by Melanie Phillips on substack
A former diplomat blows the whistle on anti-Israel bias and Islamist entryism
The “special relationship” between Britain and America is currently on life support. US President Donald Trump is furious with the British Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, for refusing to join the US and Israel in the war against Iran.
He is furious with others in the west too for similarly refusing even to help defend the Straits of Hormuz, the “chokehold” waterway which the Iranian regime is currently threatening to attack. As a result, traffic through the Straits has dwindled to a handful of tankers and the price of oil has soared.
As Trump has pointed out, the refusal of Britain, Europe and others to help defend the Straits is particularly egregious since they are vastly more dependent on the oil coming through there than is America.
They are refusing not just because they are pusillanimous appeasers who will never themselves lift a finger to confront tyranny and are all too happy to rely parasitically on the US to defend their interests.
That behaviour is disgraceful enough. Far worse is their objection to the war itself, taking refuge behind a perverse denial of the 47-year war waged by Iran against America, Israel and the west to declare falsely that the current war is an illegal act of aggression under international law.
And behind that bubbles an unsavoury stew of disgust and fear of Trump’s moral clarity over Iran (yes, you read that right); venomous hostility to Israel founded in the destruction of their own moral compass; and the disintegration of their sense of national identity and purpose and ability to acknowledge, let alone defend themselves against, predatory foes both from within and without and who need to be fought.
This is the context within which to understand the pathetic spectacle of Starmer shaming and betraying his country. He has totally collapsed the Labour party’s last vestige of its historic claim — which Starmer himself made, when he was purporting to fight the party’s exploding Jew-hatred under the previous leadership of Jeremy Corbyn — that “the Labour party is a moral project or it is nothing”.