United Kingdom

As London Climate Action Week unfolded against the backdrop of one of the UK’s most extreme heatwaves, journalists, frontline voices and campaigners gathered for a landmark Make Polluters Pay event. It highlighted the growing political, legal and public momentum to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for climate damage.

Hosted by 350.org, Stamp out Poverty, and chaired by Megan Rowling of Climate Home News, the Make Polluters Pay event brought together speakers from across movements and geographies to examine how narratives are shifting, and how accountability for Big Oil is moving from the margins to the mainstream.

As climate disasters intensify and energy prices remain volatile, public anger at fossil fuel profiteering is rising. The discussion highlighted how windfall taxes, closing tax loopholes, and a wave of climate litigation are beginning to challenge the power of oil, gas and coal companies with billions already at stake.

350.org’s recent Out of Pocket report puts the scale of the imbalance in stark terms. Some $12tn a year flows to the fossil fuel industry in subsidies, tax breaks and unpaid climate damages. That’s nearly 100 times the world’s total climate finance.

Declassified researched two years of reporting by seven British media outlets and found only 16 mentions of the phrase Israel lobby without speech marks.

Nearly all those mentions are in comment articles rather than news pieces and none we found expound on what influence such an Israel lobby might have.

The phrase “Israel lobby” – used with speech marks – is slightly more common in these outlets, with 26 mentions in two years, and tends to be used to quote others in a disparaging way or to suggest such a lobby does not exist.

For example, one Guardian article refers to “the trope of the ‘Israel lobby’”. The Daily Mail reported in May 2024 of hecklers at a speech by then foreign secretary secretary David Lammy “accusing the MP of having taken ‘shady money’ from the ‘pro-Israel lobby’ on the grounds that he once lawfully accepted £30,000 from a Zionist lobbyist named Trevor Chinn.”

In fact, British businessman Trevor Chinn has funded Keir Starmer and several senior Labour ministers and was awarded the Israeli medal of honour for his “dedication” to and “love” for Israel.

Of the seven media outlets analysed – BBC articles, Express, Guardian, Independent, Mail, Telegraph and Times – the BBC and the Express are the most extreme, and no mentions of the phrase Israel lobby, used without speech marks, could be found at all in their publications.

The BBC is failing to mention the Israel lobby while having regular meetings with it. As Declassified recently revealed, the BBC held nine meetings with Jewish groups strongly sympathetic to Israel in the first year of the Gaza genocide.

The Guardian was found to have made only five mentions of an Israel lobby without speech marks, three of which are in comment pieces by columnist Owen Jones.

Despite the clear evidence and the rapid escalation in Islamophobic attacks, the government has announced no new security measures or funding

The motion also called for the BMA to provide urgent support and training to doctors targeted by the Israel lobby