UK Column News — 14th September 2026

Ben Rubin (0:08)

Good afternoon, it's Monday, 14 September, 2026 You're watching UK Column News. It's just after one o'clock. I'm your host, Ben Rubin.

Delighted to be joining the studio today by Mr. Brian Gerrish. And we've got a big week this week, haven't we, Brian?

Brian Gerrish (0:23)

We've got a fantastically big week because Friday is the start of our 20th celebration, which is over the weekend, Saturday and into Sunday. I'm just gonna reassure people, we did book good weather. We thought that was something important to do. So don't be at all worried by the view of the window behind us where we got quite a lot of fog in the sound. I'm told the weather at the weekend is going to be good. If we have any problems, we'll be speaking to Devon County Council's Director of Climate Change. Yes, such a position exists. We'll be talking to Meg Booth.

I'm sure Meg will be sorting the climate out for us locally in Plymouth, because presumably it's easier to sort the climate out in a small local area, Ben, than it is to do it for the whole world.

Ben Rubin (1:15)

Yeah. They'll probably just have to increase our council tax or something like that and that will sort it out.

Brian Gerrish (1:19)

Well, possibly. We'll take a hit on that.

We'll also add that, of course, the fog behind us will be making the day a little bit unpleasant for some of our guests who are arriving to the UK Column 20th anniversary event by boat. The boat in question, lovely boat called Bucephalus, which if I remember correctly is the name of Alexander the Great's horse. But they will be in a little bit of a delicate situation because they'll be somewhere in the middle of the channel, with a lot of traffic operating in that foggy environment. So we wish them a safe passage. But exciting week. Yeah, fantastic.

Ben Rubin (2:01)

A very exciting week. But of course, it's not the only thing going on in the country at the moment. We've got a busy show today, lots to get through. We're going to be looking at the extraordinary cult of personality that's being built up around our dear leader. Mr. Andy Burnham will be exploring the huge blow to Burnham's signature local government reorganization scheme, which came in last week as we were just ending Extra, which we're going to talk about, including clips of an interview with Madeleine Hunt from the Heritage Party and Rachel from Council Watch, which we're going to explore further in Extra as well.

That has triggered an enormous paragraph at the center of government. There's a letter that came out from Chancellor Healy in the wake of that decision, which we're going to have a little look at, see what their response has been. We're going to be exploring the social experimentation that is being carried out around the huge influx of Ukrainian refugees who've come into the country over the past few years. We're looking at a very eventful couple of weeks for Boris Johnson, the Mind Games and propaganda playing out in the UK, coordinated by the state against its own population, and also some good news at the end of the show about the Assisted Dying Bill or the State Murder Bill, as I prefer to call it. But before we get into all of that, we're going to be continuing on a theme that the UK Column has been looking at for many, many years now, which is essentially the chaos and breakdown is happening around the country. Last Monday, we spoke about the protest which took place on the South Coast, the first one in Dover on Saturday and then Portsmouth on Sunday.

These are patriot protests coordinated by the chap on the left there, that is Danny Tomo through his Patriot Platform, which actually looks to me like a data gathering operation for people who you really don't want to be giving your data to. Danny Tomo effectively being presented now, I think, is the new Tommy Robinson.

Brian Gerrish (4:01)

2.0.

Ben Rubin (4:02)

2.0, exactly. They've almost got the same name, actually. It's quite an amazing thing. The Patriot platform have continued their fight back against the establishment this week. You can see here huge amounts of propaganda coming out from their ex-account. They're really upping the ante, essentially positioning themselves as the counter-establishment voice, even though they are essentially backed by the people behind the establishment. This is not what it's being presented at, I think it's fair to say. Although a lot of the messaging on there, I actually kind of agree with in some ways. We can get that back up, we can see it is time to fight back. But it's not to do that with violence, with courage, integrity and discipline. So they're appealing to people's good nature, but unfortunately the energy I don't think is being directed in the right direction. But people have been responding, they've been out on the streets again this weekend. Another video here from Portsmouth. Protesting against small boats. So similar to the protest that we had last week, the chants in the video, you can't hear them because I haven't got the volume playing in the background. But essentially, it stopped the boats, and this seems to be the main focus of this supposed patriot movement is stopping small boats and illegal immigration coming into the UK. But as we talk about all the time, that is a tiny part of the issue, a much broader set of issues, very complex and interconnected problems that we're facing as a society. But their attention, this patriotic attention, is being directed specifically towards this one issue, and one really has to ask the question as to why that might be. Is it perhaps that the people behind this don't actually want to fix the bigger problems that we have across the society? The Patriot platform and these protests have been getting quite a lot of coverage, and a lot of it very mainstream, including from Ann Middleton, the former SBS operative. And now, I guess, kind of presenting himself as a potential politician, he talks about himself as the future mayor of London, which I think is quite interesting. Maybe you know something that we don't. But he's encouraging people to stand up in Beek County to go down to this protest on the weekend, which is now South Coast Patriots. So we had the Patriot platform. We now got the South Coast Patriots, which is made up of Bournemouth, Portsmouth, and Southampton Patriots. So these kind of splinter groups are appearing. And of course, as you would just expect, because this is the way that they do these things, a counter protest also kicked off over the weekend in Portsmouth, coordinated by Stand Up to Racism and various unions. And this is all extremely predictable because this is the same kind of divide and rule operation that's been running in the background across the country for at least the past two years, essentially.