Paul Biya, second from right, is re-elected as Cameroon’s president last November (Photo: Angel Ngwe / Alamy
‘D-Notice’ committee secretary privately briefed Australian officials against Declassified
The Ministry of Defence is refusing to apologise for an official describing Declassified as “extreme” in a private briefing given to the Australian Attorney General’s office.
Brigadier Geoffrey Dodds was found to have described Declassified as an “extreme, non-msm [mainstream media]” organisation by The Grayzone, following a Freedom of Information request the media outlet made last year.
Dodds’ depiction of Declassified is contained in notes prepared by him for Australian officials in 2022.
As secretary of the Defence and Security Media Advisory (DSMA) Committee, Dodds was outlining instances in which some UK media organisations have refused to accept the advice of his committee.
Better known as the ‘D-Notice’ committee, the DSMA exists supposedly to prevent media disclosing information that could compromise national security. It operates a purely voluntary system and there are no obligations for journalists to censor material after receiving a request from it.
In February 2022, Declassified refused to comply with a request from the DSMA Committee to censor the name of a British military official, Lieutenant Colonel Sid Purser, who was supporting Cameroon’s dictator, Paul Biya.
Biya, 93, has ruled the police state for more than four decades with British support even while our reporting has revealed that the UK government is well aware of his regime’s human rights abuses.
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DSMA is a government body meaning its officers must comply with the civil service code. The code states that “You must not act in a way that unjustifiably favours or discriminates against particular individuals or interests”.
This quote is important since it relates to Declassified’s blacklisting by the MoD in 2020. The code was explicitly highlighted in the MoD’s review of that blacklisting to show that MoD media officers were wrong to discriminate against us.
Activists project a message opposing the US’s oil-driven intervention in Venezuela, in Washington, January 8, 2026
THE “billionaires’ decade.” That is how charity Oxfam describes the 2020s, having published research pointing to the extreme — and accelerating — concentration of wealth in Britain and worldwide.
The stats alone are alarming — billionaires’ wealth grew 16 per cent in 2025, three times faster than the five-year average; in Britain, the richest 56 people own more than the poorest 27 million.
But the report goes further in pointing to the way the super rich are monopolising political power and distorting the political process, both by entering office and by controlling the media.
The administration of Donald Trump — himself a property magnate — in the United States is the most obvious example, with the close association of “tech bro” tycoons with the US government well known.
Several of these — Elon Musk and Peter Thiel being the most famous — are explicitly associated with far-right politics, and intend to use the march of digital surveillance technologies and artificial intelligence to further subordinate societies everywhere to corporate control.
US foreign policy has always served to enrich its capitalists — companies like Halliburton and Blackwater, as well of course as arms companies like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, made a killing from the Iraq war — but is now more openly directed to resource theft and the personal enrichment of the Trump gang and its allies.
This we see in the Big Oil summit hosted by the US president directly after his kidnapping of the president of Venezuela, with demands for corporate access to Venezuelan oil forming part of the public rationale for the outrage.
We see it too in plans to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip and develop it as a Mediterranean resort, and in the creation of the so-called Board of Peace, permanent membership of which Trump has now made contingent on down payments of a billion dollars.
Sharp-eyed observers note that the new board’s charter makes no specific reference to Gaza and implies a far wider remit — “to promote stability, restore dependable and lawful governance, and secure enduring peace in areas affected or threatened by conflict” — and, with members including the head of the US-dominated World Bank and Trump’s own son-in-law Jared Kushner, may be intended to serve as a Washington-controlled alternative to the UN security council now the United States is increasingly hostile to the United Nations and the framework of international law around it.
Trump’s relations with “allies” rest on the same profit-grabbing logic. It’s why enriching US drug companies at the expense of our NHS formed a key part of his trade deal with Britain, and why British and European attempts to regulate the internet — dominated globally by US companies — draw threats of retaliation. It’s why he wants Greenland, where the extraction of energy and mineral resources is becoming more practical because of global warming.
Trump’s new world order will rest not on sovereign states acting, at least in theory, on behalf of their citizens but on undisguised corporate power. But Britain is on the same trajectory, and the interests of parasitical profiteers dominate British policy too. Only that can explain Labour’s refusal to act to bring water into public ownership in line with overwhelming majority opinion, or the stubborn persistence of wasteful outsourcing across our public services.
For the left, the great divide between the suffering public and the obscenely wealthy — the many and the few, to take the Corbyn-era slogan — needs to be the overarching narrative when we explain what is wrong with our society and how we change it.
It explains the fundamental continuity between this government and its predecessor — and can spike the guns of a far right that dances to the billionaires’ tune.
It makes the case for the expropriation of private wealth for the public good. Not just to fund services, but to protect democracy — overshadowed more than ever by the power of money.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.
Conservative MP Priti Patel speaking at the Heritage Foundation in 2021. Credit: GB News / Facebook
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint proposes sweeping anti-climate policies.
New Shadow Foreign Secretary Priti Patel earlier this year welcomed into Parliament a radical U.S. organisation behind Donald Trump’s hard-right plan for a second term as president.
As reported by DeSmog, Conservative MP Patel met with Kevin Roberts and Nile Gardiner of the Heritage Foundation in March, praising the pair on her Facebook page as “our friends across the pond” who stand for “Conservative values and beliefs at home and abroad”.
Roberts is the president of the Heritage Foundation, while Gardiner is the director of its ‘Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom’.
The Heritage Foundation is an ultra-conservative group that authored the controversial Project 2025 blueprint for a second Donald Trump term, which proposes a range of radical anti-climate policies, including slashing restrictions on fossil fuel extraction, scrapping investment in renewable energy, and gutting the Environmental Protection Agency.
Project 2025 has been accused of being “extreme” and “authoritarian” for setting out a plan to rapidly “reform” the U.S. government by shuttering bureaus and offices, overturning regulations, and replacing thousands of public sector employees with hand-picked political allies of Trump. The agenda also proposes radical tax cuts, and a crackdown on reproductive rights.
On Wednesday (6 November), following Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election, Roberts sent an email on behalf of the foundation, saying that: “starting now, we will execute our plans to dismantle the administrative state.”
At least 140 authors of Project 2025 worked for the last Trump administration, according to CNN, while several are expected to hold positions in the next Trump White House.
Patel also gave a speech about national security to the Heritage Foundation, hosted by Gardiner, in November 2021. Patel was at the time serving as home secretary, and her address was published on the UK government website.
This news comes as the Conservative Party realigns itself after the election of new leader Kemi Badenoch, positioning itself as having better relations with the incoming Trump administration.
In her first Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) this week, Badenoch called on Labour not to oppose a Trump address to Parliament, and asked whether Foreign Secretary David Lammy had apologised to the Republican for labelling him as a “neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath” in 2020.
Patel was appointed to Badenoch’s new shadow cabinet earlier this week, alongside Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick, who also has ties to the Heritage Foundation.
In February, Jenrick – who came second in the recent Tory leadership election – gave a speech to the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC entitled, “Securing Sovereign Borders in an Age of Mass Migration”.
Project 2025 proposes new sweeping restrictions on immigration into the U.S., while setting the foundations for mass deportations – a key promise of Trump’s 2024 campaign.
After being introduced by Roberts, Jenrick praised the foundation, and described meeting with and learning from Heritage while working as an intern for Condoleeza Rice, who served as secretary of state under Republican President George W. Bush.
Jenrick also praised the event’s co-host Gardiner, whom Jenrick described as “the special relationship made flesh”. He said Gardiner, who writes a regular column for the Daily Telegraph, “creates links between conservatives here and in the UK”.
As revealed by Democracy For Sale and Byline Times, Donald Trump and U.S. Republican campaigns received more than $45 million (£35 million) from donors who have funded the influential network of hard-wing Tufton Street think tanks in the UK.
“That senior Conservatives would take time out to travel halfway around the world to give talks at a pro-Trump think tanks is very revealing,” said Peter Geoghegan, editor of Democracy For Sale. “We need to be aware that the dark money that fuelled the likes of the Heritage Foundation is washing up in Britain, where secretive Tufton Street think tanks refuse to declare their donors but take millions from pro-Trump U.S. conservatives.”
A Heritage Foundation spokesperson previously told DeSmog: “Project 2025 is a coalition of conservatives who wrote ‘Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise’ which was published in April 2023, before any candidate declared a run for office. Project 2025 does not speak for any candidate or campaign.”
Project 2025 and Climate Denial
Project 2025 proposes replacing green investment with the further deregulation of the oil and gas industry.
Speaking at an event co-hosted by the Heritage Foundation and the Hungarian Danube Institute in September, key Trump ally Robert Wilkie – who served as U.S. veterans’ affairs secretary from 2018 to 2021 – confirmed that his former boss would “kill” climate budgets.
The Heritage Foundation received over £4.9 million between 1997 and 2017 from groups linked to the fossil fuel giant Koch Industries. The brothers behind the company, Charles and the late David Koch, have been the principal funders of climate denial groups in the U.S. since the 1980s.
As revealed by DeSmog, advisory groups working on Project 2025 have received at least $9.6 million from Charles Koch since 2020, along with at least $21.5 million from the Sarah Scaife Foundation, which is funded by the Mellon oil and banking fortune.
The Heritage Foundation has disputed these figures, though has not offered its own calculations. A spokesperson previously told DeSmog: “Heritage research is independent and accurate, these numbers are not.”
At a 2022 Heritage Foundation event, Nile Gardiner said: “I do think the British government needs to rethink the whole green energy agenda. It’s not a conservative agenda, in fact it’s a socialist agenda”. He added: “I think net zero has become basically a form of religion, and anyone who questions the dogma on this immediately is accused of being a heretic.”
As DeSmog has reported, Kemi Badenoch has regularly criticised the UK’s green ambitions, describing herself as a “net zero sceptic” during her Conservative conference speech in October.
During the leadership contest, Badenoch published a 40-page manifesto that cited the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, a U.S. group led by former advisors to Trump, which has likened climate science to believing the earth is flat.
Jenrick has also attacked net zero policies and has advocated for increased fossil fuel extraction, including the development of new coal mines.
Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark RichardsOrcas comment on killer apes destroying the planet by continuing to burn fossil fuels. Second version, corrected text.
A damning new report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) on the scale of destitution in the UK, has found that more than a million children experienced the most extreme form of poverty last year, with the figure almost trebling since 2017.
The report – the fourth in a series of Destitution in the UK studies published regularly in recent years, also revealed that almost 4 million people experienced destitution in 2022. Destitution is when people cannot afford to meet their most basic physical needs to stay warm, dry, clean and fed.
The damning figures shame us as a nation, with the rise in levels of destitution down to the cost of living crisis, low incomes as well as high levels of debt. The JRF report also highlighted how the social security system is failing to protect people from destitution, with almost three quarters (72%) of those destitute being in receipt of benefits.
The number of people experiencing destitution has increased by 61% since the last Destitution in the UK survey in 2019, an increase of almost two-and-a-half times (148%) compared to 2017. The report stated: “Single people of working age continue to be the worst-affected group by far, but for the first time in 2022 around a million children were living in households that experienced destitution. The shocking statistics revealed in this report reflect a social security system now so full of holes that it falls to charities – such as food banks – to try to prevent people from experiencing the worst of destitution, but the task is too great for them.
The study findings emphasise the need for urgent action to address the profoundly detrimental impact of living in destitution and prevent more people experiencing this most severe form of material hardship. Destitution impacts on health, mental health and people’s prospects. At a societal level, it puts strain on
already overstretched services. It is morally unacceptable that people have to rely on food banks and other voluntary efforts to meet their basic physical needs. We need a stronger state safety net providing crisis support to everyone experiencing destitution, regardless of where they live or who they are, with cash-first assistance and ready access to free high-quality advice. While this would make an immediate difference to those most in need, we need bolder action to address the drivers of destitution, starting with a commitment to ending destitution in the UK and moving on to ‘design out’ destitution from our social security and immigration systems.
Activists project a message opposing the US’s oil-driven intervention in Venezuela, in Washington, January 8, 2026
