Kernow Damo

The jury convicted criminal damage, but the Judge has terrorism sentencing as an option still. A media gag order blocked reporting on this - until now. Right, so on the 12th of May, the reporting restrictions came off the Filton case, and what was sitting underneath them has finally been allowed into public view. Mr Justice Johnson - sitting in the Crown Court - made a ruling back in March 2025, before the first trial of the Palestine Action defendants had even begun, that there appeared to be a terrorist connection to what they did at the Elbit Systems factory in Filton, near Bristol, in August 2024. That ruling was kept from the jury in the first trial. It was kept from the jury in the second trial. And it has been kept from the public until now. Two juries sat through the case. The first cleared the defendants of aggravated burglary and failed to reach verdicts on criminal damage; the second convicted four of criminal damage, while still being kept away from the terrorism consequence Johnson had already ruled appeared to sit behind the case. Four of them - Charlotte Head, Samuel Corner, Leona Kamio and Fatema Rajwani - were convicted of criminal damage on the 5th of May. Samuel Corner was also convicted of grievous bodily harm without intent, and cleared of GBH with intent. Two others - Zoe Rogers and Jordan Devlin - were acquitted of criminal damage, despite having admitted it, so fathom that one out. All six had already been cleared of aggravated burglary at the earlier trial where the jury could not reach verdicts on the criminal damage charge. Sentencing is provisionally listed for the 12th of June at Woolwich Crown Court, and the four convicted are now remanded in custody until that date. The mechanism Johnson is expected to use is section 69 of the Sentencing Act 2020.

Trump took Iran's war-ending offer to Netanyahu, then called it TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE when he got told no! Who's in charge here? Right, so Iran sent a written response to Donald Trump through Pakistani mediators, putting on paper what it would take to end the war and stop the blockade and stand down the Hormuz crisis. Trump read it and called it TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE. But he had picked up the phone to Benjamin Netanyahu before saying no. Trump then admitted to Axios that he had discussed Iran’s response with Benjamin Netanyahu. That is the part that matters. The American president was holding a war-ending response from Iran, and Netanyahu - the man publicly demanding uranium removal, enrichment-site dismantling, missile limits and the neutralising of Iran’s regional allies? Well it seems the President of the United States was handed that war-ending deal by the country he has spent months threatening, and the first thing he had to apparently do was check with the Israeli Prime Minister whether he was allowed to take it. That is not a negotiator. That is a courier. Trump has become a postman. If you consult Netanyahu on such things, there is only ever going to be one answer being sent back, because Netanyahu has spent every public minute of the last fortnight saying the war with Iran is not over until the enriched uranium is removed, the enrichment facilities are dismantled, missile production is halted and Iran's regional allies are neutralised. Four conditions, none of them on offer, none of them achievable through the kind of negotiation Iran was actually holding. So Trump took the call, took the conditions, and threw the offer in the bin. Have a look at what was actually in the offer though, because this is the bit the audience needs in front of them.

Israel sold the Iron Dome as the impenetrable shield - Well Hezbollah now has 'impentrable needing...fishing nets? Right, so on Friday, May the eighth, Hezbollah released footage showing an FPV drone closing in on an Iron Dome battery on Israel’s northern border, with Israeli soldiers standing nearby. Israeli reporting says Hezbollah’s FPV threat includes fibre-optic drones, the kind that trail a cable behind them and are much harder to jam, but the key fact here is simpler: Hezbollah filmed the approach, the drone hit the battery, and the Israeli army did not publicly dispute the footage. Unofficial sources inside the army said they could not dispute that the footage was real. That is the position the Israeli military is now holding, in public, on one of the most expensive and symbolically loaded pieces of defence hardware it owns. Hezbollah hit it. Hezbollah filmed it. The army went quiet. This is the system Israel has been selling to the world for over a decade as proof that Israeli technological superiority puts Hezbollah in a different league of warfare.

The Telegraph isn’t so much exposing pro-Palestine voices - it’s trying to make them unfit for public life. Right, so the Telegraph called it a conspiracy. They put it in the headline in those exact terms. Misan Harriman, the photographer, creative director, Southbank Centre chair, and the first Black person to shoot the September cover of British Vogue, had posted online about the knife attack in Golders Green and pointed out that the public framing had pushed a third victim out of the centre of the story.

Israel's own central bank just confirmed the damage. 750,000 not at work, refineries hit, businesses bleeding, deficit climbing. All on Netanyahu's war. Right, so let me start with a number, because the number is the story. Seven hundred and fifty thousand Israelis are not at work. That is the figure for March 2026, that is what is being reported, and that is what the broad unemployment rate inside Israel has now climbed to - a figure of around sixteen point two per cent. The last time it was anywhere near that high was during the COVID lockdowns. There is no plague this time. There is a war. Two of them, in fact. And the man running them is Benjamin Netanyahu, though if you already consider him a plague of a sort, then don’t let me dissuade you. Anyway, let’s lay out the craic here. Israel kicked off two simultaneous wars on the twenty-eighth of February this year - one against Iran, one against Lebanon, though arguably the Lebanese ceasefire that officially ended that day had never really functioned to begin with. Netanyahu's coalition called the Iran operation Roaring Lion. The Lebanon front continued an existing campaign against Hezbollah, the Lebanese armed political movement that has been trading fire with Israel across that northern border for years. Both fronts are running at the same time, both are pulling Israeli reservists out of their day jobs, both are inviting return fire from Iranian missiles, Iranian drones, Hezbollah rockets, and that return fire is hitting Israeli infrastructure inside Israel. That is the part Netanyahu does not want centred. He would rather the conversation stay on what Israeli aircraft are doing somewhere over Tehran or southern Beirut. The conversation is no longer there. The conversation is now sitting on a labour-market figure that Israel cannot make pretty.

Starmer's cabinet won't move. A backbencher just set a Monday deadline. The wipeout is only the start. Right, so Catherine West, the Labour MP for Hornsey and Friern Barnet in north London, has given Keir Starmer's own cabinet until Monday to find someone willing to challenge him for the leadership of the Labour Party. If no cabinet minister is willing to put their name forward, she has said publicly she will try to do it herself. She has ten Labour MPs already lined up behind her. The threshold to formally trigger a contest however is 81, the barriers Starmer put in place to prevent a member of the left of his party ever challenging for power again, but equally it may work against dissenting members of his own faction. She is nowhere near 81 yet, and Starmer's people are already pointing at that gap as if it settles the matter, but the gap is not the story. The story is that a backbench Labour MP has just told the entire cabinet of a sitting Labour Prime Minister that they have a weekend to find a collective spine between them and move or she will. Don’t be surprised therefore if she’s been suspended by the time this video goes out in which case. That is what has happened in the last 48 hours, after Labour lost 1,496 council seats in England, lost control of 38 councils, finished a distant fourth in the Sunderland that built Bridget Phillipson's parliamentary career, and was outscored by both Reform and the Greens in the national equivalent vote. The cabinet has gone silent. Starmer has refused to resign. And the only person inside the parliamentary Labour Party openly putting a clock on him is a backbencher most of you watching this video have probably never heard of, because none of the cabinet ministers you have heard of are willing to be the one who moves first.

Netanyahu's career, coalition, and freedom all depend on the policies destroying Israel's image. So now he's blowing the budget to save himself. Right, so Israel has just authorised the largest propaganda budget in its history. NIS 2.35 billion shekels. About $730 million in real money. That figure was signed off between Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich for the 2026 budget, with NIS 1 billion of it already greenlit by the government, and the rest on the way. It leaked because budgets have to go through the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, and Knesset budgets are public documents. So when the Jerusalem Post got the line on what Sa'ar and Smotrich had agreed, the number went out. And the number is sheer panic. $730 million. More than four times what Israel spent the year before. About 20 times what it was spending before the war on Gaza started. That is not a marketing budget. That is a state pulling the alarm. Sa'ar himself made it clearer than anyone watching could have hoped. Speaking during the budget debate, he said image spending should be treated like investing in jets, bombs, and missile interceptors. He called the public diplomacy fight an existential issue. An existential issue he says, because it tells you exactly where Israel knows it now sits. The Foreign Minister of a state with one of the most advanced air defence systems in the world is putting Instagram ads in the same category as the Iron Dome. He has also, in the same budget round, won approval for a dedicated public diplomacy unit inside the Foreign Ministry, a permanent infrastructure for their hasbara, which is the Hebrew word for explanation, the polite term Israel uses when it very much means propaganda.

Towns to Reform. Cities to the Greens. Wales to Plaid. Scotland to the SNP. Starmer says he's staying. Drop a comment. Right, so Keir Starmer has just lost roughly 1,400 councillors, 37 councils, control of Wales, any pretence of recovery in Scotland, and 33 of his own backbenchers at current count, and yet he is still standing at the lectern telling the country he is not going anywhere. [CLIP] Those words I hope are now haunting him, because we left, we went elsewhere, we punished you as a result, yet you still won’t leave. Labour spent the run-up to these elections running an anti-Green operation. Their messaging was almost entirely about the Greens. Their attack lines were almost entirely about Zack Polanski, the man elected Green Party leader in September last year, who became the focus of weeks of antisemitism accusations from Labour-aligned voices in the press and on social media. And on Thursday, with the smears still echoing, the Greens took Hackney, Hastings, Lewisham, and Waltham Forest, with five councils still to declare at time of writing it must be said. They came second on the BBC's projected national share, ahead of Labour. Polanski personally wasn't on a ballot anywhere, but every council the Greens took, every mayor they elected, every percentage point they put on Labour, lands as his vindication and Starmer's bill arriving.

America said it's Hormuz blockade held, Iran sailed tankers through it on live tracking, leaving Trump the only one still lying. Right, so the United States fired on an Iranian-flagged tanker called the HASNA in the Gulf of Oman. CENTCOM, that's the US military's Central Command - the bit of the Pentagon that runs the Middle East - issued a press release saying an F/A-18 launched from the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln had used a 20mm cannon to disable the tanker's rudder. CENTCOM said the HASNA was "no longer transiting to Iran." That was the line. That was the message. That was what America wanted you to think had happened. And then the data showed up. A maritime tracking outfit called TankerTrackers - they're an open-source group that watches AIS signals, the automatic identification beacons that ships are supposed to broadcast - said three empty National Iranian Tanker Company vessels had crossed the US Navy's blockade line, slipping through Pakistan's Exclusive Economic Zone. Two of them were then confirmed on satellite. The third, the HASNA itself, that same tanker America had supposedly stopped, then appeared on AIS off Shinas, Oman, about 470 kilometres west of the blockade line.

Starmer says conflating Jews with Israel is antisemitic - then uses that same conflation to smear Palestine protest. Right, so Keir Starmer’s pro Palestine protest smear has one fatal flaw, and it is not exactly tucked away in the small print of his nonsense either. Keir Starmer, the Labour Prime Minister, says Jewish people must not be conflated with Israel, which is correct. British Jews are not Benjamin Netanyahu, not the Israeli cabinet, not the Israeli army, not Israeli siege policy, not the bombing of Gaza, not the starvation of Palestinians, not the settlements, not the ministers openly describing Palestinian life as disposable.

Starmer needed those Filton convictions to bury Palestine Action as a terror problem; instead the retrial has put state machinations in the dock. Right, so Keir Starmer’s Filton retrial has not given him the clean Palestine Action crushing he needed. It has given him four criminal damage convictions, two acquittals, a rejected GBH with intent charge, a defence barrister now facing contempt proceedings, defendants sent back to prison before sentencing, and a terrorism label still hovering over a case where nobody has been convicted of terrorism. That is a filthy little mess to carry out of court while pretending justice has been done. Charlotte Head, Samuel Corner, Leona Kamio and Fatema Zainab Rajwani have been found guilty of criminal damage over the action at Elbit Systems UK’s Filton site near Bristol. Zoe Rogers and Jordan Devlin have been acquitted, even though all of them admitted to causing criminal damage. Work that one out. Samuel Corner has also been convicted of inflicting grievous bodily harm, but he has been cleared of causing grievous bodily harm with intent, which is not a small distinction when the state has spent months trying to make this case smell as threatening as possible. Four people have been convicted of damaging property, not of terrorism, not of aggravated burglary, and not of intentionally causing serious injury. The state has convictions, but it does not have the tidy terror-shaped courtroom trophy it really wanted going into the sentencing hearing on 12 June and yet still we wonder whether terror level sentencing may yet still be handed down. Elbit Systems UK is the British arm of the now infamous Israeli arms company, and the Filton site has been described in court coverage as a key research and development facility.

Israel’s phone-spying scandal is no longer foreign policy - it’s a test of whether your government protects you, or protects Israel. Right, so Benjamin Netanyahu has a new scandal round his neck, and this one reaches into the phone network people carry in their pockets and not just in Israel or just the Middle East either. A major digital research group has exposed two covert telecom surveillance campaigns, with attack traffic linked to mobile operator signalling infrastructure and with Israeli-linked networks and surveillance firms very much implicated. Regional coverage has put it more bluntly: Israeli telecommunications infrastructure, from old signalling systems right up to modern 5G, has been used to help turn phones into tracking devices across more than ten countries. Now that is not a claim that every phone in Britain has been hacked, but the hidden machinery behind mobile roaming, texts, location updates and network trust has been abused so phones can be located without the user seeing anything happen. Netanyahu’s problem is that the word security that he constantly mouths off to justify everything, now comes back at him stinking of surveillance, and every government still claiming Israel as an ally and a trusted partner ought to have some explaining to do. The news was broken through investigation by Canadian outlet Citizen Lab and what they’ve pieced together and published is not a vague internet rumours or the contents of a reddit thread from someone whose cousin once rebooted a router. Its report found two phone-tracking operations built around the hidden systems mobile networks use to talk to each other. These are the background systems that let your phone roam abroad, receive texts, connect to the right tower and tell the network roughly where it is.

Trump’s Board of Peace was supposed to control Gaza’s ceasefire; Israel shifted the borders in another land grab, and left Trump holding the baby. Right, so Donald Trump’s Board of Peace had one job in Gaza, and Israel has just made that job look even more of a sick joke than it already was. The job was to make the Gaza ceasefire look like it meant something, allegedly to stop the fighting, to get aid in, to hold Israel to a line, and to make their post-war shenanigans look like more than just a brass plaque on a door and someone’s name on a desk. Well Israel has just set fire to that mindset wholesale. Israel has you see, whilst going completely unreported of course moved beyond the Yellow Line it had already imposed on Gaza, the land grab that that blatantly was, into a new Orange Line, meaning that Israel has now de facto taken military control of more than 60 per cent of the Gaza Strip now, with some estimates putting it around 64 per cent in fact, all while the remaining Palestinians there get squeezed into what is left. So Trump gets his Board of Peace, his Civil-Military Coordination Centre supposedly to run this project with international partners, his International Stabilisation Force language, his donor demands, his reconstruction pitch, all the reportage of global seriousness by the MSM, and Israel swaps it’s yellow marker for a fat orange one, I wonder if they called it Donnie? And scrawled across the map, now saying this is mine. Deal-maker Trump got outplayed and he can’t say he was dealt a bad hand, because he knew he was playing with a shark. he has been left holding the wreckage of a big fat Board of Peace mess as it was always going to become, because the deal did not control the actor with the army.

Trump called it Project Freedom, but Iran has already made Hormuz look like the place his rescue mission goes to get mugged by reality. Right, so Donald Trump has now compared his own navy to pirates, launched a supposedly humanitarian ship-rescue mission into the most dangerous waterway on Earth, rejected Iran’s latest peace plan as again not good enough, is still maintaining a blockade on Iranian ports, which also happens to be hampering oil, gas and other exports to the rest of the world and threatened force against anyone who interferes with his new freedom plan; all now being justified with even stupider arguments about Iranian threat and aggression, the latest offering from the public excuse machine being a coughed up a claim about Iranian suicide dolphins. Seriously. Suicide dolphins. The war argument has got so stupid now that somebody has apparently looked at destroyers, drones, aircraft, sanctions, oil seizures, blockades and a failing ceasefire, and decided the missing ingredient was Flipper with a death wish.

Israel thought their flotilla grab was a done deal, but the trail now points back to which of their allies actually helped them do it. Right, so Israel has seized the Global Sumud Flotilla, taken 175 activists off 22 boats, moved most of them through Greece, but dragged two of them back to Israel, and now the bit Israel should really hate is not just the seizure at sea, but the bit that now points back at them having help to actually do it and that’s the bit we should all really hate, because we aren’t getting told this. The Israeli army acted against the flotilla through the US headquarters in Kiryat Gat, the Civil-Military Coordination Center, the CMCC, the very place dressed up as part of that whole sham of a Gaza aid and stabilisation plan. What we have therefore is the body supposedly there to coordinate aid into Gaza now having been tied to discussions about stopping people trying to bring aid towards Gaza. Israel had help, Israel’s helpers are now part of the story and we want to know who they are and every government sitting inside that plan has to now answer whether it was there to help Gaza or to help Israel protect it’s siege instead.

Ben-Gvir wanted the noose to frighten Palestinians; instead it has given campaigners a list of Israeli lawmakers to put in the sanctions frame. Right, so Israel’s horrific National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has I am sad to report, just turned 50, but as him reaching this milestone will hardly have you rushing to the card aisle of Tesco’s, it’s not necessarily been the best one for him and in fact it has somehow become a better exhibit against him and his beliefs than anything his opponents could have possibly designed. His wife Ayala there presenting him with a cake decorated with a hanging noose and the message, “Mazal tov to Minister Ben-Gvir, sometimes dreams come true,” because apparently the man who wants Palestinians facing the gallows also wanted his own birthday treat to look like a police evidence photo. The noose of course was not random decoration. It was a reference to the death penalty law Ben-Gvir and his Otzma Yehudit party have championed, a law Israel’s parliament has now passed, a law that is for Palestinians only, a death penalty only Palestinians face, an apartheid death penalty, as death penalties are not egregious in and of themselves, somehow Israel manages to make even that low bar even worse. Ben-Gvir wants that noose to look like strength, deterrence, vengeance and whatever other psychotically sanitised little label they want to stick on it after he’s blown his candles out.

Trump wanted Iran boxed in, but his fleet move now looks like failed intimidation turning into exposed escalation. Right, so the tangerine toddler Donald Trump has sent the Boxer Amphibious Ready Group into the Iran crisis now with the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit aboard, so are we looking at that land invasion of Iran happening yet after all? The stalemate of his blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is not seeking Iran budge, just price rises across the entire world, so has his desperation peaked or has he just forgotten to call them back again, frankly I could believe either. USS Boxer, USS Portland and USS Comstock are not just grey floating props for another White House muscle flex for Iran to laugh at. They are amphibious ships carrying Marines, aircraft, landing craft, command staff and the gear you move when you want the option of putting people ashore basically, so what would they be for really? The Boxer is currently in the Sulu Sea having left Guam in the last few days, so we haven’t got US Marines off the Iranian coast quite yet, but they are en route. Trump wanted Iran frightened from a distance, Iran has not given him the submission he wanted, so now the gears have been stepped up again all at US public expense of course, adding yet another expensive ways to make his Middle East mess even bigger, now with added landing ships. It’s not like the US hasn’t already been making a total pigs ear of their blockade enough already of course. The USS Spruance intercepted the Iranian-flagged cargo vessel M/V Touska in the north Arabian Sea while it was moving at 17 knots towards Bandar Abbas, issued repeated warnings, waited through a six-hour refusal, ordered the engine room cleared, then fired several rounds from a five-inch gun into the engine room to disable the ship.

Labour’s anti-racism talk looks very thin when black women councillors are pushed out and Starmer’s family ends up on the safe-seat slate. Right, so here we are with another set of local elections coming up and as sure as night follows day, we have a classic Starmerroid candidate rigging story, only this one is a biggie, which is probably why all the mainstream media are too busy slapping Zack Polanski over a retweet to notice. Two sitting black women councillors in Bensham Manor ward, Croydon, Eunice O’Dame and Enid Mollyneux, have been blocked from standing again, local members are saying the selection was not properly conducted, and the new Labour slate includes a young lady called Ellie Sandover, who just happens to be Keir Starmer’s niece. Labour’s hierarchy of racism meets nepotism now it seems as Labour’s selection process has now produced an outcome where black women are out, Starmer’s family is in, and the party that never stops talking about standards, anti-racism and clean politics now really needs to answer some questions about all of this, though obviously they’ll just say everything was conducted properly, even though ordinary members have said otherwise. Very normal. Very democratic. Absolutely nothing to see, provided you have recently misplaced your eyesight and all sense of political smell. Bensham Manor is not some hopeless paper candidacy where Labour just throws anyone on the ballot for the sake of it either, this is considered one of the safest Labour wards in all of Croydon.

Mark Rowley tried to put Polanski in the dock over a retweet — and ended up putting the Met’s politics, tactics and neutrality on trial instead. Right, so Sir Mark Rowley has put himself in the dock by trying to put Zack Polanski there instead. The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police has taken a retweet by the Green Party leader – nothing he’s actually said himself, just a retweet of someone else’s comment - written a formal public letter rebuking him in his capacity as Met Police Chief, gone onto national broadcast studios on top of that to defend it in uniform, and done all of that in the final week before local elections. Polanski did not direct an arrest, did not interfere with officers at the scene, did not stand in Golders Green giving tactical advice from a Green Party soapbox, and did not defend the man charged over the attack. He reposted this: criticism of police force after footage circulated of officers kicking a man repeatedly in the head during his arrest. Rowley then took the authority of Britain’s biggest police force and aimed it straight at a named party leader, while telling everyone this was not politics, absolutely not politics, perish the thought, it’s just the most senior police officer in the country publicly disciplining the leader of a political party days before voters go to the polls, when he is supposed to maintain a position of absolute impartiality.

Zionism claims to protect Jews, but Golders Green shows how Jewish fear gets seized, spent and turned into danger for everyone else. Right, so two Jewish men have been stabbed in Golders Green, a Jewish area of north London, and before the blood had even dried politically, the backers of Zionism were already trying to capitalise on it. Police say the attack happened on Highfield Avenue at 11.16 yesterday morning, with two men aged 76 and 34 treated for stab wounds and taken to hospital in a stable condition. Counter Terrorism Policing has declared it a terrorist incident, and one line of enquiry is whether London’s Jewish community was deliberately targeted. The arrested man is 45, a British national born in Somalia, and the Met says he has a history of serious violence and mental health issues. None of that softens the attack, none of that makes a knife less dangerous, and nobody with a functioning moral compass needs a focus group before condemning two Jewish people being stabbed in the street. But the second part of this story is what happened when the political class, the Israel lobby crowd, the racism merchants and the police back slapping brigade all arrived at once, because Jewish fear was not just being protected, it was also being weaponised at that police cordon. Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, stood in Barnet and gave the public the official version of the arrest. He said officers believed the suspect was a terrorist, said he refused to show his hands, said he was violent, said he continued to pose a clear threat, and said the officers feared he might be concealing an explosive device. As a suspected terror attack, they have grounds for that, the same was seen in other terror examples, such the 2017 London Bridge, or Fishmonger’s Hall in 2019 or Streatham in 2020.

Israel sent its navy 600 nautical miles after aid boats and somehow thought that would make the starvation blockade look less guilty. Right, so Israel has just turned a Gaza aid flotilla into evidence against itself once again. Israeli forces have intercepted, boarded and seized vessels from the Global Sumud Flotilla in international waters near Greece, way out in international waters, with the organisers saying twenty-one boats were taken and seventeen managed to escape into Greek waters, while Israel’s own foreign ministry has put the number of detained activists at around one hundred and seventy-five from more than twenty boats. This was not some skirmish at the Gaza shoreline was it? Crew reports from the support ship Arctic Sunrise put the intervention forty-five nautical miles west of Kythira and six hundred nautical miles from Gaza, which means Israel did not merely defend a coastal line, it dragged the Gaza blockade halfway across the Mediterranean and expected everyone else to nod along like this is normal. Food, medicine, doctors, volunteers, cameras and witnesses apparently now require a navy to deal with. Very brave. The physical boats have been stopped, but the image Israel has created is a state so scared, so utterly terrified of civilian aid that it has to chase it near Greece before it gets anywhere near Gaza, and of course with detained civilians now heading towards Israeli custody.

Trump thought he had Iran cornered, but others are now showing who really has to be dealt with before the Strait of Hormuz moves. Right, so Trump and Israel wanted Iran cornered, and instead ships going through the Strait of Hormuz are now being told to deal with Iran before they move and that isn’t coming from Iran either, so that is the humiliation here. Iran has not had to give Donald Trump the big clean retaliation picture he very badly wants, no dramatic missile launch into a tanker, no propaganda clips for the White House, no neat “look what Tehran did” moment for the usual parade of grave-faced officials and very serious people paid to pretend American escalation is remotely akin to adult supervision. With Trump in charge its more like a nursery after the teacher has locked herself in a cupboard with a packet of cigarettes. So what is the craic then Damo? Well, in a massive embarrassment to Trump certainly and Israel by association, Global maritime insurers are now adding clauses requiring shipowners to contact Iranian authorities prior to attempting safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz. Ibn other words, insurers are making contact with Iranian authorities contingent upon and vessel attempting to pass through the Strait and that really does say everything about who is really in control. Iran has won the battle of the blockade without firing a shot. Dylan Mortimer, the UK marine war leader at Marsh, one of the biggest insurers brokers in the world has put all this in the bluntest possible terms. America can shout about control, Israel can demand pressure, Trump can do his usual frothing-mouthed chest-beating routine like a man trying to intimidate a cash machine, but the ships still need cover, the cover still needs confidence, and the confidence now has Iran written into the insurance policies covering that route.

Israel’s war has not just hit Iran; it has put a surcharge on the boards, chips and gadgets its own tech economy needs as well as everyone else. Right, so Iran hit Saudi Arabia’s Jubail petrochemical complex on 7 April, after Iran’s own petrochemical plants at Asaluyeh, tied to the South Pars gas field, had already been hit in strikes from Israel. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards described Jubail as retaliation, so this was not Iran randomly waking up one morning and deciding to make laptops and the like more expensive for a laugh, though I’ll get onto that point in a moment. Jubail is part of the Gulf’s industrial plumbing, where Saudi petrochemicals, Western-linked supply chains, energy infrastructure and global manufacturing all meet, and that is why the consequences, the knock on effects of that strike has taken a few weeks to become clear. Production of a specialist resin used in printed circuit board laminates, PCB’s, has been disrupted, SABIC’s Jubail-linked supply has been put under pressure, and the price of those boards has jumped by as much as 40 per cent in a single month. So Israel’s war is no longer sitting neatly inside the nice little box marked missiles, oil tankers and military briefings. It has started crawling into the stuff under modern technology. Phones, laptops, servers, cars, consoles, routers, drones and medical devices still need circuit boards to work. Those boards need laminates. Those laminates need high-purity polyphenylene ether resin, which I know sounds like the sort of phrase designed to make normal people glaze over and go and do something healthier with their lives, but it matters because SABIC, the Saudi Basic Industries Corporation, operating at Jubail, is at the centre of a PCB supply chain reportedly accounting for around 70 per cent of global high-purity PPE supply used to make PCBs.

Labour thought East London was its property; but a sneer from Wes Streeting has triggerd an hilarious response message to voters. Right, so shiny faced recipient of private health donations, the health secretary Wes Streeting has picked a fight in Redbridge, his home patch, though hopefully not for a great deal longer if polling counts for anything and Labour is the one now taking the hit, because instead of putting out a slick little campaign video bigging up his party in the run up to local elections, he put out a warning shot against Redbridge Independents, called them divisive, tried to turn Jeremy Corbyn, who has publicly backed them into a warning label, tried to make campaigning on issues such as Palestine, Kashmir and Sudan, places of war and genocide sound like embarrassing distractions from proper council business, and then pointed at the Aspire run Tower Hamlets as a basket case, as if Labour’s own local record before them was something anyone sensible would laminate and frame, instead of being the reason people dumped Labour there and basically went independent too. Nice try, but no. Redbridge decided to reply to Wesly with a video of their own, now much more widely doing the rounds because it is so much better, hammering all the things Labour hates most, and answering Streeting’s sneer with plenty of receipts.

Netanyahu can still shout innocence, but the untouchable act now needs a pardon and now he's been told he's not getting it. Right, so as we know Benjamin Netanyahu had, at the urging of Doanld Trump and on top of Trump himself laying it on thick, asked Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog for a pardon while Netanyahu is very much still on trial over those corruption charges, and after a not insignificant amount of hand wringing it would seem, goodness what other reason there is for Herzog to have taken so long, Herzog has not given in and given Netanyahu a way out. Oh dear, how sad, never mind. Herzog has not lifted the trial off him, has not handed him a nice little escape route. Herzog has said all parties involved should first try to reach an agreement outside the courtroom. In other words meaning plea-deal territory, meaning prosecutors, conditions, admission, guilt, and the bit Netanyahu was clearly trying to keep away from at all costs – a confession. Netanyahu wanted mercy without saying why mercy was needed. He who is without mercy for others is what sprang to my mind. He wanted this pardon to float above his trial as if it was a national necessity, and Herzog has not saved him; has instead dragged it back down into a place where the charges sit, where lawyers negotiate, and defendants have to decide what exactly they are prepared to admit to.

Westminster’s club culture just hit someone from normal working life, and she refused to pretend MPs drinking between votes was fine. Right, so Nigel Farage, amongst others has tried to make Hannah Spencer look ridiculous over Parliament’s drinking culture, and have managed to make themselves look like defenders of booze before votes because it seems seeing the word Green ahead of upcoming local elections saw them grasping for the nearest culture war opportunity available. Spencer is of course the still quite new Green MP for Gorton and Denton and being rather new, the drinking culture in Westminster came as a bit of a shock to her. Drinking not after work. Not in a pub on their own time. But between votes, while Parliament is still sitting, while MPs are still doing the job of voting on laws. Farage then posted that the Greens are happy to legalise heroin and crack, but think an afternoon pint is a step too far, and invited everyone to make it make sense. Well fine Nige. If you insist. Let’s make it make sense. Drug policy is about criminal markets, addiction, public health, regulation and harm reduction. Drinking alcohol while still at work is about whether lawmakers should be sober when they are making decisions that affect all of us. Farage is trying to turn a workplace standards issue into a drugs scare, and all he did was put himself in the doorway of Westminster’s bar with a sign around his neck saying please don’t apply normal rules to us.

Trump’s lawyers did not expose him on purpose; they exposed him because defending the Iran war meant writing Israel’s request into their excuses. Right, so Donald Trump’s Iran story has cracked because his own State Department legal adviser has put the damaging bit in writing. Reed Rubinstein has issued the legal defence of Operation Epic Fury, the American war against Iran, and right there in the official argument is the line that the United States is engaged in the conflict at the request of Israel and in the collective self-defence of Israel, as well as claiming American self-defence. That is the memo. That is the receipt. Trump has been saying Israel never talked him into the war with Iran, and now his own administration has taken the thing he was trying to deny and very inconsiderately he might say, put it right there in the paperwork, like some overpaid legal genius trying to hide the body and filing the burial location under “attachments.” America was told this was America defending itself, but the legal defence now names Israel’s request as part of the reason American force has been used. So Trump does not get to sell that story anymore as clean story of US self-defence, nonsense as it always was with Iran sitting on the other side of the world.

Labour thought Putin would save them from Zack Polanski; instead it made itself look more terrified of the Greens...and teenagers too apparently! Right, so Labour thought Putin would do the job for them. That is the blunt shape of this latest little stunt, because Labour’s official account has taken a comment by zack Polanski, stuck it on a poster with bombed out images of Mariupol in Ukraine behind it, and tried to turn a Green leader who called Putin horrendous into somebody supposedly soft on Russia. Here is the poster itself. The quote they used does not even hide the problem for them, because the words “as horrendous as Putin is” are sitting there in the attack itself, doing the work Labour’s smear needs the viewer not to notice. This poster is not some random crank with a flag emoji having a tantrum in the replies. It is the party machine choosing to spend its time making a Green opponent look contaminated by Putin, while the Greens are rising, young voters are drifting, and speaking of, Labour MPs are now reportedly getting very nervous about giving sixteen and seventeen year olds the vote before the next general election. And that is the whole thing sitting there in a single campaign object, Mariupol used as backdrop, Polanski used as target, and Labour’s Green problem is what actually gets left on the poster. Zack Polanski’s actual answer came after he was pressed on Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, and the bit Labour wants to turn into a scandal is not a defence of Putin.

Green suspensions have put Palestine politics under pressure inside the party - members stop anti-Zionism being turned into a disciplinary risk. Right, so another Green Party suspension has now put the party’s pro Palestine politics under even more pressure now, as it starts to look like a deliberate targeting of anti-Zionists is being borne out. Tony Greenstein, a Jewish anti-Zionist and long-standing Palestine campaigner, has been suspended and now so has Mark Adderley, a filmmaker, anti-genocide campaigner and Green Party candidate for Crystal Palace and Upper Norwood in Croydon. Adderley has not shuffled off into the corner and apologised for existing over this either. He has said he is disgusted, he has accused Labour minister Steve Reed and others of defamatory smears, he has blasted the Green Party administration for folding to weaponised antisemitism claims, and he has said he will seek legal advice. Labour figures and pro-Israel media have been pushing the familiar line that a party attracting Palestine supporters must have an antisemitism problem, because apparently British politics is now just one long complaints form with Steve Reed holding the pen apparently. The damage is not yet landing on the people driving that pressure. It is landing on the Greens, and the question now is whether members force the party to resist it or watch them get trapped in the same position Jeremy Corbyn did with everything that then followed. The smear was meant to isolate anti-Zionists inside the Greens, but for as much as two suspensions on this front are alarming, it has also put the whole complaints machine under public scrutiny before the trap has settled into party habit. Zack Polanski of course ends up sitting in the middle of this because he leads the Green Party of England and Wales, not because he personally has to have pressed the suspension button. The official Green Party complaints structure has specific routes through complaints, referral and disciplinary machinery.

Israel went looking for a Red Sea foothold in Somaliland and handed Somalia a sovereignty grievance, Yemen a target warning and Iran all new leverage. Right, so Benjamin Netanyahu’s Red Sea problem has just got nastier, because Israel has recognised Somaliland, breakaway state of Somalia that only Israel recognises and as a result of that Somalia has chosen now, with all the Strait of Hormuz access problems Israel is faced with, to put access to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait on the table, and Iran has been handed another leverage advantage it didn’t even need to build for itself. But like Iran, Somalia has not suddenly become a naval superpower, it’s another case of geography giving them a big advantage. Mogadishu has not parked a fleet across one of the world’s most important sea lanes and frankly if anyone would do that, we’d have expected more of a military response from the likes of Ansarallah, the Houthis, but they aren’t alone in flexing here, its not just them with that advantage, because Somalia, sitting on the Horn of Africa as it does, can cause problems for shipping long before they ever reach Bab-El Mandeb if coming from Asia, and making shipping potentially think twice if coming from the direction of the Suez Canal. So this is very much a self inflicted hen coming home to roost for Israel, because something they cooked up a while ago is suddenly punching them in the face right when they are logistically kiboshed elsewhere.

Like a gold obsessed Zionist vampire, Trump has burned American military depth for Israel and the bill is now landing on the United States. Right, so Donald Trump has chewed through a huge chunk of America’s defensive missile stocks faster than a beaver on ket and all for what? For Israel of course, and now the first bodies are starting to hit the floor in Washington as a result of it. John Phelan, the civilian head of the United States Navy, has walked out, though whether he walked or was pushed depends on which news outlet you’re looking at, at time of writing, but is he just the first crack now beginning to show? This dose after all land right on top of reports that roughly forty-five per cent of US Precision Strike Missiles are gone, around half the THAAD interceptors are gone, and nearly half the Patriot stock is gone as well. Never mind US offensive strategies, this is the defensive stuff. Those are the weapons the United States and its allies keep for the next war, the next strike, the next crisis, to protect themselves with, so Trump, far from being this great master strategist playing 5D chess, actually looks more like a man setting fire to his own house just to keep Benjamin Netanyahu warm. And that is the rotten little core of it. This was all sold as strength. The big con of US military supremacy getting flexed for an ally. It was sold as security. It was sold as America doing what had to be done. What it looks like now is America burning through expensive defensive kit, that will take, if the war stops now, an estimated three to five years to replace and all for a war more and more people can see was driven by Israel’s needs, not any obvious direct threat to the American mainland, with allies getting jittery, Iran still refusing to play dead, and even establishment figures in the United States admitting this thing went in without full preparation or a clear intention and some are speaking out about it too.

While Westminster chases Mandelson for sport, Labour is sitting on a live criminal case over the internal route to choosing one of its own MPs. Right, so Keir Starmer’s having a bad one, but if you’re sick to back teeth of Mandelson dominating every single news cycle ad nauseum, then you’ll be pleased to know that so am I, but not only that, there is frankly a much more damaging story going incredibly poorly reported right now, because frankly the Mandelson stuff is just easier and our5 mainstream journalists might pull a muscle if they actually attempted the real thing. You see four Labour figures have now been charged after a Metropolitan Police cybercrime investigation into allegations that a Labour Party database was manipulated to increase one particular candidate’s chances of selection in Croydon. Joel Bodmer, Shila Bodmer, Carole Bonner and Gabriel Leroy are all due in court now on 19 May in connection with that, and Bodmer faces an extra charge of perverting the course of justice over alleged phone-record alteration. That is a live criminal case now, over how the local Labour Party attempted to choose a likely future MP and amid all the stories and allegations surrounding Starmerroid attempts to rig selections and ensure only the most Starmery of people could ever get selected to stand for his party, this one stands out for all the wrong reasons and if Keir Starmer’s whole sales pitch was that he cleaned Labour up, restored discipline, restored standards and put adults back in charge, then this is not a scratch on the paintwork. This is the bonnet up, smoke coming out, and the cowboy mechanic currently scratching his arse and tutting is still trying to convince you the engine sounds fine. Croydon East is where all of this has taken place. It was a new constituency for the 2024 general election and Labour was strongly placed there, as you would imagine they would be, south London, which means the internal selection was never just a bit of party admin, it was the gate through which a likely MP was going to pass. Natasha Irons was later selected after the process was rerun and she has been the MP for Croydon East since that election, Labour of course very much as predicated won it.

Israel did not just get caught smashing Christ in Lebanon, it got caught smashing its own lie that it stands as a friend and protector of Christians. Right, so Lebanon and the Israeli atrocities being committed there have been somewhat encapsulated this week by images of an Israeli soldier, who has been photographed smashing up a statue of Jesus on the cross in the southern Lebanese village of Debel and this runs somewhat counter to what Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly said of Israel’s relations with members of the Christian faith, he claims to be a protector of Christians even. Well go on then Bibi, sell us your snake oil. Not oppressed in Lebanon though apparently, nor even closer to home either. His words might account for the fact that somewhat unusally, the IDF have readily confessed to it too. They’ve put out a tweet saying: ‘Following the completion of an initial examination regarding a photograph published earlier today of an IDF soldier harming a Christian symbol, it was determined that the photograph depicts an IDF soldier operating in southern Lebanon. The IDF views the incident with great severity and emphasizes that the soldier’s conduct is wholly inconsistent with the values expected of its troops. The incident is being investigated by the Northern Command and is currently being addressed through the chain of command. Appropriate measures will be taken against those involved in accordance with the findings.

Hormuz has shown Trump that punishment is not the same thing as control - he has plenty of the first but a rapidly shrinking amount of the second. Right, so to say Donald Trump has been repeatedly and mercilessly punching himself between the legs with regards to Iran these last few days would be an understatement, I would imagine Little Donnie’s Little Donnie must resemble something akin to orange pate by this point such has been the degree of failure and if I’ve left you feeling somewhat nauseous over that mental image, it’s pretty much justified, because whether you’ve seen the reporting on all of this or not, the breadth of failure on the part of the US currently is truly astounding. Let’s start with a return to negotiations after JD Vance went on a 16 hour jolly to Pakistan, achieved nothing and then went home. Trump has just told the world that his representatives will be heading back to Islamabad for negotiations with Iran, except he’s done that after the United States went ahead and blockaded Iranian ports, after the US Navy has fired into the engine room of the Iranian-flagged cargo ship Touska, after Marines boarded it, after he has gone on Truth Social threatening to knock out every power plant and every bridge in Iran, and after oil has jumped again because the Strait of Hormuz is still not behaving like it belongs to him, because it very much doesn’t. Well surprise, surprise, if his team goes to Islamabad again, they’ll be waiting a long time for Iran, because they aren’t going to waste their time again, they’ve told him no! Well we know what Trump’s reaction to that is by now don’t we?

Israel’s own media man has said the quiet part out loud about Israeli news reporting: fake news works, truth doesn’t. Right, so Israeli propaganda, hasbara, the government financing of pro Israel talking points which for years has shielded the state from being held to account for its worst excesses, it’s taken a battering in recent years, rightly so, being exposed for what it is, no matter how much Israel clings to it being the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth and anyone saying otherwise is an antisemite. Well, Benjamin Netanyahu’s press spokesman has now been caught on video appearing to openly brag that fake news works, that truth does not actually matter, and that facts do not matter, and if you are Israel and you have spent years demanding to be treated as the truthful side while everybody else gets smeared as liars, fanatics or useful idiots, that is not a bad afternoon in the press office, that is a self-inflicted credibility hit. Eli Hazan is the man in that clip and he is not some anonymous online gobsh*te either, he is a senior Likud operator who has served as Netanyahu’s spokesman and now sits around the part of the Israeli state that deals with journalists and press access. So the story here is not that a random loudmouth said something stupid, or even said something we didn’t know already really. The story is that a man from inside Netanyahu’s media machine itself has now said the quiet part out loud, thrown hasbara under the bus, admitted the truth of it all and as such, Israel doesn’t just look dishonest on one story, it looks dishonest in every story, when a major comms official says on camera the truth doesn’t matter. So who is Eli Hazan then? Well, Israel’s embassy in Singapore says he served as Likud’s foreign affairs director from 2014 to 2023 and that in 2021 he became spokesperson for then opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu. So this is very much a man from the political machine itself. Israel’s Government Press Office pages matter for the same reason because they tell you what kind of machinery we are talking about here. This office issues press cards, handles visiting journalist accreditation and sits exactly where state messaging meets the foreign press. So the clip is not embarrassing because a politician said something silly. The clip is embarrassing because a man from the part of the system that deals with journalists appears to have admitted that truth is not the working standard inside that system, so what does that say of Israeli journalism more widely?

Tony Greenstein’s suspension is not just a Green Party row, but a warning that the pressure politics used against Corbyn is now being turned on them. Right, so the Green Party has suspended Tony Greenstein, a Brighton-based Jewish anti-Zionist activist who had only just joined the party, and the wording reportedly used against him was “documented history of antisemitism, including court decisions and recent terrorism charges.” Put that next to the fact that the party is already in a live row over Palestine and over a conference motion treating Zionism as racism – which it is - and the optics of an anti-Zionist Jew being suspended frankly lands like a ton of bricks. It starts looking rushed. It also starts looking somewhat familiar. It starts looking like certain people, certain bodies who have decided that if they cannot beat a rising Green party politically, they’ll resort to what they know worked before, the same filth that was used on Labour under Jeremy Corbyn, the weaponisation of antisemitism that we saw during his tenure. The important thing is not simply that Greenstein has been suspended. The important thing is that the people trying to make him the problem have exposed themselves for pulling this same stunt again. Zack Polanski, the Green Party leader, has not inherited a sleepy little environmental outfit minding its own compost heap. Under his leadership, still under a year old, Green membership has gone from around 60,000 to over 225,000 in seven months. That is the reason the atmosphere has changed. Small parties are tolerated. Growing parties get trawled. That’s a threat to the status quo, unless you are Nigel Farage’s outfit and then you are tolerated, because that’s an establishment party too. Parties that start to matter to ordinary people and don’t serve the establishment get inspected, denounced, briefed against and held up as public hygiene problems by people who suddenly discover a deep concern for standards when somebody awkward starts getting somewhere. Polanski has made himself very awkward in a very good way for all of us.

Netanyahu can still threaten and still destroy, but this time he has come out of it looking less obeyed, less protected and far less untouchable. Right, so Benjamin Netanyahu is in a spot of bother, I’m sure it breaks your heart to hear it, because the guy who has always sold himself as Mr invincible, Mr untouchable, practically wearing his underpants on the outside of his trousers such has been his sales pitch that only he can keep Israel safe and secure, isn’t quite landing how he’d like it to anymore. I can’t imagine why, with all the genocide and warfare he has instigated why that could be, but for all of his posturing and arrogance and egotism, his very real weakness is becoming more and more exposed and he knows it, hence stunts like this one and just as an fyi, there is nothing wrong with your sound: That was NBC’s Richard Engels asking Netanyahu about his role in taking the US to war on Iran, but we can’t let the Israeli people hear a question like that, so his mic got muted in the version they got, which is what you just saw. Propaganda is all he’s got, but he can’t control it all as we’ve seen in multiple cases in just the last few days. Lets start with Lebanon in which case. Donald Trump has announced a ten-day ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon after six weeks of fighting – that is six weeks of fighting following the collapse of the more than year long ceasefire which Israel never abided by anyway.

Netanyahu keeps reaching for the Bible to glorify war, but once Israel gets hit by a so-called ‘plague’ of bees, the sacred act stops looking so righteous. Right, so back in Old Testament times swarms of bees were seen as a sign of divine wrath and imminent threat, biblical plagues linked to Egypt and the Jewish people are well known too and of course Passover celebrates the culmination of Exodus, following a number of those plagues, and now, the City of Netivot, just to the East of the Gaza Strip, so the optics of location fit nicely here too, has been hit by a huge bee swarm. A plague of bees if you will. A shopping complex in a city in southern Israel has had bees suddenly appear all over it. Cars have had bees on them, balconies have had bees on them, and local authorities have had to tell residents to keep away while the mess got handled. Now you might be thinking, how much sympathy do I have over a few Israelis getting stung, probably not enough to bother to raise a single note on a tiny violin, and yet because of Benjamin Netanyahu, this freak of nature has still carried some weight, as well as ridicule. And that’s because Benjamin Netanyahu has spent years dragging biblical language into modern war politics whenever he wants his atrocities to sound more righteous than the blood-soaked reality we haven take place in Gaza, the West Bank and now increasingly in Lebanon and the wider war spreading across the Middle East, so this thing has gone from local disruption to public mockery in no time at all. Israel has not just had a weird day with insects. Israel has had a weird day with insects inside a symbolic world its own leaders keep feeding, and that leaves the whole chosen-people act looking a lot less convincing than it did before the bees turned up, because where the biblical plagues came to save them before, now they’ve been hit by one of their own. Netanyahu keeps reaching for scripture whenever he wants to dress state violence up as duty. Amalek, the enemy of the Israelites from the Old Testament, who’s erasure from existence came from divine command.

A real photo of settler abuse got called “antisemitic” — and that tells you far more about Israel’s panic than L’Espresso’s cover. Right, so Italian news magazine L’Espresso has published it’s latest weekly edition and being a news magazine it put a real photograph on its cover as you might imagine it would, hardly unusual is it? And yet that simple act has been enough in and of itself to have Israel wailing antisemitism yet again. Israel’s ambassador to Italy Jonathan Peled has called that cover manipulative and hateful and I would argue it could well be construed that way, though not in the way Peled means. The photograph itself shows an armed Israeli settler grinning inanely while filming a distressed Palestinian woman near Hebron during the olive harvest. That’s it. That is the row. Not a cartoon, not an artist’s impression, not some feverish bit of anti-Israel fan fiction, but a real image taken by Pietro Masturzo, printed under the title L’Abuso – The Abuse – and then denounced as antisemitic once it landed in public on te L’Espresso front cover. Enrico Bellavia, L’Espresso’s deputy editor, has not folded over this either, by now a British mainstream outlet would have prostrated itself, but not in Italy, not at L’Espresso, Bellavia has not done the usual apologetic little dance, and has instead said the image is backed by context, backed by reporting, backed by other photographs from the same scene and best of all, backed by video. So the first thing fixed on the record here is very simple. A real act of domination has been shown, the official complaint has gone after the showing rather than the act, which shows where Israel’s priorities lie, not with the abuse, but with the exposure and the magazine has answered with more proof. A handy little video clip. Now Jonathan Peled of course is not some random bloke with a social media account and too much free time on his hands. And don’t look at me like that either. He is Israel’s ambassador to Italy, which is why his intervention lands heavier than it might otherwise do, because when an ambassador says a magazine cover is manipulative, stereotyped and hateful, that is not personal offence, that is a state representative trying to push a boundary around what may be shown and how it may be described. Peled did not say the man in the image was invented, because of course he is real. He did not say the woman was invented, she is very real as is her distress.

Trump tried to choke Iran through Hormuz and ended up smashing into his own side’s trade lifeline like the orange halfwit he is. Right, so Donald Trump has instigated a blockade on ships going to and from Iranian ports through the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, though the word instigated is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, because what has followed is not some neat picture of Iran being economically strangled at sea but China saying no, you’re not stopping us or we’re going to have a problem; other nations like Britain and France saying no, we’re not going to help you in this act of self immolating stupidity, which is saying something given their leaderships, especially Keir Starmer who has been happy to launch bombers from UK soil and ‘defensively’ join Trump’s war in other ways. And although the Chinese aspect of this story is the bit the mainstream has focused on, they’ve not told the whole story, because it gets far worse for Trump. I wonder what China said to Trump to make him wet himself and allow that ship through in the end? A Chinese-owned tanker called Rich Starry carrying on through anyway. Trump wanted a display of control. He has got a display of leakage. He wanted fear. He has got argument. He wanted the image of everybody lining up behind Washington while Iran gets squeezed from the water. But he has had allies refusing to join, Beijing calling the move dangerous and irresponsible and seemingly saying something which made the orange drain from his face, and maritime data being used to show that traffic tied to Iran and traffic embarrassing to Washington have very much still been moving through the very route he said he was locking down.

An Israeli NGO has been caught discussing help for Brits moving into illegal West Bank settlements - with a UK charity and Gift Aid angle added in too... Right, so Declassified UK have been doing some of that investigative journalism type stuff again, an alien concept to mainstream media mouthpieces of course, if they haven’t got their talking points served up to them on a plate all they’re left with is passive aggressive bias and a list of things about Israel that they are not allowed to say, but Declassified have now put a particularly grubby scandal on the record seemingly completely ignored by everyone else. An Israeli organisation called Shivat Zion, which publicly presents itself as a helpful support body for Jews moving from Britain and Western Europe to Israel, Aliyah, as Israel calls it, has been filmed discussing help for a British person moving to Efrat in the occupied West Bank, and Efrat is not Israel, Efrat is an illegal Israeli settlement on occupied Palestinian land. So that means the Shivat Zion sales pitch here is not simply about moving house, not just about some dodgy paperwork, and certainly has nothing at all to do with “community fit,” or anything like that, but about helping place a British citizen into a settlement that exists because Palestinian land has been taken, ringed with military protection, and the offered up to Zionists as the biblical home for Jews when its nothing less than colonialist thievery and anyone choosing to live in such sites are themselves tainted by that very same brush. But the British angle to all of this gets that much worse, because Shivat Zion was also presenting a UK donation route tied to Gift Aid through a UK registered charity called UK Toremet, a charity which provides grants via donors, providing funding for projects here in the UK or overseas.

Trump says he is reopening Hormuz, but all he has really done is put his name to the next round of global trade chaos. Right, so Donald Trump has announced that the United States Navy will blockade the Strait of Hormuz, the same guy who has attacked Iran for apparently blocking it is now going to do so himself, because if you thought he was stupid before, you were giving him too much credit. Stop the ships that have paid Iran to pass through Hormuz and attack Iranian forces if they interfere. That is the American president putting a naval move on the record after talks with Iran in Islamabad ended without a deal of course, because he sent JD Vance and his corpse-like son in law and so inept at diplomacy were they, that they apparently had the Iranian delegation on the verge of fits of laughter. The Strait of Hormuz is of course the narrow sea route between Iran and Oman through which a huge share of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas has to pass. So when Trump says he is going to “reopen” it by force, when he’s the idiot who got it restricted to begin with, what he is actually doing is threatening to turn one of the most sensitive trade arteries on earth into an American enforcement zone and basically daring Iran to turn the Strait into the world’s biggest live action example of the PC game Minesweeper. Nobody has forced him into this epic act of stupidity, he’s done all of this in his own words, in public, under his own name. Honestly, if brains were lard he couldn’t grease a pan, because that leaves him attached to the next stage of disruption now certain to come, oil prices already on the rise once more.

Netanyahu threatened Spain that they would pay a price price, then watched Spain set him fire for Easter! Right, so Benjamin Netanyahu is anything but a happy bunny right now, oh dear, how sad, never mind. Being turned into an Easter Guy Fawkes burned more than just his cheeks I fancy. He has said that Spain would pay an “immediate price” for what he called a diplomatic war against Israel, everything always boils down to war with this despotic fool doesn’t it? What does a diplomatic missile look like then just out of interest? A paper aeroplane with mean words written on it? Spit-balls from the back seats? How dare you attack our genocidal most moral army Spain! How dare you object to our ever widening warfare and ethnic cleansing and land grabbing! Who do you think you are! I throw my favourite teddy bear at you you meanies! How dare you side with those we are starting wars with and bombing the hell out of because we have decided that they are terrorists and you have to be on my side or I won’t be your friend anymore! It is full on picking up your football and shouting I’m going home stuff isn’t it? Well as far as his ‘you’ll pay for this’ tendencies have gone, he has at least make a show of starting something by removing Spain’s representatives from the coordination centre in Kiryat Gat, removing Spain from involvement in Gaza co-ordination oversight as that is, though you’d absolutely be right to question why Israel has any say over such a thing at all and in fact in doing this has only made Spain’s point regarding Israeli atrocity that bit stronger in his choice of language, paying a price is the talk of the terrorist after all, as Netanyahu casts aspersions of that same nature on those he started wars with. He started wars with each and every time. Israel is a terrorist state in my view and I’m sure in the views of many of you watching this, Spain has simply shown some spine in taking Israel to task over what they do and who they are. Something they aren’t used to, having so heavily invested in so many other foreign governments. That is why Israel has the clout it does of course.

Trump’s team finally got Iran to the table in Pakistan, then blew the talks anyway - but how much of that came from Israel leaning on the US yet again? Right, so JD Vance has walked out of Islamabad after 21 hours of talks with Iran and no deal to show for it, stood in front of the cameras, thanked Pakistan, said Washington had left its “best” and “final” proposal behind, and then tried to talk like the side that had not just failed in public. You guys were desperate for this? You were getting your backsides handed to you, and you leave your best and final offer? Iran must have felt like they were negotiating with children, but then I think its worse than that, because kids generally know what they want, the US turned up at the meeting they were desperate for and then seemed more desperate to get out of it again. Team Trump got the meeting it seemed to want, got the room it needed – Pakistan provided it, and still could not get Iran to say yes, yet arguably ended up with such a hard line its as if they wanted them to say no. Then Vance came out and sold that as bad news for Iran. Pull the other one. If you need a two-week ceasefire, a Pakistani mediation track, a locked-down capital, and a long night of talks just to get the other side in a chair, you do not then get to swagger out sounding like the sheriff unless the room actually bent, and this room did not bend, no deal. Iran had the position of power here, not the US, we all know it, so what changed after you got in that room? The US needed a deal, Trump needs to get out of this and yet now that’s all changed suddenly? I appreciate Trump’s bipolar gymnastics are what they are, but it really does smack of somebody else calling the shots surely? Pakistan has done more than lend a hotel lobby and a row of flags to this circus as well. They brokered the two-week ceasefire of course but also kept them going for as long as they did, stepping up diplomacy precisely because Israeli strikes in Lebanon didn’t stop for the ceasefire talks, despite being on of Iran’s red lines and a term the US had agreed to to get the talks started.

Israel hit an Iranian synagogue during Passover, and the people who always claim to defend Jews suddenly found other things to talk about. Right, so Israel has hit a synagogue in Tehran during Passover, and the people who are usually first out of the blocks whenever something like this happens, an attack on Jews, an antisemitic strike as it readily gets called, have not exactly been trampling over each other in the rush to denounce it. It’s not like this event has been particularly hidden either, much has been made of it in regional news outlets, it’s just the Western ones that have tucked the story away, as if it is just a footnote for policy wonks with too much free time, if they have bothered to cover it at all. And frankly when you’ve seen the devastation Israel have wrought, that silence is all the more inexcusable. Appalling scenes, but also scenes that provide inconvenient truths too, the silence from the all too often vocally mainstream platformed apparent defenders of the Jewish faith. The proof of Israel’s atrocity is sitting there in the rubble, sitting there with the rabbi on scene, the damaged Hebrew books, and the Rafi-Nia synagogue in central Tehran left smashed after an Israeli strike that Israel has itself described as collateral damage from an attack on a nearby military target. This is not one of those familiar little media games where everybody pretends the facts are too murky to handle while still somehow finding the confidence to be very certain when the accused party is one of Israel’s enemies. A synagogue was hit, during Passover, and the organisations that spend half their lives talking like they are the emergency services of Jewish moral panic have managed an impressive impression of a power cut.

The Greater Israel plan is very much alive and kicking as Bezalel Smotrich gives one of his most insane speeches to date. Right, so Israel’s unhinged far right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich has now said in public that Israel will expand its borders in Gaza, in Lebanon and in Syria, and he didn’t mutter this in some Knesset corridor while pretending later that he had been misunderstood. He said it at the inauguration of yet another illegal settlement in the West Bank, because of course he did, it is the most Smotrich thing he could do. He said there would be a political leg in Gaza that would expand Israel’s borders, a political leg in Lebanon that would take those borders to the Litani, and a political leg in Syria taking at least Mount Hermon and the also completely illegal buffer zone Israel had already carved out there. But why stop there and more to the point, why should any of us believe you would stop there? A vision entirely in keeping with the Greater Israel plan naming Lebanon, Gaza and Syria really has surfaced now, and the first consequence for the people selling this whole regional operation as mere security is that the cover story has taken a very public kicking. Once a serving finance minister is talking about border growth across three fronts, any old line that all of this is just temporary, defensive, technical, regrettable, and very definitely not about grabbing more land starts sounding like something produced by a very tired liar in a very warm room. Israel does not come out of that looking restrained, careful, or misunderstood. Israel comes out of it looking like a state whose far right has said the quiet part out loud plainly enough to make everybody still pretending not to hear it look either complicit or thick.

Trump threatened a whole civilisation, Starmer hid behind the drapes, then flew out to pose beside the ceasefire once the danger had already passed. Right, so Donald Trump threatened Iran with civilisational destruction and Keir Starmer hid. That is the story of the UK response to Trump’s ultimate threat against Iran which fortunately did not come to pass isn’t it? Trump put out that if Iran did not make a deal then “a whole civilization will die tonight,” which is not hard-man bluster, though obviously he thinks otherwise, it is his way; it is not diplomatic pressure, it not some mangled phrase needing a clean-up crew from the Foreign Office, but a public threat against an entire country, an existential threat to a civilisation thousands of years old and Britain’s prime minister couldn’t find his spine. He did not step out and shut it down. He did not tell the public that this was depraved. He did not tell Washington that this was beyond the line. He disappeared while the threat was to all intents very real, while British bases were very much part of the wider machinery around this war, while US bombers took off to make good on Trump’s threats form UK airfields and while everybody else had to sit there listening to the president of the United States talk like a man issuing extermination terms that the daleks would be proud of. But then the ceasefire turned up, Trump instead agreeing with Iran’s 10 point plan that Pakistan had helped broker, Iran had put forward their terms, the temperature dropped a notch, and suddenly here came Starmer with his little statesman voice switched back on, tweeting that: ‘I welcome the ceasefire agreement reached overnight, which will bring a moment of relief to the region and the world. Together with our partners we must do all we can to support and sustain this ceasefire, turn it into a lasting agreement and re-open the Strait of Hormuz.’ Welcoming relief, supporting the ceasefire, and then he took off to the Gulf, ready to pose beside the safer part of the story, any excuse for yet another public purse funded foreign trip.

Iran's ceasefire plan gets accepted by trump, vetoed by his boss Netanyahu and Lebanon still pays the price in lives and carnage. Right, so Israel has tugged at Little Donnie’s leash and as a result he’s meekly gone from a position of accepting talks based on Iran’s 10 point plan, to now claiming the very bits Netanyahu didn’t like were never really in it at all, that that version of the Iranian 10 point plan had been put in the bin and this was a different 10 point plan now, and we’re all supposed to nod along and accept that are we? Don’t be silly. Pakistan said the ceasefire included Lebanon. Iran said the ceasefire included Lebanon. Netanyahu kicked the table over that part, Trump and the whole AIPAC bought and paid for administration jumped to that tune, their fools if they thought we’d miss that and Lebanon got hit in one of the worst strikes ever just to prove Netanyahu’s point.

A ceasefire was announced, Netanyahu tried to carve Lebanon out of it, and Trump has ended up looking weaker than ever. Right, so Benjamin Netanyahu has managed to turn a ceasefire into a public confession. A stop has been announced by both Iran and the Trump administration and as part of the terms agreed, the ceasefire on Iran covers other war fronts too, it covers Lebanon as well. Well, Netanyahu then came out in full Nutty Yahoo mode and said Lebanon does not count. Well who gave you permission to change the agreed terms? His is a lovely little peace plan if you are a liar, because what he is actually saying is yes to the ceasefire where it suits him and no where it doesn’t. Now I realise Netanyahu thinks he runs the US and arguably he does, but he can’t negotiate directly in that regard no matter how much he might like to. Israeli Arabic mouthpiece Avichay Adraee then told people south of the Zahrani River – well to the north of the Litani to get out because the fighting in Lebanon is continuing, and the Israeli military followed that with more than one hundred strikes in ten minutes. So there is your answer straight away. Trump says stop. Netanyahu says make me. Trump goes quiet and Iran gets handed the easiest argument in the world, because this is not a ceasefire being honoured, it is a ceasefire being picked apart on arrival, right not to trust the other side as Iran have made clear that they don’t and here’s the proof justification. Shehbaz Sharif, Pakistan’s prime minister, announced the ceasefire on behalf of both parties and said Lebanon was part of it. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, then slithered out and said Lebanon was excluded, because that is how this works with him. He wants the public credit for saying yes to a truce, while keeping the one bit of the war he still wants to prosecute. That is permanently on repeat dodge. The label stays nice and tidy for the cameras, then the actual content gets hacked to pieces over the bit he doesn’t like and refuses to adhere to. So ultimately as far as the mainstream media are concerned Trump gets his peace headline, Netanyahu claims a loophole, and people in southern Lebanon get the explosions.

Trump threatened to wipe out a civilisation, then ended up taking Iran’s terms to Islamabad. Not a leader just a loser. Right, so Donald Trump said a whole civilisation would die that night if Iran did not do what he wanted, and then less than two hours before his own deadline he backed off, took a two-week ceasefire, accepted talks in Islamabad in Pakistan, and called Iran’s proposal a workable basis for negotiation after having previously said it wasn’t enough. That is not the story of a man imposing terms. That is the story of a man finding out, in public, that there is a difference between saying the most extreme thing you possibly could, out loud and in public as usual and actually being able to carry it through. He did not just retreat. He did it after talking like he had reached the point where retreat was no longer available. He put total destruction on the table, he fixed a clock, he made the whole thing sound utterly final, and then the clock ran down into Pakistan-brokered diplomacy. He tried to sound like the end of the conversation and landed on what could frankly be the end of him, because Iran was never backing down. People forming human chains on a bridge there, putting their bodies on the line, daring the US to strike civilians, to commit the war crimes that would have been cut and dried if Trump had struck what the orange oaf said he was going to, instead it turned into taco Tuesday, but don’t denigrate the bravery of those people prepared to do that for their own country. It speaks volumes of what they think of their country, regardless of what you might think of the theocracy that rules it, would you chain yourself to a bridge for Keir Starmer, or for Donald Trump? Who is really the worse society? Of course some in the media are claiming these people were being forced into it but did you see any signs of that, because I didn’t. Worse for Trump of course is just how clearly he made his plans known. He did not mutter some vague lines about options remaining open. He talked about bridges, power plants, complete demolition, four hours of destruction, and then the big line about a whole civilisation dying that night.