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EXCLUSIVE: After a months-long investigation, Channel 4 News’s FactCheck team has obtained a dossier of new files on UK arms export licences to Israel.
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I'm loving this performative ignorance about the Byline investigation.
The point about these sort of analyses isn't to find some "hidden hand" or nefarious plot (although there are some hidden and anonymous actors), but to make plain how the most stupid and wretched moral panics are actually made.
What the Byline investigation shows is that there is a very short pipeline from online agitator accounts (often anonymous), boosted by a collection of wingnuts and swivel-eyed weirdos, to the mainstream press (like the Jewish Chronicle), which transforms the rantings of loons into a "serious issue" that leads to people like Misam Harriman or Gary Lineker getting made into monstrous racists who must be blocked from public life.
Which is not to say there can't be hidden hands, of course. One of them was Labour Together and the secret projects of Morgan McSweeney - projects that succeeded because they tapped into and then were amplified by this same network, and benefited from this model of "panic" building.
But it is striking how, when you understand this (very small) ecosystem of actors, you start to see how many of our moral panics around antisemitism - going after Lineker and Harriman but also Michael Rosen, anti-Zionist Jews, the British left in general - stem from the work of 50 or so terminally online screamers who shouldn't be taken seriously at all - yet repeatedly drive media cycles.
And, yes, when you really dig down, the key issue is almost always about how scary lefties criticise Israel's apartheid, war crimes and genocide, and raising the cost to people with public profiles doing the same.
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THE DIGITAL ENCLOSURE: HOW DATA CENTRE GROWTH ZONES ARE PRIVATISING BRITAIN
And why the Burnham Manchester model is already the template.
Strip away the branding. Enterprise Zone. Freeport. Investment Zone. AI Growth Zone. Silicon Heartland. The same model keeps reappearing across five decades of British economic policy: a public-private partnership that borrows democratic legitimacy from an elected body while handing planning power, land, and crucially public money to a private developer or a small cluster of them. The vehicle changes name every decade. The transfer of control does not.
This matters because PPP sounds procedural, a funding mechanism, a line in a council report. It is not neutral. It is the specific legal instrument through which zoning authority, energy allocation, and increasingly whole town governance functions move out of the reach of voters and into corporate boardrooms, dressed up as regeneration.
What we are living through now is a mutation of that instrument. The original Private Finance Initiative, introduced under John Major and industrialised by Gordon Brown, was at least legible. Individual hospitals. Individual schools. Individual prisons. The contracts were visible, the assets nameable, the scandal eventually documentable. Philip Hammond killed it in 2018 because even a Conservative Chancellor could no longer ignore what the National Audit Office confirmed: PFI was a racket that had saddled British taxpayers with nearly £200 billion in liabilities for infrastructure worth a fraction of that.
europeanpowell.substack.com/…
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This is very important and something that needs to be really emphasised ahead of the Milburn report.
The Fonagy report is excellent, rigorously evidenced, devastating on the socio-economic-psychological causes of youth mental illness, and written with a striking humanity and sensitivity. Fonagy writes as a mental health professional who plainly cares deeply about people (including young people) and sympathises with their struggles. It is a rare and unexpected document, quite moving in its own right. It argues forcefully that the mental health crisis is real and offers a diagnosis based on a concrete understanding of its complex routes.
Milburn is not a mental health professional. He's a Blairite politician and administrator turned millionaire consultant with a penchant for Blairite reforms: who compresses complex behavioural pathways into a the idiot logic of the market. He was appointed by Starmer after Starmer had failed to push through devastating cuts to disability and welfare. Milburn's report will be the second bite Labour takes at this cherry.
The pre-briefing by Milburn shows he cares little for the disabled and those with mental health issues. If he did, he wouldn't be giving piecemeal briefings to the right-wing press about cuts that will inevitably make the anxieties of disabled people soar. It's cruel and thoughtless.
In the tale of two reviews, Fonagy should be the one we consider and talk about and digest, but I bet you've never even heard of it; and I bet it will be Milburn's review that drives government policy and media coverage and creates the "common sense" position.
The Blairites are back with their chainsaw, this time taking aim at the first generation that has come of age under austerity, Brexit, housing price spirals, inflation and ecological collapse. Their victory is not certain, and they will have to be resisted. Fonagy gives the evidence of why and how.
Labour ordered two reviews. Clinical expert Proffesor Peter Fonagy found youth mental illness is real and cutting income worsens it.
Politician Alan Milburn, who has no medical background, wants to cut disability benefits anyway.
Why listen to Milburn over Fonagy? @andyburnham
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In Haiti, they told the Haitian people the Clintons came to save Haiti.
After the earthquake in 2010, the world watched Port au Prince crumble, and then the saviors arrived. Bill Clinton became the UN Special Envoy to Haiti. Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, controlling America's aid. And the Clinton Foundation was right there, raising money in Haiti's name.
Husband approving the projects. Wife controlling the money. Foundation collecting the donations. That was a family business.
The world pledged 13.5 billion dollars. America pledged 4 billion. It was supposed to rebuild a nation. Instead, it rebuilt bank accounts in Washington.
Less than 40 percent of that money was ever spent inside Haiti. Only 2 percent of US aid ever reached Haitian organizations. The rest went to American contractors, foreign NGOs, and the UN: a circle of friends getting rich off someone else's tragedy.
Caracol Industrial Park, their great flagship, their promise of a New Haiti. Three hundred million dollars of taxpayer money, built on prime farmland. Farmers were kicked off their land to make room for it. They promised 65,000 jobs. What Haiti got was 10,000 low-wage sewing jobs for a South Korean company. Bill and Hillary cut the ribbon and smiled for the cameras. Haitians called it a sweatshop.
They promised hundreds of thousands of homes. They spent half a billion dollars on housing, and they built 6,000 houses. Years later, millions were still sleeping in tents, with no water, no electricity, and no roads, while the Foundation kept fundraising.
A company called VCS Mining, with a Clinton Foundation donor sitting on its board, suddenly got one of the rarest things in Haiti: a gold mining permit. In a country where those permits are almost impossible to get. Donate to the Foundation, get a deal in Haiti. That was the deal.
Haitians don't call this mismanagement. They call it theft.
Billions came in, cholera brought in by UN troops killed 10,000 people, and Port au Prince still has no reliable water, power, or roads. The Clintons left with their reputation intact. Haiti was left poorer.
This is how the liberal elite works. They find a poor Black country, use it as a charity poster, fly in, take photos with crying children, raise billions, hand the contracts to their friends, and then blame corruption in Haiti when nothing gets built.
The real corruption was never in Haiti. It was in Washington, and it was in the Clinton Foundation.
If a Republican had done this, it would be called a crime. Because the Clintons did it, they called it philanthropy.
Haiti didn't need saviors. Haiti needed to be left alone to rebuild with its own money.
The Clintons didn't save Haiti. They looted Haiti.
t.me/fmazhindu
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Replying to @EJShone93
@EJShone93 is one of the best investigative journalists looking at the the world of lobbying firms and "strategic advisory" outfits.
Depressing if predictable read about what people like McSweeney and other advisors have done since their gigs ended in failure.
opendemocracy.net/coining-it…
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This is shameless beyond belief.
The WSJ was one of the key papers pushing the spy story from day one (which now even the Office of the Director of National Intelligence says is "not entirely accurate and over-torqued", edition.cnn.com/2026/11/12/p…) and, along with other outlets, running one of the most blatant character assassination campaigns in modern corporate history.
And now that this campaign succeeded in pushing Jensen out, they survey the wreckage they helped create and write that "maybe that was China’s plan".
You couldn't make it up 🤦♂️
From @WSJopinion: Jensen Huang’s resignation from Nvidia was necessary, but it also does regrettable harm to the company and America’s AI industry. Maybe that was China’s plan.
on.wsj.com/4k9p4V2
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For those working in the caring sector, as care workers, as nurses, as teachers, David Graeber made this video for you and your workplace.
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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.
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Labour was once the workers party. It’s now the political wing of Palantir.
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.
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Ok I'm calling it.
The Ten-Year Plan is going to be AI-boosterism, data centre rollouts, defence-led re-industrialisation and lip service as to how they'll fund house-building by taxing the economic boom they think this will create.
Or, in other words, total nonsense.
EXCLUSIVE:
Britain needs to embrace artificial intelligence and invest in data centres because it will offer the country a "productivity revolution" and bolster the wages of ordinary workers, the Chancellor has said
In an interview with The Times John Healey, the chancellor, said that artificial intelligence "is coming whether we like it or not" and that Britain needs to take "maximum advantage" of the opportunities it offers
He said that artificial intelligence has the potential to draw investment to Britain on a "big scale" and argued that Britain needs to develop its own "sovereign" artificial intelligence to bolster economic growth and national security
Healey believes that the improvement in productivity the technology brings will filter through to everyone. On Wednesday he discussed the artificial intelligence "revolution" with Kevin Warsh, the chairman of the US Federal Reserve, during a visit to the UK. Andy Burnham, the prime minister, also briefly attended the meeting.
Healey said: "He [Warsh] believes we're on the edge of a productivity revolution and transformation with AI.
"We had a good discussion because he sees this as not just potentially bringing benefits to the super-rich and big tech, but already in the US, signs that it is increasing, raising the level of productivity, therefore the value and the wages of many ordinary workers. It may be that we're starting to see some of that in some of the detail of the growth figures today in Britain."
He added: "I think the signs are it's a revolution already underway. The challenge for policy makers and I think the change for investors the challenge for investors and business is how do we make the most of this for Britain, and in doing so reassure people about the steps we can help take against the risks that they quite rightly also feel and see."
Healey said that Britain can learn from the bitter debates over the "free for all" of new data centres in the US by ensuring that they have the support of communities. In the Budget he announced a new data centre “covenant”, which will require owners to invest in local communities, create jobs and protect water supplies in exchange for priority access to the national grid.
He said: “It [artificial intelligence] is coming, whether we like it or not. Many people are already using it, I want to avoid the free-for-all on AI and data centres we’ve seen in the states.
“So where NHS health data is used with AI, I want that data in Britain, not in data centres abroad. Where AI is used for our security, I want that data in Britain, for Britain, not abroad. To do that, we have to develop more data centres. I’m ready to back them if they provide the community benefits and can help build public trust.
“If we haven’t got the independence, we haven’t got some of the control and sovereignty on our AI capacity in the UK, then we will find that we can’t provide the level of confidence, the level of security that I think people are rightly wanting, and we can’t make the most of the big economic opportunities that are there.”
thetimes.com/uk/politics/art…
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The chaos in El Salvador before Bukele was never an accident, and the chaos in Haiti today is not an accident either.
The media told you that the gangs were just poor boys who went bad on their own, but that story falls apart the moment you ask one simple question.
Where does a poor sixteen year old boy living in a slum with no job and no money get an AK-47 and an AR-15 and a Glock and thousands of rounds of ammunition, and where does he get a brand new Toyota Hilux and motorcycles and speedboats and drones and encrypted phones and bulletproof vests and night vision goggles, and who pays his monthly salary and pays for his safe house and pays his lawyer when he is arrested and pays the police and the judge and the prison guard to look the other way, and who pays his family when he dies?
A poor boy cannot afford even one bullet, so someone else is paying for all of it.
That someone is the multimillionaires and the billionaires and the wealthy entities who profit from chaos, because chaos is a business and a broken country is the most profitable business in the world.
When a country is in chaos its land becomes cheap so they can buy it, its gold and its drugs and its resources can be stolen without anyone asking questions, its government becomes weak so they can control it, and its people become so scared that they obey anyone who promises them a little safety.
In El Salvador the gangs were not fighting the system, the gangs were the system, paid to keep the poor terrorized so the poor would never rise up and demand a better country.
In Haiti it is the same story, the gangs are not independent, they are funded and armed and protected by rich families and foreign businessmen and foreign NGOs who want Haiti to stay weak so they can keep stealing its ports and its gold and its labour.
And when a man like Bukele comes and says I will lock up all the gangs and end this in two years, who attacks him? It is the same people.
The same billionaires who fund the gangs fund the media that calls Bukele a dictator, the same wealthy entities who arm the gangs fund the NGOs that cry human rights for murderers, the same people who profit from chaos fund the political voices that hate real help in Haiti and sabotage anyone who is actually capable of doing it.
Look at the pattern and it becomes clear, when a gang kills a hundred innocent people there is silence, but when a leader kills a hundred gang members there is outrage.
When a gang rapes children there is no campaign, but when Bukele locks up rapists there is a global campaign against him.
That is because the media is not independent, it is owned by billionaires, the NGOs are not independent, they are funded by billionaires, and the politicians are not independent, they are bought by billionaires.
They do not want Haiti saved and they did not want El Salvador saved, they want them broken, because a broken country is cheap to buy and easy to control.
Bukele exposed them, he proved that gangs can be destroyed in months if you have the will, and that terrified them, because if El Salvador can be fixed then Haiti can be fixed, and if Haiti can be fixed then Africa can be fixed, and if Africa can be fixed then the billionaires lose their business.
That is why they demonize Bukele, that is why they sabotage Haiti, that is why they hate any man who actually helps the poor.
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Young people to no longer get main sickness benefit, PIP under Milburn plan.
Milburn/Timms reviews will cut social security. Spending, as % of GDP, static since 2013.
Silence on corporate welfare, £741bn of tax not collected over last 19 yrs.
Class war
independent.co.uk/news/uk/po…
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This is absolutely brilliant, by legendary Australian investor John Hempton, who explains the core financial paradox at the heart of the AI story (and which also, to some extent, may explain the Jensen Huang story).
The numbers say that about $7 trillion in AI compute is set to be built by 2030. For the industry to earn that back, given those chips have a roughly 5-year lifespan and cost a lot to run, they need to generate about $2 trillion of AI revenue a year.
Hempton says the only way you can get to these sorts of numbers is by selling AI as a productivity tool to businesses, meaning replacing workers.
And since, for reasons he explains in the video, no company fires people to save just 10% in costs, the savings have to be about double what businesses pay for the AI: roughly $4 trillion in savings on wages a year.
What does firing $4 trillion worth of workers mean concretely? Hempton calculated this equates to roughly 10% of the OECD’s total wage bill of about $40 trillion: one in every ten dollars paid to workers across the OECD’s 38 member countries.
Which, naturally, when you suddenly take that much income out of people’s pockets, would trigger a massive global recession.
And here's the paradox: in a massive global recession, there's no way businesses will pay $2 trillion a year for AI, so the return disappears anyway.
In other words, AI's only possible path to success given the numbers requires destroying the very economy that is supposed to pay for it.
HOWEVER - and here's where the Nvidia/Jensen Huang story might come into play (and, to be clear, this is now me speaking and not Hempton given this interview is prior to the whole Nvidia saga) - this all rests on a core assumption: that compute stays super expensive. Which in practice means Nvidia keeping its pricing power, with a 75% gross margin on its chips.
Break Nvidia's pricing power, and the $7 trillion bill, the $2 trillion in revenue and the 10% of jobs all shrink with it.
This would also put the whole China story in a different light. Maybe it's not so much a "we don't want the Chinese to be competitive with similar chips to us" story as it is a "we don't want Chinese demand to drive up chip prices" one. Or probably both.
And, as such, you could actually think about the US export controls not as a national security measure but as a good old subsidy for US AI players (together with a handicap for their Chinese competitors), a way to limit the price of chips.
This holds even with China itself blocking Nvidia imports, since Chinese firms simply rent the chips abroad instead, in places like Southeast Asia, which is precisely what this whole Alice Huang/Megaspeed story is about.
The main obstacle for all this was, of course... Jensen. Obviously, the guy wanted the exact opposite: as many buyers as possible, Chinese players included, to keep chip prices and Nvidia’s margins sky-high. He was also the one man with the clout to make that happen.
All hard to prove, of course, but I can imagine that quite a few corks popped this week in Anthropic's offices: nothing like the news that the man keeping your biggest cost sky-high is out when you're a week away from a $1.2 trillion IPO.
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On the Milburn review and as Politico points out today: Milburn was on the advisory board of Labour Together. The principal advisor on the review is Matthew Upton, LT's Director of Policy from December 2023 to July 2024 and then Executive Director from July 2024 to N9v 2025.
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Bank of England urged to hike interest rates from 4% to 5%.
Banks will make bigger profits. Misery for hard pressed millions.
Inflation caused by profiteering, not wage rises. No curbs on profiteering.
Can't get economic growth by impoverishing millions
cityam.com/bank-of-england-u…





















