UK Column News - 22nd September 2025

Good afternoon. Today is Monday, the 22nd of September 2025, just after 1:00. Welcome to UK column News. I'm your host, Brian Garish, Delighted to have Ben Rubin with me in the studio. And we'll also be joined by Sandy Adams today on Live Link. Now, we've got a pretty heavy news because a lot of the information coming into the public domain is by its very nature, it's subject heavy. And we do need to cut to cover that. But we will try and lighten the mood as we progress through

today's news. We're going to start off by having a look at really is, oh, what a wonderful war. It's very clear that the British government is now very, very excited at the possibility it can help engineer a war between NATO and Russia and there's unlimited money for new military projects. And don't worry, because the country is going to be saved by using war as the opportunity to improve our business and trading situation.

But on top of that, we've got in the background the risk of casualties, of course, from any conflict. But if that isn't enough to deal with the population, the Assisted Dying Bill is coming along quite nicely and Sandy's going to be having a look at that. She'll also be having a look at the Corporate Transparency Act, where every detail of you has to be known by the government before you're going to be allowed to run a business of any

sort. And Ben, you've already got the lion's share today, which is having a look at the propaganda and mind control through the government. Interestingly enough, some of that takes us back to UK column printed edition in 2011. And finally, we're going to end with a little bit of black humour on BBC Shorts. So let's kick off with with Ukraine and the ramping up for war. And it's pretty obvious if we go to Defence HQ, we've got tweet after tweet or X post if you

prefer. Talking about jobs, 1000 jobs in helping to ramp up the drone industry. We've got building military aircraft for the US Air Force. That'll be with Boeing, an American company, but apparently that's good for the UK. We've got 200 million transformation fund for the military construction facilities in Barrow in Finesse. We've got another 1 1/2 billion pounds for Palantir Tech. And we are going to be, quote, accelerating UK defence towards war fighting readiness.

So they're not messing around, Ben. They're using the terms we're going to war and what better way to help the process than for people to be spreading this kind of material. So a little video clip that Philip Ingram, who's very big with the Times posted showing flight paths of those nasty Russians because Russia dead sent a few jets down to Kaliningrad and also there were some overflights. Of course, NATO has never been

guilty of this at all. Well, apart from Reaper drones entering Russian airspace over the Black Sea during the conflict that's been ongoing. But little clips like this all designed to ramp up fear in people and of course move us even closer towards a proper full blown war with the Russians. Now on one hand you might be relieved to know that UK sent jets into Poland to fire a warning shot to Putin to stay out of NATO territory.

So the text was pretty clear. John Healey said that he was giving a clear signal to Russia that NATO airspace will be defended. And how many British jets went into the area? Well, it was the sum of 2. So with no doubt Ben, the Russians were quaking in their boots. But if we want to see how the UK manipulates the agenda with regard to the Russians, no better place to go than the Times Radio. So let's have a look at this podcast.

John Killett, your first question comes in and says since NATO is a defensive organization, why and how does Putin think it's an offensive organization? That is a very simple question asking a very complex, a very complex question, and it is one that you have to put yourself into Vladimir Putin's perspective. Putin wants an enemy. And if we go from, you know, the end of the Second World War through the Cold War, who was the Soviet Union's enemy and who does Putin see as the enemy in

the future? Well, the Soviet Union's enemy was what became NATO, and then Putin has taken that up and continued saying NATO was an enemy, and there's no point in trying to persuade your people that your enemy is only there to defend. If you attack, you want to make it the big bad wolf. And that's what Putin has been doing the whole way through. In fact, that's what the Soviet Union did the whole way through. NATO was the big bad wolf.

And of course, whenever you look at it in the cold light of day, on paper, NATO has expanded, it's grown, and it's grown E into a lot of the countries that were former members of the Warsaw Pact. And Putin has seen that expansionism as something that is designed, in his words, to be an aggressive look against Russia and therefore suggesting that it is a threat against Russia. He doesn't care about the reality of what NATO is or the NATO's constitution or, or anything else.

And of course, we've had Russians up until just before their invasion, full scale invasion of Ukraine, Russians were embedded in the NATO headquarters. They've been working with NATO for many years. Russians have deployed under the command of NATO LED operations in the Balkans. And they haven't complained before. So Putin knows exactly what NATO

is, but NATO's expanded. For those that don't know, NATO doesn't expand by going out to different countries and saying, hey, you know, we see that you're butting up against a potential enemy. Would you like to come and join us? Here's our help to get you over the line to come and join. Now NATO sits and waits. It waits for countries to turn around and say, can we join?

You have to apply to join. And then whenever they apply to join, they have to meet quite a large number of political and military standards before they are accepted into the the overall NATO framework. So truly incredible little clip because in in in attempting to spin the propaganda against Putin, what he does is actually describes the very mechanism by which NATO has conducted an aggressive movement, E contrary to all the promises to the Russians.

And it's coming out as this man gives the little clips of how things go. But of course, his initial history, he doesn't tell the audience that immediately after the defeat of Germany, the Russians moved two million men from Western Europe all the way across Russia in order to fight the Japanese and kick them out of China.

He doesn't mention that. He doesn't mention Operation Unthinkable, which is Churchill's plans for the Western allies to actually attack the Russians in order to claim more of all of more of European territory. So he seems pretty weak on that. But nevertheless, he's put up as Times newspapers an expert. But if we have a look at his, sorry, let's say we go, if we have a look at his Twitter account X, he's describes himself as an ex military spook and planner. And then he says specialized,

let's bring that up on screen. Specialized in taking over countries, tongue in cheek. Then why would you make a comment like that unless you'd actually been engaged in that very thing, getting inside countries, breaking down the bona fide political system in order to insert the EU agenda or

the NATO agenda. This man is effectively boasting that, boasting that he's been in the game in order to inflamed the situation in the Eastern Europe while saying well no NATO of course is there to just protect the West as a defensive organization. Propaganda. Quite unbelievable. But the other place we need to go with propaganda is Defence HQ. This is from their Twitter page itself and what we've got is a commentary supposedly on what's happening in Ukraine itself.

It says here the logistics hub of Krosk remains the focal point for the Russian offensive operations. And this is absolutely true. But of course Defence Intelligence doesn't give the UK Cup public the truth that the city is operationally encircled and the Russian forces have already taken key parts of the southern city's defences.

If we go on through, it's talking about major elements of Russia's naval infantry being transferred from the Kursk region to Perkovsk. But of course it's then saying to start offensive activity in small groups. Well, the truth is that the Russian troops have successfully used small groups of men to break fortified positions and take territory for months at a time.

And if we deal with the second point that they make is that Russians have also taken the Sebriansk Forest, which is a massive area, and they've successfully taken that by massive use of bombs, rockets and artillery, which the Ukrainians don't have, supported by small groups of men.

So it's basically propaganda by a mission from Defence HQ, but we need to identify it. And if we go on to the last point here, where it's saying that the Russian forces have consolidated control over sectors of the areas ordering Janitra, Petrovsk and the Donetsk Oblast. However, many of these are still contested in. In reality, the Russians are continuing to breakthrough Ukrainian front lines largely across the whole length of the front line, and they are advancing into rare areas,

taking more ground. And This is why NATO is getting so spooked at the moment, because having denied the Russians were moving forward, that's exactly what they're doing. And so if we analyse what Defence HQ has been doing, this is deliberately misleading propaganda which is designed to ramp up fear of Russia and to hide the truth about the war in Ukraine. Now, instead of going to this despicable UK government organization for information, there are many extremely good

online analysts of the war. We've supported a whole range of them over the time that the war has been in place. And if we have a look at Petrovsk here, which they've been talking about, the first thing to understand is that the area itself is encircled by the Russians. And although they haven't, if you like, joined the full circle, they have fire control over the Western Rd. into this area. So there's no doubt that Minograd and Petrovsk are both now in circles.

And if we just show the two areas, we've got 2 city, well, small town, large towns, small city areas together. And both of these are now held in the Russian encirclement. And you can see by the extensive area in pink around it the size of the Russian progress. I'm just going to say this has come from the military summary channel. So credit for this excellent analysis.

And if we have looked in a bit more detail, we can see the yellow arrows there, which is showing the likely Ukrainian escape routes for their forces that are being encircled. And you can see the formation of the Russian pincer which is going, which is ultimately going to take the city. And there's no question that this is going to happen. If we have a look at Kupiansk, we can see this, a similar encirclement happening, Russians in this case approaching from

the north, northwest. And the flags with the sorry, the areas with the Ukrainian flags on showing largely the the strongholds of the Ukrainians which are left in Kupiansk, but the Russians are steadily encircling these. And if we translate this into reality, this is a description here or photos showing high rise buildings in Copiand. And this is really giving you the key visual for how difficult this terrain is for the Russians to fight because you've got very

flat landscape. And if you have strong multi Storey buildings, these inevitably form very difficult strong points. So credit to both sides. This is brutal urban warfare. But the facts are that the Russians are steady steadily defeating the Ukrainians in these areas and these are ultimately strategic defeats.

Now, if we just come back to UK briefly, something which caught my attention and Charles Malit at the end of last week was this report talking about the role of women in the UK armed forces. And if we've got somewhere about 11%, maybe more, up to 15% women in the reserve forces, well, the future is very different because the intention is that as we ramp up for war with the Russians, we're going to ramp up to get 30% women in our armed forces.

And that has all sorts of ramifications because if we look worldwide, women are not being put onto the battlefield to fight. Although there's much talk about this, when the chips are down, it's invariably the men that come forward. We'll talk about this a bit a bit more in extra time, but let's move on from there.

And welcome to you, Sandy. And if we're going to kill people on the battlefield in very large numbers, we're also targeting our elderly via the assisted dying bill. Indeed. And and not just the elderly. It's yeah, it, it had its, its second reading this week on last Friday, on the 19th of September in in the Lords. And they set up a special Select Committee to take detailed evidence and to scrutinize the bill.

The bill was formerly the terminally ill adults end of life Bill. And it it cleared its second reading, so it remains on the statute book track and proceeds through the Lord's stages. Obviously, due to much opposition from some peers, rather than moving immediately to normal committee report stages, the House agreed to appoint a Select Committee to gather evidence from professional bodies, coroners, ministers and other bodies

involved. The committee will publish the evidence it hears, but unusually, it's not being asked to make amendment recommendations, which makes me feel that it, you know, they are going to try and push this through without a doubt. The committee was given a reporting headline deadline, so they've been asked to report back by the 7th of November, which is quite soon. Ministers such as the Health and Justice secretaries are expected

to give evidence. So you know, it's, it's going to, it's, it's pushing its way through. So if the Lord's bill is amended, it will return to the House of Commons for consideration of those amendments. If no blocking amendments pass, the bill can proceed through both houses towards Royal Assent. So there we have it now there's, there's, there was a lot of opposition.

I don't know, you know, many people may have watched the Hansard on, on all this, but Baroness Finley and Lord Daniel Moylan had something to say about this. And we've got some, we've got some footage of both of those now. So if we could roll that footage. The bill doesn't require any attempt to relieve pain or suffering, even if they're present. It puts the power in the hands of the two assessing doctors who may know.

Nothing about the conditions of the person who cannot detect undue influence or coercion and whose motivation may be opaque. Prognosis is a guess, and diagnostic errors are common. They do. These doctors do not need to be certain. Only on the balance of probabilities do they need to believe the criteria are met with no oversight of their assessment. How can a panel approve the death with any certainty when there is no ability to appeal against a panel approval and no

coroner oversight? How many wrongful deaths a year is acceptable? No system can be 100% safe providing massive. Drug overdoses in an unlicensed way to end life is not a therapeutic act. It's notable that the words death and dying hardly appear, that the poison to be used is described as an approved substance. The still mysterious contraption by which it is to be administered is called an approved device and the business itself.

When you get to Clause 25, you'll find it's headed administration of assistance, provision of assistance. Assistance, in fact, is the term used throughout the whole of the Bill. Is this something that's going to become part of our daily language? Have you considered assistance, Mrs. Smith? My Lords, we know what this is. It is euphemism an an old ancient Greek device for hiding from the gods through the use of flowery language, something of which you are ashamed.

And that's what the language of this bill is constantly expressing at every turn. My Lords, I think we are right to be ashamed of what is in this Bill. I think he spoke very eloquently. So yeah, there's definitely, definitely something very shady about all of this. And obviously Lord Falconer is the, is the person pushing this alongside Esther Ranson. And he's a major player in pushing this bill through.

Now it's interesting. He's he did have to make an admission in, in the House of Lords. And I think we have some footage of that admission about the funding of, you know, towards the assisted dying bill. And it there's some shady things going on. So I'll let you make your own minds up.

My Lords, I draw. Attention to my entry in the Register of Members interest, which refers to the fact that I have an assistant funded by Bernard Lewis to assist me in the conduct of this Bill, and Dignity in Dying funded the printing of literature which I sent to your Lordships in connection. With the Bill, I apologize for not mentioning this in my opening speech. My Lords, this has been a debate.

So he admitted that actually the, that some of the literature was funded by Dignity and Dying. And these two, there's 2, two companies that are intrinsically linked, it's Dignity and Dying. And the other one is the, I think it's called the Compassionate dying organization. Now both of these are linked to the Bernard Lewis Trust who were funding a lot of the assisted by dying bill. So so who owns that trust? It's the the the Lewis family trust, the Bernard Lewis family trust.

And they're part of the river, the River Island fame. That's where they made their money. Like most corporate capitalists, the family has its fingers in multi, multi nefarious pies. The founder, Bernard Lewis, is responsible for the family's fortunes. The company's house lists him alone as an active director of no fewer than I think it's 20 corporations. And another company called Cavendish Square Secretariat acts as secretary for 52 other companies. It's owned by the Lewis Trust Group.

The group's portfolio spans various investment companies in England, property development in Poland and a chain of hotels in Israel and the US. And if the company it keeps, or rather the other organization it donates to is anything to go by, it seems it's, it's very comfortably a missed a missed

amongst neoliberal circles. So let's look at some of these organisations that receive funding from Bernard Lewis Trust Dignity in Dying and it's it's got a sister company called Compassion in Dying. Now Dignity in Dying had an income of 2.6 million in 2023, up from 1.7 million in 2022 / 2 million was spent on lobbying, PR, media, research and funding to push the assisted dying bill. Crucially, the accounts do not disclose who the high value donors are.

Compassion in dying charity, they show a clearer donor

information. In 2023, it owed 139,000 to Dignity in dying for staffing and overheads, meaning its donors are indirectly funding lobbying and they are very linked to these two, these two companies now, Oh, oh the, the trust, the Bernard Lewis Trust donated well over 1.8 million in documented donations to dignity and dying and compassionate dying are the recipients of the Lewis Trust's money where the Conservative Party and from Bernard Lewis personally, he

donated, I think it was 46,000 to, to, you know, personally to the Conservative Party as well as 52,000,000 between 2008 and 2010. And then a network of nefarious think tank, you know, sort of dark think tanks, the Henry Jackson Society, the Centre for Social Justice Policy Exchange Demos, as well as Zionist organisations such as the Community Security Trust, so and the Jewish Leadership Council.

So all of this is, is being funded by many, many organisations that we have nothing, we we don't, we know nothing about. They're they're just pushing money into this. So it's heavily funded by million billionaire capitalists and opaque trusts, not grassroots donations. And the same back as also Bank, pro neoliberal and Zionist organization raising concerns that the push for assisted dying aligns with ideological and economic agendas, but that devalue vulnerable lives both

here in the UK and abroad. So let's look at the hypocrisy. Of the funding, 8.12 million has been spent by lobbyists and wealthy donors to promote assisted dying over roughly A decade. Meanwhile, the annual funding gap for palliative care is is in the hundreds of millions. The government has reduced its funding of Hospice and palliative care by 47 million in the last 18 months, with hospices forced to run cakes, stalls, sales, charity shops and

marathons to stay stay afloat. In other words, just a fraction of the private money poured into lobbying for assisted dying could have transformed palliative provision for thousands of dying people, providing pain relief, hospital beds and support for families. It's clear that wealthy donors have chosen to bankroll campaigns that make death more accessible, yet those same resources are not being directed towards making life until natural death more comfortable.

Society is left in a position where it's easier and cheaper to promote a lethal injection than to guarantee proper palliative care, not because of public will, but because lobbying is better funded than compassion. This is deeply concerning. And I think we have a a video now from I think his name's he's Doctor Miller and he's he kind of puts it into perspective. And I think we should listen to this. It kind of puts it all in one place. Make your own minds up. Thank you.

That's a minor change compared with the this century's growth in the world population from 6.1 billion to 8.2 billion, a 25% increase in 25 years. But just think what the 202 five numbers would be if abortion had not been legalized or there had not been white skilled usage and advocacy of contraception. And indeed the growth of homosexuality throughout society has reduced the number of children we would have had at

the churches. Had their way, we would have had a very much bigger population than we presently have. Basically, the difficulties we have with climate change. Well, Sandy, thank you very much for that. It's it's a very, very serious and as you say, dark agenda.

And it's also deeply disturbing that there's huge amounts of money coming in in order effectively to lobby and manipulate the government into going down this path when the same money spent could have a a very much more human and compassionate outcome if it was put towards caring for people who were heading in or heading towards terminal illness. So lots of questions to be asked. We we a little bit uncertain about the name of the gentleman speaking there in the House of Lords.

We'll check that out and we'll make sure we've got that correct in you in extra today. But a lot to be discussed.

And Ben, this is more manipulation of politics, isn't it? And you, you've come in on the topic of mind control, which is is the government's main agenda, it appears at the moment it. Certainly is, yes. Well, I think that's what government is, isn't it? If we just flag this up, government, what does that mean? Mind control, that's what it's all about. Before I progress, let me just say that was an amazing report, Sandy, and that speech at the end there just took my breath

away. I can't believe that we have to talk about that more in Extra and also particularly the Henry Jackson Society because I've been looking at them over the past week or two. So anyway, we'll come back to it. Mind control, government, what are they up to, what they're planning next. There is no better place to go to find that out than Policy Live, which happened 10 days ago, week before last, and it's powered by Nestor and the Behavioural Insights Team.

Nestor, the UK's social innovation agency who are manipulating the social fabric and the Behavioural Insights Team, AKA the Nudge Unit who are manipulating our minds. Before I get into this, I'm just going to draw your attention to this organisation as well as a sidebar, but I'm going to come back to these these lot over the coming weeks.

This is Flint Global which is a strategic consulting business which advises international businesses and investors on policy, politics, regulation and competition. So very expensive polished advice from people with very privileged positions in the establishment, not least the Co founders. So first of all, this guy says Sir Simon Fraser, who as well as being a Co founder of Flint, spent a long time in the in the Foreign Office.

It was the head of the UK Foreign Office and diplomatic Service. We ran the whole embassy network for the British government. And he's also now currently the chair of Chatham House. So he has a dual role here, making a lot of money with Flint while also enormously influencing policy at Chatham House. And then more pertinent to today's presentation, Ed Richards, who is also a Co founder of Flint whilst being chair at Nestor and the Behavioural Insights team.

So between these two, that is an extraordinary amount of influence coalesced into one place, one organization. You've got the kind of blue blooded establishment of Chatham House and the neo liberal progressives of the Behavioural Insights team together in one place. And as I say, we'll come back to Flint Globe. I just wanted to register that with you because that'll give you a little bit more context. What we're going to talk about is it as it relates to Nestor Live.

Let's hear now from Ed Richards, Chair of Nestor and the Behavioural Insights Team, talking about the challenges facing the political classes in the UK in 2025. Firstly, there is a frustration in the country so that we can't somehow quite agree how to tackle the important problems of the age. That is partly a problem of the polarized politics of the age, but it is certainly a problem

the second. Would be that there seems to me to be a widespread concern that somehow some challenges are now almost insoluble, that they're just almost too difficult for us to solve. The third. Would be a concern, a worry that somehow government itself can't effect change in the way that it once could. It seems to find it harder and harder to address some of the complex challenges. That we face.

And fourthly, that the state itself, the state writ large, struggles to implement quickly and efficiently policy, even when policy objectives are in fact agreed and clear. I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday in France and she said to me that France is in fact now almost ungovernable, and it reminded. Me for a moment. Of the debates in the 70s about the UK being ungovernable, some

of you will remember them. I don't think you could say that about the UK, not with the government, with such a clear and strong majority, but there is a. Concern, I think, about the degree to which government can govern in a way that meets the challenges of our age. Government can't govern. Some challenges are insoluble, we cannot solve them. Government can't affect change.

The state can't even implement policy when it's got a clear mandate to do so. Apparently he thinks that the UK should be governable because Labour has a mandate, apparently, even though they got about 20% of the vote or something like that. And I'm rather jealous of the French actually, because apparently France is ungovernable and I think that's probably something that we should aspire to. I don't know.

I think it's got a lot to be said for it and it shows that the French spirit is causing problems. Yeah, we tend to be more dose of. I think we do, yeah. Problem. Absolutely. So anyway, they're gonna, they're gonna try though, right? So they're gonna try and govern us and we'll have a little look at some of the ways in which they're going to do that. Up on stage next. We had this crowd, Heather Stewart on the left there, economics editor of The Guardian, David Halpin, very

familiar to regular viewers. The UK column, the guy that started the nudge unit for David Cameron back in 2010, Polly Curtis from Demos, Interesting to see Demos in Sandy's segment there. Again, we have to come back to that in Extra. And then this chap on the right hand side there, that's Antonio Silva from Nestor, and he's there to talk about something called social capital.

And essentially see what they're doing here is saying, well, if the government can't fix things, which is what Ed Richards just said, then maybe society can fix things. But we've still got to justify our existence in our fancy office in central London with our well paid jobs. So let's run this big survey to go and see if we can understand the UK society from an anthropological perspective.

And this is all done in the context of essentially cultural Marxism. So he talks about these three forms of capital, economic capital, what you have, human capital, what you know, and social capital, this new thing you're introducing, which is all about who you know and looking at social networks and his kick off point now on the left hand side you can see his desk Capital by Marks, right? So these are Marxists in London developing government policy, running. With huge amounts of money.

Huge. Huge, huge, huge. Amounts of money. I mean, we talked. I think Nestor's got in the region of half a billion pounds in its endowment, hugely wealthy, traveling an office right next to JP Morgan's office on the Embankment in central London. And this is what they spend their time doing, right? And what do they run? They run a national study to look at 6 billion friendships in the UK and look at this social capital. Reading from the top lines, they looked at social networks of 58%

of the UK population. So it's 20 and a half million anonymised Facebook users. Well, will they? Well, I mean, Facebook has been quite public about the fact that it doesn't know what it does with your data. They didn't build that platform for privacy and they're allowing, this is a formal partnership with Facebook, by the way, I'll come on to that in a minute.

They're allowing this organization access to 20 million user profiles to look at relationships between all these different people, focusing on what they call economic connectedness, so looking at high income friends that low income people have and trying to understand the connection between different strata and society. They're also looking at things like social mobility, which

comes from a different data set. And then they ran a survey looking at well-being, which is about satisfaction, life satisfaction, how much people trust each other. That comes from a separate survey. And actually it's quite entertaining because he was rather disappointed that actually in the UK, friendships do bridge economic divides significantly more so than in other countries, which I don't think is what he was expecting to find out. There's enormous diversity in

the population. The class divide is actually much less entrenched than people think. People from the lower levels of society have lots of friends in the upper levels of society. We're certainly the higher earning levels of society, I think we should probably say. And, and the, the, the entertaining thing for, for me about this is what you get with these studies is that it's all done on data and they never actually say we went out and spoke to some people. It's all just, it's all

spreadsheet based basically. And we didn't find an issue, but we're still going to make a load of interventions. So we then end up with, oh, we're going to redraw the school catchment areas and we've got to create a new community ownership fund and we've got to get government investment for socially mixed sports facilities.

Even though there's not really anything particularly wrong in the country, we've got to intervene in it anyway because obviously we need to, as I said before, justify our resistance. And obviously this guy is he's not he's not English. So his name is Antonio Silva. So I'm guessing he's Spanish or Portuguese potentially, I'm not sure. Martin vessel was the guy he worked with.

Sounds like a German name to me. And actually Halpern in the response to this makes some comment about not liking the way that Anglo Saxon's positioned park benches and actually thinking that he would need to intervene to change that, which is, you know, just kind of astonishing really. And given the fact that they haven't found an issue with the class divide, I think they kind of got down to business and really opened up what this was all about when they started to

talk about immigration. Let's have a little listen to this. There's this also. Part of the recipe for dealing with absorbing quite large scale immigration in the way that we've had and, you know, forming more cohesive groups or not dividing or, you know, dealing with some of the issues that Polly was sort of gesturing up there that you know is this is this part of the recipe for for, you know, forming closer connections, whatever your background, whatever your. It can be.

It has been historically. There's another Commission, several running at the moment, but one on community cohesion which is looking at some of those issues more broadly. And it took its first evidence session and obviously it was a fantastic presentation. Somebody reasonably well known figure who grew up in the East Standard web, but was contrasting about how, you know, you look about it, his father's generation or whatever. If you're in East End.

It was a kind of, it was a melting pot for lots of reasons. You know, he rather elegantly put it, you know, we all learn a bit of Yiddish and we smoke a bit of pot and you know, it's like shit happening. But then in contrast, what also happened in a lot of those periods, if you go back, you know, to three generations, you get a lot of areas which are actually white only in other parts of the country.

And actually, they're the ones that are really most worried normally about immigration where you don't see those populations. So it's not just sort of a contact hypothesis writ large. But it looks a lot like it, right? Yeah. It's it's not a real world example, but we're running a big program on deliberative policy making around immigration at the moment.

And all the evidence shows that if you bring people with very broad opinions together in a safe space and a really powerful deliberative process, there is a natural moderation that happens in those processes and people find kind of compromises and ways through. And the it's what we talk about kind of like a Mimby majority kind of effect that actually at the moment our kind of public debate has been so driven by the

extremes when you. Bring people together without those kind of like extreme drivers in the room. People find kind of ways through those very kind of seemingly toxic debates. Arrogance is what I pick up, Ben. Unbelievable arrogance. They are the intellect and those other people are not capable of making sensible decisions. That have been managed and cajoled and moved around. And it's really the white only

areas that are the problem. But if you get your hands around them and kind of force them into it, then ultimately then the whole thing kind of moves along, right? Really, really. It's not just arrogant, it's actually destructive, right? And I use this term. Where has it gone? Oh, hang on a minute, There we are. This cultural genocide. It's actually what we're talking about here, right?

It's ethnicide. It refers to the deliberate and systematic destruction of a group's cultural religion and identity. That's what they're doing. Right. And it gets delivered in this kind of glib, air conditioned, well upholstered, metropolitan elitist fashion. But that's actually what's happening behind the scenes, right? What these people are up to. And let's have a quick look at the civil service. I'm completely blown the clock,

I'm afraid. So I don't know if we're still if we're still doing the castle prod, I'm probably going to get it. But it's definitely worth having a look at really kind of an All Star cast actually for this this session, which ran in the afternoon. So this is about the civil service of the future. You have the various perm sex secretaries. So I just flick on. We can see Ed Richards comes back. He's hosting the thing on the

left hand side there. We then have Gus O'Donnell, formerly known as God, who was the Cabinet secretary under Cameron, I believe it was for many years. And then Dame Tamara Finkelstein on the end there, who's just left Defra, where she was permanent permanent secretary. And then Susan Ackland Hood in the middle, who's the permanent secretary of the Department for Education. This is really interesting, actually. I've got to say, like kind of glimpse into what's going on in

the civil service. Gus O'Donnell was quite forthright. We're going to run a clip of him in a moment, but basically he said that we were at a stage where more, more than ever before, people want the government to do things but they don't trust the government. And I actually think that this is an issue. They they want stuff done, they're looking around and the government is the thing that's there. What they don't realise is actually we need to sort of

stuff out for ourselves. Government should have nothing to do with most of the issues that it's getting involved in. Ackland Hoods delivered a classic civil service line, which she said. The civil service is getting better, but the world is getting worse faster. It's not our fault. And then Finkelstein, she's concerned about change, actually, and this idea that maybe we they might be bringing political appointees in to run civil service departments like they do in the US.

And she was kind of terrified, actually, that someone like Farage might come in and start messing around with the top levels of the civil service. But Gus O'Donnell delivered some rather brutally honest thoughts about what change actually means when proposed by politicians. Let's have a listen. What does structural change mean in the context of that kind of challenge from the political leadership?

I, I would say I'd start by saying the prime ministers, when they'd say those sorts of things, have absolutely no idea the answer to that question. When they talk about rewiring the state, they, they honestly don't know what they mean. You know, they, it's OK. So you know, how, how do you want to do this? You know what, what are you

thinking about? Nothing so you you do need to realize that as a civil servant that and and this sometimes people forget it's an incredibly political job, right. You do have to understand the way in which politicians work for what matters to them and how to think about, you know, for example, on delivery, how to get them interested in delivery. You know, like, it's every Prime Minister I've ever worked with. He's like, oh, another foreign trip. Oh, this is good. They treat me really well.

The foreign press asked me proper questions about policy. That's great. And I've left behind all those fights about, Oh my God, the internal party fights, you know, so you can understand why they get really attracted to doing foreign policy and you have to drag them back to the domestic stuff. I just say I enjoyed that because he's clearly been out of office for quite some time because he was very honest about his interactions with prime ministers. You basically don't know

anything. Sounds about right. This is true. While that video was playing I was having a look at Auk column printed newspaper from 2011 where we were warning that the Cabinet Office was working with the French to implement political applied psychology to change the way people thought and behaved. And of course Gus O'Donnell was one of the key attendees in that 17th of December meeting. The meeting was actually December 2010, but UK column reported on it 2011.

Dangerous stuff. Absolutely. And so many of the same characters have just been there consistently through the piece. I'll just wrap up very quickly with what came up at the end of the day, this is very important. We're hearing a lot of talk over the past few days about digital ID schemes and the, the kind of the, the blockbuster one that's always held up is the, the Indian one.

And they, they had this guy, Doctor Praman Varma, who presented, he was the chief architect for the digital ID scheme in India. It's a huge programme. They've built the social credit system in their enormous country, 1.4 billion people, 22 languages, 12 religions and and they've transformed it through what they call formalisation, especially bringing people formally into the economy.

They've got a billion people into the economy that weren't recognised, like they didn't know who these people were at all. And then having brought in, obviously this is presented as a good thing. So they can now participate in the marketplace and be given lots of money through digital payments and government benefits and that kind of thing. But ultimately a lot of it is about what you can see on the right hand side there, taxation.

And now we know you, we can tax you and we can exert influence and power. Overview. It's a big part of it. They developed the whole technical architecture. It's been successful, it's been implemented. It's public private partnership. They're rolling out to the entire society essentially. And this is right at the top of the agenda for UK government. And they're certain they're looking at India to help them

implement this. So that was an important part of the day that I thought I'd just end on. Thank you very much for that Ben, and lots to talk about in UK Column extra. After today's news, let's just

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OK, Sandy, let's bring you back in and tell us a bit about this Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act. Yeah, I mean, I, this was flagged up to me. I, I didn't know anything about it really, because all this legislation goes through our, through our parliament and there's so much of it. How can you keep up? So, uh, a couple got in touch with me, their, their UK column.

Um, they, they follow UK column and they, they, they've got 2 businesses and they received a letter from their, from their, from, from Companies House. And it's, it's explaining the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act. And they were quite shocked because the letter from Companies House said Companies House are imposing a new legal requirement that all directors and PSCS, persons with significant control verify they aren't their identity.

This is being transitioned in grad in in in sort of a gradual way, starting with directors and companies directors are required to obtain a unique identifier known as Companies House

personal code. The Companies House personal code code will be used when setting up directors on companies company in corporations and adding directors to Companies House. Companies House also needs to gather the company's House personal code for all existing directorships, this being done via the company's confirmation statement. Confirmation statement confirms in part that the list of directors stored at Companies

House is correct. The company's House personal code for each director will be submitted with the confirmation statement and the requirement starts for all confirmation statements submitted on or after the 18th of November 2025. So this is really rolling out from November the 18th. We're willing to write to you as our main contact for the company so, so that you can provide us with the company's house personal code for all directors of the company.

Without the personal code, all directors will not be able to submit any confirmation statement on or after the 18th of November 2025. Now this, you know, they're saying that it's all for your benefit to stop fraud and, and, and, and, and all sorts of corruption, but actually it feeds right into the whole digital ID that we, we understand, you know the, the reasons behind that. And then he got a, a, a reply from his accountant because he

gave it to his accountant. And it says The Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act became law by passing through both the UK Parliament and the House of Lords, receiving Royal Assent from King on 26/20/23. This legislative process involved the government introducing the Bill, followed by extensive debate, review and amendments by Parliament for its final approvement and enactment into law.

More importantly, the position procedurally, as a result of the provisions of the Act is that over the next two years, any company that has any director who does not have a personal Companies House identity code will be automatically closed by Companies House. Currently, company directors therefore appear to have four choices. One, do nothing and let all the companies they are director of

be closed. 2 resign their directorships. 3, close the companies they they're a director of and trade as individuals, or 4, get their personal ID code and continue as normal. We will obviously support you as best we can, whatever you choose to do. So you know, he's between a rock and a hard place, This bloke, because he's saying I, I don't, I really don't agree to, to, to doing this, this ID verification.

He, he's quite rightly knows it's feeding into the whole, you know, digital ID, but he he's, he wants to carry on running his company. So it's be interesting to see if anybody else gets in touch in the same position. And what we really need is a mass non compliance of all this, obviously with everything to do with digital ID. Yeah, correct, Sandy. And yes, it's very, it's onerous the speed that this is coming in and it's going to affect any,

any and everybody in business. So it's time to stand up and challenge it. Ben, let's bring you back in.

And you've been looking at the creation of rage in society. Yeah, this is all we look at, isn't it? Yes. Rage bait. Take a deep breath everyone. We're under attack online. Tread carefully, Give it 24 hours, 48 hours. Find out what the full story is before you get too triggered by things like I did yesterday. There was this video going around and I should say we're going to run it, but it's been edited and that's important, which I'll come back to.

But let's have a little look at this video over supposedly a police visit in the West Midlands sometime in the past few days. OK, what were you? What was it? Sorry, I I don't like the camera. You have a body Cam. I could exhibit that to you. I just don't like the camera. Really. OK, well, I'm doing this because this is my own house and I am telling you why I'm. So I just need to know why. Why? Why would she? She's basically viewed a post which is not a an arrestable offence.

Yeah, OK. Happened in May and you'll be fine. The only thing is, yeah, we need to seize the phone at this current moment. Yeah, the phone needs to get seized from us, otherwise we will escalate this fibre. So. But with a voluntary. So have you seized anyone else? Is she the only child you're picking on? Have you spoken to anyone else? No, We'll, we'll come to the station now. Do you mind letting her finish her sentence before? Yeah, have to get further

escalation, unfortunately. That's fine. We'll come to the snow show now. The phone isn't seized right now and we're not able to basically get the phone. We'd have to escalate this further, which means your daughter will get arrested for what are you in the social media post? Is that I need to go with that in order to No, absolutely not. Shall we do to prevent description of evidence? I'm sorry. That's fine. I would like you to leave now. I'd like you to leave. OK.

I have nothing more to say to you. A social media post. I've got nothing more to say. I'd like you to leave. You've harassed this child enough. I'd like you to leave. That's no worries. How do you feel, Brian? Well, I can imagine that most the triggering thinking people would would be, would be incensed by that. And what's actually happening. The look of the two police women, they're not dressed properly. They are apparently chasing a child.

They're trying to demand a phone, They're invading somebody's house. There's a lot. There's a lot of components. So viewing a social media post and I particularly like the bit right at the start where she says I don't like having the camera on me, even though they both stood there with cameras on right. So that's that's got that's done the rounds on Twitter. A lot of people getting very annoyed about that actually. But it's not all is not as it seems because it was heavily

edited. And actually all credit, I must say, to Alex from Thinking Coalition regular guest on the UK column, who pointed out that this is all a bit odd. Really, isn't it kind of odd watching everyone filming at the mouth about this clip, which is the 100% predictable reaction, that nobody seems to wonder why it's heavily edited, which it was, and what it's all about, giving that viewing things online isn't an offence. This seems to be a narrative play. Free speech has become the

battleground issue. That's what Tommy Robinson's March was about last week, for example. And then lo and behold, within an hour or two, apparently it's so. Predictably the heavily edited viral clip for two police officers asking for access to a mobile phone is completely misleading. W Midlands Police come out and say we've seen reports that we're investigating a child for viewing a social media post.

This is completely false. We're investigating the creation of a fake social media account which has been used to send indecent images and apparently what we were looking at there is an edit down from 10 minutes. Now I don't think for a second that all of it was was was was perfect and the tone of the

interaction was not good. But actually, all I'm saying is, and this is a note to self as much as anyone else is, just take a deep breath and wait and see how things develop before getting too wound up, because it's entirely possible that was put there. I pick nefarious actors, shall we say, in order to get a reaction. So yeah. Yeah, we all need to be aware of this. Yes, Sandy, let's just bring you

back because very quickly you had a little bit of an update on digitalization in the NHS. Yes, I mean it's, it's just an update really, because last week I, I, I spoke about how NHS improvement NHS digital NHS, what's the other One X They've they've all amalgamated to bring in this predictive, preventative, personalized and participatory medicine.

So, you know, at its core, it's all working around genetics and disease and reaching into the DNA of every, every person, but also gathering the data of your fitness and everything else that goes with it. Now what they've, they've done recently is they've, they've employed the, the help from companies like Anima and Anima. It's a digital triage and workflow management platform that's been rolled about across the GP practices in the UK. And its function is to

streamline how patient requests are received, prioritised and, and managed. So they will be collecting all your data for your GP surgery. Now Anima, I own a huge company, a huge corporation. It was founded in 2021 by Shanika Sharma, ex McKinsey and Sean Pang, ex Palantir Engineer. So that you know, we know what they're, what they're up to. But why I'm coming back to this is that one of our our viewers went into her local GP service to register.

She's going through some health problems and she went to just register with her GP as normal and they wouldn't let her. They said you have to do it through Anima. And she, she said, well, I don't know who anima are. And she did a quick search I think and had a look and she said, no, why would I, Why would I share my personal data with a third party? I, I share my, my data with my GP And she refused. And it caused a big stir in the,

in the, in the, in the surgery. And they, they, they eventually they were arguing with her for quite a long time and eventually they gave up and they allowed her to. To do her own registration through the GP surgery. So this is a lesson to all of us to if we don't want to go along with all this nonsense, we can refuse. Just say no. Sandy Brilliant. That's absolutely right. And if more people did that,

that would be excellent. People can also make a difference by supporting people who are doing the right thing. And both the lady and the gentleman that spoke out in the House of Lords against the Assisted Dying Bill, they need your support. They need our support because if they're heading down the right path, knowing that large numbers of people are supporting, what are they doing is going to increase their confidence and they're going to do more and

bring more people on board. So if you're thinking what can I do, two options there. One is say no when you get the opportunity and the other one is to support people who are doing the right thing. Now we did promise with a little bit of uplifting black humour we would end on having a little look at BBC Shorts. This is just one that caught my eye. Let's have a look at the BBC giving the public serious information.

I went to San Francisco, Silicon Valley and I, I shadowed this incredible founder and just spent all day sort of walking around in his meetings, his hands on. And it was fascinating how quick decisions are made and actioned. And you know, what impact that's going to have in tech. You know, it's, it's quite profound. And so it was really interesting. Whitney is a legendary entrepreneur. She truly helped completely change the world of dating apps.

Knowing what you know now about them behind the scenes, do you see them as a force for good or the opposite or in in the middle? Well, I see them as a my brother met his wife on a dating app. So so I'll be forever grateful for my sister-in-law, Stacy. And also what Winnie did was so key because she re engineered these dating apps to put women in the driver's seat, you know, empower and protect women. So you know that is a definitely a force for good.

Well, there we are. I don't know what our audience thinks of this, but of course this is dross to be pumped into the heads of youngsters, young teenagers. I think it relates to an article which the BBC posted back in 2023. Whitney Wolf heard how the Bumble boss changed the dating scene, and apparently this has changed the dating scene to make it much better for women.

Interestingly enough, if you look at information on the dating scene online, particularly in the States, women are having more and more more difficulty finding a male partner because the men are showing away from the dating apps and the dating scenes because of the way the women are behaving and looking for a male partner.

And I think it'll be very interesting to get into what's actually happening between men and women in more detail in forthcoming not only UK column news, but some of our interviews because it's a very hot topic. But there we are, a giggly end to the news provided by the BBC. Ben, thank you very much for joining me. Sandy, huge thank you. And thank you for that very concise update on the dangers of the assisted dying. Bill. Thank you to everybody who's joined us today.

We must end there. If you're a member of UK column, join us for UK column extra shortly. See you then. Bye bye.