Green Party Co-leader Adrian Ramsay. Wikipedia CC.
Responding to news of US attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities, Green Party co-leader Adrian Ramsay MP said:
“We utterly condemn the reckless attacks on Iran by the United States that can only lead to further dangerous conflict in an already volatile region. There is no international legal basis for this unilateral action that poses a serious threat to international peace and security.
“Our prime minister has shamefully decided to echo the rhetoric of Trump and Netanyahu rather than condemn the indefensible aggression of both Israel and the US. Keir Starmer has further implied that it is justifiable for the Iranian regime to be bombed back to the negotiating table. I fully recognise the brutal nature of the Iranian regime but this unilateral action is no way to build peace and risks making the UK once again complicit in escalating a Middle East crisis.”
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer leads a roundtable discussion at the Organised Immigration Crime Summit at Lancaster House in central London, March 31, 2025
KEIR STARMER’S anti-refugee summit picks up where the Tories left off in giving unauthorised migration exaggerated status as some kind of national crisis.
Just as Rishi Sunak penned a joint article with Italy’s far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni calling for a Europe-wide crackdown on irregular arrivals, Meloni took centre-stage by video link today, citing Italy’s use of a third-country processing hub in Albania as a model increasingly adopted across the continent.
Meloni depicts Italy as a pioneer. It is, though not in a good way. It successfully pushed the EU to abolish its last official search-and-rescue service in the Mediterranean nearly five years ago and it has led the way too in prosecuting civilian search-and-rescue missions it smears as people-smugglers.
As the Public and Commercial Services union and Care4Calais recently urged, the easiest way to end criminal people-smuggling operations would be to provide safe routes for people to claim asylum, perhaps through an extension of the scheme for Ukrainian refugees to people of other backgrounds.
There is no reason why victims of one war should be privileged over victims of others, and Britain bears responsibility for many of those wars. Yvette Cooper’s own reference to gangs working from the “hills of Kurdistan to the money markets of Kabul” cites two countries devastated by invasions we took part in, Iraq and Afghanistan.
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The international refugee crisis is driven by war, poverty and climate change.
RAF fighter jets have taken part in joint bombing exercises over western Asia with the US Central Command (CENTCOM) and F-15 and F-35 fighters of the Israeli air force, believed to be preparation for attacks on Iran.
The 4 March exercise – the third in two weeks – involved giant US B-52H ‘Stratofortress’ bombers that took off from Fairford RAF base in England and conducted the exercise in CENTCOM’s ‘area of responsibility’, which comprises the ‘Middle East’ and parts of southern Asia.
The latest exercise follows a live-weapon drop on 20 February that the US military said involved B-52s conducting “multiple missions over the Arabian Peninsula and Red Sea”. With typically Orwellian language, the Pentagon said that these missions ‘promote security and stability’ in the region. In the past twelve months the US has used the B-52s, along with B-1 and B-2 bombers, to bomb Iraq, Syria and Yemen.
ARCHITECTS OF SLAUGHTER : Jonathan Powell (right)and Alastair Campbell attend a Gala dinner to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement at Hillsborough Castle in Northern Ireland on April 16 2023 [dizzy: War criminal Alastair Campbell often complains about being called a war criminal.]
The British press has welcomed Keir Starmer’s new National Security Adviser without any mention of his deep, central involvement in the criminal invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan — but history remembers, writes IAN SINCLAIR
“THE US media’s gravest shortcoming is much more their errors of omission than their errors of commission,” William Blum, historian and fierce critic of US foreign policy, once astutely observed. “It’s what they leave out that distorts the news more than any factual errors or out-and-out lies.”
Blum’s evergreen maxim very much applies to the British media, too.
Take the press response to Prime Minister Keir Starmer recently appointing Jonathan Powell to be his new National Security Adviser.
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Given the job description for his new position, amazingly, none of the five newspapers thought it pertinent to mention Powell’s central role in the illegal and aggressive invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and Britain’s subsequent military occupation. Or, for that matter, Powell’s role in Britain’s (also illegal) 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and subsequent occupation.
If we judge Powell’s political career in the 2000s using the limited, liberal framing endemic to these newspapers, his record is a disaster.
The British military interventions in both Iraq and Afghanistan are now widely understood to have been catastrophes, leading to the deaths of hundreds of British soldiers. The presence of British troops in both countries energised the armed resistance.
The Taliban are now back in control of Afghanistan, and Iraq’s social fabric was torn asunder to such an extent that Isis was able to take control of around 40 per cent of the country in the mid-2010s.
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If we judge Powell’s career using a moral lens, then he arguably becomes a blood-soaked, criminal political figure. He was, after all, one of the key individuals in Blair’s inner circle in the run-up to the invasion when this cabal repeatedly misled the cabinet, parliament, media and British public.
He attended the infamous July 23 2002 meeting recorded in the leaked minutes which have become known as the Downing Street Memo.
Summarising recent talks Richard Dearlove, then head of MI6, had had in Washington, the minute’s note: “Military action was now seen as inevitable” but “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
The minutes also note foreign secretary Jack Straw said the “case [for war] was thin” as “Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his [weapons of mass destruction] capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.”
Powell was at Blair’s side when the September 2002 dossier was compiled, with little regard for the actual evidence, to strengthen the case for war. In fact, Powell “instructed intelligence chiefs to change the … dossier to make it appear that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein was much greater than they believed,” the Guardian reported in September 2003.
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[T]he ramifications of the historical record are clear. Rather than returning to Downing Street, Powell — like Blair, Campbell and Brown — should be heading to The Hague.
