Bob Seely: Starmer’s standing by his principles and defending them, but he’s confused and not defending us

Dr Robert Seely MBE is author of ‘The New Total War’, ConservativeHome’s foreign affairs columnist and a former Conservative MP. 

Exercising power is about making choices, and Sir Kier Starmer’s painful evasions over Iran show what happens when you fail to make the right ones, or even clear ones.

At the heart of Labour’s confusion is the friction between left-wing principles and realpolitik. The trouble is, its principles are questionable whilst its realpolitik is parochial – aimed not at the great questions of war and peace, but at party unity and electoral survivability; party before country.

The result is a mess where Britain’s national interests come last. We appear weak. Churchill’s quote about our leadership in the 1930s: “Decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift,” seems apt. US President Donald Trump had his own, biting judgement. “This is not Winston Churchill we’re dealing with,” is destined to become one of the memorable quotes of the century, and will likely feature heavily and repeatedly in Starmer’s political obituaries.

First, legality; Keir Starmer and his Attorney General, Lord Hermer, a human rights lawyer, think the war is illegal. They initially blocked any bombing from UK-based bases before wriggling, agreeing that missions from US bases on our soil could be used for ‘defensive’ strikes. In taking this course of action, they have angered President Donald Trump, and now, it seems, Gulf allies too.

Aside from the attacks on our Cyprus bases, which is now clearly a cause for war, what grates is the interpretation of international law that damages open societies at the expense of evil ones.

Lord Wolfson, shadow Attorney-General, responded to the Hermer/Starmer position in an excellent post on Twitter/X last weekend. It’s worth a read. “Too many international lawyers,” he wrote, “serenely promote an analysis which ultimately protects tyrants.”

He has a point. The Starmer/Hermer interpretation of international law treats democracies such as Israel as little more than tethered goats waiting to be attacked, or only allow military action when it is too late. Go back to the 7 October 2023 when Hamas attacked; Israel would have only been able to defend itself once the murder of men, women and children had started. If they had pre-emptively struck to save Israeli lives, Starmer and Hermer would no doubt have found Israel in breach of international law.

It’s part of a wider corruption of law in this country that seems to protect the rights of the wretched over the virtuous. Even Friedrich Merz, Chancellor of Germany – Germany, for heaven’s sake – now says that Iran shouldn’t be protected by international law. Hermer and Starmer, and the legal left in Britian, are part of a generation of international law/human rights lawyers that have corrupted justice, not strengthened it, and have used it to piously attack democracies, not to deliver genuine moral or legal value to our country or the world.

Sadly, where they have led, the leftwing intelligentsia have followed.

Moral philosopher Nigel Biggar developed similar ideas to Wolfson’s in The Telegraph. He argued that uncritical compliance to international law risked sacrificing the national interest and allowing evil to flourish. “Because international law is so flawed, blind obedience to it is irresponsible,” he argued. The Iranian regime, let’s remember, is one that executes homosexuals, blinds women for advocating female rights, has killed more than 20,000 protesters in the last two months and has, according to the British security services, plotted more than 20 lethal attacks on British soil in the last 12 months. It is a pariah state. However much a pleading Starmer signals to Iran that he is sitting on the fence, we remain in Iran’s trinity of infamy – along with the US and Israel.

There are, for sure, complexities; the regime may fall, but it may not. The Israeli/US plan may work, it may not. Operation Roaring Lion/Epic Fury is pre-emptive (Israel and the US have different names, and both, from a British point of view, are a bit kitsch, we generally like our military operations named after boring market towns or random words). Regime change from the air is risky, but then in war, all courses of action are. But it can work.

It did in Kosovo in 1999. It did against ISIS (2014-2109) in a campaign that I saw first-hand, and it did a few weeks ago in Venezuela.

What air power does need is ground support. It was provided in Kosovo by the Kosovo Liberation Army, against ISIS by the Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga, a good bunch of soldiers in my humble opinion, and against Venezuela by U.S. special forces. When leftwing activists and politicians as well as ill-informed BBC journalists piously insist that air power doesn’t win wars, they are no more correct than their subjective pronouncements about international law.

A clearly nervous Starmer went out of his way to stress that Britain was not taking an active role in this operation. You do have to wonder who he was speaking to and why?

Was it special pleading to the mullahs? Was it to the Pakistani block vote in Britain following the disastrous by election last week? Or was it to his own restless and angry MPs, who fear being told another pack of lies by a Labour leadership about a Middle Eastern war. On that latter point, Labour have a record at making poor foreign policy choices; Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo (which enraged Russia), the vote for military action over Syrian chemical weapons use (when Ed Miliband broke his word), Chagos and now Iran.

Instead of a common-sense driven assessment of the national interest, aligned with morality, aligned with law, we get either crude political calculation or a sanctimonious adoration of international law.

And this returns us to the fundamental problem.

Leftwing morality is predicated on a version of law whose primary purpose is to attack the West, whilst their realpolitik is designed to hold up, in this case, a coalition made-up of the middle class, anti-Israeli protestorati and their sympathisers, and a Pakistani block vote radicalised by the Gaza conflict and with a deep hostility to both Israel and India, the latter due to the divided region of Kashmir.

As to the issue of the operation, I don’t know what will happen, and we may well be right to be cautious. But there are legal, moral and practical grounds to allow the US to use our bases, and to support in a secondary way, helping to protect our allies.

First, the legal case; Israel has a responsibility to protect his people and to prevent a second Holocaust (and no, what Israel is doing in Gaza is not a genocide). Iran and its allies have made no secret of their wish to destroy Israel.

Second, realpolitik; the US is our major military ally and frankly, given how much we have run down our armed forces, we need them more than they need us.

Third, the moral case; the Islamic regime in Iran is barbarous and medieval. As Merz says, Iran should not be protected, Iran should be the international version of an outlaw.

Rather than use this as a basis for understanding and action Starmer, has instead become trapped in a confused world of his own making. He’s accepted an interpretation of international law which aids dictators over democracies. He’s alienating our closest ally. He’s trying to appease Labour’s electoral base as well as its MPs, now staring at their own Armageddon, all be it electoral rather than military.

In this miserable mélange, Britain’s national interest comes last when it should be first.

What a mess.