UK Column News — 11th February 2026

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1:02We're going to take a look at foreign interference and intelligence vetting. But of course, we're going to have to begin today with the Epstein situation, Brian. And well, yesterday, Congressman Roe Cana in the United States was joined by Thomas Massey in a visit to the U.S. Department of Justice to try to understand why so much of the Epstein files are still redacted. On the way, he was questioned by journalists and he made some comments about the British monarchy, as we'll hear in a second. But he began by addressing the fact that Glenn Maxwell is apparently no longer answering questions. Let's have a listen to what he said. I submitted to Comer a letter with six or seven questions. Things like, who were the other co-conspirators? Who were the other men who raped these underage girls? Did she have any conversations about a deal with Donald Trump? Now, she's taken a blanket fifth amendment on any question.

2:04And my view is that many of my questions don't in any way incriminate her. So we'll see what she does. But there are seven questions that I have specifically asked. And the assumption is, she's pleading the fifth to each one of those. And the American people will see that there's an inconsistency. Why did she not plead the fifth when Blanche asked her questions? And now she's pleading the fifth about things that don't implicate her, but may implicate many of the other powerful people in the Epstein class that committed these crimes. Mandelson may bring down the whole government from what I hear. You know, you just engaged in terrible behavior. I mean, the allegations are very serious that he was working for Gordon Brown and then feeding information about UK possibly buying euros and having Epstein trade on that. I mean, it is a deeply, deeply traveling. And Epstein's, I saw this interview with Epstein's former girlfriend talking about how someone is a loser if they weren't mentioned in the Epstein files. It's a window. It's a window into the elite impunity, this club.

3:07And by the way, I think this is the most vulnerable the British monarchy has ever been. I mean, I heard they were asking the queen questions about the Epstein class. They ought to ask the king and queen questions and maybe this will be the end of the monarchy. Oh, the king has to answer what he knew. What he knew about Andrew. And just stripping Andrew of a title is not enough. I mean, Andrew needs to come before you are committing and start answering questions. I mean, look, if you have allegations of raping a young girl, I don't think the appropriate punishment is, you no longer get to be a prince. There's got to be more than that. Well, I think he's probably absolutely correct about that. And refreshing like to see somebody questioned politicians, senior politicians being questioned and being forthright in his comments about how he sees things and what he thinks he's looking at. Well, King Charles may have said a couple of days ago

4:07that the royal family would fully cooperate with any British police investigation in Andrew. But what about an investigation in the Charles prime because he still hasn't to my mind. He still hasn't addressed questions regarding his relationship with Jimmy Savile as we put this on screen. So, so, you know, there's still lots of questions about that relationship and what exactly how close it was. And in fact, Savile's relationship to many others within the British establishment as well. And of course, taking the topic slightly broader, Brian, the British establishment still tries to die and play the, the, the rent list. And so, you know, this, this is not something which is just limited to Epstein. And I think this is something we've got to keep in mind. Absolutely. Well, the cynical part of me wanted to say straight away with regard to Savile, the thing is Mike that nobody knew. It, it, it, it was just unfortunate. Nobody knew what he was doing. But isn't that the same excuse for Epstein as well?

5:08Nobody knew? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so, coming back to, to row count of them following his and Massey's visit to the Department of Justice, he had this to say on the floor of the House of Representatives. Yesterday, Congressman Massey and I went to the Department of Justice to read the unredacted Epstein files. We spent about two hours there and we learned that 70 to 80% of the files are still redacted. In fact, there were six wealthy, powerful men that the DOJ hid for no apparent reason. When Congressman Massey and I pointed this out to the Department of Justice, they acknowledged their mistake and now they have revealed the identity of these six powerful men. These men are Salvatore Navura, Zorab, Micheladz, Leipig Leonor, Nicola Caputa,

6:09Sultan Ahmed Bin Soliam, CEO of Dubai Ports World, and billionaire businessman Leslie Wexner, who was labeled as a co-conspirator by the FBI. Now, one of the other points is we was making is that there are a number of other so-called co-conspirators that are still fairly well hidden and he's demanding that those names are released and unredacted. So, I don't know what your thoughts are. Well, I'm going to get into it really now, by having a deeper look into Epstein and the files and my own thoughts having now done some deeper research into it, but we could say it's a mess. That's one way of describing it or else it's incredibly clever or fuscation. Well, one thing's for sure they don't want the truth to come out, he's talking about an extra six names, but in fact, there's close to about 90 names of very, very wealthy, powerful people

7:11that are not really being picked up in the press at all. It's taking ordinary people to do the research and pull this material out, so a lot of questions. Let's just kick off because it's UK Columnway with a look at a couple of headlines from the BBC. And of course, this one for me takes the biscuit because it's Gordon Brown. And he's saying that the Mendelssohn scandal notices not Epstein, it's the Mendelssohn scandal is serious for Starmer, but the prime minister is a man of integrity. So, Brown is saying this, well, we could start by saying is Gordon Brown himself a man of integrity? Well, I think a lot of people would question that. But what is he doing here? He's not pushing for a more depth and proper police investigation this side of the Atlantic into the Epstein files. He's basically massaging information around Kia Starmer in order to protect his leadership. But Gordon Brown doing some other interesting things

8:14in the background, which I'll get back onto in a few moments because he's playing around with constitutional issues. So let's move on. We bring another one up on screen here because Blair, according to the BBC, Blair hid Mendelssohn from us with a codename. Can you imagine the audacity of using a codename to actually hide what was going on and we the public are supposed to believe that because he used a codename, nobody can actually see what he was doing. What was the codename pizza delivery? Well, quite possibly. Again, we'll be talking more about this. So the BBC, though, very soft on connections between Epstein and Israel. So this was a report going back to the 12th of December, 2025. I'm not going to go into it in detail, but say it was very short. And if we compare it to Al Jazeera that produced a very well put together documentary

9:17on, sorry, article on Israel's ex-Prime Minister, Barack and Epstein saying how close the relationship was and what emails were talking about. We can see a huge difference in the reporting. So the BBC essentially going light on everything to do with Epstein and the fact that clearly he was incredibly interested in Israel. I put it in those terms first of all because apart from anything else, the files show that he was using a number of very, very expensive media companies to monitor daily feeds on what was being said about Israel, what the Israeli government was talking about. Anything that impacted Israel, Epstein, was watching in huge detail on a daily basis aside from anything else he was doing. And let's just take ourselves into a little bit of material, some of this has been covered

10:20on the mainstream press, but I found it interesting when you start to look at pictures in detail and you get a feel for what's going on. It's almost like your mind is taken into this horrible world of Epstein himself. So we'll start off with this one. It's just a series of some of the photographs of the New York apartment, very strange style in some ways. I don't think Epstein was into sophisticated decor rooms can vary from this sort of look to almost a colonial look, but nevertheless it just gives you a feel for that apartment and what it looked like inside. Pornographic pictures or very strange pictures, these were all over the house in today's news. I'm not going to be talking about his island and what was discovered there. So I'm just sticking with some of the New York pictures and the whole house photographed

11:22in great detail as we can see here, but strange things like this is Bill Clinton in a dress and why would you have that in the house? Wouldn't Bill Clinton be very upset about such a picture if he knew it was in existence? So I think there's really a lot of questions that the public here in UK should be asking themselves about what was actually going on inside Epstein's world and just we're not going to overdo it but to focus a little bit here on the sorts of images on the walls. Now the reduction of this nude in a very strange picture because part of it seems to be road works, but there's also mention of police department. So key parts of the anatomy have been redacted presumably by the Department of Justice. Now whether this is because it's a painting of a victim

12:23I don't know, but this is a classic example when you do not actually know who was redacting information and why redaction was taking place. Sometimes you can see large chunks of court documents redacted and you can accept that perhaps that was to protect victims, but in other cases you can see what appears to be a totally innocuous email, but the from and to address addresses have been redacted. So it's very, very hard to understand why but also if we're dealing with roughly three million plus pieces of data there must have been a huge amount of effort put into the redaction of that data. So the delays on getting it out clearly related to my mind, excuse me, apart from anything else to the amount of redaction going on. This is a bedroom picture, not my taste.

13:26I'm going to say what I'm not showing you is on the wall at the foot of the bed. There is another picture with two naked women and also either a young boy or a young man with an erection. So this is the type of pornographic material which is appearing throughout that the house itself. And then we come across strange things. We could say this is a piece of artwork at one place where we have a figure sliding down a rope, what this is I don't know, but it's against a backdrop of the sky. So make of this what you will. Now if we get on to materially itself, this is part of the court, the sort of release that will show us the court documents themselves. So this one is going back to November the 5th, 2020 and it's saying that this summer we charge Gileim Maxwell

14:30with conspiring to entice miners to travel for the purpose of sexual abuse in connection with helping Jeffrey Epstein to abuse his many victims. Now there's obviously a huge amount of material on this and she's been convicted. But nevertheless, it's very interesting to see source documentation which is setting out what the Epstein case is all about which is the sustained abuse of young women and girls in a setting where many powerful people had been present within the house, if not present during the actual act. And to my mind in looking at this documentation mic, there's no coherent, there doesn't appear to be any coherent investigation because if there was, my mind says there will be a coherent order to the way in which the data was cataloged and presented.

15:30Perhaps we might just bring in Liz here very briefly because I know Liz, you've been having a little bit at look at Epstein. And just on that one subject, what was your impression of the released material in the state of it? Hi, great to join you both. Yeah, I've been looking into this and following it with great interest. I think it's really, it's clear to me that this is some sort of, it's gonna be presented as a limited hangout in the sense that we've had this vast quantity of documents, which actually is only probably around half to 60% of what is actually available. But the way they've been released upon, it's that there's no index. It's very hard to navigate around them. They're not grouped by themes or, so it's making it extremely hard for independent journalists to actually go in and find the key documents because it's like looking for a needle in a haystack. Meanwhile, I feel that the mainstream media

16:31is sort of presenting a very carefully curated story, which is, which may be missing some really serious, damning information in there, which they are probably choosing not to report to us, should they find it because we know during COVID that how much that was going on that wasn't being reported, even though the media knew about it. So I think we can expect the mainstream to be doing exactly the same thing. And all these sort of key figures that are being thrown under the bus at the moment you've got Peter Mandelson, you've got Prince Andrew and Bill Gates. But you feel like these sort of the figures that are being sacrificed because they've outweighed their usefulness. But who are the people who we are not hearing about but who are somewhere in this vast quantity of files maybe under-redactional, maybe haven't even been released yet. So I think we have to kind of be really diligent to keep looking and all the people

17:34like you doing this investigation is really important because we cannot expect the mainstream to bring us the really important information that's in there. And of course, where are all the trials? Where's the accountability, Gelae Maxwell is the only person who's been convicted of anything and she was trafficking to who? You know, who are the people who were actually receiving and using those victims? Ronald, we'll go into this in more detail in UK column extra today. Let's just go through quickly some more material which I think is of interest. A lot of reports like this one, where a member of the public has made contact with the investigation team. This is a lady saying that she worked in Epstein's house and they found pictures and video tapes and audio tapes. Some of the tapes concern child pornography. And so you see essentially a member

18:35of the public reacting to the investigation making contact with what appears to be very important information. But then it goes into No Man's Land. You can't see what happens. And this isn't one report like this. It's what a few of them. We've got some interesting things here. Now this appears to be Andy because he's talking about being up about more of a moral summer camp for the royal family. He says there's activities taking place all day and he's exhausted. And he appears to be emailing his name Maxwell for any ideas as how he gets his brain into gear. So interesting person to be taking advice from. There's another one. Sorry, this one is a reply. I may have these slightly out of sequence here but this is a reply where A has been asking for inappropriate friends and because Lane comes back and said, well, I can only find appropriate friends for you.

19:35So that one raises quite a lot of questions. This is A talking about the sad death of his valet and that was where he was also talking about getting his mind back on track. Now, in many cases you'll find duplication of these emails even in the data release itself. This one is interesting to me because this relates to Gisland saying that basically she can't see the discovered material which is entitled to see and read and respond to now. People could say, well, does this really matter? Well, I think if justice is being done, she should be able to see material to which she's entitled to see. And if it's being made difficult for her, is that a way of putting pressure on her so that she's controlled in a later environment? None of this mentioned in the mainstream press at all.

20:36We've got another one here which is interesting because it's the authorities saying that they're finding it difficult to talk about the time of death for Epstein. So we can see trouble and strife inside the system. We've got the daily telegraph muscling in and asking whether they can get some information with regard to Prince Andrew and Miss Maxwell. And this is a little taste of material between Epstein and Barack who of course was a former general and senior Israeli politician. And this is in relation to using it would appear his apartment in Israel, which means that they would have to be security information passed, all of this going back and forward with Epstein. But as far as it appears as BBC's concern, there's no connection. This one was also interesting to me because basically it shows that Epstein was researching

21:39something to do with the tax implications actually being a resident of Israel. So did he have a detailed involvement with Israel? Yes. And so if we start to say was he collecting material for Compromat, we need to know which country he was involved with and why. But at the moment it certainly seems there's no investigation from UK intelligence services. Now we've got this one here, which I couldn't really resist. This is the massage room and you'll notice that we've got redacted pornographic pictures on the walls of Epstein's massage room. Let's bring in UK intelligence community. This is all of the UK community. There's GCHQ, there's MI5, there's Special Intelligence Service, MI6, there's Defence Intelligence,

22:40there's National Security Secretariat and there's the Office for Security and Counterterrorism and there's the Joint Intelligence Organization and essentially despite all of the evidence that we've just put on screen, which of course is almost nothing in the total release. None of these UK-based intelligence organizations say or appear to have had any idea what Epstein was doing or in relation to what compromising material was being collected. So that brings you back to Jimmy Savile. This is another Jimmy Savile, except to stop, in my opinion, the public really getting amongst the evidence. They've thrown it out in an ad hoc basis. People are picking at it and this is creating a chaotic research environment and could they say later, well, nobody can get a free trial

23:41because all of this is now over the internet. My client can't get a free trial and it slides into the... Fair trial, yeah. Fair trial. And it slides into the long grass. Yeah, and the news agenda will move on. Yeah, move on. Absolutely. The disclosure is there. It only takes a team of 500 people to work the way through it. Yeah, but how's that? Lots of interesting stuff. We will talk about it more in UK column extra today. Liz, let's move on then to the assisted dying story. Just bring us up to date with what's going on there. Yeah, so there's various attempts going on to legalize assisted suicide across the UK and the Crown dependencies. And the next few weeks see critical and final votes on whether to fundamentally change the relationship between the state and the individual and doctors and patients in this country by making it legal for a doctor to help their patient to end their life. So there were two cautionary tales

24:42which recently hit the headlines from Canada where Euthanasia has been enthusiastically adopted and enacted since 2016. And these stories show the feared slippery slope in action which should be a warning shot across the boughs of UK legislators as they debate the assisted dying bill in the House of Lords and the MacArthur bill in Hollywood. So the first story reported in the mirror concerns an elderly Canadian woman who was euthanasied against her will when her husband could no longer cope with caring for her. 80 year old Mrs. B was being cared for at home by her elderly husband and he struggled to look after her even with the help of the palliative care team. Mrs. B then expressed an interest in medical assistance in dying known as made. So her husband contacted the referral service. The very next day a made assessor visited and deemed her eligible but Mrs. B immediately changed her mind. The following day she was re admitted to hospital but was denied inpatient palliative care or hospice care.

25:46So her husband then requested a second urgent made assessment which deemed her eligible. Now remember the first assessor who sort of spoken with her he actually objected and requested a meeting but that meeting never happened because Mrs. B was euthanasied the same evening. So she went from eligibility to death within hours. And I think it's not hard to imagine a similar situation occurring in the NHS once we become desensitized to the deliberate ending of lives when we cross the ethical rubicon and allow doctors to kill patients removing the sanctity of life because death becomes accepted as a legitimate treatment for suffering and the system becomes ideologically aligned with death rather than life. And then later that week another tragic case from Canada hit the news and this time it was the euthanasia of a depressed 26 year old man with type one diabetes and blindness.

26:46I think we can get that headline on the screen. His request for it made was granted despite strong opposition from his mother. She claimed he wasn't of sound mind because he was depressed but he was killed without her knowledge or consent and she only found out four days after his death. Now with the UK assisted dying bill as it stands the same scenario could happen here because it contains no obligation to inform the family and no safeguards to protect those with mental illness from choosing assisted suicide. So onto the House of Lords where things are hotting up as they continued to debate Kim Leadbetter's assisted dying bill which was voted through if you remember by only 23 votes in Parliament last June and key figures such as the health secretary was treating voting against. So the Lords are frustrating the supporters of the bill by giving it the detailed scrutiny that Parliament failed to do. To the annoyance of Kim Leadbetter

27:47peers have tabled over 1,000 amendments to be debated. I think we've got a little slide on that. And then Lord Folkner, the Bill's sponsor in the House of Lords, accused peers of filibustering. He fears the bill will run out of time to complete before the end of this parliamentary session in May meaning it would fall. However, a constitutional committee report confirmed that the Lords has every right to scrutinise, amend or reject the bill. And as a private members bill, it is not subject to the Salisbury Convention which protects government bills promised in their manifesto from being blocked by the Lords. So as Kim Leadbetter's frustration mounts Sequir Starmer is under pressure to do something to force the bill through. She's urged the government to help pass her bill claiming it is their duty as they must respect the will of democratically elected members of Parliament.

28:47But Sequir has insisted the government will remain neutral on assisted dying. Now the government could make more time for the current bill to be debated, either this session or in the next session if it is reintroduced into Parliament. But Lord Kennedy, who's the chief whip in the Lords, ruled out reintroducing the legislation as a government bill saying on the 30th of January, I'm having enough problems getting the government's program through at the moment, let alone trying to deal with this bill. So I promise noble Lords that it will not come back as a government bill. So that's reassuring. So then the nuclear option would be for the government to use the 1911 Parliament Act to overrule the House of Lords. This was argued by Lord Falkner on BBC's today program on the 29th of July and we've got a little video of him. Why do you believe this requires an unprecedented use of the Parliament Act?

29:48Because what's happening is the Commons after detailed scrutiny have decided there should be this major change. The Lords, because of this minority filibustering will not engage in detail. We haven't even got to the bit where we vote changes yet because we haven't even got past Section 1 yet. The Constitution says if the Commons passes something and the Lords block it, which is what's happening, then the way the Commons who are elected get their way is if they pass it again second time in the same form, then it gets through without the Lords. Don't do that. I'm saying to the Lords. Yes, so as he explained, the Parliament Act would allow the House of Commons to reintroduce a bill at the next session to force legislation through if the Lords block it. This must be the same version of the bill as passed by the Commons in the previous session. And it's worth noting that this act has only been used a handful of times since 1949 to push through government bills

30:49against the will of the Lords. For example, the Fox Hunting Band. So we've seen this growing tension between the supporters and opponents of the bill who are both accusing each other of acting undemocratically. And here's Kim Leadbetter on ITV talking about this on the 5th of February. Kim, you of course were instrumental in all of this. How concerned are you that this bill will now not pass? Well, I'm really, really worried that what we're seeing in the House of Lords is a very undemocratic thing happening and that we've got a very small number of peers who are fundamentally opposed to a change in the law, a view of which I've always been very respectful, but are very clearly trying to talk the bill out. So stop it going through all its stages that it needs to do to receive Royal Assent and to change the law, which when we have MPs who took this decision really seriously when they voted for the bill in the Commons I'm deeply disturbed about the undemocratic nature of what's happening. I was always very clear and I have a huge amount of respect for the House of Lords that scrutiny is great

31:51and refining the bill where it needs to be refined is fine. But 1,200 amendments people making multiple repeat speeches is not a good look for the House of Lords. And I really worry about what the public perception is, many of whom think that the bill has already passed and come up to me on a very regular basis and say, thank you for getting this really important change through. So it's clear that invoking the Parliament Act will spark fury amongst opponents of the bill who argue that the Lords are simply doing their job and that the assisted dying bill is fundamentally flawed. The supporters of the bill are reported to be in a blind fury. They're warning Kirstama that if he allows the bill to fall he faces a huge bubble, a public backlash and we'd look impotent in the face of the action of unelective peers. So moving on to Scotland, Liam MacArthur's assisted dying bill is facing an imminent vote as early as March. Now last May, MSPs voted narrowly to proceed with the bill by 70 votes to 56.

32:53In the committee stage, several changes were made including raising the eligibility age from 16 to 18 and ensuring there's no duty on doctors to participate. But many other safeguarding amendments didn't pass. The bill is now on a knife edge requiring only seven MSPs to change their position for the bill to be defeated. Several MSPs who previously voted yes on our wavering citing concerns about inadequate safeguarding against coercion inadequate protection for healthcare professionals and the lack of clarity over the actual practicalities of the assisted dying process. And to care not killing Scotland, we've got a slide are urging Scottish voters to contact their MSP urgently in the next two weeks to ask them to vote no, which could be critical. This is time critical. And then on to Wales, people may not know this. On the 24th of February, the Senate will debate and vote on a legislative consent motion on whether NHS Wales should implement

33:55the assisted dying bill should it become law. Now, if Senate votes no, then although the assisted dying would be legal in Wales, it would only be available through private providers or by travelling to England to get it on the NHS. And more than 250 doctors and health professionals including a former Welsh Chief Medical Officer, Dame Deirdre Hine, signed an open letter to Welsh politicians last month urging them to reject the deeply flawed bill, citing unacceptable risks to patient safety and concerns that it would undermine Welsh autonomy over its healthcare system. And again, we have Welsh voters are urged to contact their Senate members before the decisive vote on the 24th of February, so not long, which you can do easily with this care not killing email tool. And finally, a word about our crown dependencies in January, Jersey's state members voted overwhelming need to approve a draft assisted dying law in principle.

34:58And this law's final stage will take place on the 24th of February, again, same date is Wales, when the state members will debate and vote on their amendments. And then finally, in March 2025, the Isle of Man was the first part of the UK to legalise doctor assisted dying, when Alex Alinson's private members bill was passed in the max parliament. However, much to the annoyance of Alinson, the bill has not been given Royal Ascent yet, despite the approval process normally only taking three to six months. So he has written to David Lamy to query the delay, believing it's related to the opposition that the Leadbet bill is having in the House of Lords. If Royal Ascent is granted, it will take 80 months to two years of work before the law becomes reality, but the current max parliament ends in September with elections. So Alinson needs to get the Royal Ascent before them. Thanks for that, Liz. I mean, I host the questions over this.

35:58I mean, are you optimistic or that actually the Lords will succeed in blocking this? Yeah, I think there's a really, really strong chance that they will manage to run out of time. And the level of opposition in the press, actually, the times has come out against this bill. And I think the mainstream media is now starting to move against the bill suggests that maybe it would not be politically a good idea for the government to invoke the parliament act, which really would be a nuclear option. And of course, we could end up having a general election before then anyway. That's the key point, isn't it? It is that storm is so vulnerable at the moment if he was to start throwing stones into the pond on this. I can imagine he doesn't want to do anything at the moment that could promote a backlash. And the other thing we ought to be saying is that in the background, Brown has been working with the Commission on the UK's future.

36:59And this is complete reconstruction of our constitution, including getting rid of the Lords. Why do you think that Mr. Brown would want to get rid of the Lords? I wonder. Well, indeed, and of course, that was why the parliament act was brought in in the first place because the Lords has been authoring the side of the Commons many, many times in the past. So thank you for that, Liz. OK, let's move on then. So if you like what we do here at the UK column, we do need your ongoing support. If you have a look on the front page of the website, you'll see a link which will take you to a page that explains how you can help us. If you're not able to help us financially, then please do share material that we release because that helps us defeat the censorship regime. But as I say, we do need your ongoing support. So we'll say thank you very much once again to everybody that continues to give that. Now, tomorrow at 1 p.m., I am speaking to Matt Errett. We're calling this kind of this carnage. You'll understand why. But this is where this was recorded just before I went to China.

38:02And so it's covering Mark Carney's speech in the World Economic Forum. But also looking at the implications of AI and universal basic income and technocracy and Canada is helping to drive that forward. So join us at 1 p.m. for that tomorrow. And I'm going to apologize to Jeremy because I've forgotten to put the graphic in for his interview at 7 p.m. tonight. But Jeremy will have a program at 7 p.m. as usual this evening. Carl is getting back into the way of Silicon Stale and that will be returning on Monday. So that's that for the ads. Have you got an answer to that? I just had a huge thank you to all of the UK column audience that emailed me or sent me messages about my interview with Erin, the American lady from far from Eden talking about feminism and some fairly challenging things being discussed. But I've had some really positive feedback.

39:03So as promised, I'll see whether we can do a part two on that. So thank you for watching and thank you for engaging. And if you haven't seen the interview, it's on the from page of the UK column website. Now, of course, everybody knows that last week, Charles and I and a couple of others were in China for a week. Brand showed a little bit of footage street footage from from fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. Mike, it was very interesting that when we got that footage. It was it was a fascinating week. Now, we were in Chongqing, which is which was the capital of China during the Second World War. And of course, for China, the Second World War lasted from 1937 until 1945. So they had a couple of extra years of it because of Japan. But it and as a result, it has a huge number of cavernous spaces where there were bomb shelters for the city at the time. And those have now been converted into interesting places.

40:08We'll show a bit more of that in the coming days. But just to give you a little bit of an idea of what we were seeing at the time, I have to say, Brian, China, the Chinese people that we met, very optimistic about life and star contrast to European countries in many ways. Maybe that's a function of of the fact that they're that they're in a growing position. You know, they're coming out of the past in a particular way. And so they don't have potholes of the roads and their streets are clean. And they still take some pride in the in the state of their roads and so on. But it was a fascinating, fascinating week, as you can see on screen now. This is a city of 10 million people or so, maybe a little bit more at this stage. But the actual broader area of Chongqing is I think something like 24 million people.

41:09So a huge number of people in this area. It's on the Axie River. In fact, it's on the confluence of two rivers. And well, it's only in the last decade, 15 years that they've had sufficient bridges to cross that river. And so in the past, they have relied on a cable car, which we took. But you know, hugely interesting. The city obviously lights up at night as you just saw there. And quite an amazing place, particularly vibrant tonight. Well, Mike, I'm going to say very fascinating for me because of course I was part of the team back here at UK column bases it were. And so it was interesting, not only to see those clips, but subsequently to be talking to you about how you found it. And one of the things which caught my attention, you could see it briefly in one of those little video clips was that you've got cities which have been greatly developed.

42:12So you've got very high skyscrapers. A lot of those are dwellings for people. You've got malls equivalent to Western malls. But you have a huge number of small traders, including the people who are trading in street markets, that still seem to be able to run. This was one of the points that Chris made to me. It's how interesting when we look at a UK city now, increasingly with boarded up shops or the little shops have gone. There may be a mall. But essentially local traders can't afford the rents. They can't afford to just run their little corner shop if I call it that. But in China, this was possible. And that says to me that the small business man woman has access to cheaper goods within the supply market. So how is it the Chinese are able to do that? But we can't do that here in UK, do you think? Well, that's a very good question.

43:12The thing about comment on the UK is that you go to any time or city in the UK and it's the same shop hoardings, it's the same names and every time. So we've effectively become, you know, it doesn't matter where you live anymore. You don't, and there's very little that's unique to the individual place. Unless you go to somewhere like Totteness, which I have to admit is some sort of character. Yes. But that was that was very striking. Now, I'm going to say I wouldn't want to live in a city like Chongqing. It has its, it clearly has its appeals for people because it's a modern city and it's led up at night and it's got a vibrant night life. And it's safe to be on the streets at night. But, you know, that's more a statement of my reluctance to be in any city, really, I'd prefer to be in the countryside. But, you know, but at the same time, the fact that every street has its own markets,

44:13its own restaurants, its own places is just something you don't see in the West anymore. Yes. And I said this the week that you were actually away, Mike. But the fact that this trip has happened and this has allowed the UK column team to get into China to see and experience some of the things for ourselves as opposed to just taking the rhetoric that comes out of the UK state at the moment. But this has been very a really interesting experience and this has only come about because of the excellent support that UK column members have given us. So, I stressed and I think this is still really important that members of the UK column team have been reporting from overseas, whether it's been for an SR out in Syria or in the Middle East or Patrick Henningson has been in Russia and he's been into the Donbass area. We've now been able to take a look for ourselves into China. This is a really major step forward

45:14in the capability of the UK column. How's this come about, Mike? It's come about because of the tremendous support everybody's given us over 20 years. And the fact that we've now got the capability to start to get news from overseas ourselves. So, I know that there were quite a lot of people seem to be surprised that UK column would want to do this. But for me, this makes absolute sense. How can you talk accurately about a country if you haven't experienced some of it yourself? Yes, I would agree with that. I mean, what I would absolutely say about that though, Brian, is you cannot get, you know, you've got to live somewhere. Actually, I think to get a real impression of it. Yes, but it does give a flavor of it. And so, you know, I'm not going to sit and pretend that I know really anything about China as such. But I get an impression from being there,

46:14but it's just an impression. Yeah. And as you've said, there's some aspects of it that seem really good. And there's other aspects where you say wouldn't want that type of system operating in UK. But now we've got the experience. I think we're getting it. Whether we want it or not, that's the same thing. Well, the other thing which is greatly abusing me is the fact that UK column has taken the initiative to actually go to China as opposed to Russia or Syria or the Middle East is we've now had people believing we're being funded by China, which is completely untrue and ridiculous. But this is what part of the hype that's built up around China is bad. UK is good, America is good. And people get on board with this narrative and then they're coming up with ideas which are completely, well, I cannot comprehend how this can happen. But there we are. So will UK column being do?

47:16Will UK column be having more visits overseas? I certainly hope so. And I certainly hope the UK column reporters whoever they are are going to be able to report from more places where we have little knowledge apart from what we can ascertain over the internet and we get through the controlled mainstream media here in UK. So I'm going to say, well done to the team. I'm a little bit jealous, but somebody had to stay with UK column, Plymouth to keep it operating. Yes, indeed. Well, yes. John is for the banter session on Friday for a little bit more on this. And so on, but sticking with China in a sense because, of course, as you say, British government absolutely making sure that we are, that we're going to believe that China is the enemy that we've got to fight. The UK intelligence agencies have given what they described as a high level security briefing to university leaders and political parties.

48:18And this is because of the expressions of concern about foreign interference and academic research and democratic processes. This was led by the MI5 and the National Cyber Security Center. And it's part of what they call a wider government effort to reinforce, well, it's, okay, this is my words. It's, it's the idea that there is more hostile influence now than there has been in the past. Or, I mean, but this is silly because we've always influenced each other's countries. Every country has soft power networks. Every country has spying. So, but, you know, the, the idea is that we've got to be scared of certain countries. So anyway, more than 70 vice-chancellors and senior university leaders attended the briefing and it was given by security minister Dan Jarvis and skills minister Jackie Smith. I'm not sure what skills she has, but anyway. They outlined how foreign states might attempt to shape

49:22or censor research and teaching and how academic institutions can resist and report that type of interference. And then a separate briefing was given to officials from all the major political parties in the UK. And, and so on. So the government denonized a three million-pound package of measures to counter this academic interference, including a new academic interference reporting route. This is what is this prevent for prevent for China or something I don't know, but anyway. This allows them to report their concerns directly to the security services and to government departments and they're also going to give additional advice and training and so on. And now Dan Jarvis said that the government was taking what he called tough action to make the UK a harder target for foreign interference. And he said we have to be clearied that our world class universities and democratic processes are being targeted by states

50:23who want to undermine our way of life. I'd like to know what evidence he has for that. So anyway, you know, in the meantime, of course, everybody's looking at Russia and China, but nobody's looking at Israel. And here we have the House of Lords. We got to remind ourselves the House of Lords worried about anti-Semitism on university campuses. But, you know, none of this briefing for academics and for politicians went into conservative fronts of Israel by calm all the other Israeli influence operations, which are absolutely operational within the UK just as one example. Because those are the right influence operations as far as the intelligence agencies are concerned partly and we don't have anything to be concerned about there. So, you know, every country does this and it's ridiculous in my opinion to be only focusing on, you know, one or two.

51:24Yeah, but it fits the fear narrative, doesn't it, Mike? And helping ramp up fear in the population. Well, I want to come back on the subject of vetting. This is the means by which the government looks at an individual to decide what type of material they can handle, just restricted, relatively low-key or confidential, a bit more serious or secret, which obviously has a direct impact on people's safety or the safety of the nation and top secret when we will be into such things as nuclear deterrent, for example, people are going to handle material at those levels or get involved in projects at those levels, get vetted. Now, my point is that a couple of days ago I pointed out that even the Institute for Government was actually saying there was something going on inside our security vetting system.

52:24It wasn't working properly. People have been talking about it collapsing. Well, if you can't vet people for their reliability and loyalty to the country in government jobs or military jobs, you cannot defend the country. So this wasn't just a breakdown in organizational structures inside government. This is actually a complete breakdown in the ability of the state to protect its secrets and military secrets and therefore protect the population. So this was a very serious event. Never made mainstream reporting, credit to the Institute of Government for reporting on it. If we just pop that slide back up on screen and we can bring in a little bit here, this is one of the things that I highlighted that all of a sudden the vetting organization was getting very interested in diversity and they were very, very concerned underlined

53:25that there was still white male and middle aged men involved in vetting others. And the problem with those white male middle aged men was that they had a particular approach to their country and loyalty, formed by their own personal experiences and background, both personal and professional. And the warning was not what's happening with people who are not loyal or people who can't be trusted, know the danger was white middle aged males. And the truth is that within the vetting system of defense of the nation state, it would have been white middle aged males with huge experience of their countries, whether it was Russia or the Eastern European countries. They would have been the people who were leading the evaluation of other people as to whether they were reliable and safe

54:25in handling classified information and nation secrets. Now again, credit to the Institute of Government because they linked through to this particular document, its intelligence and security committee appallement. But what is the whole report about? It's not about protecting the nation and improving direct and performance to vet. And we've got Mandelson as a classic example, apparently, Mikey used a code word and people can't work out what he was talking about. So let's pop this report back on screen, please. And we're just adding here the contents. So the intelligence community diversity and the intelligence community and then we've got the business case for diversity. So now we're not into a government structure. We're actually into running this organization as a business. And this is chapter three, the business case here.

55:28And it says the world, the private sector may have recognized the business case for diversity. Many organizations still have some way to go to achieve diverse and inclusive workforces. And then it says in November 2016, the government commissioned a report into the ethnic diversity of UK boards led by Sir John Parker, chair of Anglo-American. And this is Mike absolutely Ben's point that we now see that we don't know whether we're dealing with government or we're dealing with big corporations. And if we're dealing with big corporations clearly, they're not keeping UK safe because the vetting systems no longer working. If I put this one on screen, I've just taken some quotes out of this particular document. So we've got Andrew Parker, director general MI5, Jeremy Fleming, government communications headquarters. There's quite a few of them there. But Mark said, well, there,

56:28we are committed to ensuring that the most talented people join the National Security Secretary Act. And we will support them to develop the most robust policy advice for the National Security Council. Our ways of working must embed creativity and challenge. Well, they've challenged themselves so much that the system doesn't work. But with regard to diversity, they want more and more diversity, which effectively means bringing in more and more people for whom they cannot properly check their backgrounds. And we've even seen this now with a new head of MI6 where they say casually, well, of course, she wasn't, I've forgotten the lady's name, but you'll help me out. It is a matter of our lives, yes. Says, well, she wasn't too sure of her family's background in Ukraine and with really terrible things going on. And now, apparently, she is trustworthy enough

57:30by the same faulty vetting system to be running a key security service. Now, let's come back to said, well, Mike, and back in 2020, you had something to say. Let's have a look at this clip. Well, look, Pierce, you mentioned Mark said, well, so let's bring him on screen. Now, we've shown variations of this already, but I just want to remind everybody once again how powerful this man actually is. So he is National Security Advisor, therefore head of the National Security Council and therefore has control of effective control of the intelligence services, GCHQ, security service, secret intelligence service, and the new joint biosecurity center will be talking a little bit more about shortly. But the first hint of the Conduct Disinformation Program internationally came with Andy Price's Conduct Disinformation and Media Development Program

58:32within the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which ultimately comes under the remit of Mark said, well, because he's the head of the civil service. And it was that program which was funding the Integrity Initiative and similar programs. And then, of course, Mark said, well, it's also head of the Cabinet Office and so he therefore has responsibility for this rapid response unit for the National Security Communications Team, ultimately for 77 Brigade and 13 signals as well, which I'm saying this forms effectively the UK government's propaganda network both domestically and internationally. Now, of course, said, well, it's gone and they've reorganized things somewhat, but actually that graphic isn't so dissimilar these days, it's just got two people at the top instead of one. Yeah, so you've got a highly pyramid style organization controlling misinformation and propaganda. You don't want a properly functioning security service because if the security services were doing their job,

59:36they would have been rooting out the likes of Jimmy Savall and Epstein and all the people connected to that in order to protect the nation's state. So I'll just end with the last comment on this Intelligence Committee document. We pop that one up on screen. And the comment here is that the UK Intelligence Community should reflect the society it protects and I'm going to say, well, I think it does because at the moment we've got UK society being ripped apart from the inside treason in my opinion and essentially we shouldn't expect any protection from the intelligence services because clearly they're either turning a blind eye or they are complicit in the hollowing out to this country. So the idea that they didn't know what Epstein was doing and they didn't know who was involved to me is just it's no rational person in this country

1:00:40should believe that. You've got one on idea, I think, Mike. Oh, well, yeah, we'll just finish off for this one. It is worth mentioning and just to finish off, HMRC is now introducing one log in for customers very pleased about that because in the past you've had to have a 12 digit number that you've got to have to type in and all this kind of stuff. And now it's all nice and convenient for you Brian because you can sign up to the UK government's one log in. If you're a new customer, if you're talking about business and government departments and HMRC has customers, of course. And if you're a new customer, you can now sign up using one log in and have your identity validated that way. But of course, you've got to get the app on your phone in order for your phone to talk with their online platform. And it's clear that the whole thing is sucking up more and more personal data on each individual. Absolutely. That's it's got to be one log in for every government agency

1:01:42and every government service that you're interfacing with at HMRC, probably the most hungry of the lot of them. But anyway, we'll talk more about that in extra in a couple of minutes. Thank you very much Liz and Brian for joining today and everybody that's watched. If your UK call number stay on the live stream, we will have extra in a few minutes time. Otherwise, don't forget Jarmt tonight and my energy with Madera tomorrow and we'll be back at 1 p.m. for another UK column news on Friday. See you then.

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