Best Of

If Blair's intervention helps keep Starmer in place I'm all for it .

Blair was right about standing shoulder to shoulder with the US. And, quite frankly, Bush was right about the Axis of Evil too.

We are about to find out the consequences of not doing that, which will play out over years - not just months.

Standing shoulder to shoulder with Bush destroyed Blair, you can only imagine what standing shoulder to shoulder with Trump would do to anyone. The majority of UK voters loathe the moron

The way Trump has behaved to the UK - tariffs, insults, bullying, belittling our past help etc - makes him undeserving of our unconditional support. You cannot behave has he has and then expect everyone to come running when it suits him.

Latest Opinium

Ref 29% + 1
Lab 21% + 3
Con 16% - 2
Green 14% + 1
LD 10% -2

Fieldwork 4th to 6th March

Badenoch working her magic touch.

She's been too gungho, especially given Trump's latest nonsense. Why send an aircraft carrier with all the cost and risk involved? Let him fight his own war.

Nonsense. We should have sent in our carrier right from the start.

We'd have a sunker Carrier and Body Bags returning home now if we had and who would YOU have been blaming.

NOT OUR WAR!

Stay Out!

Our ex pats in the region are exactly that ex-pats , many of them there to slag off our Country , how great they are and how crap the UK is, they made their bed, tough shit. The genuine majority should be helped and supported and it;s up to Gulf States to protect them. We should offer support no more. NON aggressive support.

Holidaymakers should and are being helped and slowly getting out!

Lets remind everyone of one FACT!

One drone has fallen on a soverign UK air base. The most accurate reports suggest it was Russian made, fired by Hezbollah probably from remote Labanon area!

RAF and others are now intercepting drone, you CANNOT stop every drone and Badenoch and Farage cannot be allowed to ghoulishly cheer any drone that falls as some sort of sick excuse for their desperation to go to war!

Every drone that stops another Kuwait City tower from burning is a win - that will be appreciated in the region.

We didn't start the war. But we shouldn't sit on our hands either if we can help prevent damage.

Personally, I'd extend that to hunting down the launch sites within Iran too. But I appreciate that is further than some would go. Happy for that subject to be debated in Parliament.

How much value can we really add to the efforts though, realistically? Our contributions often seem tokenistic at best, so the crashout by the White House seems, in typical fashion, excessive.

We aren't adding anything to the efforts of the Americans and the Israelis though. We are adding to the efforts to protect our friends (and commercial partners) in the Gulf Cooperation Council. It is in our long-term interests for them to see we stand with them, to do what we can to help them reduce the damage to their countries.

We clearly have very little control over the US and Israeli war aims. We can - admittedly in a limited way - provide some cover to assist the destruction being inflicted upon the GCC by a veangeful and frankly demented Iranian "regime" - to the extent that still functions as such. Our efforts will be appreciated in Dubai and Muscat and Dohar, even though we get no thanks (or worse, actively ridiculed) in Washington and Tel Aviv.

You can still think "Fuck Israel. Fuck the USA." whilst doing what we can to help the consequences on the tens of thousands of Brits in the region under threat as ex-pats or as holidaymakers.

They aren't ex pats, they are economic migrants

I would very much like to disagree with this, but I am struggling.

Look folks, reality can sometimes be hard to accept.

We all want freedom for Iran. The regime was a horrible, nasty pack of religious zealots for whom terrorism & murder was always the first option. Their revolution started by killing 400 people in a theater with arson & chained exit doors. They sent thousand of kids to their deaths with toy keys around their necks promising entry to heaven if they just walk in to Iraqi minefields.

I’ve tracked IRGC terrorism across Iraq, Lebanon, Syria & Yemen and even fought them in the PG, They almost killed me in 1988. The Islamic regime needed/still needs to be destroyed … that said:

People are getting upset with why I assess this war will likely fail to topple the regime.

Because it is a fantasy based in Trump’s head using lethal tools we prepared for 47 years for the right moment. That moment likely has passed.

Trump has no idea what he’s doing. Because he has contempt for the people who know what they’re doing & the history of what came before him.

If Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires then Iran is the funeral home of empires. It dresses you up and lays you into the coffin neatly. Then closes the lid.

Trump cannot understand why Iran hasn’t surrendered … “Lookit all them bombs,” he shouts “They should all love Trump!”

That’s it. That’s the Iran-War strategy. He does not care about the people of Iran. It a score settling grudge match egged on by Netanyahu’s 40 years of promises that war will change the regime if we just drop enough bombs & assassinate its leaders.

So If you want to live in a fantasy world where we are suddenly being greeted as liberators by the 93 million Iranians … feel free.

You are now set up for earth shattering disappointment.

You have to account for the fact that Trump could have attacked in support of the protesters in January. He didn’t & he let them be killed. He was completely indifferent. The 30k dead were a one-day talking point.

Right now, none of these attacks will liberate Iran without a populist uprising or invading ground forces. Worse case is a sectarian Civil war. If that happens the only outcome is that it will kill a lot of people, splinter the country & take down the global economy. Trump will sleep soundly & demand he be made Ayatollah.

This is literally his mental illness masked as foreign policy

This war may give some Iranians hope but it’s a false one. Gird for a horrible chain of dramatic events but rest assured Trump doesn’t care about the people of Iran.

He only want its oil. He said so.

I’m sorry folks, but my job is to deliver reality based assessments, not promise you sunshine in a swirling hurricane of flying bullets, bombs, excrement & razor wire.
https://x.com/MalcolmNance/status/2030572269898998102

Latest Opinium

Ref 29% + 1
Lab 21% + 3
Con 16% - 2
Green 14% + 1
LD 10% -2

Fieldwork 4th to 6th March

Badenoch working her magic touch.

She's been too gungho, especially given Trump's latest nonsense. Why send an aircraft carrier with all the cost and risk involved? Let him fight his own war.

Nonsense. We should have sent in our carrier right from the start.

Why?

We weren't part of the planning, such as objectives, rules of engagement or endgame.

No matter how vile the Iranian regime is, it isn't our war nor in our strategic interrst.

It is in our strategic interest to defeat the Iranian regime - one that has been targetting us and our interests for decades. Pathetically hiding behind others, like Ireland does, is weak, makes us a total irrelevance and undermines our credibility worldwide.

We are about to find out the geopolitical consequences of taking a back seat and putting our fingers in our ears, and it won't be pretty.

We won't be taken seriously again.

Ukraine should be the Western priority right now, and the war of choice that the US has launched on Iran has led to more Patriot interceptors being used in a week than have been supplied to Ukraine over four years. At the same time Russian oil sales to India and China have soared with a massively boosted oil price.

This war on Iran is a massive gift to Russia. It harms British interests.

If Ukraine had been helped to win against Russia already then the calculus would be different, but as it is this war is massively self-harming.

And if China identifies US weakness as a result of this war and moves to take Taiwan then this war will be seen as an even more catastrophic unforced error.

I don't agree. I think both are.

We've been trying to contain Iran for 47 years. It's been a major exporter of terror and instability right across the region.

It needs defeating once and for all and, now it's started, I think we must be influencing those decisions.

I'm not saying Iran is unimportant or ignorable, but Britain and the US decided in WWII that they had to prioritise, and didn't add the USSR to their list of adversaries.

The war on Iran has already helped Russia in its war against Ukraine. It will make the US weaker and less able to defend Taiwan against China.

My fear is it will be seen in the future as a major turning-point in the decline of US power. And the truth is that Britain made itself irrelevant to the decision to go to war due to decades of penny-pinching on defence. Britain is irrelevant due to its weakness, not because it hasn't joined in.

‘but Britain and the US decided in WWII that they had to prioritise, and didn't add the USSR to their list of adversaries’

Would have been a bit awks as Britain and the USSR were already officially allied before perennial latecomers USA joined the party.

In early1940 we were planning to send aid to Finland to fight off Stalin, indeed that was part of the reason for the Narvik campaign. At that point it really did look as if we would be fighting both Hitler and Stalin at the same time, as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.

And yet 18 months later thanks to AH and fulsome propagandising by HMG, we were snuggling up to Uncle Joe and breathlessly following the battles of our brave, noble allies, the Red Army.
A year and a half is an eternity in geopolitics.

Yes, that switch was a great inspiration to Orwell when writing 1984. The BBC was the model for the Ministry of Truth. Also the British Communists who switched seamlessly from "Peace Now!" to "Second Front Now!" overnight.

Also his schooldays at a detested prep school in Sussex and his time in the Indian Imperial Police. And of course the real life contemporaneous nightmares of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia that he fought against and Stalinist Spain that he fought in.

All these influences come together remarkably in one of the greatest books of all time.

Morning all

I'm not terribly impressed by Luke Tryl's political analysis in general and this effort is misleading.

He makes big play of the Lab/Con split now but that's just polling - if he included polling and not just actual elections he would likely find other periods when the Lab/Con vote was depressed. In 1981-82, there were polls putting the Allance well in front and with Lab/Con combined barely at 50%. In the mid-80s, it was a little higher but we had plenty of polls in that period when Labour, Conservative and Alliance were all around 30% - I think famously there was one three way tie at 31%.

As recently as June 2019, there were polls showing Lab/Con in the high 30s in the period just before Theresa May resigned so this is nothing new.

The key is whether this depressed value will remain the case up to and including the 2029 GE - history shows it won't and it remains to be seen whether Reform and Green are simply feeding on midterm and general disillusionment rather than marking a seismic re-alignment.

We sometimes disagree. On this, we do not.
There is too much assignment of permanancy to a fluctuating landscape and too much ignoring previously well established patterns.
People, generally, still think its 2 or 3 years till they go to the polls again

It could well be the 2029 UK General Election will be analogous to the 1973 Danish election (there have been others in Europe) where well-established parties have been swept aside by insurgents and even with FPTP (arguably especially if the numbers are right) that could happen.

Imagine a Conservative Party with 50 MPs, imagine Labour with less than 100 - it's barely conceivable.

The other part to this is the extent of local organisation - yes, you can run local Council by-election campaigns with a small group of activists (I did it myself in the dim and distant) but a GE is several orders of magnitude different.

How many seats will each of the five main parties fight in England next time - I don't mean, put up candidates, but seriously contest. Finger in the air but I suspect the LDs will fight 100-125 to some degree, the Conservatives 150-200 perhaps but what of Reform, Green and especially Labour?

IMHO, you'd have to be borderline certifiable to have a strong view on the next GE - the predictions for this May are incoherent in extremis - the latest nonsense in the Guardian fails even basic analysis (the seat count is wrong to start with) and is more about expectations mismanagement - let's talk up the Greens so when they win 250 London seats rather than 500 we can call Polanski a failure - seriously?

Latest Opinium

Ref 29% + 1
Lab 21% + 3
Con 16% - 2
Green 14% + 1
LD 10% -2

Fieldwork 4th to 6th March

Badenoch working her magic touch.

She's been too gungho, especially given Trump's latest nonsense. Why send an aircraft carrier with all the cost and risk involved? Let him fight his own war.

Nonsense. We should have sent in our carrier right from the start.

We'd have a sunker Carrier and Body Bags returning home now if we had and who would YOU have been blaming.

NOT OUR WAR!

Stay Out!

Our ex pats in the region are exactly that ex-pats , many of them there to slag off our Country , how great they are and how crap the UK is, they made their bed, tough shit. The genuine majority should be helped and supported and it;s up to Gulf States to protect them. We should offer support no more. NON aggressive support.

Holidaymakers should and are being helped and slowly getting out!

Lets remind everyone of one FACT!

One drone has fallen on a soverign UK air base. The most accurate reports suggest it was Russian made, fired by Hezbollah probably from remote Labanon area!

RAF and others are now intercepting drone, you CANNOT stop every drone and Badenoch and Farage cannot be allowed to ghoulishly cheer any drone that falls as some sort of sick excuse for their desperation to go to war!

I saw your name. And then instantly skipped over your shite and didn't read it.

As usual.

I out your shite for the shite it is.

You’re a dullard, a party hack, and an anti semite. Worse, you’re boring

You are not an addition to the site