Lord Ian Austin said the UK was still ‘open for business’ with Israel despite suspending trade talks (Image: @ukinisrael, via Twitter/X)
THE UK Government’s trade envoy to Israel has visited the country to “promote trade”, just days after Labour said they were calling off negotiations with the Israeli government on a new free trade deal.
Lord Ian Austin was pictured in Haifa in northern Israel visiting various projects, where he said the Government would continue to “[encourage] British businesses to export to Israel and Israeli businesses to invest in the UK”.
On Monday, the British embassy in Israel shared an image of Austin and wrote: “Great to welcome @LordIanAustin to Haifa!
“In a day full of innovation by the Carmel, the UK Trade Envoy to Israel visited the cutting-edge Customs Scanning Centre, Haifa Bayport, the Haifa–Nazareth Light Rail project, and the Technion – witnessing [Great Britain flag emoji, Israel flag emoji] cooperation at every stop.”
In a day full of innovation by the Carmel, the UK Trade Envoy to Israel visited the cutting-edge Customs Scanning Centre, Haifa Bayport, the Haifa–Nazareth Light Rail project, and the Technion – witnessing 🇬🇧–🇮🇱 cooperation at every stop pic.twitter.com/v6Rk7BZrgU
UK Labour Party government ministers Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are partners complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide. The UK has provided Israel with arms, military and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.Vote For Genocide Vote Labour.Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpA
KPMG is being paid £8 million to promote Peter Thiel’s tech in NHS hospitals – but we’re being forced to fight for information about this public contract.
It’s been a good week for Palantir. The controversial spy-tech company, co-founded by Trump donor Peter Thiel, looks set to secure even more UK government work after the defence secretary pledged to expand the role of AI in the military.
Palantir already holds a £330 million NHS data contract. But as Democracy for Sale revealed last week, most hospitals in England are not using the software, with many complaining that it simply isn’t up to scratch.
To encourage hospitals to take it up, the government signed an £8 million deal with consultancy giant KPMG to “promote the adoption” of Palantir’s tech in the NHS.
We wanted to know more about how this money is being spent. How exactly has KPMG been promoting Palantir’s software to hospitals? And has it worked?
So, we submitted a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), asking for reports produced by KPMG under its contract, as well as briefings prepared for Health Secretary Wes Streeting, who publicly supported the deal.
The government’s response? Silence. They’re refusing to release the information—so now we’re fighting for transparency.
Sue Hawley, executive director of Spotlight on Corruption, told us the government’s “impulse to secrecy around public money and public contracts” is “deeply concerning.”
“KPMG’s contract raises a real question: if [Palantir’s] software is so good, why does the government need to give £8 million of taxpayers’ money to a management consultancy to encourage NHS hospitals to use it?,” she added.
He is calling for the scrapping of the two-child benefit cap and restoring the winter fuel payment to all pensioner
Nigel Farage’s tax and spend plans were slammed as “fantasy economics” as Reform UK claimed it could save a massive £225 billion over five years by scrapping net zero projects.
Mr Farage’s party also wants the threshold for paying the basic rate of income tax to be dramatically increased from £12,570 to £20,000.
…
Reform sources said the £225 billion figure of savings from ditching net zero projects was based on a report by the Institute for Government.
But the IfG stressed that the bulk of this green investment, highlighted in the paper called “Paying for Net Zero” was due to come from the private sector, not public funds.
Jill Rutter, senior fellow at the IfG, told The Standard: “Cancelling private investment does not save the Government money.”
…
Nigel Farage reminds you that he’s the man that brought you Brexit and asks what could possibly go wrong.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
People carrying an inflatable of a bomb with the words “End arms trade with Israel” passing by the Spanish Parliament in Madrid, Spain on 5 October 2024 [Marcos del Mazo/LightRocket via Getty Images]
The Spanish parliament decided Tuesday to accelerate the passage of an arms embargo bill against Israel, according to media reports, Anadolu Agency said.
The Sumar, Podemos, Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC), Basque EH Bildu and the Galician Nationalist Bloc (BNG) parties submitted a petition to the Congressional Bureau demanding the urgent procession of the bill, said the El Mundo newspaper.
The request, also supported by Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s Socialist Party, was approved, halving the timeline and accelerating the process.
It came after parliament passed a non-binding motion on May 20 that urged the government to impose an arms embargo on Israel in response to its military operations in the Gaza Strip.
The motion, introduced by the leftist Sumar alliance, part of the ruling coalition, along with opposition parties Podemos and the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC), was approved in a 176-171 vote.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
UK Labour Party government ministers Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are partners complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide. The UK has provided Israel with arms, military and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpA
Keir Starmer and David Lammy’s remarkable attempts to publicly realign their government’s support for Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza reflect similar shifts recently performed by political leaders in France, Canada, the US and Germany.
On 20 May, Starmer told MPs that innocent children’s suffering in Gaza was “intolerable”, while Lammy called it “abominable”. Lammy condemned Israeli Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich’s call to “purify Gaza” by ethnic cleansing as “dangerous, repellent and monstrous”[1].
By 26 May even the GermanChancellor, Friedrich Merz admitted that Israel’s actions in Gaza “can no longer be justified”.
Given such politicians’ unstinting support for Israel’s assault on Gaza, we may be forgiven for questioning whether their latest pronouncements indicate a shift in policy, a rhetorical attempt to placate public opposition to state collusion in genocide, or an insurance policy against being named in future legal proceedings.
In fact, Lammy’s suspension of UK-Israel free trade talks on 20 May in response to Israel’s block on aid to Gaza was swiftly followed on 26 May by an official visit to the port of Haifa by UK Trade Envoy, Lord Ian Austin, who as the UK Embassy to Israel triumphantly tweeted was “witnessing cooperation at every stop”[2].
While President Trump’s recent decision not to visit Israel was a signal to US allies to adjust their foreign policy stance, UK arms exports to Israel have been a consistent focus of sustained, pro-Palestine mass protests in Britain since October 2023.
Alongside an unparalleled mass movement on the streets of British towns and cities a quiet but effective legal challenge was launched against the UK government’s policy of arms exports to Israel. Campaigners took the UK government to court, accusing it of failing to uphold domestic and international legal obligations by supplying weapons and components used in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.
Starmer and Lammy’s performed their volte-face in the House of Commons just four days after a landmark High Court challenge by Global Legal Action Network (GLAN)[3] and Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq[4] against the UK government’s decision on 2 September 2024 to continue licensing export of F-35 fighter jet components to Israel, while suspending other arms exports due to risk of violations of international law.
The High Court case displays a web of contradictions and the hypocrisy of ministers’ public statements on arms sales to Israel. According to GLAN and Al-Haq, it exposed “structural flaws in accountability” in the UK arms export control regime, which “renders it unfit to ensure respect for fundamental legal and humanitarian obligations”.
Al-Haq points out, “In Parliament, the government maintains it is for the courts to decide whether Britain is complying with its legal obligations. Yet in court, their lawyers argued the opposite — they say that such matters are not for the judiciary to examine.”
Charlotte Andrews-Briscoe, representing GLAN points out, “The government has been telling Parliament that it is unable to answer questions regarding its decision to indirectly arm Israel because that decision is being tested in the courts, and at the same time telling the judiciary that it cannot examine that decision because that is the role of Parliament.”
In the High Court, UK government lawyers rejected Al-Haq’s assertion that there is at least a serious risk that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and said there is “a tenable view that no genocide has occurred or is occurring”.
Internationally accepted arguments relating to breaches of the Genocide Convention, in the context of the enormous harms suffered by civilians in Gaza, were dismissed by UK government lawyers as “touchy feely”.
The UK government also claimed it had seen “no deliberate targeting of women and children”, and therefore “no serious risk of genocide”. In its own evidence, the government included a report entitled “Research Report: Long-Range Shootings or Shootings of Minors.” This was withheld from GLAN and Al-Haq, despite a duty to disclose and an explicit request for its disclosure.
The UK government also claimed in the High Court that Israel’s targeting policies were as good as the UK’s. Is that even a defence?
That this happened days before Lammy’s statement to MPs on the situation in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories will lead many to suspect that Lammy’s latest windy denunciations of Israeli politicians and a few settlers is a red herring intended to shield UK government ministers from charges of arms exports to Israel in breach of domestic and international law.
Lammy in his statement to MPs on 20 May referred to “a new, extensive ground operation throughout Gaza”, “renewed bombardment, new displacement and new suffering”, and said “we are now entering a dark new phase in this conflict”.
The emphasis on the new level of Israeli atrocities in Gaza is intended create a bogus political and legal distinction between the ‘normal conduct’ of Israel’s war on Gaza, impossible to conduct without arms exports, military intelligence and diplomatic support from Britain, and the latest ‘unacceptable conduct’ of the siege of Gaza by Israel, the starvation and mass displacement of Palestinians, which David Lammy and Keir Starmer condemn so robustly before TV cameras in the House of Commons.
Given the sustained horror of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians over a period of 20 months and the growing evidence of UK government complicity in immoral and illegal arms sales, it will be a difficult political trick for Starmer and Lammy to pull off.
As Gearóid Ó Cuinn, Director of the Global Legal Action Network says, “The government has now been exposed as being disingenuous in Parliament and in court; this merry-go-round of delay and inaction is facilitating genocide and needs to stop. A decision in our case will come far too late for the people of Gaza who are being starved to death – the government must immediately end arms sales and other forms of military support to Israel and apply sanctions.”
[4] UK’s ‘flawed’ assessment of genocide in Gaza revealed in court that contradicts claims made in Parliament, 20 May 2025 https://www.alhaq.org/advocacy/26458.html
UK Labour Party government ministers Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are partners complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide. The UK has provided Israel with arms, military and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.Vote For Genocide Vote Labour.UK Conservative Party leader Kemi ‘not a genocide’ Badenoch explains her reality that the Earth is flat, the Moon is made of cheese and that she was born from Unicorn horn dust
