UK Column News — 11th September 2026

Mike Robinson (0:08)

Good afternoon, it's Friday the 11th of September, 2026, just after one o'clock. Welcome to UK Column News. I'm your host, Mike Robinson. Joining me by video today are Basil Valentine and Patrick Henningsen, and we will be joined by a couple of special guests a little bit later now. 25 years ago today, of course, an event took place which changed the world, presented by politicians and corporate media as a terrorist attack run by a man living in a cave in Afghanistan. Aircraft were flown into the World Trade Center in New York and something hit the Pentagon.

Of course, this is the 25th anniversary, and so we're going to look at this in quite a lot of depth today. But we're going to begin today by taking a look at an exclusive for the independent. This is Ken McCallum, the head of MI5, Britain's counter-intelligence agency. He has written an opinion piece for them, claiming that Britain faces the worst of both worlds as Russia and China pose growing threats alongside terrorism. So headline there, MI5 chief says Britain faces greater danger now than on 9-11. And he says, the MI5 I lead in 2026 contends with a threat landscape markedly different to 2001s. Sadly, mass-casualty terrorist ambition endures, but the terrorist threat now sits alongside strategic national security threats posed by capable states. This is my call to arms. After 25 years, he said, government, businesses, academia, and the public must treat national security not as a specialist concern of a handful of agencies, but as a shared national endeavour, contending with rising state-backed aggression, whether sabotage, subcontracted to criminals, or covert interference in our democracy, or destructive cyber attacks on power stations, demands new laws, as well as new tradecraft.

He said in 2026, unlike 2001, many of the assets, systems, and services under threat sit in private sector hands. This means many of the most critical decisions would be taken not in COBRA, but in boardrooms. We need a new team of teams preserving an open economy, by cooperating across government, industry, and academia to close vulnerabilities and enable swift, coherent action when crises hit. Patrick, let me begin by welcoming you to the programme. Welcome back live. It's been a few weeks since you've been on live. But again, he is pushing this fusion doctrine idea of a merger between state corporations, academia, and in fact, think tanks and other non-governmental organisations.

What are your thoughts on that and what does this represent?

Patrick Henningsen (2:56)

This is absolutely the total mobilisation of society. And we see the very same trends happening throughout Europe, also in the United States as well. It's somehow in some special new kind of era where the dangers are more than ever, and the threat from the East is higher than ever. And it's an existential threat for Western civilisation, and the Western democracy, et cetera.

And anything can be further from the truth. This is coinciding with our government's totally abandoning diplomacy as a track to resolve any of the major flashpoints in the world. Specifically, I'm talking about NATO's proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, but ditto for the situation in Iran.

And there's no meaningful negotiations regarding Lebanon, not Lebanon, and also Gaza as well. So they're shirking their responsibilities, real statecraft, diplomatic statecraft, in exchange for this, which is total mobilization and more preparing for a war. A war that nobody can quite see, but they keep telling us is omnipresent.

Mike Robinson (4:12)

Yeah, and we just cannot overstate the effect that September 11th, 2001 had. And the fact is that pretty much everything that we've seen since was created, was able to be created by that one event.

Patrick Henningsen (4:31)

It is, and lastly, I'll say, Mike, even today, the New York Times, the Washington Post, they're all lamenting all of these powers, these Patriot Act powers that Trump has now gotten a hold of and is deploying against the American people. They're talking about the Joint Terrorism Task Force. They're talking about ICE, an agency that was created, Department of Homeland Security. Suddenly, 25 years later, the chattering classes are somehow returned by the current president in the United States. Now he's abusing all of these extraordinary extrajudicial powers that were accumulated post 9-11. Meanwhile, I can't tell you, Mike, and I speak for everybody on this program, we have been sounding this clarion call, this alarm for a very, very long time.

Mike Robinson (5:21)

Absolutely. Now, Basil, I know you've got some thoughts on this as well.

Basil Valentine (5:26)

Yes. Ken McCallum said that the big dragon of ISIS had been slain, but there were still snakes in the shape of Russia and China. I can only think he's been playing Dungeons and Dragons or watching too much Lord of the Rings, quite frankly. It's quite sort of fantastical language to use.