service L and ER, which is part of a major train operator up here in the North.

So if we look at some of these fundings, in particular the Higher Education Innovation funding is the particular funding scheme from the UK Government's Research innovation, part of the UK Research Councils that funds these kinds of programmes. And this has a budget overall of £260 million. Obviously not all of this meant to the University of York, but a lot of it did go to funding

these events. And the what the point of this type of innovation funding is what universities called knowledge exchange, which basically means that the universities feel that they have a responsibility to share whatever their work is at the university with the wider public. Which then invites people from the public to be able to do things like this and come into the university for free and see what they've been doing.

Another funder that was listed on that page from the programme is also, if we can put that up up here is another foundation which is called the Joseph Brontree Foundation. And Joseph Brontree was an important person in the history of York. You can look him up if you're interested. But he was known at the time as a philanthropist. And so several of these trust related organisations that he created have really evolved over

time. And now he's, it says their motion is that they are a social change organisation. So going back to what Ben was saying earlier about social change not being up to any goods, it says that this part of their mission as well is to speed up the transition to a more equitable and just future where people and planet can

flourish. So we're seeing once again sustainable development level language Agenda 2030, UN language built into this sort of local charity that has been a major funder for the festival of ideas. And we can also see that part of the programme, the, the overall the programme was called making waves for this entire two week period. So this was this year was the anniversary of Joseph death. And so they've got 2 programmes

that have been particular to honour him. 1 is about benefits of economic growth and 1 is about sustainable futures through regional growth. So again, we're seeing this globalist language coming straight through into this particular event. Now, what I went to on Sunday in particular was, again, there were so many things. You can't go to all of them. But if we go into what I was actually attending on Sunday was this series of three panels.

So I've got just some photos here to kind of show just what it was like on the day. You can see there's kind of a big open area where there were several exhibitions and a lot of these were for children, which was kind of at odds with the the panels that I attended. But anyway, here's I'll just take you through some photos of what they were doing for children. I can talk about this a little

bit more in extra as well. So if we go through these photos, different academic departments, the research programmes, the ancient crops featured food, plants and prehistory. So there were things on history and archaeology. We can go through these fairly quickly. We can just go 1 by 1, some robots. They invited me to come play with the robots, the remote controlled robots that I was allowed to spin around on the floor a little bit. I don't know the purpose of them, but there they were.

We have, what else do we have? L And ER, so again, the train service, whether it's one of the sponsors of the festival of ideas, they have a set up for children building wooden trains and, and, and you can do have sheets for colouring on trains that coloured pencils out for the children to play with. This was from archaeology, so pieces of ancient buildings and stone walls and so on from around Yorkshire in the area. So some little bit of archaeology research for

children. Originally I thought this was part of an art department, but it was actually maths and physics looking at different structures and how pieces fit together in nature. And they wanted to know if these actually occurring crystals or other natural materials. And so they were having the children try to play with those. We have some bones from animals. So again, the archaeology department allowing children to see these things and, and, and put their hands on things directly.

We have what's the next one we have here the history archive. Yes. So this was all about looking at the archives and trying to get children to challenge them to see if they could read very old handwriting to understand if it was possible for them to see what the words were at different levels of, of complexity at the ancient DNA lab.

This actually was was encouraging children to sort of share their DNA, which is a little bit scary considering what we know about some of the genetics programmes that have been going on recently. But that was part of the the fun apparently. And there's the zoo archaeology lab. So once again, looking at, you know, sort of animals from history and, and kind of what this meant for science. So not all terribly bad, but again, really different from what I would have expected from

the panels that I was attending. Here's one more from the stable isotope lab next to the ancient DNA lab. So getting children, I guess, trying to get them interested, science, engineering and all these different disciplines that they offer at the university. Now to go to the grown up part of the day, which took place in the same location, the same venue. This was the series of three

panels that I attended. The entire day of panels was called A World in Crisis question mark, asking questions about democracy and so on. So this was, there were three panels that I attended throughout the day. I will, if we go on to the funding, I'll come back to the panels in just a minute. The the funder, the major funder for this organisation was the Merrill Centre for Legal and Political Philosophy at the University of York. They used to be called the Morrell Centre for Tolerance.

So you could go into a long sort of academic rabbit hole to figure out what tolerance actually means. You can see at the top it used to be the morale centre for toleration. Their website has not been updated for about 10 years as far as I could tell, but they have changed their name in recent times to legal and political philosophy. So there are again three panels, the the, the 2nd and the third one I will talk about an extra.

So there's some interesting and very alarming to you political discussions that took place in those. So I've just got photos of those two for now. Here's a panel called a New World Order question mark and some of the people included, Evie Espinal, for example, used to work with UN Women UK and there's some academics on the panel. And the other one that I was at the end of the day was the next one was is Europe safe question

mark. And again, we have some academics and a lot of the media people that were part of these panels were contributes to Guardian and and other very

mainstream sources. The one that I want to focus on the main news because there's so much here to talk about and hopefully I can get some reaction from Ben and Brian at the end of this was this one called, and this is the particular one that I was the most interested in is the first one in the morning called Disinformation, Polarisation and the Future of Democracy. So there was a, in their opinion, a particularly illustrious panel and what they

were doing, the splitting themselves up into presenting us with the problems that they see and then from there trying to give us solutions about what they see are the problems. So let's break this down a little bit more. If we go into the people that are participating in the panel. So the chair of the panel was this lady called Joan Concannon. She is the director of external relations for York University, which is a quite high up position in any university.

Looking at you see here that part of her job is supporting delivery of institutional objectives, income generation, advocacy, reputation, global and local partnership and stakeholder engagement. So at any UK university this is a very important role, very strategic role for a number of reasons that I can go into another time. The two panellists that presented us with explaining

what the problems are. The first one was Doctor Christopher Featherstone, who's an associate lecturer at the University of York in the the politics department. He's been a contributor to The Conversation, which is sort of an academic propaganda website if you ask me. France 24, LBC, he had a lot to say about Trump, as all of these people did, actually for the whole day. So positioning himself as an expert on foreign policy in the US and the UK. Professor Aurelian Mundone, I

hope I'm saying that correctly. It's professor at the University of Bath. He talked about reactionary politics used a lot of, in my opinion, rather polarising language, which I thought the point of the panel was to overcome polarisation. But anyway, if we go to the the next slide, I've got a photo here of a book that he Co authored just a couple of years ago called Reactionary democracy, How racism and the populist far right became

mainstream. So he is the first author on that book and we can also see that his publisher, Verse of Books is advertising, just by coincidence, the top of the page that they are celebrating Pride Month with 30% off their Pride Month reading list. And so those were the first two panellists and they presented what they saw are the problems. So let's take a look at what they said the problems were.

This is a very quick summary. This isn't everything, but here are the main things that I took away from it. These are direct quotes. The problem is that people are believing different sets of facts. So they're not saying that every set of fact is wrong. They're just saying that there are sets of facts and some of us are believing the wrong. There was a lot of criticism about Trump being the problem. One of them called him an empty core and they made jokes about the quote rubbish.

He says. They said Trump lacked an ideology, and this is part of what leads to disinformation, that other American presidents before him had an ideology, which I guess somehow may have stopped disinformation. They talked quite a bit over and over and over again about the rise of the far right, the problems with populism. Nigel Farage has mentioned, of course, the rise of inequalities and the climate crisis are all part of the problems that we

need to solve. So we've got all these terrible problems. OK, So what do we do to solve it? So who was going to tell us about this? Well, now we have Alexander Hurst, who is an American who has lived in Paris for a very long time, a Guardian contributor. He has, he looks like he's, you know, maybe about, I don't know how old he is, but he doesn't look old enough to have a memoir anyway. He has one coming in 2026, which is called Generation Desperation.

And the main part of the story is that he has basically won and lost $1.2 million trading at mean stocks during 2020. But so he goes, I, I don't know, the book isn't out yet, but he talked about desperation, capitalism and all of the other Main Street sources that he was sort of supporting. So, so the, the the highlight of the panel, I guess we could say was this lady herself. Her name is Jessica Cecil. She is the non executive director of Digital Catapult,

but she is much more than that. She has a 30 year career in her past being BBC veteran and working in a number of roles. She positions herself as a media industry leader and an expert in the field of disinformation. Now if you look back at UK column reports from I think one or two years ago, you will see the the Trusted News Initiative. And Jessica was responsible for founding and creating this Trusted News Initiative, which

of course is founded by the BBC. She's got a whole of other list of things on her CV, but let's take a look at the Trusted News Initiative very quickly beyond fake news, BBC trusted news initiatives. So it tells us exactly that this is who we're supposed to trust. And don't worry, the BBC and the partners along with them are going to be the ones to make sure that we're all doing the right things.

So this is just a screenshot of just some of the many partners that are part of this trusted news initiative. So we see the major Associated Press, CBC, which is the BBC equivalent in Canada. We see the tech companies like Meta, Google, Financial Times, Twitter, which of course needs to be updated. They haven't changed that to X. That's, that's a little bit old now.

Reuters, Microsoft, the Washington Post also of our favourites that are that are part of these trusted parts that are under her trusted news initiative. So what do they have to say about how what the solutions are? Well, let's look at what I again, these are just a quick takeaways from yesterday. Basically, a lot of this came from Jessica saying that one piece of legislation is not enough. We need a much, much bigger plan to combat what she calls

disinformation. And she says, well, of course, because it's her organisation, the Trusted News Initiative has defined for the good of the people, a subset of disinformation that poses an immediate threat. And she gave election results as an example of what can happen that could go terribly wrong if there is disinformation that's being spread out there without their permission.

And then they can alert the big tech companies like Meta and, and supposedly, I guess X now maybe in TikTok, all the major social media platforms. And the other person who was the other respondent to express the solutions, the, the one who's the, the guardian writer and so on. He said that the intervention and regulation need to be things

that set the culture. And here was the really scariest part for me of one of the scariest parts out of all of it that we really need to pay attention to is that he said that that social media private companies such as X and TikTok

should be banned. X and TikTok should be banned completely and that media media to be the only sources for media content in Europe and the UK. Because it's to him it's overwhelmingly obvious that the information that comes from public media is so much more trustworthy than anything that any other private organisation could possibly find out on its own. So that is particularly of interest. Now what happened from here was I decided, of course I had to ask the question in the the

question national session. So I asked and I, I was just, I was taking a lot of notes and paying very close attention. And I asked why they said far right several times throughout the panel as being the problem. Never once did I hear the terms far left. And I asked, well, how can we solve with polarisation if this is supposed to be a panel on polarisation of the future of democracy, that maybe we shouldn't be talking about far left or far right at all.

And that maybe we should just return to having civil debate in our society to figure out what the problems are and what to do about them and how to save democracy. They had a very, very defensive response to my question. One of them told me the far left doesn't matter because the far right is in power, so we don't even need to talk about the far

left. Jessica herself, the the Trusted Youth Initiative lady looks me in the eye, which is a big lecture hall and she still looked at me directly from on the bottom of the floor. And she said she did not use the term far right. So maybe she didn't, but the rest of them certainly did several times. And there was then the conversation kind of drifted a bit talking about building local trusted media sources.

So I guess I don't know, but maybe some of these new government structures that been covered will be providing our media in the future. There was also it drifted to why there was so much panic about a trans girl in Florida who wanted to play sports on the girls teams.

I don't know where that came from, but the the really, the really interesting, exciting and I want to stay a good part of it all was that several people came up to me after the session after I asked my question and thanked me because they said you got it right on. Because nobody was talking about this. Nobody was talking about the fact that they spent the whole time attacking far right and far

right populism. And the question of whether left and right actually exists is a really good question, especially because if we were trying to look at the future of democracy and how to fight polarisation. But actually all it turned into was them talking a lot about the far right and and fighting disinformation. And saying that these sources, including the BBC and all of their trusted partners are the ones who are going to be telling us the right things.

That everything else needs to be stopped through government control and shutting down private companies in any sort of competition. So with all that, Ben and Brian, I would love to hear your response to any of this. Well, Diane, the first thing for me to say is thank you so much for attending that event because this is a brilliant intelligence as to what the other side are thinking and doing.

And you've also demonstrated by asking some, some good questions, the panic that then ensues amongst these people when you challenge them in the right way, reasonable direct questions, this throws them into no man's land because nobody is supposed to challenge them. So 1 you attended, you learnt what they're, what they're up to and we've shared that with our

audience today. But then you've gone further and demonstrated the panic that when you challenged them and then what happened, you got support from people there. So in one event, Diane, you're demonstrating all the things which UK column would love all of our members to be doing, which is getting out there, finding out what's happening, getting amongst it and challenging it.

Because I, I'll just end really this segment on the parish councils, which Ben pointed out they are targeting parish councils because they're very worried about bodies that control and support local communities. So the power of the Roundtree organisation or any of these other big organisations, they are huge. They're very powerful in political sense, in a social change sense, but who do they need to control? Individual people at the bottom of the pile, at local community

level. So when people say we know what you're doing and we're not having it, this is a huge problem for them. I'll just let you respond to that briefly, Diane, but I am clock watching. Yeah, No, I just wanted to say that I, I think it's a perfect example of how we do have the power to take back the power that belongs to us as the people.

And I'm really happy, especially after such such an interesting event yesterday that we will be having our next live event in York on the 18th of October. Because it's pretty clear by some of the local people that were there that see what's going on. And I think it will be a perfect, perfect opportunity hopefully for them to come and and attend our event and get to meet other people and then we can all kind of work against this together. So I think it's not not all entirely a bad thing.

And have fun, work together and have fun. Now I'm just going to end and say our message is clearly beginning to resonate with the UK column audience. Because over the weekend, I think it was, I had an email, yes, it was on Saturday, I had an email come in where somebody said is I've found this organisation, they're part of it, aren't they? Well, I had a quick look. Here's Neon. What a lovely group of people. So a big thank you to the UK column viewer for supplying

this. And they are clearly seeing what we're seeing this this organisation believes that building movements, these are change movements, is central to winning social justice. That's social justice for them, not us. And if you have a look at the funders, the one that should jump out immediately is the Open Society Foundation. So Mr Soros has got his tentacles in here, plus many of these other organisations.

So let's end there on a very positive note that it's clear that UK column viewers at least are now seeing what's really attacking them in this country. Yes, we should be worried and concerned for people overseas in Gaza or Ukraine or America, even as their societies come under attack. But if we're going to stay safe in this country, we need to see the threat that our own government is building with our money, our own money. We'll be doing a lot more on

this. And I just want to thank you, Diane, and you, Ben, for such a comprehensive news today. Now, if you're a UK column member, you'll be able to join us for extra time in a few minutes where we're going to go through some of these issues at a slower, more jovial pace. And that's one of the big advantages of being signed up to the UK column. You can enjoy UK Column extra where we cover a whole variety of issues in a very different style, but lots of good information.

That's it for all today's news. Thank you very much everybody for joining us wherever you are in the world. We'll be back for another UK column on Wednesday at 1:00. See you then. Bye bye.