Declassified UK July 2023
Posted: 31st July 2023
July 2023
Hi all,
Leila Dougan here, you might have seen me in Declassified’s recent series of short videos. If not please do go check them out on Declassified’s YouTube, Instagram or TikTok pages! Plus keep a look out for bite-size explainer articles where I’ll be spelling out some of the facts around issues like this one here on depleted uranium.
The climate crisis is the most urgent threat to our planet. We’re in a defining decade for the environment, and we need some serious action. While oil companies fiercely protect their profits and influence there’s the rather urgent issue of rising temperatures and extreme weather events that are destroying vulnerable ecosystems, food security, and human lives.
We are fast running out of time and DCUK-Earth is a new initiative launched this month to deep dive on how the UK’s policy decisions are fueling the climate crisis.
Obviously, it all comes down to profit and power as laid out by Helena Farstad and Professor Rupert Read from the Climate Majority Project. They provide a no-nonsense breakdown of how we can reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and put some real pressure on the world’s major oil corporations. Because goodness knows they’re just stalling while the planet burns.
Farstad and Read demand a stop to new oil and gas extraction contracts and loophole free windfall tax on oil and gas companies. Let’s hit them where it hurts already!
My personal favourite is their calling on fossil company insiders to become whistleblowers and “double-agents” as well as calling on us to pull our hard-earned money from oil, to boycott the baddies and support activists who are holding corporations to account. Remember, we can’t rely on the oil and gas industry to change voluntarily, let’s step up and make them take action.
tentacles of British Petroleum spread far beyond the corporate boardroom. Files unearthed in Colombia by John McEvoy, one of Declassified’s regular contributors, reveal that BP funded Colombia’s military when the company struck “major” oil reserves in that country in the mid-1990s, with barrels flowing into the billions. BP not only provided funding to military units operating around its oil sites but also proposed financial support for Colombia’s “national defence activities” across the country. This was during a time when the armed forces were responsible for a significant portion of the political killings in Colombia.
Declassified’s director Mark Curtis outlined how Britain’s Foreign Office is largely captured by global climate polluter BP. From Iran to Azerbaijan, Iraq to Nigeria, Russia to Venezuela, the UK prioritises the corporation’s profits over a decent foreign policy. Indeed, BP’s interests drive UK support for wars, coups and dictatorships.
You can watch my short video on this here.
More Bombs
Speaking of weapons. Prof. Paul Rogers argues that instead of funding research on climate science and trying to understand the very real threats that will arise from the inevitable catastrophic damage of storms, floods, wildfires and droughts, the UK is obsessed with expensive and irrelevant military equipment, some of which is barely functional anyway.
Raising eyebrows this month, the widely banned and highly controversial weapons, cluster munitions, look like being used by Ukraine in the fight against Russia after US president Joe Biden authorised their supply. Declassified’s chief reporter Phil Miller reviewed the grim legacy of NATO firing this banned weapon in the Balkans and visited sites in Kosovo where they were fired in the late 1990s. Check out his video on Instagram.
Meanwhile, declassified files also show that Margaret Thatcher’s government was so eager to make a quick buck during the Cold War that they flirted with selling up to 10,000 cluster bombs to communist China. The Chinese engineers were even allowed to witness a demonstration of the cluster bombs at a factory in Hertfordshire. The deal fell flat after the UK worried that the regime would not order enough bombs to make it financially worthwhile.
Keir Starmer
Declassified’s chief investigator Matt Kennard reminds us of Keir Starmer’s cozy relationship with major players. Back when Starmer was the Director of Public Prosecutions, he couldn’t resist the allure of lunches and drinks with the likes of Rupert Murdoch’s Times, Sunday Times, and the Sun.
He even attended Murdoch’s summer party and the Times Christmas drinks, only apparently cutting them off socially after the phone hacking scandal. None of these events were official so there’s no record of what was discussed but we all know there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
And Matt also revealed something else about Starmer. Starmer joined an international grouping closely linked to US and UK intelligence while he was serving in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet. The Trilateral Commission was founded in 1973 by billionaire banker David Rockefeller as a networking group for elites from the US, Europe and Japan. Starmer served on the Trilateral Commission alongside two former heads of the CIA without telling Jeremy Corbyn—who would have blocked it, Declassified found.
A feminist foreign policy?
What about the idea the UK government has a ‘feminist’ foreign policy? Britain’s high commissioner to Kenya, Jane Marriott, has spent the past five years dishing out UK aid in the country but has failed during her tenure to address a specific case of violence against women perpetrated by British soldiers.
Agnes Wanjiru, a Kenyan woman, was brutally murdered in 2012, allegedly by British soldiers who paid her for sex. Despite an inquest confirming the involvement of British soldiers, no one has been convicted for the crime and there is no justice for Wanjiru’s family. It’s just one more example of the UK military using Kenya as its personal playground, with no consequences for bad behaviour, environmental damage or violent crimes.
I hope everyone has a great August!
Best wishes
Leila Dougan
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