In order for a warplane to bomb its target, it must first take off from the ground and enter the sky. To state the obvious: the closer the plane is to its target when it leaves the runway, the more favourable the circumstances. Proximity means shorter flights, less fuel, and the ability to transport heavier weapons.

Once that plane has wiped its target off the face of the earth, it needs somewhere to land. Without somewhere safe to return to, it may not even take off in the first place. Often, that’s the same runway from which it first entered the sky. 

After briefly prohibiting the United States from using UK airbases for attacks on Iran, US B-2 stealth bombers will arrive at RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire and on the UK airbase at Diego Garcia sometime today or tomorrow. Up to this point, US warplanes had to contend with far longer distances for takeoff and landing, a point of considerable irritation for Donald Trump. Now, according to US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, “the amount of firepower over Iran and Tehran is about to surge dramatically”, with predictions for an intensified onslaught over the weekend. 

During the first week of the US-Israel war of aggression on Iran, “pre-surge” firepower killed over 1,300 people across the country. That includes the assasination of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and many high-ranking officials, as well as a reportedly “double tap” US strike on a girls’ primary school which killed at least 150 students and staff, and attacks on over a dozen Iranian hospitals and health facilities. 

As a result, war now stretches from the UK’s military base in Cyprus, to Lebanon, where Israel is carpet bombing Beirut and occupying the country’s southern villages, across every Gulf state and in cities like Dubai and Riyadh, down through the now-closed Strait of Hormuz, and all the way to Sri Lanka. In Palestine, Israel has re-accelerated genocide and famine in Gaza by closing the Rafah crossing, which occupying forces had only partially reopened last month after almost two years of total shutdown, meaning aid is once again blocked and around 18,500 people seeking medical treatment remain stuck. Similarly, check points across the West Bank have been closed, limiting Palestinians’ freedom of movement, while settlers escalate their deadly assaults across the territory, under the protection of the Israeli army.     

That this is an illegal war, strong-armed into existence by Israel, pursued by the US without any lucid objectives, purpose, strategy, or expertise, led by idiots and buffoons like Trump, Hegseth, and Marco Rubio, and plainly progressing toward regime collapse or civil war is so clear that even Keir Starmer can see it. And yet, Starmer has once again managed to triangulate the most timid, dishonest, and morally vacant position possible for the UK with the insulting fiction that the country is only providing US access for “defensive strikes” – an utterly meaningless phrase when applied to the world’s primary purveyor of civilian slaughter, in a war which it initiated. 

According to new reporting, Starmer was not actually opposed to the US using RAF bases for strikes on Iran. Rather, his instinctual support for providing access to the bases was overruled by pressure from members of his cabinet, which he was too weak to overcome. Once Iran sent retaliatory drones and missiles toward UK allies in the region, including at the UK’s base in Cyprus, Starmer could then force his position through. Yet this may not be all. Yesterday, defence secretary John Healey refused to state that the UK would not join the US and Israel war effort with its own bombing campaign in the days and weeks ahead.

Despite eventually acceding to all of Trump’s demands, Starmer can’t catch a break. Trump now takes to the press on a near daily basis to lambast him as “a loser” – a badge of honour (coming from Trump) that Starmer doesn’t deserve, particularly when President Pedro Sanchez of Spain, for all his faults, has actually denied the US permission to use its bases. At home, Labour has been surpassed in the polls and outflanked to the left by the anti-war Greens, and overwhelmed by the deluge of war mongering jingoism to the right from Reform, the Tories, and the media. For them, this war has advanced the central cause of the Faragist political project, which asks voters to consider why the UK should settle for submission to MAGA when it could instead stagger toward total absorption.

Labour seems to have exported its messaging on this question to Ben Judah, the former writer turned foreign office special adviser, now doing the rounds as a commentator on international affairs. 

It should be no surprise that Judah – whose vile, racist writing on migrants in London ought to have disqualified him from a government position, and whose role as adviser to David Lammy during the Gaza genocide should make him persona non grata in public life – has nothing to offer. From the insulting, to the idiotic, and the irredeemable, Judah has perfectly captured the Starmerite insistence on treating people like they’re dumb as rocks.  

In recent pieces, Judah rightly identifies the US-UK relationship as an issue, but falls remarkably short when he advances further. He believes that a culture of dependence has (only now) taken hold which “has softened our ability to think clearly”, rather than understanding external dependence as the structuring characteristic of British life since at least the late nineteenth century – one that has defined the country’s relationship to empire and its turn to financialisation. He asserts that the “special relationship” exists in the ineffable connections between people and businesses, and has no conception of the underlying political economy that has tied the two countries together through the democratically devastating practice of offshoring since the 1960s. 

More than that, he pins his hopes for the future of the relationship on the return to power of “the highly intelligent, highly professional Washington China hawks – that think-tank-cum-security-state world of which Jake Sullivan as Biden’s national security adviser was king, with their green-industrial Atlanticism, and plan for allies to be both respectfully integrated but subordinated into a global contest with China.” You know, just the completely discredited foreign policy elite who led the way in perpetrating a genocide (you might be surprised to hear that Gaza does not figure in Judah’s writing on the end of the rules-based order) and were subsequently voted out of office in disgrace. 

The same fate awaits this government, so it’s no surprise that restoration is the only vision of the future that it and its supporters can articulate. In the meantime, they have a lot more killing to do.▼