British Prime Minister Andy Burnham has approved the US use of some UK bases for “defensive” air strikes on Iran, in a continuation of a policy introduced by his predecessor Keir Starmer, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday.
According to sources who spoke to Bloomberg on condition of anonymity, Starmer held a meeting of senior ministers and officials on Friday, in which it was decided that US planes could continue to use bases at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire.
The sources said that Burnham was briefed on the discussion and agreed with the decision, confirming that he would likely continue Starmer’s policy throughout the renewed US operations.
The decision comes as US bombardment targeted cities across Iran for the 11th consecutive night, with Iranian media reporting explosions in cities including Bushehr, Tabriz and Chabahar and in the provinces of Kurdistan and Ilam.
[…]
But Burnham’s continuation of Starmer’s policy of allowing American use of British airbases is likely to face backlash, as UK rights groups previously warned that the move could violate international law.
Starmer announced his policy in early March, arguing that the bases were to be used for defensive purposes.
He later confirmed that the agreement would be expanded to allow for the US to launch strikes from UK bases on Iranian sites targeting the Strait of Hormuz - also invoking “collective self-defence” of Gulf state allies as a legal basis for the decision.
Human Rights Watch’s UK director, Yasmine Ahmed, wrote to the prime minister, highlighting that the government’s legal justification for the move failed to mention issues related to international humanitarian law (IHL).
She cited a number of instances which have raised questions around US compliance with IHL, including an air strike on Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in the southern Iranian city of Minab, at the start of the US-Israeli assault on 28 February. Over 150 people were killed in the attack, most of them children.
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It’s bad enough being stuck in the middle of this shit. Why is the world enabling us?
Er, it seems more like we’re enabling the yanks.
Well, if anyone had any doubt that Burnham is a paid up israeli stooge, i think those doubts can be considered settled.
Sick of these unelected prime ministers swapping the keys to number 10 whenever it suits a sufficiently wealthy lobby group.
You need to read up about how our parliament works. We never elect a prime minister, we only elect a person to be an MP for that constituency. That’s the way it’s been for centuries.
That’s the farce of it all. On paper people vote for an MP, but in their minds people vote for a party, and that party is led by the PM they hope will be running the country.
Literally no one voted for Burnham to lead the party, even though party rules dictate how the party leader is democratically selected. With Labour, I understand the registered party members decide, although they may have restricted that to MP’s voting only in the wake of party members choosing Corbyn years ago.
Starmer threw in the towel, over nothing in particular, and Burnham stood uncontested. There is nothing democratic about that.
So you agree he is a paid stooge at least.
Read my other comment. The revolving door of party leadership is recent and dysfunctional. And your vote is for your local MP AND the party they are a member of, knowing the policies and leadership of that party.
If you think otherwise you are ignoring a substantial amount of what you should have been considering in your voting decisions.
Both Starmer and Burnham were elected.
Oh come on, you know what they meant. People might have voted for Labour, but not to have Burnham as PM. Nor Sunak, or Lettuce Lady.
No I don’t because that’s not how our democracy works. We don’t vote directly for the PM, we vote in a local representitive and they vote for the leader of the party. It’s either a misundestanding or just being dishonest to say that they’re unelected. They were elected by their constitutency and elected again by whatever mechanism the party uses.
That’s not how general elections work in the UK.
You vote for your local MP, and the party with a large enough selection of MPs gets to choose their Premier to be PM. So if the party wants to rotate their premier, so be it.
It’s quite simple but a lot of people seem to have trouble understanding this process. It just goes to show the dire state of education.
It’s permissible by the letter of the rules, but it absolutely is not what people expect to be happening with their democratic say.
Most people vote for whichever MP is in the party they want to vote for, run by the leader they want to run the country. Most people expect some stability, at least until the next opportunity to have their say.
And Labour party members are supposed to vote on the party leader, it isn’t supposed to just be a decision by MP’s. Because Burnham stood uncontested, there was no vote, and effectively the only people who got to decide were the MP’s at the nomination stage.
And Starmer had no good (publicly known) reason to leave. His controversies were never that damning, and they were contrasted with quiet competent successes.
You dismiss this as “all right and proper” according to British election rules, while ignoring that it is all dripping in slime.
It’s funny to me that nobody is disputing that he is a stooge in thrall to a foreign power. Instead people want to ague about the mechanisma of the elctoral syatem and whether or not burnham’s appointment is normal or dysfunctional. Which of these two assertions matters more? Ii is not our expectations of party leadership changes.
But while people want to argue misunderstanding of one thing to discredit the other argument, I’ll clarify that I have no misunderstanding of how the system is supposed to work.
We vote for an MP to represent us in parliament, knowing the policies of the party and of it’s leader who would step into the pm role. There has never been, on the history of parliament, and expectation that party leadership would change hands like car keys at a swingers party. If you think otherwise, you ae normalising the dysfunctional behaviour and speeding the breakdown of the democratic process.
In my own, experience I have never had a local MP actually represent my view on anything that i have written to them about, they just quote and follow party or funded lines instead. ymmv This means the pm role and party policies are substantially more impactful.
As a result, ayone casting a vote without at least 50% of their choice being related to party leadership and policies is not understanding the system and is damning the rest of the population by voting for fictional authority over local concerns at the expense of national authority over real issues.
So to my original assertion, Burnham was not elected to the office of PM.
So to my original assertion, Burnham was not elected to the office of PM.
And the party didn’t even have a vote on him. He stood uncontested.
Literally the only group that had a say were the party MP’s who were responsible for nominations. However the party rules are designed to give the wider party membership a say; no opportunity for this was given. There wasn’t even a Count Binface option.
