Picture shows HMS Duncan a ship that may have sailed to war too late to be of any use.
So we have a war in the Gulf break out. It was a war that was expected because the build up to it has been there for ages and many people could see it from both the aggressive actions of the Islamic regime in Iran against nations like Israel and the Iranian’s war against its own people and the actions of the Americans to counter Iran’s belligerence. This is not a war that should have taken anyone with a functioning brain by surprise.
In a functioning Britain the UK government might have least had reasonable grounds to predict that such a war involving an ally of Britain, the USA, might take place and at the bare minium give the Americans as much help as needed with regards to facilities such as military bases and make sure that if needs be then we have at least some forces to contribute.
However in the non-functioning nation that Britain has become we didn’t even do that. Starmer’s government faffed around weighing up standing with an ally and not upsetting parts of Labour’s left and Islamic sections. We ended up with a situation where one of the Royal Navy’s few functioning ships was not ready to sail to the Gulf region until after the war had started. This conflict could be seen as one that could go off at some point months ago. It could be seen to be brewing during the 12 Day War when Israel attacked Iranian missile sites along with the intransigence of the Iranian regime and the unwillingness of Iran’s proxy groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas to do anything like enough to accept peace. This was a war that anyone with any sense could see coming. I thought it might have come a little earlier during the Iranian peoples uprising, but I was sure it would happen. All the conditions for conflict were there and such a conflict was made more certain by the decisions and statements of the current US administration.
How the Starmer government has responded to conflict in an area that we once had some standing in is a national humiliation. Where were the allegedly bright and knowledgeable people in the Ministry of Defence or in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office in all this? How much did party political concerns play a part in Starmer’s wariness about involvement?
Whether you agree with the idea of the UK assisting the Americans in the war against the Iranian Islamic regime or not, it’s difficult not to concur that Britain has been humiliated on the world stage because of the action or rather inactions of the British Labour government aided by all the other previous governments who’ve run down our Armed Services and turned them into a laughing stock.