Declassified UK

Declassified UK is an investigative journalism website founded in 2019 by Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis. It describes itself as "the leading website for in-depth analysis and exclusive news on British foreign policy, investigating the UK military, intelligence agencies and its most powerful corporations." It is hosted by the "Daily Maverick", an independent online newspaper based in South Africa. It was briefly blacklisted by the Ministry of Defence in September 2020.
History.
"Declassified UK" was set up in 2019 by Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis and is hosted on the website of the "Daily Maverick", an independent South African website. Kennard is an investigative journalist and author who has previously written for news outlets such as "The Guardian", the "Financial Times", "openDemocracy" and "The Intercept", usually focusing on Britain's role on the international stage. Curtis is a historian who has written excessively about British foreign policy, particularly its role in multiple coups in the Middle East and Latin America, its backing of oppressive and authoritarian governments, and how little gets reported about it.
Board members at "Declassified" include former South African MP Andrew Feinstein; former leader and vice-chair of the Respect Party, Salma Yaqoob, and dub poet Benjamin Zephaniah.
The "mainstream" UK media is not uncovering the reality of Britain's role in the world and the public is being largely kept in the dark. This means that governments are not being held to account for their policies.
The problem is not just with the UK's right-wing, billionaire-owned media but also with its more "liberal" outlets and the BBC, the most popular source of news for the British public.
The British media are less and less mainstream – and are if anything becoming even more embedded in the establishment, regularly amplifying extremist policies that support war, human rights abusers and corporations contributing to catastrophic climate change.
The government publishes key information on its policies virtually every day which is often very revealing. But only a tiny proportion of this is ever covered in the establishment media. Those journalists choose not to cover it, or else don't care. We do.
However, much remains hidden. Britain's culture of secrecy is deeply embedded in Whitehall. This means that numerous government policies are hidden from the same public who should be able to hold a government to account in a democracy. These hidden policies often need to be exposed, and the secret state challenged. 
Exclusives.
In August 2020, "Declassified" published a story about a British soldier, Ahmed Al-Batati, being investigated by the Royal Military Police for protesting UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia. British missiles, fighter jets and bombs have been used in the Saudi Arabian-led intervention in Yemen since 2015.
In November 2020, "Declassified" revealed that the United Kingdom had nearly 150 overseas military bases, hundreds more than the Ministry of Defence (MoD) had previously claimed.
In February 2021, it revealed that figures from the British royal family had had more than 200 meetings with leaders of tyrannical Middle Eastern dictatorships since the start of the Arab Spring in February 2011. These included 44 meetings with the Bahraini House of Khalifa and 40 with the Saudi regime.
Blacklisting.
In August 2020, "Declassified" journalist Phil Miller, who wrote the piece about Ahmed Al-Batati, asked the MoD for comment. An MoD press officer responded by asking him what angle Miller's article was taking and claimed not to know much about "Declassified"; the officer later told Miller, "we no longer deal with your publication". Following this, the Council of Europe, the continent's leading human rights organisation, issued an alert warning of a serious breach of press freedom.
After the MoD issued an apology, "Declassified" editor Mark Curtis told "Press Gazette": "We are looking at taking legal action against the MoD because we think they have certainly acted against the Civil Service Code, for example, and there may be other codes of conduct or other legal requirements that they might not be consistent with by telling us that." The National Union of Journalists called upon Defence Secretary Ben Wallace to intervene and an independent review was later ordered. The inquiry was headed by Tom Kelly, who was one of Tony Blair's Downing Street press spokespeople when Blair was Prime Minister. It found that MoD press officers believed their communications director had "sanctioned a blanket ban" on giving any comment to the website. Curtis said, "It is clear that Declassified was blacklisted, which is contrary to the way that public officials are required to deal with news organisations. The MoD should admit it and stop trying to let its most senior media official off the hook. The MoD is used to dealing mainly with compliant journalists who are happy to follow the official line. Declassified is different, and seeks instead to perform a public service by revealing what governments do."