The UK Political System Enables Ministers To Conduct Secret Wars With Zero Parliamentary Or Public Oversight

The UK Is “Balancing The Books” While Yemenis Starve.

Britain’s halving of aid to Yemen is a bid to ‘balance the books on the backs of starving people’, the head of the UN humanitarian affairs office has claimed.
The UK will lose global standing for the sake of a ‘relatively small’ sum, said Briton Sir Mark Lowcock, ex-boss of the department for international development.
The reduction from £160million to £87million will lead to tens of thousands of deaths, he added.
Boris Johnson has said the cut was necessary in the ‘straitened circumstances’ of the pandemic.
( Metro, 09.03.2021 )

Exam Textbooks Are Censored And Redacted In A State-Funded Jewish Girls’ School.

A state-funded Orthodox Jewish girls’ school in north London, UK, has admitted censoring sections of GCSE textbooks to remove mentions of homosexuals and examples of women socialising with men, saying it did so to protect girls from sexualisation.
Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls’ school in Stamford Hill, which serves the strictly Orthodox Haredi community, covered text and images including Fred Astaire dancing with Ginger Rogers.

Words and photos were redacted in a book called ‘Understanding the Modern World’, one of the exam board AQA’s GCSE history resources.
The school removed references to homosexuals from a section on the Nazi belief in the superiority of the Aryan race.
Elsewhere, a number of images of women were censored to hide their chests, shoulders and arms, and legs above the knee.
In a section on the position of women in modern American society, references to women smoking, drinking and driving with men were redacted, as was the sentence: “They kissed in public.”

Ofsted has promised to take a tougher line on faith schools and illegal schools over concerns that children are not receiving a balanced and modern education.
Similar complaints were made against Yesodey Hatorah in 2013, when the exam board OCR found 52 papers in two GCSE science exams had questions on evolution obscured, meaning they could not be answered.

At the time, the exam board held discussions with the school to ensure the episode was not repeated.
It also raised concerns with the Department for Education and Ofsted, as well as the Joint Council for Qualifications.
An Ofsted spokesperson said all schools had a duty to actively promote fundamental British values, including “mutual respect and tolerance of those who hold values different from their own”.
( Sarah Marsh, 09.03.2018 )  ..  theguardian.com

An Israeli Security Services Firm Was Blacklisted For Supplying Arms To Both The Sudanese Government And The Opposition.

Akodit is among the almost seven million South Sudanese people facing hunger, 61% of the population, with 1.8 million on the brink of starvation.
The crisis is largely a consequence of the civil war that broke out in South Sudan in 2013 shortly after it gained independence from the north.
In 2015, the South Sudanese government launched a multi-million dollar project meant to develop farms that would feed its people and even export the surplus.

But according to the U.S. government, the farming project was instead used to cover up the sale of approximately $150million in weapons, including rifles, grenade launchers, and shoulder-fired rockets.
In December 2018, an Israeli security services firm contracted to run the project, as well as its owner, were blacklisted for allegedly fuelling the conflict by supplying arms to both the government and the opposition.

In its sanctions announcement, the U.S. Treasury Department mentioned, but didn’t name or blacklist, a “major multi-national oil firm” that was in “close collaboration.”
Newly leaked internal documents, emails, and other records obtained by OCCRP, as well as confirmation by two closely placed sources, show who that collaborator is likely to be: Trafigura Pte Ltd., an oil trading subsidiary of Trafigura Group Pte Ltd., one of the world’s largest commodity trading companies.
( Sam Mednick, 17.07.2019 )  ..  occrp.org

British Files Reveal Shocking Details Of Torture From A Virtually Unknown Episode In UK Military History.

British files seen by Declassified reveal shocking details of torture from a virtually unknown episode in UK military history, when in 1970 special forces invaded and annexed the most important oil supply route on the Persian Gulf.
Fifty years ago, U.S. troops began building a military base on the Chagos Islands, a British territory in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
Its inhabitants, who numbered several thousand, were forcibly removed to make way for a naval station.

They received almost nothing in compensation for the loss of their homeland, but Britain did well out of the deal.
The Pentagon gave the Royal Navy a discount on its first nuclear-armed submarine fleet.
This bargain helped Whitehall keep up the pretence of being a great power, bolstering the UK’s permanent membership of the United Nations Security Council even as the British empire crumbled.
But nuclear weapons would not be enough to stay ahead in this new world order.

While evicting the Chagossians, UK officials busily conducted another colonial carve-up, this time to ensure continued control of global oil supply routes.
Known as Operation Intradon, it saw a proudly autonomous Arab tribe have their land handed over to a pro-Western dictator, detainees tortured by British troops and a UK special forces soldier dying in a night-time parachute jump.
Yet the episode has been largely forgotten outside of Musandam, a mountainous peninsula overlooking the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow sea lane between Iran and Arabia through which a third of the world’s oil supplies are shipped each day.

A researcher from Musandam provided Declassified with the names of ten members of the Shihuh tribe he believes to be among those tortured by the British in 1971, including the man who sustained gunshot wounds during the invasion.
31 people were interrogated over a five-week period.
The surviving paperwork shows that out of this group of 31 detainees, 27 were interrogated by the British unit for an average of eight and half hours.
The remaining four were selected for harsher treatment, with their interrogations ranging between 32 hours and three and a half days.

These marathon interrogation sessions in Oman might never have come to light had similar techniques not been used in Northern Ireland two months later.
In August 1971, the British army launched Operation Demetrius.
Hundreds of people were arrested and imprisoned without trial on the suspicion that they supported the IRA, a militant group fighting to end British control of Northern Ireland.
Among those interned, 14 were selected for “deep interrogation”.
They were taken to a secret location and subjected to what became known as the five techniques.

The men were hooded and forced to stand against a wall for hours in painful stress positions, as had been done in Oman weeks earlier.
Anyone who failed to remain in the stress position would be forced back into the posture.
White noise was played to overwhelm their senses, as they were deprived of food, water and sleep to weaken their resistance.
The combination of these five interrogation methods was carefully designed to leave no marks, but it was so traumatic that the hair of one detainee, 42-year-old school caretaker Sean McKenna, turned from black to white.
He died prematurely four years later from a heart attack.

When the interrogations came to light later in 1971, MPs were so outraged that Britain’s Conservative government had to commission an inquiry chaired by England’s top judge, Lord Parker.
He found that the interrogation tactics were illegal under domestic law.
Privately, ministers had gone further. Merlyn Rees, a former Northern Ireland Secretary, described the five techniques as “methods of torture”.
But Northern Ireland and Oman were not the only places where such methods had been used.
Since the end of World War Two, British soldiers had violently interrogated anti-colonial activists in more than half a dozen territories, from Kenya in 1956 to Yemen in 1967.
( Phil Miller, 22.10.2021 )  ..  declassifieduk.org

We Are Stealing From Our Own Future.

We demand more, you have heard the aspiring tyrant’s words that promise more.
Political promises evaporate when there is insufficient energy to support them.
The notion of “Saudi America” is reassuring, but the facts are not.
Despite the rhetoric and posturing, reality cannot be ignored.
The USA produces around 12+ million barrels of oil a day, but uses 0ver 19 million barrels a day (2016).

This imbalance is not going to change, despite collective belief to the contrary.
The USA cannot produce sufficient oil to sustain itself.
Price fluctuations and the ebb and flow of gluts should be ignored.
If the cost of oil rises to a level that sustains the producers, users can’t afford to buy it.
If it falls, oil producers can’t afford to extract it.

This is the economic vice that is inexorably crushing the global industrial system as oil supplies decline.
As surplus energy falls away, so does real income.
We have substituted debt for income and caused that debt to grow to mask the reality of our situation.
We are stealing from our own future and from generations unborn to stay solvent.
It might be called intergenerational larceny.

When our great grandchildren arrive they will find nothing left for them to burn.
We are already in the phase of expending too much energy to get energy, which is why real income has been static for 30 years.
We live in an energy economy, not a money economy.
We cannot devote our commercial existence to the businesses of finding new sources of energy.
( Norman Pagett, 17.07.2018 )

The UK Are Currently Engaged In Conflicts In Seven Countries.

UK special forces (UKSF) are currently engaged in conflict in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.
Yet the nature of UKSF operations means that our political system enables ministers to conduct secret wars in our name with zero parliamentary or public oversight.
The British government states that its policy on the covert wars it fights is “not to comment, and to dissuade others from commenting or speculating, about the operational activities of special forces because of the security implications”.
Added to this, the UK’s Freedom of Information Act gives “absolute exemption” to UKSF activities.
So this makes it virtually impossible for anyone to question or “scrutinise policy”.
( Fréa Lockley, 18.09.2019 )

Corruption In Ukraine?

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy was elected in 2019 on the promise of wide-reaching reforms to battle corruption and improve the economy.
Former prime minister Oleksiy Honcharuk was fired in March 2020 along with several of his ministers, the Ukrainian prosecutor general, Ruslan Riaboshapka, and other officials.
Honcharuk and Riaboshapka, who were well-regarded in the West, have since expressed their concern about the direction of Ukraine, where they feel the malign influence of powerful people on the country’s economy is growing.

Anders Aslund, an economist and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said: “Since early March, when Zelenskyy changed the government for no apparent reason with unknown people, there has been no direction in the government. We have seen that Zelenskyy’s new people have undone everything that was done before. It seems for me that it is done to restore corruption and oligarchs seem to influence this development. Everything is getting destroyed. The hope for a better future which prevailed when Zelenskyy was elected has gone.”

At the beginning of July 2020, the governor of the National Bank of Ukraine, Yakiv Smolii, handed in his resignation because of ‘systematic political pressure’.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently provided Ukraine with a $5billion loan to battle COVID-19, but noted in a report that “reforms increasingly faced resistance from vested interests”, and court rulings were undermining reform progress “especially in tackling corruption and financial sector reforms”.
( Emil Filtenborg and Stefan Weichert, 25.07.2020 )  ..  euronews.com

Donations To The Tory Party From People Linked To Russia.

UK Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis was listed as receiving £25,000 from long-time Tory donor Lubov Chernukhin, the wife of one of Vladimir Putin’s former ministers, and £23,000 from Alexander Temerko, a former chief of a Russian arms company, The Times newspaper reported.
It also emerged that 14 Tory ministers and two members of the Intelligence and Security Committee, which published a long-delayed report into Russian interference in British democracy, had taken money from figures linked to Russia.

The donations, which are legal and had been properly declared, emerged as the ISC’s Russia report raised concerns about an influx of Russian money into the UK since the 1990s.
Other senior Tories who received personal donations or money for their local constituencies from the two donors include Chancellor Rishi Sunak, Business Secretary Alok Sharma and Justice Secretary Robert Buckland.
Tory MPs Theresa Villiers and Mark Pritchard- both members of the ISC – also received donations to their constituency branches from Mrs Chernukhin and Mr Temerko.
( Lizzy Buchan, 23.07. 2020 )