Kernow Damo

Christian pilgrims have returned to the Holy Land, but have faced torrents of abuse from Israelis - you'd think they'd welcome the tourism! Right, so you can always tell when Israel’s spin machine is wobbling, because something leaks out through a source that normally acts like a government loudhailer. And that’s exactly what’s happened here: Christian tourists finally start trickling back into Jerusalem after a year of war and a ninety-per-cent tourism collapse, and what do they find? Not welcome, not safety, not the “shared civilisation” nonsense Western governments like to parrot — they find ultra-Orthodox men spitting at them, boys kicking them off bicycles, crosses being hidden because the police can’t be relied on. And when even a right-wing paper admits it, you know the problem isn’t isolated, it’s structural. Because this isn’t about one incident on the Via Dolorosa. It’s about what happens when a state that plays the eternal victim starts behaving like the unchallenged landlord of everyone else’s holy sites. Right, so you can always tell when a state is losing control of its own story, because the mask slips in a place where it never meant to. That’s what’s just happened in Jerusalem. Christian tourists, the very people Israel claims as cultural allies, the very people Western governments tell themselves they are protecting when they defend Israel on the world stage, are being spat on, kicked, threatened and harassed as they return to the Old City.

Israel has thrown its own tech industry under a bus again with a pathetic stunt in Gaza, but its backfired deservedly. Right, so you can always tell when a state stops pretending it cares about civilian life, because it starts doing things even its own lies can’t cover, and Israel has been doing that again in Gaza, blocking antibiotics and dialysis supplies while somehow letting gold-plated iPhones glide straight through the crossing. You don’t need a grand theory to see what’s going on there; you just need the memory of Lebanon, where pagers packed with explosives maimed thousands of people and Israel admitted it later, and the warnings from digital-rights groups about Israeli-authored software buried inside mass-market Samsung phones across the region. So when Gaza gets flooded with smartphones in the middle of a medical blockade, of course people think something’s off. That’s not paranoia. That’s what happens when a state burns its own credibility and keeps lighting matches. Right, so you can always tell what a state really cares about by what it lets into a besieged territory and what it keeps out, because a blockade is not an accident, it’s a policy written in lorries and cargo lists, and Israel has made that brutally clear over Gaza again. Essential medicines, IV fluids, antibiotics, dialysis consumables, surgical kit, the things that actually keep people alive, not to mention other basics from food to hygiene products, are still being blocked or throttled at the crossings, while, at the same time, luxury foodstuffs and high-end consumer electronics are getting in, including gold-plated iPhones and whole consignments of new smartphones that nobody under bombardment and famine conditions has asked for.

Israel's plans for further war in Lebanon have hit a major snag - Saudi Arabia don't want to pay for it if they get no say in the matter! Right, so Israel has reached the point where it thinks it can dictate the terms of Lebanon’s survival, and it’s doing it openly now, without even pretending the threat is conditional. Extremist defence minister Israel Katz stands in the Knesset and says Hezbollah must disarm by the end of the year or Israel will “work forcefully again in Lebanon,” and he ties that threat to the assassination they’ve just carried out in Beirut’s southern suburb as if that ki*ling is an argument rather than a violation. Then Egypt arrives in Beirut using a tone Lebanese officials describe as threatening, warning that a massive b*mbing campaign and a ground invasion may be imminent unless Lebanon complies. And in the middle of that pressure, Lebanon’s own prime minister turns his criticism not on Israel over this, but on Hezbollah for failing to disarm having failed to be a deterrent! If Lebanon’s own leadership is determined to punch inwards therefore, who can possibly come to Lebanon’s rescue? Well as it happens there is a twist in this tale because Saudi Arabia — the financier Israel is banking on to pay for all of this while Israel and the US call all of the shots — has quietly signalled it has no intention of paying for a political order built without it. Perhaps saviour is too strong a word for them therefore, but if the outcome is the same, does it matter? Right, so let’s walk through this properly because the stories coming out of Lebanon, Israel, and the Gulf aren’t separate threads; they’re the same crisis seen from different angles, and the thing you realise once you put them next to each other is that the region’s centre of gravity is shifting underneath Israel right as it tries to force a deadline on Lebanon. And Israel knows exactly what it’s doing with that deadline, because you don’t stand up in your parliament, point at an assassination you’ve just carried out in the capital city of a neighbouring country, call it “proof” of your intent, and then stick a date on the table unless you’re preparing the ground for escalation. That’s the point. Israel Katz isn’t improvising. He’s announcing a timetable and pretending it’s a condition. He’s saying Hezbollah must disarm by the end of 2025, and he’s saying it in the tone of someone who believes he’s setting the pace, and he’s using the k*lling of a Hezbollah official in Beirut’s southern suburb as if that assassination is some form of political leverage, which it is, because it’s not a secret strike anymore; it’s a political message dressed up as enforcement.

Labour's attempts to tie the IHRA definition of antisemitism to NHS employment agreements is getting a deserved pasting! Right, so you look at what the government’s doing to the NHS and you have to laugh, because if they were trying any harder to prove the Forde Report right they’d invoice themselves for the labour. They’ve decided the health service isn’t creaking because of understaffing or collapsing infrastructure — oh no, the real emergency is that too many nurses have opinions the government doesn’t approve of. So now the Department for Health and Social Care is rolling out a racism policy that somehow manages to mention antisemitism 28 times and Palestinians not once, while turning mandatory training into a political obedience test. Doctors in Unite have called it exactly what it is: a top-down attempt to hard-wire a hierarchy of racism into the NHS to silence Palestine solidarity. And once you see it, you realise the repression isn’t accidental — Labour have literally made it policy. Right, so Labour are taking a system that’s already buckling under pressure, a workforce that’s been brutalised for years, and instead of fixing anything, instead of dealing with pay, safety, retention or the collapsing estate, putting patients first like the staff in the NHS do, they’ve decided the real priority is to criminalise a colour scheme and turn a workplace code of conduct into a foreign-policy enforcement mechanism. And it only makes sense once you accept the central fact that Doctors in Unite are laying out in painful detail: that this isn’t about antisemitism in the NHS, it’s about shutting down Palestine solidarity among the one group of workers whose voices the government cannot afford to let the public hear. Because health workers describing what’s happening to hospitals in Gaza is one of the few things that cuts through the noise, and the government knows it.

Israel is facing an absolute existential crisis as tens of thousands of key role workers emigrate, with far fewer choosing to move there in return. Right, so Israel keeps telling the world it’s winning, it’s strong, it’s stable, it’s unbreakable — and meanwhile more than a quarter of its own population is quietly checking flight prices and Googling residency visas. When seventy-nine thousand people leave in a single year and the state can only tempt forty-six thousand back, you don’t need a demographer to tell you what direction the country is heading in. You just need a calendar and a passport. Because this isn’t the fringe doing the running. It’s the secular core — the engineers, the doctors, the teachers, the people who keep the lights on — deciding they’d rather build a life somewhere that isn’t permanently braced for its next catastrophe. And when the stabilisers are the first ones out the door, the wobble that follows isn’t a surprise. It’s the bill coming due when all you’re left with are the extremists. Right, so Israel is watching the people it relies on most quietly make plans to leave, and the state has created every condition pushing them out. You don’t get twenty-seven per cent of a population telling pollsters they’re considering emigration unless something has shifted at the level where people decide whether the place they live is still capable of giving them a future. I suppose it’s at least good to know that for many of them, that they can always go back to where they actually came from though. You don’t get a year where seventy-nine thousand depart to never return and only forty-six thousand arrive unless the internal story people tell themselves about their country has broken down. A country can survive many things, but it cannot survive losing the population that believes its tomorrow is worth staying for. What makes this more than another political argument is the composition of the people thinking of leaving. It isn’t a fringe. It isn’t a marginal bloc. It is the secular heart of the country, the high-tech engineers, the researchers, the medical staff, the academics, the younger families, the global middle class that pays the taxes, keeps the institutions functioning, and carries the cultural and professional bandwidth that makes a state feel like a state. When that group begins to drift, the consequences run deeper than numbers on a graph. It affects every institution, every election, every sector that depends on continuity, and every attempt to steer the country away from the extremes. And people always ask why. Why now, why this scale, why this kind of demographic? It is because the pressures that once felt temporary have turned into the norm. The wars and genocide in Gaza have ceased to be episodes and become the default setting now.

Labour's appalling for the few not the many budget is up a certain creek without a paddle as the hidden truths emerge! Right, so you can always tell when a government is about to pick your pocket because it spends the entire week insisting it’s doing you a favour. This time around, they’ve spent the last month doing that and that’s exactly what Rachel Reeves has done with this budget. She calls it a plan for ordinary working people, she used that phrase, as if the numbers haven’t already shown it’s the workers who are paying for it. She’s hauled in tens of billions by freezing thresholds, taxing wages by stealth, nudging commuters for a bit extra, and leaving renters exactly where Westminster always leaves them: paying more and getting nothing. Meanwhile the people who actually hold the wealth barely feel a tap on the shoulder. Property stays protected. Capital stays sheltered. Markets stay reassured. And the government congratulates itself for being fair. So let’s drop the performance and say it plainly: this is a budget for owners, funded by earners, all dressed up as responsibility. Labour is just another Tory Party, having completely abandoned the working class that created it and this budget stamps that truth out in triplicate. Right, so Rachel Reeves has delivered a budget she insists is built around working people, and the funny thing is she says it as if nobody is going to bother reading the numbers despite all the analysis that gets done, yet so much of it has framed this as yes being high tax burden, but implying she has come after the rich. She really hasn’t. The truth does sit there in the numbers, and it’s not subtle, it shouldn’t need interpretation but it does need some honesty. What she has set out is a budget for people who own things, people who sit on assets, people who live off investments and inherited value, and it is being paid for by people who get up, do the job, take home the wage and hand over more of it every year because the tax threshold never moves. She has raised tens of billions through the parts of the system that fall on wages and consumption, and she has protected the parts of the system that store wealth. It is not complicated. It is just unpleasant to admit, which is why Labour tries not to.

The Starmer regime plan to strip us of 800 years of trial by jury, because suddenly jurors are the problem, but its been tried before - and failed badly. Right, so you always know the country’s in trouble when a government starts calling a constitutional right an “efficiency problem”, because that’s how you sell something you’d never dare say plainly. And that’s what’s happening now with jury trials. They’ve taken a backlog they created through court closures, CPS collapse and a decade of cuts, and decided the real issue is the public being in the room. So instead of fixing the system, they’re cutting the public out of it. And the pitch is almost impressive in its shamelessness: this isn’t the erosion of a centuries-old safeguard, it’s just “modernisation”. It’s Diplock logic without even the honesty of acknowledging it, and you can see exactly where it leads. Because once ministers start deciding who gets a jury, you’re not protecting justice. You’re protecting power from scrutiny. Right, so you can always tell when a government is about to do something that would never survive a straight conversation with the public because they stop talking like politicians and start talking like middle managers. And that’s exactly what’s happening right now with jury trials. Nobody in government is willing to say, plainly, that they’re removing the public from criminal justice. Nobody is willing to say they’re taking a right that has existed for centuries and turning it into a privilege. Nobody will say they’re rewiring the justice system so the state can judge the public without the public being in the room. So instead they call it “modernisation”, “efficiency”, “reducing the backlog”, as if justice is a logistics chain and the real problem is that twelve ordinary people have the audacity to want to participate in it. And when you strip away the managerial gloss, the reforms are brutally clear. They want a new Crown Court division where a judge and two magistrates hear either-way cases that currently go to juries.

The Palestine Action judicial review has been slammed for what appear to be dodgy doings in changing the judges Right, so you can always tell when the British state is nervous, because it stops pretending it isn’t. And that’s exactly what’s happened with the Palestine Action judicial review. A judge who granted permission for the case has been removed from it. No reason, no explanation, just gone. And in his place the judiciary has quietly installed a panel that reads like the Home Office’s wish-list: the government’s former national-security attack dog, the judge who has already shielded the UK–Israel arms pipeline, and the senior public-law judge whose own family sits deep inside the financial networks tied to the very companies Palestine Action has been exposing. And the Starmer government thinks people won’t notice. Well they’re going to after this rant. Get comfy because this is a long one, but you won’t hear half of this anywhere else, but more people need to, because this is one h*ll of a stitch up. Right, so the situation with the Palestine Action judicial review is one of those moments where you can feel the system blinking. You can feel it shifting its weight, you can feel it deciding that the truth of what has happened cannot be allowed to stand on its own terms, and you can feel the Starmer government settling into the machinery with the kind of confidence only a government has when it believes the institutions will bend for it, not against it. You start with a simple fact: a High Court judge, Mr Justice Chamberlain, granted permission for the most significant challenge to the UK’s t*rrorism powers in years, and days before the hearing, he gets removed without explanation. No reason, no notice, no transparency. A judge removed at the last minute from a case that threatens two thousand arrests, the credibility of the Home Office itself, the state’s alignment with Israeli defence interests, and the political authority of the Starmer government which has been presenting its proscription as a clean, lawful act. And you don’t need to be an expert in judicial process to recognise that this isn’t normal. You just need to know how British institutions behave when they’re under pressure, because they behave like this: silently, abruptly, and in a way that reveals more about the pressures they are under than they ever intended to show.

Albania relies on tourism to the tune of 25% of its economy. So will building an arms factory for Israel there make it your next holiday pick or BDS target? Right, so Albania has picked one hell of a moment to wander into Israel’s arms trade, hasn’t it? But they very much have. A country that lives off ten million tourists a year has decided the smartest move, right in the middle of an ICJ genocide case, is to host a weapons plant for the state actually standing in the dock. You couldn’t make it up. They’re taking ATMOS howitzers, SPEAR mortars, tactical drones, a flight school, and a 5,000-square-metre production line underwritten by Israel’s own export insurer, and they’re acting like this is just another infrastructure project. It isn’t. It’s a political choice delivered with a straight face, because they’ve convinced themselves that if Germany and the UK can do it, nobody’s going to look twice at Albania. But tourists look. And Albania’s entire economy depends on the people who notice exactly this kind of thing. And if they don’t think they’re a likely target for legal repercussions because bigger economies have got away with it, perhaps BDS is something that should concern them far more. Right, so Albania has signed a government-to-government defence deal with Israel’s biggest private weapons firm at the exact moment Israel is standing before the International Court of Justice for plausible genocide, that is abusing a ceasefire that exists only on paper anyway, that has carried on laying waste to Gaza and the people within it now for two long years. There’s no gentle way to put this, and I’m not looking to try either, because the facts are already doing the heavy lifting here. Elbit Systems is supplying Albania with artillery, mortars, and tactical drones under a formal agreement between the two states, and that agreement goes well beyond just procurement.

Singapore has ignored Israel's Gaza atrocities for two years, but now suddenly they hand out sanctions...with Iran in the background. Right, so Singapore has finally sanctioned four Israelis, and you almost have to laugh, because if there was ever a state that could stretch the definition of “late to the party” into a full diplomatic philosophy, it’s Singapore. Two years of Gaza being levelled, two years of famine warnings, two years of the International Court of Justice saying the risk of genocide is real and ongoing, and Singapore didn’t move an inch. Then four settler extremists in the West Bank start making headlines, the region heats up, a tanker carrying cargo bound for Singapore gets grabbed in the Strait of Hormuz by Iran, and suddenly Singapore decides it’s time to show principle. Not on Gaza, obviously. Not where the real political cost to Israel is. Just enough to look balanced now that the consequences of silence have started to reach its own shipping lanes. Right, so you look at what Singapore has just done and the first thing you notice is how late it is. Two years of Gaza being torn apart, two International Court of Justice rulings saying the risk of genocide is real and happening in front of everyone, months of starvation warnings, aid blockages, schools and hospitals being smashed to dust, and Singapore has done nothing more than issue the usual calls for restraint. Then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, they sanction four Israeli settlers for extremist v*olence in the West Bank. Not for Gaza. Not for the starvation. Not for the mass displacement. Four individuals tied to settler militias who even Israel’s own institutions treat as a nuisance when things get too loud. That’s the first thing to understand: this move is tiny in scale, limited in its reach, and aimed at the softest possible target. But because Singapore has done almost nothing for two years, people are scrambling to understand why this has happened now, and why at this moment Singapore wants to look like it’s finally willing to take a stand on something involving Israel. And that’s where the timeline matters, because this isn’t morality kicking in, this is something else, and when you lay the events out in the order they’ve unfolded, you see exactly how Singapore has judged the moment and decided it had to reposition itself before things got any worse.