Kernow Damo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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