Mick Hartley

Daniel Finkelstein in the Times on Starmer’s obsession with international law, reinforced by his choice for attorney-general, Lord Hermer:

Can it really contravene international law to act against a regime that wages wars by proxy all over the Middle East, sponsors terrorist murderers all over the world and is building a ballistic missile and nuclear capacity to make good on its threats to bring death and annihilation to other nations? What sort of law only allows action after nuclear weapons have been built or deployed? The idea that this action is not self-defence, and not legal as such, seems to me completely naive.

Just ask Israel. Tehran has made no secret of its main foreign policy objective: to destroy the Zionist state. Was Israel meant to wait till after Tel Aviv had been obliterated before striking back?

Naive seems about the right word for Starmer’s whole position. He seems to have no feel for what it might be like to be a political leader, so just stumbles along, blindly clinging to the small print of international law – the only world he understands..

Our position makes little sense diplomatically. It has been a major aim of the Starmer government to maintain a close alliance with the increasingly erratic American administration. In the long term we clearly need to be less reliant on the US but the prime minister judged that this would take time. Our position over Iran has made a mockery of his entire approach to the Trump administration.

It makes little sense morally. We are now engaged in a war we regard as illegal. We are not on the side of the Iranian people yearning to be free, nor on the side of the opponents of all wars. We seem to have lost a sense of who our allies are and who the enemy is. The cheers ring out from Tehran apartment blocks, while in Britain you hear the sound of humming and hawing. A massive war has broken out. It wasn’t at a time of our choosing, or in a way we would have planned, but surely we should at least know which side we are on. Australia does. Canada does.

And it makes little sense practically. It was obvious that if Iran were attacked it would lash out at its regional enemies and therefore at our friends. And obviously we would need to defend them. It’s ridiculous to think that the US could be in a war in Iran and that we would remain uninvolved. But now we have lost much of the goodwill that would have come with this involvement.