EuropeanPowell

British, lives/works in NL. UCL. Artist/Political researcher. 🏳️‍⚧️Green Party member. Support me via Ko-Fi. Free zones are Ponzi schemes for the asset classes

[EuropeanPowell @EuropeanPowell]

What Are Free Zones—And Why Hasn’t Anyone Told You About Them?
Ask your family and friends if they’ve heard of Freeports, Special Economic Zones, or AI Growth Zones. Most will look at you like you have two heads.
That should worry you.
Here’s What I’ve Discovered
The UK is being quietly carved into deregulated economic zones, areas where normal tax rules, labour protections, and regulatory oversight don’t fully apply. The government promotes them as engines of innovation, job creation, and net-zero progress.
I’ve been documenting what they really are since the advent of Brexit.
Through FOI requests, policy analysis, and tracking the money, I’m exposing the connections between UK free zones and a global network of tech billionaires, anarcho-capitalists, and neoliberal policymakers who share a vision: replacing democratic government with corporate governance.
The Players
This isn’t conspiracy theory, there are documented relationships between:
Tech oligarchs (Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, Balaji Srinivasan)
Political figures across the spectrum (JD Vance, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer)
Libertarian theorists (Curtis Yarvin, Patri Friedman, Tom Bell)
Their shared ideology? The “Dark Enlightenment”, a movement that views democracy as obsolete and advocates for corporate-run territories governed like businesses, not nations.
Why This Matters Now
Three major UK parties, Conservative, Labour, and Reform UK, all back this policy. It passed with:
❌No parliamentary debate (secondary legislation)
❌No public consultation
❌No press notification
We have less than 5 years before transparency mechanisms, public regulators, and audit bodies lose access to these zones entirely. After that, legal accountability becomes nearly impossible.

How public money (state aid) is being funnelled into private profit in these zones
The Brexit connection and why timing matters
Which corporations are positioning themselves inside these enclaves
The legal architecture is being built to shield these zones from oversight
What this means for British sovereignty and democratic accountability
This is volunteer research. I’m not funded by think tanks or political parties. I’m documenting what mainstream media won’t touch.
Alternatively, you can support my research through my online Ko-Fi tip jar if you can; it helps me dedicate more time to FOI requests, document analysis, raising awareness, and connecting the dots, something the MSM is singularly failing to do.
https://t.co/Jiz0mTBftP

[Krystal Ball @krystalball]

This is a major Hakeem Jeffries fail. You could have impeached the war criminal Pete Hegseth but Dems didn't show up to vote.

[Rivkah Brown @rivkahbrown]

NEW: 260 British Jews – among them British Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, human rights barrister Margaret Owen OBE and journalist and politician @andrewfeinstein – have accused the @BoardofDeputies of genocide denial in an open letter.

[Greens4Palestine @Greens4P]

Just a reminder that you are not going crazy.

The BBC is absurdly biased against Palestinians.

[Zarah Sultana MP @zarahsultana]

So you did gaslight the public, didn’t you, @Ed_Miliband?

You announced nothing but fig-leaf sanctions and performative gestures while the UK continues to sell arms to the genocidal Israeli war machine and award public contracts to firms linked to illegal Israeli settlements, helping sustain Israel’s system of apartheid.

You’re complicit in the genocide of the Palestinian people. Hope you’re proud of yourself.

[Paul Holden @pauleholden]

Sagal Abdi-Wali has just filed her first register of interest in Parliament, revealing who funded her election campaign in the Holborn & St Pancras by-election where she defeated Zack Polanski.

And they stink.

They are from sources with strong historical ties to Labour Together. And through one of her key donors, Sagal is linked to investments in companies like Palantir and Elbit Systems and Boeing. There is something completely broken about how the reporting regime for donations works that we're only finding this out now, after the election.

The returns show that Abdi-Wali had two big donors: Daniel Luhde-Thompson and his wife Cressida Pollock who donated jointly, and Green Britain Group Ltd, the holding company of Dale Vince's Ecotricity. Both donated £50k to the campaign.

Daniel Luhde-Thompson is mega-wealthy. He is one of the co-founders of the quant-trading hedge fund Quadrature Capital. Quadrature, whose holding company is registered in the Caymans, donated £4m to the Labour Party during the 2024 General Election.

It was the single largest donation Labour had ever received. But nobody knew this fact during the election itself, as the donation was only declared after the election as it was made in a specific week-long window that was exempt from immediate reporting.

As I revealed in OpenDemocracy in October 2024, Quadrature had held shares in companies connected to the genocide in Gaza in late 2023 and early 2024. It held an average of $121m in shares in companies linked to the genocide in Gaza between December 2023 and July 2024. This included shareholdings in arms companies like the lead contractor on the F-35, Lockheed Martin.

I've just checked Quadrature's most recent SEC filings submitted at the end of June 2026. They show that Quadrature still has investments in arms companies like Boeing and Lockheed. The June fillings show it held $9m in Elbit shares and an astonishing $117m in Palantir.

What is it with the Labour Party and connections to Palantir?

Luhde-Thompson also donated to Labour Together. He donated £50k at the end of November 2023: smack-bang in the middle of the period when Labour Together hired APCO to investigate journalists (including me and my family) who had exposed Morgan McSweeney's failure to report donations in violation of the law between 2018 and 2020 (of course there is no indication Luhde-Thompson knew about this).

Dale Vince, Sagal's other donor, was also a big donor to Labour Together. He has, most recently, strongly supported approving drilling at Jackdaw and Rosebank oilfields.

We found out about Dale Vince donating to Sagal during the campaign because it was leaked to the Independent. But voters in Holborn & St Pancras had no idea that she was also being funded by Daniel Luhde-Thompson, linking her to Quadrature and, through that, investments in companies complicit in genocide.

There is really something deeply wrong here. Voters were deprived of key information before they cast their vote. Our electoral laws around donations, which allow the mega-rich to dominate our politics, have to be reformed.

[Acyn @Acyn]

COLLINS: What do you say to those 11 Democrats who didn't show up to vote tonight?

EL-SAYED: You should show up and do your job.

[Secular Talk ([email protected]) @KyleKulinski]

WE GIVE THEM A BLUE TSUNAMI AND THEY IMMEDIATELY START SQUANDERING IT IN MULTIPLE WAYS

[EuropeanPowell @EuropeanPowell]

https://t.co/0OVoypeqx7

[The Hormuz Letter @HormuzLetter]

BREAKING: The 11 House Democrats who missed the vote that killed Thomas Massie's Hegseth impeachment resolution have all received significant pro-Israel AIPAC money in Congress.

Just seven of them voting against the referral motion would have flipped the 211-204 result.

Haley Stevens (MI): $15.9M
Laura Gillen (NY): $551K
Marilyn Strickland (WA): $371K
Steven Horsford (NV): $214K
Nancy Pelosi (CA): $166K
Julia Brownley (CA): $134K
Brittany Pettersen (CO): $125K
Lou Correa (CA): $80K
Frederica Wilson (FL): $39K
Melanie Stansbury (NM): $28K
Jonathan Jackson (IL): $21K

Haley Stevens is the highest AIPAC recipient in Congress.

[EuropeanPowell @EuropeanPowell]

11 Democrats didn't bother to show up to vote on impeaching Pete Hegseth.
Nancy Pelosi was one of the 11 "Democrats" who didn't vote.
The Blue Tsunami is being quickly mopped up by the Democrats!
https://t.co/bts8Qqt9oS

[The Hormuz Letter @HormuzLetter]

BREAKING: The 11 House Democrats who missed the vote that killed Thomas Massie's Hegseth impeachment resolution have all received significant pro-Israel AIPAC money in Congress.

Just seven of them voting against the referral motion would have flipped the 211-204 result.

Haley Stevens (MI): $15.9M
Laura Gillen (NY): $551K
Marilyn Strickland (WA): $371K
Steven Horsford (NV): $214K
Nancy Pelosi (CA): $166K
Julia Brownley (CA): $134K
Brittany Pettersen (CO): $125K
Lou Correa (CA): $80K
Frederica Wilson (FL): $39K
Melanie Stansbury (NM): $28K
Jonathan Jackson (IL): $21K

Haley Stevens is the highest AIPAC recipient in Congress.

[Felicity Campbell @feli_campbell]

I read the reports coming out of Manchester this morning and I am genuinely speechless.

Andy Burnham’s old political machine has just been caught secretly intercepting and censoring emails sent by the public to elected politicians.

What were those emails actually about? A resident was asking hard questions about the £55 million in taxpayer loans Burnham handed to Abu Dhabi property developers when he was Mayor, with zero affordable housing requirements.

Instead of letting elected councillors read the concerns of their constituents, unelected bureaucrats quietly diverted the emails straight to the legal department to be buried.

The politicians had absolutely no idea their personal inboxes were being filtered by the state.

The council claims they had to intercept the messages because of potential litigation. It is a complete lie.

Internal correspondence proves the city solicitor asked for this specific resident to be blocked months before any legal threat even existed.

You vote for local representatives to hold the system accountable. But the second a citizen asks where Burnham sent public money in a Gulf state property deal, his political syndicate builds a secret digital firewall to protect the investment.

This is not a functioning democracy. This is a captured corporate cartel running a cover-up for the Prime Minister, and the national media is letting them get away with it in broad daylight.

[EuropeanPowell @EuropeanPowell]

For nine years as Mayor of Greater Manchester, Burnham had been the primary architect of the institutional and regulatory framework that made the Old Trafford regeneration zone investable, and made Blackstone’s land, sitting inside it, enormously valuable. As Blackrock was to Keir Starmer so Blackstone is to Andy Burnham.
https://t.co/tjzAu32XiT

[Zack Polanski @ZackPolanski]

If true this is outrageous.

It seems that Andy Burnham’s latest version of ending 40 years of neoliberalism is handing Thames Water over to US hedge funds.

Labour have stopped even pretending to serve us or our communities anymore.

Labour stand for the hedge funds.

[Zack Polanski @ZackPolanski]

Andy Burnham has appointed the US consultancy giant BCG into the heart of Downing Street to draw up his 10 Year Plan for the country.

Last year they worked with Donald Trump on his plan for a 'Gaza riviera' to permanently ethnically cleanse Gaza.

There are no words.

[EuropeanPowell @EuropeanPowell]

I am a volunteer who has exposed the 'free zones-by-stealth' policy eclipsing the UK commons since Brexit, with zero any mention of this in the MSM and barely any coverage in alternative media.
Please support my research, read, share and subscribe to my Substack.https://t.co/CxDbCyts3U

[EuropeanPowell @EuropeanPowell]

This is not a comparison designed to diminish what is happening in Gaza.
73,000 Palestinians killed. Two million displaced. A luxury resort planned on the rubble.
It is a comparison designed to make visible what zone architecture does wherever it is applied, and to ask why the politician who built it in Manchester cannot find the language to name it in Gaza.
As Starmer is to BlackRock, so Burnham is to Blackstone.

[EuropeanPowell @EuropeanPowell]

The zone is what the clearance was for.
In Gaza the world can see it. Kushner presented it at Davos in January 2026 to the World Economic Forum. Glass towers on the Mediterranean. A Special Economic Zone. A Middle East Riviera.
In Manchester it took three years of investigative research to make the same logic visible.

[EuropeanPowell @EuropeanPowell]

A politician who built investment zone architecture in Manchester, made Blackstone's land enormously valuable through public money, and presided over compulsory purchase powers that could displace thousands, has a very specific reason to keep Gaza and Manchester in separate compartments.
Naming the genocide would require naming the mechanism.
Naming the mechanism would require naming what he built.

[Rachel Millward @rachelmillward]

The Green Party would slam the brake on new data centres. Policy must serve communities and nature, not the interests of corporations and shareholder profits.

[🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 SeanLlangynidr 🇮🇪 🇵🇸 @SeanLlangattock]

@earthygirl011 All those fools who've been had again, only need to read this thread to realise that they...really have been well and truly had. Burnham is the continuity version of Starmer, but just more manipulatively convincing with his 'northern' accent. No change. https://t.co/M42Niuig2r