Kernow Damo

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.