My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (21.4.26) challenging the albeit minority support for the illegal war against Iran. Trump is under huge pressure at home and globally, more threatened by oil prices than any moral upset at human death and environmental destruction. But Starmer’s hypocritical role is possibly the most astounding of all – stating that the UK does not support Trump’s war but ensuring Britain as the launchpad for the weapons of mass destruction. We have to protest!
A B-1 Bomber is filmed high in the sky over Plymouth. Its rumblings, distinct from rolling thunder, cause us to look up, to question and to assess. It is not normal, not a usual sound. Some marvel at the power represented by the technology. But the black silhouette causes many to fleetingly reflect on the distant wars that are being rehearsed overhead.
Britain is an aircraft carrier for the United States. Only those who are comfortable with this “special relationship” applaud the US bases strewn across our island and the use of the Royal Air Force for Trump’s illegal war in Iran.
At least 23 US strategic bombers are now operating from RAF Fairford, Gloucestershire, US military personnel flying missions from England in support of ongoing strikes against Iranian targets. They’re practising and refuelling over our homes, but dropping huge payloads – 2,000lb “bunker buster” bombs – on everything from schools and hospitals to ancient historical monuments and, oh yes, civilians, women and children.
Just as Blair and Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 was formally recorded as illegal under international law, so will the bombing of Iran in 2026. There are no weapons of mass destruction, no nuclear weapons in Iran. Only Israel has nuclear missiles in an otherwise nuclear-free Middle East.
Wars are deadly. And costly. Thousands dead, hundreds of thousands injured, millions homeless inside of one month’s assault. This illegal invasion is costing the US $891million each day and the global economy hundreds of billions in disruption, transport and agriculture descending into chaos. Blocks to oil supplies is already the equivalent of the daily consumption of Europe’s five largest economies combined. Petrol and gas prices are a superficial inconvenience when compared with the real and lasting costs to us all.
By the end of this week, roughly 60,000 American service members will be in or around the Middle East, the largest concentration since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Trump is calling the current pause in fighting with Iran a fragile two-week ceasefire, set to expire on Thursday April 22 after talks in Pakistan fell apart almost as soon as they began. Then what?
Only last week, Trump’s threat to destroy a civilisation, with its implied threat of nuclear war, sent a chill around the world. Trump and Netanyahu’s war has been a brutal and illegal onslaught on the people of Iran and Lebanon. It has created a humanitarian disaster and caused the destruction of infrastructure, environmental damage, and economic crisis. And the British Government is wholly implicated.
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has been complicit in this illegal war, allowing US planes to use British bases. The British government must break with Trump and his warmongering policies, including disallowing the stationing of US nuclear weapons at the Lakenheath USAF base in Suffolk.
British “patriots” are cheerleading the US bombers as if they’re “our own”! Their allegiance is to Trump’s Stars-and-Stripes far-Right White-supremacy, not the Union Jack, and to western capitalism, the only beneficiaries of mass slaughter being the western oil companies who have made an extra $100billion more than their usual profits in the last month, and the arms companies scurrying to increase production.
Which brings us back to Plymouth. The B-1 stratospheric rumblings are in part a propaganda exercise to pull the population behind support for rearmament and the diversion of much-needed tax funding for health and education into arms spending. The real power of that jet bomber is in tying us to the politics and economics of warfare, not welfare. Nothing at all to cheer about in a country ravaged by austerity politics and corrupt profiteering.
On Saturday we will be protesting at RAF Fairford to demand the UK stops the bombers! Kick US nuclear weapons off British soil! Fund doctors and nurses, not Nukes! Vote for Welfare not Warfare!
This Week’s column in the daily Plymouth Herald (14.10.25), stating the obvious about Trump’s Plan for Gaza – no plan at all for Palestinian sovereignty. It is not just that our protests against genocide need to continue, but they must grow and combine anti-imperialism and opposition to rearmament before we’re all treated like Gazans. Written on Monday morning whilst watching the Trump Show, by publication on Tuesday morning the spectacle had already been exposed as an empty fraud to be condemned. The Big Lie! Keep protesting!
Here’s the original unedited version (900 words) with the printed version (max 600) beneath.
So President Trump has proclaimed Peace in the Middle East and the end of the violence against the people of Gaza! Why, then, did 600,000 people march through London last weekend calling for Freedom for Palestine? They’ve won, haven’t they? No! This ceasefire is a respite, the third ceasefire in the two-years of assault upon Gaza. It does not represent peace or justice. It is not a Peace Agreement. Despite all living hostages being released, Israel has not agreed that this is a permanent ceasefire. Medical workers, doctors and nurses arrested without charge during the destruction of the hospitals of Gaza are not being released from detention. Gaza has no electricity, neither water nor sanitation, almost no food, medical supplies or any basic infrastructure whatsoever. No economy. At least 180,000 Palestinians dead including 20,000 children, 5 times that injured, the entire Gazan population of two-million traumatised. The seige conditions that may be be lifted were always illegitimate, inhuman and illegal under international law. Netanyahu’s Israeli Defence Force has violated one international law after another and is not withdrawing from Gaza. Netanyahu is a war criminal yet applauded by the most powerful rulers of the world. The Israeli State refuses to recognise Palestine and cannot be trusted. The first phase of the Peace Plan has no timetables and has no plan for self-determination or even representative government for the Palestinian people. The Board of Peace chaired by the President of the United States of America is now unlikely to be administered by Tony Blair, an architect of the illegal invasion of Iraq, and equally unlikely to replace the Israeli occupation with an international military force. In any case, Israel will maintain a security perimeter to Gaza’s borders, ensuring a militarised open-air impoverished prison. Any Palestinian civil authority will be fragmented and disempowered. The plan does not include any plan for reparations for the wholesale destruction of Gaza by Israel, and no accountability for Netanyahu’s war crimes. There will be no dismantling of all the Israeli settlements in and around Palestine’s West Bank – the larger part of Palestine not even recognised by the Trump Deal – gained by force and ethnic cleaning and declared illegal over decades by the United Nations Council. There’s no right-of-return for any of the 8 million Palestinian diaspora – those already forced from their own land and living in exile. Previous agreements surrounding Gaza, for example at Camp David or the Oslo accords, have been signed and then discarded by Israel. Earlier this year, the Real-Estate billionaire Steve Witkoff organised a deal accepted by not only by Hamas but a wide range of different regional liberation groups representing a much broader cross-section of Palestinian society. They all signed the Witkoff Deal on August 18th, only to have the entire negotiating team of Hamas targeted by Israeli air strikes hours later, bombing buildings in Doha, Qatar but failing to kill Hamas leaders. Israel can’t be trusted. Trump’s Plan is neo-colonialist. The racist apartheid military state of Israel wants the entire surrender and subjugation of the people of Gaza. Israel is creating open-air concentration camps of the most intense poverty, heavily restricting water and food aid as well as maintaining a visible and palpable atmosphere of disempowerment and fear. For the Zionist ultra-right nationalists, the Palestinian people are still the target for complete extermination, Palestine to be erased from the map and from history. This short pause is better than nothing. A respite. But it’s not over. No people can agree and sign-up for the end of their very existence. Israel remains wholly entrenched in Gaza. The people are traumatised and immiserised but have not surrendered. The potential for a viable Palestinian State, as already recognised by the UK and 148 other nations, is further away than the serious opportunity for “a land for all” – a secular and multicultural democratic state from the river to the sea. The Israeli people may not like Netanyahu but show no wish for a Palestinian State. The loss of support for Israel by the majority of people across the West and further afield is extensive and irreparable. Our protests have made Israel a pariah State. Gaza represents the most barbarous peak of the logic of the system we are all subjected to. The brutality of Capitalism. Why does no-one ask for Israel to disarm? Why is Israel allowed to produce, site, arm and aim nuclear weapons, threatening their imminent use, whilst all others in the region are banned? Why is the single-ethnicity state of Israel allowed to maintain an Apartheid constitution when the world previously damned and deposed the Apartheid State of South Africa? The answers are two-fold: the ideological commitment of western politicians to the racist elitist tenets of Zionism, and the capitalist economics clawing at the wealth of the region through imperialist militarism. So the genocide in Gaza has awoken peoples across the world to the nature of Israel and imperialism. There is a movement of millions across five continents that is focussed upon challenging Israel. This week’s meetings of the most powerful politicans and Corporate directors in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, will include business talks to carve-up the beach-front property rights and the gas and oil extraction off the coast. Trump wants this deal because he wants-in on the Gaza Riviera property developments, and his negotiators are in on the scam. We can’t easily access these facts of what’s happening. Trump’s friends, centibillionaire Larry Ellison and his son David, own Paramount and are buying media institutions including CNN and TicToc. The billionaire owners of global mass media control the narrative. They buy mass media to ensure it will report what they want said. And censor what they don’t want said. Trump’s Plan was represented by Trump’s son-in-law-law, the billionaire financier Jared Kushner, his US speculative land acquisitions once bankrolled by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and with major shares in Israel’s finance firm Phoenix known as “the JPMorgan” of Israel. Yet he is portrayed as a neutral player negotiating for human rights. If the media and politicans can lie straight-faced and contiunously, if the big corporations are granted ever more power and control without challenge, and if the military is allowed to infiltrate public spaces to protect the rich and powerful, then we will all become Gaza – subjugated to the inhuman drive for wealth and power by the billionaire class, and terrorised if we resist. The Palestine protests will continue. We will apply boycotts, divestments, sanctions (BDS) against Israel to end the genocide and colonisation. We will expose the lies and slights-of-hand of the media spin and political machinations on behalf of the imperialists and colonialists. Freedom for Palestine, self-determination for the people, is the test for freedom for us all.
In print:
President Trump has proclaimed Peace in the Middle East and the end of the violence against the people of Gaza! Why, then, did 600,000 people march through London last weekend calling for Freedom for Palestine? We’ve won, haven’t we? No! This ceasefire is a respite, the third ceasefire in the two-years of the current assault upon Gaza. It does not represent peace or justice. Despite all living hostages being released, Israel has not agreed that this is a permanent ceasefire. Gaza has no electricity, neither water nor sanitation, almost no food, medical supplies or any basic infrastructure whatsoever. At least 180,000 Palestinians dead, 5 times more injured, the entire Gazan population of two-million traumatised. The siege conditions are illegitimate, inhuman and illegal under international law. Netanyahu’s Israeli Defence Force has violated one international law after another and is not withdrawing from Gaza. The Israeli State refuses to recognise Palestine and cannot be trusted. The first phase of the Peace Plan has no timetables and has no plan for self-determination or any representative government for the Palestinian people. Any Palestinian civil authority will be fragmented and disempowered. A Board of Peace chaired by the President of the United States of America is yet to be organised, unlikely to include the hated Tony Blair or to replace the Israeli occupation with an international military force, the tensions high across the Region. However contrived, Gaza will remain a militarised open-air impoverished prison, the IDF securing its perimeter. The Plan does not include any details of reparations for the wholesale destruction of Gaza by Israel, and no accountability for Netanyahu’s war crimes. There will be no dismantling of all the Israeli settlements in and around Palestine’s West Bank, gained by force and ethnic cleaning and declared illegal over decades by the United Nations Council. There’s no right-of-return for any of the 8 million Palestinian diaspora – those already forced from their own land and living in exile. This short pause is better than nothing. A respite. But it’s not over. No people can agree and sign-up for the end of their very existence. The people are traumatised and immiserised but have not surrendered. The potential for a viable Palestinian State, as already recognised by the UK and 148 other nations, is further away than the serious opportunity for “a land for all” – a secular and multicultural democratic state from the river to the sea. Gaza represents the most barbarous peak of the logic of the system we are all subjected to: the ideological commitment of western politicians to the racist elitist tenets of Zionism, and the capitalist economics clawing at the wealth of the region through imperialist militarism. Today’s meeting of the most powerful politicians and Corporate directors in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, includes business talks to carve-up the beach-front property rights and the gas and oil extraction off the coast. Trump wants this deal because he wants-in on the “Gaza Riviera” property developments. The media and politicians obscure the facts. We are all at risk of becoming Gazans – subjugated to the inhuman drive for wealth and power by the billionaire class, and terrorised if we resist. The big corporations are granted ever more power and control without challenge, and the military is allowed to infiltrate public spaces to protect the rich and powerful. The Palestine protests will continue. We will apply boycotts, divestments, sanctions (BDS) to end the genocide and colonisation. We will expose the lies and slights-of-hand of the media spin and political machinations. Freedom for Palestine! Self-determination for the people! Gaza is the test for freedom for us all.
Emotional Climate 