Transcript

The Watchman · UK Column Radio

0:07
We need to set the scene as to why we're here, of course, don't
0:11
we? Well.
0:11
Mike Mike's working in the studio and we haven't got Studio
0:14
2 set up yet. That's why we're here.
0:16
We are. So we are here on the edge of
0:19
Dartmoor, in case you're wondering about the clothes
0:22
since June and it's pretty cold and it was raining heavily here
0:28
in Plymouth, Devon. So we're we're dressed for the
0:32
winter again. It's a very British summer's
0:36
day, isn't it? So where where exactly are we
0:40
then? You said Dartmoor, but like,
0:41
what's? What's this locale?
0:43
Like what? Well, we're on, we're on the
0:45
southern edge of of Dartmoor, the very southern edge.
0:51
We've just come up from Plymouth, past what used to be
0:54
Rowborough, the old. In its day it was one of the
0:58
World War 2 airports and this road takes us up to Yelverton,
1:05
which is the first major town on the Moor, which is it's about
1:09
Yelverton's about 5 miles north. Right.
1:12
If the weather's nice and it's clear then you get a fantastic
1:17
view back over Plymouth but also southwest into into Cornwall.
1:23
So it's it's a pretty lovely spot just on the edge of the
1:27
Moor. And Plymouth's quite isolated in
1:31
that real regard, isn't it, because you've got more land to
1:35
the north of it? And then, and then how far does
1:39
this run run on this expanse here, Dartmoor?
1:44
Well, it's all to the all to the north of us.
1:46
So you're, you're right. Plymouth is trapped against the
1:49
sea on the Sotherly side, the Tamar River to the West and then
1:55
Dartmoor to the north. Dartmoor is, you can call it a
2:00
circle, more or less. That's about 30 miles across.
2:04
Right, OK. Circular area of of park.
2:08
Now it's a very good National Park.
2:11
Yeah, beautiful, isn't it? And you, you, you are from this
2:18
area, right? Plymouth Dartmoor.
2:21
This is where you grew. Up not, not quite.
2:24
I actually grew up in Gloucestershire.
2:27
I went went to school at a place called Thornberry, which is
2:32
about 8 miles north of Bristol. That's where I went to school.
2:37
But it was when I joined the Navy initially I moved down here
2:40
because I was at, at Dartmouth Naval College and then for my
2:45
whole naval career we've we've been here since then.
2:49
So I'm allowed to have been in the area about 40 years now.
2:53
OK. Don't quote me on that though.
2:58
You've been naturalised. Indeed.
3:00
Yeah, yeah. You've been integrated.
3:02
And it is a lovely place. It is, yeah.
3:05
It's fantastic, Fantastic city. Yeah.
3:08
And I'm getting to know a little bit more of the surrounding
3:12
areas. But yeah, spending a bit too
3:16
much time in front of the laptop at the minute, unfortunately.
3:18
So hopefully we'll have to change that.
3:20
We all do. Yeah, right, exactly, exactly.
3:24
So we're going to talk a bit about the where the UK columns
3:30
started and, and how it's developed over the years.
3:36
And what is quite well established, I think is that you
3:40
were in the Navy for many years and then when you left the Navy,
3:44
you came back to Plymouth. But it'd be great to just
3:46
understand a bit about what you were doing in the Navy 1st and
3:48
then maybe how that LED into what you've been doing.
3:53
Because there's, there's, I'd imagine there's some parallels
3:55
between your earlier career and then what you've done since.
4:00
Well, I've certainly used some of what I learnt in the in the
4:02
Navy, Yeah, naval career was I went to the Naval College at
4:08
Dartmouth, that's for officer training.
4:13
And so I did all of the basic training.
4:18
Once you've done your basic training, you go out and join
4:22
one of the ships of frigate, normally where you are a
4:27
trainee. Watch keeper, bridge watch
4:31
keeper and you essentially work in the initial part of your
4:36
career in order to get your bridge watch keeping ticket.
4:39
So you're, you're learning your trade in navigation, but you
4:45
also have to get a qualification in the Navy in order to be a
4:49
bridge watch keeper and hold watches on your own.
4:53
This is this is the key thing. So I did that initially.
4:56
Then I I went from that to being involved in the mine warfare
5:04
side of the Navy, which are all much smaller ships.
5:07
And I was a navigator of one of those.
5:09
And then I was a squadron navigator.
5:12
And then I was at the age where they start pulling you into the
5:17
warfare training. And actually I just started the
5:21
warfare course when the Falklands War started and very
5:27
quickly they needed more people at sea.
5:31
So I did not finish the full warfare course.
5:35
I was pulled off to join a ship, a frigate, which then went S to
5:39
the Falklands. I have.
5:42
You left the course and you just went into the straight into the
5:44
warfare. Well, I didn't do that because
5:50
the Armistice was signed two days before we actually arrived
5:54
down, right? So I have to be grateful for
5:57
that because people died down there.
5:59
But on the other hand, it was a bit tough getting down and
6:03
hearing all the stories from everybody else and you were just
6:06
there to do a patrol for six months with nothing happening
6:10
very much. But when I came back, the most
6:14
interesting part of my career started and that was I
6:18
specialised in anti submarine warfare.
6:22
And I have to say I was not a submariner, I was a surface ship
6:25
man. But we, we, we took out what was
6:28
then a very new sonar system and our job was to find the Russian
6:33
submarines that you hear so much about in the, in the press and
6:37
media in the present times. OK.
6:40
And and this. Is height of the Cold War
6:42
basically? This was height of the Cold War,
6:44
Yeah. But what was I found really good
6:47
about what we were doing Instead of going out on a NATO exercise,
6:52
when we went to see, we were always doing the real job.
6:56
And it was us looking for the Russian submarines and finding
7:00
them and tracking them. And even if an exercise was
7:05
going on, you still had the real job to do it it.
7:08
It was fascinating and and in as much as you say warfare is
7:14
enjoyable, but it was a enjoyable job at sea.
7:17
Yes. And very technically
7:19
sophisticated, right, Because you're dealing with basically
7:22
the most advanced technologies of the time, I would imagine.
7:26
Out of the time and this is I'm talking about passive sonar.
7:32
So this is this is towing a a mile long listening device
7:37
behind the ship and, and essentially analysing all of the
7:41
acoustic frequencies in order to just, you know, detect Russian
7:45
submarines. Same systems are still used
7:47
today. But of course the signal
7:50
processing is so much better. I suspect the the phone which is
7:55
recording us how does has as much processing power as sort of
8:00
three fridges stood together which would have been the size
8:04
of the equipment that did the processing in my day.
8:08
Yeah, with that question, yeah. Absolutely.
8:10
Yeah, I remember going to visit my dad in his office.
8:15
He used to work in the Pharmaceutical industry back in
8:17
the mid 80s. And they had these
8:20
supercomputers in a separate room.
8:24
Yeah, with sort of these dials and reel to reel things playing.
8:29
Around, yeah. It's a completely different
8:31
world, you know, and. It's now been taken over by one
8:34
chip. I know it's incredible, isn't
8:36
it? And you know, kids are walking
8:37
around with them in their pockets.
8:38
It's unbelievable. You use the word right at the
8:42
start there, which I think is very informative actually, of
8:49
what's happened subsequently. And it was the watchman.
8:54
You were keeping watch. Yes.
8:56
And is that something that you were particularly suited to or
9:01
does everybody do that when they get in the Navy?
9:03
Like how does that? Well, one branch because you
9:08
you've got different specialist branches.
9:10
So you could have gone into, you could have gone into naval
9:13
aircrew. You could be an engineering
9:16
officer or a supply officer. Yeah, logistics officer.
9:21
If if you go through the sea seaman branch, then you are
9:25
you're going to be watch keeping and navigating and then you go
9:28
onto the navigate onto the warfare side.
9:33
But but Even so, standing watch at sea is something that is a
9:39
fascinating job. And the other bit of course that
9:42
goes with it. It's not only to do with the
9:44
ship and the organisation of the ship.
9:46
It's to do with what the weather's like.
9:49
And it's absolutely true that a powerful storm at sea changes
9:55
your whole perspective of the world because you realise how
9:59
insignificant you are. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.
10:02
But a lot, a lot of happy memories actually out of that.
10:07
I'm sure, yeah. And that's, and it's a big
10:09
responsibility as well, right? The idea because you're keeping
10:12
watch for. For the whole ship, right, For
10:14
the whole ship. And it is a big responsibility,
10:19
and it's pretty tragic when people get it wrong because,
10:23
yeah, collisions often do a lot of damage and very often they
10:27
injure people. So, yeah.
10:30
And we could have a whole discussion about that.
10:32
Because I would say that one of the things that Mariners are
10:37
facing at the moment is that is that the link between people and
10:43
the sea and the elements is reducing and people are a lot
10:48
more dependent on digital systems in order to navigate and
10:54
collision avoidance. Yes.
10:56
And they've lost the intuition. It was there previously when
11:01
people were doing it by it was, it was, you know, it was a cross
11:07
between professional skill and how do you describe it?
11:13
Gut. Instinct.
11:14
Gut instinct. Yeah, yeah.
11:15
Your intuition. Yeah, yes, that's really
11:18
interesting because I noticed the similar thing when my my
11:25
girlfriend at the time, her younger sister started driving.
11:29
This was 20 years ago now. And and these Tom Toms had just
11:33
started, the GPS systems had just appeared.
11:37
And you realise that people, the, the, the, this young woman
11:43
in particular, this is not just constrained to her or young
11:47
women either, right? I think this is true with a lot,
11:50
a lot of people is that they, she didn't actually know where
11:52
she was. She was just looking at the
11:55
thing and waiting for that to tell her where to go.
11:58
And there was never a moment where she was developing an
12:03
understanding of the landscape that she was navigating.
12:07
It was all being delivered through this little screen.
12:10
And this, this same thing, this is a big problem, a big problem
12:14
at sea, not only in merchant navies, but also in the military
12:18
as well, because people are getting too drawn into these,
12:23
you know, systems and navigating is what the computer screen
12:27
tells you. But actually now navigating is
12:32
not only knowing where you are, the most important thing is
12:35
knowing where you will be in 15 minutes time, 20 minutes time.
12:41
And, and the the if if you look on YouTube, there's some really
12:46
interesting video, some of them pretty tragic, where in
12:50
particular people in very big yachts have ended up in really
12:54
dire situations. And the more they talk about
12:58
their stories, the more you say to yourself, yeah, that's
13:01
because you were too busy playing around with the SAP
13:04
satellite NAV system. You weren't actually looking out
13:08
with a feel for where you. Were yes, yes and and and the
13:12
technology was governing you. You weren't using the
13:16
technologies at all. Correct.
13:18
To elevate your own skill set, essentially.
13:22
You see that everywhere. There's another bit that goes
13:25
with it, and that is that although it's catching up
13:29
overwhelmingly anytime you see information depicting a marine
13:35
chart. So if it's a digital picture of
13:40
the English Channel or the North Sea or the Pacific, that digital
13:46
picture has overwhelmingly been compiled from the original paper
13:50
charts which were put together by people using a sextant to
13:57
locate the geographical position and using some form of sounding
14:02
line to tell you what the depth of the water is.
14:05
And people have a mistaken belief that because it's a they
14:09
now see a digital picture. This picture is incredibly
14:12
accurate. But in fact, a lot of the places
14:16
in the world, it's still certainly true, we'll say around
14:21
some areas of New Zealand, the information you see on your 2025
14:26
digital screen was actually put together in, you know, the 1820s
14:32
or the 1830s. And and so it's only as accurate
14:38
as the work they did then, not what you see on the screen.
14:42
And there are warnings about this, but of course, nobody pays
14:44
attention to the war. They just follow the SAT NAV,
14:48
the SAT NAV told me and off they go.
14:51
Right. Isn't that incredible?
14:53
Yeah. And you were based out of
14:56
Plymouth that entire time. Were you at sea quite a bit or?
14:59
Were you? No, I, I spent some time at
15:02
Portsmouth. I spent a lot of time up in
15:04
Rosyth in Scotland. Yeah, because that's where all
15:06
the mine Wharf, most of the mine warfare ships were based.
15:11
Well, Portsmouth and Rosyth. And then when I started the
15:15
Todoray work, that's when I came to, that's when it came to
15:18
Plymouth. The what works.
15:20
Alright, Toad array. That's the Toad sonar system.
15:23
Right, OK. Bit of jargon for you.
15:26
Yes, very good. Yeah.
15:30
OK. And then and then that was you
15:33
until when when you said 2021 years was.
15:36
It Yeah. So I left in 93.
15:38
What? OK.
15:39
It's a real struggle to talk about this, Ben, because it you
15:43
say where did that time go? Where did the time go from 1993
15:48
to 2025? Yeah.
15:51
Well, where did it go? What have you been doing?
15:53
Well, something captured my life and and I've been battling ever
15:57
since. But I will say my life has been
16:00
interesting and fun with some ups and downs in it.
16:04
But yeah, out of the Navy. What?
16:06
Was your plan when you left? Well, just, yeah, my plan was to
16:11
follow one of the reasons that I left, which is that you spend a
16:14
lot of time away from your family.
16:16
And I'd got to the point where I thought 21 years was enough.
16:21
And if you want to go climbing the promotion ladder, actually
16:26
you, you then get less and less time with your family.
16:30
And so I didn't want to be doing a job with the Ministry of
16:33
Defence in London and coming home every weekend.
16:36
That seemed to me and so I'd left for more time with my
16:40
family and also more time to enjoy life.
16:43
And so I just wanted to achieve a job that I enjoyed and to
16:48
start having some proper, you know, I didn't.
16:53
Well, if I say quality of life, there was quality of life in the
16:56
military, but it, it is different.
16:58
I wanted some normal life and so I just tried my best to get
17:04
established in the civilian world and I did that quite
17:08
happily and until I discovered stuff in Plymouth which was
17:13
clearly fraud and corruption, right, so and so.
17:18
Describe that then, like what? What was it that you were
17:20
beginning to see? I, I it all of it centred around
17:26
grant money that Plymouth City Council and indeed city councils
17:31
across UK, they were all beginning to feed not only off
17:38
central government grant money, they were also feeding off
17:43
European regeneration money. And so Plymouth, like many other
17:50
cities made applications for millions of European money.
17:55
And what I discovered is that much of that money was being
17:59
used fraudulently. The the, the funding package was
18:03
being broken up into small financial packages that were
18:07
then effectively disappearing. And when I felt I had enough
18:13
knowledge to talk on it, I thought mistakenly it would be
18:17
good to talk to the Chamber of Commerce.
18:20
I felt this because it was public money overwhelmingly, and
18:24
I thought therefore private businesses in the Chamber of
18:27
Commerce would be interested, but literally it was the
18:31
opposite. And what I came to realise was
18:34
of course many of the companies, people were actually feeding off
18:41
this money themselves. And so I became really unpopular
18:45
really quickly. Really unpopular.
18:47
And and and where were you seeing this grant?
18:50
Like what were you actually seeing that was drawing your
18:52
attention to this in the first instance?
18:54
Well, I, I was working in a project management building
18:58
surveying, well, project management building surveying
19:02
company. And we've been able to build up
19:06
some links with the work that was going on to do with
19:09
regeneration in the Devonport area of Plymouth.
19:13
And that's the largely historic area around the old naval base.
19:18
And it also brought me in contact with the community,
19:23
people themselves. And I just, I started to be able
19:29
to see some of the regeneration plans and I started to
19:34
understand how this funding stream worked.
19:37
But when you started to ask where were the accounts, it all
19:40
got pretty woolly pretty quickly.
19:44
And I think the other bit I would add is that there was some
19:48
major central government changes at the time where they brought
19:52
in the government offices of the region.
19:55
So we had the government office of the southwest, we had the
19:59
southwest of England regional development agencies.
20:03
And I, I I'll sit here and say my view.
20:08
They were corrupt before they started.
20:12
Right. I mean, it's why they were they,
20:13
why they were established essentially.
20:15
Well, you could look back and say instead of regenerating and
20:20
and building things in a positive way, actually they
20:24
destroyed things. They certainly destroyed a lot
20:27
of historic infrastructure and and this, this of course was
20:32
where you started to see the what was called the regeneration
20:37
of inner cities that has resulted in our cities all
20:41
looking the same. They've all got the same
20:43
pedestrianised centres with block Pavia roads and no
20:50
pavements, the same black bins, the same benches.
20:54
Yes, ugly flats. Ugly flats, yeah.
20:58
Inexplicable designs to buildings.
21:00
Yeah, right. And so this is late 90s getting
21:04
into the early 2000s. Yes, absolutely, yeah.
21:07
Yeah. So this is basically Blair 1/2,
21:11
right? Those those 2 terms.
21:13
And I, I have a, a story, it's a true story about Blair coming to
21:17
Plymouth. And he had a meeting with
21:19
Plymouth City Council. A local journalist who'd
21:23
attended the meeting, who I was very friendly with, called me at
21:27
about 4:00 one afternoon, say he'd been in the meeting.
21:31
And he said, Brian, they were discussing things I found scary.
21:35
They were using military language about the city in the
21:39
future having zones and what what class of people would be
21:45
living in which zone. And the waterfront area was all
21:50
going to go to the better class of people.
21:52
And, and yeah, other communities would would have much higher
21:56
density development in other parts of the city.
22:00
And he actually used the word scary.
22:02
I found it very scary and when the then chief executive said to
22:07
Tony Blair that Plymouth City Council were having some
22:10
problems in persuading some of the communities to adopt the
22:15
regeneration strategy, Tony Blair turned to the chief
22:19
executive and said you've been given special powers and you
22:23
should use them. And what he was referring to was
22:26
the recently, the then recently enacted Communities Bill, I
22:34
can't remember the exact name of it, but this is where you saw
22:37
that this was central government policy through the through the
22:42
Blair government being enacted out on the ground by what was
22:48
then a labour control council. Fascinating and creating and
22:54
embedding a class structure into.
22:56
Absolutely. The city, right, Coming from a
22:59
Labour Prime Minister. I mean, obviously now in
23:01
hindsight people would look at Blair and say this man was not
23:03
really working for the working classes or, you know, by any
23:06
stretch of the imagination. But to hear it that explicitly,
23:12
even even today, is quite amazing.
23:14
Well, and the the other bit that I particularly saw because I was
23:18
interested in helping this Devonport community, this in
23:24
it's heyday, it was such a special area because every trade
23:28
and skill base associated with the dockyard was there.
23:31
So you, you had ship rights, you had metallurgists, you had
23:35
lagers, you had any job in this huge dockyard complex.
23:42
The people live locally and that skill base had been in the
23:46
families for generations. Right.
23:49
Because. This is the central, this is the
23:52
centre of shipbuilding for the British Navy, yes.
23:54
Yes, in it's day, yeah. Right.
23:56
And so I've, I've been exploring this a little bit recently.
24:00
And for me, this is almost like the Silicon Valley of its era.
24:05
Right, this is true. Because this is the most the
24:08
ships were the most advanced technology that we had in our
24:11
civilization and and, and Britain was the dominant global
24:16
empire of the time with the most advanced technology.
24:19
So it's it's reasonable to say that this was the most
24:23
technologically sophisticated place on Earth for probably a
24:27
couple of centuries. It's.
24:28
It's not, it's not far off that, yeah, due due to the all of the
24:33
industry and the skill base around we're we're talking late
24:38
1700s into the well, in fact, it went from the from the 1700s and
24:45
the square rigged warships right the way through to probably the
24:51
late 50's. The late 50s is when decline
24:55
started. But but all through that time,
24:59
yeah, Plymouth was a was a very special place.
25:02
And you say decline, deliberate decline, manage decline.
25:09
Initially, I would say an inevitable decline because of
25:13
course, by the time the Second World War was happening or had
25:20
just finished, we, we ended up with a vast Navy, far too many
25:26
naval vessels that we could use and support and fund in the
25:30
future. So at the end of the Second
25:32
World War, I mean, it's a story my father tells me because he
25:36
was involved in the dockyard in his life.
25:40
Was that basically at one point at the end of the war, there
25:45
were so many ships in the harbour at Plymouth, you could
25:48
almost walk from one side to the other on ships and of course
25:52
they had to go. So immediately after the war
25:57
they, the Navy was cut and a lot of ships and, and men went and
26:02
then infrastructure went. And then increasingly these
26:06
defence reviews came up where they said there's not enough
26:09
money for us to have military forces of this side so size.
26:13
So everything was cut, the Air Force, the Army and the Navy.
26:18
And by the time you got into the, I suppose by the time you
26:22
got into the 70s, which is when I joined 72 people were already
26:30
getting very worried about ongoing cuts.
26:33
I'll, I'll stick with the Navy because I know the Navy cuts in
26:37
the Navy that people said we, we can't, we can't sort of
26:41
guarantee a defence if these cuts continue.
26:45
But of course they did continue. I think there was a reason for
26:49
that. Right.
26:51
And now we're in a situation where we've got more, more
26:53
Admirals than ships, very famously.
26:55
Yes, I know. Yes.
26:57
She's ludicrous. It's incredible, isn't it?
26:59
Yeah. Right.
27:01
And this is all. All of these things are
27:03
interlink with each other ultimately, I think it's fair to
27:06
say. It's, it seems to me when when
27:09
you're living it, you can't put all the pieces back.
27:11
But particularly when you can look back.
27:14
There's a lot of hindsight. And to me, a lot of the cuts I
27:19
am sure were because they were already planning one unified
27:24
European Union military system and therefore they wanted parity
27:30
between the respective military forces.
27:33
Because actually you will this, this, this, this parallels
27:36
perfectly with European economic integration in the Common market
27:42
and then political integration through the 80s and the 90s and
27:45
then through to, well, when we, we spoilt everything by deciding
27:50
to leave, you know, But you know, the actual block itself is
27:54
constantly pushing towards greater integration.
27:57
Yeah, and and military UK columns always called it
28:01
military unification. So yes.
28:03
But don't forget it's Brexit without the exit.
28:05
There was never any Brexit. No, that's fair to say.
28:10
And they're trying to drag us straight back in again now.
28:13
Anyway, we're getting slightly ahead of ourselves.
28:15
So we're in the early 2000s and cities around the UK are being
28:24
regenerated. Slash.
28:26
Destroyed and I was in Nottingham at the time and I
28:28
remember the, the, the old lace market buildings getting pulled
28:35
down and these new things going up.
28:36
And you know, everything's a shopping centre now.
28:39
And you know, the, and actually the, the damage that was done.
28:43
You can still see when you walk around the centre of with our
28:46
cities, you know what was done by by those regeneration
28:49
programmes. So you decide to start reporting
28:55
on this in some fashion. Like, was it was was it always
28:59
your idea or your ambition to have a newspaper?
29:04
No, absolutely not. It was.
29:08
I have to use the we word straight away because there was
29:13
a little group of us who had been active in getting involved
29:19
with the Devonport community. So there was myself, there was
29:22
another retired Navy guy a bit younger than me.
29:26
There was a wonderful guy who ran a little printing shop.
29:30
And there was some of the community people.
29:32
And the more we discovered the corruption, the more we felt we
29:37
should do something about it. And I can't remember where there
29:43
was somebody else. There was definitely three of us
29:45
in a car. We, we had a car journey and we
29:47
were talking about this and I think it was the man from the
29:52
print shop who said I think we should produce a, a little
29:57
leaflet and push it out there and see what happens.
30:01
And he actually then of his own accord drafted 1.
30:08
And we looked at it and thought it was so excellent.
30:10
We said yeah, let's do it. And that was the first of 500
30:14
copies went out of what we call then the Devonport column.
30:18
And we, we, we just, it was a bit Private Eye ish because we
30:22
tried to keep it humorous. But we were talking about stuff
30:26
going on, fraud and corruption and dodgy deals.
30:30
And we pushed them, pushed 500 copies out for three months with
30:36
not a lot happening. And then suddenly it was like
30:39
these things must have spread a bit and people, I will either
30:43
would speak to us personally or they'd phone us and tell us more
30:49
stuff. And so we took the bold step of
30:53
going from an A4 sheet to a an A3 sheet.
30:57
So we got 4 pages of fine information and we, you know, we
31:04
as seriously as we could because factually we had to be accurate
31:07
because we were stepping on some big toes.
31:09
We started to report what was happening and shortly after that
31:15
I, we had a website set up which was the Devon Port column
31:21
website. And then I started to be
31:23
contacted by other people around the country who, who recognise
31:27
the problems we were talking about.
31:29
And so that man from Sheffield got in touch and he said
31:33
everything you were describing in Plymouth is happening in
31:36
Sheffield. And then somebody in Liverpool,
31:39
somebody in Glasgow, Newcastle, London, and then we realised
31:43
that what we were seeing wasn't just a Plymouth problem, it was
31:47
bigger. Right.
31:49
So that that's essentially how we got started and and.
31:54
Were you selling these leaflets or?
31:57
No, we were handing them out but saying if you want to give us a
32:01
donation that would be nice. And I watched the Light
32:07
newspaper with interest now because I'm, I'm really pleased
32:11
it's there. It's lovely to see all the good
32:13
work they're doing. But back in our day that's what
32:16
the UK column was doing. So the leaflet eventually got
32:22
into a proper size newspaper and we decided to call it UK column
32:28
to give it some wider. How do you describe it?
32:34
Scope. Scope.
32:35
Yeah, yeah. But how many of the how many of
32:37
the Devonport ones did you do? And then how long did that
32:40
process take of, of, of it of, of the the dots being connected
32:44
between the different cities? Oh, I, I, no, I, I reckon, I
32:49
reckon nine months. Oh wow.
32:52
OK, yeah, Short, short time. This is something that really
32:55
surprised me when when suddenly people are contacting me and you
33:00
then learnt that somebody in Plymouth had sent their little
33:04
Devonport column to a brother or a sister in South Wales.
33:09
Yeah. And yeah.
33:11
So it was very interesting. It seemed to spread pretty
33:13
quickly. Right.
33:15
And then and then you became the UK column.
33:17
So it was, it was a Devonport national interest and then you
33:22
become the UK column and around the same time that the website
33:25
goes live is it that's. Yeah.
33:27
And the other thing was that we had, we had some very generous
33:32
people who, one man, a great guy, did a lot of work for us.
33:38
Unfortunately, he's no longer with us.
33:41
I mean that. And he died, which was very sad,
33:44
but he paid for us to have a little office, tiny, tiny
33:48
office. And we were given chairs and
33:51
tables and computers and things. And so we set ourselves up
33:56
there. And then eventually it was a
34:00
little group of retired people, retired professional people.
34:03
So, you know, they were comfortably off and several of
34:07
them made some quite generous donations, few 1000 lbs.
34:12
And this helped us get to the point where we thought we'd try
34:17
and print a newspaper properly. And then once we did that on a
34:22
donation basis, we were able to fund it for several years.
34:27
OK, So that that's how the UK column started and the newspaper
34:32
got going and that's when Mike came and joined the team.
34:37
And that was a major boost because Mike was very clever at
34:40
lots of things. Indeed he is.
34:43
And, and so the UK column expanded and in the time we
34:48
published it, we, we didn't quite make a million copies, but
34:52
we were up at about 940,000 per total.
34:59
Total, total total. Yeah.
35:01
So, you know, we did try and do one a month and sometimes we
35:06
couldn't and it was a bit intermittent, but I can't even
35:11
remember how many years that. So that was probably over about
35:15
five years, that number of copies.
35:17
OK, so, so you're doing, so you're doing 3040 thousand
35:23
copies per addition then. Yeah, Right.
35:25
OK, this is, I mean, that's actually, that's probably about
35:29
the same as the Guardians doing today, to be honest with you.
35:31
You know they they don't. Seem that many copies monthly as
35:35
not damage, of course, Yeah, sure, yeah.
35:37
But it was pretty incredible. It seemed we touched a note and
35:41
people got in touch with us and then of course stories came in
35:45
and and information and and the thing began to grow.
35:49
And how did the editorial process expanded during that
35:54
time? Is it quite, quite organic
35:55
because you start off with a very specific slice of
36:00
corruption that you're seeing around these regeneration
36:02
programmes, but then when you start to pull on the thread of
36:05
these things and you know, it all just expands out.
36:07
Was it just, were you just following where the story?
36:10
Was following our noses. And of course, the other thing
36:12
is all of us were researching to try and understand what we could
36:15
see happening. And then I'd I'd say it's true
36:19
that when Mike came on board, Mike had got a lot of interest,
36:23
but he still has in the geopolitical stuff.
36:26
And so that was a natural expansion.
36:30
And we did a lot of work with people who were particularly
36:33
concerned about what they saw as a major attack on the
36:37
constitution. And we were, well, we helped set
36:41
up a group called the British Constitution Group, which did a
36:45
lot of public talks about the Constitution and our law, our
36:49
system of law and common law. And then each time you did one
36:53
of those events or we gave public talks, people just pumped
36:58
us full of information about another subject.
37:00
So it was all an organic sort of growth.
37:03
Yeah. Yeah.
37:06
And what, what else was going on around in this space at the
37:12
time? Was there anyone else doing
37:13
reporting because you've mentioned the light?
37:15
The lights come along more recently.
37:17
Yeah, much more recently to give them credit.
37:22
And we should give them credit. As we began to research, of
37:26
course, what we came across is, is quite a lot of older or quite
37:32
elderly people who'd actually been producing pamphlets and
37:36
writing and even giving talks warning about what was starting
37:41
to happen in the country. And a lot of those interfaced
37:46
with us, and some of the better ones did some really good talks
37:50
for us or wrote articles. And then then the sort of social
37:59
scene sort of started very slowly with one or two
38:03
individuals who got a name for themselves.
38:06
There was a very interesting young guy called John Harris who
38:11
suddenly called me one day. He wouldn't want me saying this,
38:16
so no disrespect, but you know, he was quite happy that he'd
38:20
been a well, he wasn't happy because he'd changed, but he'd
38:23
be happy if I said, well, of course he was a football
38:25
hooligan in his early days. But he then got interested in
38:30
what the police were up to and that had led him to look at the
38:33
law and he'd started to research how the law in this country
38:38
worked and in particular definitions of the law.
38:42
So here was this ex football hooligan who started to know
38:49
incredible things because he'd taken the trouble to study
38:53
Black's Law Dictionary, which is a big fat book and.
38:58
Law Fair. And what words meant and the
39:01
fact that when people are in court, they think they
39:05
understand words that are being used around them.
39:07
But Black's Law Dictionary proved that there was a
39:10
completely different meaning to the word.
39:13
So people like him came along. And the other thing that came
39:16
along were people who were distressed because they'd been
39:20
bullied by the system. They might have lost their house
39:25
due to a regeneration programme, or they'd been harassed by the
39:29
police, or they'd challenged their local council and then
39:32
there'd been a backlash. So, so a lot of people who who
39:37
were hurting came to us with their stories and they were
39:41
invariably campaigners in their own right.
39:45
So yeah. So it it, it has been a pretty
39:49
interesting 30 years really. I'm sure you've seen it all
39:54
World amazing in that time. Can't say all but quite a lot.
39:59
I think there's some more we've got to see which we haven't seen
40:02
yet. Yeah, that's that's, that's,
40:04
that's that's certainly true. So it's one of the things that
40:09
column is very well known for and you personally are very well
40:13
known for is the focus on issues of child abuse and abuse by the
40:19
state and rich individuals and all the different permutations
40:23
that that take. When did that appear in on your
40:26
radar? In the mix very, very early,
40:29
right? Certainly in the first couple of
40:32
years that we when when we've got a presence putting out this
40:39
little leaflet. I got a call one morning from a
40:43
family in Cornwall and their story was that social services
40:49
were taking their daughter's baby and they were all
40:52
incredibly distressed. This was completely new
40:56
territory to me, but we got involved actually.
41:01
David Noakes was working with us then at that stage and he he did
41:06
a lot of work around this particular case, including
41:09
including going into court with a mum.
41:13
And what we learnt was that a baby was being taken away from
41:18
the mother rather than that mother getting a little bit of
41:23
help in order to get over a difficult period.
41:27
And it was just alien to us. And then it got a little bit
41:34
dark really quickly when one day the grandfather and he was very
41:39
distressed and he said the social workers were at the
41:44
house. And one of them said to me as if
41:47
it was a casual comment, well, you know, if we get the baby, I
41:52
get a new kitchen. Wow.
41:55
And he said so. Said that to the grandfather.
41:58
Yeah. And he said The thing is, was
42:01
the lady having some sort of black humour joke?
42:07
If if it was a joke, it was bad enough.
42:10
But actually he believed, he believed that she was being
42:14
serious, that she was going to get some sort of bonus if they
42:17
could get the baby. And they did take the baby.
42:21
And then we we reported on that case.
42:26
And then, of course, a few more cases came out of the woodwork.
42:30
But the key one was the lady in South Wales who told me that a
42:35
young daughter, 10 or 11, can't remember quite how it was taken
42:40
at gunpoint by Neath Port Talbot social services and the American
42:47
police in Florida. That's what she told me on the
42:50
phone and it she probably spoke to me on the phone for an hour
42:53
and a half. It was such a bizarre story.
42:56
And and I said, well, what's the evidence?
42:58
And she said, I'll, I'll bring you the evidence.
43:01
And she came to see me with a big suitcase full of court
43:04
documents. And I spent several days working
43:08
through those documents with her.
43:10
And at the end of the time, I was convinced that the story she
43:14
gave was correct. And the story was her daughter
43:17
had become I'll. There was no diagnosis.
43:20
The GPM got one. The hospital hadn't got one
43:23
older. Hey, hospital hadn't got it.
43:26
She went to a number of hospitals and then eventually
43:30
the girl's so I'll she can't go to school and as the mother
43:35
fights to try and find out what's the matter with her
43:37
daughter and she's got the daughter at home because the
43:40
girl was too I'll to be at school.
43:43
She was accused by social services of having Munch house
43:46
and by proxy and making the whole thing up and eventually
43:50
she got the opportunity to Fascinating little bee.
43:54
If people are wondering why I'm twitching, this little bee is
43:57
come and see us. He likes your jacket.
43:59
Yeah, it's probably what it is, actually.
44:01
Yeah, trying to work it out. I'll take it off.
44:03
Actually, I think summer's arrived.
44:05
It's wormed up a lot. Something's breaking through,
44:08
yeah. Sorry.
44:10
So she was accused of Munchausen.
44:13
My proxy, a daughter was seriously ill and, and in a lot
44:16
of pain and eventually the mother discovered that there was
44:20
a specialist hospital for children with, with gut problems
44:25
in, in Florida. She flew the daughter over
44:28
there. Her, her, the grandfather went
44:31
with them. They were fully entitled to do
44:35
this because at that stage there was no restriction or court
44:38
orders from the social services. The little girl was in hospital,
44:43
I think for three days. And at the end of that time they
44:48
diagnosed that she had Solinger disease, which is multiple
44:52
ulceration of the gut. It's intensely painful, but it
44:57
relatively easily treatable. So mother and her father, the
45:02
grandfather, are there. The little girl is due out of
45:05
hospital that day. And Neath Port Talbot Social
45:09
Services turned up with an American policeman with a court
45:13
order to take the girl. And the grandfather got a bit
45:17
agitated and the American policeman did actually draw his
45:21
gun and the girl was taken away from mum and the grandfather,
45:26
she was put on a plane with the social workers, flown back to UK
45:30
on a false passport. All of this all provable.
45:34
And they put her in a psychiatric, the little girl in
45:37
the psychiatric unit and told her that her pain was imaginary.
45:42
And when the mother got back to UK and was able to communicate,
45:48
thinking that everything was going to be OK because she had
45:50
the diagnosis, the social workers took the diagnosis,
45:56
treated the girl for Zollinger but never gave her back to the
46:00
mother. Unbelievable.
46:02
And that was the story. And the family, who were utterly
46:07
lovely people and their friends and supporters.
46:10
I came into contact. But the big thing was that the
46:14
mother was so emotionally distressed she couldn't give a
46:19
presentation herself. So I ended up giving the
46:21
presentation and, and the next stepping stone was I can't
46:29
remember when, but probably 18 months after that.
46:33
Somewhere around there I was invited by a gentleman called
46:37
Ian Crane to give a talk at his alternative view.
46:41
I think it was AV2IN Bristol. And I gave an hour's talk on
46:46
what was called child stealing by the state, what I called
46:49
Charles stealing by the state. It was live streamed.
46:53
And when I walked out of the room into the foyer, the hotel,
46:57
my phone rang. And that was the first call of
47:00
another parent saying I've just watched your interview and can I
47:05
talk to you because they took my child and that was 2006.
47:10
And it's it's never stopped since then.
47:13
Wow. Yeah, so as a military man, this
47:19
was new territory, but I was very quickly struck by the sheer
47:27
maliciousness and brutality of the system.
47:30
Well, that's that's that's what I think people will.
47:34
Going to take take my jacket off if I may.
47:36
The audience will. Don't get too excited, it's only
47:40
the jacket. Start swinging it around his
47:44
head in a minute. A lot of people will hear that
47:53
what you've just described and not be able to understand it
47:58
because it sounds insane. You've got a system that is
48:05
completely out of control. What was actually going on back
48:09
there inside the bureaucracy for it to behave in that fashion
48:12
because you've it's completely callous.
48:19
It believes it has the right to travel internationally to take a
48:23
child from its mother when it, when it's demonstrated that it
48:29
did that for the wrong reasons, Not that you should have done it
48:32
anyway, right? But it's saying that the, the,
48:34
the mother is, is misdiagnosing an illness.
48:38
But then it turns out the child does have the illness.
48:40
And when it's proven and, and the child is treated, they still
48:43
keep the child. I mean, what's happening here,
48:46
like this isn't just an institutional failure.
48:49
This is that's that's. It's orchestrated.
48:52
Right. You could say it's an
48:54
orchestrated failure and I could agree with that, but I think the
49:00
system is, is more devious and pernicious than that.
49:04
So I, I think the system is created to do what it does.
49:08
But it, it took me a long time to get my head around it.
49:13
And as these cases came in, the, the key thing for me was so it's
49:18
different parents might be a mum or a dad or a couple, and
49:23
they're from different parts of the country.
49:25
So the people would say this happened to me in Cornwall or it
49:30
happened in London and in the London borough or it happened in
49:33
Scotland or Northern Ireland. And also we did come across
49:37
cases affecting Ireland itself and, and even France and
49:42
Germany. And when parents talked about
49:46
what had happened, inevitably it was like they described a
49:50
template, this happened, that happened, they said this, they
49:54
did that. And the end result was this, a
49:58
key bit being that the moment it got near the family courts, this
50:02
is a closed court. There's no jury, there's no
50:05
press. There still isn't any proper
50:07
press. And, and those courts seem to
50:10
make unbelievably cruel judgements which very often
50:15
meant the fact that children were taken away from the the
50:18
parents. My conclusion in 2025, after
50:24
seeing a lot of these cases and in in a number of them working
50:28
alongside the parents in order to learn, my conclusion is that
50:33
we have a a system which it with the child protection system,
50:38
which is being used and abused in order to steal children who
50:43
have a financial value. That's so to take the children
50:50
with the added bonus around a child is a big package of money
50:54
circulating. And the other one is to
50:56
breakdown stable family relationships.
51:00
It's actually to destroy the family.
51:05
And I'll add, and I think it's important to add that some
51:11
people would say, well, you know, my daughter's works in
51:16
social services and she's a nice person and she wouldn't do this.
51:19
And I would say I'd totally accept that.
51:23
But we have a system where there are a lot of good people working
51:26
in that system. But inside the system is another
51:30
system operating, and that is malicious.
51:34
And one of the things that happens from time to time, which
51:38
is very important, is you get whistleblowers from inside
51:42
social services blowing the whistle on exactly the abuses
51:47
that I'm talking about and trying to report these days.
51:51
Yes, now I hear that a lot from people working in, people who
51:57
know people in newspapers or in bits of the government.
52:02
And you tell them about some of the things that we report on and
52:05
they say, wow, that can't be true because I've got a friend
52:08
who's on the editorial team at the Times for.
52:10
Example. You know, and they wouldn't do
52:13
this. And it's like, OK, you don't
52:15
they they can't necessarily see what's going on around them
52:19
properly. Yeah, I, I used to find this
52:23
very frustrating, this sort of attitude, but I've got, I've got
52:26
used to it now and I'm a lot softer in replying it.
52:30
The basic problem is most people, for all their faults and
52:34
foibles are good. They're basically decent people.
52:39
They're not going to do anything nasty to another person, almost
52:43
certainly not going to do anything nasty to a child.
52:46
And therefore they find it very hard to understand people who
52:50
can do nasty things to families and to children.
52:54
And, and they will tend to defend, you know, put up
52:59
shutters at a subject which is very hard for them to, to
53:04
actually understand. And so you, they deflect it.
53:08
Oh, well, you know, my brother is a social worker and he's a
53:12
nice guy and he's, he's not talking about this.
53:15
Well, he probably isn't, because maybe he hasn't come across it,
53:17
but it's there and it's real and it's affecting thousands and
53:21
thousands of families. And people will put things down
53:25
to incompetence or. Yes, cooker.
53:30
Oh, it's just, it was a mistake, you know, an inexplicable
53:34
mistake, but a mistake nonetheless, right.
53:36
But, but actually, they don't understand that.
53:38
Actually, no. That's the system doing what
53:39
it's supposed to do. Yeah, this is, this is where for
53:43
me, key evidence, I call it evidence coming in, was that you
53:49
had different parents, different social backgrounds, poor, rich,
53:54
different parts of the country telling you that stuff happened
53:58
to a template. That's the bit that says to me
54:02
this isn't a cock up, this is an incompetence.
54:06
This is calculated. Is that camera still going?
54:14
Indeed it is. Well, that's really good.
54:16
Yeah, all. And the sun's out.
54:18
I know, I know. We're still rolling, don't
54:22
worry. We're talking serious subjects
54:24
and, and we're also laughing. And Ben, you said to me earlier
54:31
when we were being a little bit jovial in the rain, we're going
54:35
to talk about a serious subject. But I, I'm going to say to you
54:39
that it is important to keep a sense of humour about this
54:43
because very dark subject and it can pull you into a really bad
54:49
place. And also for the families who've
54:52
been through it, it's also very important that they somehow keep
54:59
a sense of humour about things. And I will be talking more about
55:05
this, but a couple of days ago I was able to be with a group of
55:12
women who've lost their children, had their children
55:15
taken away from them. And although over the years I
55:19
have got to know quite a few, I should add up because how many
55:23
is it? But it's a lot of mums who've
55:26
lost their children. This was the first opportunity
55:29
for me to be with with quite a big group of them and in the
55:35
first hour, hour and a half, unbelievable stress and anxiety
55:42
and tension in the room. And it was almost like the newer
55:48
mums had to get through that before they were relaxed enough
55:52
to be able to sit and listen and engage with what what was being
55:58
discussed, where people were discussing.
56:01
How do we expose and solve this problem?
56:04
And we specifically talked about the power of laughter and that
56:11
whatever was happening to these families and whatever they've
56:13
been through, the ability to take themselves somewhere and
56:18
get into a much lighter environment and change the
56:22
mindset was important. So we're not going to apologise
56:27
for laughing. Laughing is a very powerful
56:29
weapon. And the other thing which the
56:32
irony here has made some of the mums laugh is I did give a
56:36
little talk to them and I said if you really want to get back
56:40
at the people who are doing these horrible things, you
56:43
should be upbeat and smiling because the happier you are, the
56:48
more they hate it. They want you in the gutter.
56:52
And if you show that you're fighting and you're not in the
56:55
gutter, they get very disturbed. They don't know how to deal
56:59
with. It they don't know how to deal
57:00
with it. And this brought a smile to the
57:02
faces of several of the mums who were present in that room.
57:06
So that was very good. No, I.
57:07
Completely agree with that. So this is so, so 2006 then You
57:12
said the first instance of this came across your across your
57:17
desk and, and, and it's been just an ongoing process since
57:20
then. So it's nearly 20 years.
57:22
Yeah, because every time you report, more people come
57:25
forward. But the, the thing which makes
57:29
it challenging is that you are, you know, I've never been a
57:35
normal reporter, but if you, I can imagine you reporter for a
57:38
local paper and you want to get whatever the story is, you go
57:43
and see the people and you discuss it and you get the
57:45
evidence and then you print your story.
57:48
But when you engage with people who've had their children
57:51
stolen, these are people who are often struggling to keep
57:55
themselves together because the experience has been so
57:58
shattering. And therefore to engage with
58:02
them and get them to trust you to be able to sit down and let
58:08
them tell their own story in their their own time frame.
58:15
This requires a lot of time. And so to even get the
58:19
information to report on it requires you to give a lot of of
58:25
time with people who've been traumatised.
58:29
And so it's a much longer, slower process.
58:32
And so whilst you would think you just sort of get out there
58:39
and go and speak to thousands of them, it's not that easy because
58:43
every person you speak to, they've got to trust you before
58:46
they'll talk to you. And that trust only comes from
58:50
building up a rapport and a relationship.
58:54
However, I will say that what seems to have happened this year
58:59
is that the numbers of mums and dads is, is increasingly now
59:05
whether this is the success of things circulating on the
59:09
Internet, I don't know. But I, I think that's part of
59:12
it. But I, I have been contacted by
59:16
a lot of mothers over the last six months and interestingly,
59:21
the first thing they've seen of me is on TikTok.
59:25
And I say I don't post a TikTok. But apparently another mum has
59:30
watched the UK column reports and interviews and started to
59:35
cut them up and put them out as TikTok clips and then other
59:39
mothers have picked up on this. So something is is happening.
59:43
It's beginning to spread. Yes, yeah, so awareness.
59:47
But then I thought, you know, I've heard that one of the one
59:50
of the many consequences of the lockdowns was and, and the whole
59:57
kind of COVID era was, was the the greater levels of
1:00:02
destruction of particularly working class families and the
1:00:05
family courts went into OverDrive.
1:00:07
With that process and probably. More of this is happening as
1:00:10
well, right? So it's a combination of of a
1:00:13
few things. That, that's, that's, that's an
1:00:15
astute observation because a significant, there was a
1:00:21
significant increase in the number of children that went
1:00:23
into care during the lockdown period.
1:00:26
I think we're up at over 100,000 now.
1:00:30
And if people picked up when I mentioned money, the simple
1:00:36
thing to realise is that the moment and authority touches a
1:00:42
child, that money, that, that child is generating a flow of
1:00:48
money. So social services are involved
1:00:51
then, then legal teams get involved, then specialists get
1:00:56
involved, clinical psychologists or psychologists, guardian and
1:01:01
lit in all sorts of support workers and even foster carers.
1:01:08
And This is Money circulating. And many years ago I would talk
1:01:14
about my estimate of one court case for a child where I said
1:01:21
roughly 200,000 lbs circulates fees for everybody, the judge,
1:01:28
court, social workers, the experts for expert reports,
1:01:35
£10,000 a pop depending on who's writing it.
1:01:39
So the moment they touch a child, that's 200,000 through a
1:01:44
court case. And then if the child goes into
1:01:46
the care system, somebody's being paid either either as a
1:01:50
foster care carer or in a children's home.
1:01:54
And if the child is a normal child, maybe you're talking £500
1:02:00
a week, but if the child's got any form of special needs, mild
1:02:06
special needs, you're probably talking 1000 lbs a week fees
1:02:10
being paid. If you've got a child with
1:02:13
severe special needs, you might be the sum might be five 6000
1:02:19
lbs a week. So if there's 100,000 children
1:02:24
who've been through one court hearing, you're into a multi
1:02:29
billion # industry before the next level of nastiness has
1:02:35
started, which is that children in care have disappeared from
1:02:41
sight. And so these are easy pickings
1:02:44
for the for the sex abusers and the people who will make money
1:02:48
out of the abuse of children. Yes, that's unbelievable.
1:02:53
That is how the system is working.
1:02:55
And at that point I will when people are listening to this and
1:03:00
say no, this can't be true. At the gathering I was at a
1:03:05
couple of days ago with with the mums, I showed the clip of the
1:03:09
former. I don't know whether he's alive
1:03:11
still, but he was a Tory whip called Tim Fortescue and he is
1:03:22
on YouTube speaking to BBC Camera and in it he says they,
1:03:28
the MPs, would come to us with problems.
1:03:32
It could be anything, it could be money, it could be, it could
1:03:36
be little boys and we would fix it for them because, and you
1:03:43
might find this a little bit hard, we would fix it for them
1:03:47
because if we did they would do as we asked.
1:03:52
So what you had is an MP working as a whip openly admitting to
1:03:58
ABBC camera that when politicians MPs were abusing
1:04:03
little boys it was covered up so they could be blackmailed into
1:04:08
following the party policy. So and that was then broadcast
1:04:13
on the BBC. It's on the BBC, the clip clip
1:04:16
still up. On well, it's, it's, it's the,
1:04:19
you know, to our shame really the, a lot of this stuff has
1:04:23
just become understood as part of the course in the country.
1:04:28
You know this idea of bishops and choir boys and people make
1:04:33
jokes out of this stuff and it's nothing funny about it at all.
1:04:36
There is nothing funny about it, but it's it's dismissed when you
1:04:40
point a finger at the establishment, the political
1:04:44
establishment or the, you know, the true establishment figures.
1:04:49
If you point a finger and you say this organ, this
1:04:53
establishment, this system is not only breaking families apart
1:04:58
to steal their children, many of those children are then being
1:05:02
trafficked into an abuse system. You are Pooh poohed.
1:05:06
The BBC laughs at you. And then the latest gimmick is
1:05:11
that we're to believe that the only people abusing children are
1:05:16
the are the Asian grooming gangs.
1:05:19
Now, are there Asian grooming gangs out there?
1:05:23
Absolutely. Have they been operating for
1:05:25
years? Yes.
1:05:26
But there's also Italian gangs, there's Bangladeshi gangs,
1:05:32
There's all sorts of people abusing children because one,
1:05:36
some people get a kick out of it, but also there's a lot of
1:05:39
money circulates around it. But for some remarkable reason,
1:05:43
at the moment the country is being pumped full of the idea
1:05:47
that the only people abusing children are Asian grooming
1:05:51
gangs. And this of course is incorrect.
1:05:55
And it also means that the people who are really in control
1:05:58
of the system, including the family court system, are are
1:06:04
they must be laughing their socks off because they can do
1:06:07
what they like while everybody else is focusing on the Asians.
1:06:12
Yes, limited hangout. You know you can get angry about
1:06:16
this. Career.
1:06:18
But while you're angry about that, you're ignoring the fact
1:06:21
that actually the whole political system runs on this,
1:06:23
and it has done for that's going to say decades.
1:06:26
It's probably longer than decades.
1:06:27
Well, this is the key thing. If you, if you say, how long has
1:06:30
this been running? It's actually been running.
1:06:35
It's we could say it's been running for thousands years, but
1:06:38
let's keep it. It's been running for hundreds
1:06:41
of years and it's across the abuse of children is across all
1:06:47
sectors of society. It it isn't dirty old men in
1:06:53
raincoats, it can be judges, it can be politicians, it can be, I
1:06:57
believe, members of the royalty. It, it can be anybody who's got
1:07:01
a predilection for this, this horrible abuse.
1:07:06
But if you if you have that as an accepted part of the system,
1:07:10
whereas Tim Fortescue says we'll cover it up, then it's
1:07:14
completely logical to me that you're going to be running
1:07:18
systems which say they're there to protect children and in fact
1:07:22
they're doing the exact opposite.
1:07:23
So why was nothing done with the Asian grooming gangs?
1:07:28
Well, they didn't want to do anything with the Asian grooming
1:07:30
gangs because if they'd fully investigated that, it would have
1:07:35
led them on to the other grooming gangs, including the
1:07:40
political grooming gangs, including, you know, people who
1:07:47
were involved with King Korra, Boys Home and all this stuff
1:07:50
where we're getting to the highest levels of the state,
1:07:53
including the security services. So they didn't want to
1:07:57
investigate what the Asians were doing because it's the old
1:08:00
dominoes lined up. They start investigating too
1:08:04
deep into the Asians and who was facilitating the Asian abuse.
1:08:10
And then the next minute, Oh dear, the police are implicated.
1:08:14
And then when the police are implicated, well, you've got to
1:08:18
start looking at the security services because if you say MI 5
1:08:23
did not know that this form of criminality was going on and we
1:08:29
also know politicians are involved, then we say beginning
1:08:35
to look like the security services are implicated as well
1:08:39
and. Beginning to look like the
1:08:40
entire structure has been set up to enable it.
1:08:44
And every single. Component part of it.
1:08:46
Can we just talk quickly about common purpose because you
1:08:53
started off seeing corruption around the way money was flowing
1:08:58
in from the EU and into construction projects and the
1:09:02
council and local businesses in Plymouth.
1:09:05
And then the, the, this child abuse issue came up very early
1:09:09
on in the process of you beginning to report on that.
1:09:12
But these, these, they're not distinct things, they are
1:09:15
intrinsically linked to each other, right?
1:09:17
They are. It's basically one seam of
1:09:20
corruption. You're just seeing it from
1:09:22
different angles. Well, that's exactly how I did
1:09:26
see it because I I couldn't put these things together initially.
1:09:29
I right, I found that in Plymouth when I went to look at
1:09:34
things that were going clearly wrong or shouldn't have been
1:09:38
happening around the regeneration thing, particularly
1:09:42
where European grant money was concerned.
1:09:46
It was as though people were communicating and operating
1:09:50
together, but I couldn't understand what was uniting and
1:09:55
what was bringing them together. And it was only one day when I'd
1:10:00
been talking to a group of local people in Devonport about, about
1:10:06
this, what I was seeing. And, and I said, there's
1:10:08
something which is, it's like a Jelly that a gel that holds it
1:10:13
all together. And this man said to me very
1:10:17
quietly, well, I, I think it's common purpose.
1:10:20
And I said, what's that? And he said, well, it's a, it's
1:10:23
a really weird charity. And I eventually persuaded him
1:10:29
to meet me. Was it later that evening or the
1:10:32
next day? I think it was the next day.
1:10:35
And I, I said, tell, tell me about this thing.
1:10:38
What is it? And he said, well, it's, it's
1:10:39
really weird. It's, it's, it's, it's this
1:10:42
organisation and they say they're training future leaders
1:10:47
and, and they're all over the city, but you never actually
1:10:52
know who they are. And, and I say, well, what do
1:10:56
they do? When he said, well, they're
1:10:58
training future leaders, but they also, and they run courses
1:11:02
for people. But you also find they're
1:11:05
working as a little club to get the, excuse me, their agenda
1:11:10
moving. And it was a really weird story.
1:11:15
Well, when I pushed him at one point and said, will you tell me
1:11:19
more? He, he said I'd rather not.
1:11:22
And I came to the conclusion that he was scared.
1:11:26
And I went home and I went online and very quickly you can
1:11:30
find a, a common purpose website.
1:11:34
And I'll say it looked completely different from the
1:11:36
one now. It was very dark, very dark
1:11:39
website and it was talking about training these future leaders
1:11:44
and I still really couldn't work out what it was doing, but it
1:11:48
was all about future society and you know, the world was going to
1:11:53
be better. We're training all these leaders
1:11:55
to work together and, and then the next.
1:11:59
Breaking down silos and were they using that kind of
1:12:02
language? There well, I came across that
1:12:04
later when I started to look at Julia Middleton, It was the the
1:12:09
then chief executive and she, she wrote a book called Beyond
1:12:13
Authority in which not only did she talk about breaking down
1:12:18
silos, she she also described how common purpose would work.
1:12:24
It would, it would build networks and it would
1:12:29
steamroller over people who challenged it.
1:12:32
It was brutal language and I was fascinated by it.
1:12:36
But then a certain gentleman sent me a very interesting
1:12:43
envelope one day and it was lists of common purpose
1:12:47
graduates. And subsequently it emerged that
1:12:52
common purpose trained people and they could then go on to a
1:12:55
common purpose database so that they could, if you trained in
1:12:59
Plymouth and you you were doing whatever you were doing in
1:13:02
Liverpool, you could have a look on their database and see who
1:13:06
the common purpose graduates were in Liverpool.
1:13:09
It's like a quasi secret society.
1:13:12
And eventually one of the very kind Common Purpose graduates
1:13:17
who was not convinced by what they were doing, shared the
1:13:20
database. And then, and then it was just
1:13:23
phenomenal because I discovered that lots of people who I'd
1:13:28
been, who'd worked around me in Plymouth, were involved with
1:13:32
Common Purpose but had never mentioned it, never declared it.
1:13:36
And then you could see how as an organisation it was manipulating
1:13:44
people across society, getting them to believe that by becoming
1:13:50
a Common Purpose leader, you were going to be some special
1:13:54
person who was going to change the world.
1:13:58
And eventually when I started to do a lot of Freedom of
1:14:01
Information requests, I, I was able to show documents where
1:14:06
police chiefs, police chiefs themselves who'd been recruited
1:14:11
by Common Purpose were then holding internal meetings in
1:14:16
police time where they were recruiting other people to be
1:14:21
involved in common purpose work. And where to my analysis, much
1:14:27
of that work was in breach of all forms of separation of
1:14:31
powers and and this sort of thing and the.
1:14:35
That's the key from the separation of powers from.
1:14:38
The we can put up a link to this, but I'll, I'll mention it
1:14:42
to camera because we have a very old website which is called CP
1:14:47
exposed.com, cpexposed.com. And if you go on that website,
1:14:55
it's very old. It's a little bit, what's the
1:14:58
word rustic? But essentially it is full of
1:15:02
documents, real documents, genuine documents about common
1:15:06
purpose and it's even still got that original database there.
1:15:10
But you can see how an inappropriate dialogue was
1:15:15
engineered between professionals, the police, fire
1:15:19
service, NHS, universities, local authorities, where common
1:15:25
Purpose was not only installing a highly political agenda for
1:15:31
change it it was also it was also encouraging professional
1:15:38
people to have an allegiance to common purpose and its change
1:15:43
agenda over and above what they should have been doing as their
1:15:48
proper formal job. Very pernicious, nasty
1:15:53
organisation and. And, and, and, and UK column
1:15:56
research over the years has revealed the where we've seen
1:16:01
issues around care homes, children being taken, that
1:16:04
they're very often in the immediate vicinity, people
1:16:08
who've come out of these programmes.
1:16:11
I I'm going to have to say there, because I've got to be
1:16:15
honest about this. I couldn't say it as tightly as
1:16:19
that. Yeah.
1:16:21
I think what I would say is that where we could see breakdown as
1:16:27
a result of manipulation by common purpose, you were very
1:16:31
often looking at the same authorities.
1:16:35
Right. Where a lot of dirty stuff was
1:16:38
going on. And to me this makes sense
1:16:39
because if you know, if you've got a professional working
1:16:43
inside a local council and they believe doing a professional job
1:16:48
is, is the right thing and telling the truth and, and, and,
1:16:53
you know, having a morality about their professional work.
1:16:57
If you start to interfere with that and breakdown that, that
1:17:02
professional moral basis, all sorts of stuff is going to start
1:17:07
happening anywhere from bullying to theft to ultimately
1:17:15
interfering with children. If that's your if you know, if
1:17:19
that's your thing. But what what I what I would not
1:17:24
say is that because somebody that you know has been involved
1:17:29
with common purpose or trained by them, that automatically
1:17:32
means that they've done something nasty with children.
1:17:34
Because that's not true in my in my book.
1:17:41
So here we are in 2025, sat on the edge of Dartmoor.
1:17:47
It's very cloudy, but the sun. There's sun coming from
1:17:50
somewhere I can't quite work out where from.
1:17:53
And I will say that for me, people are really going to wake
1:18:00
up, never mind what's happening in the UK, what's happening in
1:18:05
out in the Middle East or what they think is happening, you
1:18:10
know, in UK. If you really want to know what
1:18:12
the danger it is, the danger is that the state is attacking
1:18:17
every single family. If it isn't the fact people have
1:18:22
lost jobs and they're poor, it's attacking the identity of men
1:18:28
and women. So they didn't even know if
1:18:31
they're a man or a woman anymore.
1:18:33
And we've got a state that if it can, we'll steal your children.
1:18:38
And if you think that because you're a professional, you're
1:18:41
you're academic or you're intellectual, you're safe,
1:18:46
you're absolutely not. Because they've demonstrated
1:18:49
they will go for any child that they take a particular fancy to.
1:18:56
So in my book, you know, a key part of the work I do with with
1:19:01
UK column is to expose and ultimately to stop state
1:19:07
stealing of children. And I'm going to say to you,
1:19:13
Ben, I'm not going to stop doing this because the more I'm in
1:19:16
contact with these families, the more I know that you can't just
1:19:20
walk away from them. Lots done, lots done, lots to
1:19:25
do. Indeed.
1:19:26
Yeah, very good. Well, thank you for the
1:19:28
conversation, Brian. I really appreciate it.
1:19:31
Well, I'm going to thank you Ben, actually, because it's
1:19:33
quite therapeutic for me to do this because although people
1:19:37
have done interviews about with me on certain subjects you've
1:19:41
taken me through, it's a bit of this is your life, isn't it?
1:19:44
You've taken me through a big chunk of my life, yes.
1:19:48
And I, I like where we began, which is that you're a watchman.
1:19:52
And I think that's what you're still doing today.
1:19:55
I think that's the job that you're playing.
1:19:59
This has been suggested to me before, Ben, so maybe there's
1:20:02
some truth in that. Yeah, maybe very good.
1:20:06
Thank you very much. Thank you.
1:20:08
Cheers Brian all. Right.