Declassified UK June 2022

Posted: 10th July 2022

June 2022

Hi all,

John McEvoy here. I’m one of Declassified UK’s regular contributors, an investigative journalist, and a historian of British foreign policy in Latin America. It’s an honour to be able to write for Declassified, and support the growth of truly independent, adversarial journalism.

It’s been another massive month for Declassified. Here are some of the highlights from June.

Corbyn’s most candid interview

Declassified’s head of investigations Matt Kennard sat down with Jeremy Corbyn for a discussion about his time as Labour Party leader. It was Corbyn’s most candid interview yet, with the MP for Islington North lambasting the “supine media” in Britain and discussing how the British intelligence services “deliberately undermined” him.

For me, the most damning part of the interview was about Saudi Arabia, and how it enjoys aggressively bipartisan support within Parliament. After Corbyn pushed to cease all arms sales to Saudi Arabia, he was “met with the most extraordinary levels of lobbying and opposition from Labour MPs”. Corbyn said: “It was the biggest rebellion ever against my time as leader of the party”.

Blowback

Declassified also began releasing a series of articles on the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017. The bombing looks like an incredibly serious case of foreign policy blowback, with Britain’s one-time allies later becoming a grave threat to the British public.

Editor Mark Curtis wrote a detailed piece tracing the links between British covert military action in Libya and Salman Abedi, the Manchester bomber. Mark also revealed that MI5 and Greater Manchester Police gave Abedi “free rein” to travel to Libya, where he gained military experience and contacts.

In a third piece, Mark and the brilliant Phil Miller revealed how Britain kept bombing Colonel Gaddafi’s forces in Libya, even after the UK military realised a terrorist group would profit from regime change.

Priti Patel’s chilling threats to press freedom

This month, UK Home Secretary Priti Patel approved Julian Assange’s extradition to the US. For anybody familiar with the case, or Patel’s reactionary politics, the decision was not a surprise. However, it was a crippling day for press freedom, and Britain once again emerged as a pariah state, with political leaders denouncing the decision worldwide.

Patel landed a second blow to press freedom this month. As veteran journalist Richard Norton-Taylor found, Patel has been championing the National Security Bill, which would make it an offence to publish leaked information seen to prejudice the “safety or interests of” the UK. There would be no public interest defence, and offenders could face a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

Britain’s hidden role in the world

Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, and definitely don’t ask where it came from… This month, Phil wrote another piece about how Azerbaijan’s authoritarian president Ilham Aliyev gifted the Queen a horse to celebrate her Platinum jubilee. The Queen said it was “very generous”, a bit like Azerbaijan’s decision to open the resource-rice Caspian Sea to British oil giant BP.

The excellent Matt Broomfield wrote about NATO ally Turkey’s brutal occupation of northern Syria, and how it wants to launch a fresh offensive against Kurds and other minorities. In May 2022, the UK removed limitations on arms sales to Turkey.

Peter Cronau of Declassified Australia and I also wrote a piece about the UK’s secret Cold War propaganda unit, the Information Research Department (IRD). In the early 1970s, Britain helped Australia set up its own secret propaganda unit, which was modelled on the IRD and designed to counter Western decline in the Asia-Pacific.

DCUK Parliament & DCUK Intel

A reminder of this – 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.

However, if Twitter is too much for you, make sure you sign up for our Twitter Revue newsletter. It’s a completely free email that Mark curates each Friday morning to include all the chatter around our articles and every question to parliament that we think you need to hear about.

All regular donors also get our weekly DCUK Intel report, which I’ve been preparing for the past couple of months. Each week, I comb through the goings on of British ministers and organisations, to make sure their actions are as known to you as possible. It’s an incredibly useful tool for researchers and the general public alike, and well worth a couple of quid a month, if I say so myself.

Want to stay in the loop but don’t want to spend all day on Twitter? Why not subscribe for free to our weekly Twitter Revue? A weekly highlight of what we’ve been talking about on Twitter, plus a round-up of our #DCUKParliament tweets.

We Are Truly Independent 

I used the word “truly” at the start of this email because the word ‘independent’ has lost almost all meaning when it comes to the British media. The Guardian, which rakes it in from corporate advertisement and sits on a huge endowment fund, cheekily tells its readers it’s independent while asking for donations.

It gets worse. Over the past seven years, the Guardian, the Independent, the Telegraph, Financial Times, and Evening Standard have all taken money from the Saudi regime. No wonder over half of the British public polled in 2017 didn’t even know about Saudi Arabia’s brutal, UK-sponsored war on Yemen – now the site of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

And it’s not just Saudi Arabia. The polls consistently show that the media has done the public a disservice in informing them about Britain’s real role in the world. In 2019, 32% of Britons said the British empire was “more something to be proud of”, with 37% saying it is “neither something to be proud nor ashamed of” and only 19% saying the British empire is “more something to be ashamed of”.

There’s a lot of work to do, and Declassified needs your support to do the job the corporate media won’t. For as little as £2 a month you can help Declassified keep producing this vital work. Please consider supporting us!

All the best,

John McEvoy

Regular Contributor at Declassified UK