Kernow Damo

Trump issued the ultimatum and Iran sent him back a bill, and a whole list of demands that'll change the Middle East forever. Right, so Donald Trump has thrown down what he wanted treated as a final ultimatum to Iran, threatened to blow up bridges and power plants if the Strait of Hormuz is not fully reopened by his deadline, tomorrow at time of writing and Iran has not folded. Iran has sent back its own response through Pakistan, rejected a temporary ceasefire, and put a permanent end to the war on the table instead. And that was just for starters. Not a little pause, not a tidy breathing space, not some stage-managed bit of diplomacy that lets Trump strut about saying he forced them to heel. A permanent end. A regional end to all other ongoing Israel instigated war and genocide too. That puts Gaza in the frame and Lebanon in the frame as well as Iran and that was just for starters. More on all this in a moment. But the man who wanted this sold as his deadline, by his order, because he is in charge now gets to stare at a counter-package that exposes his threats for what they really are, the baby throwing his toys out of the pram. However being the bloviating little man baby that he is, Trump has then compounded this, because of course he has. He has called the response significant but not good enough. He did read it didn’t he? Someone did break the big words down for him? He didn’t have Whisky Pete slurring it out for him or anything? Did someone draw a picture? These don’t seem completely unreasonable questions to ask, considering everything Iran has put on the table, 10 clauses. And yet hee has said the deadline is final. He has threatened bridges, power plants, and civilian infrastructure, he is literally threatening to commit war crimes before the entire world. He has gone from command language to apocalyptic language because the first round of threats did not produce the result he wanted. Iran will never bend to him. A man in control does not need to keep telling you he is in control after all, all while adding fresh threats every few hours it seems. A man with clean leverage does not need to keep widening the promised punishment because the original pressure will have already settled the matter. Trump has not settled the matter.

Haifa got hit, the mayor said the north had been left to cope alone, and Netanyahu’s answer made it all a lot harder to hide. Right, so four people have been killed in Haifa after an Iranian missile strike hit a residential building, Haifa’s mayor, Yona Yahav has then gone public saying the north has been treated like an afterthought, and Benjamin Netanyahu has come in afterwards with a phone call, some promises of help, and a little sermon about obeying Home Front Command instructions. But that is issue in itself, that is the whole political wound in miniature. A city in the north gets hit, and Haifa has of course been hit a lot over the last month, the refineries, the naval dockyards, and the like, it makes for a very convenient target for Iran, but this is the third largest city in all of Israel, people have died, and the mayor has had enough to the point he’s gone public, said he’s heard sod all from Netanyahu since the war with Iran began, says the place has been left carrying too much of the consequences on its own, and the prime minister’s answer is not to grapple properly with that complaint but to tell people that if they follow the rules and get into protected spaces their odds improve dramatically. I think you’re missing the point sunshine. Netanyahu has not waded into this looking like the man in command of a system that is holding together. He has stepped into it looking like the man arriving after a local authority figure has named and shamed him, has already defined the embarrassment for him, four people dead in Haifa after a month of that third largest city being ignored and all of a sudden a few hours later, Netanyahu scuttles out that video clip, that message, and still manages to miss the point completely. Yahav has not conjured this up because he fancied a turn in front of the cameras. He has been on this line for some time.

A downed US jet over Iran has turned into a contested Isfahan rescue fiasco that has left Trump wearing the bigger humiliation. Right, so rescue one downed crewman, rescued two or was it really a uranium centric ruse? Whatever the truth of the downed F15, who can possibly believe one version of events over another anymore? Donald Trump has ended up neck deep in his own nappies. A US fighter has come down over Iran, both crewmen have ended up on Iranian territory, one has been reported recovered first, and the second has then become the centre of a much bigger row around southern Isfahan, with one side claiming a daring extraction and the other side insisting the rescue mission turned into a bigger humiliation and then did it happen at all, or was it all about that enriched uranium? The images now doing the rounds are not images of command, not images of control, not images of clean superiority, but wreckage, smoke and a field in Isfahan attached to fresh claims of further US losses. Now none of this sits tucked away in some briefing room where they can smother it in official language. This is a step by step public mess that ordinary people can follow quite easily. An American F-15E has come down over Iran, both crewmen have ended up stranded inside Iranian territory, one has been hauled out first, and the second has then hung over the whole war long enough to turn the follow-up mission into the bigger public row. Trump can shout that he got his man all he likes, but when the story attached to your name is a downed jet, stranded crew, a contested rescue and fresh wreckage strewn across Isfahan, his strongman act starts sounding like a desperate child trying to cover up his own mess when he missed the potty. Iranian forces destroyed two C-130 transport aircraft and two Black Hawk helicopters during the botched US attempt to recover that second pilot of the downed fighter in southern Isfahan.

Reform talks like a revolt, the old-right cruelty with a bigger megaphone, but now the Greens have taken the headline with a decent offer. Right, so Lord Ashcroft has published a new poll and Nigel Farage has finally been handed his backside, because Reform UK’s inexplicable months long lead has finally disappeared. Zack Polanski’s Greens have caught him up and just nudged ahead, Farage as a result has lost the clean stretch of road he had been driving on for months, and the man who has been selling himself as the only real home for anti-establishment anger now has to watch Zack Polanski’s party walk into the same space and say hold my beer to him and scat him into second place. Ashcroft’s own write-up calls it an unprecedented three-way tie, rounding off has the Greens, Reform and Kemi Badenoch’s Tories tied on 21%. Actually the figures read greens on 21.4%, Reform on 20.9% and the Tories on 20.5%. I wonder how concerned some of those Tory defectors to Reform might be at this point, it’s looking like less of a sure thing for them now isn’t it? But Ashcroft uses a different method from most pollsters, asking only people who are more than 50% likely to vote at all, how likely they are to end up voting for each party, instead of usual if there was an election tomorrow, who would you vote for? So we have a focus on people who will actually vote rather than weighting polls according to those who may not vote at all. But that caveat does not rescue Farage. A pollster who is not standard shall we say, has still produced a headline that is standard enough for everybody to understand and is certainly reflective of the Greens overall polling trend of the last several months: the Greens are now up where Reform expected to be standing alone with a clear lead. Labour incidentally is down in the teens on just 17%, the Liberal Democrats are miles off in single digits. Farage has sold himself and his party as the only anti-establishment option, but taking on all those Tories and coming out with some abhorrent policy, from ICE style deportation command plans, scrapping sick pay, parental leave, guaranteed work hours under their Employment Rights Act plans and slashing benefits to prop up the triple lock on pensions, the over 65’s the only demographic they currently have a lead with of course.

Israel’s secure-state image takes the hit when Ben Gurion chokes and Israelis start leaving by land through Egypt instead. Right, so Ben Gurion airport is down to one departing flight an hour with just fifty per flight now because Iran has basically all but decimated Israel’s domestic flight capability. Israelis have been going out by land through Egypt and Jordan instead, something of a reverse Exodus if you will, except the Red Sea won’t open for them this time, so doesn’t that make them not so much God’s chosen people in which case? But it is a rotten look for Benjamin Netanyahu when he has spent years selling himself as the man who keeps Israel secure and in control and the only way out is via the privilege of crossing borders that they deny the right to for others. This is not a country calmly riding out pressure as they would like the world to think then. That is the state’s main international airport choking while people start treating the neighbouring borders as the more practical way out. Netanyahu can call it temporary, he can call it operational, he can call it whatever he damn well likes, but the picture is already there in front of everyone: the airport is banjaxed, the roads out are doing all the work – good job Iran doesn’t believe in blowing them like Israel itself has a habit of doing; just look at Lebanon and its bridges, or iran and their still under construction bridges - and his strongman image looks a lot less convincing when people are heading for the exits as fast as they possibly can. I wonder they’re all going? Home perhaps. Ben Gurion says more than any speech here because airports are where states either look normal or they do not. The restriction was not some tiny adjustment buried in a notice. One flight an hour, fifty passengers on the outbound leg only and calls from Israeli aviation officials for immediate closure of the airspace ahead of Passover. That is not normality under strain. That is the main airport being reduced to a controlled choke point.

A fixable capacity screw-up was left sitting there long enough to decide what business lived and what business died at Green Party Conference Right, so the Green party has managed to turn an online conference tech crash into a question about what happened, what took so long to rectify it and as it turns out, who sat on the fix while conference time bled away. Green Party Spring Conference went online on 28 and 29 March, and much of the discussion surrounding it has been around the Zionism is Racism motion, and in part, this story may well relate to that still, but it’s not focus here because the tech faults on the day came first and foremost and an answer to those has not been particularly forthcoming. Conference is supposed to be the supreme forum of member decision-making, where we as Green party members make party policy, we do it, we vote on it, we bring motions, we as groups or individuals spend months working on them so issues like this that kill off what is already a limited space of time, three sessions on just a single day this time around, which was in my view ridiculous, Spring Conferences have been much longer in previous years, especially with the membership now the largest it has ever been. To little surprise the event sold out therefore, and then the voting system fell over right from the get go, on a day already carrying contentious business, the Zionism is Racism motion, so any suspect goings on were bound to be linked to that motion by some. The system did eventually get working again, but so much time on a day already too short, and with Conference ending with the Zionism is Racism motion getting introduced but getting no further than that, the tech issues and what was behind them, arguably could have been the difference. When voting finally got going, members have then voted against ruling that motion out of order, the first attempt to derail it. Members then voted to move the motion up the running order, which passed because we had the numbers. So the voting system machine for all of its false start, worked brilliantly when it got going. But that leaves a very awkward question sitting there in its place. If the system could be restored quickly enough to producing results – everything was fixed by the time we came back from a 10-15 minute break - who allowed the delay to become the story and the subsequent bottleneck to the democratic process?

Britain is blaming Iran for the consequences of war abroad while using the same crisis to excuse more fossil fuel failure at home. Right, so Yvette Cooper has put herself on camera chairing a meeting of more than 40 countries to denounce Iran over the Strait of Hormuz, talking about freedom of navigation, urgent action and the need to reopen the waterway, still conveniently ignoring the fact it’s not been shut, its just that the thought of negotiating directly with Iran spoils that whole Donald Trump leg humping routine Starmer’s regime insists upon, whilst of course prostrating themselves before the altar of Zionism, therefore not putting a step out of line, lest a strongly worded statement from the Board of Deputies land on Number 10’s doorstep. The problem for this pathetic shower chaired by Cooper, is of course that they are cutting their noses off to spite their faces. Iranian officials are at the same time saying European countries can make arrangements to pass through it and Tehran is drafting a joint transit protocol with Oman, who sit on the other side of the Strait, so for all the claims that this is Iran exercising dominance over a waterway that isn’t entirely theirs, they’re sharing responsibility with the opposite coastline and for all the claims of this being international water, well who’s going to enforce it? Nobody can force the opening of the Straits, there was no problem here before Trump kicked off his illegal war, now there is one, it’s all his fault and the orange idiot is telling Europe it’s up to them to get the Straits open now, nothing to do with him.

Trump blasted an unfinished bridge, Israel has sewage in the streets, the whole war effort now looks less like control than filth, bluff and coercion. Right, so it’s not been a good 24 hours for Trump or Israel you’ll be broken hearted to hear, even if the tangerine tyrant thinks he’s onto a winner right now. Donald Trump has gone online and bragged that Iran’s biggest bridge “comes tumbling down, never to be used again”, and that there is “much more to follow”, despite the fact the bridge was still under construction, was not in use by anyone for anything at this point and therefore this is a clear cut terror attack on civilian infrastructure, now blowing up in his face, because we aren’t all lobotomised by the likes of Fox and Friends, or GBeebies, but worse, it seems this was also a double tap strike, just to double down on the backlash. For Israel though, well they have had quite the stink to deal with as the people in Bnei Brak have been filmed wading through filthy floodwater after Iranian fire hit sewage infrastructure there. The people who celebrated the targeting of sewage works in Gaza, now have s**t on their own shoes it seems – and then some. Mmm nice. One side has spent weeks telling the world this war is controlled, precise and nearly done, and central Israel has ended up looking like a blocked drain on camera. The other side has spent weeks talking about military necessity, and the President of the United States has chosen to boast about destroying an unfinished civilian bridge and threaten more destruction unless Iran takes his deal. Is that the deal you’ve been cooking up with your imaginary Iranian friends is it? Israel gets the sort of humiliation its critics would have ordered off a menu if they could, because after years of being told this is the clean, disciplined, civilised side, along comes sewage in the street and the country starts looking like its PR team has finally been overruled by the plumbing.

Israel turned fuel and infrastructure into fair game, then the latest Haifa strike came along and slapped the smugness clean off their faces. Right, so Benjamin Netanyahu has stood in front of cameras and said this war could end “a lot faster than people think”, and that Iran is being decimated, and then Haifa has gone and done the very rude thing of catching fire again. The Bazan refinery there in Haifa has been hit again in a missile barrage from Iran and Lebanon, a fire broke out, black smoke went up over one of Israel’s key northern industrial sites, and that was the second attack on that facility since this war started. No deaths were reported from that strike. But that doesn’t really rescue Netanyahu from the problem at all. In some ways it makes the problem nastier, because the humiliation here is not mainly a body count story. It is a control story. It is a proof story. He has been talking like the matter is being settled in his favour while one of Israel’s most sensitive northern hubs is still able to appear in the footage as smoke, flame, and another public reminder that Iran has not signed anything like the surrender papers his mouth keeps trying to file on reality’s behalf. Bazan is not some random warehouse on an industrial estate that nobody has heard of and nobody needs to care about. Haifa matters because it is one of the places where fuel, port activity, and military significance sit too close together for comfort. It makes for an awfully convenient target for Iran. The refinery complex sits in the same city as Israel’s main naval base. That means a strike there does not read like generic wartime misery. It reads like a state failing to keep one of its own working organs out of reach. This is the part casual coverage often flattens because “Haifa hit again” is easier to say than “a strategic hub you are supposed to keep functioning under pressure has become a repeat feature in the strike map”. One sentence sounds like routine exchange. The other sounds like the thing it is: a public argument with the boast that Israeli control has already been demonstrated.

Trump said the war was nearly over, then his Gulf protection racket answered with burning fuel tanks in Kuwait. Right, so Donald Trump is telling us the Iran War is nearly over, that its almost finished, that he has stood by his Gulf allies and protected them and thanked them for their help. I don’t think anybody has told Iran though. Those are scenes from Kuwait International Airport, where they have had their fuel tanks hit and set on fire by an Iranian drone strike, and Donald Trump chose that precise point in time to tell people the war was nearly over. Whoops. Bad timing. Kuwait of course hosts American forces, sits inside American defence arrangements, and lives under that sales pitch from the orange tan man that the price of US alignment is US protection. Well the fuel tanks still burned didn’t they? The airport still had to be secured. Emergency crews still had to put the fire out. So when Trump says nearly over, what he is really saying is that you are meant to ignore the fact that the side he is supposed to be protecting is still taking hits on its own infrastructure, because the old American promise doesn’t hold up when protecting Israel comes first and foremost, it is Israel First. Donald Trump has spent this whole war, this past month basically talking like the job is already done, how many times now has he said it’s finished, or nearly finished before another defence funding request goes in, more missiles get fired, more interceptors run out because, Iran is in the drivers seat and not Little Donnie, those allied with Israel and the US finding themselves very much on the target list at the same time Iran triggers another Trumpy toddler tantrum with another of their lego videos. This is the kind of man who wants the victory speech ready before the wreckage has finished burning. He has pushed the line that American objectives in Iran are near completion. He has paired that with threats of more attacks over the next two to three weeks, because apparently “nearly over” now includes more bombing, more escalation and more bargaining through force – at least he claims to bargaining, with real or imaginary Iranians nobody is quite sure anymore.