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Well, thank goodness for that!

Imagine if we had been ready to leap into the action over Iran. The pressure from the US to get involved would have been far greater if our two aircraft carriers had been battle ready and prepositioned in or near the Gulf. We would have been dragged in willy nilly. Having more frigates off the Cyprus coast would not have changed anything. Iran would still have lobbed over enough drones to create a minor panic.

So what precisely do these scaremongers and warmongers like Robertson suggest we should have been doing by way of deploying more assets if we had had them? They don’t say. In fact it was our limited involvement such as it was, allowing the US to use bases in Suffolk and Diego Garcia for bombing Iran, alongside our long history of hostility towards Iran, which prompted the Iranian attacks on Cyprus in the first place.

What dunderheads like Robertson fail to understand is that security comes more from not having enemies than from being armed to the teeth. This simple truth escapes them. It’s whipping up war fever against Iran and Russia which has got us into a position of vulnerability. By sanctioning Iran, a country which has never conceivably been a threat to us, in order to help Israel, and by joining in Israel’s campaign to demonise Iran, we were paving the way for Trump’s mad gamble. We never dreamed that our recklessness would come back to bite us. Well now it has, big time, with the UK turning out to have more exposure to the economic fallout from the crisis than any other Western country. A proper common sense defence policy would have realised how exposed we were and put more emphasis on conflict avoidance than battle readiness.

In this same week of Robertson’s plea for throwing more good money after bad the cry went up that we were not ready to retaliate against Russia for apparently recceing our underwater cables. But as with Iran this is to ignore our own provocations. We have been threatening action against Russia’s so-called “shadow fleet” of civilian vessels, a fleet which only exists anyway because we led the way in sanctioning Russia over Ukraine. The alleged cyber-attacks and cable-related actions only took off after the start of the Ukraine conflict and in light of the leading role this country has taken in trying to bring about Russia’s collapse.

Are those Gulf countries who paid vast amounts to US arms contractors saying to themselves: “If only we had spent more on weapons”? No, they are ruing the day they put faith in being armed to the hilt and regretting that they had not done more to appease Iran. Appeasement, by the way, simply means soothing your adversary, as we do in our personal lives all the time, and as we did for a long time with Trump.

Starmer for once has read the room correctly, more or less. He has gained a few points in popularity by distancing himself from Trump somewhat and by keeping our involvement in the Iran war limited.  Farage has lost points by over-association with Trump and seemingly being in favour of greater involvement if only we had had more military capability (proving our point, incidentally).

In responding to Robertson Starmer would be doing himself a favour if he turned the tables on the old nitwit, calling him out for shameless warmongering and advocating diversion of welfare to warfare. Starmer would be putting himself in tune with popular feeling and prompting comparisons with Attlee, who led Labour to victory in 1945 when the British people showed how much they loved warmongers’ favourite Churchill by getting rid of him at the first opportunity.

But Starmer doesn’t have the gumption to do that. His minions proclaim “Oh but we are in fact spending loads on the military. We have the highest sustained military spending since the end of the Cold War.” Labour should be apologising for that, not boasting about it.

No, we should not be spending more on what is misleadingly called defence. We would be safer if we spent less, indulged in less post-imperial posturing, sought to calm conflicts rather than exacerbate them, and focused on a domestic front where so much has been neglected and run down.

Original article: workerspartygb.org