Great Britain - The Ongoing Influence of Empire

What Forces Lie Behind the Current Conflicts?

I have been out of touch for a few weeks because local council responsibilities have tied me up and I also have been attempting to consider the bigger picture of the various forces at play. I do recommend Dr Jacob Nordangård’s excellent books: Rockefeller: Controlling the Game and Temple of Solomon.

As I was completing this edition of Sons of Issachar News, the U.S. strikes on the nuclear sites in Iran were announced. Noone really anticipated this strike so soon but my central thesis in this post - war as a tool of the globalists - is certainly true.

As I considered all the forces at work, many seem to trace back Great Britain, still very influential today, despite losing much of its Empire.

The Queen and the British Psyop

One of my most enduring memories is when I was around five years old and my 20 fellow schoolchildren (Grades 1 to 6) and I were taken from the tiny town of Dalgety in various parents’ cars to the small town of Berridale in southern NSW about a 20 min drive. We were driven from various farms and villages to stand on the street to see Queen Elizabeth II, the Queen of Australia, who was coming through the town in a motorcade on the way to visit the Snowy Mountains scheme, a large hydroelectric project.

The motorcade was delayed and we stood on the hot and dusty streets for several hours, with small Union Jack flags ready to wave. The Queen’s driver must not have been given clear instructions because he drove through the town like a rally driver and we children were left waving our flags and then coughing from the dust generated by the official car passing along the unsealed main road. I maintain that it was the moment that turned me from a monarchist to a republican.

Australia was “all in” for the Queen, starting with the first of her 16 visits in 1954. Young Prince Charles and Princess Anne were left at home as the Queen and Prince Philip visited every state in Australia during a two-month period. It is estimated that 75% of the Australian population saw the Queen on that first visit in 1954.

New Zealand and Canada were similarly “all in” for the Queen and the British government effectively used its royal ace to keep the colonies in line. Despite Australia being founded in 1788 as a convict colony of Great Britain, the allure of the Royal Family managed to keep the country deeply connected to its distant parent. Even in 1954, the British Empire was still one where the sun never set, as its domain stretched around the world.

It seems extraordinary now to think that a group of clever bureaucrats in London were able to expand their influence over resources from Africa and the Indian subcontinent to North America, the Caribbean and the Pacific. Much of it must have been sleight of hand and the appearance of indomitable power.

The British Disease - Socialism, Union Control, Unrestricted Immigration and “Free” Healthcare

Great Britain was the home of capitalism but perhaps the excesses of capitalism and the class system provoked a dramatic shift to the political left and the concept of the welfare state. Great Britain’s Trojan Horse, wheeled into the colonies has been the idea of unrestrained welfare spending and “free” health care.

In the last 10 years, welfare spending in the U.K. has increased from £210 billion in 2013-14 to £296 billion. By the end of this decade, the welfare bill is estimated to reach £378 billion. Extraordinarily, Britons are becoming more ill year-by-year (COVID vaccines?). It was recently estimated that by 2029, half the welfare claims in the UK will be for sickness. It seems as though socialism makes you ill! Late last year the Guardian reported: “2.8 million people out of work due to long-term sickness, and the 4.2 million claiming incapacity and disability benefits.” This is ~10% of the total working population of 43 million.

With so much of the population sick, of course there is the need for “free” healthcare. Healthcare in the UK is via the NHS, a socialized medicine system where everyone is equally badly treated! Waiting times in emergency rooms can be as long as 24 hours.

Figure 1 demonstrates the linear increase in health care and the government-financed amount in 2023-24 was £258 billion or 11.1% of GDP.

Figure 1. The cost (in billions £) of health care in the United Kingdom since 2000. Source.

Then there is the cost of government-facilitated illegal immigration that started with Tony Blair’s government in the late 1990s. Over the last 25 years, successive British Governments of the notional Left and Right have allowed illegal immigrants to overrun Great Britain.

Figure 2. Net migration to the UK from 1991 to 2022. Source

As dinghies arrive daily across the English Channel, seemingly with the support of the French police, almost £20 billion per year is being spent on illegal immigrants and the U.K. government has no idea about what to do to stem the flow. A fanciful plan by Boris Johnson to send illegal immigrants to Rwanda resulted in just a handful of people voluntarily relocating, because there were obstacles with the European Court of Human Rights. The cost to the taxpayer - £904 million! Is it incompetence, or is it planned?

Recent analysis by GB News suggests that white Britons will be in a minority in the next 40 years (currently the figure is 73%). In addition, Great Britain is on its way to becoming a Muslim country, with the percentage of Muslims likely to rise from ~7% of the population now, to ~20% by the end of the century. As I looked at a drone shot of the Lords Cricket Ground last week, the minaret of a large mosque could be seen quite prominently, visibly demonstrating the change in this land of cathedrals and church spires.

Each evening I read the UK Telegraph and the Times. I am struck by the stories of ongoing violence and knife attacks, penalisation of private enterprise and self-reliance, shocking health care, restriction of freedom of speech, escalating crime, farming families being taxed and re-wilded out of existence, out-of-control immigration and Big Government out of touch with its citizens. The trajectory is clear and there is no political solution. Readers in the UK - abandon ship! But where to go?

The U.S. has become increasingly polarized and is now essentially two countries - the conservative centre and the liberal/socialist coastal elites who have been afflicted with the British virus. The whole education system is aimed toward producing socialists and welfare-state dependents. The period of the Trump ascendancy cannot be long-lasting because the whole Western education system is focused on producing state-dependent globalists.

Australia, New Zealand and Canada are also afflicted with the British disease and have become addicted to the welfare state. Who would have thought when the British Empire was at its peak that the end result would be welfare-dependent countries with no desire to uphold freedom or borders?

It certainly is an outcome of the philosophy and policies of the United Nations itself a creature of British elites, and an organisation that has sought to remove international borders and encourage global approaches to policy. But how was change toward globalism achieved?

War As A Tool of Change?

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace identified early in the 20th century that the best tool for global change and world government was war. Despite U.S. citizens being opposed to their country being drawn into international conflict, the U.S. played a decisive role toward the end of WWI and WWII.

This involved a substantial propaganda campaign, so successful that in the later Vietnam War, the then Australian Prime Minister declared during a visit of the U.S. President, Lyndon B.Johnson, that Australia was “all the way with LBJ”. Australia became, in effect, what Mike Benz described in an interview with me in February 2024 : “A large CIA station with kangaroos”!

The end result of what originally was a British program of global dominance, now involves the U.S. as a world policeman and a New World Order (“neoconservatives”) who realised that war could be used to impose a U.S. “liberal” order. The next stage of course is a global order because “global problems require global solutions”. This is where we are at the moment and undoubtedly we are being manipulated toward global government.

[A small aside: I had a small win at a local level when I managed to get the U.N.’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals removed from our council’s community strategic plan. It was a small but important step because I thought that there would be concerted organisational pushback. Local action against the globalist philosophy is still possible, even if in a small way].

The Second World War demonstrated where the real power lay - the United States. Great Britain was humiliated in 1956 by President Eisenhower who failed to support Great Britain and France retaking the Suez Canal after nationalisation by the Egyptian president. Additionally, after WWII, in what seems to have been a suicide pact, Britons demonstrated a fatal attraction to socialism and the welfare state, with only a brief interlude under Margaret Thatcher whose famous quote: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money” succinctly articulated the key issue.

Despite this small interlude of capitalism, there has been an ongoing love affair between the British people and the welfare state. Thatcher pushed back against the unions and encouraged Britons to stand on their own feet with incentives to end government dependency. This period didn’t last long and the handout mentality resumed under both Conservative and Labour governments throughout the last 25 years.

Now, the welfare system is out of control and the relative ease of receiving health benefits is crippling the British economy. Taxation in the U.K. is the highest ever and it is not surprising because almost half the population is on some type of welfare. Similar patterns are seen in different parts of the former British Empire. Thus, the welfare state and lack of commitment to defending national borders, prevents governments from having sufficient funds to defend their countries.

Australia has not invested in defence for many years and one recent strategy was to send Australian “experts” to promote diversity, equity and inclusion within the Indonesian military as part of a defence cooperation with Indonesia. You can only imagine how this majority Muslim country would have received this woke advice.

Various conflicts are shaping up to dominate the international horizon over the next months/years. Apart from Russia-Ukraine (meant to last just weeks before a Russian victory), there is Israel-Iran and the almost certain Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Various commentators are describing recent Chinese military activities in the Taiwan Strait as practice for invasion rather than simply defense exercises.

Then there is “Little Rocket Man” in North Korea and various radical jihadist cells right across the West. While there are undoubtedly clever generals planning various strategies in relation to Iran, the law of unintended consequences will be the hidden force at work. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars drew the U.S. into 20 years of Middle East conflict and perhaps $5 trillion of borrowed funds. The end result - a worse situation than before the wars.

Every country (except Australia) is spending more on defence, and with the number of nuclear nations proliferating, the risk of nuclear conflict increases. President Eisenhower warned in his farewell address on 17 January 1961 of the dangers of the “military-industrial complex”. These forces are undoubtedly at work in the current disputes and “war as a tool for global change” is the underlying philosophy of those dictating the trajectory of the current conflicts.

This brings me to the current challenges faced by President Trump.

President Trump - Is He the Messiah or Is He Just A Naughty Boy?

There is no doubt that a satirical film about the life of Muhammed will never be made. The Monty Python team filmed The Life of Brian in 1979, about Brian of Nazareth being mistaken for Jesus throughout his life.

There is a classic scene where crowds on the street call out for Brian and his mother tells them: “He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy”. This short segment of the film is included below.

President Trump’s supporters believe that he could be a type of messiah and you often read about their analysis of Trump’s various moves indicating that he is playing 3-D chess. Trump may be more or less clever and astute than many people give him credit for, but he is certainly caught in a challenging negotiating trap at the moment. There seem to be no good options.

Trump has repeatedly declared that the Russia-Ukraine war would never have happened if he had been U.S. president, and that he could bring the conflict to an end in 24 hours. It turns out to be much more challenging than President Trump or his aides had believed.

Below is an interview from 2023 with current UK Reform Leader, Nigel Farage, where Trump says that he could end the Ukraine conflict quickly.

Trump is right to decry the terrible loss of life and injuries (now perhaps as many as 2 million) in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war. However, the conflict has a long historical background that makes President Trump’s approach to “just doing a deal”, very difficult.

Now Trump has entered more deeply into a conflict between Israel and Iran. The antecedents prevent any simple solution and few appreciate that the battle also is a spiritual. For Iranian religious leaders who have an apocalyptic world view, they see and welcome a final conflagration because it could bring about the return of the Mahdi (“The Guided One”). For the mullahs, the issue is not a threat but an opportunity. I wrote about the details of Shi’ite beliefs almost two years ago:

“An important but little understood foundation of Islam is the idea of the coming Mahdi – a mystical messianic figure who will return at the end of a final conflict and force conversion of the world to Islam. The Shi’ites have a different view of the Mahdi, whom they call “The Twelfth Imam”. There is a fascinating fictional series - see this link - by Joel Rosenberg that I have read and provides some great insights into the concept of the Twelfth Imam.

All the main clerics and politicians in Iran are known as “Twelvers” and believe in the 12^th Imam. This is how the 12^th Imam is described in learnreligions.com

“They believe that a series of Imams was appointed to carry on the Prophet Muhammad's message and that these Imam rank above all other prophets except for Muhammad himself. The 12th, Muhammad al-Mahdi, is believed by these Shiites to have been born in present-day Iraq in 869 and never to have died, only gone into hiding. Twelvers—not other Shiites or Sunni Muslims—believe that al-Mahdi will return as a messiah…”.

Sunnis also believe in the Mahdi but that he has not yet appeared.

The material in this post from October 2023 is relevant to Israel-Iran conflict today and I commend the article to my readers:

Many conservatives point to the false information (perhaps deliberate) of the G.W. Bush administration’s claim of Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

President Trump has repeatedly said that Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon and he must have felt that he needed to back up his rhetoric with action. However, to Iran, their access to a nuclear weapon is non-negotiable. If Iran’s entire nuclear capability has now been destroyed, the next steps for Iran are limited and may involve a resort to terrorism.

Some analysts point out that it was only a few months ago that Tulsi Gabbard, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence testified to Congress about the U.S. intelligence assessment that:

“Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and supreme leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.”

Who knows whether or not the Iranians were close to acquiring nuclear weapon capability? It seems likely, given the extraordinary attempt to hide the nuclear facilities deep underground to prevent inspection.

The United Nations nuclear oversight committee, the IAEA, voted by majority just two weeks ago that Iran was in breach of its non-proliferation obligations. Reuters reported on 12 June 2025 that:
”…the motion, drafted by the United States, Britain, France and Germany, was carried by 19 votes in favor. Russia, China and Burkina Faso opposed the motion, 11 abstained and two nations of the 35 did not vote.

Iran responded defiantly to the resolution by announcing it would open a new enrichment site and upgrade centrifuges at the Fordow nuclear facility.

"The Islamic Republic of Iran has no choice but to respond to this political resolution," the Iranian Foreign Ministry and the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran said in a joint statement.”

It is important to remember the philosophy of “war as a tool for global change” lies behind much of the current rhetoric. It equally important to understand that we are also in a spiritual conflict and that Trump’s skills as a “deal maker” may not be the skill set needed.

There are leaders in Iran (fewer now in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard because of assassinations) who wish to see a nuclear conflict because of their spiritual world view. This is one where a “final conflict” will hasten the return of the Mahdi and the whole world will become Islamic.

I listened to an interesting podcast today with Matthew Syed interviewed by the TRIGGERnometry team (you can listen to the link below).

There was a fascinating introduction where Matthew Syed talks about the fundamentalist Shia Islamists. I have transcribed this part of the interview (about 5 min in):

“Mutually assured destruction is what prevents people with nuclear bombs from initiating the first strike because they worry that in the counter strike they will be eliminated. So it's a very strong doctrine and even though there are nuclear weapons in the world, we have not yet thankfully been subject to a nuclear holocaust.

And it's worth saying that even a relatively small nuclear conflict like between Pakistan and India which almost flared up recently would not be localized. It would lead to a nuclear winter that would affect farming around the world and could kill hundreds of millions. We don't think enough about that risk.

So why do I say that the regime in in Tehran is not subject to that mutually assured destruction doctrine? The reason is because they are religious fanatics. They believe that they have absolute truth … and that anyone who disagrees with them by implication is an infidel. Moreover, they glorify martyrdom they believe that if they can take out infidels they will go through a door into heaven and be blessed for eternity.

I might have mentioned in the previous podcast that my father was born as a Shia Muslim. Most of his family are moderates, as are many Muslims around the world. But there are a few who are fundamentalists and believed that my father was an apostate and that he deserved to die. I've looked people like this in the eyes and I know that they are implacable in those circumstances.

In fact one other bit of context.. I was 10 years old during the Iraq-Iran war and for obvious reasons I took quite a deep interest in that war. A lot of people don't seem to know about the 20,000 child martyrs who were indoctrinated by the fanatics and the clerics who took over after the 1979 revolution. (These children were taught) to believe that the greatest duty they could perform for Allah is to walk and sometimes run into minefields and up against machine gunfire to clear a path for the adult military coming in behind. They died their limbs strewn across battlefields, and they were then glorified in government propaganda.”

The spiritual dimensions of the current Israel-Iran war are underestimated by many analysts. Now that President Trump has taken the U.S. directly into war with Iran, there will be a major fallout with the Muslim world and activation of jihadists.

Potential Scenarios for the U.S. Intervention in Iran

President Trump has sent in “bunker busting bombs” that can only be carried by the B-2 Stealth Bombers, and in the next days and weeks we will see the law of unintended consequences played out. Victor Davis Hanson provided a useful overview of what he deemed, optimistic, realistic and pessimistic scenarios related to the U.S. attacking Iran directly. I have a link to the podcast below which is only 11 min long.

Here are the three scenarios outlined by Victor Davis Hanson:

• Pessimistic: if the U.S. enters the war and bombs Iran’s nuclear sites it will start a wider conflict with Islam and activate jihadists internationally. President Trump’s supporters want him to focus on “America First” not foreign wars. In this view, the outcome may look initially positive but downstream there could be some bad outcomes.

• Realistic: it is difficult to completely destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities and they could quickly be rebuilt. It will be very difficult to obtain regime change and we have examples of the mess left in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya as examples. The unintended consequence is for the theocratic regime in Tehran to be strengthened.

• Optimistic - many analysts see the positives of Israel removing at least 50% of the missile launches and removing the senior command of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and key nuclear scientists. An attack by the U.S. on the nuclear sites may result in the Iranian people staging an uprising.

It seems likely that Trump will be reluctant to draw the U.S. further into the war between Israel and Iran but he may have no choice. Major unknowns are the involvement of Russia and China, and even North Korea, a country that has been assisting Iran with their nuclear program.

How Does This Relate to Great Britain and the Future of the West?

It’s probably only for the most committed conspiracy theorists, but the central idea is while Great Britain lost their empire, the philosophy about British dominance and global government is still alive and well and promoted by the neoconservatives and a range of global influencers.

Myriad global organisations are at work and against the backdrop of the issues covered in this newsletter, it may be worthwhile for my readers to understand the role of the Royal Institute of International Affairs - now called Chatham House. This London-based think tank has spawned offshoots such as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission.

James Corbett is a noted commentator on the sinister nature of globalism and wrote a very interesting post in January 2019 about the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA). Here are some selected quotes from the article by Mr Corbett:

• The RIIA - “The idea for the group was hammered out at an informal session during the 1919 Paris peace conference. The Institute was formalized the next year, first as the British Institute of International Affairs, and then, after receiving its Royal Charter, as the Royal Institute of International Affairs.

  The group has become synonymous with Chatham House, its headquarters in St. James' Square, London, and is widely recognized among foreign policy experts as the most influential think tank in the world.”

• “In the years since its inception, the RIIA has opened branches in countries across the British Commonwealth and around the world, including the Council on Foreign Relations, born largely from the same 1919 Paris meeting that birthed the Institute itself, the Australian Institute of International Affairs, the South African Institute of International Affairs, the Pakistan Institute of International Affairs, the Canadian International Council, and similar organizations”.

• “Born from the ashes of WWI, the RIIA was brought into existence by the same people that brought about "The WWI Conspiracy." As viewers of my work on the subject will know by now, the "Great War" was in part engineered by a (not-so-secret) secret society formally created by Cecil Rhodes in 1891”.

Mr Corbett writes about the influential nature of the RIIA and its apparent openness via conferences and publications, in contrast to organisations like the secretive Bilberberg Group. However, the RIIA was set up as an offshoot of Cecil Rhodes’ secret Round Table Group to promote the interests of the Anglo-American establishment.

Mr Corbett concludes his article as follows:

“In some ways, perhaps this is its greatest accomplishment: to hide its enormous influence and its ongoing role in steering global geopolitics, not by hiding under a blanket of secrecy like the Bilderberg Group, Skull and Bones, or other secret societies, but by putting itself so much in the public spotlight that it seems mundane. It should be noted, after all, that this is precisely the way that Rhodes envisioned such an organization to function”

I think it is important for Sons of Issachar readers to understand the larger context of the current conflicts facing the world. Much traces back to the British Empire and its influence via various secret and powerful groups like the Royal Institute for International Affairs. It is important to remember that “war as a tool for global change” is still lurking in the background and used by power brokers on all sides.

Even in the current conflict, nothing is as it seems and I suspect like Elvis Presley in his great song “Suspicious Minds”, President Trump is: “Caught in a trap; can’t get out…”

At the heart of the Israel-Iran war is a spiritual battle that cannot be solved by “doing a deal”. There are difficult days ahead.