Robert Jones

Welsh data miner

[Canary @TheCanaryUK]

Our reporter @cjmbaillie was bundled out of the Farnborough International Air Show today (even though he had press accreditation) after asking difficult questions of the Elbit staff that were there. Clearly they don't like us encroaching into their spaces 🤷

[Sarah Wilkinson @swilkinsonbc]

The israelis kill all six members of the Masri family, including all the children, in a targeted strike on their home, burning them all to death

[Declassified UK @declassifiedUK]

Andy Burnham's new defence secretary Wes Streeting attended the 2025 Bilderberg conference.

[Tayab Ali @tayab_ali_]

🚨 Urgent Lawyers letter to ICC states Parties

Extract “You are the decision-makers. You alone will determine whether the Prosecutor is removed. Yet the man whose removal you are considering has been told that his representatives may not address you, may not answer before you the case put against him, and may not correct errors, of which there are many, in the material placed in front of you. We know of no court or tribunal in any proper and fair legal system that bars a person facing the gravest professional sanction from being heard.

So we write openly, though restricted by confidentiality obligations, because no other route has been left to us.”

Read more ⬇️

[Tanita Tikaram💙 @tanita_tikaram]

Don't deify Starmer, the man categorically refused to see photos of children murdered by Israel which a UK surgeon brought to show him as evidence of Israel's terrible crimes , hoping this knowledge would change Starmer's support for Israel. There was no change .

[Declassified UK @declassifiedUK]

❗️Keir Starmer authorised hundreds of spy flights for Israeli intelligence during its genocide.

That is his legacy.

Watch our film revealing those spy flights that the national media refused to cover, and helped Starmer get away with it.
👉https://t.co/qL3jN8D1qV

[Jonathan Cook @Jonathan_K_Cook]

Since some two million people took to the streets to oppose Britain’s illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, new ways have been found to restrict the ability of ordinary citizens to raise their voice against the abuse of governmental and state power.

Recent legislation allows police to ban protests because they are “too noisy” or cause “serious unease”. Disruption has been redefined to now include hindrance to any daily activity. Protests can be barred if they have a “cumulative” impact.

These are all inherent features of protest. The mass demonstrations against Britain’s illegal attack on Iraq were noisy, disruptive and repeated – as have been the marches against Britain’s collusion in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

By judging the legality of protest according to these selective and largely subjective criteria, the state has given the police huge latitude to decide which protests should be criminalised and which allowed.

It is hardly surprising then that the police are currently concentrating their efforts on the anti-genocide marches, which highlight British collusion in Israel’s crimes.

Facial recognition technology – pioneered by Israel against Palestinians – is being rolled out too, normalising the Big Brother, "panopticon" state recently advocated for by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood.

Where is all of this leading? The answer is to a new piece of legislation that was hurried through parliament by Mahmood.

The National Security (State Threats) Act gives the state unprecedented powers to proscribe groups, as it did with Palestine Action, but now without having to claim to have evidence of a terrorist threat.

The home secretary can make such a designation unilaterally, without any parliamentary oversight, simply because he or she claims the group is a “hostile” foreign state actor that poses a threat to national security or public safety.

Mahmood has already done so with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), effectively Iran’s military.

Further, anyone who works with or receives a “material benefit” – defined to include “information” – from a proscribed group can be jailed for up to 14 years. That includes expressing support for the group or sharing information it has provided.

Simply hosting an event where someone expresses support for the group could open one to prosecution, as could posting something on social media that the British state claims is a hostile foreign state “talking point” – whether or not the information is true.

Once again, this is an assault on the most fundamental of Enlightenment values.

In the National Security Act, it matters only who is passing on the information, not what the information is, or whether it is truthful. There is no public interest defence, such as exposure of criminality by the British state or its allies.

There is no exemption for journalists, lawyers, scholars or human rights groups. It will be impossible for them to do the most essential part of their job: digging out information, testing claims from one side against the other’s, and allowing audiences to determine the truth.

Assuming Hamas is declared a hostile foreign actor, as seems all but certain, journalists will be barred from collecting details of Palestinian casualties from Gaza’s health ministry or speak to doctors there. Why? Because the Hamas government runs the health ministry and hospitals.

Worse, it would be impossible for journalists to visit Gaza to investigate Israeli crimes – something that will delight Israel – because such a visit would need to be organised through the Hamas government. To do so would risk 14 years in jail.

The same will be true for reporting from Iran or Russia, if the home secretary so decides.

The only apparent carve-out will be for journalists who get approval from the British government beforehand.

That should ensure that only the most compliant, access-driven journalists, belonging to state and billionaire-owned media, will be able to engage with “hostile” foreign actors – in ways the British state can be sure will best represent its interests.

Under this new law, the search for truth, and potentially the truth itself, will be criminalised.

This is an extract from my latest article Britain's Big Brother state is already here - we just don't realise it yet. Find a link to the rest in the reply post below ⬇️

[Clive Lewis MP @labourlewis]

This document should keep you awake at night.

The govt’s National Risk Register now ranks losing our drinking water alongside a PANDEMIC as one of the two biggest threats facing the country

This year, in the right-hand document: The chances of “Catastrophic impact” on our drinking water supplies - up to a one in four chance.

Last year, same document (on the left) rated it a minor risk. Bottom of the chart.

So what changed? Nothing changed!

Water is still in private hands and depute the Water Special Measures Act deteriorating rapidly.

This is where 36 years of privatised water has brought us.

Tens of billions handed to shareholders. Over £60 billion of debt racked up on water assets that should belong to al of us.

Leaking pipes. No new major reservoirs. Sewage in our rivers, on our beaches, in our sea.

They didn’t invest. They extracted. And now the state’s own risk experts are telling us the tap water could go.

And the regulators? They watched. Fines for pollution became a business expense. Thames Water’s creditors are now asking for their pollution fines to be written off. You couldn’t make this stuff up!!!!

So let’s cut the crap about ‘tougher control’ of water companies. We’ve tried that for 36 years. It ended with drinking water on the national risk register next to a pandemic. You can’t regulate a cash machine into caring about you.

There’s one answer. Bring water back into mutualised public ownership. Run for people, not profit. Answerable to bill payers, not bondholders. Every single pound going back into the pipes and reservoirs we should have built decades ago.

Water is life. And yet we’ve watched it turned it into a payday.

Time to take it back.

[Farrukh @implausibleblog]

Charlie Stayt, "You said Andy Burnham is too in hock to vested interests to deliver real change. You haven't given him a chance, have you, he hasn't even started?"

Zack Polanski, "If he does do the right things I'll be the first to applaud him"

"He's appointed James Purnell as chief of staff. This is a man who is a corporate lobbyist for private water companies"

"When we have water companies pumping sewage into our rivers and charging us extra for the privilege, this doesn't seem a good start"

"Then we know Josh Simons hired a private investigator to look into a journalist who was talking about undeclared donations for Labour Together"

"And finally, the only substantial thing he's voted on as an MP in the last week, is to support Shabana Mahmood's regressive immigration reforms. Including asking asylum seekers to review their cases every 30 months. That's deeply inhumane for people fleeing war and persecution"

"Andy Burnham might surprise me and move in a more progressive direction and I'd really welcome that"

"But the rumours of appointing Shabana Mahmood as Chancellor, a politician who cites Margaret Thatcher as one of her political heroes"

"This doesn't sound like we're moving in a direction to end ripoff Britain, it looks like more of the same"

[Double Down News @DoubleDownNews]

Nigel Farage and Reform are not anti-establishment

THEY ARE the Establishment

This is the ultimate guide to Nigel Farage & the secret network bankrolling Reform UK

@Lowkey0nline follows the money all the way to the tax haven

[Paul Holden @pauleholden]

In total agreement with this from David Hearst. My concern is that it will be impossible to rebuild Labour's "moral core" without completely excising the Labour Together project from the top of the Party.

From all reports it instead seems that Burnham is planning on keeping its key players (like Shabana Mahmood) and giving them wide powers and influence.

If that's true, Burnham will find it nearly impossible to rebuild Labour's electoral coalition because the Labour Together project had total disdain (and relentlessly attacked and marginalised) the sort of left-wing voters who have abandoned the Party for the Greens and other electoral options; and because one upshot of the Labour Together project was to significantly chill support for Palestine in the Labour Party, which, for many left voters, is a fundamental red line.

[Robert Jones @misterjones]

@pauleholden Does anyone believe Burnham is a fresh start, seriously?

[Paul Holden @pauleholden]

Here you go.

The last dying kicks of this corrupted, authoritarian government.

This is being done under the State Threats Bill that Mahmood and allies like Luke Akehurst pushed through Parliament in the last month. This is going to have wild, unpredictable effects. Practically what it will mean is that it will be almost impossible for media outlets to work with on- the-ground journalists to report on Iran, Gaza or Lebanon.

But I fear this will also be turned on the movement protesting Israel's genocide in Gaza.

Don't believe me? Just days ago NGO Monitor produced a wild-eyed report, endorsed by Lord Walney and Michael Gove, that paints the huge public protests in the UK against Israel's genocide as the work of an international campaign linked to nefarious foreign actors. The report urged the IRGC to be proscribed.

Proscribing the IRGC is one of the most consistent and powerful demands of the Board of Deputies and other pro-Israel organisations.

Deeply chilling, authoritarian, irresponsible stuff. Mahmood and the Labour Together project have waged a vicious war on our democracy and basic civil liberties.

[Jonathan Cook @Jonathan_K_Cook]

The International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court, ruled back in 2004 – nearly a quarter of a century ago – that Israel’s Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem violated international law and needed to be dismantled.

It reiterated that demand in a decision two years ago in which it identified Israel as an apartheid state ruling over Palestinians. It warned states to “take steps to prevent trade or investment relations that assists in the maintenance of the illegal situation created by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territory”.

And yet the West has done nothing tangible year after year as the settlements have stolen more land from Palestinians, made their lives there ever more miserable, and trashed any chance of the West’s supposed ambition of two states living alongside each other.

Remember this when Israel’s apologists tell you to wait for the same court’s definitive ruling – in a year or two, or maybe three – on what it deemed in early 2024 to be a “plausible” genocide in Gaza, just three months into Israel’s mass slaughter there.

Not only will any such ruling be far too late to make any difference to the victims of the genocide, but the US, Britain and Europe will do precisely no more to punish Israel for this crime of crimes – one we can see for ourselves without an ICJ ruling – than they have done in punishing Israel for the settlements.

Why? Because most western states no more wish to impose a penalty on Israel for its crimes than you would want to amputate a healthy arm.

If they refuse to lift a finger to stop a live-streamed genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, why on earth would anyone imagine they are ready to do anything to stop Israel’s violent settlers ethnically cleansing the West Bank?

The settlements are as deeply integrated into Israel as your arm is attached to your shoulder. And in turn, Israel is as much the punching fist of the imperial West’s war machine as the City of London – and its former tax-haven colonies – are the beating heart of the imperial West’s financial machine.

Western elites cannot imagine a world without Israel as their military thug in the oil-rich Middle East any more than you can imagine life without your arm.

That explains why no one really believed that EU foreign ministers, meeting once again this week to discuss banning settlement products – the bare minimum they have long been obligated to do under international law – would reach an agreement.

More than 100 legal scholars had earlier written to the European Commission’s top trade and foreign policy officials stressing the EU’s “international legal obligation”.

But as everyone predicted, EU ministers kicked the can down the road – until at least October, when they agreed to more talks about talks.

This is an extract from my latest article The West won't punish the settlements. Its two-state solution was always a sham. Find a link to the rest in the reply post ⬇️

[Robert Jones @misterjones]

Voting for the vile #Starmer and expecting justice and progress is delusional. This Tory will carry on where the last lot left off, including support for the #GazaGenocide

[BDS movement @BDSmovement]

The often mentioned $3.8 billion the US sends to Israel each year in military funding, as part of its MOU, is only a tiny fraction of the real cost that US taxpayers actually pay to finance and arm Israel’s endless wars of aggression, war crimes, military occupation, apartheid and genocide.

Leading economists, including Harvard war budgeting expert Linda Blimes, estimate the Iran war will exceed $1 trillion – yes, you’ve read it correctly! – in long term costs to US taxpayers.

The US could be funding schools, healthcare, housing and jobs for its people, but has instead chosen to fund Israel’s wars.

$1 trillion for Israel’s wars, austerity and rising costs for US taxpayers – not to mention US complicity in international crimes. Escalate BDS pressure to end all forms of US complicity!

[Paul Holden @pauleholden]

This is what it looks like to be truly morally and politically bankrupt.

Cooper and her ilk treat Gaza like it's a comms issue, not one of the most profound moral and political outrages of a generation. Still defending their record in government, only admitting early failures of tone.

[STEVE MOSS 💙💚 Ⓥ☘️#Ireland. Stop #GazaGenocide @mr_stephen_moss]

Hannah Spencer speaking up for the surgeon Dr Hussam Abu Safiya who has been beaten & tortured in the natorious facility Rakefet.
Hospital workers say he worked 24/7 to save lives.
The Israeli's claim he was a colonel in Hamas but provided no evidence.

[Jon Harding @_i0n]

He knew GCHQ were involved
He knew the SAS were advising
He knew that RAF spy planes were being used
He knew the BBC were spreading misinformation
He knew the Palestinian population were being eradicated

Starmer is a Genocidaire, without qualification
- he participated in it

[Tom London @TomLondon6]

If the IRGC is to be proscribed as terrorist @BarakSeener, how can it possibly be justified not also to proscribe the IDF?

The IDF has committed war crimes, crime against humanity and GENOCIDE on a scale far in excess of the crimes of the IRGC

@LBC