Best Of

Starmer needs to get ahead of this oil crisis. Do some unpopular stuff that people will come to appreciate and will signal this is a big deal.

Cut speed limits, mandate wfh where possible, introduce carpool lanes all over the place...

Tories and Reform will oppose on reflex and it will show he's the serious politician thinking about national interest.

Pure authoritarianism that will do nothing to fix the problems.

Serious politics means fixing what the politicians control.

The Australian Labor Government has had good ideas on this. The price of fuel is mostly tax anyway, and the fuel cost is controlled by HMG. Australia has halved fuel duty, we should do the same, or go one better and suspend it altogether.

Doesn't that kind of miss the point?

The issue facing us isn't so much that fuel will become more expensive, but that fuel won't be available in the quantities we want at any realistic cost for a meaningful period of time. It's going to be horrible, but demand needs to be destroyed, at least for a while.

(See also the Rosebank etc debate. Even if EdM gave permission today, the lead time for a project like that surely makes it irrelevant for this crisis.)

Is anyone on Pb still of the view the UK should have joined the war?

We should have sent the RAF to attack Iranian missile sites as Kemi rightly said. If Trump commits ground troops we should join Israel and provide them with support from the air in my view too as that would be the only way to topple the regime.

However as Starmer is in power neither will happen as he is sticking to his line offensive actions in Iran are not authorised under international law

If we'd done that we'd be counting body bags in London, Birmingham, Glasgow, Cardiff, Belfast, Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle, Edinburgh and any other town or city

Sleepers in our midst revenge lone rangers martyrs

Forget all that. That is not the reason we should not be doing this. If Iran was a genuine threat to us and we needed to change the regime there then attacks in the UK are simply part of that scenario and one we have to deal with.

The real issue here is we should not be attacking Iran or supporting the US and Israel in attacking them. They are not and were not a threat to ourselves, Europe or the US. They did not attack us. They did not attack the US or Israel. They were attacked and we should not be supporting or condoning the aggressors.

I think you can make an argument that they were attacking Israel fairly regularly via their proxies

Well yes, but by the same rote you could say Russia has been attacking us for decades. Nobody has suggested bombing St Petersburg in response.

Russia has been attacking us for decades

And bombing St Pete’s always been on the list of options.

But wiser heads have prevailed to date

Because Russia has nukes.

Iran does not, yet, and its better to have this conflict now than after a mushroom cloud appears above Tel Aviv.

Israel has had nukes for a long while, yet there has been no sign of mushroom clouds over Tehran, or anywhere else.

Israel is not led by deranged, religious nihilists.

As much as people claim they are.

Israel is not my ally. Iran is not my ally. They are both bad and I have little interest in discussing who is badder.

When it comes to setting fire to ambulances in the UK I have no tolerance for any kind of justification. Everyone has a right in this country to live free of fear and intimidation.

The war - although it can't be that, or Congress would have to approve it - was indeed ill-thought out, a knee-jerk reaction to Netanyahu seeing a moment in time to kill a large number of Iranians resposible for funding Hamas and Hisbollah and for posing an existential threat to Israel with their intent to acquire nuclear-armed missiles.

We were not a party to the intial strikes that killed 40 top Iranains and 175 Iranian school girls. But it was an event, that had consequences from which we cannot hide.

When Iran lashed out at our commercial interests in the Gulf, do people really think it wise not to do all we can to stop the vulnerable infrastruture from being trashed? Infrstructure upon which our energy, our industry, our food depend. This is nothing to do with helping getting Trump out a hole. He was a fuckwit for not foreseeing the consequences of his actions. We should not be fuckwits in allowing Iran to prosecute its campaign of revenge.

Iran's actions in trying to lay waste to the economic interests of its neighbours should leave us in little doubt that the current Iranian regime having the bomb should be prevented. They would use it.

Which is all well and good.
But what would you suggest we do differently which would be practical and effective?

I met up with my friends: all “centrist dads”, whether in Law, Consulting, Advertising or IT.

They are now all ferociously anti-Israel, if not actively anti-Zionist.

We seem to have been on the same journey

And yet the deliberate planned horror of the brutal rapes of women on October 7 and the female hostages kept thereafter has not led to any journey by you - or apparently @Gardenwalker's friends - reflecting on why male violence against women is wrong and why those groups, states, cultures etc which promote it should be equally viewed with horror and distaste. Which is doubtless why we read you this morning proudly saying that you feel like punching an opportunistic female politician but never an opportunistic male politician, of which there are many.

I met up with my friends: all “centrist dads”, whether in Law, Consulting, Advertising or IT.

They are now all ferociously anti-Israel, if not actively anti-Zionist.

I'm anti-Israeli Government but the problem with that is there are a lot of people (including the Israeli Government) who aim to make such comments appear anti-Israel and antisemitic because that protects the Israeli Government by pushing the blame back on those objecting.

Critical thinking is all about letting uncomfortable facts sit alongside each other. One fact is that genuine antisemites disguise their antisemitism with chat about Zionism and Nakba, an other is that the Israeli government expends huge resources on portraying any criticism of their many iniquitous actions as antisemitism. Anyone who doesn’t accept both these facts can get in the fucking sea (or river) as far as I’m concerned.