Kernow Damo

Right, so. Britain has apparently found the threat.

She’s 84 years old, she’s a retired Anglican priest, she walks with a stick, wears a clerical collar and a crucifix, and for this the state has decided terrorism law is the appropriate tool.

Meanwhile Elbit Systems gets more contracts.

Its executives get conference seats.

Its technology gets plugged into British military systems.

And another Israeli state arms company with a presence in Britain ends up operating through a supposedly Dutch corporate structure but doesn’t have any Dutch employees. The actual people and business activity seem to be over here.

But yes. Obviously. The elderly with their placards are the danger, that sign could give you a nasty paper cut, the fiends.

Grannies in the street travelling in groups armed with walking sticks and wheelchairs and a bag of Werther’s original are who you need to watch out for, not the targeting systems. Not the arms executives. Not the companies being welcomed into Britain’s military establishment. As much as we can poke a lot of fun at the framing here, because we all know how ridiculous this looks, this is more than one odd arrest. Not one copper having a funny five minutes. Britain has built a system which treats opposition to Israeli arms companies as a security threat, while treating those companies themselves as respectable partners and it’s all going on at the same time.

Right, so Nigel Farage has resigned as MP for Clacton.

Except, of course, he’s standing again.

Well nice try sunshine, but you’re kidding nobody.

What he’s doing here, at the expense of all of us, because by-elections cost a mint in and of themselves, is trying to replace one question with another. Instead of "Did you break the rules?" he wants the conversation to become "Can he still win Clacton?" They're not the same thing, it’s just the latest grift.

Farage is trying to turn an investigation into victimisation and thinks he can sell that from the soapbox. He’s not leaving politics. He’s not stepping away. He’s not saying, “Right, let the process run, let the watchdog do its job, let’s get to the bottom of this.”

No, no. He’s saying: let’s have a by-election.

Why?

Because if he wins Clacton again, he gets to say, “the people have cleared me.”

But they haven’t.

A by-election doesn’t clear you of failing to declare gifts. It doesn’t clear you of questions over homes, money, donors, crypto cash, or alleged undeclared support your sidekick and chief cigarette break organiser Posh George AKA George Cottrell, a literal convicted fraudster. It just means enough people voted for you.

That’s not a standards investigation. That’s a popularity contest, though just how popular you are in Clacton when you’re never bloody there remains to be seen.

Right, so Benjamin Netanyahu has been on Fox News claiming that Christian villages in Lebanon want to be annexed by Israel.

Yes. Annexed.

Not just “Israel protects them.” Not just “they’re worried about Hezbollah.” Not just the usual security porridge ladled out in front of an American TV audience. He went further than that. He claimed some Christian villages in Lebanon had actually asked to be annexed by Israel because Israel protects them.

Protection becomes annexation. Fear becomes consent. A village under pressure becomes, somehow, a willing participant in Netanyahu’s border-redrawing routine now. And all of it delivered with the breezy confidence of a man who apparently left the names, the documents and the actual villages in his other suit.

Which is handy, isn’t it? Very convenient. A prime minister currently sitting on occupied Lebanese territory suddenly discovers that, actually, bits of Lebanon would quite like to be Israel. Except of course it was bo**ocks.

Right, so this is what a “withdrawal framework” looks like now, apparently. Not a convoy leaving. Not a border post being handed back. Smoke.

Lebanon gets told there is a deal. A framework. A peace step. A route back to sovereignty. You can almost smell the conference-room coffee.

And then the ground blows up, because Israel’s idea of withdrawal, by the look of it, comes with a detonator in the welcome pack.

Yet that’s a problem for Netanyahu here. He needed this to look like withdrawal with a tie on. Careful language, official backdrops, everyone lined up for the cameras. Then the smoke rolls in from southern Lebanon again, and the whole thing starts looking less like diplomacy and more like a demolition job with a press pass.

But then there’s this footage.

And once you’ve seen the smoke, the sales pitch starts looking a bit less like diplomacy and a bit more like somebody missed - well, something rather important out of it and it stems from this recent event, which you might recall.

That was of course in the aftermath of Lebanon’s sell out of a deal to Israel

Lovely room. Lots of flags. Important people looking very official, though you can’t escape the feeling somebody’s back might have a knife pressed to it can you?

The violence is going on elsewhere. All the death a destruction goes on somewhere else. You put all the conditions you feel like you can get away with imposing here into the appendices at the back. Then you stand back and admire your machinations.

A framework. A step forward. A path to peace.

Wonderful.

And then, once the cameras move from the podium back to southern Lebanon, the whole thing starts coughing up smoke like a clapped-out old van trying to pass its MOT.

Right, so Ben-Gvir was apparently meant to be heading to New York.

For of all things, a police summit.

Yes, Ben-Gvir at a police summit, because apparently irony died and was buried, complete with a judicial badge pinned to the coffin.

But then something funny happened. Not so much funny ha-ha, more funny “oh look, there’s lawyers at the airport.” The Hind Rajab Foundation and the Center for Constitutional Rights were ready for him. New York authorities were being asked to look at who was preparing to touchdown on their soil. The prison scandal very much attached to his ministry that he cannot shake off, because the rest of the world isn’t as gone in the head as he is was very much going to be travelling with him.. And suddenly the trip is now reportedly not happening. Bottled it again by any chance Itamar?

Well, his office hasn’t confirmed the reason. We can enjoy a mental image of him quivering under his desk clutching a picture of Zohran Mamdani and cursing in his throatiest Hebrew, but we don’t actually know for certain. So no, as much fun as it would be to write a piece where we imagine him sprinting through Ben Gurion Airport with a suitcase full of panic and his tiny hat on sideways. We can’t.

However, the sequence is enough. A Police summit. Legal pressure. A prison scandal on the minister for prisons in Israel. And then cancellation.

Ben-Gvir is horrible, that’s stating the obvious. The fact that this story is now becoming more and more awkward outside Israel though appears to making the world a much smaller place for him and not without good reason.

Right, so Keir Starmer’s Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy, a woman who has just now decided to take herself and her department off of Twitter due because despite it being her brief, legislating its behaviour appears to be beyond her has gone to Parliament with a plan for “trusted news” online, because apparently Independent media outlets are a much safer target.

What counts as trusted news though? Public service media. The mainstream outlets, legacy news. It must be highly visible. Easy to discover. The sort of news the government likes given a boost over those that actually hold them to account.

But the moment a government starts saying certain news outlets should be made more visible on YouTube amongst other platforms, you have to ask who gets picked. You have to ask who gets pushed aside. You have to ask who decides which outlets count as trusted and which ones are apparently just grubby little peasants shouting into the digital ether.

People did not wander away from mainstream outlets like the BBC because they couldn’t find it. The BBC is hardly hidden. ITV is not buried in a cave. Sky News has not been living under a tarp behind the bins.

People went elsewhere because, on issue after issue, legacy media gave them reasons to go elsewhere.

And now the government’s answer appears to be: well, perhaps the old outlets need better placement.

Not better trust. Not better accountability. Better placement.

Right, so Israel’s grand security zone in southern Lebanon has apparently reached the “put a shop-window soldier in the firing line and hope for the best” phase.

Despite talks of some miracle new defence system in the offing, this is not a fancy laser, it is not a brand new air defence system to be deployed in Lebanon called the iron scrotum or some such other daft name, not one of those glossy start-up gadgets being presented by a salesman with a glossy pamphlet who says “battlefield ecosystem” far too much. It’s dummies. Fake soldiers. I suppose it goes well with all the fake news that comes out of Israel. Shop mannequins dressed up in military gear, reportedly placed in Lebanon as decoys against drones.

And yes, obviously, it’s funny. Look at it. It’s ridiculous.

But don’t let the joke distract from the bit underneath it, because the dummy is not just a gag. It’s what happens when the Hezbollah drone problem quite obviously still hasn’t gone away, and the attempts at answering them, from fishing nets as have been used in recent weeks to this now, clearly haven’t been enough, and seemingly such is the desperation now in trying to find a solution to this, that the next line of defence is now apparently Action Man with a death wish.

So when Israel’s leaders talk about control, and security zones, and staying until the threat is gone, keep that image in your head, because the answer now is apparently a helmet, a vest, but no pulse.

Right, so this is the bit of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Iran War victory lap that he’s been running for months now, no it wasn’t all about running away from his corruption trial apparently, that he doesn’t want anywhere near, because you can say “contained” as many times as you like. You can say “localised”, “manageable”, “operational”, all those lovely little words officials use when something is on fire but they don’t want anyone making a fuss.

But then there’s the footage.

There’s the fire. There’s the smoke. There’s the great big orange clue in the sky – flames and heat haze for those of you thinking Donald Trump’s raided the Red Bull and its given him wings.

But now there’s been a leak consisting of a damage report and a repair schedule and it very much doesn’t care about the speech, doesn’t care about Netanyahu’s claims, the boasting of total victory, doesn’t care how heroic the evening news package on Channel 14 was supposed to sound.

So what we need to look at here, the question that needs asking is not just what Iran hit.

The question is what Israel has also tried to minimise, and why Netanyahu is still selling more war while the last one is apparently still sending him invoices and apparently will be for a very long time yet.

Right, so Bezalel Smotrich has looked back at the Hamas hostage story, the families, the people who never came home, the deals he fought, the war his government kept selling as “total victory,” and somehow arrived at the conclusion that what this whole thing really needed was a round of applause for Bezalel Smotrich.

Because of course it did.

Why have grief, negotiations, pressure, families camping outside government buildings, months of rage and fear, when you could have one far-right minister sitting in a studio going: actually, this was basically me.

A hostage story turned into a medal ceremony. For him.

But the problem with trying to wear a national trauma as jewellery is that sometimes the people most closely attached to that trauma, the families of those killed, are still around. Still angry. Still bereaved and aggrieved. And suddenly this little victory lap routine starts to look a lot less like leadership and more like a man jogging round a cemetery in his party shoes.

So let’s start with the boasting, because, really, you need to see the nerve of it.

Well that wasn’t exactly subtle was it? Modesty not exactly his middle name. Placing himself right at the centre of it.

Thanks to me.

I mean, the sheer neck of it. You could power a small coastal town off that level of ego. The man Israeli reporting says opposed hostage deals at various stages is now presenting himself as the reason the hostages came home at all. Is there an election coming up? Oh just 3 months away now isn’t it?

Right, so Palantir, the giant US surveillance-tech firm that keeps turning up wherever public systems, police data, health data and state power are being bundled into something shiny and expensive, has just hit a rather awkward patch of road, you’ll be broken hearted to hear I’m sure.

Its boss has been boasting about Israel. Europe is starting to back away. France is moving off. Spain has reportedly told state-backed firms to avoid new contracts with them. Even permanently on the wrong side of history Germany has had its own sovereignty alarms go off over them. But here in Britain, because apparently our government sees a warning sign and mistakes it for a sales invitation, Palantir’s UK boss is on television over a blocked £50m Met Police deal, while Westminster still finds room for the corporate hospitality. Any excuse for a buffet.

So this story is about the moment Palantir’s politics, its public-sector ambitions and Europe’s growing rejection of US tech dependency all collide, and Britain somehow ends up standing there having still rolled out a red carpet.