Keir Starmer is leading Britain into another illegal war

All are priorities claimed by Keir Starmer’s government. It took Starmer 48 hours to risk them all for an illegal war started by the US and Israel.

On Sunday evening, with the halting delivery of a hostage, Starmer announced that he had allowed the US to use British bases to strike targets inside Iran.

The Government’s claim that these are “defensive” strikes is a smokescreen: Britain is supporting attacks inside another country as it retaliates against an assault by two of the world’s largest military powers.

The timeline of the war demonstrates the US and Israel’s aggression. On Friday, the Omani Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi, mediator in negotiations between the US and Iran, announced that a comprehensive deal on Iran’s nuclear programme was “within reach”. In response, the US and Israel started a war, setting Tehran ablaze. Reports indicate that their bombs hit a school and a sports hall, killing at least 100 children.

As mediator, Albusaidi made a rare move by criticising the war, which is an obvious violation of the UN Charter. The US government has been clear in its desire for regime change and barely attempted to persuade its own public that war is needed.

The US and Israel started this war and have unleashed destruction across the Middle East, putting British personnel and civilians at risk and sending energy prices soaring, most sharply in Europe.

Starmer has increased the risks. By supporting US strikes, British bases have an active role in attacks on Iran and are prominent targets for retaliation.

By contrast, Spain has been a leading advocate for de-escalation and international law: condemning the US and Israel’s war and preventing the US from using its bases on the Iberian Peninsula. A similar approach by Starmer would have dampened the risks faced by British personnel who could have focused on genuinely defensive action to protect their bases from any attacks.

The exposure of Britain’s bases across the Middle East reflects its outdated foreign policy in an era of unbridled US aggression. While the government parrots the need for massive spending on defence, it maintains expensive military commitments from Cyprus to the Chagos Islands, using them to support US-led wars thousands of miles from home. In the last two years, Cyprus alone has been used to bomb Yemen and run daily spy flights over Gaza.

Britain remains part of the architecture of US-led interventions that have killed an estimated 4.5 million people through war and its wider devastation since 9/11. These are not wars that the British people want to join — about half of Britons oppose the war on Iran and the use of British bases to support US strikes — but wars that politicians impose.

These politicians do not lose children in the fighting or bear the brunt of soaring energy prices. In the brutal project of US power politics, it is working class people everywhere who bear the costs.

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Khem Rogaly is Co-Director of Transition Security Project, a research centre that studies the economic, climate and geopolitical impacts of the US and UK militaries, and Principal Research Fellow at Common Wealth.

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