German chancellor Friedrich Merz said of last year’s illegal US-Israeli attacks on Iran that “Israel is doing the dirty work for us all”. Now he has said that the protections of international law shouldn’t apply to Iran. Because rogue states ignore international law.

Except that when he says ‘rogue states’, he doesn’t mean Israel and the US, which just ditched international law to murder Iranian schoolgirls, assassinate Iran’s leader and blow up around twenty Iranian hospitals. He doesn’t mean their enablers – like the German and UK governments – who ignored international law to support the Epstein class’s genocide and now to abet its latest illegal war.

He means Iran.

German double standards

Merz said that “now is not the time” (we’ve heard that before) to “lecture” the US and Israel about their lawbreaking. But apparently now is the time to lecture the victims and tell them international law doesn’t protect them because that doesn’t suit Trump or Netanyahu.

Because Iran hasn’t done the ‘right’ thing and surrendered completely to US and Israel’s demands and the amplification of their European cheerleaders, as he made clear:

Appeals from Europe, including from Germany, and condemnations of Iranian violations of international law, and even extensive sanctions, have achieved little over the years and decades…international legal assessments will have relatively little effect. This is all the more true if they remain largely without consequence… therefore, now is not the time to lecture our partners and allies.

What international law?

Süddeutsche Zeitung’s Wolfgang Janitsch described the comments as “a long farewell to international law”.

Even in Germany, which has a genocide-long record of brutal repression of protests against Israel’s crimes, Merz’s comments caused outrage. So his spokesperson tried to backtrack without backtracking, insisting both that Germany respects international law and doesn’t at the same time:

Germany does not question international law. I want to make that absolutely clear. But there is also a security interest that is not addressed by international law.

Responsible Statecraft summed up the situation succinctly:

Craven Europeans give US and Israel a blank check for illegal war. They frame the crisis not as an act of war against a UN member state, but as a natural consequence of Tehran’s failure to capitulate unconditionally.

Perhaps it’s Merz, like Starmer and his fellow criminals, who needs the protection of international law – but only of his right to a fair trial in the Hague before going down for crimes against humanity.

Featured image via the Canary

Palestine activists are preparing to lobby Welsh pension bosses. And they’ll be pushing the case for divestment, human rights and justice for Palestinians. The push will call on the Wales Pension Partnership to divest pension money from companies complicit in the oppression of Palestinians.

The activists, from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and others, will come to Cardiff from all over Wales. They’ll form a Red Line protest from 9.30am on 10 March at County Hall in Cardiff during a meeting of the Wales Pension Partnership. And they’ll call on the pension fund to divest from genocide.

The Red Line for Gaza campaign takes inspiration from symbolic ‘red line’ protests around Wales and the world. Protesters carry a symbolic red line fabric. The red lines the Israeli government continues to cross include starvation as a weapon of war, and targeting and killing civilians seeking safety (including children), journalists, medics and care givers.

The Wales Pension Partnership

The Wales Pension Partnership invests £1.1bn on behalf of Welsh local authorities in companies enabling Israel’s genocide. They include Elbit, Palantir, Barclays Bank and companies critical to the West Bank settlements. The United Nations has declared these settlements illegal.

Despite the declared ceasefire, Israel continues to attack Gaza and the West Bank, with hundreds killed and infrastructure destroyed. According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), Israel has killed over 100 children in Gaza since the ceasefire. Israel has intensified, not relaxed, land confiscation – especially in the West Bank.

Ten Welsh councils have already voted to back divestment by their pension funds, yet the Wales Pension Partnership refuses to act. On 4 March Rhondda Cynon Taf council will debate and hopefully pass a divestment motion. While on 5 March Pembrokeshire council will debate divestment by Dyfed Pension Fund.

The Wales Pension Partnership approach is what it calls “constructive engagement” with companies identified as potentially complicit in human right abuses.

Bethan Sayed is co-chair of PSC Cymru. PSC Cymru is the Welsh branches of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Ahead of the protest, she said:

The Wales Pension Partnership prefers to write polite letters to companies selling the means of genocide than pulling the rug on them. It’s not good enough, and that’s why we call on the WPP to change course and set about pulling money out of these companies.

Our focus is firmly on the lack of decisive divestment despite most councils in Wales demanding it. Genocide continues.

Featured image via the Canary

Commanders at more than 30 US military locations have told their troops that the US is attacking Iran to cause “armageddon” and hasten the second coming of Jesus – passing on an apparent message from deranged defence secretary Pete Hegseth.

The message includes a combat unit commander telling unit non-commissioned officers – sergeants and corporals – that US president Donald Trump is:

anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.

Hesgeth leading ‘Christian’ charge

According to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), in just a three-day period from the start of the illegal US-Israel attacks on Iran, MRFF has been “inundated” by more than 110 complaints from various units across thirty different bases in every branch of the US military about this messaging.

Hegseth reportedly attends, at least weekly, a White House ‘bible study’ led by a Zionist ‘pastor’ who insists the US must support Israel no matter what.

The news has horrified many US Christians as well as the rest of the right-thinking world. Baptist News Global covered the revelations and noted MRFF’s disgust with the bloodthirstiness of the so-called ‘Christian nationalism‘ Hegseth and his ilk espouse:

These calls have one damn thing in freaking common: Our MRFF clients (service members who seek MRFF aid) report the unrestricted euphoria of their commanders and command chains as to how this new ‘biblically-sanctioned’ war is clearly the undeniable sign of the expeditious approach of the fundamentalist Christian ‘end times’ as vividly described in the New Testament book of Revelation,” Weinstein said.

Many of their commanders are especially delighted with how graphic this battle will be zeroing in on how bloody all of this must become in order to fulfill and be in 100% accordance with fundamentalist Christian end-of-the-world eschatology.

A horror show run by paedophiles, fanatics and heretics who threaten the world and feed on the innocent: the US government under Donald Trump (and not only his administration).

Featured image via the Canary

More exclusive footage from Skwawkbox sources on the ground in Qatar shows the scale of Iran’s retaliatory barrage on US military facilities in the Qatari capital – and the number of interceptors the US base there is burning through in an attempt to stop them:

Thousands of migrant workers are trapped in Qatar and neighbouring states. They have little prospect of repatriation despite the danger the US and Israel have created for those in Gulf states through their reckless and illegal imperialist war on Iran.

Featured image via the Canary

Unite, one of the UK’s biggest trade unions, has carried out a survey of parliamentary staff on the pay offer for 2026-27 (Alamy)

3 min read37 min

The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) announced on Monday that MPs’ basic salary will rise by 5 per cent to £98,599 a year from April, while also aiming to move towards a salary of around £110,000 by the end of the Parliament, due in 2029. The MPs’ pay decision for 2026-27 includes a 1.5 per cent benchmarking adjustment, as well as a 3.5 per cent cost-of-living increase.

However, MPs’ staff are only being offered an ‘optional’ 3.5 per cent pay increase, despite months of lobbying by the trade union and some MPs for a substantial rise in staffing budgets due to low pay and unsustainable workloads.

In a survey of parliamentary staff by trade union Unite, seen by PoliticsHome, 91.5 per cent of respondents said they would reject the 3.5 per cent automatic pay uplift for staff salaries for 2026-27. Only 4.6 per cent of the more than 600 respondents voted to accept the offer, while 3.8 per cent abstained.

Parliamentary staffers told PoliticsHome on Monday that there was widespread “fury” over the proposals, with one saying that IPSA “treats MPs’ staff with total contempt”.

The Speakers Committee on IPSA are meeting later on Wednesday afternoon, with trade unions hoping to get the chance to challenge the IPSA budget. The committee technically has the power to veto or amend the budget, though this power has not been exercised before. 

Trade unions representing parliamentary staff are hopeful that IPSA will come back to the table with a new offer.

In an email to staff on Tuesday morning, Unite asked all parliamentary staff – including non-members – to fill in the survey and “join the union to challenge this injustice and ensure a fair pay settlement”. The union recommended that respondents reject the 3.5 per cent offer.

A spokesperson for the Unite Parliamentary Staff Branch said the survey of MPs’ staff showed the “widespread outrage at yet another year of real terms pay cuts”.

“Offering staff a pay rise less than MPs and lower than inflation is nothing short of an insult,” they said, demanding that IPSA explain why the larger uplift applied to MPs would not apply to staff “who carry the bulk of the work and absorb the worst pressures of the job”.

Parliamentary staff have had a 14.6 per cent real-terms pay cut since 2020, based on RPI, with many caseworkers earning little more than the minimum wage.

“Our offices are chronically under-resourced, with staff often required to work unpaid overtime, provide practical and emotional support for constituents facing difficult situations, and support MPs in high-pressure situations,” the spokesperson continued. 

“Our jobs are fundamentally insecure, yet our pay and pensions lag far behind those of comparable jobs in the civil service and local government.

“We are proud of the work we do to serve our communities and support our MPs, but stress and burnout are at an all-time high. If we want a thriving democracy, we need to start by paying the people who make it work fairly.”

IPSA does not have the power to set exactly how much a member of MPs’ staff should be paid; instead, it is proposing an automatic 3.5 per cent pay uplift for all staff, funded by a 5 per cent increase to staffing budgets, and an increase of at least 5 per cent to the minimum of each pay band. In practice, this could mean some staff salaries could rise by more than 9 per cent.

However, MPs have the authority to block their staff from receiving the 3.5 per cent pay rise. PoliticsHome understands some parliamentarians, including Labour MPs, signed to prevent their staff from getting pay uplifts last year.

Mark Yale is a Conservative activist and Treasurer of One Nation Conservative Network, a new grassroots movement supporting pragmatic, inclusive centre-right politics.

“Progress must be extended and accelerated not by subordinating the individual to the authority of the State, but by providing the conditions in which no one shall be precluded by poverty, ignorance, insecurity, or the selfishness of others from making the best of the gifts with which Providence has endowed him” – 1945 Conservative Manifesto

It is easy to think that One Nation Conservatism is a new phenomenon because of its association with the post-Thatcher shift towards the centre led initially by Sir John Major and more recently Lord Cameron. However, as the quote shows, the Conservative Party has a strong and long history of standing on a centre-right, pragmatic platform.

This tradition was carried forward in the post-war period by figures such as Rab Butler, whose role in shaping the 1944 Education Act and accepting much of the post-war settlement reflected a practical commitment to social reform within a Conservative framework.

At its core, One Nation Conservatism is about ensuring that opportunity is widely and fairly shared, that economic freedom is balanced with social responsibility, and that everyone has a stake in the nation’s success. It is not about ideological purity, but rather the practical goal of governing effectively for the whole nation.

Today, the country is increasingly facing social division and a growing gap between the experiences of those doing well economically and those less well. A good example of this is that the ability to get on the housing ladder is becoming increasingly defined by whether parents or grandparents are able to help financially. As a result of this growing economic divide, there is a risk that we return to the two-nation society that Benjamin Disraeli wrote about in his novel Sybil.

It is easy to claim that we have tried this type of Conservatism and that it failed – evidenced by the defeat we suffered at the 2024 general election.

But this is not a fair criticism. Analysis from Lord Ashcroft after the general election showed that the number one reason people stopped voting Conservative was that we had lost the people’s trust. Why we lost the people’s trust is easily explained by the other reasons highlighted by those asked; “Conservative government had not been competent”, “Partygate and other scandals”, and “The Liz Truss mini-budget of 2022”.

None of those reasons are linked to the ideological direction of the party, but rather our ability to do what a government should be doing – delivering for voters, improving the country and improving individuals’ circumstances.

There has been much discussion about what the future direction of the Conservative Party should be. Narrowing our appeal by rejecting policy or ideas from the traditional centre-right and shunning those who are nearer the centre is a mistake and will only make being re-elected harder.

The party is better when it is a broad church with mass appeal. Polling for Prosper UK by More in Common identified millions of voters in the centre ground who feel that they are politically homeless and that no party represents them.

So why would we want to ignore this mass of potential voters?

Those who identify as traditional centre-right or as a One Nation Conservative are pragmatic and recognise the centre has shifted, in particular on immigration, and are not trying to remould the party in our image or reject the concerns of certain voters, but rather ensure it remains a broad church, with both sides being listened to.

To help maintain this tradition within the party, a new grassroots initiative – the One Nation Conservative Network – has been established. It wants to help ensure the party remains a broad church through a focus on the grassroots, activists and councillors, and supporting candidates during election campaigns. Additionally, we want to bring One Nation Conservative ideas outside of Westminster and show how they can benefit voters at a local level.

One Nation Conservatism plays an important role in ensuring that the party remains rooted in its historic mission to govern responsibly and for the whole nation. From Disraeli’s warning of a divided society to the principles set out in the 1945 manifesto, the Conservative tradition has long recognised the importance of social responsibility.

At a time of economic uncertainty and social division such as we are currently experiencing, accommodating this strand of Conservatism will help ensure that the party speaks not only to one section of the country, but the whole country.

In a strange turn of events, it seems Israel has realised that international law does, in fact, exist.

BREAKING: There is growing suspicion that Iran used cluster munitions in their attacks against Israel.

A clear war crime. pic.twitter.com/TbXOMkzVpp

— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) March 1, 2026

Technically, the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) prohibits the use, production, stockpiling or transfer of cluster munitions and requires states to ensure that they claim no further victims.

However, neither Israel nor the US signed the CCM. That might have something to do with them being some of the biggest producers of the weapon. Obviously, the law isn’t important when there is money to be made.

Hey, Eyeball – remember when the United Nations tried to ban cluster munitions and the US and Israel fought against it?

Good times. https://t.co/L3z3cCeEBP

— 99% Johnny Graz (@jvgraz) March 1, 2026

According to Oxford Public International Law:

if widely implemented and adhered to, the CCM will dramatically decrease the harm to civilians caused by cluster bombs both during and after armed conflicts.

Of course, knowing what we know about Israel, it has no intention of minimising civilian casualties

Israel playing the victim

But no matter whether they are illegal or not, Israel does not get to play the victim now that another country decides to play them at their own game.

We have to remember, this is after Israel fired more than a million cluster bombs into Lebanon:

pic.twitter.com/hjsoslAkDD

— melissa “cancelled student debt” byrne (@mcbyrne) March 2, 2026

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Killed thousands of Palestinian children:

You have no right of mentioning war crimes after killing 200.000 children in Gaza.

Stfu

— Parody Jeff (@BackupJeffx) March 1, 2026

Used white phosphorus on Gaza:

Israel has always used white phosphorus on Gaza.

And look who is talking about war crimes. https://t.co/pAej5Sid2y pic.twitter.com/y4yzLBKj5X

— The Saviour (@TheSaviour) March 1, 2026

Zionists who used internationally banned white phosphorus on the children of Gaza to burn them alive are now complaining about war crimes https://t.co/EUFHTbltiO

— Fiza (@fizakkhann) March 2, 2026

Bombed schools, hospitals, health workers and journalists.

Bombing a school in Iran while calling them war criminals is peak Israel. https://t.co/BGVTegFsuF

— Walter Masterson (@waltermasterson) March 2, 2026

The country that would never “bomb a hospital” is bombing hospitals again.

Israel only feels alive when it kills.

Israel only feels safe when it’s hated. https://t.co/5w3IZiLhUC

— Bashar Zapen (@BasharZapen) March 3, 2026

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Whilst creating and upholding a system of apartheid for years.

It’s one rule for Israel (and the US) and one rule for everyone else.

the absurdity of these pro-genocide propagandists suddenly caring about “war crimes” isn’t an accident. they know what they’re doing. they just believe that israel should be allowed to commit crimes nobody else can https://t.co/KleJmuBYYC

— matt (@mattxiv) March 2, 2026

Of course, Israelis want to talk about the law now bombs are dropping on Tel Aviv.

Oh Israelis wanna talk about the law now https://t.co/Qpe6Hq9CS8

— James🔻 (@GoodVibePolitik) March 1, 2026

They had zero sympathy when the IDF was carpet bombing Gaza.

International Law died under the rubble in Gaza, and these zionist rats genuinely think they have the right to speak https://t.co/DY9JeUBaEg

— 📕 (@SwampCommunist) March 2, 2026

MAN WHO HAS BEEN SLAPPING PEOPLE IN THE BACK OF THE HEAD FOR YEARS REPORTEDLY VERY ANGRY HE HAS BEEN SLAPPED IN THE BACK OF THE HEAD https://t.co/ozrI5VgGAK

— AWSTEN KNIGHT (@awsten) March 2, 2026

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Even Mark Carney, the Canadian Prime Minister, agreed that the US and Israel were breaking international law. But of course, because it’s the US and Israel, he’s going to look the other way.

Asked about the illegality of the US-Israeli attack on Iran, Carney admits that “it appears that these actions are inconsistent with international law,” while simultaneously reaffirming that he supports it “in context.” This is not a principled foreign policy, it is a total mess. pic.twitter.com/sjBuhDevZq

— Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (@CJPME) March 3, 2026

Israelis are partying in bomb shelters. Do the people in Gaza, Lebanon, or Iran have bomb shelters? Do they fuck.

Look at this. It’s worse than fiction. They truly don’t care what goes on outside.

And how could they? They’ve had a genocide in their backyard for years now. https://t.co/TDAxXgwGNG

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— Shaun King (@shaunking) March 3, 2026

We have watched Israel commit war crime after war crime for two years. The terrorist state expects us to livestream babies being burnt alive, hospitals getting bombed, and journalists running from bullets and look the other way. Meanwhile, they want us to pay attention and join their cries of ‘international law’ when a couple of buildings get hit in Tel Aviv? Or when things don’t quite go their way?

If Israel wants to fuck around, they’re going to find out. And we are not going to have sympathy for them when they do find out.

Featured image via Al Jazeera English/ YouTube.