The heir to the British throne, Prince Charles, has held 95 meetings with eight repressive monarchies in the Middle East since the ‘Arab Spring’ protests of 2011 threatened their power. Charles has played a key role in promoting £14.5-billion worth of UK arms exports to these regimes in the last decade.
Britain’s royal family has met members of autocratic Middle Eastern monarchies nearly once a fortnight since the crackdown on ‘Arab Spring’ protests began 10 years ago this month. Their visits have often coincided with human rights abuses in the Gulf, where pro-democracy activists are punished for criticising the Windsor ties to regimes.
The UK has just requested to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership but this trade deal could deepen the influence of multinational companies over Britain’s economy, make it harder to regulate Big Tech, and lower food standards and workers’ rights protections.
Britain’s Foreign Office knew Kenya’s Anti-Terrorism Police Unit (ATPU) was involved in renditions of terror suspects yet paid for its new headquarters and continues assistance programmes, along with London’s Metropolitan Police, disclosures obtained by Declassified UK show.
The new ‘authorised history’ of GCHQ, Britain’s largest intelligence agency, ignores or simply dismisses its most controversial activities as supposed scandals, giving a thoroughly one-sided account of the spy agency.
New research reveals that dozens of senior UK defence, foreign office and intelligence officials find employment with oil, gas and mining corporations once they leave public office, rubber-stamped by a Whitehall committee which pays little attention to potential conflicts of interest. Such private profiting from energy companies is likely to restrict Britain from taking stronger action to address climate change.
Declassified UK’s analysis of the written outputs of three of Sky News’ principal foreign affairs journalists has found that the media outlet acts largely to amplify the views of the British Ministry of Defence and Foreign Office, while rarely offering critical, independent analysis.
James Duddridge, Britain’s minister for Africa, earned tens of thousands of pounds as an adviser to a London-based finance house whose advisory board is chaired by an ally of Uganda’s authoritarian ruler, Yoweri Museveni. He also did not declare shareholdings in African companies to Parliament’s register of interests.
As US prosecutors lodge an appeal in their resolve to jail Julian Assange for espionage, a former British Cabinet minister has delivered a stinging attack on Britain’s extradition treaty with the US.
The UK government has effectively endorsed evidently unfair elections in Uganda, where both the opposition and media were subjected to violence and intimidation, to help Yoweri Museveni, a favoured authoritarian leader who has been in power for 34 years, to remain in office.