Brian Gerrish discovered Common Purpose when he was involved with a group in Plymouth in the west of England, helping people find jobs and one of their projects was repairing wooden boats. He said they had lots of public support and backing from the local authorities and everything was going fine. But then it suddenly changed and the council support was withdrawn. When they tried to continue alone, he said that within a short time key people were being threatened:

‘When we started to explore why we were being threatened we were absolutely staggered to find a very strange organisation called Common Purpose operating in the city. And we were absolutely amazed that there were so many people involved but they were not declaring themselves …’

In the following video Brian talks of his findings.