Definitely signs of a government bounce. Could be greater if he went further and actually condemned the US/Israeli action. Maybe saving that for closer to an election. No question it's a vote winner. The polling is so obvious as are the vox pops and programs such as Any Questions.
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
He's not even Iranian. just a semi literate American. Unless you live in a country you don't know the people or even have a sense of them.It feels like that with this man. He could be right but when you start with dramatic openings like that you seldom are. Iran is one of the few places I haven't worked in in that region so my only knowledge is from Iranians abroad and they're not homogenous. I know ones I like and ones I don't. By contrast I know lots of Israelis nearly all English ex pats. I would be interested to know how they would fare if faced with the treatment their government meet out to their enemies? The answer I suspect is they would be back to their motherland before you could say Shabbat shalom
The murderous thuggery of the Iranian regime has been detailed for many decades. The regime gets off on violence and their narrow, vicious, interpretation of Islam.
There’s a reason they need to use such violence to keep control - you don’t turn every mosque in to a secret police station because the people love you.
Nearly all Iranians abroad are refugees from that or descendants of refugees from that. A diaspora of millions.
As the chap says, Trump is just making a murderous mess.
At university we had good fun with the Iranian Society being run by exiles - and regime supporters who were sponsored to do degrees in London getting violently angry that the anti-regime types weren’t suppressed by the university.
It rather reminded me of stories of the East bloc exiles in London and the various interactions with their regime supporters. There was that story from the 70s about a minor Polish government “trade envoy” guy who hung around a Polish exile club. Still missing, they say.
Right wing in slight retreat in polling Reform now sub 30 with all but 5 pollsters (JLP, Techne, Ipsos, Freshwater and Deltapoll but they havent reported since December) Tories off a point or two to just under 20 with most pollsters Labour picture is very varied, some tentative evidence of a no bases bounce but not conclusive yet Lib Dems in slight decline from last year and may see the odd single figure in the near term Greens on the march but still have not broken through 15% with any BPC pollsters except YG and Find Out Now
I think it's a rally to the flag effect.
And I think it's hard for the opposition to take a line - especially hard for Reform, because Farage actually wants stuff from Trump - he wants Chagos killed (and so say all of us). It would be far easier and more electorally rewarding to take an anti-Trump line.
However, as someone mentions downthread, Starmer will find a way to become less popular than ever. Let's just hope there's no loss of human life involved.
Now McSweeney has gone someone needs to be telling Starmer that whatever he does now he's crossed the rubicon with deranged Donald.
We should cut off all diplomatic relations with Israel anyway until there is regime change there.
Having crossed the rubicon with Donald he should on a case by case basis treat any American requests the same as he would from any other Country
The Special Relationship if not dead is dormant, it can only be revived post Trump and MAGA.
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.
Hitler was supporting the Finns wasn't he? One of the reasons Finland had to hand over so much territory IIRC.
The Finns were in a desperate position and sought help where they could. Despite being hugely outnumbered, they fought heroically, the Russians having been foolish enough to invade a country where there's nothing much to do other than ski about the place and shoot at stuff (and take a sauna after). Luring the Russians into forest clearings and then ambushing them was a special tactic. Russian losses were something like five times the Finns'.
The loss of territory has been demanded by the USSR before they declared war, so was pretty much inevitable either way - today it's a wasteland of appalling poverty and crushing social issues, whereas the parts adjacent Karelia that Finland kept are relatively prosperous. But the real Soviet objective was to conquer Finland and set up a puppet communist government - which completely failed. The additional land they were forced to give up, in addition to parts of Karelia and the buffer zone beyond Leningrad (now StP), was adjacent Lake Ladoga.
In Finland, what we see as the War was actually three wars; the first "Winter War", when the Soviets invaded, were fought to a standstill, and ended with the peace settlement and loss of territory in 1940. The second, "Continuation War", which broke out when Germany invaded the USSR in 1941, with Finland taking the opportunity to try and regain its lost territory, and after the German advance broadly refusing to fight on beyond its historic borders, which ended with a peace settlement in 1944 that required the Finns to remove all German forces from its territory. That led to the third, "Lapland War", in which the Germans burned down every settlement in the north of the country (hence there are few old buildings there nowadays), drove off most of the inhabitants, and laid lots of landmines (the removal of which took thirty years afterwards), before retreating to defensive positions in the north of Norway, where they mostly held out until the war ended. Officially Finland and Germany stayed at war into the 1950s.
I recommend “Кукушка” (“The Cuckoo”), the 2002 film set in Lapland in this period.
Apologies if I am raising an issue that is verboten.
Looking for a cross comparison between Wards and Constituencies to see how the 8000+ wards matches to the 650 constituencies. Before I embark on this (for betting purposes), does anyone know where I might get this information from the public domain. If not, I'll do it myself.
Apologies again for interrupting the current trashing / praising Trump.
The boundary commission's review website has a full map of all the relevant boundaries
Of course the master data that combines everything together is the PAF file that is owned by the post office but if all you care about is Ward to constituency that will give you everything you need.
With the boundary changes in Bradford we now have a ward that straddles the Shipley and Keighley constituency boundary.
I'm not sure how common this sort of arrangement is.
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
He's not even Iranian. just a semi literate American. Unless you live in a country you don't know the people or even have a sense of them.It feels like that with this man. He could be right but when you start with dramatic openings like that you seldom are. Iran is one of the few places I haven't worked in in that region so my only knowledge is from Iranians abroad and they're not homogenous. I know ones I like and ones I don't. By contrast I know lots of Israelis nearly all English ex pats. I would be interested to know how they would fare if faced with the treatment their government meet out to their enemies? The answer I suspect is they would be back to their motherland before you could say Shabbat shalom
The murderous thuggery of the Iranian regime has been detailed for many decades. The regime gets off on violence and their narrow, vicious, interpretation of Islam.
There’s a reason they need to use such violence to keep control - you don’t turn every mosque in to a secret police station because the people love you.
Nearly all Iranians abroad are refugees from that or descendants of refugees from that. A diaspora of millions.
As the chap says, Trump is just making a murderous mess.
At university we had good fun with the Iranian Society being run by exiles - and regime supporters who were sponsored to do degrees in London getting violently angry that the anti-regime types weren’t suppressed by the university.
It rather reminded me of stories of the East bloc exiles in London and the various interactions with their regime supporters. There was that story from the 70s about a minor Polish government “trade envoy” guy who hung around a Polish exile club. Still missing, they say.
The same with Iraqi Ba'athists in unis in the late 70's/80s.
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.
If Kuwait wants to stop drones being launched at Kuwait, then Kuwait can bomb the launch sites. Likewise UAE, Qatar and Bahrain. We can sell them the hardware.
So, you'd let the shaheed drones slam into civilian infrastructure? Even though we could help stop that?
Noted.
Russian drones are slamming into civilian infrastructure in Ukraine and we’re not attacking Russia. Israeli and US missiles are slamming into civilian infrastructure in Iran and we’re not attacking them. Life is somewhat more complicated than you’re painting it.
We have done what we can to assist Ukraine. We have sent them the DragonFire laser system to shoot down drones. Unlike the US, the UK isn't giving Russia an easy ride for giving up on democracy and committing war crimes on an industrial scale - 300,000 logged incidents and counting.
Great. So we can do the same for the Gulf states. We don’t have to start bombing Iran.
We have provided Ukraine with StormShadow cruise missiles. That thy use to bomb Russian command and control centres and weapons caches. Within Russia.
Would you not use our StormShadow cruise missiles to bomb known Iranian shaheed drone caches in Iran? Do you not see how inconsistent you appear?
We can sell Storm Shadow to UAE.
IIRC the Storm Shadow problem is that we don’t have enough and the production line is still closed.
Do a deal that UAE can get immediately from UK stocks at double the usual price, which funds production starting up again for UK and Ukraine.
C'mon freedom loving Iranians, sorry, Persians, get on them streets and start dying so you can make a trillion dollars for the USA.
Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal 🚨🇮🇷 Reza Pahlavi: In the first 10 to 15 years, Iran's economy could generate over a trillion dollars worth of revenue for the U.S.
The Tories crime policy, I agree with most of. I particularly detest the smell of cannabis (aka dog shit) on the street. And littering - why? These are signs of a dysfunctional society.
I think the devil's in the detail though - they say 'back our police to take a zero tolerance approach' - how does that actually compell the police to have a zero tolerance approach? The Home Secretary has no operational control over the police force. So how are you going to do it? There's also nothing really here on justice, which is absolutely vital if there's a crime crackdown. How are courts going to handle the extra cases? How are prisons going to handle it?
That strikes me as a lack of a 'worked out policy' that Kemi places so much importance on.
Though tbf I've only seen the social media video, they could have answers to all this.
I saw an interesting paper the other day, that correlated Lottery funded spending on minor projects with local feelings of “progress” and “things are working”.
Turns out that a 10 foot long footbridge over the rivulet next to village, or a changing room for the kids from the local school to use a bit of the park as a sports field, has a much bigger perceived impact than giant programs.
It’s rather sad that there’s a push, in Lottery funding, to bigger and bigger projects. Even submitting applications has been “professionalised” - to the point you really need to hire a consultant to prepare one…
There is a saying that families fall out with each other, but if they come under attack from an outsider they come together
Trump is that outsider and he has given a boost to Starmer which may well see his survival, not least because there is no obvious successor
This is a fast moving and dangerous time with untold consquences and as of now we are active in the arena and have to reserve the right to respond if Iranian missiles take out any of our military, civilians or interests
Defence spending is going to become a 'hot potato' and it is true over the last 20 years the UK and Europe have relied on the peace dividend to reduce defence spending, which Trump has come along and thrown in the bin
If you are an American it is legitimate to ask why is the US paying and subsidising other nations in NATO ?
Europe and UK have a war in Europe, and now one in the middle east, and something has to give to allow us to invest tens of billions more and now in our defence
You are buying into an incorrect US narrative there. The US is not paying and subsidising other nations in NATO.
They benefit massively (historically) from a disproportionate share of defence spending from Europe flowing into the US defence industry. They also benefit from installed forward bases and the ability to force project much more easily into the middle and Near East. Bases like Fakenham, Molehill, Rasmussen are immensely valuable as are the ability to use (sometimes!) Akrotiri, Gib and Diego Garcia.
For example, SACEUR is always a US flag officer and has control of the SHAPE organisation. That’s something that money can’t buy
Apologies if I am raising an issue that is verboten.
Looking for a cross comparison between Wards and Constituencies to see how the 8000+ wards matches to the 650 constituencies. Before I embark on this (for betting purposes), does anyone know where I might get this information from the public domain. If not, I'll do it myself.
Apologies again for interrupting the current trashing / praising Trump.
The boundary commission's review website has a full map of all the relevant boundaries
Of course the master data that combines everything together is the PAF file that is owned by the post office but if all you care about is Ward to constituency that will give you everything you need.
With the boundary changes in Bradford we now have a ward that straddles the Shipley and Keighley constituency boundary.
I'm not sure how common this sort of arrangement is.
Quite common. Ward splitting was one way to meet the ludicrously tight constituency size parameters. Separating wards from the rest of the LA being another.
The environmental crisis in Tehran now is an own goal for the Israelis, and Netanyahu probably has too much leeway.
This is the part of the country with the largest concentration of pro-U.S. abd pro-Israel feeling, and it's now being subjected indiscrimatejly to a toxic cloud.
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.
given they are still trying to make it seaworthy that was hardly likely, what are the chances of it actually making it there
I’m still completely lost as to what the end game of this Iran action is.
The regime still in place, but having agreed to end its nuclear ambitions? And ending all beligerant actions against its GCC neighbours?
Whether it extends to ending support for regional proxies is less certain.
It is going to need a lot of background displomacy. I can see Trump agreeing to let Putin persuade Tehran - and giving Putin what he wants on ending sanctions as the quid pro quo.
C'mon freedom loving Iranians, sorry, Persians, get on them streets and start dying so you can make a trillion dollars for the USA.
Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal 🚨🇮🇷 Reza Pahlavi: In the first 10 to 15 years, Iran's economy could generate over a trillion dollars worth of revenue for the U.S.
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
He's not even Iranian. just a semi literate American. Unless you live in a country you don't know the people or even have a sense of them.It feels like that with this man. He could be right but when you start with dramatic openings like that you seldom are. Iran is one of the few places I haven't worked in in that region so my only knowledge is from Iranians abroad and they're not homogenous. I know ones I like and ones I don't. By contrast I know lots of Israelis nearly all English ex pats. I would be interested to know how they would fare if faced with the treatment their government meet out to their enemies? The answer I suspect is they would be back to their motherland before you could say Shabbat shalom
The murderous thuggery of the Iranian regime has been detailed for many decades. The regime gets off on violence and their narrow, vicious, interpretation of Islam.
There’s a reason they need to use such violence to keep control - you don’t turn every mosque in to a secret police station because the people love you.
Nearly all Iranians abroad are refugees from that or descendants of refugees from that. A diaspora of millions.
As the chap says, Trump is just making a murderous mess.
At university we had good fun with the Iranian Society being run by exiles - and regime supporters who were sponsored to do degrees in London getting violently angry that the anti-regime types weren’t suppressed by the university.
It rather reminded me of stories of the East bloc exiles in London and the various interactions with their regime supporters. There was that story from the 70s about a minor Polish government “trade envoy” guy who hung around a Polish exile club. Still missing, they say.
The same with Iraqi Ba'athists in unis in the late 70's/80s.
Interesting - we didn’t have any Bath Tubbists that I recall. A fair number of “Death To West” types from Iran.
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.
If Kuwait wants to stop drones being launched at Kuwait, then Kuwait can bomb the launch sites. Likewise UAE, Qatar and Bahrain. We can sell them the hardware.
So, you'd let the shaheed drones slam into civilian infrastructure? Even though we could help stop that?
Noted.
Russian drones are slamming into civilian infrastructure in Ukraine and we’re not attacking Russia. Israeli and US missiles are slamming into civilian infrastructure in Iran and we’re not attacking them. Life is somewhat more complicated than you’re painting it.
We have done what we can to assist Ukraine. We have sent them the DragonFire laser system to shoot down drones. Unlike the US, the UK isn't giving Russia an easy ride for giving up on democracy and committing war crimes on an industrial scale - 300,000 logged incidents and counting.
Great. So we can do the same for the Gulf states. We don’t have to start bombing Iran.
We have provided Ukraine with StormShadow cruise missiles. That thy use to bomb Russian command and control centres and weapons caches. Within Russia.
Would you not use our StormShadow cruise missiles to bomb known Iranian shaheed drone caches in Iran? Do you not see how inconsistent you appear?
We can sell Storm Shadow to UAE.
IIRC the Storm Shadow problem is that we don’t have enough and the production line is still closed.
Do a deal that UAE can get immediately from UK stocks at double the usual price, which funds production starting up again for UK and Ukraine.
There's likely to be a lot of this sort of pragmatism falling out in coming weeks and months.
The environmental crisis in Tehran now is an own goal for the Israelis.
This is the part of the country with the largest concentration of pro-U.S. abd pro-Israel feeling, and it's now being subjected indiscrimatejly to a toxic cloud.
A point much underreported. Bombing cities which are anti-Regime doesn't encourage an uprising. Meanwhile, the heavily conservative rural areas aren't affected much.
Right wing in slight retreat in polling Reform now sub 30 with all but 5 pollsters (JLP, Techne, Ipsos, Freshwater and Deltapoll but they havent reported since December) Tories off a point or two to just under 20 with most pollsters Labour picture is very varied, some tentative evidence of a no bases bounce but not conclusive yet Lib Dems in slight decline from last year and may see the odd single figure in the near term Greens on the march but still have not broken through 15% with any BPC pollsters except YG and Find Out Now
If Trump and Bibi win this (doubtful) don't you think Kemi and Nigel will be vindicated and Starmer will be left looking weak. This is why he will bottle it and join an Iraq style war with Iran.
I'm not going to guess. The electorate act in ways that amaze me in times like this
I’m still completely lost as to what the end game of this Iran action is.
The regime still in place, but having agreed to end its nuclear ambitions? And ending all beligerant actions against its GCC neighbours?
Whether it extends to ending support for regional proxies is less certain.
It is going to need a lot of background displomacy. I can see Trump agreeing to let Putin persuade Tehran - and giving Putin what he wants on ending sanctions as the quid pro quo.
Which in turn will prolong the Ukrainian war.
I read your first two sentences and thought, yes, it would be good if Israel ended its nuclear ambitions and its belligerence against its neighbours… but then I realised you were talking about Iran. It would also be good for Iran to do those things.
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
He's not even Iranian. just a semi literate American. Unless you live in a country you don't know the people or even have a sense of them.It feels like that with this man. He could be right but when you start with dramatic openings like that you seldom are. Iran is one of the few places I haven't worked in in that region so my only knowledge is from Iranians abroad and they're not homogenous. I know ones I like and ones I don't. By contrast I know lots of Israelis nearly all English ex pats. I would be interested to know how they would fare if faced with the treatment their government meet out to their enemies? The answer I suspect is they would be back to their motherland before you could say Shabbat shalom
The murderous thuggery of the Iranian regime has been detailed for many decades. The regime gets off on violence and their narrow, vicious, interpretation of Islam.
There’s a reason they need to use such violence to keep control - you don’t turn every mosque in to a secret police station because the people love you.
Nearly all Iranians abroad are refugees from that or descendants of refugees from that. A diaspora of millions.
As the chap says, Trump is just making a murderous mess.
At university we had good fun with the Iranian Society being run by exiles - and regime supporters who were sponsored to do degrees in London getting violently angry that the anti-regime types weren’t suppressed by the university.
It rather reminded me of stories of the East bloc exiles in London and the various interactions with their regime supporters. There was that story from the 70s about a minor Polish government “trade envoy” guy who hung around a Polish exile club. Still missing, they say.
The single biggest problem in the MENA region is Iran.
Everything else is relatively easy once Iran is contained.
UAE sources suggesting that the next step in their own escalation could be freezing of Iranian bank accounts - which would have a similar effect to the EU’s freezing of Russian funds.
It's such a crime what the Israelis are doing to Lebanon.It is one of the nicest places in the world with a really beautiful gentle population They deserve so much better than their grotesque belligerent neighbours and their American allies. It makes me so angry. Just watch some of the interviews with the young population. They use three languages often in a single conversation. They go from English to french to Arabic. The f***ing Israelis have just bombed the Ramada Hotel which is in the Christian area. They are gung-ho morons.
It is not a crime to fight Hezbollah.
If you want peace for Lebanon then regime change in Iran, so that Lebanon can finally rid itself of Hezbollah, is the best way of achieving that.
I really don't want to engage with you at all. You sometimes make me feel physically sick. But Hezbollah are not what you think they are. In rough figures Lebanon is 60 ;40 Moslem Christian. There are sub groups and sub groups of sub groups all going back to the civil war which went on for about 20 years.
The barbarism and devastation that went on during that time has been explained to me many times. I have found myself working in a studio with active members of up to 4 different factions. All now friends again.
The executives and producers I worked with spent the war years at Universities in Paris Canada or London so the fighting didn't touch them. It is NOT a classless society. But for many it was an incredibly brutal affair. ......
It started with roadblocks set up by the Palestinians which led to the blowing up of a school bus by a Christian Militia which killed 42 children. ....And then it began.....Hezbollah was set up at that time to look after their communities and wipe out corruption
They set up schools and housed the homeless and when the Israelis joined in it was Hezbollah the communities looked towards to protect them. ...................
So when the civil war was over and a recognised government took over they were given seats in the new multi party parliament and given ministries.
My producer who is a Lebanese Christian does not consider Hezbollah to be terrorists and to describe them as such just shows a lack of understanding
I’m still completely lost as to what the end game of this Iran action is.
There isn't one.
Netanyahu needs to remain in power at all costs. He convinced Trump (who also needs to remain in power at all costs) that now would be a good time to attack Iran as there is a vague justification possible thanks to the suppression a few weeks ago.
So do you really think Netanyahu and Trump have spent any time thinking about what the end state will look like.
Got to say Iran annoying all their neighbours by attacking every single one of them wasn't on my radar...
Apologies if I am raising an issue that is verboten.
Looking for a cross comparison between Wards and Constituencies to see how the 8000+ wards matches to the 650 constituencies. Before I embark on this (for betting purposes), does anyone know where I might get this information from the public domain. If not, I'll do it myself.
Apologies again for interrupting the current trashing / praising Trump.
The boundary commission's review website has a full map of all the relevant boundaries
Of course the master data that combines everything together is the PAF file that is owned by the post office but if all you care about is Ward to constituency that will give you everything you need.
With the boundary changes in Bradford we now have a ward that straddles the Shipley and Keighley constituency boundary.
I'm not sure how common this sort of arrangement is.
Quite common. When ward boundary changes happen, they create the bits with a different code, they don't do constituency boundary changes till the main revue unless something large happens. I think the creation of Milton Keynes was a special case.
I’m still completely lost as to what the end game of this Iran action is.
The regime still in place, but having agreed to end its nuclear ambitions? And ending all beligerant actions against its GCC neighbours?
Whether it extends to ending support for regional proxies is less certain.
It is going to need a lot of background displomacy. I can see Trump agreeing to let Putin persuade Tehran - and giving Putin what he wants on ending sanctions as the quid pro quo.
Which in turn will prolong the Ukrainian war.
I read your first two sentences and thought, yes, it would be good if Israel ended its nuclear ambitions and its belligerence against its neighbours… but then I realised you were talking about Iran. It would also be good for Iran to do those things.
Israel's nuclear weapons are going nowhere, not for a hundred years at least. Memories of the Holocaust enure that.
You might argue that Iran having nukes would counter-balance Israel's, rather like India and Pakistan. But Iran slamming conventional missiles into Dubai and Kuwait City and Dohar suggests that would be a bold approach. And a risk that Israel will never take.
Right wing in slight retreat in polling Reform now sub 30 with all but 5 pollsters (JLP, Techne, Ipsos, Freshwater and Deltapoll but they havent reported since December) Tories off a point or two to just under 20 with most pollsters Labour picture is very varied, some tentative evidence of a no bases bounce but not conclusive yet Lib Dems in slight decline from last year and may see the odd single figure in the near term Greens on the march but still have not broken through 15% with any BPC pollsters except YG and Find Out Now
I think it's a rally to the flag effect.
And I think it's hard for the opposition to take a line - especially hard for Reform, because Farage actually wants stuff from Trump - he wants Chagos killed (and so say all of us). It would be far easier and more electorally rewarding to take an anti-Trump line.
However, as someone mentions downthread, Starmer will find a way to become less popular than ever. Let's just hope there's no loss of human life involved.
Now McSweeney has gone someone needs to be telling Starmer that whatever he does now he's crossed the rubicon with deranged Donald.
We should cut off all diplomatic relations with Israel anyway until there is regime change there.
Having crossed the rubicon with Donald he should on a case by case basis treat any American requests the same as he would from any other Country
The Special Relationship if not dead is dormant, it can only be revived post Trump and MAGA.
Trump destroyed it.
I have some (a lot) of sympathy with the line that the special relationship was always incredibly one-sided and America should be treated as what it is - a foreign country.
The trouble is, the time to take that line was 10, 20, 30 - frankly 80 years ago, and if we had, we would now have a truly independent country. We still can, but it will take years, and right now our entire security aparatus is entirely tied in with the US.
Given that situation, it's also more than a little stupid that the proposed solution from the left is giving more power away, to the EU. Another organisation that we do not (and did not even when we were in it) control and can (and did) therefore take steps that are also against our national interest.
We need to do the hard yards of becoming a truly independent country. We've been given every geographical and institutional advantage to do so. So let's jfdi.
It's such a crime what the Israelis are doing to Lebanon.It is one of the nicest places in the world with a really beautiful gentle population They deserve so much better than their grotesque belligerent neighbours and their American allies. It makes me so angry. Just watch some of the interviews with the young population. They use three languages often in a single conversation. They go from English to french to Arabic. The f***ing Israelis have just bombed the Ramada Hotel which is in the Christian area. They are gung-ho morons.
It is not a crime to fight Hezbollah.
If you want peace for Lebanon then regime change in Iran, so that Lebanon can finally rid itself of Hezbollah, is the best way of achieving that.
I really don't want to engage with you at all. You sometimes make me feel physically sick. But Hezbollah are not what you think they are. In rough figures Lebanon is 60 ;40 Moslem Christian. There are sub groups and sub groups of sub groups all going back to the civil war which went on for about 20 years.
The barbarism and devastation that went on during that time has been explained to me many times. I have found myself working in a studio with active members of up to 4 different factions. All now friends again.
The executives and producers I worked with spent the war years at Universities in Paris Canada or London so the fighting didn't touch them. It is NOT a classless society. But for many it was an incredibly brutal affair. ......
It started with roadblocks set up by the Palestinians which led to the blowing up of a school bus by a Christian Militia which killed 42 children. ....And then it began.....Hezbollah was set up at that time to look after their communities and wipe out corruption
They set up schools and housed the homeless and when the Israelis joined in it was Hezbollah the communities looked towards to protect them. ...................
So when the civil war was over and a recognised government took over they were given seats in the new multi party parliament and given ministries.
My producer who is a Lebanese Christian does not consider Hezbollah to be terrorists and to describe them as such just shows a lack of understanding
Who murdered a judge and some journalists when the official Lebanese government enquiry into the port explosion started asking about Hezbollah’s involvement with importing the fertiliser/explosives that went bang.
One might have thought that after the campaigns against Hamas and Hezbollah there would have been some understanding that even when these groups have been ‘decapitated,’ leaving them rocked and uncertain, and their military assets have been severely degraded, they still have deep wells of leadership capacity and don’t give in easily. If, as some reports suggest, the Trump Administration is surprised that the Iranian regime is still operating despite the blows of the past week, they have no right to be.
The key struggles now will be those within Iran. Disagreements about tactics at the top are one thing. Schisms that go much deeper are another. There will undoubtedly be anger inside the country directed against the US and Israel, aggravated by the loss of life, but there will also be anxiety. The choices the regime faces are pretty dire whether they stay defiant or look for conciliation. A peaceful transfer of power to a popular revolutionary government able to restore law and order seems to be the least likely outcome even if the regime starts to collapse under its own dysfunctions. Chaos is more likely.
The intended part of the war is going to plan. Israel and the US quickly achieved command of the skies so that they could attack targets with impunity. But the unintended consequences will largely be in the political, social and economic spheres — and they will be felt for some time. It is becoming increasingly hard to avoid the conclusion that the Trump administration has embarked on this operation without a plan, and is making it up as it goes along, as if they killed enough of the right people and destroyed enough Iranian assets everything would fall into place.
Only with a presence inside Iran can the US really influence the country’s future and even then, as was seen with both Iraq and Afghanistan, that would be no guarantee of being able to push it decisively in the desired direction. A bombastic celebration of military strength can only take you so far when there is no obvious strategy for bringing the war to a satisfactory conclusion.
Definitely signs of a government bounce. Could be greater if he went further and actually condemned the US/Israeli action. Maybe saving that for closer to an election. No question it's a vote winner. The polling is so obvious as are the vox pops and programs such as Any Questions.
Nah - it’s all MoE
Thought the LibDems might get an anti-war bounce. Seems not though.
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
He's not even Iranian. just a semi literate American. Unless you live in a country you don't know the people or even have a sense of them.It feels like that with this man. He could be right but when you start with dramatic openings like that you seldom are. Iran is one of the few places I haven't worked in in that region so my only knowledge is from Iranians abroad and they're not homogenous. I know ones I like and ones I don't. By contrast I know lots of Israelis nearly all English ex pats. I would be interested to know how they would fare if faced with the treatment their government meet out to their enemies? The answer I suspect is they would be back to their motherland before you could say Shabbat shalom
The murderous thuggery of the Iranian regime has been detailed for many decades. The regime gets off on violence and their narrow, vicious, interpretation of Islam.
There’s a reason they need to use such violence to keep control - you don’t turn every mosque in to a secret police station because the people love you.
Nearly all Iranians abroad are refugees from that or descendants of refugees from that. A diaspora of millions.
As the chap says, Trump is just making a murderous mess.
At university we had good fun with the Iranian Society being run by exiles - and regime supporters who were sponsored to do degrees in London getting violently angry that the anti-regime types weren’t suppressed by the university.
It rather reminded me of stories of the East bloc exiles in London and the various interactions with their regime supporters. There was that story from the 70s about a minor Polish government “trade envoy” guy who hung around a Polish exile club. Still missing, they say.
The single biggest problem in the MENA region is Iran.
Everything else is relatively easy once Iran is contained.
UAE sources suggesting that the next step in their own escalation could be freezing of Iranian bank accounts - which would have a similar effect to the EU’s freezing of Russian funds.
I don’t think the problems in the MENA region stop at Iran, however. Syria is delicate, and Israeli forces are deep into Syria. The Palestine question remains unanswered, although plenty in Israel think the answer is ethnic cleansing. Kurdistan still wants an existence. The UAE is still funding a brutal civil war in Sudan. Yemen! Saudi Arabia remains a totalitarian regime that’s happy to kill and chop up journalists, and promotes radical Islamism around the world.
Definitely signs of a government bounce. Could be greater if he went further and actually condemned the US/Israeli action. Maybe saving that for closer to an election. No question it's a vote winner. The polling is so obvious as are the vox pops and programs such as Any Questions.
Nah - it’s all MoE
The movement may be MoE but there is certainly a trend of RefCon down and Labour up.
I suspect it won't have much effect on the locals or Scotland and Wales, but certainly the Labour decline appears seems to have been arrested, certainly until Starmer goes boots in to an unwinnable war.
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.
If Kuwait wants to stop drones being launched at Kuwait, then Kuwait can bomb the launch sites. Likewise UAE, Qatar and Bahrain. We can sell them the hardware.
So, you'd let the shaheed drones slam into civilian infrastructure? Even though we could help stop that?
Noted.
Russian drones are slamming into civilian infrastructure in Ukraine and we’re not attacking Russia. Israeli and US missiles are slamming into civilian infrastructure in Iran and we’re not attacking them. Life is somewhat more complicated than you’re painting it.
We have done what we can to assist Ukraine. We have sent them the DragonFire laser system to shoot down drones. Unlike the US, the UK isn't giving Russia an easy ride for giving up on democracy and committing war crimes on an industrial scale - 300,000 logged incidents and counting.
Great. So we can do the same for the Gulf states. We don’t have to start bombing Iran.
We have provided Ukraine with StormShadow cruise missiles. That thy use to bomb Russian command and control centres and weapons caches. Within Russia.
Would you not use our StormShadow cruise missiles to bomb known Iranian shaheed drone caches in Iran? Do you not see how inconsistent you appear?
We can sell Storm Shadow to UAE.
IIRC the Storm Shadow problem is that we don’t have enough and the production line is still closed.
Do a deal that UAE can get immediately from UK stocks at double the usual price, which funds production starting up again for UK and Ukraine.
There's likely to be a lot of this sort of pragmatism falling out in coming weeks and months.
Indeed, with bonus points for getting the Gulf states out of their neutrality with regard to Russia, at least in the sort term. Needs doing carefully though, becuase the Russian money in Dubai isn’t in Moscow and isn’t available to Putin.
There is a saying that families fall out with each other, but if they come under attack from an outsider they come together
Trump is that outsider and he has given a boost to Starmer which may well see his survival, not least because there is no obvious successor
This is a fast moving and dangerous time with untold consquences and as of now we are active in the arena and have to reserve the right to respond if Iranian missiles take out any of our military, civilians or interests
Defence spending is going to become a 'hot potato' and it is true over the last 20 years the UK and Europe have relied on the peace dividend to reduce defence spending, which Trump has come along and thrown in the bin
If you are an American it is legitimate to ask why is the US paying and subsidising other nations in NATO ?
Europe and UK have a war in Europe, and now one in the middle east, and something has to give to allow us to invest tens of billions more and now in our defence
Under Trump ? It is absolutely not "subsidising NATO", so no, it's not legitimate.
Right wing in slight retreat in polling Reform now sub 30 with all but 5 pollsters (JLP, Techne, Ipsos, Freshwater and Deltapoll but they havent reported since December) Tories off a point or two to just under 20 with most pollsters Labour picture is very varied, some tentative evidence of a no bases bounce but not conclusive yet Lib Dems in slight decline from last year and may see the odd single figure in the near term Greens on the march but still have not broken through 15% with any BPC pollsters except YG and Find Out Now
I think it's a rally to the flag effect.
And I think it's hard for the opposition to take a line - especially hard for Reform, because Farage actually wants stuff from Trump - he wants Chagos killed (and so say all of us). It would be far easier and more electorally rewarding to take an anti-Trump line.
However, as someone mentions downthread, Starmer will find a way to become less popular than ever. Let's just hope there's no loss of human life involved.
Now McSweeney has gone someone needs to be telling Starmer that whatever he does now he's crossed the rubicon with deranged Donald.
We should cut off all diplomatic relations with Israel anyway until there is regime change there.
Having crossed the rubicon with Donald he should on a case by case basis treat any American requests the same as he would from any other Country
The Special Relationship if not dead is dormant, it can only be revived post Trump and MAGA.
Trump destroyed it.
I have some (a lot) of sympathy with the line that the special relationship was always incredibly one-sided and America should be treated as what it is - a foreign country.
The trouble is, the time to take that line was 10, 20, 30 - frankly 80 years ago, and if we had, we would now have a truly independent country. We still can, but it will take years, and right now our entire security aparatus is entirely tied in with the US.
Given that situation, it's also more than a little stupid that the proposed solution from the left is giving more power away, to the EU. Another organisation that we do not (and did not even when we were in it) control and can (and did) therefore take steps that are also against our national interest.
We need to do the hard yards of becoming a truly independent country. We've been given every geographical and institutional advantage to do so. So let's jfdi.
I’m still completely lost as to what the end game of this Iran action is.
The regime still in place, but having agreed to end its nuclear ambitions? And ending all beligerant actions against its GCC neighbours?
Whether it extends to ending support for regional proxies is less certain.
It is going to need a lot of background displomacy. I can see Trump agreeing to let Putin persuade Tehran - and giving Putin what he wants on ending sanctions as the quid pro quo.
Which in turn will prolong the Ukrainian war.
I read your first two sentences and thought, yes, it would be good if Israel ended its nuclear ambitions and its belligerence against its neighbours… but then I realised you were talking about Iran. It would also be good for Iran to do those things.
Israel's nuclear weapons are going nowhere, not for a hundred years at least. Memories of the Holocaust enure that.
You might argue that Iran having nukes would counter-balance Israel's, rather like India and Pakistan. But Iran slamming conventional missiles into Dubai and Kuwait City and Dohar suggests that would be a bold approach. And a risk that Israel will never take.
I think Israel could at least admit they have nuclear weapons and agree to enter into talks about limiting numbers. Maybe that would help?
Why do you think Iran might want nuclear weapons? I suggest the number one reason is because Israel has them, and the number two reason is that Pakistan has them.
Isreal wants a failed state and couldn’t care less if there’s a civil war in Iran .
And if there’s a refugee crisis which spills into Europe the same right wing Trump lapdogs like Farage who supported the war will then use the refugee crisis to hammer the government.
Seems reasonable.
Why should we care if there is a civil war in Iran?
A failed state and civil war would be a huge improvement on the IRGC.
Hopefully liberal Iranians can win the civil war, but it needs to be in Iranian hands.
We could bomb Israel to rubble, killing 1000s of women and children, and hope that the liberal Israelis come to power in the aftermath. Are you on board with that?
No.
Israel is a democratic ally that is neither attacking us nor any of our allies.
Not a totalitarian, theocratic dictatorshil that is repeatedly attacking allies and calls us Little Satan.
So if it's a democracy are Israeli citizens more or less complicit in the actions of their Government than the citizens of a totalitarian dictatorship?
More.
Which is moot since the Government's actions are completely justified and legitimate.
Definitely signs of a government bounce. Could be greater if he went further and actually condemned the US/Israeli action. Maybe saving that for closer to an election. No question it's a vote winner. The polling is so obvious as are the vox pops and programs such as Any Questions.
Nah - it’s all MoE
Thought the LibDems might get an anti-war bounce. Seems not though.
The anti-war bonus gets onto the table when something in the war goes horribly wrong, and we are seen to be involved or complicit in it. And even then, there'd be a delay before it feeds through to VI. So far, Starmer has been sufficiently restrained by his own party.
And even then, the Greens are higher up the media agenda after the by-election
Definitely signs of a government bounce. Could be greater if he went further and actually condemned the US/Israeli action. Maybe saving that for closer to an election. No question it's a vote winner. The polling is so obvious as are the vox pops and programs such as Any Questions.
Nah - it’s all MoE
Thought the LibDems might get an anti-war bounce. Seems not though.
They are getting a 'crowded out' deflation. Green success will nibble away at them too
C'mon freedom loving Iranians, sorry, Persians, get on them streets and start dying so you can make a trillion dollars for the USA.
Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal 🚨🇮🇷 Reza Pahlavi: In the first 10 to 15 years, Iran's economy could generate over a trillion dollars worth of revenue for the U.S.
Right wing in slight retreat in polling Reform now sub 30 with all but 5 pollsters (JLP, Techne, Ipsos, Freshwater and Deltapoll but they havent reported since December) Tories off a point or two to just under 20 with most pollsters Labour picture is very varied, some tentative evidence of a no bases bounce but not conclusive yet Lib Dems in slight decline from last year and may see the odd single figure in the near term Greens on the march but still have not broken through 15% with any BPC pollsters except YG and Find Out Now
I think it's a rally to the flag effect.
And I think it's hard for the opposition to take a line - especially hard for Reform, because Farage actually wants stuff from Trump - he wants Chagos killed (and so say all of us). It would be far easier and more electorally rewarding to take an anti-Trump line.
However, as someone mentions downthread, Starmer will find a way to become less popular than ever. Let's just hope there's no loss of human life involved.
Now McSweeney has gone someone needs to be telling Starmer that whatever he does now he's crossed the rubicon with deranged Donald.
We should cut off all diplomatic relations with Israel anyway until there is regime change there.
Having crossed the rubicon with Donald he should on a case by case basis treat any American requests the same as he would from any other Country
The Special Relationship if not dead is dormant, it can only be revived post Trump and MAGA.
Trump destroyed it.
I have some (a lot) of sympathy with the line that the special relationship was always incredibly one-sided and America should be treated as what it is - a foreign country.
The trouble is, the time to take that line was 10, 20, 30 - frankly 80 years ago, and if we had, we would now have a truly independent country. We still can, but it will take years, and right now our entire security aparatus is entirely tied in with the US.
Given that situation, it's also more than a little stupid that the proposed solution from the left is giving more power away, to the EU. Another organisation that we do not (and did not even when we were in it) control and can (and did) therefore take steps that are also against our national interest.
We need to do the hard yards of becoming a truly independent country. We've been given every geographical and institutional advantage to do so. So let's jfdi.
This is where an alliance with a country such as Japan would be useful. Both advanced economies, in top 10 but not superpowers, with few military enemies in common and large defence industries. UK/JP joint projects could benefit both countries massively.
Oh, and the added benefit of an absolutely wonderful Japanese ambassador to the UK at the moment, possibly the world’s best diplomat.
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
He's not even Iranian. just a semi literate American. Unless you live in a country you don't know the people or even have a sense of them.It feels like that with this man. He could be right but when you start with dramatic openings like that you seldom are. Iran is one of the few places I haven't worked in in that region so my only knowledge is from Iranians abroad and they're not homogenous. I know ones I like and ones I don't. By contrast I know lots of Israelis nearly all English ex pats. I would be interested to know how they would fare if faced with the treatment their government meet out to their enemies? The answer I suspect is they would be back to their motherland before you could say Shabbat shalom
The murderous thuggery of the Iranian regime has been detailed for many decades. The regime gets off on violence and their narrow, vicious, interpretation of Islam.
There’s a reason they need to use such violence to keep control - you don’t turn every mosque in to a secret police station because the people love you.
Nearly all Iranians abroad are refugees from that or descendants of refugees from that. A diaspora of millions.
As the chap says, Trump is just making a murderous mess.
At university we had good fun with the Iranian Society being run by exiles - and regime supporters who were sponsored to do degrees in London getting violently angry that the anti-regime types weren’t suppressed by the university.
It rather reminded me of stories of the East bloc exiles in London and the various interactions with their regime supporters. There was that story from the 70s about a minor Polish government “trade envoy” guy who hung around a Polish exile club. Still missing, they say.
The single biggest problem in the MENA region is Iran.
Everything else is relatively easy once Iran is contained.
UAE sources suggesting that the next step in their own escalation could be freezing of Iranian bank accounts - which would have a similar effect to the EU’s freezing of Russian funds.
I don’t think the problems in the MENA region stop at Iran, however. Syria is delicate, and Israeli forces are deep into Syria. The Palestine question remains unanswered, although plenty in Israel think the answer is ethnic cleansing. Kurdistan still wants an existence. The UAE is still funding a brutal civil war in Sudan. Yemen! Saudi Arabia remains a totalitarian regime that’s happy to kill and chop up journalists, and promotes radical Islamism around the world.
I suppose if Saudi Arabia can go from the country of Osama bin Laden & Al-Qaeda that was behind 9/11 (unless one is of the Mossad conspiracy theory peruasion) to valued ally and $billion briber of Trump's son in law, anything is possible. Iran just needs to get a corrupt autocracy in asap.
"Israel's military has issued a warning to Iran that it will continue pursuing every successor of the country's deceased supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei."
Trump wants to appoint him, then Israel will try to kill him.
That was their strategy for Hezbollah as well
Netanyahu’s policy of bomb/invade/settle everyone (Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, West Bank), I think we can ask whether it’s going better or worse at delivering security to Israel than, say, Yitzhak Rabin’s approach.
Rabin's policy outlived him and lasted until 2000 when Arafat rejected Clinton's peace proposal and started the second Intifada instead.
Israel pulled out of Gaza under Sharon.
Problem is that backed by Iran, Hamas then took over.
I don't think Israel would have elected Netanyahu had their peace proposals not been rejected.
I’m still completely lost as to what the end game of this Iran action is.
The regime still in place, but having agreed to end its nuclear ambitions? And ending all beligerant actions against its GCC neighbours?
Whether it extends to ending support for regional proxies is less certain.
It is going to need a lot of background displomacy. I can see Trump agreeing to let Putin persuade Tehran - and giving Putin what he wants on ending sanctions as the quid pro quo.
Which in turn will prolong the Ukrainian war.
I read your first two sentences and thought, yes, it would be good if Israel ended its nuclear ambitions and its belligerence against its neighbours… but then I realised you were talking about Iran. It would also be good for Iran to do those things.
Israel's nuclear weapons are going nowhere, not for a hundred years at least. Memories of the Holocaust enure that.
You might argue that Iran having nukes would counter-balance Israel's, rather like India and Pakistan. But Iran slamming conventional missiles into Dubai and Kuwait City and Dohar suggests that would be a bold approach. And a risk that Israel will never take.
I think Israel could at least admit they have nuclear weapons and agree to enter into talks about limiting numbers. Maybe that would help?
Why do you think Iran might want nuclear weapons? I suggest the number one reason is because Israel has them, and the number two reason is that Pakistan has them.
Iran wants to be the Billy Big Bollocks, seen in the region as carrying the torch for standing up to Israel. If they get them, the Iranian regime of today is sufficiently bonkers to use them. But if say Saudi were to acquire nukes, then the Iranians would be doubly determined, to ensure in their paranoia that their own version of Islam prevails.
I don't think Pakistan is an issue (other than that its scientists is how Saudi might readily acquire its own Bomb). Whilst they are neighbours, Pakistan looks far more to its neighbour to the East than to Iran.
C'mon freedom loving Iranians, sorry, Persians, get on them streets and start dying so you can make a trillion dollars for the USA.
Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal 🚨🇮🇷 Reza Pahlavi: In the first 10 to 15 years, Iran's economy could generate over a trillion dollars worth of revenue for the U.S.
One might have thought that after the campaigns against Hamas and Hezbollah there would have been some understanding that even when these groups have been ‘decapitated,’ leaving them rocked and uncertain, and their military assets have been severely degraded, they still have deep wells of leadership capacity and don’t give in easily. If, as some reports suggest, the Trump Administration is surprised that the Iranian regime is still operating despite the blows of the past week, they have no right to be.
The key struggles now will be those within Iran. Disagreements about tactics at the top are one thing. Schisms that go much deeper are another. There will undoubtedly be anger inside the country directed against the US and Israel, aggravated by the loss of life, but there will also be anxiety. The choices the regime faces are pretty dire whether they stay defiant or look for conciliation. A peaceful transfer of power to a popular revolutionary government able to restore law and order seems to be the least likely outcome even if the regime starts to collapse under its own dysfunctions. Chaos is more likely.
The intended part of the war is going to plan. Israel and the US quickly achieved command of the skies so that they could attack targets with impunity. But the unintended consequences will largely be in the political, social and economic spheres — and they will be felt for some time. It is becoming increasingly hard to avoid the conclusion that the Trump administration has embarked on this operation without a plan, and is making it up as it goes along, as if they killed enough of the right people and destroyed enough Iranian assets everything would fall into place.
Only with a presence inside Iran can the US really influence the country’s future and even then, as was seen with both Iraq and Afghanistan, that would be no guarantee of being able to push it decisively in the desired direction. A bombastic celebration of military strength can only take you so far when there is no obvious strategy for bringing the war to a satisfactory conclusion.
Chaos is a good thing.
And Hamas and Hezbollah had Iran's billions behind them.
In the Atlantic: If "Vance promised one thing during the 2024 presidential campaign, it was that America would not enter into a war with Iran of the kind that is currently raging,” Kahloon writes. “These arguments look farcical now that President Trump has chosen—months after bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities and pronouncing its enrichment efforts ‘completely and totally obliterated’—to join Israel in launching a war on the Islamic Republic.”
When Vance became vice president, his ideas included “a more modest place for the United States in world affairs; a new, worker-friendly version of Republican economics; and aggressive, Teddy Roosevelt–style regulation of Big Business,” Kahloon writes. But “little Vanceism is discernible in the administration’s actions” on economics, foreign policy, and other issues.
“This is a major comedown from the role he once seemed likely to fill. Vance’s nomination as vice president was not a concession to the Republican Party of old, but a promise of the Republican Party to come, of Trumpism after Trump. Instead, he has receded in importance in the past year
Definitely signs of a government bounce. Could be greater if he went further and actually condemned the US/Israeli action. Maybe saving that for closer to an election. No question it's a vote winner. The polling is so obvious as are the vox pops and programs such as Any Questions.
Nah - it’s all MoE
Thought the LibDems might get an anti-war bounce. Seems not though.
They are getting a 'crowded out' deflation. Green success will nibble away at them too
I don't think you can judge the lib Dems like that. I see them as 'generic centre party'. So if it looks like they've the best chance of beating the undesirables -most of the rest- they get my vote. I'm sure there are Labour Green and even Tory voters who do the same
In the Atlantic: If "Vance promised one thing during the 2024 presidential campaign, it was that America would not enter into a war with Iran of the kind that is currently raging,” Kahloon writes. “These arguments look farcical now that President Trump has chosen—months after bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities and pronouncing its enrichment efforts ‘completely and totally obliterated’—to join Israel in launching a war on the Islamic Republic.”
When Vance became vice president, his ideas included “a more modest place for the United States in world affairs; a new, worker-friendly version of Republican economics; and aggressive, Teddy Roosevelt–style regulation of Big Business,” Kahloon writes. But “little Vanceism is discernible in the administration’s actions” on economics, foreign policy, and other issues.
“This is a major comedown from the role he once seemed likely to fill. Vance’s nomination as vice president was not a concession to the Republican Party of old, but a promise of the Republican Party to come, of Trumpism after Trump. Instead, he has receded in importance in the past year
In the Atlantic: If "Vance promised one thing during the 2024 presidential campaign, it was that America would not enter into a war with Iran of the kind that is currently raging,” Kahloon writes. “These arguments look farcical now that President Trump has chosen—months after bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities and pronouncing its enrichment efforts ‘completely and totally obliterated’—to join Israel in launching a war on the Islamic Republic.”
When Vance became vice president, his ideas included “a more modest place for the United States in world affairs; a new, worker-friendly version of Republican economics; and aggressive, Teddy Roosevelt–style regulation of Big Business,” Kahloon writes. But “little Vanceism is discernible in the administration’s actions” on economics, foreign policy, and other issues.
“This is a major comedown from the role he once seemed likely to fill. Vance’s nomination as vice president was not a concession to the Republican Party of old, but a promise of the Republican Party to come, of Trumpism after Trump. Instead, he has receded in importance in the past year
Vance is willing to take any policy position that suits him, at the time in question. He seems genuinely pro-Putin, however.
Definitely signs of a government bounce. Could be greater if he went further and actually condemned the US/Israeli action. Maybe saving that for closer to an election. No question it's a vote winner. The polling is so obvious as are the vox pops and programs such as Any Questions.
Nah - it’s all MoE
Thought the LibDems might get an anti-war bounce. Seems not though.
They are getting a 'crowded out' deflation. Green success will nibble away at them too
I don't think you can judge the lib Dems like that. I see them as 'generic centre party'. So if it looks like they've the best chance of beating the undesirables -most of the rest- they get my vote. I'm sure there are Labour Green and even Tory voters who do the same
Sure, but thats not the story of 'all' their support. Some was always the NOTA crowd that now has Green to move to, or even Reform. Some is visibility based, which is tough for them right now. Some are people that those like the guy who canvassed me yesterday can bamboozle with bar charts even! (And im not accusing the LDs of exclusivity on that front!)
In the Atlantic: If "Vance promised one thing during the 2024 presidential campaign, it was that America would not enter into a war with Iran of the kind that is currently raging,” Kahloon writes. “These arguments look farcical now that President Trump has chosen—months after bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities and pronouncing its enrichment efforts ‘completely and totally obliterated’—to join Israel in launching a war on the Islamic Republic.”
When Vance became vice president, his ideas included “a more modest place for the United States in world affairs; a new, worker-friendly version of Republican economics; and aggressive, Teddy Roosevelt–style regulation of Big Business,” Kahloon writes. But “little Vanceism is discernible in the administration’s actions” on economics, foreign policy, and other issues.
“This is a major comedown from the role he once seemed likely to fill. Vance’s nomination as vice president was not a concession to the Republican Party of old, but a promise of the Republican Party to come, of Trumpism after Trump. Instead, he has receded in importance in the past year
Vance is willing to take any policy position that suits him, at the time in question. He seems genuinely pro-Putin, however.
In the Atlantic: If "Vance promised one thing during the 2024 presidential campaign, it was that America would not enter into a war with Iran of the kind that is currently raging,” Kahloon writes. “These arguments look farcical now that President Trump has chosen—months after bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities and pronouncing its enrichment efforts ‘completely and totally obliterated’—to join Israel in launching a war on the Islamic Republic.”
When Vance became vice president, his ideas included “a more modest place for the United States in world affairs; a new, worker-friendly version of Republican economics; and aggressive, Teddy Roosevelt–style regulation of Big Business,” Kahloon writes. But “little Vanceism is discernible in the administration’s actions” on economics, foreign policy, and other issues.
“This is a major comedown from the role he once seemed likely to fill. Vance’s nomination as vice president was not a concession to the Republican Party of old, but a promise of the Republican Party to come, of Trumpism after Trump. Instead, he has receded in importance in the past year
Vance isn't a promise of anything other than more sociopathic government. Policy wise he has been willing to follow whoever has been funding him. Who knows what he actually believes or would do were he to inherit the top job.
"Israel's military has issued a warning to Iran that it will continue pursuing every successor of the country's deceased supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei."
Trump wants to appoint him, then Israel will try to kill him.
That was their strategy for Hezbollah as well
Netanyahu’s policy of bomb/invade/settle everyone (Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, West Bank), I think we can ask whether it’s going better or worse at delivering security to Israel than, say, Yitzhak Rabin’s approach.
Rabin's policy outlived him and lasted until 2000 when Arafat rejected Clinton's peace proposal and started the second Intifada instead.
Israel pulled out of Gaza under Sharon.
Problem is that backed by Iran, Hamas then took over.
I don't think Israel would have elected Netanyahu had their peace proposals not been rejected.
Bibi is a corrupt war criminal but it’s the Palestinians fault that he became pm, not Israelis who voted for him again and again. Gotcha.
Netanyahu was first elected pm in 1996. Awfully prescient of Israelis voting for him knowing in advance that Arafat would reject Clinton’s peace proposals.
Any Labour 'no bases/leave oor Keir alone' bounce' wont survive beyond about £1.60/litre Cost of living trumps Trump
If this lasts more than about a fortnight, also expect the US to announce restrictions on their O&G exports for “national security” reasons.
The US is pretty much self-sufficient, but nothing leads political popularity in America as much as “gas” prices.
This means more expensive O&G everywhere else.
It wouldn't surprise me if we saw that earlier then that - by Wednesday this week oil fields are going to be closing down as there is no where to pump the oil to..
That part of the world economy is about to seize up..
Definitely signs of a government bounce. Could be greater if he went further and actually condemned the US/Israeli action. Maybe saving that for closer to an election. No question it's a vote winner. The polling is so obvious as are the vox pops and programs such as Any Questions.
Nah - it’s all MoE
Thought the LibDems might get an anti-war bounce. Seems not though.
They are getting a 'crowded out' deflation. Green success will nibble away at them too
I don't think you can judge the lib Dems like that. I see them as 'generic centre party'. So if it looks like they've the best chance of beating the undesirables -most of the rest- they get my vote. I'm sure there are Labour Green and even Tory voters who do the same
Sure, but thats not the story of 'all' their support. Some was always the NOTA crowd that now has Green to move to, or even Reform. Some is visibility based, which is tough for them right now. Some are people that those like the guy who canvassed me yesterday can bamboozle with bar charts even! (And im not accusing the LDs of exclusivity on that front!)
And petrol prices here once had Hague/Con very briefly ahead of Blair/Lab in their pomp
It's such a crime what the Israelis are doing to Lebanon.It is one of the nicest places in the world with a really beautiful gentle population They deserve so much better than their grotesque belligerent neighbours and their American allies. It makes me so angry. Just watch some of the interviews with the young population. They use three languages often in a single conversation. They go from English to french to Arabic. The f***ing Israelis have just bombed the Ramada Hotel which is in the Christian area. They are gung-ho morons.
It is not a crime to fight Hezbollah.
If you want peace for Lebanon then regime change in Iran, so that Lebanon can finally rid itself of Hezbollah, is the best way of achieving that.
I really don't want to engage with you at all. You sometimes make me feel physically sick. But Hezbollah are not what you think they are. In rough figures Lebanon is 60 ;40 Moslem Christian. There are sub groups and sub groups of sub groups all going back to the civil war which went on for about 20 years.
The barbarism and devastation that went on during that time has been explained to me many times. I have found myself working in a studio with active members of up to 4 different factions. All now friends again.
The executives and producers I worked with spent the war years at Universities in Paris Canada or London so the fighting didn't touch them. It is NOT a classless society. But for many it was an incredibly brutal affair. ......
It started with roadblocks set up by the Palestinians which led to the blowing up of a school bus by a Christian Militia which killed 42 children. ....And then it began.....Hezbollah was set up at that time to look after their communities and wipe out corruption
They set up schools and housed the homeless and when the Israelis joined in it was Hezbollah the communities looked towards to protect them. ...................
So when the civil war was over and a recognised government took over they were given seats in the new multi party parliament and given ministries.
My producer who is a Lebanese Christian does not consider Hezbollah to be terrorists and to describe them as such just shows a lack of understanding
Who murdered a judge and some journalists when the official Lebanese government enquiry into the port explosion started asking about Hezbollah’s involvement with importing the fertiliser/explosives that went bang.
For example.
Roger is right but outdated in his views
Hezbollah had its roots - like the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas - as a community protection organisation. Which then morphed into something much more threatening. They are a cancer in Lebanese politics which would be far healthier without them
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
He's not even Iranian. just a semi literate American. Unless you live in a country you don't know the people or even have a sense of them.It feels like that with this man. He could be right but when you start with dramatic openings like that you seldom are. Iran is one of the few places I haven't worked in in that region so my only knowledge is from Iranians abroad and they're not homogenous. I know ones I like and ones I don't. By contrast I know lots of Israelis nearly all English ex pats. I would be interested to know how they would fare if faced with the treatment their government meet out to their enemies? The answer I suspect is they would be back to their motherland before you could say Shabbat shalom
The murderous thuggery of the Iranian regime has been detailed for many decades. The regime gets off on violence and their narrow, vicious, interpretation of Islam.
There’s a reason they need to use such violence to keep control - you don’t turn every mosque in to a secret police station because the people love you.
Nearly all Iranians abroad are refugees from that or descendants of refugees from that. A diaspora of millions.
As the chap says, Trump is just making a murderous mess.
At university we had good fun with the Iranian Society being run by exiles - and regime supporters who were sponsored to do degrees in London getting violently angry that the anti-regime types weren’t suppressed by the university.
It rather reminded me of stories of the East bloc exiles in London and the various interactions with their regime supporters. There was that story from the 70s about a minor Polish government “trade envoy” guy who hung around a Polish exile club. Still missing, they say.
The single biggest problem in the MENA region is Iran.
Everything else is relatively easy once Iran is contained.
UAE sources suggesting that the next step in their own escalation could be freezing of Iranian bank accounts - which would have a similar effect to the EU’s freezing of Russian funds.
I don’t think the problems in the MENA region stop at Iran, however. Syria is delicate, and Israeli forces are deep into Syria. The Palestine question remains unanswered, although plenty in Israel think the answer is ethnic cleansing. Kurdistan still wants an existence. The UAE is still funding a brutal civil war in Sudan. Yemen! Saudi Arabia remains a totalitarian regime that’s happy to kill and chop up journalists, and promotes radical Islamism around the world.
I suppose if Saudi Arabia can go from the country of Osama bin Laden & Al-Qaeda that was behind 9/11 (unless one is of the Mossad conspiracy theory peruasion) to valued ally and $billion briber of Trump's son in law, anything is possible. Iran just needs to get a corrupt autocracy in asap.
Bin Liner was the black sheep of his family, who were noted pillars of the Saudi system. A big part of his thing was wanting a revolution in Saudi, where he and his followers would kill off the entire Royal family and chums.
(I knew Wafah, slightly, years back. Obviously didn’t discuss Uncle, though)
Definitely signs of a government bounce. Could be greater if he went further and actually condemned the US/Israeli action. Maybe saving that for closer to an election. No question it's a vote winner. The polling is so obvious as are the vox pops and programs such as Any Questions.
Nah - it’s all MoE
Thought the LibDems might get an anti-war bounce. Seems not though.
They are getting a 'crowded out' deflation. Green success will nibble away at them too
Where Lib Dem support will show up is in local elections (in turn, partly blocking any advance for the Greens.). Look how well they’ve been doing in local by-elections, over the past year.
NEV in 2022 was Con 30%, Lab 35%, Lib Dem 19%.
Assuming that Con and Lab get 17-20% each this time, the Lib Dem’s will gain a lot of seats off them. They’ll lose some to Reform, but not too many.
Any Labour 'no bases/leave oor Keir alone' bounce' wont survive beyond about £1.60/litre Cost of living trumps Trump
What would replacing Keir do beyond tarring the next person with the same brush.
It would be better for SKS to weather the pain and when prices starting falling you bring in someone else and take advantage of the bounce.
Did I say it would lead to replacing Starmer? Im saying Labour will be back in the basement of post 24 support. And if that is timed for April to May.......
It's such a crime what the Israelis are doing to Lebanon.It is one of the nicest places in the world with a really beautiful gentle population They deserve so much better than their grotesque belligerent neighbours and their American allies. It makes me so angry. Just watch some of the interviews with the young population. They use three languages often in a single conversation. They go from English to french to Arabic. The f***ing Israelis have just bombed the Ramada Hotel which is in the Christian area. They are gung-ho morons.
It is not a crime to fight Hezbollah.
If you want peace for Lebanon then regime change in Iran, so that Lebanon can finally rid itself of Hezbollah, is the best way of achieving that.
I really don't want to engage with you at all. You sometimes make me feel physically sick. But Hezbollah are not what you think they are. In rough figures Lebanon is 60 ;40 Moslem Christian. There are sub groups and sub groups of sub groups all going back to the civil war which went on for about 20 years.
The barbarism and devastation that went on during that time has been explained to me many times. I have found myself working in a studio with active members of up to 4 different factions. All now friends again.
The executives and producers I worked with spent the war years at Universities in Paris Canada or London so the fighting didn't touch them. It is NOT a classless society. But for many it was an incredibly brutal affair. ......
It started with roadblocks set up by the Palestinians which led to the blowing up of a school bus by a Christian Militia which killed 42 children. ....And then it began.....Hezbollah was set up at that time to look after their communities and wipe out corruption
They set up schools and housed the homeless and when the Israelis joined in it was Hezbollah the communities looked towards to protect them. ...................
So when the civil war was over and a recognised government took over they were given seats in the new multi party parliament and given ministries.
My producer who is a Lebanese Christian does not consider Hezbollah to be terrorists and to describe them as such just shows a lack of understanding
Who murdered a judge and some journalists when the official Lebanese government enquiry into the port explosion started asking about Hezbollah’s involvement with importing the fertiliser/explosives that went bang.
For example.
I think my explanation was inadequate but their purpose was essentially charitable and not to be confused with Hamas. Certainly when they were founded their intentions were not belligerent
"Israel's military has issued a warning to Iran that it will continue pursuing every successor of the country's deceased supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei."
Trump wants to appoint him, then Israel will try to kill him.
That was their strategy for Hezbollah as well
Netanyahu’s policy of bomb/invade/settle everyone (Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, West Bank), I think we can ask whether it’s going better or worse at delivering security to Israel than, say, Yitzhak Rabin’s approach.
Rabin's policy outlived him and lasted until 2000 when Arafat rejected Clinton's peace proposal and started the second Intifada instead.
Israel pulled out of Gaza under Sharon.
Problem is that backed by Iran, Hamas then took over.
I don't think Israel would have elected Netanyahu had their peace proposals not been rejected.
Bibi is a corrupt war criminal but it’s the Palestinians fault that he became pm, not Israelis who voted for him again and again. Gotcha.
Netanyahu was first elected pm in 1996. Awfully prescient of Israelis voting for him knowing in advance that Arafat would reject Clinton’s peace proposals.
Bibi is corrupt but he is not a war criminal.
He was elected in 1996 but lost to Barak in 1999 and it was Barak who was PM when Arafat rejected Clinton's peace proposals.
The UAE has struck a desalination plant in Iran -Israeli Media
Would be the first confirmed UAE strike on Iran, and follows a pattern of escalating strikes against critical water infrastructure in the Gulf region
I thought you hawks were doing this to unshackle the Iranian people, not for them to die of thirst.
I think that annoucement is quite extraordinary in that a gulf state on it's own decision and with its military attacks Iranian infrastructure
This is an escalation directly as a result of Iran firing drones and missiles at and over friendly states
The GCC isn’t particularly friendly to Iran even before the last couple of weeks
I don't think the Iranians banked on GCC retaliation.
Well what the fuck did they expect in return for 1,500 drones and missiles aimed at the UAE, plus a thousand more aimed at a dozen more countries in the region?
Did they expect them all to say “muslims good and Jews bad, let’s all bomb Israel”?
It's such a crime what the Israelis are doing to Lebanon.It is one of the nicest places in the world with a really beautiful gentle population They deserve so much better than their grotesque belligerent neighbours and their American allies. It makes me so angry. Just watch some of the interviews with the young population. They use three languages often in a single conversation. They go from English to french to Arabic. The f***ing Israelis have just bombed the Ramada Hotel which is in the Christian area. They are gung-ho morons.
It is not a crime to fight Hezbollah.
If you want peace for Lebanon then regime change in Iran, so that Lebanon can finally rid itself of Hezbollah, is the best way of achieving that.
I really don't want to engage with you at all. You sometimes make me feel physically sick. But Hezbollah are not what you think they are. In rough figures Lebanon is 60 ;40 Moslem Christian. There are sub groups and sub groups of sub groups all going back to the civil war which went on for about 20 years.
The barbarism and devastation that went on during that time has been explained to me many times. I have found myself working in a studio with active members of up to 4 different factions. All now friends again.
The executives and producers I worked with spent the war years at Universities in Paris Canada or London so the fighting didn't touch them. It is NOT a classless society. But for many it was an incredibly brutal affair. ......
It started with roadblocks set up by the Palestinians which led to the blowing up of a school bus by a Christian Militia which killed 42 children. ....And then it began.....Hezbollah was set up at that time to look after their communities and wipe out corruption
They set up schools and housed the homeless and when the Israelis joined in it was Hezbollah the communities looked towards to protect them. ...................
So when the civil war was over and a recognised government took over they were given seats in the new multi party parliament and given ministries.
My producer who is a Lebanese Christian does not consider Hezbollah to be terrorists and to describe them as such just shows a lack of understanding
You can say what you like but they absolutely are terrorists and they struck first between Israel and Hezbollah/Lebanon in this current conflict . . . And Israel absolutely has the undeniable right to hit back when they are under attack.
The Lebanese Government wants Hezbollah gone. Peace between Lebanon and Israel would be possible were that to happen.
Definitely signs of a government bounce. Could be greater if he went further and actually condemned the US/Israeli action. Maybe saving that for closer to an election. No question it's a vote winner. The polling is so obvious as are the vox pops and programs such as Any Questions.
Nah - it’s all MoE
Thought the LibDems might get an anti-war bounce. Seems not though.
They are getting a 'crowded out' deflation. Green success will nibble away at them too
Where Lib Dem support will show up is in local elections (in turn, partly blocking any advance for the Greens.). Look how well they’ve been doing in local by-elections, over the past year.
NEV in 2022 was Con 30%, Lab 35%, Lib Dem 19%.
Assuming that Con and Lab get 17-20% each this time, the Lib Dem’s will gain a lot of seats off them. They’ll lose some to Reform, but not too many.
The Sussexes (no, not those ones!) And the new Surreys and parts of Hampshire should certainly be productive for them and thryll be looking to make inroads in London boroughs 20% for either Lab or Con (esp the latter) is probably event horizon between terrrrrible night and just a poor one
Definitely signs of a government bounce. Could be greater if he went further and actually condemned the US/Israeli action. Maybe saving that for closer to an election. No question it's a vote winner. The polling is so obvious as are the vox pops and programs such as Any Questions.
Nah - it’s all MoE
Thought the LibDems might get an anti-war bounce. Seems not though.
Definitely signs of a government bounce. Could be greater if he went further and actually condemned the US/Israeli action. Maybe saving that for closer to an election. No question it's a vote winner. The polling is so obvious as are the vox pops and programs such as Any Questions.
Nah - it’s all MoE
The movement may be MoE but there is certainly a trend of RefCon down and Labour up.
I suspect it won't have much effect on the locals or Scotland and Wales, but certainly the Labour decline appears seems to have been arrested, certainly until Starmer goes boots in to an unwinnable war.
Not sustained enough. I think there looks to be a trend that Ref has peaked (probably leakage to whatever Tice’s party is called) but Con/Lab/Lib are bouncing around the bottom together
In the Atlantic: If "Vance promised one thing during the 2024 presidential campaign, it was that America would not enter into a war with Iran of the kind that is currently raging,” Kahloon writes. “These arguments look farcical now that President Trump has chosen—months after bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities and pronouncing its enrichment efforts ‘completely and totally obliterated’—to join Israel in launching a war on the Islamic Republic.”
When Vance became vice president, his ideas included “a more modest place for the United States in world affairs; a new, worker-friendly version of Republican economics; and aggressive, Teddy Roosevelt–style regulation of Big Business,” Kahloon writes. But “little Vanceism is discernible in the administration’s actions” on economics, foreign policy, and other issues.
“This is a major comedown from the role he once seemed likely to fill. Vance’s nomination as vice president was not a concession to the Republican Party of old, but a promise of the Republican Party to come, of Trumpism after Trump. Instead, he has receded in importance in the past year
Vance, and the GOP generally, requires the removal of Trump after the mid terms.
Its amazing that the political situation is repeating in consecutive presidencies.
We will see if the GOP manage the situation better than the Dems did with Biden.
It's such a crime what the Israelis are doing to Lebanon.It is one of the nicest places in the world with a really beautiful gentle population They deserve so much better than their grotesque belligerent neighbours and their American allies. It makes me so angry. Just watch some of the interviews with the young population. They use three languages often in a single conversation. They go from English to french to Arabic. The f***ing Israelis have just bombed the Ramada Hotel which is in the Christian area. They are gung-ho morons.
It is not a crime to fight Hezbollah.
If you want peace for Lebanon then regime change in Iran, so that Lebanon can finally rid itself of Hezbollah, is the best way of achieving that.
I really don't want to engage with you at all. You sometimes make me feel physically sick. But Hezbollah are not what you think they are. In rough figures Lebanon is 60 ;40 Moslem Christian. There are sub groups and sub groups of sub groups all going back to the civil war which went on for about 20 years.
The barbarism and devastation that went on during that time has been explained to me many times. I have found myself working in a studio with active members of up to 4 different factions. All now friends again.
The executives and producers I worked with spent the war years at Universities in Paris Canada or London so the fighting didn't touch them. It is NOT a classless society. But for many it was an incredibly brutal affair. ......
It started with roadblocks set up by the Palestinians which led to the blowing up of a school bus by a Christian Militia which killed 42 children. ....And then it began.....Hezbollah was set up at that time to look after their communities and wipe out corruption
They set up schools and housed the homeless and when the Israelis joined in it was Hezbollah the communities looked towards to protect them. ...................
So when the civil war was over and a recognised government took over they were given seats in the new multi party parliament and given ministries.
My producer who is a Lebanese Christian does not consider Hezbollah to be terrorists and to describe them as such just shows a lack of understanding
Who murdered a judge and some journalists when the official Lebanese government enquiry into the port explosion started asking about Hezbollah’s involvement with importing the fertiliser/explosives that went bang.
For example.
Roger is right but outdated in his views
Hezbollah had its roots - like the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas - as a community protection organisation. Which then morphed into something much more threatening. They are a cancer in Lebanese politics which would be far healthier without them
They also operate in Iran and are a key component of the loathsome morality police.
The UAE has struck a desalination plant in Iran -Israeli Media
Would be the first confirmed UAE strike on Iran, and follows a pattern of escalating strikes against critical water infrastructure in the Gulf region
I thought you hawks were doing this to unshackle the Iranian people, not for them to die of thirst.
I think that annoucement is quite extraordinary in that a gulf state on it's own decision and with its military attacks Iranian infrastructure
This is an escalation directly as a result of Iran firing drones and missiles at and over friendly states
The GCC isn’t particularly friendly to Iran even before the last couple of weeks
I don't think the Iranians banked on GCC retaliation.
Well what the fuck did they expect in return for 1,500 drones and missiles aimed at the UAE, plus a thousand more aimed at a dozen more countries in the region?
Did they expect them all to say “muslims good and Jews bad, let’s all bomb Israel”?
"We have never seen Israel or America launching missiles at Gulf capitals. Iran is the one that did that.
Defending Iran because it raises the banner of Palestine while ignoring what it did to Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and the Gulf is a grave insult to the Arab countries that bore the cost for four decades."
In the Atlantic: If "Vance promised one thing during the 2024 presidential campaign, it was that America would not enter into a war with Iran of the kind that is currently raging,” Kahloon writes. “These arguments look farcical now that President Trump has chosen—months after bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities and pronouncing its enrichment efforts ‘completely and totally obliterated’—to join Israel in launching a war on the Islamic Republic.”
When Vance became vice president, his ideas included “a more modest place for the United States in world affairs; a new, worker-friendly version of Republican economics; and aggressive, Teddy Roosevelt–style regulation of Big Business,” Kahloon writes. But “little Vanceism is discernible in the administration’s actions” on economics, foreign policy, and other issues.
“This is a major comedown from the role he once seemed likely to fill. Vance’s nomination as vice president was not a concession to the Republican Party of old, but a promise of the Republican Party to come, of Trumpism after Trump. Instead, he has receded in importance in the past year
Vance, and the GOP generally, requires the removal of Trump after the mid terms.
Its amazing that the political situation is repeating in consecutive presidencies.
We will see if the GOP manage the situation better than the Dems did with Biden.
There’s precisely zero chance of the GOP putting Trump up for re-election.
Can anyone ground the language of "before times, the year when everything changed"?
It's from a provocative quote I heard this morning about Trump and 2016:
"That was 2016, the last year of the before times - the year when everything changed for so many of us."
To me it sounds a bit John Wyndam or maybe Ray Bradbury, anyhow pre- and post-apocalyptic.
2016 - the year an enormous, poisonous plant life won the presidency and lashed out at any intelligent opponent (and just about anything else that moved).
The UAE has struck a desalination plant in Iran -Israeli Media
Would be the first confirmed UAE strike on Iran, and follows a pattern of escalating strikes against critical water infrastructure in the Gulf region
I thought you hawks were doing this to unshackle the Iranian people, not for them to die of thirst.
I think that annoucement is quite extraordinary in that a gulf state on it's own decision and with its military attacks Iranian infrastructure
This is an escalation directly as a result of Iran firing drones and missiles at and over friendly states
The GCC isn’t particularly friendly to Iran even before the last couple of weeks
I don't think the Iranians banked on GCC retaliation.
Then they are idiots
It takes some going to be an Islamic country in the Middle East at war with Israel and to be unanimously less popular than Israel across the Middle East.
Its only in Europe that 'useful idiots' want to back the Iranian regime.
Comments
There’s a reason they need to use such violence to keep control - you don’t turn every mosque in to a secret police station because the people love you.
Nearly all Iranians abroad are refugees from that or descendants of refugees from that. A diaspora of millions.
As the chap says, Trump is just making a murderous mess.
At university we had good fun with the Iranian Society being run by exiles - and regime supporters who were sponsored to do degrees in London getting violently angry that the anti-regime types weren’t suppressed by the university.
It rather reminded me of stories of the East bloc exiles in London and the various interactions with their regime supporters. There was that story from the 70s about a minor Polish government “trade envoy” guy who hung around a Polish exile club. Still missing, they say.
We should cut off all diplomatic relations with Israel anyway until there is regime change there.
Having crossed the rubicon with Donald he should on a case by case basis treat any American requests the same as he would from any other Country
The Special Relationship if not dead is dormant, it can only be revived post Trump and MAGA.
Trump destroyed it.
This is an escalation directly as a result of Iran firing drones and missiles at and over friendly states
I'm not sure how common this sort of arrangement is.
Do a deal that UAE can get immediately from UK stocks at double the usual price, which funds production starting up again for UK and Ukraine.
Turns out that a 10 foot long footbridge over the rivulet next to village, or a changing room for the kids from the local school to use a bit of the park as a sports field, has a much bigger perceived impact than giant programs.
It’s rather sad that there’s a push, in Lottery funding, to bigger and bigger projects. Even submitting applications has been “professionalised” - to the point you really need to hire a consultant to prepare one…
They benefit massively (historically) from a disproportionate share of defence spending from Europe flowing into the US defence industry. They also benefit from installed forward bases and the ability to force project much more easily into the middle and Near East. Bases like Fakenham, Molehill, Rasmussen are immensely valuable as are the ability to use (sometimes!) Akrotiri, Gib and Diego Garcia.
For example, SACEUR is always a US flag officer and has control of the SHAPE organisation. That’s something that money can’t buy
Ward splitting was one way to meet the ludicrously tight constituency size parameters.
Separating wards from the rest of the LA being another.
This is the part of the country with the largest concentration of pro-U.S. abd pro-Israel feeling, and it's now being subjected indiscrimatejly to a toxic cloud.
Whether it extends to ending support for regional proxies is less certain.
It is going to need a lot of background displomacy. I can see Trump agreeing to let Putin persuade Tehran - and giving Putin what he wants on ending sanctions as the quid pro quo.
Which in turn will prolong the Ukrainian war.
Bombing cities which are anti-Regime doesn't encourage an uprising. Meanwhile, the heavily conservative rural areas aren't affected much.
So Trump is planning on pounding Iran until he likes the shape of the new Iran. But isn’t doing any work or planning on what that shape should be.
In one of Terry Prachett’s works there is an Active Phrenologist - who hits people over the head to cause various bits of the brain to swell.
Like that.
Everything else is relatively easy once Iran is contained.
UAE sources suggesting that the next step in their own escalation could be freezing of Iranian bank accounts - which would have a similar effect to the EU’s freezing of Russian funds.
The barbarism and devastation that went on during that time has been explained to me many times. I have found myself working in a studio with active members of up to 4 different factions. All now friends again.
The executives and producers I worked with spent the war years at Universities in Paris Canada or London so the fighting didn't touch them. It is NOT a classless society. But for many it was an incredibly brutal affair. ......
It started with roadblocks set up by the Palestinians which led to the blowing up of a school bus by a Christian Militia which killed 42 children. ....And then it began.....Hezbollah was set up at that time to look after their communities and wipe out corruption
They set up schools and housed the homeless and when the Israelis joined in it was Hezbollah the communities looked towards to protect them. ...................
So when the civil war was over and a recognised government took over they were given seats in the new multi party parliament and given ministries.
My producer who is a Lebanese Christian does not consider Hezbollah to be terrorists and to describe them as such just shows a lack of understanding
Netanyahu needs to remain in power at all costs. He convinced Trump (who also needs to remain in power at all costs) that now would be a good time to attack Iran as there is a vague justification possible thanks to the suppression a few weeks ago.
So do you really think Netanyahu and Trump have spent any time thinking about what the end state will look like.
Got to say Iran annoying all their neighbours by attacking every single one of them wasn't on my radar...
You might argue that Iran having nukes would counter-balance Israel's, rather like India and Pakistan. But Iran slamming conventional missiles into Dubai and Kuwait City and Dohar suggests that would be a bold approach. And a risk that Israel will never take.
The trouble is, the time to take that line was 10, 20, 30 - frankly 80 years ago, and if we had, we would now have a truly independent country. We still can, but it will take years, and right now our entire security aparatus is entirely tied in with the US.
Given that situation, it's also more than a little stupid that the proposed solution from the left is giving more power away, to the EU. Another organisation that we do not (and did not even when we were in it) control and can (and did) therefore take steps that are also against our national interest.
We need to do the hard yards of becoming a truly independent country. We've been given every geographical and institutional advantage to do so. So let's jfdi.
For example.
One might have thought that after the campaigns against Hamas and Hezbollah there would have been some understanding that even when these groups have been ‘decapitated,’ leaving them rocked and uncertain, and their military assets have been severely degraded, they still have deep wells of leadership capacity and don’t give in easily. If, as some reports suggest, the Trump Administration is surprised that the Iranian regime is still operating despite the blows of the past week, they have no right to be.
The key struggles now will be those within Iran. Disagreements about tactics at the top are one thing. Schisms that go much deeper are another. There will undoubtedly be anger inside the country directed against the US and Israel, aggravated by the loss of life, but there will also be anxiety. The choices the regime faces are pretty dire whether they stay defiant or look for conciliation. A peaceful transfer of power to a popular revolutionary government able to restore law and order seems to be the least likely outcome even if the regime starts to collapse under its own dysfunctions. Chaos is more likely.
The intended part of the war is going to plan. Israel and the US quickly achieved command of the skies so that they could attack targets with impunity. But the unintended consequences will largely be in the political, social and economic spheres — and they will be felt for some time. It is becoming increasingly hard to avoid the conclusion that the Trump administration has embarked on this operation without a plan, and is making it up as it goes along, as if they killed enough of the right people and destroyed enough Iranian assets everything would fall into place.
Only with a presence inside Iran can the US really influence the country’s future and even then, as was seen with both Iraq and Afghanistan, that would be no guarantee of being able to push it decisively in the desired direction. A bombastic celebration of military strength can only take you so far when there is no obvious strategy for bringing the war to a satisfactory conclusion.
I suspect it won't have much effect on the locals or Scotland and Wales, but certainly the Labour decline appears seems to have been arrested, certainly until Starmer goes boots in to an unwinnable war.
The lucky winner wishes to remain anonymous.
It is absolutely not "subsidising NATO", so no, it's not legitimate.
Why do you think Iran might want nuclear weapons? I suggest the number one reason is because Israel has them, and the number two reason is that Pakistan has them.
And even then, the Greens are higher up the media agenda after the by-election
Oh, and the added benefit of an absolutely wonderful Japanese ambassador to the UK at the moment, possibly the world’s best diplomat.
Israel pulled out of Gaza under Sharon.
Problem is that backed by Iran, Hamas then took over.
I don't think Israel would have elected Netanyahu had their peace proposals not been rejected.
I don't think Pakistan is an issue (other than that its scientists is how Saudi might readily acquire its own Bomb). Whilst they are neighbours, Pakistan looks far more to its neighbour to the East than to Iran.
And Hamas and Hezbollah had Iran's billions behind them.
Iran has nobody behind them.
Any Labour 'no bases/leave oor Keir alone' bounce' wont survive beyond about £1.60/litre
Cost of living trumps Trump
When Vance became vice president, his ideas included “a more modest place for the United States in world affairs; a new, worker-friendly version of Republican economics; and aggressive, Teddy Roosevelt–style regulation of Big Business,” Kahloon writes. But “little Vanceism is discernible in the administration’s actions” on economics, foreign policy, and other issues.
“This is a major comedown from the role he once seemed likely to fill. Vance’s nomination as vice president was not a concession to the Republican Party of old, but a promise of the Republican Party to come, of Trumpism after Trump. Instead, he has receded in importance in the past year
https://x.com/Mr_Andrew_Fox/status/2030571518963363936
Farage has been out in Mar-a-Lago and got his tweet from Trump, so Reform are chirping up.
This war is deeply unpopular in Britain, and staying out is 100% the right move.
Reform do nothing but denigrate and run down our great country for votes. Plastic patriotism.
It would be better for SKS to weather the pain and when prices starting falling you bring in someone else and take advantage of the bounce.
Who knew?
Some was always the NOTA crowd that now has Green to move to, or even Reform. Some is visibility based, which is tough for them right now. Some are people that those like the guy who canvassed me yesterday can bamboozle with bar charts even! (And im not accusing the LDs of exclusivity on that front!)
The US is pretty much self-sufficient, but nothing leads political popularity in America as much as “gas” prices.
This means more expensive O&G everywhere else.
Policy wise he has been willing to follow whoever has been funding him. Who knows what he actually believes or would do were he to inherit the top job.
Netanyahu was first elected pm in 1996. Awfully prescient of Israelis voting for him knowing in advance that Arafat would reject Clinton’s peace proposals.
That part of the world economy is about to seize up..
Hezbollah had its roots - like the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas - as a community protection organisation. Which then morphed into something much more threatening. They are a cancer in Lebanese politics which would be far healthier without them
(I knew Wafah, slightly, years back. Obviously didn’t discuss Uncle, though)
NEV in 2022 was Con 30%, Lab 35%, Lib Dem 19%.
Assuming that Con and Lab get 17-20% each this time, the Lib Dem’s will gain a lot of seats off them. They’ll lose some to Reform, but not too many.
Im saying Labour will be back in the basement of post 24 support.
And if that is timed for April to May.......
He was elected in 1996 but lost to Barak in 1999 and it was Barak who was PM when Arafat rejected Clinton's peace proposals.
Did they expect them all to say “muslims good and Jews bad, let’s all bomb Israel”?
The Lebanese Government wants Hezbollah gone. Peace between Lebanon and Israel would be possible were that to happen.
https://x.com/aseman_aa/status/2030559087209972012
20% for either Lab or Con (esp the latter) is probably event horizon between terrrrrible night and just a poor one
A rapist too! Who could have guessed? Settled out of court.
3 wives in 3 years. Who would marry that??
People would 'rather die in bombing than in the Islamic Republic’s prisons' - woman in Tehran
With the journey involving the steady destruction of Iran's current and future military capabilities.
Also, what would have been the end game of not taking this action ?
Inaction is often easy but has its own risks and costs.
They know how to build a winning race car.
It's from a provocative quote I heard this morning about Trump and 2016:
"That was 2016, the last year of the before times - the year when everything changed for so many of us."
To me it sounds a bit John Wyndam or maybe Ray Bradbury, anyhow pre- and post-apocalyptic.
Which is of course precisely why they’ve invested in the IMSA and F1 projects.
The recent CTS-V is a remarkably good car, damn close to the Germans for quite a bit less money.
Its amazing that the political situation is repeating in consecutive presidencies.
We will see if the GOP manage the situation better than the Dems did with Biden.
Saudi writer Abdulrahman Al-Rashed:
"We have never seen Israel or America launching missiles at Gulf capitals. Iran is the one that did that.
Defending Iran because it raises the banner of Palestine while ignoring what it did to Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and the Gulf is a grave insult to the Arab countries that bore the cost for four decades."
Its only in Europe that 'useful idiots' want to back the Iranian regime.