Kernow Damo

EU blacklists Iran’s IRGC as a terrorist organisation, breaking its own legal precedent and exposing a double standard the bloc will never fix. Right, so the European Union has put the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC on its terrorist list. And by doing that, the EU has changed what it can say without being challenged, has changed the definition of terrorism itself. It has said that a state military body, and all states have them in the name of defence, can meet the terrorism threshold. That removes a defence the EU has relied on for years, which is that terrorism only applies to non-state actors. Dissidents. Armed militias. Extremists. They just tossed that in the bin. From this point on, when the EU uses the word “terrorism”, it has to explain why that label applies in one case and not in others given equal weight. That explanation is no longer optional and they’re going to have a tough job doing so given what they cast a blind eye to. Yet it has to be given every time the standard is invoked. And explaining selective application is harder than issuing the label in the first place. It forces officials to justify exclusions rather than assert principles. That is the situation the EU has created for itself, and they deserve every bit of the fallout for their blatant hypocrisy. Right, so the European Union hasn’t just sanctioned the IRGC, it has used its terrorism designation framework against it, and that matters because this is the first time the EU has used its terrorism designation framework against an official arm of a sovereign state’s armed forces. Until now, that list has been reserved for non-state actors, insurgent groups, armed movements, and individuals operating outside recognised state command structures. The EU has never before put a state military institution into that category. By doing it here, the EU has collapsed a distinction it previously relied on in such designations whether it cares to admit it or not. From this point on, terrorism is no longer a label that stops at the edge of state power. It has now been formally extended into it.

Greens surge in Gorton and Denton by-election as Labour pushes a decidedly dodgy poll to try and shut them down. Right, so the polling company Find Out Now has published a by-election poll for Gorton and Denton based on just 143 people, commissioned by a private company, with Reform ahead, Labour close behind, and the Greens written off. That poll is already being used as proof that voters only have two real options, despite the pollster itself warning it’s small, unstable, and early. At the same time, Reform has parachuted in a candidate with a long record of anti-Muslim rhetoric, while campaigning in the wrong place, the Greens have made pushing back on such narratives a central plank of their campaign, the Muslim Vote advocacy group has endorsed the Greens as well so momentum is with them. Yet a really poor quality poll, conducted seemingly in Labour’s interests, is being pushed hard on social media, and is getting rightly torn to shreds, because when a tiny poll is passed off as reflective of 78,000 people, when endorsements are breaking old loyalties, and when Labour is attacking the Greens harder than Reform, what’s failing isn’t so much an election campaign, it’s Labour’s credibility – whatever is left of it these days anyway. Right, so Find Out Now has put out a voting-intention poll for the Gorton and Denton by-election with a sample size of just 143 people, run between 25 and 27 January on behalf of Betterworld Ltd, weighted by age, gender and 2024 General Election vote, and the headline figures excluding don’t knows are Reform UK on 36 per cent, Labour on 33 per cent, the Green Party on 21 per cent, the Conservatives on 8 per cent and the Liberal Democrats on 3 per cent, with the pollster explicitly warning that the sample is very small and the margin of error is larger than a regular voting intention poll, and also warning that the by-election is about a month away and not all candidates have been selected. That is the hard procedural core of it, the bit that’s meant to feel neutral and managerial, the bit people get waved at as if it’s a weather report, but the sort of weather report where you’d be better off looking out of the window and checking if its raining for yourself.

The Green Party has tabled a motion at Spring Conference seeking to make the party anti-Zionist, triggering a major political debate in UK politics. Right, so the Green Party has accepted a motion for its Spring Conference saying that Zionism is racism. It’s in the system. It’s got a number. It’s on the agenda. And that’s the bit people weren’t expecting, because this is the argument that’s supposed to stay outside. You can shout about it, march about it, argue about it online - just not put it through the rules. That’s how this has worked for years. And now it hasn’t. Because the moment it goes through procedure, the safety net goes. You can’t say it’s settled anymore. You can’t say it’s unsayable. All you can say is it shouldn’t be there. And that’s not an argument. That’s panic. Because once it’s inside the rules, you either deal with it - or you admit you never had an answer in the first place. Right, so the Green Party of England and Wales has tabled Motion A105 for its Spring Conference. It has been accepted into conference procedure and so is now set for debate. It states plainly that Zionism is racism and commits the party to an explicitly anti-Zionist position. That sentence alone would have been treated as unutterable inside British party politics for more than three decades, not because it was disproven, not because it was illegal, but because it was kept out by design. The fact it now exists as a procedural object means that design has failed, in no small part due to more than 2 years of Israeli genocide in Gaza and the old excuses, because that is what they were, no longer wash.

Belgium has closed its airspace to Israel-bound weapons during the Gaza ceasefire, shredding the idea it actually means something. Right, so Belgium has blocked its airspace to weapons heading to Israel, including flights that don’t land, during a period everyone is calling a ceasefire, but of course we all know isn’t really one. Israel is still firing. That pulls away a prop people were leaning on without realising it: the idea that once a ceasefire is announced, everyone else can behave as if the genocide has slid into a safer phase. Belgium isn’t doing that. It’s acting like the violence still carries consequences that come back up the chain to anyone who keeps the routes open. Governments don’t close airspace when they think something is winding down. They close it when they expect the damage to continue and they don’t want their fingerprints on it. So either the ceasefire is stabilising things, or Belgium wouldn’t need to shut its skies. Both can’t be true at the same time. And once one country treats the ceasefire as something that doesn’t actually protect third parties, it stops being a confidence blanket for anyone else still pretending it does. Right, so Belgium has closed its airspace to aircraft carrying weapons and military equipment bound for Israel, including so-called technical stopovers that used to slip through as paperwork exercises, and it has done it at the exact moment everyone is being told the Gaza war has entered a calmer, managed phase. Belgium didn’t make a speech and it didn’t issue a moral warning. It physically blocked its airspace so weapons can’t pass through. That matters because governments only do that when they think whatever those weapons will be used for is still going to cause trouble later. If Belgium believed the ceasefire had changed anything in real terms, it wouldn’t be closing routes now. It would be standing back and letting the process run. Closing the route is Belgium saying, without saying it, that it doesn’t believe the risk has dropped.

Britain stripped Shamima Begum of citizenship - now Iraq and the US are forcing this back into Britain’s hands, whether ministers like it or not. Right, so the US military has started moving ISIS detainees out of SDF custody in northern Syria and into Iraq, and Iraq is telling European governments to take their nationals back because the arrangement is temporary. That pulls the ground out from under the assumption Britain has been relying on since 2019, the one where you strip Shamima Begum of citizenship, call it settled, and let distance do the work. The camps and prisons in the north were never fixed infrastructure, they were an improvised holding space that only functioned while someone else had the manpower, the territory, and the incentive to keep it functioning. Iraq is setting limits, the SDF are stretched, detainees are already being moved, and the confidence that this could be left to run indefinitely is starting to look like what it always was, a claim that only sounded solid while nobody tested it. Right, so the back in 2019 the British state made a decision it expected never to have to revisit. It stripped Shamima Begum of citizenship, declared the matter closed, and relied on the distance to make that declaration real. Distance from the camps, one of which she was held in. Distance from the courts. Distance from responsibility. That decision was never framed as provisional or contingent. It was framed as final. The problem with the belief that the right conditions at the time meant finality is that it only holds if nothing moves. Well, things are moving and rapidly.

Labour barred Andy Burnham from standing in the Gorton and Denton by-election — and the fallout starts before polling day. Right, so Labour’s National Executive Committee has blocked Andy Burnham from standing as the party’s candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election, and that decision has already removed one of Labour’s most relied-upon assumptions, which is that if you can clearly win a seat, the party will let you. The NEC is overwhelmingly aligned with Keir Starmer, so the idea that this was some neutral procedural outcome doesn’t survive even a light tap, because committees don’t act like this unless the leadership wants them to. The assumption that electability still outranks internal control is now a total bust, because a leadership confident in its position would not have needed to narrow its own options at this stage. And this doesn’t stop with one mayor or one seat, because once a pro-leadership machine chooses extra electoral risk to avoid potential future rivalry, every claim about local choice, discipline, and grown-up politics starts resting on process instead of judgement. The leadership has now acted in a way that only makes sense if Burnham was seen as a threat. Right, so Keir Starmer has it seems used the Labour Party’s central machinery to block Andy Burnham from standing as the Labour candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election, overwhelmingly the likeliest candidate to win the seat you would think. The National Executive Committee has exercised its power to prevent a sitting metro mayor from even seeking selection, not because of misconduct, not because of disqualification, not because local members rejected him, but because the leadership decided that letting him back into Parliament carried a risk they did not want to manage, even though they can hardly say he was an unsuitable candidate. What makes it worse for Starmer is that Andy Burnham is not a radical figure and never has been. His parliamentary record sits squarely in the Brown-era managerial centre of the party, he defended NHS market mechanisms when in office, such as PFI and when Labour members were offered a genuine break from that politics in 2015 they rejected him in favour of Jeremy Corbyn. None of that has changed.

So Zelensky did a Davos podium speech, but where he should have stayed in his lane over Iran, he didn't, and got exposed for the clown he is. Right, so Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky went to Davos, criticised Iran over the protests there, and Iran’s foreign minister replied by calling him a confused clown. Not diplomatically. Publicly. By name. And this matters, not just because diplomacy went straight out of the window, but because it ends a long-running convenience a lot of people have been relying on, which is the idea that Zelensky can speak as some kind of universal moral authority and everyone else has to take it seriously. Iran didn’t argue with him, didn’t rebut the claim, didn’t justify itself. It simply told him where he can stick it. And another reason this matters so much is that a whole set of assumptions just stopped working at once. The Davos platform stopped protecting the speaker. The values language stopped forcing compliance. And the habit of treating wartime legitimacy as a licence to lecture other countries doesn’t stand up, especially given Ukraine’s own history on such things. Because when a system loses persuasion, it doesn’t get debate in return. It gets ridicule. And deservedly. Right, so Volodymyr Zelensky stands on the Davos stage and does what he has learned to do very well. He speaks in the moral register. He talks about repression. He talks about values. He talks about what the world should not tolerate. And this time he directs that language outward, toward Iran, toward protests there, toward what he frames as a failure of the international community to act. That speech landed to great adulation, easy to do when Iran was banned from attending, making you wonder if Zelensky would have been so bold if they had been in attendance. But Iran is not known to let such things slide and within hours the response comes back not as a diplomatic note, not as a formal rebuttal, not as a procedural complaint. Iran skipped the typical diplomatic niceties and went with open ridicule. Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghci publicly called him a confused clown. Iran publicly insulted Zelensky because it does not accept him as someone who gets to lecture it. And why should they?

Trump talks up taking Greenland — and suddenly impeachment language is being used before anything has even happened. Right, so Donald Trump has started talking again about the United States taking Greenland, and he’s doing it without threatening war. No troops, no orders, no plan — just the idea, put back on the table. The immediate cost is this: the thing people normally rely on to stop presidents doesn’t activate. There’s no war powers vote. No court case. No switch Congress can flip to make it stop. And that’s the problem. Because once force is ruled out, the system everyone assumes will step in doesn’t actually have a way to intervene. So instead of law, you’re left with hope. Hope that he drops it. Hope that it blows over. Hope that nothing follows from saying it out loud. And once you’re relying on hope instead of rules, the confidence people keep selling you about how American power is restrained doesn’t hold up anymore. Right, so Donald Trump is still on about the United States acquiring Greenland. He has done it in that way that he usually does when he wants leverage without committing himself. He presents it as strategically necessary, treats objections as noise, and yet since he started banging on about this, is now insisting that he does not intend to use military force. That is where we are at this point. There are no troops moving. There are no orders. There is no plan on paper. What has happened is that Greenland has been reintroduced into serious public discussion as something the United States might pursue, paired with a verbal assurance that nothing violent is intended. Inside the United States, the response has been immediate and unusually severe compared to what has actually occurred. Constitutional lawyers, former officials, and political actors who normally avoid emergency language have gone straight to talking about impeachment and constitutional crisis territory, even though there is no action yet for the system to respond to. Donald Trump's renewed interest in the United States acquiring Greenland, without threats of war or concrete plans, presents a unique challenge to established political norms. This discussion highlights how the lack of overt force means traditional checks and balances on the executive branch, like war powers votes or court cases, are not activated. This situation raises important questions about geopolitics and the limits of political intervention when proposals are made outside conventional frameworks.

This by-election isn’t about the seat — it’s about whether Labour’s control model still works when voters stop playing along. Right, so Andrew Gwynne has resigned as a Labour MP, which means a parliamentary by-election is now locked in, whether anyone likes it or not and that certainly applies to Keir Starmer, this being his first parliamentary test since conning his way into power 18 months ago. Coming as this likely is to coincide with May’s local elections, all the more attention will be on it, and the speculation is rife as to whether or not Andy Burnham might run, or whether another Manchester local boy in Zack Polanksi might have a run at it too, especially off the back of a dynamite party election broadcast last night. But above anything else, from this point on, Starmer’s Labour in name only party has to actively defend its authority in a place once regarded as so safe it was never in question and now not only is it in question, but by how much Labour might lose it by. But the fact is briefings are happening before candidates get named. Hypothetical scenarios are already being handled like threats. And control mechanisms within Labour are being discussed out loud, which only happens when people stop trusting the system to deliver the desired outcome This doesn’t stop at one seat. It doesn’t stay local. And it doesn’t end on polling day, because once a party has to manage its own voters as a risk in what was a very safe seat, all the pieces are in play for this to become absolute Hell for Keir Starmer. Right, so Andrew Gwynne has resigned as a sitting Labour MP for Gorton and Denton in Manchester and a parliamentary by-election has been triggered in a seat Labour has treated for years as safe. Gwynne won in 2024 with 50% of the vote, actually down on 2019 when he got 65% of the vote, so this is a safe as houses Labour seat, the kind of seat that if Labour can’t hold it, they are in existential crisis territory, second place in 2024 being Reform Uk who only got 15% by comparison. But all of their problems here have a common theme – Keir Starmer himself. Labour’s first problem is that this by-election lands at a moment when Labour has already tightened every internal bolt it can reach, centralised selection, cracked down on dissent dissent, and collapsed the difference between leadership and the party machine itself.

Trump is escalating his threats against Iran again, but he’s doing it after already showing exactly how far he was willing to go last time. Right, so Donald Trump is escalating the threats against Iran again. The language has hardened, the plans are back in circulation, the warnings are bigger, louder, more absolute and the machinery is being spun up as if this is the first time he’s done it all over again. But it isn’t. All of this is happening after an alleged strike was already prepared, talked up, and then either not authorised or called off at the last minute, depending on source, so is this more of the same now? Whether it is or not, it blows a hole straight through the idea that you can say the same thing again, louder, and pretend nothing happened in between, it’s like an inverse boy who cried wolf moment. Escalation was taken right to the point where it’s supposed to turn into action, and then it didn’t. So can we take Trump seriously this time? Should we? Probably safer to than not, but if it all gets watered down again, we shouldn’t be that surprised either. But with more assets en route to the Middle East all at the same time, is there a genuine difference this time? Right, so Donald Trump has ordered the military to draw up new strike plans against Iran. Carrier groups and air assets are moving to the region already, but now the language has hardened again, and talk of “wiping Iran from the face of the Earth” has been Trump’s latest refrain. The USS Abraham Lincoln has been redeployed, refuelling tankers and fighter squadrons have been repositioned as well now, and the White House is allowing the impression of imminence to hang in the air. This is not the same moment as the strike that was prepared and then pulled back earlier. It’s a new escalation returning after that decision. Trump flip-flopping over striking Iran, like that’s a calm and rational position. Everything unfolding now is happening in the shadow of the last time the line was reached and not crossed, begging the question as to whether this time it will. Iran has responded accordingly. Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi did not issue a screaming denunciation or an emotional threat as perhaps western media might prefer. He didn’t shout. He didn’t posture. He set the terms and moved on. Maximum pressure had run its course, restraint wasn’t on offer anymore, and if Iran was hit, it would respond. That’s not how you talk if you think bombs are about to fall. That’s how you talk when you think the test already happened and you held. His language doesn’t dare Washington to act, it assumes Washington already showed its hand, and it shuts the door on the idea that saying it louder will fix that. The same logic runs through the assassination threats aimed at Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.