So, our government says it doesn’t want war with Iran, yet backs the warhawks attacking Iran, and tells the British public that flying sorties ‘saves’ British lives.

British MPs are still straddling the fence over Trump’s Iran war. But, even the Zionist-leaning Telegraph warned that these developments could plunge the country into a recession as the world braces for stratospheric jumps in food and oil prices.

But, with oil prices soaring, many countries are having to rethink their relationship to Russia.

Iran war pushes Western re-consideration of Russia

On 12 March, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on X that the US Treasury will temporarily permit countries “to purchase Russian oil currently stranded at sea.”

Bessent spoke of the need to “promote stability in global energy.” However, considering the 10 plus years of US sanctions on Russia, America has just dealt itself a hard backhand slap. The waiver will run until 11 April and is reportedly limited to cargoes “in transit.”

However, UK MP Michael Shanks, told Sky News this morning that UK sanctions on Russia would stay in place.

Minister Michael Shanks is asked about the US lifting some sanctions on Russian oil. He says it’ll help Russia & thats a shame.

Maybe the UK govt should be putting pressure on the US & Israel to end their illegal war? But instead of doing that you’re helping the US to bomb Iran! pic.twitter.com/Z8HnpGSYu3

— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) March 13, 2026

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Shanks said that the UK will do anything possible not to grease the wheels of the Russian war machine.

What about the US war machine “mowing the lawn” in Iran Mr Shanks?

(John Eveson / Alamy)

3 min read1 hr

A fight in which mental health, despite progress, does not have parity of esteem with physical health – mental health makes up around 20 per cent of NHS cases but receives less than 10 per cent of funding; and a fight in which the policy response is still lacking. Had Mind and others not campaigned hard for its inclusion in the inquiry, mental health would have been an afterthought again.  

It’s true the Covid-19 pandemic created a mental health crisis in several different ways. But it’s also true that in many ways it simply turned up the heat on what was a slow burning crisis already in motion – overstretched services already unable to meet growing demand.  

As the pandemic hit, thousands who were already receiving support saw that help delayed, disrupted or moved out of reach just when they needed it most.  

Module 10 of the inquiry mattered because it finally took mental health seriously on its own terms. But if this moment is to mean anything, we must confront an uncomfortable truth: the UK’s mental health system was vulnerable long before the pandemic, and in many respects it is more vulnerable now.  

We must also be honest about who paid the highest price. Racialised communities, people in poverty and disabled people faced disproportionate risks and poorer outcomes. Women and girls were exposed to higher levels of abuse at home.  Young people missed key milestones, saw their education disrupted, and were isolated from their friends. Inequality isn’t a footnote; it is the central story of the pandemic.  

It’s also an uncomfortable truth that people with severe mental illness were more likely to find themselves in situations that exposed them to the virus, which they were also more likely to die from.  

Why did the system bend so quickly under pressure? The mismatch between the burden on the NHS and funding meant services were already stretched before the first lockdown, and the shock of Covid-19 pushed a fragile system closer to the edge.  

The result was longer waits, higher thresholds, exhausted staff and inconsistent quality at the very moment demand surged. Funding alone will not fix this. We need both spending and structural reform for the mental health system to work.  

We must design for the inevitable surge in mental health problems during national emergencies in the same way we plan for acute bed capacity in winter. This means ensuring that every base is covered, including infection control guidance for mental health; building social connection into public health planning; and equipping health systems to deliver hybrid mental health care.  

We need to embed voluntary and community sector partners, like the federation of local Minds, into local and national planning. These organisations are rooted in communities, understand the unique needs of the people they serve and know how to respond effectively.  

It is essential we protect the people we know are at higher risk. The data was there before the pandemic. We need mandatory equality impact assessments built into national emergency planning to ensure that all groups receive the appropriate support.  

This needs to form part of a shift towards building trusting therapeutic relationships between patients and professionals and delivering holistic care and support. Getting this right will allow us to build a resilient system for crises we will inevitably face in the future, and also help to create a mental health system that provides accessible and high-quality care right now.  

Module 10 was a moment of national reckoning with what happened, what went wrong, and how we avoid the mistakes of the past. The inquiry’s recommendations can shape a lasting legacy: a resilient, compassionate and effective mental health system that delivers the support people need, in calm and in crisis alike. That is the least we owe people.  

Dr Sarah Hughes is CEO of the charity Mind

There’s not much evidence to suggest eggshells repel slugs

So, how should I keep slugs away from my garden?

Social media company Meta appears to have shadow-banned the pro-Palestine ‘Wear the Peace’ clothing brand. This happened after it shared previously unseen footage of Israeli soldiers gleefully shooting at displaced Palestinians. The firm’s Instagram page has amassed 2.3m followers.

The footage – which can only be described as resembling a sniper safari – had been shared by David McIntosh. He previously worked for Gaza aid sites in 2025.

Wear the Peace makes Palestine-branded clothing and donates profits to Palestinian causes. Israel killed Palestinian social media personality, Grandpa’ Nabhan, in 2024 on the first morning he wore one of the firm’s new t-shirts. The item was made in honour of his granddaughter, Reem, who he called “soul of my soul.” The two were inseparably close. Reem was also murdered by occupation forces early on during the Gaza genocide.

The footage shared by the page published by Mcintosh, also referred to a security contractor, shows one of the sites operated by the controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). The organisation was shutdown after months of outrage at Israeli forces massacring and starving Palestinians.

But it appears Mcintosh has a conscience, though he claims to be “blessed” by having served with the GHF. He posted the footage with a comment that Israeli forces shoot Palestinians “for fun.”

Earlier today, Skwawkbox copied the link to this post. But then later attempts to follow it to the post opened completely different Instagram posts. Even obtaining an ’embed code’ to show the post above was only possible by manually accessing the company’s profile page directly and opening it from there.

Mcintosh’s full comment with his own post makes clear he considers the Israeli military to be war criminals:

*Hard watch* I was blessed to assist in Gaza and work with some of America’s finest soldiers…. can’t fault my American comrades in the work we did there, highly skilled top tier operators….albeit the IDF surrounding our sites, are another level of wicked they openly fire on civilians for fun and even on us (standard procedure)! I Won’t go into detail here… but have faith that there are real warriors still out there ….. These videos are of the infamous gaza aid sites and the strong willed palestinians refusing to bend the knee to fear and let their family’s starve. At the sites I managed the men/women did nothing but their best to help the people of gaza, unfortunately the IDF had sinister motives and would try and sabotage the work we would do… They freely commit war crimes with ease, Ive truly never come in contact with such warped sycophantic minds like this!

He posted his video in a wider format, giving a better view of Israel’s barbarity and the panic of emaciated Palestinians as they fled:

New evidence continues to emerge of the appalling, inhuman crimes of the ethnostate’s colonial occupation.

Social media companies, like ‘mainstream’ media in print and digital, appear to be doing everything they can to shield the apartheid state from scrutiny for its continuing crimes.

Featured image via the Canary

All six crewmembers of the US military tanker which crashed on 12 March 2026 are dead, after Trump carried out an unprovoked attack on Iran and brought severe unrest to the region. That brings the overall US death toll thirteen – officially, at least. The cause of the crash is unclear, as the Canary reported here.

Needless to say the number of innocent civilians killed across the region are still being counted and are unlikely to have anything like the same sort of news value in the Western legacy media.

For me, the crash summons an acute memory. Twenty years ago, I personally delivered the coffins meant for 14 dead airmen across Kandahar Airfield in Southern Afghanistan to the base’s medical centre where their remains were held.

Their Nimrod spy plane had crashed days earlier. Some reports blamed a fuel leak on the ageing aircraft.

Then as now, the airmen concerned died in a war of choice they were sent to because of the remote, hubristic ambitions of politicians thousand of miles away. Then as now, such deaths were useful to the political class at home.

Trump will fall for the sacrifice trap

One way of understanding how the deaths of these crew members will be received is to look at the ‘sacrifice trap’. I first heard the term in a 2018 report authored by scholar and anti-militarist writer professor Paul Dixon. He describes the trap as one of:

a range of rhetorical devices are identified to justify war.

This device was regularly used back then to head off public opposition to the failing Afghanistan war.

Here’s Dixon:

The Sacrifice Trap – refers to the situation in which the deaths of military personnel creates a
reason to prolong war in order to justify these sacrifices. As more die this creates further
reasons to justify their deaths by defeating the enemy.

You can almost hear a Trump or a Blair saying it now. ‘If we stop fighting, the previous deaths will have been for nothing’.

In this way, the last death becomes the justification for the next one.

Dixon again:

There is an incentive to put military personnel in harm’s way so that their sacrifice leads to the justification of war. The state escalates or continues to fight in order to justify prior sacrifices.

I haven’t heard this rhetorical device employed fully yet. The US leadership doesn’t seem to care much about public opposition… But in my opinion it is only a matter of time as the death toll mounts. And what I do know for sure is that Trump – whose rise to power is so deeply entangled with the War on Terror – won’t hesitate to wield its devices, narratives, and vocabulary for his own ends.

Featured image via the Canary

The Times of Israel has reported that Benjamin Netanyahu has warned that the Egyptian military is “getting stronger” and Israel needs to “keep an eye on it” to make sure it “doesn’t go too far”.

Of course, this is the Zionist media attempting to manufacture consent for presumable “pre-emptive strikes’ on Egypt.

Hebrew-language media reported that Netanyahu said that Israel and Egypt:

have a relationship and common interests

However:

Jerusalem needs to prevent it [the Egyptian army] from becoming too strong.

Because, of course, armies full of black and brown people should never be strong. That way, Israel can’t overpower them.

Israel accusations are a confession

Reports as far back as September 2025 suggest that Israel was “concerned” about Egypt’s military buildup in the Sinai.

Israeli officials also claimed that Egyptians have extended runways at air bases in Sinai so that they could be used by fighter jets. The claims also include Egypt building underground facilities, which they believe could be used for storing missiles directed at Israel.

However, the officials also said that there is no actual evidence that the Egyptians are actually storing any missiles in these facilities.

Time and time again, Israel claims the people it is ethnically cleansing are using underground military facilities, which are, of course, a huge threat to Israel. The reality is, there is zero real evidence supporting the claims. In actual fact, it is Israel who is using a huge underground bunker dubbed the ‘Fortress of Zion’.

Make of that what you will.

According to a New York Times article in 2021, it is:

a new Israeli Army command post deep underground beneath its headquarters in the heart of Tel Aviv

Talk about using civilians as human shields.

Illegal occupation

Twice previously, Israel has occupied the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt.

The first time was during the Suez Crisis in 1956.

Israel, France and Britain illegally invaded Egypt. In true colonial fashion, the three countries wanted to topple President Gamal Abdel Nasser. This was simply because he nationalised the Suez Canal Company – a British-French enterprise.

Essentially, all three were set to lose money and control, and as we saw with Iran in 1953, when Western countries are going to lose money, they call for regime change.

Eventually, they withdrew. But then in 1967:

The Soviet Union falsely warned Egypt that Israel was assembling its troops to invade Syria. Under an Egyptian-Syrian defence treaty signed in 1955, the two countries were obliged to protect one another in the case of an attack on either.

Israel then launched a surprise attack against Egypt’s airbases and destroyed its air force.

What followed was Israel seizing the remainder of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, along with the Golan Heights in Syria, and the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt. It did all of this in six days.

The night before the 1967 attack, Israeli minister Yigal Allon wrote:

In … a new war, we must avoid the historic mistake of the War of Independence [1948] … and must not cease fighting until we achieve total victory, the territorial fulfillment of the Land of Israel.

Immediately, in direct contravention of international law, Israel started building illegal settlements for its citizens on land it did not (and still does not) own.

By 1977, over 11,000 Israelis were living in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula.

In 1979, Egypt signed the Peace Accord with Israel.

Israel agreed to withdraw from Sinai, and Egypt promised to establish “normal diplomatic relations” between the two countries and open the Suez Canal to Israeli ships.

Israel finally withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula on April 26, 1982.

Manufacturing consent once again

It seems Israeli news sites have been attempting to manufacture consent for taking back the Sinai Peninsula for a while. In 2024, The Times of Israel reported:

northern Sinai has been mired in an insurgency by Islamist groups for the past decade, including an ISIS cell.

It’s a pattern – Israel claims terrorists need to be taken out and then proceeds to flatten entire countries with no regard for life.

Israel made its intentions for Egypt clear as far back as 1967. So why wouldn’t Egypt build up its armed forces? The whole world is watching the Zionists destroy Iran and Lebanon, after already destroying Gaza. Anyone in their right mind would take that as a warning and take the necessary steps to protect their citizens.

Israel has nukes – yet allows no one else in the region to have them. Israel has one of the most technologically advanced militaries in the world, yet its neighbours and resistance movements must disarm. And Israel is using massive underground bunkers under hugely populated areas, yet is blowing entire communities to pieces in other countries for that same reason – without any evidence.

The rest of the world cannot let a genocidal, terrorist state keep bullshitting a moral high ground through fear of ‘antisemitism’, whilst it destroys any semblance of life in majority Muslim countries.

Featured image via Real Time History/YouTube

The UK has awarded 26 arms firms lucrative contracts to develop its own autonomous targeting systems –  this is despite numerous atrocities in Gaza – and now, Iran – being linked with haphazard AI kill chain systems. The UK NGO Drone Wars reported:

that as public concern about the use of AI for warfighting grows in the aftermath of Israel’s war on Gaza and US strikes on Iran, the UK is quietly pressing ahead with development of a new AI-based military targeting system.

This should be a worry for us all. Besides the gigantic cost – up to £1bn handed to death firms – the ethics and effectiveness of handing the killing over to AI systems are highly dubious.

The UK is developing a system (typically and idiotically) named ASGARD, a reference to Viking mythology. The tender notice states:

This Open Framework will focus on the ‘Decide’ element of the target acquisition cycle (Sense-Decide-Effect); supporting ASGARD’s goal of reinventing, and transforming, how land forces deliver operational decision-support and decision-making software via the use of modern Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning (AI/ML) technologies.

Gaza is a testing ground for AI

Drone Wars’ Chris Cole said:

While militaries are keen to use AI to speed up decision making around lethal strikes, there are serious ethical and legal concerns about these developments, with increasing evidence that ratcheting up the number of strikes leads to greater danger for civilians.

Drone Wars’ tone is urgent to say the least:

As we have said before, the grave dangers of introducing AI into warfare and in particular for the use of force are well known.  While arguments have been made for and against these systems for more than a decade, increasing we are moving from a theoretical, future possibility to the real world: here, now, today.

The horrifying nature of autonomous war systems is hardly a mystery in 2026. Israel’s genocide in Gaza has been fuelled with AI tools like Lavender and the grotesquely named Where’s Daddy, which is:

used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.

There is mounting evidence AI targeting has shaped the US-Israeli attack on Iran too. The Guardian said on 3 March:

Academics studying the field say AI is collapsing the planning time required for complex strikes – a phenomenon known as “decision compression”, which some fear could result in human military and legal experts merely rubber-stamping automated strike plans.

The US also reportedly used AI in the 3 January attack on Venezuela.

US-Israel attacked Iran first on 28 February without provocation. Iran was offering unprecedented concessions in negotiations at the time. The Pentagon has since stated there was no imminent threat from Iran. And the UN’s atomic watchdog, the IAEA, has said there is no evidence Iran was developing a nuclear weapon.

The UK government is racing to catch-up with its allies in the US and Israel. There is ample evidence that AI targeting is, at best, deeply flawed. It’s increasing use by indifferent imperial powers – seemingly concerned more with speed and a deadly numbers game – has already produced horrific results for targeted populations in Gaza, Iran, and Latin America.

Featured image via the Canary

Rabbi Jonathan Guttentag is a UK representative of the Coalition for Jewish Values and a communal rabbi based in Manchester.

 As the confrontation between the United States, Israel and Iran unfolds, Western governments — including Britain’s — now face not only a strategic challenge but a test of moral clarity.

Public statements from many European capitals have emphasised legal caution and diplomatic restraint while avoiding direct engagement with the ideological nature of the Iranian regime.

That hesitation reflects a deeper uncertainty within Western societies: an increasing difficulty in distinguishing between regimes that defend civilisation and those that undermine it.

This is not merely a geopolitical problem. It is a test of whether Western societies still possess the moral clarity required to recognise ideological threats.

For decades the Islamic Republic of Iran has maintained a posture of hostility toward Israel while supporting proxy militias across the Middle East. Its leadership has invested heavily in ballistic missile development and pursued nuclear capabilities while sponsoring armed groups operating from Lebanon to Yemen.

None of this has been hidden. The strategic outlook of the Iranian regime has been visible for many years.

Yet reactions across parts of the Western world to the recent confrontation have been strikingly confused. Within days of military strikes against Iranian targets, demonstrations appeared in several Western cities condemning Israel and the United States, while paying little attention to the actions and ideology of the Iranian regime itself.

At precisely the moment when the nature of the Iranian government’s policies should have become clearer, many in the West seemed unable to say plainly what they were witnessing.

The crisis exposed by Iran is therefore not only about Middle Eastern strategy. It reflects a wider Western uncertainty about power, religion, and the moral foundations of political order.

A deeper civilisational uncertainty

During the twentieth century, Western democracies ultimately recognised that certain ideologies represented existential threats to civilisation. Nazism and Soviet communism were understood not simply as political adversaries but as systems fundamentally hostile to human dignity and freedom.  Today that moral clarity appears to be weakening.

In much contemporary discourse, liberal democracies and authoritarian regimes are increasingly treated as morally interchangeable actors in a global system. The language of “both sides” has too often become a substitute for serious moral judgment.

Yet moral relativism becomes difficult to sustain when one side openly pursues destabilisation across an entire region.

Iran’s ruling ideology combines religious absolutism with revolutionary hostility toward Western influence in the Middle East. Its regional strategy has centred on supporting armed proxy groups and expanding its strategic reach through networks of allied militias.

These are not the policies of a conventional state pursuing ordinary diplomatic interests. They are the policies of an ideological regime.

A memory from another moment

For me, these debates carry echoes of an earlier period.  In the late 1970s, as a teenager studying in yeshiva in Israel, the radio would often carry news bulletins referring to bnei ha’arubah — “the hostages”. The phrase was repeated constantly during the Iranian revolution and its aftermath, when diplomats and civilians were held captive in Tehran.

For a young student immersed in Torah study, hearing those broadcasts created a vivid impression. Even then it was clear that something profound had shifted in the Middle East: a revolutionary regime had emerged that openly challenged the norms of international conduct.

Those memories return today when watching the current crisis unfold. The ideological roots of the confrontation we see now were already visible in those early years.

The language of a revolutionary regime

Another feature of the Iranian revolution that left a lasting impression was its political language. From the earliest years of the regime, public rallies and official demonstrations were marked by chants calling for the destruction of the United States and Israel. These slogans were not fringe expressions; they formed part of the official vocabulary of the state.

For many outside observers this was sometimes dismissed as rhetorical theatre. Yet slogans matter. They reveal the ideological worldview of a regime and the moral climate it cultivates within its society.

When hostility toward entire nations becomes embedded in public ritual and political messaging, it signals something deeper than ordinary geopolitical rivalry. It reflects a revolutionary ideology that defines itself through confrontation with the outside world.

Religion and power

One of the deeper problems raised by the Iranian regime is the way in which religion itself can be distorted when fused completely with political power.

The Islamic Republic presents itself as a religious state governed by clerical authority. Yet history repeatedly shows that when religious leadership and state power become fully merged, faith can easily become a tool of political control.

The Jewish political tradition developed a different model. In the biblical structure of leadership, authority was distributed across distinct institutions. The king exercised political power — and even he was subject to explicit limits in the Torah’s law of the king (Deuteronomy 17) — while the kohen embodied religious authority and the prophets spoke with an independent moral voice. These roles were not intended to collapse into one another.

In other words, the Hebrew Bible recognised very early that faith must sometimes stand as a restraint upon power rather than an instrument of it.

This arrangement allowed religion to function not merely as an instrument of state authority but as a source of ethical critique of power itself.

In that sense, the Jewish tradition anticipated a principle that later became central to Western constitutional thought: the need to restrain concentrated power and preserve independent moral authority within society — a principle that would eventually find expression in the Western idea of limited and separated powers.

When legalism replaces moral judgment

Another revealing feature of the recent crisis has been the hesitant response of some Western governments. In Britain, as elsewhere in Europe, official statements have often emphasised legal caution and diplomatic restraint while avoiding direct engagement with the ideological nature of the Iranian regime.

Another complication in the present debate has been the tendency to frame criticism of Western preparedness for Iranian escalation as though it were simply an endorsement of a more confrontational American posture toward Iran. That framing risks obscuring the real issue. It is entirely possible to reject reckless rhetoric or unilateral adventurism while still asking whether Western governments adequately recognised the scale of the Iranian threat and prepared accordingly. A serious strategic discussion should not collapse into caricatures about “pro-war” or “anti-war” positions; the more relevant question is whether the warning signs were visible and whether governments responded with sufficient foresight.

Instead of asking the most basic moral question — whether a regime pursuing aggressive regional expansion should be permitted to acquire the means to make those ambitions irreversible — much of the debate has revolved around a narrower legal question: whether military action satisfies particular interpretations of international law.

International law plays an important role in restraining the arbitrary use of force. But when legal frameworks become the sole lens through which governments view serious threats, they risk paralysing the very societies they were meant to protect.

Democratic governments should not lightly resort to war. But neither should they allow procedural legal debates to obscure the underlying moral reality of the situation.

The classical just war tradition, which shaped the development of Western law, recognised that the defence of innocent life may at times require decisive action — a principle that also appears in Jewish law’s distinction between necessary and discretionary wars and in the Talmudic teaching that one may rise in self-defence against a mortal threat.

The question facing Western leaders today is therefore not simply legal.  It is whether they still possess the moral clarity required to defend the societies they govern.

Recovering moral confidence

The conflict with Iran will eventually subside, as conflicts always do.  But the deeper question facing Western societies will remain.  Do we still possess the moral confidence required to defend the values that built our civilisation?  Or will we continue drifting into a moral fog in which democracies and authoritarian regimes are treated as morally equivalent actors?

The Iranian regime represents not only a geopolitical challenge but also a warning about the dangers of unconstrained power justified in religious terms.  Recovering that clarity — moral, political and institutional — may prove essential if the West is to defend the civilisation it has inherited.