Declassified newsletter June 2021

June 2021

This month we covered stories about Colombia, Israel, Oman, China and Qatar and on nuclear weapons, threats to UK journalism and how UK intelligence agencies are flouting environmental legislation.

Very striking is how the UK is deepening relations with many of the world’s most repressive regimes – something which the establishment media hasn’t seemed to notice. A case in point is the RAF establishing a second squadronwith Qatar, an authoritarian state long reported to be supporting extremist groups in the Middle East.

We covered Colombia for the first time, revealing how the UK’s National Crime Agency trained the Colombian police in a multimillion-pound five-year programme that is shrouded in secrecy.

If you haven’t seen Phil Miller’s new video yet, you can watch it here. Phil revealed that the spy chief of the repressive state of Oman bought a palatial property in Surrey for $16m. Omanis have been protesting against corruption and unemployment in the country.

As many of you will know, Oman is the closest UK ally in the Gulf – but try finding articles on the UK military relationship with the regime in the press (actually, don’t bother – there are none).  

Kate Hudson of CND wrote a piece for us on how the UK’s new nuclear strategy is illegal. I have to say the sheer hypocrisy of UK nuclear strategy is amazing – while the government preaches that Iran must never acquire a nuclear weapon and ignores Israel’s actual possession of nuclear arms, Britain goes ahead and increases its nuclear arsenal and adopts a new policy which “allows” it to threaten to use nuclear arms against non-nuclear states. This is a huge issue.

As is the rising threat to journalism in the UK, documented again by Richard Norton-Taylor. This time, Richard wrote about the Home Office’s proposed reforms to Britain’s Official Secrets Acts which could land journalists and others in jail for 14 years for publishing information the government claims damages national security.

We also discovered that the Foreign Office gathered information on our head of investigations, Matt Kennard, before rejecting his freedom of information requests. This appears to be a breach of UK transparency laws.
In the pipeline are investigations on Turkey, Kenya and the City of London, among other areas – some of which I shouldn’t mention.

Monitoring parliament
Some of you might have noticed that we monitor the UK parliament to capture key information that the government reveals – which we then tweet out on our Twitter account. Make sure you follow us @declassifiedUK. If you search on Twitter for #DCUKparliament you’ll see all these tweets. Practically every day, there is something to reveal – almost none is reported in the UK press. So we see this as a public service.