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Brian Gerrish
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Brian Gerrish is a prominent figure in the British Constitution Group and the Lawful Rebellion movement. Gerrish is active on the seminar circuit and routinely gives talks at BCG meetings. Gerrish is mainly known for his paranoia regarding the organisation Common Purpose with his website Common Purpose exposed and for his newspaper the UK Column. Gerrish particularly dislikes communists, Marxists, the Fabian society and Neurolinguistic programming. Gerrish is also an independent parliamentary candidate for Plymouth. Prior to becoming a woo purveyor Gerrish was a British naval officer.
Gerrish claims that various change agents as he calls them such as Common Purpose, Bilderberg, the think tank Demos, various other think tanks and pressure groups are attempting to subvert democracy and shape government policy by influencing the third sector (which he seems to confuse with the public sector). As part of the Lawful Rebellion movement he's not a fan of the judiciary, claiming they are all bent criminals who find in favour of paedophiles on a regular basis. Gerrish was also present when the BCG attempted to arrest a judge in Birkenhead.
Common Purpose
Gerrish hates Common Purpose with a passion, describing it as a political cult, brainwashing its 'graduates'. He is the main source and purveyor of conspiracy theories surrounding the organisation and regularly gives talks about their nefarious influence on government. He believes that Common Purpose are attempting to infiltrate all areas of government in order to subvert it and push its own pro-EU agenda. He is the man behind the website "Common Purpose Exposed."
Neurolinguistic programming
Gerrish has unusual views on NLP in that to him it isn't a pseudoscientific personal development methodology; instead, he completely misunderstands it as some kind of sinister brainwashing technology that's being used to influence us in society.[1] Gerrish asserts that NLP is a kind of hypnosis. In the examples he gives, he seems to confuse any kind of persuasive marketing technique as NLP. Any attempt to convey a message whether implicit or even completely explicit can be cited as an example of NLP at work. Any kind of metaphor, simile, pause or even gesture is NLP at work. Here is a perfect example in which everything this woman does in her talk is apparently an example of NLP. Gerrish also claims that NLP training can be harmful to health even claiming that the Bridgend suicides
were because the teenagers involved had all taken courses that were full of NLP techniques. Gerrish sees NLP training everywhere, in advertising, in training (especially police training) and in the media. He claims that NLP is now so effective that it even allows the police to murder people on tube stations (referring to the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, although what NLP had to do with it we have no idea). Gerrish is particularly critical of Common Purpose as being responsible for using NLP in its activities, though he claims that its chief executive, Julia Middleton, may be more of a victim of NLP than genuinely evil.
References
- ↑ The 'programming' in Neurolinguistic programming is (according to NLP principles) performed on oneself, not on others as Gerrish seems to think.
See also
Sources
- Brian Gerrish - State of the Nation (YouTube)
- British Constitution Group Conference Q&A session In this video Brian Gerrish (sharing a stage with Roger Hayes and John Harris) field a series of questions starting with several from NLP woowoos in the audience who take offence at their NLP woo being criticised by Gerrish's anti-NLP woo.