Britain’s Foreign Policy-Making Doesn’t Prioritise Human Life, Or Even Take It Seriously

In 2009 The MPs Expenses Scandal Was Exposed – Are They At It Again?
In 2009, the expenses scandal exposed what politicians had been claiming and a kind of wholesale wrongdoing in parliament.
More than 15 years on, it appears little has changed, with an estimated two-thirds of MPs engaged in huge claims.
This time, the Canary has uncovered that MPs on both sides of the House have been submitting huge claims on staffing, office, and accommodation expenses on what appears to be an industrial scale, and have been doing so for some time.

A significant number have been claiming remarkably similar amounts, as close to the maximum allowed as possible, regardless of where they are in the country, where they live, how many people they employ, or even whether they have an office outside parliament.
Further, a survey of property prices reveals that a significant number are claiming amounts that bear no relation to commercial rates in their constituencies.

When Rishi Sunak became prime minister in October 2022, all the members of his first Cabinet claimed more in staffing costs than he did, with the then deputy prime minister, Dominic Raab, claiming the most, over £240,000.

Both Tory and Labour Friends of Israel were more than twice as likely to make massive claims.
Some 80% of Tories belong to Conservative Friends of Israel.
Of 55 MPs listed as members of Labour Friends of Israel, 44 (80%) claimed more than £200,000 in staffing costs from 2023-2024.
In the same year, 47 (85.5%) claimed more than £20,000 in office costs.
23 (42%) claimed more than £20,000 in accommodation costs.

After the investigation in 2009, 392 politicians were ordered to pay £1.3million of mis-claimed expenses.
Famously, Tory MP Peter Viggers was forced to apologise after claiming for a duck house in his garden pond.
This time around, the scale of the potential mis-or-over claiming and the length of time this has been allowed to go on suggest something much worse.
With potentially tens of millions of pounds involved, it’s not clear how MPs will repay the money without divesting of all their assets to avoid criminal proceedings, if, of course, any of these claims are fraudulent.
( The Canary, 03.11.2025 )  ..  thecanary.co

Israel Accused Of Stealing Body Parts From Palestinians They Abducted.
Authorities in Gaza have confirmed that the Israeli occupation forces stole body parts from killed Palestinians during the two-year genocidal war on the besieged territory.
After Israel returned 120 mutilated bodies of Palestinian abductees as part of the ceasefire, medical examinations revealed that the occupying forces had removed organs from several, including corneas, kidneys, and livers.
According to the Gaza Media Office, the bodies arrived in deplorable condition, many blindfolded, bound, hanged, shot at close range, or showing signs of prolonged torture leading to death.
Some were returned without heads, limbs, or internal organs, while others were melted or unrecognisable.
Forensic teams in Gaza also documented clear tank-track imprints on several of the returned bodies, suggesting that some victims had been crushed under military vehicles.

In 1996, Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, an influential leader within the Zionist terrorist outfit, Chabad-Lubavitch, made controversial remarks, claiming that organ theft from non-Jews could be justified on the basis that Jewish lives hold greater religious value.
The first major reports of organ trafficking linked to Israel surfaced during the First Palestinian Intifada in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
In 1990, Dr. Hatem Abu Ghazaleh, former chief health official for the occupied West Bank, stated that during the first intifada, ‘organs, especially eyes and kidneys, were removed from the bodies during the first year or year and a half.’

Further evidence emerged in 2009 when Swedish journalist Donald Boström published an investigative piece in Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet titled ‘Our sons are plundered of their organs’.
The report detailed testimonies from Palestinian families in the West Bank and Gaza who said their sons had been abducted, held in secret, autopsied and returned to their families with major body incisions indicating organ theft.
According to the report, Israel’s transplant system has long been carrying out or supporting illegal transplants using organs obtained from foreign or coerced ‘donors’.

In her 2002 book ‘Over Their Dead Bodies’, Israeli physician Meira Weiss provided details of the systematic harvesting of organs from dead Palestinians between 1996 and 2002 for use in medical research at Israeli universities and transplant.
A 2008 CNN investigation identified Israel as one of the largest hubs in the global illegal trade in human organs.
In 2014, an Israeli television report featured confessions by high-ranking officials that skin from the bodies of dead Palestinians and African workers had been used to treat Israeli burn victims.
A 2015 European Parliament report titled ‘Trafficking in Human Organs’ listed Israel as a key importer and consumer in the trade and noted its refusal to sign the 2008 Istanbul Declaration aimed at combating organ trafficking.
( The News Line, 23.10.2025 )  ..  wrp.org.uk

TikTok Is Much Closer To Washington Than It Is To Beijing.
Amid a national hysteria claiming the popular video-sharing app is a Chinese Trojan Horse, a MintPress News investigation has found dozens of ex-U.S. State Department officials working in key positions at TikTok.
Many more individuals with backgrounds in the FBI, CIA and other departments of the national security state also hold influential posts at the social media giant, affecting the content that over one billion users see.
While American politicians demand the app be banned on national security grounds, try to force through an internet surveillance act that would turn the country into an Orwellian state, make clueless statements about how TikTok is dangerous because it connects to your Wi-Fi, it is possible that TikTok is already much closer to Washington than it is to Beijing.
( Alan MacLeod, 13.04.2023 )  ..  mintpressnews.com

Gaza Shows How Britain’s Foreign Policy-Making Doesn’t Prioritise Human Life, Or Even Take It Seriously.
The British political system has utterly failed to confront a genocide.
That system has allowed the British establishment to be complicit in one of the worst horrors of our time — Israel’s two-year offensive against Palestinians, complete with ethnic cleansing, systematic attacks on schools and hospitals, and crimes against humanity.
Now, under a current supposed ceasefire, Israel is still killing Palestinians and their plight in Gaza remains dire, as the world sees the extent of the mass destruction visited on them.
Throughout the attacks on Palestinians in Gaza, British leaders have actively cooperated with Israel in their military, trade and diplomatic policies.
Still now, significant sanctions on Israel are completely off the government’s agenda, a striking contrast to Russia, because the establishment chooses to back Israel even in its criminality.

There is little morality in British political and economic decision-making.
But this doesn’t mean the system is “broken”; it’s working as it’s intended to.
What we’re witnessing is the pinnacle of ministerial impunity for complicity in crimes overseas, and the utter irrelevance of human rights and international law to UK policy-making.
More important to the establishment than these has been protecting Israel, and the British and Israeli arms industries.
Gaza illustrates many deep problems in British governance and exposes the illusion that the UK is a democracy.
Most obviously, Gaza shows how Whitehall’s foreign policy-making doesn’t prioritise human life, or even take it seriously.
From the outset in October 2023, UK ministers put their strategic alliance with Israel above the lives of dehumanised Palestinians, even as the death toll mounted in the tens of thousands.
Ministers in both Conservative and Labour governments overtly apologised for obvious Israeli breaches of international law and human rights.

Beyond Gaza, the reality is that Britain has aided many of the world’s genocides and backs most of the world’s repressive regimes, with British arms and diplomatic support helping to prop many of them up.
Contrast the rhetoric and policy of ministers standing up for Ukrainians compared to Palestinians, ministers believe they can pick and choose whose human rights to support.
Every UK government says it upholds international law but this is plainly untrue.
Gaza highlights that ministers think they can behave like criminals, supporting the laws they like and ignoring those they don’t.
Whitehall has repeatedly refused to acknowledge Israeli war crimes and given ‘special immunity’ for Israeli military leaders to visit Britain.
It has done nothing to support the various international bodies demanding the UK fulfils its obligations to stop aiding Israel’s occupation policies and “prevent and punish” it, as the Genocide Convention demands.
( Declassified UK, 18.11.2025 )  ..  declassifieduk.org

The Stench Of Death Associated With The Kincora Child Sex Abuse Scandal.
It includes the murder of a Westminster MP by an MI5 agent inside the IRA.
The murderous agent was Alfredo ‘Freddie’ Scappaticci.
The victim was Robert Bradford, a member of the Ulster Unionist Party and the Vanguard Progressive Unionist Party.
He represented Belfast South.

The death of Scappaticci shut the door on the last realistic opportunity to solve Bradford’s murder.
Operation Kenova, which has been probing the Scappaticci scandal, and has cost approximately €40million is unlikely now to establish what took place.
The killing was linked to the cover-up of the Kincora Boys’ Home scandal.

There are other murders which are associated with Kincora.
One of the most significant Loyalist terrorists of the period 1968-82, was John McKeague, a paedophile.
He knew all about Kincora.
McKeague was murdered by British agents when he threatened to spill the beans on the scandal.
( David Burke, 07.07.2023 ) .. Full story:  villagemagazine.ie

Israel’s Genocide Is Being Powered By Microsoft.
From creating a massive digital dragnet, aiding in the production of A.I.-generated kill lists, hiring hundreds of Israeli spies to run its internal affairs, and suppressing figures opposing the slaughter, the Seattle-based tech corporation has played a key role in the violence.
MintPress has detailed the deep collaboration between the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) and Amazon, Google, TikTok, Apple, Palantir, and Oracle, but Microsoft’s relationship with the government and armed forces of Israel is potentially the closest, leading then-CEO Steve Ballmer to state that “Microsoft is as much an Israeli company as an American company.”
MintPress explores the decades-long partnership between Microsoft and Israel, and the employees trying to break that marriage from the inside.

“Among U.S. tech firms,” the Associated Press wrote, “Microsoft has had an especially close relationship with the Israeli military.”
That relationship, it notes, massively expanded after the October 7, 2023, attacks.
In the months following October 7, the IDF’s usage of Microsoft’s Azure cloud service surged more than 200-fold.
The amount of data from surveillance cameras, drones, checkpoints, biometric scanners, phone calls, and intercepted Palestinian personal data stored by the IDF on Microsoft servers doubled in the next nine months, reaching 13.6 petabytes by July 2024, equivalent to 23,000 years of audio, or seven trillion pages of text.
The point of all this was to create an enormous digital dragnet, where Palestinians’ every move, word, and keystroke was recorded in monitored in the greatest and most dystopian digital dragnet ever created.
In the words of Yossi Sariel, the head of Unit 8200, the IDF’s surveillance division, the plan was to “track everyone, all of the time.”
( Alan MacLeod, 27.10.2025 )  ..  mintpressnews.com

A Completely Fictional Allegation Published By The Times.
On 31 October 2025, Private Eye ran a short column detailing the potential origins of a rumour, breathlessly printed by the Times newspaper, that Palestine Action was under investigation for receiving funding from Iran.
The Private Eye alleges that a boss at CMS Strategic, once a lobby group for Israeli arms firm Elbit, is taking credit for planting the story in the press.
This is significant given the fact that the Times article came out very shortly before the British government, in its infinite and measured wisdom, decided to declare Palestine Action a terrorist organisation.
Of course, the Times didn’t bother to include any quotes from Home Office officials regarding the investigation into Palestine Action.
That’s just as well, given that this entire line of the story has turned out to be completely fictional.

NGO Monitor, a research institute that holds campaign groups to account and promotes transparency, has said Palestine Action’s lack of public financial information “reflects a lack of transparency and accountability”.
Except NGO Monitor, which claims to be a “globally recognised research institute promoting democratic values and good governance”, is far from an unbiased source.
NGO Monitor was founded in Israel in 2002 for the purposes of monitoring civil organisations which it sees as acting counter to Israeli interests.
Not exactly an unbiased source on a group like Palestine Action.
( The Canary, 03.11.2025 )  ..  thecanary.co

Palestinian Aid Seekers Killed And Their Bodies Bulldozed Into Unmarked Graves.
Ammar Wadi knew he was risking his life when he set out to get a bag of flour for his family from an aid truck near the Zikim crossing into Gaza in June 2025.
“Forgive me mum if anything happens to me,” he wrote on his cell phone’s home screen.
“Whoever finds my phone, please tell my family that I love them so much.”
Amid regular Israeli gunfire toward aid seekers this summer, Wadi never made it home and the message he left was delivered to his family weeks later by someone who found his phone.
It was the last they heard from him.
Wadi is among the dozens of Palestinians whose loved ones say they vanished near Zikim and whose fates remain unknown.

A CNN investigation now points to the Israeli military bulldozing the bodies of some of those killed near the crossing into shallow, unmarked graves.
At other times, their remains were simply left to decompose in the open, unable to be recovered in the militarised area.
CNN’s review, which also found that aid seekers were killed by indiscriminate Israeli fire near the crossing, drew upon hundreds of videos and photos from around Zikim, along with interviews of eyewitnesses and local aid truck drivers.
Satellite imagery also shows bulldozing activity throughout the summer in the areas where aid seekers were killed.
Two videos, geolocated by CNN to the Zikim area, show the aftermath of an incident in June, depicting bodies partially buried around an overturned aid truck.
( CNN, 06.12.2025 )  ..  Full report:  edition.cnn.com