Parliamentary group closes down after accepting Israeli arms money

Today we prise open Westminster to reveal how a parliamentary group that reportedly took money from a state-owned Israeli arms company has suddenly closed down.

This story is about the nebulous relationships between multinational weapons makers and the UK’s democratic institutions – and the revolving door between the two.

In the middle of it sits a man who went from being the defence secretary’s special adviser to founder of the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) for defence technology, an industry-funded lobby group that helped arms execs get face time with the politicians making key purchasing decisions.

Our investigation with Democracy for Sale reveals that the APPG shut down very recently, after the parliamentary commissioner for standards launched an investigation into the group over “due diligence of funding provided to an APPG secretariat”. Declassified UK reported in July that the group had taken money from an Israeli state-owned weapons company, even though parliamentary rules state that APPGs should not “accept the services of a secretariat funded directly or indirectly by a foreign government”.

What this story really exposes is some of the deeper problems with Westminster’s workings. We wanted to know more, so we dug deeper.

We discovered that James Clark co-founded the APPG in November 2024, just six months after leaving his Ministry of Defence job as special adviser to then-defence secretary Grant Shapps. Considering the group immediately banked £60,000 from defence giants like Lockheed Martin and Leonardo, you might think there’s just a slight conflict of interest. You might also wonder if that’s even allowed.

And here’s the rub. The rules on officials going from government into the private sector say that you normally can’t take up a lobbying role for at least a year. 

Despite this, the Ministry of Defence said it did not apply any restrictions to Clark’s role because it considers an APPG to exist within central government rather than outside of it. But APPGs don’t have any official status within parliament. They seek to influence policy. They receive funding from private companies. It doesn’t quite make sense to me.

To top it off, another of the APPG’s co-founders also sits on the standards committee, which oversees the commissioner running the investigation. You couldn’t make it up, really.

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Nearly 50 insurers have pledged to end or limit coverage for coal projects. Because banks rarely finance projects that lack insurance, this shift has major implications for coal’s access to capital.

Find out more

The tide may be turning. US insurer Chubb has broken its pledge to stop covering companies that derive more than 30% of their energy from coal. In July, it reinsured a coal-fired power plant on Vietnam’s coast. One industry insider warned the move could have a major market impact, predicting that other insurers may follow suit by exploiting loopholes in their climate policies.

Read more here.

The period app ‘eavesdropped’ on by Meta

When it comes to Big Tech companies snooping on your private business, it doesn’t get much worse than this. 

Meta was gathering confidential information about millions of users of the fertility tracking app Flo Health without them knowing about it. There’s all sorts of private information stored on these apps: when a user’s period arrived, when they had sex, whether they’re trying to have a baby and even whether they were masturbating.

It’s not exactly the kind of information you’d want to be widely shared, let alone fed into Mark Zuckerberg’s tech machine. Yet that’s what was happening, via a tool embedded in the app.

But there’s a silver lining to this story. Eight women found out that Meta had been collecting their information – and they sued the company. A jury in California last month found Meta guilty of illegally gathering this data. As always, that’s not the final beat in the lawsuit, but it shows that you can stand up to tech giants and win.

Andjela Milivojevic wrote a terrific analysis of this case, exploring what this means for people power and explaining how these tech companies sneak their way into our lives. It’s terrifying to learn how valuable some of this data is to them. 

Announcing our mentorship scheme

Finally, this week we announced a mentorship scheme to help expand the incredible work our team has done on covering the family courts. 

These courts have only recently been covered by the media. Our reporter Hannah Summers is leading this work – not just for our benefit, but for everyone’s. She has revealed some of the most heartwrenching stories of family trauma and interrogated the decisions that have a profound impact on people’s lives. 

She even exposed a rapist, who was previously allowed to have unsupervised time with his child.

Hannah’s tireless work has improved transparency in the courts and driven change which has made people serving in court more accountable. The pilot scheme allowing journalists to report on these cases has also been expanded, giving them better access to court documents and allowing people involved in these cases to talk about them more openly.

Hannah benefitted from mentoring in her career and now wants to help others by offering the same, looking for two journalists to mentor across a six-month period. Navigating the family courts is tough and complicated work. 

Hannah is the best there is, and anyone getting guidance from her will be very lucky.

If you know someone who you think might want to apply, send them this link.