Portugal’s foreign minister, Paulo Rangel, has said that Portugal would “obviously” back the United Kingdom’s possible return to the European Union, but it is still too soon to discuss this
The post Portugal’s government ‘obviously’ in favour of UK returning to EU appeared first on Portugal Resident.
Successful tech companies are being punished—for being successful.
Last week, Britain's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) proposed designating Microsoft as having strategic market status, which would give the government regulator enormous powers to regulate Microsoft and impose specific conduct requirements on product design. A consultation process has begun, with a decision on whether Microsoft will be given strategic market status expected in February 2027.
If the CMA decides to designate Microsoft as having strategic market status, it could intervene in product bundling (how Microsoft packages Teams, Word, Excel, and Copilot together), interoperability (whether Microsoft should make it easier for competing software and AI developers to integrate with its products), cloud licensing (whether Microsoft's licensing arrangements disadvantage rival cloud providers), and customer switching (whether businesses face unreasonable barriers to leaving Microsoft's ecosystem) in the United Kingdom.
Bizarrely, the CMA's fundamental gripe with Microsoft is that it has made its software so interconnected, convenient, and commercially attractive to buy together that competitors struggle to persuade businesses to use anything else. For example, the CMA says that Microsoft offers customers "technology that is useful, secure, easy to deploy and manage, and available at an attractive overall price." According to its own customer research, Microsoft is seen as "relatively good value for money," and its bundles are "seen as more cost-effective than buying and managing separate licences." Because commercial bundling "makes customers less likely to adopt products from alternative providers," the CMA thinks it must intervene.
Microsoft is not the first tech giant to feel the CMA's wrath for creating products people like. In 2025, the CMA decided Google had strategic market status in general search and search advertising, giving the regulator the power to impose legally binding requirements on how the company operates. Since then, the CMA has ordered Google to use government-mandated standards for ranking organic search results, provide competitors with tools to access users' search data, and give publishers greater control over how their content is used in AI-powered search. (These requirements were imposed without finding that Google had violated competition law.)
"Products working well together at an attractive price used to be called a selling point," but is now "attracting intervention pushed by an overzealous regulator," Matthew Lesh, public policy fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs, a London-based free market think tank, tells Reason. Lesh is the co-author of Digital Overload, a 2023 report that warns against giving the CMA "extensive, discretionary powers" amounting to the regulator "telling some of the most successful and popular platforms on the planet how to run their businesses."
Lesh argues that including Copilot, Microsoft's AI chatbot, in the designation is "particularly outrageous." Last year, when Google was designated as having strategic market status, the CMA excluded Gemini because the "AI assistant sector is relatively small, nascent, and highly dynamic." Lesh argues that, with Google, the CMA acknowledged "uncertainty about the market's development," but now "proposes sweeping Microsoft's workplace AI into a designation requiring an assessment looking at least five years ahead."
"Five years ago, ChatGPT didn't exist. Anyone confident about who will lead workplace AI in 2031 should be running a hedge fund, not a regulator," he tells Reason.
While European countries have taken a far more interventionist approach to technology, the United States has, at least comparatively, celebrated competition and innovation. But American lawmakers are increasingly flirting with importing similar restrictions on Big Tech.
In June, Sens. Chuck Grassley (R–Iowa) and Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.) reintroduced the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, which would allow federal and state antitrust enforcers to challenge certain practices by dominant online platforms, including favoring their own products and disadvantaging competitors. Jack Nicastro described the bill in Reason as an "atrocious importation of European-style competition policy," arguing that it would undermine innovation and choice. The following month, Sen. Mark Warner (D–Va.) introduced the AI AGENT Act, which would impose new requirements on major online platforms to accommodate competing AI agents.
These proposals are intended to address similar concerns to those of the CMA in Britain. The idea is that established companies outperforming their competitors is somehow evidence of "market failure," undermining the very innovations that made them successful.
Technological progress has always been driven by entrepreneurs and the companies they've built competing to win over consumers. Britain seems to have forgotten this. If the United States wants to remain a world leader in tech, it should avoid the British approach like the plague.
The post Britain Wants To Punish Microsoft for Being Too Successful appeared first on Reason Magazine.
By Jonathan COOK
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Andy Burnham’s government is rolling out a new “Centre for Information Defence”. But the outside actors most aggressively undermining what little remains of British democracy are nowhere in its sights
Russia “interfered” in the 2016 Brexit vote by running some “anti-EU” articles on its RT channel and promoting a few internet trolls. Even MI5 has to admit that this activity had no tangible impact on the referendum campaign.
No matter. British prime minister Andy Burnham has once again revived the incendiary claim that Russian disinformation is an especial threat to British democracy. At the United Nations a few weeks ago he announced plans for a National Centre for Information Defence “to detect, attribute and disrupt these kinds of hostile state information attacks”.
For the new British prime minister, as for his predecessors, this is all about Moscow and the UK’s favourite bogeyman, Vladimir Putin. At the UN, Burnham promised British expertise to other European nations to protect them from Kremlin disinformation.
Meanwhile, evidence continues to mount that another foreign actor is meddling even more aggressively in British politics – and neither Burnham nor MI5 have a word to say about it.
Any evidence of Russia disinformation-peddling in the UK pales in comparison to Israeli influence operations – and that’s just the ones we know about. The head of MI5, Ken McCallum, noted that Russian disinformation was neither sophisticated nor successful. The same cannot be said for Israel’s handiwork.
Israel has been using “hasbara” trolls on social media platforms to manipulate public debates in Britain for years – the thrust of the accusation against Russia. But in Israel’s case, it goes much further than that.
This year the Israeli state massively increased its public diplomacy budget to $730 million to expand its influence operations. That includes flying even more politicians, clergy, academics and influencers to bombard them with pro-Israel propaganda they are then likely to spread back home. According to foreign minister Gideon Saar, Israeli advocacy should be treated “like investing in jets, bombs, and missile interceptors”.
There was already plenty of evidence through the late 2010s, as I reported at the time, that Israel was helping to organise, stoke and amplify a campaign to smear its arch-critic, Jeremy Corbyn, as an antisemite, in order to prevent him from reaching No 10 Downing Street.
Not least, Israel did so by advancing a new, bogus definition of Jew hatred through the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). Usefully, for Israel, that definition largely ignores hatred of Jews to focus instead on criticism of Israel.
That was the most blatant meddling possible in what remains of Britain’s democratic processes. UK politicians and media not only failed to oppose it, but actively sought to amplify the smears.
Civil war
That is likely not only to remove criticism of Israeli atrocities and criticism of western governments, such as the UK’s, for colluding in Israel’s genocide but turn social media into a playground for bots and Israel apologists, giving them free reign to spread their propaganda without challenge.
We also know, thanks to the work of the French security services – maybe MI5 was too busy chasing Russian bots to notice – that an Israeli cyber agency called Blackcore targeted the SNP in May’s Scottish elections, as well as meddling in elections in France and New York.
Israeli tech firms, especially those dealing in spyware, intelligence and influence operations, are typically closely aligned with the Israeli state and its military. Most of the founders of tech start-ups are alumnae of the Israeli army’s 8200 intelligence unit.
Alongside the SNP, New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and a leftwing French party headed by Jean-Luc Melenchon were targeted. Why? Because, unlike their political rivals, all had dared to speak out against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
With echoes of what happened to Corbyn, Blackcore’s campaigns were designed to smear candidates. In the case of the French elections, fake accounts were created to accuse one candidate of rape and another of paedophilia.
A new documentary, NAZA, shows how Israel has paved the way in using AI in pioneering new ways to kill on a mass scale in Gaza. It selected banks of targets for assassination, often by murdering those “suspects” when they are in family compounds, slaughtering large numbers of bystanders in the process.
It is therefore hardly surprising that tech firms in Israel have been caught using AI in similarly innovative and indiscriminate ways online, to target western publics with disinformation.
In the summer it emerged that the Israeli government had created a website for a fake “scholarly” think-tank. In a short period of time, it produced prodigious quantities of AI-generated content on Israel, optimised for common search terms, that promoted Israeli talking points and constantly suggested criticism of Israel risked fuelling antisemitism.
It was set up not only to influence internet chatbots into echoing its pro-Israel disinformation but also to integrate its content into what experts call the “underlying training data”: that is, the unquestioned assumptions on which chatbots operate.
Back in May 2024 Meta identified fake Israel-based accounts, “posing as Jewish students, African Americans and other concerned citizens”, peddling pro-Israel content in the US and Canada in support of Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.
Two months ago, Meta again found the same kind of dirty tricks emanating from Israel, this time targeting Britain, France and Australia among other countries. The AI-generated accounts posed “as local, civically-engaged brands, news sources, religious organizations, and political activists”.
Notably in the case of the UK and France, the influence campaigns were designed to stoke “anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim” sentiment. Israel has been critically involved in advancing Islamophobic content, fuelling fears of a supposed “Muslim takeover” of Europe to mobilise support for Israel as a bulwark in the Middle East against Islam, and thereby encourage sympathy for its genocidal attacks on Gaza.
As a consequence, the political landscape in Britain has been disfigured. Support for the far-right has been artificially inflated, polarising British society. The path is being paved towards deeper authoritarianism and the possibility of civil war.
Death knell
But it isn’t just the influence of Israel we should be worried about. The problem runs much deeper, with a host of other noxious outside actors trying to warp and disfigure British politics in ways that closely accord with Israel’s malign intent. Burnham’s Centre for Information Defence will do precisely nothing to tackle any of it.
Here are two other powerful external actors aligned with Israel in distorting British politics.
The billionaire class, a transnational elite that has no loyalty to Britain, interfere in our politics by making our political parties dependent on their donations. They use their money to buy influence with the main parties – which is why for decades it has made little difference whether we vote for the Conservatives or Labour. We get austerity either way, while the billionaires get permission for their forever wars, directing public wealth away from public services into the arms industries and resource grabs.
Jeremy Corbyn tried to break with this model by funding Labour with small donations from ordinary people instead of the billionaires. As a result, he was destroyed by a confected campaign run by the billionaires, in association with Israel and its trolls, to smear him as an antisemite.
Sir Keir Starmer, Corbyn’s successor, went right back to begging for money from Big Business, got the billionaires behind him, and rolled on with the austerity programme.
Is Nigel Farage’s Reform different? Of course, not. Even before reaching power, he’s dependent on crypto-billionaires living in Thailand and Hong Kong.
Meanwhile, the sometime US trillionaire Elon Musk is busy rallying Britain’s new blackshirts, led by serial fraudster Tommy Robinson, to chase after a few “illegal” migrants rather than identifying the real criminals tearing apart Britain: the super-rich like Musk.
The billionaires both wield and conceal their influence through their ownership of the corporate media. They use the media to aggressively promote their own causes – political and economic policies ensuring their further enrichment – by normalising the extreme ideology of neoliberal capitalism, with its promotion of endless resource extraction through forever wars and the fuelling of needless consumption.
The consequence is the destruction of the conditions for human life on the planet. The billionaires hope they can ride out the catastrophe in their bunkers, or cryogenically freeze their bodies until a point in the future when they can be uploaded to the cloud.
One of the media’s most important jobs is to use smear campaigns to destroy anyone, such as Corbyn and now Zack Polanski, who threatens the billionaires’ privileged position by offering a mildly socialist programme of wealth redistribution.
The recent claims of a supposed “terrorist plot” outside RAF Fairford – really a US airforce base pretending to be a British base and one from which the US has waged an illegal war of aggression against Iran – should have reminded us that the Pentagon is largely in charge of UK foreign policy.
The US has some 15 major military bases on British soil, plus half a dozen smaller intelligence sites. As the rightwing US podcaster Tucker Carlson recently observed, the fact that Britain has foreign troops crawling all over it makes us little more than an occupied “vassal state”.
The US recently announced a $4 billion upgrade of its UK bases, including establishing storage sites for its nuclear arsenal. The plan caused barely a ripple of interest among British politicians or the media .
Although our political and media class pretend the UK is an equal partner in a western defence alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the reality is very different. Nato takes its orders from the US, doing Washington’s bidding. That’s why Nato has been pivoting towards America’s biggest economic rival, China, which is, of course, nowhere near the North Atlantic.
When the US snaps its fingers, Britain stands to attention and hikes its spending on the war industries. Along with European governments, the UK is willing to drain its national coffers and scythe through public spending with yet more austerity cuts to support Washington’s military agenda for “full-spectrum global dominance”.
Hidden influence
In the early 2010s, the US was desperately seeking a pretext to extradite Julian Assange from the UK and lock him up in a super-max jail, hiding him out of sight after his organisation Wikileaks revealed US and British war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. It was during this period that Starmer, as the director of public prosecutions, repeatedly jetted off to Washington for secret meetings with US officials.
We will never know what was discussed. Freedom of information requests discovered that his own officials destroyed all records of those meetings.
Once he became a politician, Starmer was recruited to the shadowy Trilateral Commission, originally founded in the 1970s by officials in Jimmy Carter’s administration to deal with the supposed problem of “an excess of democracy” in the US. The commission’s view was that voters were becoming dangerously less passive, at that time over the Vietnam war, and ways needed to be found to return them to docility.
There are a plethora of other “respected’ think-tanks and organisations whose chief role is to embed US policy ideas, especially those relating to foreign policy, in the thinking of British elites. They include the Bilderberg Group, Chatham House, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Atlantic Council, The British-American Parliamentary Group, and BritishAmerican Business.
The US uses its financial muscle through these organisations and many others to manufacture consent for its extreme neoliberal and neoconservative ideologies. The latest example are massive grants to organisations willing to export Trump’s MAGA ideology to the UK, masquerading as a “public education” initiative.
There is plenty of evidence to show that it was pressure from the Trump administration that led to the unprecedented decision by Starmer’s government to proscribe a civil disobedience group, Palestine Action, for the first time in Britain’s history as a terrorist organisation.
Palestine Action had incensed Israel by targeting its weapons factories on UK soil, highlighting another aspect of British collusion in the Gaza genocide, and had infuriated Trump personally by spraying one of his golf courses in Scotland with the words “Gaza is not 4 sale”.
Burnham is already rolling over to reverse the UK’s decision to honour a ruling from the International Court of Justice and other international tribunals that Britain has no claim to sovereignty over the Chagos Islands and must return them to Mauritius. The UK has faced a temper tantrum from Trump on the matter because the US operates an illegal military base on one of the islands.
Disobedience by the UK is the exception, not the rule. Which makes Burnham’s exclusive focus on Russian influence almost laughably beside the point. This furious finger-pointing at the Kremlin is designed with one purpose in mind only: to distract the British public from where the real external meddling in our politics is coming from.
Original article: jonathancook.substack.com
Three days of silence ended in London. Volodymyr Zelenskyy used a Financial Times interview to announce that Ukraine would resume strikes on Russian oil refineries, and the message was aimed as much at Washington as was at Moscow.
The ban on refinery strikes is lifted, Zelenskyy declared. “Enough,” he added, in a statement that amounted to an open rejection of the White House moratorium. The timing is notable. Until the trip to London, Kyiv had avoided a direct confrontation with Donald Trump. Only after arriving in the British capital, where political backing for Ukraine remains strongest, did the tone harden. The episode points to a widening split inside the Western bloc. Over the coming month, tension may grow between those pushing for a settlement and those committed to continuing the war.
While politics heats up, the strikes on Ukraine’s rear continue without pause.
Overnight on October 16, Russian drones hit the western regions in a massive attack. In Lutsk, an energy facility was struck, leaving parts of the city without power and halting electric transport. As the blackout spread, residents began stocking water. In Khmelnytskyi, an oil depot was attacked. Kovel reported interruptions to both water and electricity, while in Ternopil a foreign-owned enterprise was hit.
The situation in the capital is worse. According to the Ukrainian outlet Ekonomichna Pravda, three Kyiv thermal power plants – TEC-5, TEC-6, and the Darnytsia plant – have stopped generating electricity. Those facilities provided the bulk of the capital’s power. Media reports say 600,000 people have already left Kyiv, a city that had nearly three million residents before the conflict.
Meanwhile, a technological shift is emerging on the battlefield. Russian forces have begun using Molniya drones fitted with satellite antennas, bearing a logo strikingly similar to that of Bureau 1440. That company develops Rassvet, a Russian low-orbit satellite network widely seen as a counterpart to Elon Musk’s Starlink. Such a network offers jam-resistant control for mid-range strike drones operating 100 to 150 kilometers from the front line. Satellite guidance is also expected to improve the accuracy of long-range Geran drones. If Russia can quickly scale up terminal production, the consequences could be dramatic. Ukraine’s rear could come to resemble the land corridor to Crimea, where roads are effectively blocked by constantly loitering drones.
Kyiv has lifted its own ban on refinery strikes just as its capital loses the ability to keep itself warm and lit. Russia, meanwhile, is building a satellite-guided drone fleet that no foreign company can switch off. Defiance in London is easy to announce. Defiance in a city without power, with roughly one in five residents gone, is far harder to sustain.
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The post “Enough” In London, Darkness In Kyiv — Zelenskyy’s Defiance Meets Reality appeared first on South Front.
Latvia's decision last week to declare Russian-born journalist and blogger Leonid Ragozin persona non grata has drawn attention to a broader trend: Russians who once presented themselves as opponents of Vladimir Putin are now accused of echoing Kremlin narratives.
Some now live in Europe, taking advantage of the
I was held for hours and forced to submit to a DNA test upon my return to Heathrow from an international conference
By Ian PROUD
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Britain is clamping down even harder on critics who consider Western foreign policy to have been a catastrophic failure. We are fast approaching the point where expressing an alternative opinion can land you in jail.
On the night of October 2, while exiting a flight from Moscow via Istanbul, I was detained by UK counter-terrorism police for three hours under the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act 2026. I had no right to remain silent, my person and possessions were thoroughly searched, I provided fingerprints and a DNA sample, and was required to give up my electronic devices and provide my passwords or face arrest.
This was a “suspicionless” detention. I was not suspected of anything, yet police officers were empowered to subject me to an intrusive examination to assess whether I was planning a “hostile act” against the United Kingdom.
An officer approached me and immediately took me into custody after I informed him that I had been to a conference in Russia to discuss geopolitics. I was not told why I was being detained, except that he wanted to ask me “a few questions.” Bizarrely, he pointed out that the “counter-terrorism” powers he was using “aren’t as scary as they sound.”
I had attended the International Valdai Discussion Club Conference in Moscow Region from September 27 to October 1, including attending President Vladimir Putin’s keynote address. I participated at the invitation of the Valdai Club, which provided my flight and accommodations, as is standard practice for foreign guest attendees at such international conferences.
The Valdai Club, founded in 2004, is primarily a meeting of academics from all over the world. Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it was attended by a former Head of MI6, former British Ambassador to Russia Sir Tony Brenton, and Fiona Hill.
Valdai has found itself in the British government’s crosshairs. Throughout September, a host of journalists and academics have received letters from the UK Home Office inviting them to register with the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme, if they are “being directed to carry out relevant activities in the UK as part of an arrangement with a foreign power.”’ Non-compliance with the scheme is considered a criminal offense.
British journalist Mary Dejevsky, who was The Times Bureau Chief in Moscow in the 1990s, is the latest to receive such a letter as a publicly listed contributor to the Valdai Discussion Club, though she has not attended since the war began. The idea that if you attend an academic conference you are being directed by a foreign power is patently absurd. Nevertheless, and given the obvious risks, I wrestled with the dilemma of whether I should accept the invitation from Valdai and make my first visit to Russia since I drove out of that country in February 2019 at the end of my four-and-a-half year diplomatic posting there.
My primary role then was as the Economic Counsellor responsible among other things for sanctions policy. After my return to the UK, I authorized around 1000 sanctions against Russians, including after the war broke out.
I had some concerns that my role in sanctions may cause me problems once inside Russia (indeed, I was subjected to an extremely stressful four-and-a-half-hour detention and interrogation by the FSB upon arrival in Moscow).
Sir Tony Brenton, with whom I had consulted, suggested that I should attend, saying that Valdai was an “excellent event.” Upon his advice, I notified the UK Foreign Office, underscoring my commitment to abide by my obligations under the Official Secrets Act before I left for Moscow. This included confirmation that while Valdai had paid for my flights, I had not received any payment for my attendance.
I served as a British diplomat for 24 years and I take seriously my ongoing commitments to preserve the secrets that I had access to during that time. The suggestion that I might plan a hostile act against Britain is offensive and wrong. However, since my retirement in 2023, I have been an outspoken critic of the direction of UK foreign policy towards Russia, notably the departure from diplomacy in favor of war.
The important and necessary precautions that I had taken were insufficient to prevent me from being detained with fewer rights than had I been formally arrested and cautioned. I am of the view that security figures in London had authorized the action against me ahead of time. Indeed, Russia commentator Mark Galeotti suggested on his podcast that the system was “making a statement” by acting in this way.
(Editor’s Note: A request by RS to the UK’s Counter Terrorism Policing for comment about the author’s detention — for which he provided RS with documentation – went unanswered as of this writing.)
My detention marks the latest escalation in the British state’s war on free speech. Increasingly, people who speak out publicly against forever wars — not only in Ukraine, but also in the Middle East and elsewhere — are seen as a threat to national security that must be quashed.
Airport detentions are one step short of full-blown imprisonment, of course, but this pattern of intimidation has been spreading over the past four years.
British conservative academic and author John Laughland was detained at an airport for one hour in 2022. The late Robert Skidelsky, a member of the House of Lords and esteemed British economist, and investigative reporter Kit Klarenberg were subject to more lengthy and rigorous detentions in 2023. Klarenberg still has not received back an SD memory card that was confiscated at the time.
Professor Richard Sakwa, Emeritus at Kent University, was detained for three hours at Heathrow in 2025; he has only been able to return to Russia since that time following an intervention by his lawyer. George Szamuely, a Hungarian-born British political analyst, was detained in March 2026.
In 2023, Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, was detained for an hour at Glasgow Airport under the tougher provisions of the Terrorism Act 2000, which is concerned with activity related to the commission, preparation and instigation of acts of terrorism. His phone was not returned to him afterwards.
Investigative journalist Richard Medhurst was arrested for making statements in support of a proscribed pro-Palestine organization and held for 24 hours before his release. His home and office in Austria were subsequently raided in February 2025 and he was accused of membership of Hamas. To date, no charges have been laid against him.
More broadly, in Britain, the group Palestine Action has been proscribed as a terrorist organization following widespread protests against the gross violations of international humanitarian law by the Israeli state in Gaza. Elderly people, including Holocaust survivors, have been arrested at Palestine Action protests for the crime of holding cardboard placards.
The practice of suspicionless airport detention is uncommon in European states, although alternative, more insidious forms of repression of free speech are employed. Former Swiss military intelligence officer and author Jacques Baud remains in Brussels, de-banked and unable to travel home, having been sanctioned by the European Union for “pro-Russian propaganda.”
This past week, Russian-born journalist and former BBC reporter Leonid Ragozin was declared persona non grata by Latvia, where he has lived since the onset of the Ukraine crisis. Having criticized the direction of Western foreign policy toward the war in Ukraine, he has also been a regular Putin critic and described the 2022 invasion of Ukraine as “criminal and irrational.”
This pattern of repressing free speech in Britain and more broadly in Europe is growing. I fear that the more obvious it becomes that the war in Ukraine cannot be won by the West and that Israel cannot remain insulated from international censure over its actions in Palestine, actions by the British state may become even harsher.
We are reaching the point where offering an opinion on the perilous state of Western foreign wars can land you in prison.
I thought I had been careful in notifying the British government before my sole visit to Russia since 2019. If the UK is at the point where former diplomats can be detained and have their property temporarily confiscated, then no one is safe from the long arm of lawfare.
Upon my return from Valdai, I wrote again to the Foreign Office, offering to brief them in full on the insights I gained while I was in Russia. To date, they have not replied.
Original article: responsiblestatecraft.org
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