United Kingdom

The British Museum removed the terms “Palestine”, “Palestinian” and “Israelite occupation” from its displays in direct response to months of lobbying in 2024, a Middle East Eye investigation has found.

In February 2026, the museum defended its decision to alter some displays, saying that “audience testing” showed the term “Palestine” to be “no longer meaningful”.

However, a new disclosure by the museum to MEE, in response to a freedom of information request, confirms that no such testing was carried out, nor any visitor research related to the term “Palestine”.

MEE analysed two sets of heavily redacted internal emails and cross-referenced them with online complaints to identify some of the activists and public figures who lobbied the museum.

Complainants include a former Daily Mail showbiz editor, a prominent historian and the Board of Deputies of British Jews, a pro-Israel Jewish community organisation which recently partnered with the museum on events marking Jewish Culture Month.

The Halifax brand is being scrapped after 173 years, with all customer accounts to be rebranded to Lloyds.

Lloyds Banking Group, which has owned Halifax since 2009, confirmed the move after reports in May said it was considering phasing out Halifax as a standalone brand.

Lloyds said it remained committed to the town of Halifax and the wider Yorkshire and Humber region, where 3,000 staff are based at its Trinity Road office.

Lloyds Banking Group's chief executive of consumer relationships Jas Singh said very little would change for customers.

"As Halifax changes to Lloyds, our Halifax customers will keep everything they know and love today - the same fantastic app design, the same friendly faces in our branches - even the same sort code and account number," he said.

No job cuts are being announced as part of the shake-up, and Halifax branches will either be rebranded to Lloyds or shifted to a nearby branch throughout 2027.

It is understood the decision was rooted in efforts to simplify the group's portfolio, with the distinction between Halifax and Lloyds seen as becoming less prominent in recent years.

A leading figure in the Oxfordshire's Raise the Colours movement is due to stand trial accused of making indecent images of children.

Ben Cullen is due to appear before a jury at Reading Crown Court on July 1 having been charged with three counts of the offence.

Court documents say the 45-year-old is accused of making 22 indecent category A photographs, including one moving image, in Wallingford on March 25, 2021.

He is also accused of making indecent pseudo-photographs, namely 36 Category B images of children at the same place and on the same date as well as making 20 Category C images of children.

Cullen, who lives in Wallingford, has been a leading figure behind the Raise the Colours movement, which gained more than 4,000 members of its Facebook social media page but appears to have since been deleted.

The group has been putting up flags across Oxfordshire, from Wallingford to Wantage and from Oxford to Witney.

Motorists will have seen the flags flying from lampposts since last summer. And most of them were put up by the small group of people.

Key figures have said they are motivated by patriotism, but it has received criticism from others.

Earlier this month, Oxfordshire County Council won an injunction against the group and four members including Cullen to stop putting up flags.

Oxfordshire County Council said it brought legal action to stop people raising flags near highways, saying it involved safety risks, as well as trespass and obstruction.

After a short hearing at the High Court where the group represented themselves, the group members agreed not to put up more flags, not to encourage others to do so, and not to obstruct any council worker or contractor taking them down.

Cullen, of Wallingford, is due to appear at Reading Crown Court on July 1.

Sir Keir Starmer has announced an extra £15bn for defence over the next four years, but warned it would mean some road and energy projects will now be scrapped.

The UK prime minister said on Tuesday that the long-awaited defence investment plan (DIP) would reverse the “corrosive hollowing out” of the armed forces and transform a military that has been “underfunded and unsuited to the threats we face”.

He called the blueprint “a platform on which I know my successor will build”. It has been signed off by Andy Burnham, to whom Starmer is expected to hand over power as soon as July 20.

Reform UK’s deputy leader said last week that a parliamentary debate into Israeli influence on British politics was “antisemitic in its very motivation and at its core”.

“As such, we should utterly reject it,” argued Richard Tice to a room full of MPs.

What he did not tell them, however, was that he had been on a trip to “the Gaza front line” last September funded by the newly-created Reform Friends of Israel, where he concluded that the Gaza famine was a “blatant lie”.

They also visited Israel’s police headquarters, which is overseen by far-right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who is sanctioned by the UK for “repeated incitement of violence against Palestinian civilians”.

This trip was funded by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, according to newly released Israeli government data seen by Declassified and found by Berlin-based journalist Yossi Bartel.

The records show that the ministry paid Conexión Israel – a company based in Jerusalem that organises high-level country visits – more than £50,000 to facilitate the delegation.

The delegates returned singing Israel’s praises and denouncing British protesters marching against the war in Gaza as antisemitic and “naively propping up a terrorist ideology”.

Andy Burnham’s new economics advisor oversaw an illegal sacking and an incident where police were called on his own staff, according to a trade union.

The Independent Workers’ of Great Britain (IWGB) union said Andy Haldane should not be “anywhere near a government that claims to stand for working people”.

Last week it was reported that Burnham was receiving advice from some “top economists” ahead of his Labour leadership run, including Haldane, a former Bank of England chief economist.

Haldane was the chief executive of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) from 2021 to 2025, where he oversaw a period of unrest, with staff taking strike action for the first time in the charity’s 270-year history after management refused to recognise their trade union.

Burnham’s appointment of new economic advisors is seen as an attempt to bolster his fiscal credibility. However, Haldane’s former staff have expressed concerns that his inclusion “points in the opposite direction” of a leadership that can “bring people together”.

They sneaked the news out in a paragraph near the bottom of an article about a nature podcast - “As part of the BBC’s evolving commissioning strategy, Winterwatch will not be continuing.”

I thought this was coming when they reduced it from two weeks to one. You can send in comments to the BBC here - https://www.bbc.co.uk/contact/comments

The Canary has been debanked by Lloyds. Despite banking with them for almost a decade they are currently withholding a substantial amount of our money. We are left with barely any funds.

We do know that multiple other politically engaged people have suffered similar actions by other banks in recent times. It is not lost on us that powerful banks are able to restrict the financial activity of anti-Zionist and pro-Palestine organisations and individuals. Whilst we do not currently know the reasons behind our debanking, we cannot afford to be naive about this.

It is an outrage that the Canary has been unceremoniously dropped into financial instability with no notice or explanation from Lloyds.

The construction plans include building new bunkers in Suffolk, which will seemingly be used to store nuclear weapons, and modernising facilities to help covert units run secret operations.

The US military is also planning to upgrade its base in Gloucestershire, from which waves of powerful bombers attacked Iran earlier this year on the orders of Donald Trump.

The plans highlight the breadth of the US military and security establishment’s footprint in the UK, where more than 12,000 US military personnel are spread around at least 15 bases and facilities.

There are questions about whether Britain should continue to host the US installations on its soil.

For more than seven decades, successive governments have seen the bases as a foundation of the UK’s military partnership with the US.

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Another $1.1bn is earmarked for Mildenhall airbase in Suffolk, at which about 4,000 American military personnel are stationed. During this year’s US-Israeli war on Iran, the base played an important part in facilitating bombing missions. Huge planes flew from the base to the Mediterranean to refuel other airborne aircraft flying to and from Iran.

Less visible are the covert forces based at Mildenhall. They are tasked with flying special operatives into what they call “hostile, denied and/or politically sensitive territories” across Europe and Africa.

An unspecified portion of the $1.1bn earmarked for Mildenhall will fund the construction of purpose-built facilities, to enable these special forces to house their aircraft in one place. This, according to the Pentagon, will enable the forces to react more rapidly in a crisis.

Nearly $500m is to be spent at RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire, which played a vital role in US bombing raids on Iran this year.

The base has a very long runway, at almost 2 miles, and is reinforced to withstand heavy bombers, such as the B-1 and B-52, which can carry huge payloads, including the so-called “bunker buster” bombs.

This enabled the bombers to take off from Fairford instead of the US, cutting out thousands of miles.

Labour is definitely experiencing a Burnham bounce; the question is how high the ceiling is, and how far the party will drop back down

When British Prime Minister Keir Starmer resigned last week, an old but forever damning clip resurfaced. Appearing on a London radio show in October 2023, the former human rights lawyer told the host that Israel had the right to cut water and electricity off to the besieged population of Gaza.

This was no slip of the tongue. Instead, it represented the instincts of a man who went on to oversee Britain’s complicity in the greatest crime of our time. In opposition, Starmer helped Israel accrue the confidence and capital it needed to justify its crimes. In office, his government helped Israel accrue the military means it needed to carry them out.

After Starmer took office in July 2024, the value of arms export licences granted from October to December that year alone was 127.6 million pounds ($168.8m), far higher than what was approved by the Conservative government from 2020 to 2023. In September 2024, Labour Foreign Secretary David Lammy announced a partial suspension of arms exports to Israel. Pausing about 30 arms export licences out of a total of 350, the government made one, huge, glaring omission: the continued supply of parts for Israel’s F-35 stealth fighter jets. This included components that went to the United States to be sent on to Israel and spare parts that went into global stockpiles that may have gone to Israel.

Arms sales typically dominate discussions of British complicity. However, perhaps even more significant has been the continued role of Royal Air Force Akrotiri base in Cyprus. “The whole world and everyone back at home is relying on you. Quite a bit of what goes on here can’t necessarily be talked about all of the time. We can’t necessarily tell the world what you’re doing.” This is what Starmer told service members while visiting the RAF base in December 2024. If Starmer won’t tell the world, we will: RAF bases have been a critical site of complicity, principally through the performance of routine RAF surveillance flights over Gaza.

Israel has not just relied on the United Kingdom’s military support but its economic support too. The government should have been using every single economic and political tool at its disposal to force Israel to stop. That is the approach the government has taken towards Russia. Refusing to do the same to Israel is rank hypocrisy – and proof of economic, diplomatic and political complicity. A sprinkling of sanctions against a handful of extreme settlers and ministers doesn’t cut it. Without comprehensive sanctions, Israel will never adhere to international law: not in Gaza, not in the West Bank, not in Lebanon, not anywhere.