United Kingdom

Published also at Declassified UK.

US nuclear bombs were delivered to Lakenheath air base on Thursday 17 July as part of NATO plans to deploy new battlefield nuclear nuclear weapons intended for war-fighting in Europe.

This is a terrific read

“We can’t think of anything right now, but if you pay us, we’ll come up with something.”

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[On] 22 July, the House of Lords will hold a consequential vote on whether to allow up to 15 percent foreign ownership of domestic media, in a long-standing debate that poses potential consequences for information integrity in the UK.

At the heart of the issue is whether to allow the American investment firm RedBird Capital to proceed with its plan to purchase the parent company overseeing the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph and its global distribution. ARTICLE 19 is deeply concerned about the risks posed to media pluralism, transparency, and information integrity by this proposed relaxation of foreign ownership limits without robust safeguards. We note that RedBird Capital’s close ties to China, including through its chairman, John L Thornton, raise risks of Chinese information influence in UK media and globally.

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We recall that a group of MPs and peers expressed, in a letter sent to [British Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport] Lisa Nandy in early June, concerns in this case stem from ‘the lack of transparency regarding the source of the funds behind this acquisition,’ making it ‘conceivable, and increasingly likely, that funds could be sourced directly or indirectly from foreign state actors,’ including China. This risk arises from the close relationship of RedBird Capital chairman, John L Thornton, to China, as argued in the letter.

Thornton’s connections to China are manifold, as outlined in a recent article for Index on Censorship by Luke Pulford, Executive Director of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC). Thornton sits on the International Advisory Council of the China Investment Corporation, China’s largest sovereign wealth fund, and chaired the Silk Road Finance Corporation, both vehicles through which China has pursued financial influence. Bloomberg has also reported his ‘solid Chinese connections’, including positions on the boards of the semi-state-owned Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) and China Unicom Hong Kong, a subsidiary of the State-owned telecommunications operator, which was barred from doing business in the US in 2022 over national security risks. He has also served in advisory roles for the Confucius Institute, which the Henry Jackson Society and the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation identified in a 2022 report as a direct extension of the Chinese Communist Party Propaganda Department in the UK. #

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UK's slide into authoritarianism by the Israeli bootlicker Keith Starmer

This £100 billion figure is from a report funded by the Privatised Water Industry to lobby against Nationalisation.

Why is a Labour MP regurgitating industry lies?

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Students for a Free Tibet (SfT) raised concerns over Labour’s early years minister, Stephen Morgan MP, following his trip in May to Wuhan, where he represented the UK at the World Digital Education Conference.

SfT is a global chapter-based organisation that campaigns in solidarity with Tibetans seeking freedom and independence after China’s invasion in 1950.

According to various media sources and the United Nations, around 80 per cent of Tibetan children aged between four and eighteen - around one million pupils - have been placed in state-run boarding schools. These schools reportedly remove children from their families and replace Tibetan with Chinese as the primary language of education.

As a result, some children return home unable to speak their mother tongue, making communication with their families difficult. SfT describes this as a form of “cultural erasure” that can result in long-term emotional trauma.

In 2022, the UK government told the United Nations that Tibet remained an issue of “deep international concern, including new reports of boarding schools being used to further erode cultural, linguistic and religious identity.”

The following year, UN experts expressed alarm at what they described as the “forced assimilation” of Tibetan children and "erosion of their identity".

Following Mr Morgan’s visit, SfT wrote to the MP seeking clarification. The group said it received only a vague reply in which Mr Morgan asserted that a Labour government would “challenge where we must, to protect UK values,” and highlighted that there is no record of him raising the Tibet issue during the conference.

In a statement, SfT said:

“The fact that Stephen Morgan, as the individual entrusted with overseeing Early Childhood Education and representing the United Kingdom abroad, is publicly contradicting an established, major foreign policy position held by the UK and echoed in consensus by many like-minded countries and allies cannot be ignored, as the potential political consequences are significant.”

The group has called on the UK government to release a statement detailing the purpose of the visit, including who funded it and what was discussed at the conference roundtable.

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