UK Column News - 9th March 2026

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Good afternoon today is Monday, the 9th of March, 2026, just after 1 o'clock. Welcome to UK Column News. I'm a host, Brian Garrish, delighted to have with me in the studio Ben Rubin. Welcome Ben.

Thank you very much.

Good afternoon today is Monday, the 9th of March, 2026, just after 1 o'clock. Welcome to UK Column News. I'm a host, Brian Garrish.

delighted to have with me in the studio Ben Rubin. Welcome Ben.

Thank you, Brian. It's always a pleasure. Sunday is Sunday. Monday is the highlight of my week.

Although Sunday is pretty good because I get to think about Monday.

Okay, excellent. Well, you're here. That's the main thing.

We've got a busy Monday's news today. We're going to have a look at the war in Iran from the point of view of causes of the war.

We'll discussion around causes. We're going to have a look at legality issues.

We're going to have a look at the Blair storm at war of words.

We're going to be looking a little bit about site press and some of the chaos in the UK military.

We're going to be looking at the cost of the war. So quite quite a lot to be told. I think about Iran.

And Ben, you're going to be having a look at third empire, the third British empire, the touch of the Commonwealth.

Look at restore Britain. We've got some really important news to do with the family courts.

And we're going to be ending up today's news with a look at voting for 16 year olds. So that's quite a packet.

Well, let's kick straight off with a look at a pretty tough headline by the express. Here it is.

Kia storm worse than Hitler appeasing prime minister.

And from a man who we should know, and of course, absolutely right, we should know this man.

Now, what has caused the war?

I went looking over the weekend for some explanations as to what was actually going on.

And today we've got quite a lot of video footage to share with you.

So let's kick off with channel falls take on things.

There's a war in the Middle East. Operation epic fury has already led to the depths of more than a thousand civilians and eliminated one of the most powerful leaders in modern history.

Donald Trump and the Israelis say the conflict is about security, stability, and that they're provided in the people of Iran with an opportunity for change.

But the reasons why this war has started are all over the place.

Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. This is not a so-called regime change war. Take back your country.

Eliminate the threat of Iran's short range ballistic missiles.

We did not start a war. We're trying to stop a war.

So in this full site, let's talk about what the Trump administration claims is driving this conflict.

And why this actually looks more like a president ripping up the rulebook to cement his place in the history books.

Trump seeks the stature or the historical legacy of a figure like Reagan.

This is the biggest role of the dice from a president who feels right now invincible.

But has unleashed chaos across the region, he barely understands, risking the lives and futures of millions of people across the Middle East.

So channel four, obviously a bit confused, but their final take is, well, the war in Iran or war against Iran at the moment is just down to Donald Trump effectively.

He's worried about his position is alternatively he's very overconfident about his position.

He can do anything. He can move these huge military assets around the world.

So it's just a, well, it's just a little bit of Trump saber rattling.

Let's have a look at this second video clip where somebody is saying something rather different.

This is a long term game because what we want to do is get such massive oil reserves in Iran out of the hands of terrorists.

And so, and so what we're going to experience here in the short term is a highly outweighed of the long term benefit because ultimately we're not going to have to worry about these issues in the state of her moves because we're going to get all of the oil out of the hands of terrorists.

So interesting little clip there Ben and while it's to do with the oil and I think many people would actually say this seems to be part of the pattern of the US over recent years or we go back as to the trouble in Iraq.

And at the end of the day, it's who is in control of the oil, of course, in Ukraine, it's using control of the rare earth minerals, the mining assets.

But this is about a very powerful country, the USA with its supporters seemingly deciding who it can strip out resources from.

Now, one of the things that's interesting is when you go looking for legal comment or comment under the law as to what's happening, I came across just security.

Now, I'm not saying that this organization is trustworthy, but from anything else, it's funded by open society, but I was interested in their position.

So here we've got the logic of the United Kingdom's legal position is clear by distinguishing between offensive and defensive action against Iran.

The United Kingdom is taking and supporting only military action that falls within the exercise of individual and collective self defense against unlawful attacks by Iran, but not the wider US Israeli offensive campaign.

And that takes a little bit of thinking through, but I'll give you the second part.

In short, the United Kingdom is at best walking a legal tightrope.

At worst, it is attempting to draw an impossible distinction as one of their writers, Mr. Hake had argued earlier, his position is doctrinally coherent in the abstract in practice, however, maintaining a distinction between offensive and defensive operations would require would require a degree of control and situation awareness over US military activity conducted from British bases.

That the UK may simply not possess the risk is that having opened the door to limited defensive support, the UK now finds that door difficult to close.

So that's a pretty interesting comment. And of course, many people in UK utterly confused by what Starmer really meant by saying we were being defensive when clearly we were helping the Americans to attack Iran.

So this is part of the confusion in the legal world. Yes, but at least he was being doctrinally coherent in the abstract. So that's OK, though.

Thank you for that. Well, keep that in your mind as we go to this clip with Laura Kuhnsberg from the BBC who's interviewing Israel's president.

And in this clip, there's some very interesting body language and language. Let's have a look at this.

The United Kingdom is not at all convinced in government that you had the legal right to do this. There is now chaos and danger across a whole region.

And Iran was at the negotiating table when you began this attack. How can you justify that?

You know, there's these questions that I can't repeatedly from British press mostly about the legality of the action.

It's quite amazing when you think about the fact that Iran did not adhere to any rule of international law in your own prime minister mentioned that in the last year only there were way above 10 events or 20 events for which are suspected as terrible attacks of Iran in Britain.

You ask yourself, why? Why did they have to attack Britain in the last year only? They've done that all over the world with their empire of evil, with their proxies, violating every rule of law.

And just two months ago, killing about 50,000 of their own citizens, just like that. So to ask about the legality of an action which is clearly self-defense, which is not only self-defense for us, but self-defense for Europe.

But many people in many democracies around the world think that having a framework where there are rules for democracies through a base still matters.

And you have been expanding this war. You have attacked Lebanon again. Hundreds of people have been killed and thousands of people have been forced to leave their homes.

Why does Israel have the right to start dropping bombs on another sovereign country beyond Iran?

Here's another unbelievable question. We didn't do that. We were attacked very mentally by missiles from Lebanon, from Hisbalah.

When the sovereign Lebanese government says that they object to it totally, but they don't have the power to do it. We're doing their work for them.

And how do the civilians are suffering?

We have to up. Don't you understand that there is an empire of evil means proxies, armed to the neck, with billions of dollars of Iranian people's money.

Simply to create havoc, terror, pain, bloodshed, all over the world, any around the region. Unfortunately, this is a true tragedy.

There was an agreement signed with Lebanon, with Hisbalah just a year ago.

And they violated it. All of a sudden, of course, under the instruction of the Iranians, of course.

They sent dozens of missiles on Israel, and they keep on doing it on the hour, every hour, all the time, towards our northern border and the rest of the country.

So we have the full right to defend ourselves.

So I found that an interesting clip, because personally, I haven't seen this lady get so motivated in questioning somebody.

She seemed to be pretty hot under the collar and look at the reply that we get back from the president that basically Israel is saving us.

It saved us with our own security services, which are locked into Israel.

It saved us from multiple attacks, British public, never given what evidence there is to support such claims.

But Israel is essentially protecting the Western world from all of these overseas threats.

And he's coming back with some real aggression in my book, but it was interesting that there's signs, I think, here that even the BBC is now confused as to what this war is about and who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.

Speaking of bad guys, let's bring in Tony Blair, because of course he's the one who's been stabbing stormer in the back for not getting fully involved.

This is the London economic here with, of course, Tony Blair says UK should have backed the US war with Iran from the start.

And if we just have a look at this video clip from 2013, it's almost way back then that Blair knew what was coming.

Do you believe that Israel is genuinely planning to do some kind of preemptive strike based on the rhetoric we're now hearing?

And if they do, what should the reaction be particularly of America, but also other ally countries?

Well, is Israel absolutely determined that Iran should not acquire nuclear weapons capability yet?

I mean, how they prevent that is another matter.

But I mean, it is clear that Iran continues to work towards getting that capability and for Israel.

I mean, the President of Iran just a few days back was questioning Israel's right to exist, so you can understand why they feel this is an existential question for them.

Now, I still think it's possible that a combination of sanctions and negotiations can resolve this, but you've got to say that time is marching on and so is their nuclear weapons program and Israel will feel obviously alarmed and threatened by it.

If they do something, should America do anything? Or does America keep out of this?

We're not, we're not that point yet.

The United States of America, by the way, has also given an absolutely clear and firm statement on this that Iran with a nuclear weapon is unacceptable.

And by the way, I'm quite sure President Obama, when he says that, he means it and intends to stand by it.

So I think America is also giving a very strong message to Iran, but everybody wants to resolve this without a conflict, because that is sensible and the best way of doing it,

because the consequences of any conflict would be very serious, a low profoundly unpredictable.

So fascinating, they're according to Blair, it should be done by a negotiation, but of course, Iran has been negotiating with the West and was attacked during those negotiations with the West.

And then of course, he's saying about the threat of nuclear weapons, but just a little while ago, America attacked Iran and claimed it had destroyed Iran's nuclear capability.

So just fascinating to see what was in his head back in that time, but everything is on the back of what Israel does, what Israel does, and when he was asked about the US coming in, he completely ignored the point.

If we pop up some of his comments directed towards Starmer, this is what he actually had to say, I think we should have backed America from the very start.

We've got to be very clear about this as a country, we're depending on the American alliance for our country, they're not just an ally, they're an indispensable ally right.

And they were asking to use our basis to refuel, that's the Americans, of course, it's not like it was in Vietnam, not like the Iraq campaign where we had thousands of British troops.

If they are your ally and they are in dispensable cornerstone fuel security, you had better show up.

Now the interesting thing is that Blair was speaking at a private Jewish media event here, and although it was briefly mentioned in the British press, you had to dig to find out what was going on.

So I just like to bring up on screen Jewish news, this is the news organization, which held the private meeting in which Blair was speaking.

And the Jewish news funded by the Jacob foundation and the object of that foundation is to promote cohesion within the Jewish community between the Jewish community and other communities in the UK and support the vital work of many Jewish charities and other institutions.

And to find the Jacob foundation, you need to go and have a look at details from the Charities Commission, but amongst other things, they show the level of funding, which has had a pretty dramatic increase peaking at 2023.

So clearly this organization has seen as important. Now compare Blair's statements with Lord Wilson, the shadow attorney general, and these are some comments that he was he was quoted as saying these comments by the

excuse me by the legal organization we've just covered. And he said that international law ought to provide a mechanism to restrain an if necessary end, despotic and tyrannical regimes such as that in Iran.

If the doctrines of international law prove unable to restrain Iranian terrorism at mass murder and tie the hands of democracies or forcing them to stand and watch Iranian atrocities.

International law will have failed. It would have become a fundamentally immoral system of law and one which is worse than worthless in the modern world.

And just to finish this quote to be clear, I don't believe that it is. I think international law is important and both can and should provide a legal adjust legal order.

I do, however, have serious questions as to the moral attitudes of some of its expositors to many international lawyers serenely promote an analysis, which ultimately protects tyrants. So that's quite a statement. It's clearly pro Israel. Let's have a look at the video clip of Lord Wilson speaking publicly.

We are here tonight for two reasons. First of all, because on Hanukkah, we celebrate our faith publicly. We light our menorah in the window in the doorway and yes, also in the public square.

So that's why we're here tonight. That's one reason why we're here tonight. But there's another reason we're here tonight and we all know it. It's because what happened in Australia on the first night of Hanukkah.

And let's be clear what happened. Jews celebrating their festivals were gunned down simply because they were Jews.

And we are able to be here in safety because and let me thank them publicly. Here we have the community security trust.

Without the community security trust, there would not be viable Jewish life in this country.

And while it is important that this government, like previous governments, provides funds to the community security trust.

The answer to Jewish security and Jewish safety is not to build yet higher walls around our synagogues. It is not to put yet more guards outside our schools.

The answer to Jewish safety and Jewish security is to ask ourselves and not just ourselves as Jews, but UK society. Why do we need this security? What are the root causes of the extremist ideologies which drive anti-Semitic violence?

I want to see as all being more muscular in defending the values that make the UK the society we want it to be.

A lot to take in in that talk as you saw that there was an edit in the middle. I didn't take change the context of what he was saying only showed the two clips.

But essentially he is saying that if it wasn't for CST, the community security trust, no Jew in the country would be safe.

So this is saying that there is a complete failure of the police in this country, a failure of our security services, a failure of the military to protect Jews.

And he then says that the Jewish community has got to be a lot more robust in establishing what they want.

And then he asks that the incredible question, which is essentially we need to understand why people are upset with the Jewish state and elements of the Jewish society.

So apparently when he can't understand the deaths of tens of thousands of people in the Middle East or the continuing creation of war around Israel with Western backing, he simply can't understand this.

But I have to say what an insult to say to the country that it is only one Jewish organization which is protecting Jews. I find it unbelievable.

And is this attitude going to be taken into the law system in UK?

I think that's without question. Yes. Indeed.

Well, we lend on that note a lot more to discuss, but Ben, you're going to be having a look at the British Empire.

The British Empire, yes, it's getting flags out people. It's Empire Day. Actually, it's not its Commonwealth Day 2026, but it's basically Empire Day as I'll come on to.

Let's have a little look at this clip and it will explain what the whole thing is about.

The Commonwealth is a family of 56 independent countries representing 2.7 billion people across the globe.

Commonwealth Day is observed on the second Monday in March each year by people all over the Commonwealth in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Americas, Europe and the Pacific.

It's a moment to celebrate the strong unity, diversity and shared values of our Commonwealth family.

This year, Commonwealth Day will be marked on the 9th of March with the Special Service of Westminster Abbey alongside faith and civic gatherings, cultural events and flag raising ceremonies around the world.

The theme unlocking opportunities together for a prosperous Commonwealth highlights how our member countries can work together to tackle today's challenges and create lasting prosperity for all.

Join the celebrations of social media using hashtag Commonwealth Day.

Commonwealth Day, hashtag Commonwealth Day. Unfortunately, no one has used that hashtag, so they've not been very successful with their social media promotion.

But it is today this very day, what's not to love diversity, community, opportunity, 2.7 billion people, 56 countries, 33 island nations, small island nations that form the Commonwealth.

But there has been fury spot over the weekend because the Commonwealth Day service at Westminster Abbey will not be broadcast and instead has been replaced with a repeat of a show called Escape to the Country.

Which I don't want to BBC, I don't know what that is, but yes, anyway, you probably get the idea and obviously everyone is up in the homes about this.

Of course, the poor BBC hasn't got enough money to actually cover that event. They couldn't get a couple of camera men there for a few thousand pounds, they couldn't cover it.

But let's have a look at the express because the express was sounding off.

BBC breaks silence after axing live coverage of all families, Commonwealth Day service.

And I had to bring this on screen because it made me laugh because if you read it, it says today the corporation is opted to air is capped to the country instead.

So the poor old express couldn't actually, couldn't get it spelling right as it came out with a normal report on this.

So just a bit of black humor here from the UK column, but it did make me laugh.

So my goodness, lots of things happening. Nobody wants to see the royalty at work.

Yeah, BBC's got no money to cover it.

Right. And I think that's probably important. I think that decision has probably got something to do with the fact that we've seen quite a lot of the royalty recently and they want to maintain a low profile this year, but just in case you forgot what they look like.

There's some clips from last year at the same service at Westminster Abbey, so Charlie Boy Camilla and then the nations with flags parading through Westminster Abbey,

pomp, pageantry, ceremony, multi-ethnic clergy.

And I think that the royals are probably sitting there wondering which of these law is going to have the honor of cutting them around on their shoulders at some point and not too distant future because whenever I think of the Commonwealth, this is what I think of.

It's just a throwback, isn't it?

Yeah, it's pretty amazing, Ben.

Yeah, I think we're in an era where we have to start questioning quite a lot around the raw family and what they think they're doing.

Well, absolutely, because for me, ultimately, the Commonwealth is the Empire.

It's had a lick of pain and a rebrand and it uses a different tone of voice and what not, but essentially it's the same thing.

It's about a centralisation of power around Britain and to understand this better, you've got to go and look back.

Over a hundred years now, these things have been in the pipeline for quite some time.

Obviously, the Commonwealth itself was formed immediately after the Second World War, but a lot of that was driven by the thinking of this chap, his Alfred Zimmer, who was a professor of international relations.

He invented the science of international relations, something that was perfected in institutions like Chatham House, where he was a co-founder, which was one of the outcomes of the First World War.

He was involved in establishing UNESCO as part of the UN after the Second World War.

He coined the welfare state, which was a big part of this transition.

Previously, we were a warfare state, and the Empire would driven through military might, and the transition has been towards a welfare state, which is about social justice, which is another term that he helped to popularise.

He actually wrote a lot of these ideas down in a book called The Third British Empire, came out in the mid-1920s, where he talked about this transition away from an empire that was centrally managed from London with the British nation at its core, this enforced through military power, towards something that is distributed out into the dominions, is managed through institutions and think tanks using soft power, trade deals, sustainable development and that kind of thing.

But again, ultimately delivering the same outcome, total centralisation of wealth and power within that system under this neo-imperial regime, overseeing ultimately by the British monarch Charles III, eased the head of the Commonwealth, very important point.

Now, he was also Zimmer, writing in this magazine, when he popularised the term Commonwealth, it was because he was writing in the Round Table magazine, which was created by the Milner Group in 1910, I think it was the first launch, and this is still active today.

He actually traced a direct lineage from the work that was coming out of people like Cecil Rhodes and Lord Milner and the Round Table and then into Cham House and whatnot back in the, just over a century ago now, in the past 100 years, right the way through to the way that things are running today, across 56 nations, 2.7 billion people.

Bernard, this helps explain why the foreign Commonwealth and development office is pumping in billions and billions and billions into these overseas projects, never declared to the UK public.

Of course, Mike Robinson pointed out when he started to put in freedom of information request to track down these billions, all of a sudden the FCDO closed the database to be released at some future date.

So, there's the organisation and there's billions to back it.

Absolutely, absolutely. All that money going out to lubricate the deals and the conversations around them ultimately.

There's a term that we'll wish to use is which is a business wrapped in diplomacy and a lot of this is about making money, right?

This is a great quote here from Simon Wanzer, Ke'pewe, who's a former vice president of Zambia actually died in 1980.

I think he died quite young. I think he was probably too good at calling out the Commonwealth and the British Empire on its nonsense.

And he said, if we don't handle our independence very well, colonizers will come back in the form of investors, which is exactly what's happened.

Yes, you've moved from gunboat diplomacy to impact investing, corporate loans, you've got the Commonwealth Enterprise and Investment Council absolutely at the heart of this.

They're running a concurrent event with all the other Commonwealth stuff that's going on around Commonwealth Day.

This council is based in the Guildhall at the City of London.

It's the primary administrative building of the City of London. That's where the Commonwealth Enterprise and Investment Council is based.

This is about money, but then it's also about exerting influence across all other nation states internationally.

We've got control over the Commonwealth, but then that is used to exert influence and ultimately control over the rest of the global population as well.

The best person to hear about that is Baroness Patricia Scotland, who is former Commonwealth Secretary-General, who described the Commonwealth as a petri dish that you can grow almost anything in.

You can come up with solutions that work not just for the Commonwealth, but for everybody.

Yes, so this is the mechanism through which Britain exerts international control and the two best examples of that for me are the Langkawi Declaration on the Environment in 1989.

The Commonwealth declared a climate emergency since the first time any kind of multinational body had come out and said there is a climate crisis.

Climate change is a real thing. We've got to do something about it. We've got to introduce this new sustainable development agenda.

In 2015, on a similar vein, a special session on climate change was held in Malta, which delivered a communique where Commonwealth heads of government committed themselves to a 1.5 degree rise in temperatures or lower on pre-industrial levels.

And then the month after that, those exact same commitments within encoded into the Paris Agreement and from there we have pretty much the entire climate change, gender, sustainable development goals, everything is kind of cascaded down from.

So the Commonwealth and incubator is just policies?

Exactly. And it creates a channel through which Britain can turn around and say, oh, well, we've got all of these island nations and people of colour who we're being nice to and have a democratic say in how our policies are being developed.

And they can turn around to the rest of the world and they can convince them that actually this is all transparent and above board whereas actually it's not.

And it delivers the outcomes that we've described. So, yeah, Commonwealth Day.

Third British Empire in all the name.

Okay. Thank you for that, Ben. Well, I just add a bit to that. This is a little video clip of Jeffrey Sacks talking about very wealthy people, very, very wealthy people as I've listened.

Already the 10 richest Americans have 2.3 trillion of wealth. That's a lot for 10 people, 10 individuals. That's not 10 companies. That's not 10 clans. That's 10 people.

But they also happen to own a lot more. They own the White House.

They install the Vice President. They determine US government policy.

They will own the cryptocurrencies, which will become our main currencies.

They own all of the big platforms on which we communicate.

They own YouTube, of course, which is the channel where I'm able to say sometimes things that are not in the US government's light.

But I don't know for how long they own my email address.

They own the full knowledge of every keystroke I've made in the last 10 years, no doubt. They own my privacy.

They own the newspapers like the Washington Post owned by Jeffrey Bezos.

They will own TikTok shortly, TikTok USA, because Larry Ellison is buying it on behalf of Benjamin Netanyahu.

And Ellison will give it to his son as a nice gift.

He's already given to his son Paramount Studios, Paramount Media and CBS News.

It's quite a world. And that's just 10 or so Americans.

So we're in a very strange concentration of power.

I think the likes of which we've never seen before. It has already destroyed democracy.

We are democratic and form only. But we don't have a sensible, non-democratic system.

We have a privatized system.

So a lot of interesting words there, but essentially what he's describing is immensely, immensely wealthy powerful people who are driving politics and put that under the heat of the war against Iran.

Who is actually driving it? Is it government or is it policies through the think tax?

Let's have a look at the Times radio.

And they were having a discussion with Larissa Brown, which was a bunch of number of topics.

But in one particular clip, there was some really quite interesting things that again, confusion in the media as to what's actually happening and why.

So let's join this video.

I mean, we've got so few frigates and destroyers and a lot of them are tied up in maintenance, long maintenance periods.

And we've got a problem with our submarines. There's not enough sailors.

Both of the aircraft carriers aren't currently out at sea. And I think our European allies have got frustrated and so too have our American partners.

And the wider region of criticized the UK government for failing to protect them from retaliatory Iranian strikes.

Cyprus isn't happy either. The country's high commissioner to the UK says the least his country expected was to provide a robust defense of the island that is home to two British bases.

The Defense Secretary John Helius traveled to Cyprus this morning and the Times Defense editor Larissa Brown is with him.

We can speak to Larissa now morning.

Good morning.

What's Ross John Helius doing in Cyprus?

This morning is meeting with local officials, including his defense counterpart.

Obviously he's flying into quite a tense time. He's come under a criticism or the Labour government has for not doing enough to protect the base.

And later on, we can't say too much for security reasons, but he will be speaking to troops here as well to talk to them about what they're doing and how it's all going.

Do you think you get a sense he's frustrated himself because a lot of people say John Helius is a good secretary of state for defense.

He would have been pushing for more action for more preparedness and may have been blocked by other people.

I think he decided a few weeks ago to send more F-35 jets here in Cyprus.

And I think from his perspective, he feels like he did send some assets here to protect the base.

Clearly, when he's obviously after the Navy, when the next ship is ready to go, he's been told that the ship that's held at the highest readiness

won't be able to leave until next week because it needs to come out of maintenance and needs to have all its weapons fitted before it heads to Cyprus.

And this drone we were initially told had hit the runway at the base, but actually now it emerges that it had hit a hunger.

And this inside the hunger were two US spy planes that aren't really talked about much, but they are there.

And they've been flying my understanding as part of Operation Epic Fury, they've been carrying out reconnaissance missions.

And we were told a bit more information about the drone late last night.

The drone is thought to have come not from Iran, but from either Lebanon or Western Iraq, which suggests it's an Iranian-backed militia, possibly his baller, rather than the Iranians themselves.

And also it was flying so low that it managed to evade the radar system at the base.

Again, there's so much to talk about here and we'll bring some of it into UK column extra after the news for our members.

But we've got first of all the chaos with the British military. We can't get any defensive weapons to Cyprus.

We can't get a frigate there. The frigate hasn't got the weapons.

So it's all delay and chaos, which is seemingly puzzling the times.

But then in that clip and amazing piece of information, we're told for the first time that the drone attack on Cyprus wasn't just a hit on a runway.

It was a hit on a hanger specifically used by top secret US reconnaissance aircraft.

That was really quite an amazing statement, which means whoever targeted the drone had top level information about where these very, very important assets were.

We'll talk more about that in extra.

But if we just finish off a little bit of a summary on the war itself, of course, one of the big things that really is not coming across in Western press is the sheer losses that the US is absorbing.

So down here on the left of the screen, we've got 1.1 billion facilities in Qatar.

We've got 500,282 million. All of this adding up to 2.5 billion pounds of damage in the first few days caused by Iran on the immense power of America, which is truly incredible.

And social media, swapping a lot of information, some of it coming, of course from mainstream like CBS here, but talking about US drones worth millions of millions of pounds being shot down.

But one of the key things that's happening in this war is that the Americans and their allies are shooting off air defense missiles at a rate which they can't resupply.

And a statistic here saying that Ukraine uses about 700 Patriot interceptors in four months, according to the UN commissioner.

And then we've got the Kiev independent here stating that more Patriot missiles been used in the Middle East in three days than in Ukraine since 2022.

If correct, this is astonishing because there is no way the Americans are going to resupply they don't have the factory capacity to build these missiles.

And Kiev post here also saying about 800 Patriot missiles were used in just three days of fighting in the Middle East more than Ukraine has had during the entire war.

Now the irony is that if Ukraine has been failing to defend itself against missile and drone attacks in the war, it's the Ukrainians themselves that are now going to be pulled into the Middle East.

In order to teach the Americans and presumably the UK how to fight against drones and possibly missiles. So this is quite astonishing here.

And so many questions to be asked, but of course what it's demonstrating is that Iran is absolutely no pushover and the Americans are in deep trouble, which another aircraft carrier, which is likely to be on its way soon is unlikely to stop.

So how is all this possible? Well, it's possible by huge sums of money coming in through the military industrial complex to keep the military running and keep those weapons factories running.

But at the end of the day, it's money driving the war. Let's have a look at this Tucker Carlson interview clip.

We're being honest, the global war against Israel's enemies cost us $8 trillion. That's why we're bankrupt. Yeah, I mean, here we are at 38 trillion and Tucker, that's the other amazing part.

So now in the last two weeks they give and Trump gave another 8.6 billion totally unaccounted. Where's that 8.6 billion coming from? Did anybody ever vote for that 8.6 billion? And then onivated he gave another 3.3 billion.

Where is this money coming from? Is anybody voting on this? What is going on?

Well, it's these are IOUs to countries that are buying our treasuries. Exactly. So that's the next layer of it. So you're telling us we have to borrow money from China and Japan so we can give money for free to Israel.

And then we pay the interest for the rest of our lives and they don't pay any interest. Well, why don't they borrowed from China and Japan? Exactly.

So that's a level of analysis, which is beyond the BBC all the times they simply can't get their heads around what's going on there, but leave you to think about that.

First of all, big thank you to our audience wherever you are in the world and especially everybody who is supporting the UK column by making a donation or joining us as a monthly annual member.

We can only do what we're doing here with your financial support and generosity of our members truly outstanding. So thank you all very much for that and we're hoping to grow in 2026 and that will be up to more people coming on board with the UK column team.

Now, military matters will be able to one o'clock tomorrow and interesting discussion. I'm not going to do too much of a spoiler on it, but you might like to listen in as to what was discussed between Charles ballot myself and some of it seemed to have amazing relevance to what it's taken place a few days later. So do have a look at that.

Now a thousand words a picture paints a thousand words has been a very popular edition of UK column and we've delighted that to say that Jake has been into the studio in order to paint me special experience got a little bit of a video clip here to show you what it's like to sit in the painter's chair.

This was very unusual language for anybody that I normally associated with. I can look at the camera and smile because it's equivalent to being the dentist chair now.

I mean, literally a scribble and a splodge and my son's game. I could have done.

Can you for like 2000 pounds? Well, I was just absolutely bugling.

There you go. Well, brilliant on camera. I sure say thank you very much.

And now sorry to do a bit of bridge government and redact some of the information in that little video clip. But the rule is that there's no revealing of that portrait until Jake's completed it, which he should have done by now.

But of course that will be become visible during in the main video about the painting. It was fun.

A unique experience. Ben restoring Britain. It's on the way.

Well, apparently yes, we talked about Bristol Britain quite a lot and we'll continue to do so.

There you go. Rupert Lowe wants you to restore Britain before I get into this. I'll just say there's a really interesting kind of picture that they've used there is obviously a match up of Kitchener and Obama.

Kitchener who invented the concentration camp and recruited millions to die in the trenches of World War One and Obama who invaded seven countries and brought about killing people with predator drones and they decided to use that.

Yes, quite interesting. Anyway, last week I talked about this organization. This is Wild Kingdom.

And they appeared out of wild east, which is based in Norfolk and it's run by that guy, Hugh Somalatin, who is deputy lieutenant, not lieutenant.

I've got picked up on that. So I'm very Americanized, deputy lieutenant of the County of Norfolk.

And he's big boss is this lady, Pippadana, who is the Lord Lieutenant of Norfolk, who's the patron of the Norfolk Community Foundation, which has been closely linked in the past to common purpose.

And I said, given the Rupert Lowe is farming in Norfolk and he's an MP for Norfolk, does he have anything to say about this.

And I was pulled up on this quite rightly, because actually Rupert Lowe isn't farming in Norfolk at all. He's on the other side of the country, just outside of Cheltenham, which interestingly is,

just on a four hours away from great yarn from his constituency. So the first thing I'll say is, may a cold part. I got that wrong.

So apologies for misleading you. Wasn't my attention whatsoever. But this doesn't actually open. It didn't really undermine the message, because it actually opens up a bunch of other conversations for me, questions for me.

The first one being, how can you be an effective MP in a constituency that you are literally the other side of the country from?

An interesting question. I'd say to you many years ago, we had the leader of Cornwall County Council, who lived somewhere up in Newcastle, and they flew down and did their job in the week and then flew back out of the horrible county to go home.

Right. Okay. Yeah. And surely there's an issue there in terms of your understanding of the local people and the ability to get your arms around the job.

Of course. Yeah. Well, there you go. And actually, I'm reminded of this quote from GK Cheston, what we should try to do is make politics as local as possible.

Keep the politicians near enough to kick them. The villagers who met under the village tree could also hang their politicians to the tree.

It's terrible to contemplate how many, how few politicians are hanged. We can't condone that in any way. No, no, certainly not. No, no, no.

This was another time, another, another world. Absolutely. Yeah. But you know, I think the question has to be asked, how can you do that job if you're in the other side of the country, strikes me that would be rather difficult to do, particularly with all the other stuff that Mr. Lowes got going on as we'll get into the other point about the

report that I made last week is that actually that wild kingdom thing, although it is originally based in Norfolk, it is part of the national network and it's linked into this thing, which is rewilding Britain, which is operative in

Gloucestershire, and they've actually got a whole bunch of projects going, including this, which is about ecosystem and natural capital mapping.

It's not in your landscapes, it's not nature anymore, Brian, it's natural capital and they've been examining it, mapping it from space.

So there's this map that you can go and look at, provide links to all this, you can go and see it and you can look at this is just Gloucestershire, but we'll see they've done the hold of the country.

And importantly, this is going on globally as well. They've actually got the infrastructure now to remotely analyze, to view, to assess all human settlements and natural assets as they like to call them anywhere on earth.

You know, that's been going on for quite some time, so whether you realize it or not, your house, whatever it is, whatever asset you might have, has probably been indexed in some way and it just sits in a database somewhere with a carbon rating attached to it.

And lo and behold, that little blue circle you can see in the middle of the kind of all kind of, kind of a hodgepodge that is Gloucestershire there on the diagram.

If we zoom into that, that is Rupert Lowe's farm. So he's right down in the mix there and you can see using the color coding that his farm is high priority for rewilding, which strikes me he should be interested in.

Maybe he just doesn't know this stuff.

Well, it's possible, isn't it? Because we've seen politicians before amazingly ignorant of policies that are beginning to swirl around them.

So we could say he doesn't know or he does know, but he's going to pretend he doesn't know either way it's up to the restore team, the people on the ground supporting restore to ask him what he's going to do about this.

Yeah, I think that I think that those questions definitely need to be asked. Luckily, he's not actually farming the land.

Right. It's just quite a thing to find out given he's really going to bat presenting himself as a farmer. He actually runs it 550 acres as a horse training center.

They breed train trade race horses and he's got a top Irish trainer, Fergalo Brian, he runs this and this is all on Rupert Lowe's land and they feed cakes to the horses and it's all lovely and it's quite an entertaining video.

This actually I'll put a link to the website. You can go and watch it.

So he's sort of presenting himself as a farmer, but then he's not doesn't appear to be completely on top of the issues relating to what's happening around farming, even in his own area.

And actually, but also he's not farming. He's running a horse racing setup, which I'm sure Basil will be very excited about. He likes to reflect.

Wasn't there a phrase quote by somebody who said let them eat cake? Yes, there was Mary Antoinette. Yeah, do you think we're heading towards another revolution?

Well, we had a very wealthy elite and they didn't know the difference between bread and cake prices.

Yeah, but it's cakes for the horses.

Case for the horses, quite exactly. So I think this is interesting.

You know, I've lifted the rock up when I'm digging around and strikes me.

Some of the things that have been communicated about Rupert Lowe are very different to what the actual reality is and I don't understand why that's happening.

It feels like you should probably be a bit more transparent.

Another important thing to note is that the Community Foundation Network mentioned Norfolk Community Foundation earlier.

That's actually part of a national network, which is centered around UK Community Foundations.

There are 47 of these across the country, including importantly in Gloucestershire, just to route this back to Mr. Lowe.

And you can see the Gloucestershire Community Foundation, which is run by a bunch of lovely ladies, including this one.

This is Dame Janet Trotter, OBE, DBO, who herself was former Lord Lieutenant of Gloucestershire from 2010 to 2018.

So there's a pattern recurring here, right? We're rooting this right into the, essentially the course, right?

This is the top tiers of the British establishment out in the counties across the country.

And these foundations appear to be, well, first of all, we know that they're linked into common purpose, at least in some sense.

But they're also explicitly aligned to the UN Sustainable Development Agenda.

So here we can see the Suffolk Community Foundation, where they have an entire page on SDGs.

And the Chief Executive says, Community Foundations across the UK, not just here, all of them, or a large number of them,

are embracing the adoption of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals to not only complement our grantmaking activity, but to support our operational culture.

This is globalism. This is the global dictatorship being disseminated down through the system.

And so this area that I had never come across before, actually, we talk a lot about what's going on politically.

We talk a lot about what's going on with corporations.

We do touch on what charitable foundations are doing, particularly the bigger ones like your open societies and that kind of thing.

But these local foundations, one in basically every county around the UK, which you completely interlinked with.

It's like indistinguishable from the royal apparatus in the country are absolutely driving this agenda forward and appear to be linked into all of these issues around rewilding and the transformation of our food system, which poses extraordinary national security issues.

We don't come anywhere near being able to feed ourselves at the moment. So why are we going to rewild when we should be farming?

Yeah, lots of questions, but this is new politics. This is what politics really looks like.

Westminster, absolute theater. This is real politics. This is how society, individuals, families are going to be controlled.

Exactly. Final thing. I will just flag up about Mr Low, which is that actually a lot of these wealth seems to come from this company low and all of our, which is an electrical and mechanical contracting business.

It's been in the family for about a hundred years. They work across lots of different sectors, museums, residential, education.

It looks like it's really good company, actually. Clearly very well run, well accredited, good business.

By the way, I have no issue with people being successful business people. I'm not like that. My background is working in industry. I see no issue with this at all.

No issue with people being wealthy. The question is, what are you doing with that money? Also, how did you get it? Also, how are you behaving when you do have it?

But importantly, this organisation low and all of our, we scroll down to the bottom of the website. We can see that it operates by royal appointment.

Yeah, which is quite an accolade for people to obtain that. Exactly. Yes.

Again, Mr Low appears to be talking a good game on the lot of national issues. He's got a lot of excitement. A lot of members coming into the party.

But he's very closely connected into the cities, which talks about last week, but also into the royal networks.

And as we talk about ad infinitum on UK column, King Charles, the Windsor's more broadly, as well as many other elite international families are the ones calling the shots in the transformation of our societies at the moment.

And environmental matters. And particularly as it relates to environmental matters. Yeah. So again, questions to be asked.

OK, excellent. Just looking at the queue here. What is this one that we've got here? We can flick on.

That's fine. Well, so let's bring this up on screen because in the introduction to today's news, I said the government was changing family course.

This is unbelievably dangerous. So this is the announcement government moves to protect children from abusive parents through new courts and tribunals bill.

The change means the courts will no longer start from an assumption that parental involvement is always in a child's best interest and instead adopt an open-minded inquiry into what is in a child's best interest.

Now, what this is so dangerous is because many people would think this is a step in the right direction that it's about getting a grip of the family courts and some of the polling decisions they make.

But actually this is stripping away the bond between parents and their children and effectively saying the state knows better.

So if we have a look at what Lamy actually said because he's quoted in the announcement, he said every child deserves to be safe, every victim deserves to be heard and every family deserves a justice system they can trust.

We need to make sure that what happened to Claire and he's talking to Claire Throssel will look at her in just a minute and her children never happens again.

This government's priorities to bring our justice system back from the brink. That means making sure the safety and welfare of children remains at the heart of every decision.

And that's why we are repealing the presumption of parental involvement through the courts and tribunal bill.

And if we bring the last bit of his remarks, this is a landmark moment that I want to dedicate to the remarkable Claire Throssel and to the memory of her two children Jack and Paul.

Her selfless campaign is helping us rebuild a justice system that is fair, compassionate and with children safety at heart.

Remember what's really happening is he is he is stripping even more power away from parents to be involved with their children and to defend their children.

Now to give credit to Claire, if we just pop up on screen, this lady you can find at women's aid, tragic story behind a case in that are two sons, Jack 12 and Paul 9 were killed by their father.

Despite her warnings that he was a danger to them, she has since campaign tirelessly stopped unsafe child contact with dangerous perpetrators of domestic abuse.

Now in this one paragraph, if we think about it, she is actually, she's challenging the very system, which Lamy is trying to put in power because as a parent, it was her warnings that the court ignored.

The state system, the family court, ignored the parental warnings of this mother and as a result, the two children died and what Lamy is now saying is that we're going to strip away that power from parents.

It is going to be the state that presumably makes more crass stupid decisions, which ultimately result in damage to children.

To give credit to the lady, this is just the second paragraph that's on the website, due to her commitment and resolve family court's safer.

It's now mandatory for the court to determine whether children will be at risk of harm from a contact order and perpetrators are no longer able to cross examine their victims in court.

Now I have to say to the audience today, this is tragic because clearly this lady is well intentioned, she done some really amazing work over the years, but she does not understand what's coming through the pipeline.

These are some of her quotes because she's quoted in the government's press release on this.

So we bring this up on screen for a decade, I've been campaigning with the woman's aid to change the family court system to make sure that no child is ever again placed at risk of further harm from abusive parents, seeing that the presumption of parental contact will finally be repealed.

And in memory of my son, Jack and Paul is deeply meaning for no child should have to hold out a hand for helping darkness, saying that they were hurt by someone who was meant to protect them.

And lastly, no parents should have to hold their children as they die from the abuse of a perpetrator as I did 11 years ago.

Absolutely tragic story, but remember what the circumstances were this brave kind loving mother did the right thing and it was the state that failed and resulted in ultimately the death of her two children.

Now I'd like to say to our audience today in March 2026 that over nearly 20 years, the UK column has warned and warned of the immense dangers of family courts and the removal of parental rights.

I'm just going to bring up some of the articles that are on the UK column website where we're talking about this issue children taken away from their parents and then brutalized in the state supposed protection system social workers coming forward to blow the whistle on their own organizations that's one page let's put up some more articles so that our audience knows what we're saying is absolutely correct.

We have warned and warned us to what the state has been up to and lastly I'm going to bring in this article from 2017 where David Scott was warning about the noted the named parent scheme in Scotland where the state said every child should have a state appointed guardian and that was overturned ultimately with pressure from people in Scotland.

But in this article that David wrote no business of the state there's a quote from Sir James mumby who was former president of the family law division and he said and this is pre 2017 put starkly the state by its actions has denied these parents the right to decide for themselves within the privacy of the family.

What in their view is devoted parents is in the best interests of their children a matter which to speak cleanly is no business of the state so president of the family law divisions James mumby got the issue but Lamy David Lamy now overturning this and giving the state even more power over youngsters truly shorting.

Now Ben I'm watching the clock we've got we wanted to talk about 16 year olds and the vote I think if we just touch on it and we'll bring the bulk of the discussion into extra.

Okay sounds good so last week and the representation of the people bill twenty twenty four twenty six had a second reading in house commons a lot of stuff in there but the most important thing the real headline the one that you would have heard about is that part one of the bill would make the necessary changes to electoral law to lower the voting age for reserved elections from 18 to 16 they can give 16 year olds the vote certainly will if it passes the House of Lords importantly.

What is this coming from why they pushing so hard on this and what we know why it is because they captured the minds of young people and if they can turn them into a democratic force very energetic democratic force and now help them to progress their agenda and right behind it is this organization my life myself spoken about them a lot previously.

Supposed charity a youth led charity coordinating the country's extension of the franchise which is the votes is 16 franchise apparently they are coordinating it's literally what it says on the Twitter page.

I've spoken about some of the organizations around this my life my say it's just extraordinary including Rothschild and co Tony Blair the mayor of London secret intelligence service the US State Department and we can see here all often and it's been incredible the amount of organizations and people circulating this charity over the past ten years or so since it was set up and they're absolutely running the campaigns for this V 16 votes is 16

They want to update democracy their candidate of choice right and this nationalist I think particularly need to hear this the people that are being that are really pulling the strings in the country at the moment want this guy to be the next leader of the country not group at low probably not even for us frankly looking at the ways performing it's all about putting this guy forward and directly behind my life my say you straight into look there's the king again talks about him earlier and it's not just the king it's not just my life.

My say it's the whole ecosystem full factor in the mix they've been talking a lot recently about the fears that they have we really scared at 16 year olds won't be able to make decisions so we've got to intervene and we've got to help school strength and media literacy and we've got to create a national plan and we've got to embed more money and more education and the electoral commissions got to get involved and we've got to get social media companies to actively support people who can be able to do that.

You can't understand the difference between AI and reality and all of which kind of suggests to me that probably this isn't a very good idea but they're pressing head with it anyway.

So keep it there of course the government stopping youngsters looking at any form of alternative media new media that's going to be controlled so they're going to live their lives up to 16 with government controlled media and then bang they're given the vote.

This is about control and we'll discuss it more in UK column extra in a few minutes we must end there my goodness so much going on in the world it's difficult to pack it all in.

But one one thing for sure is that there is a cause of the wars and the violence and the deaths overseas we can see the people we can see the organizations.

But we've got to be brave enough to stand up and call them out and we've certainly got to be calling out our own government and politicians when they are involved in these senior crimes overseas more in UK column extra stay with us huge thank you to our audience today wherever you are in the world we'll be back for another UK column news at one o'clock on Wednesday see you then bye bye.

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