Liverpool has become the ‘guinea pig’ for a sinister Satanic plot. Or has it?

Outside Town Hall, where city councillors abetting the aims of evil globalists are unmasked

Dear members — it was all drama outside Liverpool’s Town Hall on Tuesday. A fringe protest outside a council meeting turned sour, with the Echo reporting that councillors had to be “smuggled out of [a] side door” to avoid the baying crowds. We were there too, among that baying crowd, attempting to get to the bottom of things. We’ve also been undercover on the social media channels where the protest was first arranged, and have seen evidence that an organised far-right group was present. Council leader Liam Robinson has since condemed the protestors.

The crux appears to be that a new policy put forward by the council — to divide the city into 13 districts and improve the delivery of services, which on the surface of things is municipal politics at its most granular — has been seized upon by activists and conspiracy theorists from here to Canada, who believe it is a plan to control citizens. Our conversations outside Town Hall ran the full gamut — from Satanism and black magic to an upcoming massacre of 80% of the world’s population — but aside from the fantasy, we think there’s a worrying trend here. Councillors have reportedly received abusive, threatening texts and email correspondence from those involved in organising the protest. The conspiratorial thinking that grew over the pandemic and brought like-minded individuals together has shown little sign of dying down. Via several conversations with those in attendance, we tried to work out what had brought them out onto the streets.

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Your Post briefing

“Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy,” begins this Guardian report on the bombing of a cathedral in Ukraine’s Odessa, Liverpool’s twin city. The priest — whose voice emerged from a loudspeaker outside the crumbling Transfiguration Cathedral in the heart of Odessa's Unesco-listed historic centre — was speaking after the latest Russian strike on the southern port city. Liverpool was twinned with Ukraine back when it was part of the Soviet Union in 1957, as part of a post-WW2 quest to bring global cities together and foster mutual understanding. Most twinned cities share commonalities; Liverpool and Odessa are both ports. The strikes on Odessa in the past few days have left 14 hospitalised and one dead. Russia has also threatened to treat commercial ships attempting to dock in the city as military targets. “This is barbarism, it’s terrorism. The people who did this are not people at all,” according to Myroslav Vdodovych, chief priest at the Transfiguration Cathedral.

Academy-award nominated acting will grace Liverpool’s Depot in November, with Ralph Fiennes starring in a performance of Macbeth. Famed for his roles in Schindler’s List, Harry Potter and The Grand Budapest Hotel, Fiennes will play opposite Indira Varma, of Game of Thrones. The Depot opened in 2021, with plans to seize upon Liverpool’s known popularity as a filming location for film and TV projects. Its two sound stages are designed for filming however, and it has never been used as a venue for live productions. Harry Doyle, the city’s cabinet member for culture, called it a “huge coup”. 

And to end, a very positive story from the business world. We’ve offered a critical eye at times when it comes to local leaders and their capacity to attract inward investment, but the news that the Liverpool City Region has been confirmed by the government as a £320 million investment zone, with a particular focus on life science and the pharmaceutical industry, can only be a positive. LCR is the second such zone announced after South Yorkshire, so it appears we were near the front of the queue. The zone is backed by £80 million of government money, which may not sound enormous in the grand scheme of things, but the government hopes the zone will leverage £320m in private sector investment over five years, “[making] Liverpool a pharmaceutical production superpower”, at least in Whitehall’s words. Six more investment zones will be announced across the country.

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Post picks

🕺 Camp and Furnace hosts Garlands Day festival this Saturday as part of Liverpool’s Pride celebrations. Enjoy performances from some of the city’s own club kids, drag queens and DJs, and grab a bite to eat at the festival’s food stalls. Find out more here.

🎤 Take a breather after a busy weekend with Soul Sundays at Blundell Supper Club. Offering a full roast dinner with all the trimmings inside Liverpool’s oldest cabaret bar, the event is perfect for fans of lounge music looking to wind down before the working week begins. Details here.

🎭 Nigerian comedian Igosave heads to the Adelphi on Friday for a performance of his latest show, Igosave Unusual. Featuring guest performances from Erriga, Lafin Gas and Smith Edirin, the show is sure to be a laugh a minute. Buy tickets here.

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By Jack Walton

I’ve not been long outside Town Hall when a short gentleman in a blue cap takes the loud hailer and launches into a tirade about the massacre of poultry. The bird flu pandemic of the mid-noughties, he explains at some volume, was a government plot, and the mass efficiency with which our feathered friends were dispatched offers insight into what might be coming for us.

Let’s rewind. Last week, the Liverpool Echo ran a news story with a fairly innocuous headline: Plan to divide Liverpool into 13 neighbourhoods gets approved. And perhaps the Echo wasn’t expecting this minor municipal shake up to attract global attention. It appeared — on the face of things — to be about that most thrilling of topics: a council meeting, at which it was proposed (and approved) that Liverpool be diced up into 13 zones for the purpose of delivering services more efficiently. Each of those zones will be assigned a service manager, and the budget for the scheme is £1.2 million. Council leader Liam Robinson ensured it would see improvements in things like how “we sweep the streets and empty the bins”.

That said, if you were a member of Liverpool’s People’s Resistance, you would have read something quite different. Liverpool’s People’s Resistance is a Telegram channel (Telegram being the favoured social media messaging app of the conspiratorial-minded, owing to its comparative lack of regulation, compared to say, YouTube). Back in 2021, The Post revealed how Liverpool’s People’s Resistance (LPR) were harassing head teachers over school vaccine programmes. Today it has 1,290 members, and is one of a number of such forums to have sprung up locally in wake of the pandemic. In response to the Echo article, LPR members shared worried comments that Liverpool was at the centre of a massive “communist-style” plot to restrict the movement of its citizens. And that the city’s residents were being used as “guinea pigs” by the World Economic Forum.

A concerning word on the death of chickens. Photo: Jack Walton/The Post.

According to one comment in the group, the proposed changes were “part of the World Economic Forum's plan to install 15-minute cities by 2025”. The WEF, a business lobbying organisation that meets annually in Davos, Switzerland, has in recent years become a bugbear of conspiracy theorists who believe it wants to take control of Western nations and immiserate their populations. 

But it wasn’t only the comments section that was pulsating with fury. Jim Ferguson, the Brexit Party’s former candidate for Barnsley — now a self-styled social media influencer with 68,000 followers —- picked the story up too. “This is about nothing more than controlling the population of #Liverpool,” he tweeted. “Fight it.” Ferguson’s tweets were seen by well over 350,000 people. Media figures as far away as Canada were sharing the news.

Soon after, a leaflet was circulating the LPR page, advertising a protest. People were to gather outside Town Hall on Tuesday night, as the council’s neighbourhoods committee gathered to discuss the new policy. “This can’t be true. They're trying to lock us up in our own areas. Break free Liverpool and stay strong,” read one comment. Needless to say, we had to head along and see what it was all about.

There’s between 30 and 40 people here when I arrive, gathered directly outside Town Hall. They have banners reading “AN ATTACK ON OUR FREEDOM” and “GLOBALISTS FUND CLIMATE SCIENTISTS FOR CLIMATE HOAX OR THEY GET DEFUNDED”. As councillors arrive to attend the meeting they’re met with chants of “treasonous traitors”. A number of speakers take turns and I recognise one of them from LPR who targeted school teachers during the pandemic. And while the protest today isn’t especially feisty, it clearly has the effect of intimidating some councillors. Eventually, the council members discussing the plan had to be ushered to safety out a side door, with the Echo reporting that “some [were] understood to be fearful of the crowd outside”. 

We’ve since heard that some councillors had received abusive and threatening texts and emails from those involved in the protest. Moreover, The Post has discovered that a member of Patriotic Alternative, a far-right, fascist group — whose neo-Nazi leader cites Mein Kampf as his favourite book — was in attendance at the meeting, having heard about it on Telegram. It goes to prove a worrying point: that among these conspiratorial protest groups, many of which sprang up during the pandemic, there are some overlaps with the organised far-right.

Regardless, I’m here to ask the pressing questions. Is Laura Robertson-Collins, the council’s new cabinet member for neighbourhoods, in cahoots with a shadowy global cabal? A man named Paul is kind enough to explain.