A U.S. Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcon
In one respect at least, Andy Burnham’s new government already looks rather a lot like the last one. One of Starmer’s final acts as Prime Minister was to call a Cobra meeting last Friday at which it was reaffirmed that the British government would continue allowing the United States military use of British bases in Diego Garcia and Fairford, Gloucestershire, for mythical ‘defensive’ purposes against Iran. Burnham has not demurred: Washington remains in command.
Mr Burnham’s first days in office have also seen the appointment of former Defence Secretary John Healey as Chancellor. Healey resigned from Starmer’s government by beating the drums of war and protesting that the huge increase in ‘defence’ spending still was not enough. It was the final nail in the coffin for Starmer, leading directly to Burnham’s challenge and, clearly, keeping him in hock to the military. Healey now has a stranglehold over spending and we can be sure it will be channelled to weapons before wages. Fellow right-winger Wes Streeting is now in Healey’s old job as Defence Secretary and will doubtless, in a pincer movement, demand even more support for the military.
We are about to see British government policy towards the Middle East get even more dangerous, as Burnham chooses anew to facilitate Trump’s catastrophic resumption of war. The notion that US operations from UK bases are in any way defensive is absurd: this is a war of aggression waged from the White House situation room. Fairford with its long runways is the site of the heavy B-1 and B-52 bombers. The B-1 can carry a very heavy payload, transporting massive quantities of guided bombs. The Gloucestershire base also allows direct bombing missions, with US pilots able to make return trips without refuelling — impossible from the distant, peaceable American homeland. It may suit Burnham to reprise Starmer’s pretence that Britain is not involved in this war, but that is a travesty of the truth.
The war has gone extremely badly for Trump. When he launched it in alliance with Benjamin Netanyahu last February, he promised a rapid victory which would see regime change and the defeat of the major adversary of the US-Israel axis in the Middle East. That’s not what happened. Weeks of bombing left infrastructure destroyed and thousands dead, and powerful retaliation from Iran that Trump and his testosterone-fuelled ‘Secretary of War’ Pete Hegseth clearly didn’t expect.
The Iranians might have suffered huge losses but they have hit back militarily at the US allies in the Gulf States. In a move whose possibility simply doesn’t seem to have occurred to Trump and his advisers, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz to international traffic, thus cutting off supplies of oil, gas and other materials, stranding many ships, and heralding a major international economic crisis. Some military analysts now judge Tehran, with its powerful asymmetric capacities, to have attained ‘escalation dominance’.
That checkmated Trump, who has successively proclaimed peace, threatened war, blockaded, withdrawn the blockade, tried to impose US tariffs, hailed peace talks, said the peace talks were dead, and is nearly two weeks into the resumption of daily bombardment. The US has targeted bridges, hospitals, railways and other civilian infrastructure. These actions — like much of what the Americans and Israelis did in the war’s first round — amount to war crimes, although you wouldn’t know it from the mainstream media. Or indeed from the vassal European governments — who were roundly insulted by Trump at the NATO summit but continue to appease him.
The war on Iran was launched jointly with the architect of the Gaza genocide, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has also waged a barbaric war on Lebanon. Burnham has admitted that ‘we got it wrong’ over Gaza. But if he wants to get it right he needs to completely stop arming Israel and admit we have witnessed a genocide in Gaza.
Continuing to aid and abet war crimes in the Middle East while cutting public spending in every other area to pay for Healey’s plans, as working class people suffer with the cost-of-living, will land this government in the same place as Starmer’s. But this time the decline and fall is likely to be even more politically explosive. If Burnham wishes to avoid that fate, he should kick the habit of a lifetime in Labour and stop bowing down before the United States. Denying Iran-bound American bombers access to British military bases, a measure that the majority of the public supports, is the obvious — and urgent — place to start.
Source: Tribune