Kernow Damo

Iran and Hezbollah are still hitting Israel and Gulf oil and gas dries up, but Trump insists he's still in control and it's nearly over. Who's he kidding? Right, so Donald Trump has said there is “practically nothing left” to target in Iran and that the war ends when he decides it ends. Fine. But then reality has answered back. Hezbollah fires a heavy barrage into Israel overnight in joint strikes with Iran hitting Haifa and other targets in the north. Israel’s mad war minister Israel Katz answers that not by restoring quiet, not by proving control, but by ordering expanded operations in Lebanon, because that is what you do when the thing you promised to stabilise is still burning in public. The International Energy Agency has answered the Hormuz crisis by reaching for the biggest emergency oil stock release in its history, which is not the behaviour of people who think this is all nicely contained and in another signal as to how precarious energy supplies are right now, Shell has piled on more pressure as they have now been forced to declare force majeure themselves on Qatari LNG-linked contracts, so now even the big energy firms are having to admit that the normal machinery is seizing up and even they cannot now deliver. Spain has permanently withdrawn its ambassador from Israel and following that move Iran has said the Strait of Hormuz will stay passable for states willing to send their Israeli and US ambassadors home. So no, this is not some neat little demonstration of strength under Donald Trump’s firm hand.

Netanyahu admits Iran may not break, US intel says it hasn’t, and the whole filthy war is starting to blow back on the people who sold it. Right, so Benjamin Netanyahu has finally crawled out from whatever rock he has been hiding under as Iranian missiles hammer Israel, all his own doing of course, and has now said out loud that his gamble may fail. After all the dead, after all the bombing, after all the talk about strength and deterrence and teaching enemies lessons they will never forget, the man selling the war has had to admit he cannot promise the result. He says Israel is creating the conditions for toppling Iran’s government, but he cannot tell you with certainty that Iranians will do it. So, you mean to say that after taking out their Supreme Leader on day one, they didn’t scatter and demand regime change? Well of course they didn’t! You did the one thing sure to unify them! And just to salt that wound that bit further, reporting on US intelligence says Iran’s leadership is still very much in control, not close to collapse at all and frankly breathing fire at this point, not a cat in hells chance of this ending now, when the new guy in charge is the son of the old supreme leader, and not only did you kill his father, you took out half his family with him. So the first thing to get straight here is brutally simple: the war’s main salesman is now admitting this hasn’t gone to plan, all while the intelligence says the target state is very much still standing, still active and that leaves Netanyahu with a war still running and no guaranteed political payoff, especially as munitions continue to dry up faster than price rises at our petrol pumps. Donald Trump hasn’t helped matters either, because the delusional fool keeps speaking as if the thing is already won while the region keeps answering back in fire.

Labour broke the courts by underfunding them, and now wants to use that damage to strip one of the public’s last checks on state power. Right, so Keir Starmer’s government is trying to cut jury trial rights, and the first thing to ask is who gets the better deal once ordinary people start getting pushed out of the room. Because this bill would take a whole range of criminal cases away from juries and put many of them before a judge sitting alone, which is a very different room and they know it. And it doesn’t seem unreasonable to me to ask about those pushing these reforms such as they are, which is being met with such dramatic outcry either. Sarah Sackman, the courts minister helping front this, has declared membership of the Jewish Labour Movement and has been reported as having worked at Israel’s Supreme Court in Jerusalem. David Lammy, the Justice Secretary above her, has declared membership of Labour Friends of Israel. Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister carrying the government pushing this through Parliament, has spent years publicly courting Labour Friends of Israel. Zionist without qualification. So these optics are not subtle are they? They are not made up. They are sitting right in the middle of it while Labour tries to move verdicts further away from juries and closer to the state. So should we be worried about some kind of Zionist intent behind this, or is it just coincidence? Starmer’s government has already pushed this bill through second reading in the Commons by 304 votes to 203, so the bill has moved forwards.

Trump says it’s nearly over, but Iran is still tightening the trap, the oil shock is spreading, and Washington already looks desperate for a way out. Right, so Tel Aviv has been hit again, central Israel has been under alerts again, commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz have been hit again, and Donald Trump is now doing the exact opposite of what strong men do when they are winning: looking for a way out. That is the story as it stands today. Not control. Not dominance. Not the clean victory lap he and Benjamin Netanyahu were puffing and panting through waving their respective flags, that they thought they were buying with bombs if they threw enough of Iran, because there is no way Iran could cope with such an assault right? Didn’t work out that way did it though? Iran is still firing, and still haven’t broken out their best stuff yet by all accounts. The region is still tightening up, the costs are still spreading through shipping, oil, prices at the petrol pumps and troop exposure, and the White House is hunting an exit, even allegedly going cap in hand to Putin to try and get to an endgame. So there is your meltdown. The side that sold this as strength has landed in the oldest trap in war, because these people are functionally idiots: they can still make things worse, but they cannot make it look under control, Iran said they wouldn’t back down if you struck them and they’re doing so. No way out. Donald Trump is not talking like a man who has achieved his aims and can now calmly set terms. He is talking like a man who helped start something far dirtier and wider than the sales pitch allowed for, and is now trying to edge toward an exit without admitting the whole thing has gone badly wrong. So the old cover story is done all the same.

Trump’s “quick war” is already widening into a regional liability - Iraq hit, Gulf cover blown, oil shock rising, and even his own side reportedly wants an exit. Right, so Donald Trump has spent the last few days talking like this war is going brilliantly. He stood in Florida and said the United States was making “major strides”, said some people could say the job was “pretty well complete”, then said he could call it a “tremendous success” right now or go further, and of course he said they were going to go further didn’t he? It must be lovely to live in a world devoid of reality. yet at almost the same time, people around him have reportedly been urging him to start talking about a way out. So there it is, right at the top, no mystery, no ceremony, no need for any clever decoding. The man in public is still selling victory, but the people near him still in touch with some semblance of real life are already looking for the exit. Making matters worse, US CENTCOM has managed a trumpian trick all of their own. Gulf governments have spent this war trying to sound like they are above it, beside it, merely enduring the weather while American forces happen to pass through. As if those US bases were just figments of Iran’s imagination and these Gulf monarchies and their Israeli normalisation and US alliances were equally all pie in the sky too. Well, CENTCOM has blown that notion sky high. You see they have put out their own material showing HIMARS supporting Operation Epic Fury, HIMARS standing for High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, which is a lot more understandable, mobile rocket launchers basically, and its blown this whole Gulf State denial act out of the water, because guess where CENTCOM said these HIMARS are?

Israel’s own propaganda racket is now being sued by the very people and firms it used to sell the Gaza lie abroad Right, so Israel’s own propaganda racket has started chasing the state for its money. People hired to go out and sell Israel’s line, shoved in front of cameras, flown around, paid through private companies, performed a skit on Insta are now saying the state never paid up. Not the usual critics. Not the people Israel always tries to smear and brush aside. Its own people. Its own companies. The same outfit used to push the story abroad is now sitting under lawsuits and payment claims from inside the machine itself. Now this is frankly quite funny, the state that sells a con by way of new has itself conned the conners, but it is also filthy, because once the people hired to do the lying start demanding their money in public, this stops looking like conviction and starts looking exactly like what it is, a paid operation with court paperwork now attached and the propagandists chasing some two million shekels. Now the Prime Minister’s Office took over this hasbara machinery after the Ministry of Information collapsed after 7 October 2023, so that already tells you something useful about the moral confidence of the whole operation, because if the thing is so righteous and so self-evident and so obviously true, why is it being thrown together in a rush through replacement channels inside government as the bombs are falling and the bodies are piling up? Moshik Aviv was the chap who had just taken over the national information system in August 2023 and then the genocide of Gaza commences following that Hamas attack on October 7th. Staffing is thin, urgency is cited, normal tender procedures are said to have been bypassed, and private production companies are pulled in as payment conduits for people representing Israel abroad. Listen to the language of that and tell me it does not sound exactly like what it is trying not to say. “Payment channels.” “Irregularities.” “External consultants.” “Exceptional payments.” The whole vocabulary is built to keep the stain off the façade. Strip the wording back to ordinary English and what you are left with is a state operation using outside firms to fund message carriers during a genocide, and now those firms are saying the money did not arrive through signed work orders.

Israel pulled an epic self-own - and instead of breaking Iran, it’s triggered toxic fallout, oil panic and a much bigger war. Right, so Israel has spent days selling this as control, as precision, as pressure, as the kind of war those in the know can widen without losing hold of the edges, and now Tehran is sitting under toxic smoke and black rain after fuel depots and refinery-linked sites were hit, a Chinese intelligence vessel has been reported operating south of Iran in international waters near the Gulf, and footage from the video game ARMA has been circulating online as if somebody needed fake explosions to make the real ones look more convincing. That is how things are going now. Not with a neat chain of military success, but with a poisoned capital, an information war that cannot keep its trousers up, and outside powers moving closer to the scene because the fire is now big enough to pull them in. Then Iran named Mojtaba Khamenei as the new Supreme Leader under wartime conditions, so the leadership gap Israel and Washington plainly wanted did not open. It shut. Overnight. Just as they were told it would. With a new man in place and the whole succession question taken off the table by a formal appointment. China has not sent in divisions, nobody is pretending that, but Liaowang-1, the vessel in question is being reported south of the Iranian coast in international waters, not randomly sight-seeing, but positioned so that it’d be a war crime for the US or Israel to try the same stunt here, that they tried with that Iranian training vessel off Sri Lanka last week, and Beijing has already had its foreign ministry fielding questions about safe passage through Hormuz because Chinese trade and energy flows sit inside this war prominently, Iran being a major source of energy for them. That is what happens when you decide to turn a regional confrontation into a shipping and energy crisis though isn’t it? Other powers do not need to fire a shot to become part of the pressure.

Trump’s Iran war is not just hitting oil routes, it is dragging Europe’s fake energy independence into the open and putting Russia back in the frame. Right, so Donald Trump has set this one up so badly that a war sold as strength against Iran is starting to look like a gift to Vladimir Putin, and no, not because Putin has suddenly become some military wizard in the Gulf, but because oil and gas do not care about swagger, tanker routes do not salute campaign slogans, and Europe still runs on fuel it does not control. The Strait of Hormuz has been carrying around 20 million barrels a day, a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil trade, and once traffic there backs up, Saudi Arabia can reroute some cargo through the Red Sea, the UAE can bypass a slice of it from the Omani side of their country, which sits just outside the Strait, but nowhere near enough to replace the gaping hole left in global oil and gas supply. So the first thing that hits is not a speech, not a summit, not one of those tragic little statements about resilience from people who would not know what resilience was if it landed on their desk and kicked their coffee cup over. The first thing that hits is price, shipping, storage, and buyers fighting for cargo. QatarEnergy has already put force majeure on affected LNG buyers after halting production at Ras Laffan, and that matters because gas is where the polite European story starts wheezing. Oil is ugly but flexible. Europe can buy more crude from places like Norway, the United States, Kazakhstan, West Africa, North Africa, wherever the grade works. Gas does not work like that. Gas needs liquefaction plants, tankers, regas terminals, contracts, and a seller with spare supply. So once Qatar drops out even partially, Europe is not browsing many shelves for a replacement source. Europe is entering an auction. Asia is already the bigger direct buyer of Gulf energy, so when Gulf LNG goes missing or gets delayed, Asian buyers will then go hunting in the same Atlantic market Europe will need to for a refill. That is how Trump’s Iran war turns into Europe’s energy trap, with tankers diverting east and Europe staring at its storage schedule with ever increasing dismay. The European Commission has spent the last few years telling everyone the system is more secure now though haven’t they? It has points on paper for that. EU gas storage rules still target 90 per cent by the start of winter.

Trump & Israel’s war lies are going up in flames — from Haifa to the Gulf, the fire, failures and panic are getting harder to hide. Donald Trump has rushed more than 20,000 bombs to Israel under emergency authority, while B-1 bombers have landed at RAF Fairford, because no matter what Keir Starmer says, the UK is definitely involved, though it ought to be pointed out that RAF Fairford has little to do with the RAF, it is just a US air base on UK soil, because of course we have such things here too. All whilst that has been going on, anti-war organiser Mike Prysner, a guy who knows a thing or two about war given he has served in both Iraq and Syria has now said US troops and families are contacting his group, the Center on Conscience and War, or CCW looking for help to avoid deployment. One soldier told his mother in his final call home that his unit would be going “boots on the ground” that night, and that his commander said the operation was meant to bring about the Second Coming of Christ, but we’re supposed to believe the Iranians are the religious zealots of course. But that is the current picture in one go: more bombs for Israel, American bombers in Britain, and the coming of the Lord in exchange for razing Iran – how very Christian, not. That is not a picture of control. That is a picture of a war machine feeding itself harder because the first sales pitch has already fallen flat. Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu sold this as pressure, deterrence and dominance, the usual words the men in suits use when they are about to set half a region alight and call it stability. And it’s not just Trump with issues blowing up in his face right now either.

Jordan says it is outside the Iran war, but with missiles overhead & a US missile launcher destroyed, that story is getting harder to sell by the hour. Right, so King Abdullah of Jordan said on 24 February that Jordan would not let its airspace be violated and would not become a battlefield. Four days later Jordanian forces were intercepting drones and ballistic missiles over the country, the Interior Ministry was dealing with falling debris across multiple regions, and people in Jordan were being told to treat suspicious objects like live danger instead of bad weather. That is the first promise gone. The state line was that Jordan would stay out of the war between the United States, Israel and Iran while protecting its own territory. The actual condition on the ground was missiles overhead, fragments coming down, airspace controls, and emergency alerts. A government can call that sovereignty if it likes. People tend to call it the war arriving anyway don’t they? If it looks like a war and smells like a war, it’s a war. By 1 March the Interior Ministry had recorded 73 incidents involving falling objects and missile debris, with property damage reported in Amman, Zarqa, Madaba, West Balqa, Jaresh, Irbid, Aqaba and the Central Badia, and that leaves the palace with wreckage on record. The Jordanian Armed Forces then said they had intercepted 49 drones and ballistic missiles. That matters because it strips the polite little fiction down to the studs. Jordan is not sitting on a hill watching two other countries trade blows through binoculars. Jordanian air defences are up, Jordanian skies are active, Jordanian territory is taking fallout, lying between Israel and Iran as it does, and the state itself is counting the pieces. There is no neutral-looking way to dress that up once the numbers are public. When a government moves from issuing regional statements to listing debris incidents governorate by governorate, the distance between “we are not part of this” and “please report suspicious fragments to the authorities” has already closed.

Trump and Israel wanted a war with Iran — what they’ve got instead is failing defences, trapped allies, and a nightmare spreading across the whole region. Right, so Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu wanted a war with Iran. What they have got instead is a widening chain of blowback that now runs through Israeli cities, British bases, Gulf oil terminals, shipping lanes, airline schedules, insurance markets and the homes of people who had no say in any of this. The sales pitch was control. The footage says otherwise. Iranian missiles and drones have kept getting through. Israeli authorities have kept tightening what can be filmed and shown. Trump has started talking about “unconditional surrender” because when the clean quick dominance fantasy falls apart, the language just gets bigger while the room for manoeuvre gets smaller. The fantasy that passes for a brain in the head of the mango coloured muppet seemingly has no bounds. Of course he’s not the only muppet in the room right now. Pete Hegseth has confirmed an investigation into the strike on Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab after a US official told investigators the strike was likely American, and the evidence around the site has made the usual excuses look very thin. More than 165 people were reported killed there during school hours, most of them as we know were children, and satellite analysis has pointed to clustered, precise impacts inside the compound rather than some random malfunction story doing the rounds to protect reputations. The school stood next to a Revolutionary Guards compound, questions need asking about that certainly, it’s the sort of thing we expect Israel to do. But equally that does not make the school a military target.

Trump and Netanyahu sold this as control - now Israel’s getting blasted, Lebanon’s blowing wide open, and the lies are falling apart. Right, so Tel Aviv has been hit again. Central Israel has been under alerts again. Explosions have been reported again. And Donald Trump has chosen that exact moment to announce that Washington must have a role in choosing Iran’s next leader. What planet is he on? He’s up against the wall right now, the Middle East is on fire and he thinks somehow, he’s winning. Israel gets hit in public, the promise of control starts looking very thin, and the man backing Benjamin Netanyahu decides this is the perfect time to talk not like a defender, not like a mediator, but like somebody auditioning for the job of Emperor. Well this one is wearing no clothes and that is a horrible mental image for which I will apologise for. Netanyahu is still widening the war, increasingly moving into Lebanon now as well as continuing atrocities across the Palestinian territory. Trump is all but declaring victory even though Iran is very much still firing and apparently is still using stock right now more than 10 years old – they’re not even into the modern stuff yet. So this is not a neat campaign under tight management. That is a story slipping increasingly out of control for Trump and Co, with Israel and all those Gulf states the US swore to protect in exchange for those bases very still on the receiving end of Iranian fire. Donald Trump has not misspoken here though. He has not been dragged off message by some stray microphone or an awkward media question causing him to soil himself. He has said out loud that the US wants a say in who runs Iran next.

$95 Billion that congress doesn't want you to know about, the return of the Houthis and a bit of a head scratcher over some drones... Right, so Donald Trump is being handed a bill being talked about at roughly ninety-five billion dollars as the expected cost for backing Israel through a war with Iran, and the US Senate has just blocked an effort to curb his war powers, which is the neat procedural way of saying: the people who could have slowed this down have decided they won’t. At the same time, Yemen is signalling it’s back on the board – perhaps you’ve been wondering where the Houthis have been thusfar in all of this, with reports saying that Sanaa is now in a declared state of war and the timing of their first actions therefore is the question left hanging in the air right now, and when that switch flips, it won’t’ necessarily just hit one city, it will hit shipping lanes and energy flows, their warning having gone out not to Israel or the US, but to other Gulf states saying if they attack Iran, the Houthis will be coming after their oil and gas. And then you’ve got a third thread, staying with the oil and gas theme, but away from the Houthis.

Hit lists, religious destiny being sold as justification, and war spreading to more and more nations, is the Iran war beginning to go global? Right, so A US submarine has torpedoed an Iranian frigate in the Indian Ocean off Sri Lanka, and Sri Lankan officials are now counting bodies and hospital beds while Washington boasts about “global reach”, with eighty-seven bodies recovered off Galle and thirty-two wounded being treated at Karapitiya Teaching Hospital, and the ship said to have carried one hundred and eighty crew. A war that is “contained” does not produce a mass rescue operation on somebody else’s southern coastline, and it does not do it with torpedoes in international waters. It produces one thing: a new rule that says Iranian state assets can be hunted far from the Gulf, and the only thing separating that from chaos is whether the other side chooses to answer in the same language, on the same oceans, with the same distance. UK Maritime Trade Operations records an attack fifty nautical miles north of Muscat in Oman, and the sequence in the notice tells you how fast a normal shipping run turns into an emergency. First it’s a report of a strike above the waterline and an engine-room fire. Then it’s updated as a confirmed uncrewed surface vehicle attack, with the crew evacuated to shore.

Israel and their British Zionist allies in parliament have tried a double gotcha on the Greens, but karma had something to say about it Right, so the Embassy of Israel in the UK has put out a public condemnation of a Green Party conference motion and it has done it in the language of authority, shame, and threat, meant to make a British political party flinch before it even gets to a vote, because within days the row has travelled from a document to a widening dogpile, from Israeli whining into the House of Commons, and then implicating the safety of an elected politician, seemingly forgetting the lessons we supposedly had to learn from before. Motion A105, titled “Zionism is Racism”, is a member motion going to the Greens’ spring conference, and the first problem is that most people arguing about it aren’t reading the motion at all, because the text isn’t sitting in front of the public in one clean official place everyone can point to. So what you end up with instead is a fight over characterisations. One side says it’s an anti-racist statement about a political ideology, the other side says it’s hostile and extremist, and the press picks the most inflammatory paraphrase and sells that as the meaning, because it’s what establishment pro-Israel press will do. The bits that keep getting cited are consistent though: that it calls for the party to adopt an explicitly anti-Zionist stance, that it pushes a one-state position in historic Palestine framed as equal rights for all, and that it includes language about a right to resistance and liberation, with a line about “all available means under international law” being treated as the flashpoint, because that phrase can be framed as either a legal claim or a coded endorsement depending on what the person speaking wants their audience to hear.

Trump can brag as much as he likes - the real hit is the one that makes fleets, insurers, and governments price up his 'wins.' Right, so Donald Trump has said, on camera, “If anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand,” and that one sentence is the whole story of this war in miniature, because it takes the public excuse, the tidy “we had no choice” posture, and it puts a wobble right through it while the bombs are still falling. He has added that he thought Iran was going to attack first and he did not want that, and he has said it while sat next to Friedrich Merz in the White House. That is the first crack in the pitch: the White House is not even keeping its own trigger story straight. A war sold as unavoidable gets harder to sell when the man who started it tells you he did the forcing. A chap called Yahya Rahim-Safavi has then walked right up to the other end of the escalation ladder and said Iran knows where Benjamin Netanyahu is, where he convenes his meetings, and that their intelligence database is complete, which is not a battle report, it is a message aimed at one man’s sense of safety. He has framed it as a capability claim and a warning. The important part is the target set he is talking about though. When a former IRGC commander as he is starts describing leadership locations, he is telling everyone watching that the war is not staying in the lane of “sites” and “assets” and “intercepts.” He is dragging it toward personal vulnerability and personal consequence, with Netanyahu as the named subject.

Cloud services sunk, Israeli false flag accusations and the price tag of one day of fighting Iran show Trump and Israel's utter desperation already. Right, so Amazon has had to publish the sort of notice it never wants to publish, because it tells you the war has now reached the wiring and the power rooms, not just the runways and bases. It says drone strikes have physically hit its cloud facilities in the Gulf, with structural damage on site, disrupted power delivery to its infrastructure, and fire suppression that has left additional water damage, and it is warning customers the recovery is prolonged and that some services may take at least a day to stabilise, which is a polite way of saying businesses and services that sit on that cloud are now dealing with the fallout of a military strike, an outage notice. The United States has then had the opening day of its strike campaign costed at roughly seven hundred and seventy-nine million dollars in a single twenty-four hour window, not a decade-long programme, not a procurement plan, a single day of sorties, munitions and the machinery that keeps the operation moving. That is the first invoice of a war being run like an open tab, where the headline isn’t just what got hit, it’s how quickly the spend ramps and how little room there is to pretend this is tidy or cheap, day one, a bill. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei has then walked into a school in Tehran and chosen that venue on purpose, because he is talking about escalation while standing inside a civilian site that should never be part of any targeting conversation, but on the day more than 160 little girls get laid to rest after their school was bombed on day one, it was a prescient choice.

Depleted defence capabilities trigger ultimatums, a war related betting scandal, are things going more and more Iran's way? Right, so Marco Rubio has gone on the record and admitted the United States struck Iran because it knew Israel was going to strike Iran, and it expected Iran to hit American forces in the region in response, so Washington chose to hit first to reduce the American body count Yeah right. Netanyahu said jump and Trump said how high. And that is why the tables have now turned, because the excuse is no longer “Iran was about to attack America,” it is “we joined a war because Israel was about to start it and we didn’t want to take the retaliation.” Well you’re idiots then, because now you are and if you expect us to believe any of that, you think we’re idiots too. US Central Command has now confirmed six American service members killed in action as of 4pm Eastern time yesterday, including the recovery of the remains of two who were previously unaccounted for from a facility struck during Iran’s initial retaliation. A war sold as preventing American deaths therefore has already produced American deaths, and the administration’s first job therefore becomes managing the gap between the nonsense they are spouting and that toll. Saudi Arabia’s defence ministry spokesperson, Major General Turki al-Maliki, has said the United States embassy compound in Riyadh was hit by two drones, causing a limited fire and minor material damage, and no injuries were reported, and the phrase “limited fire” is the kind of minimising language states use when they are trying to keep the streets calm, but the act itself is the point, because a diplomatic compound in a capital being hit means the host-state bargain is now being contested by force.

Trump and Netanyahu have been reduced to making excuses, burning through defences, and somebody’s already trying to cash in on it too... Right, so US Central Command has admitted that three American F-15E Strike Eagles have been shot down over Kuwait by Kuwaiti air defences in an apparent friendly-fire incident, with all six aircrew ejecting and being recovered, and that is the sort of sentence that ought to stop you dead, because it’s not just “an incident”, it’s the mask-off reality of this mess: the people running the most expensive military machine on earth have got their allies shooting their planes out of the sky, and they still want you to believe they’re in charge of what happens next. Donald Trump has then gone on to tell people the “big wave strikes” have not even happened yet and that a bigger one is coming, and you can hear the arrogance in that because he is talking about escalation like it is a phase in a project plan, a four-week job he’s telling us as his own side shoots his own planes out of the sky and fire rains across air bases, US military shipping and Israel as if that means nothing, like he can schedule chaos and still pretend he’s somehow managing it, that he’s in control of this mess, while the first visible proof of this war’s reality is allied air defences accidentally shooting down their own assets. Keir Starmer has gone to the Commons and said a drone came down within 800 yards of British personnel at RAF Akrotiri, nobody killed fortunately, but you can’t say that sentence out loud and still pretend Britain is standing off to the side can you?

Starmer can call this “defensive” all he likes, but once the state is moving families off a UK base within hours, the consequences have already started. Right, so Keir Starmer has said yes to Donald Trump on Iran, and within twenty-four hours a British base has taken a hit. He gives the United States permission to use UK bases to strike Iranian missiles “at source”, he calls it “defensive”, he puts out a legal summary to wrap it up in a ribbon, and then the Sovereign Base Areas Administration has confirmed a suspected drone impact at RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus and at time of writing sirens are going off and people are being urged to head for shelters. Families get moved. Non-essential people get dispersed. Cyprus’s president, Nikos Christodoulides, goes on record saying his country is not taking part in any military operation. British sovereign territory on an EU member island is now part of the active map, and Starmer still wants you repeating the word “defensive” like it changes what the runway is actually being used for. Green Party leader Zack Polanski has done the simplest thing in politics in response to this, which is to drop the receipts though. He has quote-tweeted Starmer’s own 2020 pledge graphic, one of those infamously broken 10 pledges from when Starmer ran to lead the Labour Party; the one that said “No more illegal wars”, the one that promised a Prevention of Military Intervention Act, the one that promised human rights at the heart of foreign policy and a review of arms sales, and he has put it next to Starmer’s present-day decision to let American strikes launch from British bases in an act of atrocity against Iran that has zero legal basis whatsoever.

Carrier claim or not, tankers are anchoring, embassies are pulling out, and Gulf states quietly admitting the war has reached their doorstep. Right, so Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has put out a statement claiming it fired four ballistic missiles at the USS Abraham Lincoln. Washington has not produced public proof either way that settles it, and that is the point of the move, because a carrier is not a building you can walk past and photograph, it is a floating system in managed space. A claim like that is designed to make everybody else move first, because the risk is not the hit, the risk is what the possibility of the hit does to everyone who depends on calm. Every Gulf ruler hosting American forces, every shipping company deciding whether to transit, every insurer pricing war risk, every airport deciding whether to keep routing traffic through the region, all of them get forced into a decision they cannot postpone. The claim is the pressure tool, because it drags the US military’s most prestigious asset into the argument and dares everyone to pretend the argument is still small. Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have treated this whole thing like a job you can do with a press statement and then walk away from. You strike, you call it defence, you announce objectives, you act like the map is still a set of separate boxes. Then the boxes start leaking. Bases in other people’s countries become targets. Ports become targets. Tankers become targets. Debris starts injuring people in places that sell themselves as safe.

With Ayatollah Khamenei now gone, if Israel and Trump thought Iran would roll over they have no idea what's coming next. Right, so Ayatollah Khamenei’s dead. And that’s not just another incident in a region that’s been burning for decades. It’s the break of a long-standing, carefully maintained fiction: that the Gulf can host US power projection and still remain a neutral, insulated commercial space. It’s not just that the leader is gone, it’s what follows next. And what follows next? A massive escalation. Iran isn’t going to turn the other cheek, nor are they like Venezuela in that they’ll apparently roll over. That’s no how this works, that’s not the mindset, for all the decades of Western and Zionist occupation and presence in the Middle East, they remain as utterly clueless as ever about the people of the region. With their leader gone, all bets are off, the gates of hell have now been opened and how much of the region will now end up burned in the process is anyone’s guess. The entire structure shifts in real time, right in front of our eyes now. You thought you could keep it isolated, didn’t you? You thought Iran would just fold in on itself, be broken by some bomb, some missile, some airstrike. The people would rise up against their government after you take out the Supreme Leader. The West assumed that killing a leader like Ali Khamenei would collapse the entire system. They thought it was a decapitation strike, and the system would just stop moving. But here’s the thing: Iran’s system doesn’t freeze. It hardens. In one of the most remarkable political acts, the Iranian government invokes Article 111 of its own constitution, forming a leadership council to carry on the fight. And suddenly, the enemy is faced with a new problem: they’ve killed the figurehead, but the engine? It very much keeps running. Now, you’re seeing the consequences of that reality. But let’s break it down. From the moment Khamenei was killed in that joint US-Israeli strike, the Iranian people, the Iranian military, the leadership, they all see this for what it is: a direct attack. And they’ll make sure it’s paid for. Khamenei being taken out is the Shia equivalent of assassinating the Pope.

Host states to US air bases can’t pretend they’re not involved in attacking Iran when their airspace is taking all the risk for Trump and Netanyahu. Right, so Bahrain’s National Communication Centre has said sites and facilities inside Bahrain have been targeted in the Iranian retaliation, following US and Israeli strikes this morning, and that the country has been subjected to external attacks, with emergency procedures activated and “further military-related details” to follow. That isn’t Bahrain doing commentary, it’s Bahrain warning its own public that missiles and interceptions have dragged their airspace into the fight. And they aren’t alone. Iran’s retaliation has gone after the US basing network in the Gulf: Al-Udeid in Qatar, Ali al-Salem in Kuwait, Al-Dhafra in the UAE, and a Fifth Fleet-linked facility in Bahrain. Those are not abstract “partners”, they are the forward operating nodes the US uses for air operations, logistics, command and control, and regional reach, which is why they sit where they sit. Once those sites are named as targets, the host states stop being background scenery and start being part of the operational picture, because they have to manage airspace closures, interception activity, civil aviation disruption, public alerts, and the domestic question of why their territory is being used as a platform in the first place. Donald Trump has called the US strike package “major combat operations” and has claimed it was about “eliminating imminent threats”, and Israel has used “pre-emptive” language for its own strikes. Those labels are not decoration, they are legal and political cover, because “pre-emptive” only survives as a claim if there is an imminent threat that can actually be shown.

Israel has shut schools and civilian airspace because Iran’s missiles have made this a live, ongoing threat - But It's Netanyahu first into the lifeboats. Right, so Donald Trump has ordered the United States into joint strikes on Iran alongside Israel, and the first day’s headlines are already the ones nobody can spin away: an elementary girls’ school in Minab has been hit and children have been killed. The adults running this can talk about “targets” and “operations” and “imminent threats” until they are blue in the face. The dead children do not move for their language. Israel has hit two schools, according to Iranian state reporting carried by international coverage, with the Minab strike described as an attack on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school, and another school strike reported near Tehran. The Minab death toll has been reported as at least 115 killed, with at least 45 reported wounded. Those numbers matter because they are the harm made countable, and because the count only rises as rubble is cleared and missing children are accounted for. The other fact that sits alongside those figures is the location: a girls’ elementary school has been one of the sites hit in the opening wave, as if a school is as big a threat to Israeli interests as a missile silo. Trump has dressed the operation up in the oldest clothes in the cupboard, the same ones every White House administration reaches for when it wants violence to sound like responsibility. He has talked about “freedom”, he has talked about eliminating threats, he has talked like a man who thinks he can bomb his way into a clean story. You do not get to sell yourself as the man who hates interventionist wars, as the peace President with your fake FIFA peace prize medal and then run this line when schoolchildren are being dug out of a crater by their bereft parents and the community.

If Israel are now saying that the Bible sets their borders and “security zones” that will last forever, don’t call it talk - call it a map. Right, so Yair Lapid, the leader of Israel’s main opposition party in parliament, has gone into an interview and described the Bible as Israel’s ownership deed over the land, and then treated “biblical borders” as the reference point for where Israel can stretch when “security and policy and time” allow it. Meanwhile, Israel Katz, Israel’s defence minister, has gone to a military officers’ graduation ceremony and said the Israeli army will remain in a Gaza “security zone” forever, along with territory in both Lebanon and Syria, that is aside from the Golan Heights which they took years ago. Those aren’t two random lines. They’re two senior politicians, from two different lanes of Israeli power, taking the same move and making it harder to deny, because a deed claim and a forever claim remove the escape hatch that relies on pretending this is temporary. The American sitting in the background of all of this is Mike Huckabee, the United States ambassador to Israel, the man who is meant to speak for Washington on Israel in public. Huckabee has been on a high-profile interview and treated the “Bible borders” framing as something he can entertain, and he has used language that amounts to blessing total control, before trying to walk it back as if that undoes what was heard. That matters here only as a trigger, because the real story begins when Israeli figures respond to that kind of permission talk not by rejecting it as reckless, but by leaning into the premise more, then backing it with permanence language from the defence ministry. The power play is taking a claim that should be treated as unacceptable and shifting it into the range of “things important people can say,” then using “security” to make the map change feel like a defensive reflex.

US–Israel strikes on Iran have already started widening into a regional war, and the spillover is happening fast. Right, so Donald Trump has ordered the United States into strikes on Iran, Israel has joined in, and Tehran has been hit, and the pretence of a tidy, controlled event is already dead. Sirens have been sounding in Israel, a state of emergency has been declared there, and that is what “backfires already” looks like though isn’t it: once you hit a country like Iran, you don’t get to dictate the reply, the timing, or the shape of the region’s next forty-eight hours. A statement from Donald Trump has put the scale on record in his own words, because he is calling it “major combat operations” and saying the objective is to eliminate what he calls “imminent threats” from Iran. He is talking about destroying missiles, razing an industry, annihilating a navy, and preventing Iran from having a nuclear weapon, they don’t want anyway and this is the public opening of a campaign built to justify the words he has chosen. A claim about “imminent threats” is the word you use to say you had no choice and had to act now. The trouble is its what they always say and with Iran never having launched an attack on any other nation unprovoked, it is particularly weak here. Trump has used the word anyway, and the public is being asked to treat his deranged speech as evidence and to accept that the same people who chose the timing get to define the urgency after the fact. Israel’s government has mirrored that framing, because Benjamin Netanyahu has called Iran an “existential threat”, he’s been saying it for 30 years, and has praised Trump for leadership, nothing to do with him having gone to the states 7 times since Trump became President again of course and talked about joint action while pitching it as creating conditions for Iranians to take their fate into their own hands.

Jordan says their airspace if off limits to strikes on Iran while the US fill one of their airbases withh aircraft, cargo flights and air defences. What gives? Right, so Jordanian foreign minister Ayman Safadi has phoned Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi and said Jordan will not allow its territory or airspace to be used for any military action against Iran, said like the sentence itself can shut a runway. Three things then happen, and you can’t talk around any of them. First, Muwaffaq Salti Air Base at Azraq in eastern Jordan is being used as a US hub. Second, commercial satellite imagery has shown more than sixty American military aircraft on the ground there. Third, flight tracking has logged at least sixty-eight US military transport planes landing there since mid-February. So Safadi has “off limits” for the microphones and Azraq has “in use” on the tarmac, and the tarmac is the part that decides what is true. King Abdullah has put himself right in the middle of it because he runs the state that hosts it, and his government is trying to sell two versions of reality at once, one for Washington and one for everyone at home who doesn’t want Jordan volunteered into someone else’s war. Jordan has lived off defence agreements and basing arrangements for years, and the bargain is always the same: keep the relationship sweet, keep the public calm, and do it with protective language about sovereignty and control. The problem is that “we won’t be used” is not a feeling, it is a claim about use, and use is something you can measure when a base fills up and the cargo aircraft keep landing. Muwaffaq Salti isn’t a talking point, it’s an airbase at Azraq, and it either gets used or it doesn’t.

Farage and Goodwin have now wailed to their supporters that losing is “cheating”, as the Greens take Gorton And Denton Right, so that was a good night to be a Green Party supporter wasn’t it? the result in Gorton and Denton by-election has been declared and the numbers are the whole story before anyone gets to start crying about “integrity” and who has it and who doesn’t. Hannah Spencer for the Greens got 14,980 votes, Matt Goodwin for Reform got 10,578, Angeliki Stogia for Labour got 9,364, and the Greens are more than 4,400 ahead of second place, so it wasn’t even close in the end, all while Labour isn’t even the runner-up, it’s third, its nightmare scenario position. Nigel Farage has immediately taken an early lead in something else though and that would be the sore loser stakes, as while others in his party are playing the result down, that they never thought they would actually win, as if Matt Goodwin would ever be the candidate if that were true, Farage called it “a victory for sectarian voting and cheating”, and he has done that after losing by a margin that does not need excuses to explain it away and done so in such a way as to make obvious what he means – he’s blaming Muslims and a weird family voting story that is going round, which I’ll deal with in a moment. But Nigel Farage has chosen to respond like this because he has just watched the one thing that matters to him fail, which is his ability to make Reform look inevitable in a seat where he thought the demography and the mood might be enough. He has got a strong second place, he has pushed Labour into third, he has done the thing he always does which is turn politics into a grievance machine, and he has still lost, so he has reached for the same move that always follows a loss that hurts, which is to put suspicion onto the voters rather than responsibility onto himself. That is why “cheating” is the word he’s reached for, because it is not about fixing a procedure, it is about staining a result, and it is the first step in making people argue about legitimacy instead of arguing about why a party got rejected by thousands of people.

Labour couldn’t sell their case, so they tried to steer choice instead with a made-up “tactical vote” flyer before you can reach the polling station Right, so Labour has shoved a “tactical voting” leaflet through doors in Gorton and Denton that cites a tactical voting company calling itself “Tactical Choice”, telling people that Labour are the tactical voting choice in this by-election to keep out Reform. The only trouble is the whole stunt is a sham, as the tactical voting organisation being used to recommend a vote for Labour here appears to be entirely fake. Keir Starmer’s lot can dress this up with neat fonts and a little logo and the usual desperate air of adults doing something responsible, but when the claim on the paper is “an independent tactical voting organisation says vote Labour” and the accusation is “that organisation does not exist”, you’re not in the territory of persuasion, you’re in the territory of a party using outright deception to secure votes. Starmer’s party turning out to be a bunch of dirty little liars, well I can just hardly believe it(!) Green Party leader Zack Polanski has put the outspoken Labour Deputy Leader Lucy Powell on the spot over this in a letter, though the question being put to her isn’t “did some random volunteer get carried away”, the question is who signed off on a tactic that appears to be riddled with the worst excesses of bottom feeding scummery that relies on a voter believing a neutral outside body is speaking from a position of authority when it isn’t. The letter doesn’t play games with euphemisms either, it calls it lying to voters, and it asks a very simple question that a governing party hates being asked, which is whether it thinks different standards apply when it is in power and when it is fighting for a seat. Tactical voting exists because first past the post turns elections into a hostage situation. People don’t get to vote for what they want; they get told to vote against what they fear, and then they get blamed if the fear wins. That creates a market for tactical voting guides, because voters are trying to make a decision under constraint, and a party that can’t make a positive case learns to weaponise that constraint by turning it into a demand.

Trump’s war posture is now entirely physical: assets move, bases clear, smelly repairs bite, protests flare, and Iran has put retaliation on record. Right, so Donald Trump is continuing his game of chicken with Iran, and the part that’s turned ugly here – well there’s a few of them - isn’t so much the shouting, it’s the receipts, because the United States is trying to project “readiness” while the practical reality being reported is strain, friction, and timetable, and the small detail that he can’t pep-talk a massively faulty sewage system into working. The USS Gerald R. Ford, can be smelt before it is seen it seems as it has been reported as having ongoing, massive sewage system failures, because despite the price tag of the vessel sitting at $13Bn, they ballsed up the toilets. Despite there being 600 toilets to serve the needs of more than 4500 crew members, narrow pipes, frequent clogs, toilets going down have been reported hundreds of times. In one instance whilst on deployment in Venezuela, over 200 toilet tantrums got reported in the space of a single day and with deployment having been extended again so the vessel could be deployed straight to the Eastern Mediterranean, the issue appears to only have gotten worse. Sailors queueing for in excess of 45 minutes, engineers dragged into long shifts to keep a basic sanitation system going on a ship carrying thousands of people. That’s a war platform supposedly advertised as the flagship of US military dominance and effortless control, and then you hear the human detail from on board that says the crew are living in a rotating set of “this works, this doesn’t” constraints. It is the perfect metaphor for Donald Trump’s position against Iran in my minds, because it, like him, is full of sh**.

Labour and Reform are pushing the same drugs-panic smear because polling has Greens ahead, so the “only Labour can stop Reform” line has failed. Right, so Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has decided that the way to hold Gorton and Denton is to tell people they don’t get a choice in the matter. The pitch is “only Labour can stop Reform”, it’s their only pitch, God forbid they stand for something rather than arrogantly demand your vote, but there we are. The threat is “a vote anywhere else lets Reform in”, never mind they’ve been copying Reformesque policy for months and the proof they’ve waved around for that claim has already been pulled apart in public. You see Full Fact has looked at Labour’s “only Labour can beat Reform” ad and said the bar chart in it is built on answers from just sixty-two respondents, and that it can’t reliably show how support compares between the parties. Whoops, you got full facted, and Labour could have just dropped it there, taken the loss that is coming their way regardless, and tried to win on something real. Standing for something if they can convince people something coming out of Starmer’s face is believable to begin with, but they didn’t. Of course then came the Omnisis poll didn’t it? This polled the seat with a sample size of four hundred and fifty-two and put the race where everyone can see it: Greens on twenty-two per cent, Reform on twenty per cent, Labour on eighteen per cent, with twenty-seven per cent undecided and thirteen per cent saying they would not vote. That’s before you even get into the numbers that come out once you exclude undecideds and non-voters and look at the weighted results, where the top three are sitting close enough to each other that nobody gets to talk like they’ve already won, or can speak like they expect to either. But both Labour and Reform have decided nevertheless that Zack Polanski is the person both will build attacks around, as well as Green candidate Hannah Spencer – how dare she go on holiday to San Francisco 12 years ago and be married whilst also not married to a chemist whilst also simultaneously living but not living in a gated mansion, I mean who does she think she is?

Huckabee didn’t just mouth off - he put “take it all” on the record with a US job title attached, and now the White House owns the fallout. Right, so US envoy to Israel Mike Huckabee has sat down with Tucker Carlson and said, with regards to the so called Greater Israel project that, “It would be fine if they took it all.” He then hurriedly walked back on it, presumably realising what he’d said, describing it as “somewhat of a hyperbolic statement,” and says Israel is not looking to expand its territory. Well tell that to Syria when the settlers broke through, or Lebanon as happened just the other week or indeed to the West Bank as further land seizures get legalised in Israeli law and Gaza is under the yoke of Trump’s Board of peace, where Israel have a seat at the table, but no Palestinian does. Tucker Carlson has done something that interviewers almost never do in these roles though, which was to push the question until the answer was plain. He asks about the biblical land framing, he names the rivers, the Nile to the Euphrates and he forces Huckabee to say out loud whether the claim is acceptable. Huckabee gave the permissive answer, not the careful one. Carlson then spelt out what “all” would mean in modern geography, because anyone pretending this is harmless talk relies on people not visualising the map. Huckabee didn’t stop there either, he leans into the framing and only later tried to pull back. The recording is out there, its on social media for all to see, there’s no deniability that’ll pass muster. Of course it was the Cheeto dusted one himself, Donald Trump who appointed Huckabee to the post, begging the question who is the bigger fool here. Ambassadors are selected, nominated, and sent to represent an administration, they are not free agents hired by chance. If the ambassador is reckless, the appointment is reckless.

China’s reported move to help Iran lock down its systems isn’t “spy drama” — it’s Israel’s inside-access playbook being priced out. Right, so China has decided it is not watching Israel’s intelligence footprint inside Iran like it’s a regional soap opera anymore, and the immediate consequence of that is very simple: the “inside access” part of Israel’s Iran playbook – ie Mossad - is now being treated as something that can be denied, choked, and priced up, and when that happens the people in Israel who have been selling “we’re always going to be there” start sounding like they’ve just been told the key in the door doesn’t work anymore. Benjamin Netanyahu can posture all he likes, he does love to pose, but if the door stops opening, all he can do is stand outside threatening to huff and puff. Mossad is of course Israel’s foreign intelligence service, and the allegation running through the current reporting isn’t just that they’ve got agents in Iran because every serious state assumes foreign spies exist, plus we’ve observed major arrest campaigns following the 12 day war with Israel last year and following the Iranian protests in recent weeks, but it’s also that they’ve been infiltrated deep enough to make Iranian systems fail from the inside and deep enough to make military action look easier than it should. That turns the whole story from jets and missiles into passwords, procurement, maintenance contracts, vetting, and the boring seams where state secrets can leak. Well one state has it seems had enough of that - China. Chinese military and security commentators are being quoted describing Mossad’s penetration of Iran as a “Pandora’s box” problem, because sabotage, cyber intrusion, and internal enablement don’t stay local once they work, they get copied. A second report leans into the same line and frames it as a China problem, because if a foreign service can get inside critical systems and make air defence and command structures wobble before anything starts, then ports, pipelines, rail corridors, satellite links, and trade routes become targets long before the first missile launches.

If Mandelson’s toxic legacy can wipe out a whole influence firm this fast, what else have they been doing behind those closed doors? Right, so Interpath has been appointed joint administrator to Peter Mandelson’s infamous firm Global Counsel Ltd and well, that’s going to hurt isn’t it? The firm has stopped trading, the clients have fled, and the people who thought they were buying permanence have just discovered how quickly a business built on reputation dies when the reputation turns into poison. Global Counsel has traded for years on one thing, and it isn’t genius strategy or rare insight, it’s borrowed authority. It’s access dressed up as expertise, the promise that if you pay the right people you don’t have to fight your case in public because you can fight it in rooms you’ll never see, the rooms where power and the people who wield it reside. Peter Mandelson’s name has been part of that product because he’s spent decades moving between government, Labour’s internal power games, and the corporate world that pays for those introductions. You don’t even have to hate him for this to be ugly. The point is the same: his name wasn’t decoration, it was part of what the client thought they were buying. Interpath has said the directors had “no option” but to seek administrators after a rapid loss of clients, and it has said the business has ceased to trade while options are reviewed. Those are not the words of a temporary wobble. Those are the words you use when the runway is already behind you. It also tells you the brutal truth of this industry: a public affairs firm can look healthy right up until the moment it becomes untouchable, and then it can die in weeks, not years, because the product is trust and trust is the first thing that runs when the story turns toxic.

Trump’s “Deal Or Else” stule of diplomacy with Iran is now a trap he built for himself - and now the consequences are closing in. Right, so Donald Trump has put “deal or else” on the record with Iran, and he has done it with a clock attached, “10 to 15 days at most”, while the US military has been moving serious hardware into the region and while American officials keep floating “limited strikes” as if that phrase makes anything limited once you light everything up. Trump says he is considering limited strikes to “boost” his negotiating position, and that single admission removes the polite story people like to tell themselves about diplomacy being a separate lane from war planning. Not when its this berk it doesn’t. A negotiation becomes a coercion exercise the second the threat is presented as a tool. That is Trump’s choice, but it fixes a problem for him: if he keeps escalating the posture and the rhetoric, he has to either climb down publicly or climb into something he can’t easily climb out of. The US military build-up being described is anything but subtle of course. Reporting cites more than 120 aircraft moved into the region in recent days, described as the largest surge since the 2003 Iraq war, with fighter aircraft like F-35s and F-22s alongside enablers like AWACS, tankers, and cargo aircraft that make sustained operations possible rather than symbolic. The USS Gerald R. Ford has been redeployed from the Caribbean towards the Middle East to join the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group, recent reporting noting a brief transmission of its location off the coast of Morocco as it transited towards the Mediterranean. Carrier movements get sold as “presence”. Carrier movements operate as options. Options create pressure on decision-makers to “use” what they have visibly assembled.

Saudi Arabia just rewired the Middle East to dodge Israel - and Netanyahu’s normalisation dreams just slipped further out of reach. Right, so Saudi Arabia has just done the grown-up version of a snub. Not a speech, not a summit, not a “we remain committed” statement, just a quiet bit of map-redrawing where a route that was being floated through Israel is now being pushed through Syria instead. That tells you exactly what Riyadh wants you to know: Israel doesn’t get to be the default bridge, and the region doesn’t have to route its future through a state that keeps setting fire to its own neighbourhood. Saudi Arabia and Greece have been talking about a data corridor because the Gulf isn’t just trying to sell oil for ever, it’s trying to sell speed and scale, the kind of digital plumbing that lets you stick AI data centres in the desert and still ship the output straight into Europe. Saudi Telecom matters because this is how that ambition gets bolted to the ground. And if that corridor runs through you, you don’t just get a bit of money, you get to be necessary. That is what Israel was being positioned for, not because anyone loves Israel, but because the “normalisation” fantasy needed Israel to look like a safe, sensible, inevitable option. Saudi pushing Syria instead is Riyadh telling everyone it no longer wants to pretend. Benjamin Netanyahu has been selling that inevitability for years. He has made a whole political brand out of the idea that Israel can do whatever it wants to Palestinians and still be rewarded with trade, investment, and diplomatic trophies. The specific trophy he has chased hardest is normalisation with Saudi Arabia, because Saudi Arabia is the one that turns “quiet cooperation” into “the region has moved on”. That has been the promise: the occupation remains, the siege remains, the bombings remain, and the prizes still roll in.

If Israel can’t sell settlement dates honestly, it’ll try to sell them anonymously - check the label, photograph it, and report misleading origin. Right, so Israel is being accused of Medjool dates reaching European markets via third countries with origin labelling that obscures where they were grown, in a way that frustrates boycott-led consumer choice, and that claim bites because it lives or dies on one thing you can actually check: what the pack says, what the paperwork says, and what route the product took before it landed on a shelf. One report alleges that large volumes sold in Europe originate in Israel or Israeli-controlled production, including settlements in the occupied West Bank, and alleges some consignments may be repackaged or presented with origin information that points to intermediary countries rather than the growing location like the Netherlands, Morocco, the UAE, or even Palestine. Another report frames the same allegation as a traceability and consumer-labelling problem, saying settlement-grown dates are being routed through intermediaries and labelled in ways that conceal settlement provenance, even though European rules require clarity on origin for settlement goods. That is the concrete event: a live accusation of origin being obscured on a specific export product, circulating right as Ramadan demand spikes. The reason this is so combustible is that origin is not a decorative detail, it is the whole point of the purchasing decision for people who are boycotting Israel right now, and it is the point of the law for regulators who are supposed to stop consumers being misled. The Court of Justice of the European Union has already ruled, that food originating in territories occupied by Israel has to carry an indication of that territory, and if it comes from an Israeli settlement it has to say so, because otherwise consumers are misled about what they are buying and where it comes from.

Shock Green Party by-election win just shattered the hype machine — and it could happen again next week. Right, so Leicester City Council has declared a Green Party gain in Stoneygate, and it is already a receipt for anyone still pretending the “Green surge” is just a social media aesthetic. And the establishment and their media mouthpieces the spin machine if you like are scrambling because the numbers don’t just show a Green win, they show utter humiliation for those they hype up. Aasiya Bora has been elected for the Green Party with 1,195 votes, Labour, who held the seat previously came second with 1,089, but Reform UK managed to get just 106 coming in 6th. A win like that does two things at once. It takes a seat off Labour, and it punctures the lazy assumption that Reform is the inevitable protest vehicle in every bit of England where voters are furious with the main parties. Reform has turned up on the ballot in Stoneygate and has landed just 106 votes. That is not “momentum”. That is not “breakthrough”. That is not the “red wall meets the suburbs” fairy tale. That is a flop in plain English: showing up, getting flattened, and then hoping nobody notices. Well too bad, some of us have and I’m here for it! A by-election is a pressure test. It shows what happens when a local contest turns into a referendum on national conduct and local credibility at the same time. Stoneygate has just shown that the Greens can take Labour head-on and win, and it has shown that Reform can be present and still be irrelevant on the night. That is a problem for Labour’s complacency and a problem for Reform’s hype, and it sits there as a constraint on what either of them can credibly say next. Aasiya Bora has not dropped out of the sky as an anonymous green either. She has been a named Green Party candidate before, and she has been visible enough to have published political writing under her own name. She has written publicly as a Green Party member from Leicester, describing herself as a mum, a former English teacher, and now working in a project role.

Andrew arrested, Mandelson probed - where it comes to Jeffrey Epstein, “nobody is above the law” is about to get tested hard. Right so Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly known as Prince, has been arrested by Thames Valley Police on suspicion of misconduct in public office, and officers have been searching addresses in Berkshire and Norfolk, and that alone is enough to set the whole Epstein universe on fire again, because this isn’t another vague “links to Epstein” story any more, it’s the British state saying, out loud, that it is treating a former royal now as a suspect in an abuse-of-office investigation connected to what he is alleged to have passed to Jeffrey Epstein while holding a public role. But Peter Mandelson is the name sitting right beside that in the public mind, because the Metropolitan Police have already confirmed they are also investigating misconduct in public office allegations involving a former minister in relation to Epstein material and they have executed search warrants there as well, and the public can see the two tracks at once now, not as gossip, as policing decisions, and that is why the question becomes immediate and unavoidable: why does one man get the full spectacle and the coercive control of an arrest while the other gets “under investigation” language, even while warrants are being served? Andrew’s brother, King Charles has done the ritual line, deep concern, proper process, law must take its course, and Keir Starmer has done the other strand of that, saying nobody is above the law, and anybody with information should come forward. With the nonsense he’s up to in trying to make the law fit when it comes to protesters, it’s a bit rich invoking the law in respect to this quite frankly, but that’s by the by. Those phrases though are supposed to steady the ship, but they don’t, because when the Epstein name is involved people do not hear reassurance, they hear establishment self-protection, and they start asking who is being thrown overboard and who is being kept behind the rope, how far does this latest Epstein rabbit hole go?

Trump’s Iran threats are now colliding with real-world red lines, a live military build-up, and a negotiation track detonating into war. Right, so Donald Trump has sent big, very loud signals at Iran while keeping the talks going, and those two things do not sit together unless the threat is the whole point. The second round of indirect talks in Geneva has ended, Iran’s side has described it as more serious than the first round, and they are talking about “guiding principles” and drafting. At the same time, Trump has been pushing more military weight into the region, and Israel’s own leadership has been told to prepare for a war scenario. Ali Khamenei has gone on record with the bluntest version of what Iran is saying back: you bring carriers, we have weapons that can sink them. He has framed it as a warning, not a plea, and he has framed American “strongest army” boasting as exactly the sort of arrogance that produces a surprise you cannot walk off, that even the strongest armies can get hurt. Once the other side answers your threat with a specific consequence, it stops being performance and starts being a bill you might have to pay. Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, has described the Geneva talks as more constructive than the earlier round and said there’s a general understanding on guiding principles, but he has also been careful to say it’s early days and the hard part is still to come when it comes to putting anything into text. The real fight isn’t the atmosphere in the room, it’s what Iran would actually accept on uranium enrichment, what the United States would actually trade on sanctions relief, and whether Washington is trying to drag missiles and regional alliances into a nuclear negotiation until “deal” really means surrender. Steve Witkoff, Donald Trump’s special envoy leading the US delegation, is doing it in a format that shows how little trust exists, because the talks are still indirect and mediated by Oman. Nobody is sat there smiling across a table. Notes are being carried back and forth like both sides are building a paper trail as much as they are building an agreement.

BBC Question Time panel leaves the Greens out while Labour bleeds councillors to them days before Gorton & Denton votes. Right, so Fiona Bruce is hosting Question Time tonight and the BBC has already published the panel list, which means the thing doing the damage is not a clip, not a quote, not a bad moment on air, it’s a decision that exists before the cameras even roll, because it names four people and only four people: Heidi Alexander for Labour, Richard Holden for the Conservatives, Robert Jenrick for Reform, and Jon Sopel as the journalist, and the Greens are not in the room. That list sits there in public before a single audience question, and that’s the whole point, because when a programme that often squeezes in five guests decides it’s only doing four tonight, it isn’t “one of those things”, it’s a hard exclusion choice, it’s a choice about who gets treated as automatic politics and who gets treated as optional, and they’ve made that choice in the same week a Green candidate is actually on a real ballot in a live parliamentary by-election. Tom Stannard, acting as Returning Officer for Manchester, has already signed and published the legal notice that fixes the Gorton and Denton by-election for Thursday 26 February 2026, and that notice is the hard object the whole week is built around because it lists the candidates by name, including Hannah Spencer for the Greens, Labour’s Angeliki Stogia, and Reform UK’s Matt Goodwin, so the Greens aren’t some outside commentator asking for airtime, they are literally on the ballot in a parliamentary contest happening in days. Robert Jenrick being put on that Question Time sofa tonight then becomes a broadcast decision with teeth, because the BBC is choosing who gets treated as automatic national politics in the same news cycle that by-election is live, and with Jenrick booked Reform gets the default stamp of “serious” while the Greens get treated as the party you can leave off the stage even when the Returning Officer’s own notice says they are in the same race.

Israel is using a land-registry process to reclassify Palestinian land as “state land” when proof thresholds can’t be met - on their terms of course. Right, so this is the proof object. Land registration. A state registry entry. A file that turns Palestinian land into “state land” if the people living on it can’t satisfy an Israeli proof test. Bezalel Smotrich is Israel’s finance minister, and he’s the one driving this as part of the settlement push. Yariv Levin is Israel’s justice minister, giving the legal machinery and the courts cover to run it as “procedure”. Israel Katz is Israel’s defence minister, which means the whole thing sits under the same security apparatus that controls Area C on the ground. They’ve restarted a process that was frozen for decades and they’re calling it “transparency” and “dispute resolution”, which is always the language you reach for when you want theft to sound like admin. Because once the registry says the land belongs to the state, the eviction stops looking like a land grab and starts looking like “enforcement”. That’s how people get erased without a headline-making massacre, and it’s also why Jordan is sounding the alarm and why this stops being a local story. So stay with me, because I’m going to show you how the mechanism works, why the proof bar is the weapon, and what this locks in for the region once it’s written into the record. Right, so Israel’s cabinet has now approved a return to land registration in the occupied West Bank, and the names attached it matter because it tells you what this is for: Bezalel Smotrich has brought it, Yariv Levin has backed it, and Israel Katz has signed onto it, and the mechanism is brutally simple even when it’s wrapped in tidy bureaucratic language. The state restarts a process that was frozen for decades, the state decides what gets “settled”, and anything Palestinians cannot prove to an Israeli standard gets recorded in the state’s name. Land becomes “state land” by default. A dispossession pipeline with a rubber stamp.

Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain is splitting Farage’s vote — and dragging the whole right wing further into a deportation bidding war. Right, so Rupert Lowe has launched a new party called Restore Britain, so now there are now two hard-right parties chasing the same voters, Reform and Restore, sat side by side, competing in the same turf. The far right starting to eat itself. So on the surface, that sounds like good news. If you want Nigel Farage stopped, a split like this could blunt his momentum, waste votes under First Past The Post, and turn his “inevitable next government” act into a right wing scrap. But here’s there is a catch. Lowe isn’t trying to beat Farage by being better at governing. He’s trying to beat him by being nastier. He’s already on record talking in “millions will have to go” terms when it comes to migration, he’s already playing games with who counts as British, and Reform figures are already publicly arguing about the racism swirling around Restore’s online antics. So here’s what we need to go over, because I’m going to walk through what this split could block under first past the post, what it could still drag the country into even if Restore wins nothing, and why Farage’s attempt to look respectable could end up forcing him into the same mistake we’ve seen the Tories and Starmer’s Labour make in chasing a right wing flank of voters drifting away from you, until the whole argument moves right. Right, so Rupert Lowe has launched Restore Britain as a political party and, in the process, he’s turned Nigel Farage’s big selling point into a visible weakness: the far right in Britain is not a single brand, it’s a market, and markets split when there’s money, attention, and grievance to harvest. Lowe has done the launch through a set-piece announcement video, shot on his farm, built to travel on social media first, and to feel like it’s already a movement before it’s even a party. Restore Britain has been presented as the place you go if you think Reform has started playing dress-up and trying to look “credible” for the cameras, the donors, and the same old TV panels, and that framing matters because it means Lowe isn’t trying to outcompete Farage on competence, he’s trying to outcompete him on permission.

Labour’s Gorton & Denton dinner tape has triggered a police complaint - watch the clip, then judge what it says for yourself. Right, so Labour’s Gorton and Denton dinner tape is leaving a bit of a legal aftertaste, and I’m not asking you to take my word for anything because the proof is the tape itself. So here’s the deal, I’m going to play you the clip, I’m going to tell you what we can say with certainty just from what’s visible and audible, and then I’m going to walk you through the only thing that matters after that, which is the legal and political mechanics that make this so toxic for Labour in Gorton and Denton. Because “treating” is a real word in election law, “ordinary hospitality” is the excuse everyone reaches for, and intent is the hinge that decides whether this is just grim optics or something that drags a campaign into a police file. And if you’re thinking this is just another internet row, it isn’t, because once a by-election is being fought with a dinner tape as Exhibit A, nobody in that race gets to pretend it’s about policy leaflets anymore. So stick with this, because by the end of this you’ll know exactly what questions Labour can’t dodge, what receipts would make or break the story, and why the public judgement lands long before any official process does. Right, so that was the video clip in question, circulating from the Gorton and Denton parliamentary by-election campaign showing a roomful of people at a sit-down meal, with Labour campaign material visible, and a voice on the recording setting out a condition for being fed that sounds, to the ear, like “if you want to get fed” then you need to hold signs up. And the first consequence is not even legal, it’s practical: once something like that is on film, nobody in that room gets to pretend the event is private, nobody in the campaign gets to pretend it’s a misunderstanding that can be tidied away with a statement, and every other party in the constituency now has a ready-made line that fits on a leaflet.

Greens “Zionism Is Racism” Vote Being Stopped? Here’s how the conference clock could stop a vote without anyone actually banning it. Right, so Green Party Spring Conference 2026. Motion A105. “Zionism is Racism.” Is the vote now at risk of not being reached? Because look at this. A stack of amendments are now sitting on top of the motion like a weight, and the only thing you need to know about conference is the clock doesn’t care who’s right, it cares how long it motions take to proceed. If this gets dragged out, if this turns into endless micro-changes and procedural wrangling, you don’t need anyone to ban it. You just need time to run out, and then you get the easiest outcome for everyone to hide behind is ‘we ran out of time’ ‘we didn’t have time to get to get to vote’. So I’m going to show you what is happening in regards to this motion now, how a vote can be stopped without anyone admitting they stopped it, what the Standing Orders Committee can do about it, and what members can do to make sure this doesn’t end as a no-vote scandal where everyone’s furious and nobody’s accountable. Right, so Jewish Greens has published a call urging Green Party members to vote against Motion A105, and it has done it in the only way that forces the party into a reputational bind, because it frames the motion as something that risks making Jews feel unwelcome in the party and it treats “Zionism” as a term so broad that it can become a disciplinary label rather than a political description. Jewish Greens has also put on record a fear that party structures could be instructed to act on that label in ways that leave Jewish members uniquely vulnerable to accusation and disciplinary stress, and it has warned about the public impression of the party moving from anti-Zionism to anti-Jewishness in the eyes of people who will not read fine distinctions. Jewish Greens does not speak for all Jews and it does not speak for every Jewish Green member, and it does not need to, because the moment a self-identified Jewish group inside the party publishes a warning about belonging and discipline, the party is now operating under a public constraint that no procedural memo can undo.

Right, so Donald Trump has just come out with the line that tells you where this is really heading. Regime change in Iran, he says, would be “the best thing that could happen”. Well for who, you big orange balloon? So when you now hear about how “talks are ongoing”, don’t picture diplomats leaning over a table looking for a deal. Picture a countdown with a polite label stuck on it instead.Because at the same time, the US military is being described as getting ready for operations that could run for weeks, with everyone involved expecting Iran to hit back. A second aircraft carrier is moving in. Bases are being hardened. And the kind of targets being discussed aren’t just “nuclear sites”, they’re the state itself.So in this video I’m going to do something really simple. I’m going to take the tangerine tyrant’s quote, lay it next to the buildup, and show you what it removes, because in doing what he has done and saying what he has said, he’s already removed deniability and it removes the idea this is still about a neat little technical deal. And it leaves you with the only question that matters now: how long do they plan to keep calling it “talks” while they set the board for war, now seemingly saying as much out loud?Right, so Donald Trump has stood there, in public, and answered the regime change question by saying it “seems like that would be the best thing that could happen” in Iran, and once a US president starts speaking like that, every other sentence about diplomacy becomes stage dressing and every “indirect negotiation” becomes a timer you can’t see, because the end-state being floated isn’t a deal, it’s a removal. That fixes a constraint on everyone else in the room, including the negotiators who are still trying to pretend this is a normal bargaining process with a normal off-ramp, and it fixes a constraint on Iran too, because there is no technical concession that answers a demand for your government to stop existing.The Pentagon is simultaneously preparing for the kind of operation that doesn’t fit inside the neat little euphemisms people use when they want audiences to think “limited”, “surgical”, “one night”, “back to normal by Monday”. The planning being described by US officials is for sustained operations measured in weeks, not hours, and the target set being contemplated goes beyond nuclear-related infrastructure into Iranian state and security facilities. That is the operational definition of escalation, because once state facilities are in scope, the action is no longer being sold as “non-proliferation enforcement”, it is being built as punishment, disorientation, and pressure against the machinery of the state. It is also being built with an assumption of retaliation, meaning the plan is not “hit and stop”, it is “hit, absorb, hit again”, and that means the real decision is not whether a strike happens but whether the United States accepts a back-and-forth cycle as a managed condition for weeks.The hardware posture has been shifting in ways that match that assumption, because a country preparing to throw one punch does not spend this much effort on shields unless it expects the other side to throw one back. The USS Gerald R. Ford is being moved towards the region to join the USS Abraham Lincoln, and you don’t do that for show. You do it because you want more aircraft, more sorties, more command-and-control depth, and the ability to keep going day after day. A second carrier isn’t about signalling politely across a negotiating table; it’s about making the threat real, and keeping it real.

Yvette Cooper’s Observer column is now the evidence in a contempt complaint - but will the law apply to a minister? Right, so look at this. Yvette Cooper, former Home Secretary, now Foreign Secretary, wrote in a national newspaper piece about Palestine Action while criminal proceedings linked to them are still live, and she’s done it in the one way that creates the maximum legal friction, because she’s not just arguing policy, she’s branding them with “violence, intimidation… weapons, and serious injuries”, and then she admits in the same breath that “important details cannot yet be publicly reported because of criminal proceedings”. So she’s telling you she knows the cases are active, she’s telling you she can’t publish the specifics, and she’s still pushing the most loaded framing she can get on the record anyway. Now Defend Our Juries say they’ve lodged a contempt of court complaint to the Attorney General, Richard Hermer, over that exact kind of ministerial commentary, because contempt exists for one reason: so powerful people don’t get to salt the ground around a trial and then act surprised when “fair jury” becomes a fantasy. So stay with me, because I’m going to put the line on screen, I’m going to show you why it’s not a harmless turn of phrase, I’m going to connect it to what Parliament has already voted through, and I’m going to spell out what this forces onto the table now: either ministers are bound by the rules they preach, or “rule of law” is just something they shout at everyone else. Right, so Yvette Cooper has chosen to write a newspaper column about a group that the state has just shoved under terrorism powers, while criminal cases linked to that group are still live, and she has done it in the one way that creates the most legal friction: not by arguing policy, not by talking in generalities, but by stitching together a picture of “violence, intimidation…

Trump’s “very big force” threat ramps up as a second US carrier heads for the region, with Iran refusing to play ball at all... Right, so Donald Trump is sending a second aircraft carrier towards Iran while talks are still on, and he’s not even pretending what it’s for. He’s saying the quiet part in plain English: if there’s no deal, he “needs” the force, and if there is a deal, he can “cut it short”. So this isn’t diplomacy with a backstop, it’s a negotiation being conducted with a threat sitting on the table, and everyone’s meant to call that “peace”. Here’s what matters. Iran doesn’t respond to being leaned on like this, because the whole point of its posture is to make intimidation expensive. Meanwhile Trump is widening the demand list, Netanyahu is pushing for maximal terms, and the US Navy is stretching deployments like that has no cost. So in this one, I’m going to lay out what this actually locks in, who it traps, and why moving more hardware doesn’t buy control - it buys risk. Right, so Donald Trump has ordered a second US aircraft carrier towards the Middle East while indirect talks with Iran are still happening, and he has linked the deployment to whether Iran signs up to what he wants. Donald Trump has said the United States is prepared to deploy “a very big force” if the negotiations fail. Donald Trump has been asked why he is sending another carrier and he has answered that “in case we don’t make a deal, we’ll need it”, and that “if we have a deal, we could cut it short”. Donald Trump has said the second carrier will be leaving “very soon”. Donald Trump has added that if the talks are not successful it will be “a bad day for Iran — very bad”. That is the posture. That is the language. That is the environment the talks now sit inside. Trump’s moving the USS Gerald R. Ford strike group out of the Caribbean and sending it to link up with the USS Abraham Lincoln group already out there. And let’s not kid ourselves what that actually is. That isn’t “presence”. That’s a floating airbase with escorts and supply ships, built for one job: launching strikes and surviving long enough to keep doing it. So when Trump says he’ll “need it” if there’s no deal, he’s not talking about reassurance. He’s saying the threat is part of the bargaining.

High Court rules Palestine Action ban unlawful as Starmer’s government appeals, keeping proscription in force and fuelling backlash already. Right, so Keir Starmer’s government has just been told by the High Court that the Palestine Action ban was unlawful, and instead of taking the hit and moving on, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is already saying they’re appealing, which means they’re choosing to spend more public money fighting for the right to keep a protest group proscribed under the Terrorism Act 2000. “That label isn’t just a badge, it’s a legal weapon, because once proscription is in place it creates offences around membership and inviting support, it makes speech and symbols legally risky, and it gives police grounds to act on banners, badges and slogans, and it does it while ministers hide behind the word “security” like it ends the conversation. So in this video I’m going to walk through five concrete reasons that appeal is going to blow up in Labour’s face, because the court has already said they overreached, and the only question left is how loudly they insist on proving it again. Right, so Keir Starmer is now fronting a government that has been told by the High Court that its decision to proscribe Palestine Action was unlawful, and Shabana Mahmood is still insisting on appealing, which means the ban stays in place for now while the state argues for the right to keep it. Huda Ammori has brought the challenge as a co-founder of Palestine Action, so this isn’t some abstract rights group speaking on someone else’s behalf, it’s the person at the centre of it forcing the Home Office to justify the terrorism label in court. Dame Victoria Sharp has been on the panel that has ruled there was very significant interference with freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, and that is the court describing the move as a rights hit, not a bit of paperwork. Mahmood has chosen appeal over acceptance, so instead of taking the loss and stepping back, she’s dragging the government into a longer fight to defend the decision. And that lands on Starmer because he is the prime minister, she is his Home Secretary, and he’s the one who ends up owning the bill and the blame.

Iran’s offer puts Trump on the spot as Netanyahu pushes harder, with Oman talks, new US sanctions and the nuclear standoff back in the spotlight. Right, so Donald Trump is being offered a way out and it’s the kind of way out that makes powerful people uncomfortable because it forces them to admit what this has really all been about. Iran’s atomic chief, Mohammad Eslami, is saying fine, talk nuclear only, talk dilution of that sixty per cent stockpile, but lift every sanction in return and stop pretending this is a negotiation if you’re still tightening the noose while you talk. But here’s the bit that really matters: Benjamin Netanyahu is in Washington pushing for the exact opposite, widening the demands until there’s no deal left to sign, and Pete Hegseth is telling Iran to “make the wise choice” turning diplomacy into little more than a drunken threat. So in the next few minutes I’m going to walk you through the mechanics of the offer, the trap it sets for the US and Israel, and why the next escalation, if it comes, won’t be something that “just happened,” it’ll be a decision made in full view, with an offramp for Iran already sitting there, being ignored by the mainstream media on purpose. Right, so Mohammad Eslami has put a simple condition on the table and it has the annoying quality to the US and Israel of being clearly coherent. He has said Iran could consider diluting its stockpile of uranium enriched to sixty per cent if all sanctions are lifted in return. He has also said exporting uranium is not on the agenda. Donald Trump is trying to posture as the man of deals while keeping the boot on Iran’s throat, and the two instincts can’t both run the show at the same time. The American state wants Iran to accept a “zero enrichment” position, and it wants the kind of “bigger deal” that strips out missiles and allies and anything else that makes Iran hard to hit. Iran is saying no on everything except the nuclear file, and it is putting a price on even that, and the price is sanctions relief. Head of Iran’s National Security Council, Ali Larijani has walked into Muscat with that message and he has done it with deliberate timing. He has met Sultan Haitham bin Tariq in Muscat for nearly three hours and then held talks with Omani Foreign Minister Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi, and the visit is being explicitly tied to the first round of indirect talks between the United States and Iran on nuclear and sanctions-related issues hosted by Oman days earlier.