Most mainstream journalists are just courtiers for the status quo, relaying the official government line or that of the mainstream opposition.
Declassified UK runs the stories you often can’t find in the British mainstream media. This is the basic duty of every news publication, yet so few live up to it. It’s up to muckrakers working on shoestring budgets to do the work the rest of the press should be doing.
Someone must dredge up what government secrets in official documents. And someone must ask politicians hard questions about them.
Declassified UK has proven its worth tenfold with coverage of the UK’s role in enabling Israel’s war in Gaza. The publication doggedly followed the British spy flights setting off from the Royal Air Force military base in Cyprus over the Gaza Strip until the mainstream media had to acknowledge them.
The Times ran a story in August, taking the government’s line at face value: the RAF was merely providing intelligence to help locate Israeli hostages held by Hamas. If you believe that the RAF would not hand over intelligence to support Israel’s military campaign, I have a unicorn to sell you. “Never believe anything until it’s officially denied” is the old saying of many great journalists for good reason.
Such coverage has earned Declassified UK the scorn of Westminster, with its “particular standpoint” on Gaza singled out for hostility.
Journalists working for right-wing TV channel GB News are free to stalk the hallways of Parliament. Even the staff writers of Guido Fawkes are welcome at the Palace of Westminster. This shouldn’t be a surprise, really.
The role of the Westminster lobby was to limit the reach of the press and meddlesome members of the public. It was never about ensuring open access for a free press. The function of the Westminster lobby—just like the Washington press corps – is to reinforce and defend the political consensus.
Muckrakers’ Revenge
Investigative journalist Matt Kennard and historian Mark Curtis launched Declassified UK in 2019 as a subsite of the Daily Maverick, a lively independent South African newspaper. This was an apt arrangement, since the UK was ranked lower than South Africa at the time by the World Press Freedom Index.
Declassified UK still has a South African connection to this day. Anti-Apartheid campaigner Andrew Feinstein, who served as a lawmaker for the African National Congress, sits on the company’s board. Feinstein resigned in 2001 in protest over the ANC’s handling of an arms deal.
Feinstein later stood against Keir Starmer in the 2024 general election, coming in second with almost 20% of the vote. He ran on a platform to support a permanent ceasefire to end the Israel-Gaza war.
Editor Phil Miller, chief investigator Martin Williams and chief reporter John McEvoy lead Declassified UK’s coverage. The roster also includes veteran investigative journalist Richard Norton-Taylor, commentator Peter Oborne and British-Palestinian writer Hamza Yusuf, among others.
The first signs that Declassified UK had rankled the powerful came in 2020. The publication discovered that it had been blacklisted by the Ministry of Defence. Later, the ministry had to issue an embarrassing apology for doing so.
That same year, Matt Kennard published emails showing that he had been blacklisted by Government Communications Headquarters, the largest of Britain’s big three intelligence agencies.
This was after Kennard reported that the GCHQ had gained access to at least 22,000 school children in schools across the UK. The story didn’t catch much mainstream attention, but the blacklisting was harder to ignore.
Around this time Declassified UK was outgrowing its host publication. Realising that departure from the Daily Maverick was necessary to establish an independent brand, the team launched a standalone site in September 2021.
Despite being derided by mainstream politicians and journalists, Declassified UK makes its impact felt. Some of its stories have broken through and made it into the national media, such as the revelation that Margaret Thatcher deployed 31 nuclear weapons to the Falkland Islands during the 1982 war with Argentina.
This story reignited old tensions with Argentina over the Falklands. With the likes of GB News and the Daily Express covering it, the Thatcher story was too big to ignore.
Richard Norton-Taylor later followed up with another report on the Falklands. He suggested that the government may have deployed Polaris submarines with 16 nuclear-tipped warheads. The episode is a testament to the secretive nature of the British state.
History is often inconvenient for the old imperial powers. The UK is no different. Declassified UK’s incisive reportage threatens the cultural amnesia maintained by the national press.
Truth or Power
Declassified UK is still a young publication, developing and changing. Although co-founder Matt Kennard left in October 2024 to pursue other projects. The team shows no sign of slowing down anytime soon.
Every year is crucial for the success of a venture like Declassified UK. Unlike the national papers, small independent publications can’t afford to be sloppy. They need to hit their mark, hard and well, without falling into the legal trouble that would spell their doom.
From a historical perspective, Declassified UK ‘s best work can be compared with the sort that appeared in the American publication I.F. Stone’s Weekly. Starting out at the height of the Red Scare in 1953, Stone built his newsletter with tireless research rather than meetings with Capitol Hill insiders.
This was true family journalism, with Stone’s wife Esther managing the crucial subscription side of the business. The Weekly started out with just 5,000 subscribers, yet grew to more than 70,000 by 1960.
Stone only stopped publishing in 1971 because he had angina. Although he could have published the Ellsberg papers, he took the scoop to The New York Times. He knew that the story was so big that it had to go to the paper of record.
This was during Richard Nixon’s first term, when the Vietnam War dominated the headlines. We now remember how the Watergate scandal eventually forced him to resign, after Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein exposed a plan to sabotage the Democrats in the 1972 presidential election. But we forget that, prior to their story breaking, the mainstream US press had also sabotaged George McGovern’s campaign, leading to a landslide victory for Nixon.
From their perspective, Nixon’s great crime was going after his enemies—real and imagined—in the US establishment. Meanwhile, the carpet bombing of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam was just business as usual for them.
This suggests a fruitful analogy with the British political class and the Gaza war. Despite their many missteps, the last two governments – Conservative and Labour – have escaped public condemnation for helping to arm Israel.
Many people are still unaware that the British government continues to sell military components and equipment to Israel. Just as many more people are unaware that the RAF has flown over Gaza more than 600 times during this war.
Just as the American war in Indochina wasn’t for IF Stone’s Weekly, British involvement in the Gaza war isn’t business as usual for Declassified UK.
All journalists like to think of their profession in glowing terms. Everyone thinks they could be Woodward and Bernstein circa 1974. The reality is that far too many journalists speak for power rather than speak truth to power.
Declassified UK represents a welcome break from such spinelessness.
Photograph courtesy of Wikimedia. Published under an Open Govenment license.
