Monthly Archives: August 2024

Britain, Government, Israel, Middle East, Politics, Society, United States

Escalating tensions could induce a wider war

MIDDLE EAST

SOME are wondering whether the blizzard of missiles, rockets, and drones blasted from Lebanon into Israel in the early hours of yesterday may have been no more than a preliminary.

The shelling could have been much worse but for a series of earlier Israeli air strikes designed to pre-empt plans by Hezbollah to launch an even bigger wave of rockets.

The Israeli air force struck at thousands of rocket launchers and bunkers housing everything from antiquated Soviet Katyusha systems to modern Iranian missiles.

Many of the missiles fired from Lebanon can do serious damage if they hit a target, but as it happens they are mostly easy for the Israeli air defences to detect and destroy.

Nonetheless, this latest fusillade serves to further deplete Israel’s defensive capability – notably, the Iron Dome system – thereby improving Hezbollah’s chances of hitting major targets with more powerful missiles in the future.

The Islamist leadership is claiming to have damaged buildings deep inside Israel, as far south as the outskirts of Tel Aviv – hitting a military base, and a patrol boat further north.

We cannot be sure of this – Israel has prohibited the publishing of photographs of bomb damage, both on TV and via social media. This prevents Hezbollah making a damage assessment.

A state of emergency has also been declared.

Whatever the case, Hezbollah’s attack has been expected for weeks, as payback for Israel’s double assassination of one of its commanders and the Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh, killed in the Iranian capital Tehran in July. The revenge strike was delayed because of the Shi’ite holy festival of Arbaeen, when up to two million pilgrims travelled overland from Lebanon and Iran to Karbala in Iraq.

Now their journey is over, the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard – Hezbollah’s real masters – has warned the war will commence in earnest.

Israel says it is well prepared, but it’s pre-emptive strikes yesterday may not have been enough to deflect the onslaught. It’s estimated that Hezbollah has around 150,000 rockets in its secret cache of hidden arsenals. This escalation also seems certain to have put paid to American efforts at brokering a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. Central to this is the release of the surviving hostages seized on October 7.

Both sides say they don’t want all-out war. But neither is willing to be the first to turn the other cheek and stop retaliation – so war is looming. If that does happen, it will be on a scale that dwarfs the unfathomable civilian cost of Israel’s heavy assault in Gaza over the past ten months.

Many observers to this conflict believe that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is relying on a constant state of conflict to keep him in power.

As long as there’s no ceasefire in Gaza, an uneasy truce will continue within Israeli politics. If the fighting stops, Netanyahu will be ousted by his rivals, and will face prosecution and perhaps prison on corruption charges.

America is pledged to support Israel in any war against Iran. The U.S. has already deployed vast naval forces, including three nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, to seas around the Middle East.

With our military bases in Cyprus, a little over 100 miles from the nearest missile launchers in Lebanon, the UK would be drawn into the war, too. Expats and holidaymakers in Cyprus would also be in danger.

And within the last few days, Hamas announced that Israelis in Europe and elsewhere were now regarded as targets for attacks abroad.

Meanwhile, schools in northern Israel are closed and up to 100,000 Israelis have been evacuated from the border with Lebanon.

The threats to peace continue to loom beyond the Middle East. Fears are growing that the vortex of escalating violence could drag us and many others into the conflict.

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Britain, Economic, Government, Politics, Society

Labour’s true manifesto is being revealed

BRITAIN

NOW he’s safely in office, Sir Keir Starmer continues to reveal his real manifesto – attacks on pensioners, higher fuel bills, and a whole array of excuses for other flops and errors that he has not even made yet. With apparent gusto, he will tell us shortly that things will get worse before they get better and that he will not shy away from tough and unpopular decisions.

Such rhetoric has often been a favourite warning from Prime Ministers nearing their end of time in office, usually an attempt to claim that their difficulties will one day produce a happy outcome. But it is highly unusual for newly elected leaders with a full five years ahead of them to use language like this. If he starts in this way, what will it be like a year hence?

This is a government in trouble within weeks of being elected to office.

Beguiled by Labour’s legendary skills at spin and planning, many expected and hoped that Sir Keir would ride smoothly into power. It has been anything but. Apart from proposing to concrete over the Green Belt, abandoning any attempt to control illegal migration, splurging taxpayers’ money on extravagant public sector pay claims, and mauling independent schools with VAT, there has been little for the PM to boast about. The chief turn of phrase of his opening few weeks, along with that of his Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has been: “The Tories left a huge black hole in the national finances.” Labour claims that the outgoing Conservative government left a £22bn black hole that Labour has exposed following an audit of the books when they took over. Anyone who understands economics, whether Labour supporting or not, will know the claim to be untrue.

Absurdly, and in a similar vein, Labour has even started blaming the previous government for the recent violent disorders. No doubt the Tories have not been as tough as their voters would have liked on law and order, but Labour, for more than half a century has been the party of soft sentencing and politically correct policing, can hardly blame the Conservatives for the “cracks in our society”.

This is a government in a mess. The removal of the winter fuel payment to pensioners looks more than ever like a classic political bungle, now made even worse by the ten per cent rise in the energy cap that has just been announced by the energy regulator. It will hit many elderly people hard. Is this what Starmer calls a “government of service”? It increasingly looks like the sort of administration in which the people serve the state, and the state is above our heads in ways that aren’t normally associated with socialism.

Britons can feel the wind blowing and will know that things aren’t right. Expect some heavy hitting changes.

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Britain, Economic, Government, Politics, Society

Ingratiating the unions will lead to ruination

BRITAIN

DURING the election campaign, one of the very few things Sir Keir Starmer was clear about was that the Labour Party had “changed”. He said this even more often than reminding the nation that his father had been a toolmaker.

Anyone listening to this pledge must have assumed that he meant the party had changed for the better: less militancy, more readiness to tackle immigration, being tougher on crime, no rapid resort to higher taxes, and more consideration for the squeezed middle class.

Well, it has been far from that. The “changed” Labour Party has immediately resorted to traditional Leftist policies, from a penal VAT levy on independent schools to promises of higher taxes, based on highly dubious claims of a hitherto concealed £22bn black hole in the national finances. It has begun to sidle up to the EU, giving every sign of stealthy plans to undo much of Brexit. On top of that, it has cynically cut pensioners’ heating allowances, launched a frenzy of green spending, and lit a bonfire of the planning protections which have for many decades helped to keep the suburbs reasonably green and spacious. It all sounds pretty “unchanged”.

But above all Labour has remain unchanged in its treatment of trade unions and their excessive pay demands. There is hardly a militant union which has not received a large bag of taxpayers’ golden mint in the past few weeks, which is why Chancellor Rachel Reeves is now complaining that she does not have enough of our money and will soon be demanding more.

With amazing abandonment, within just a few short days of Labour coming to power, intractable disputes were cheerfully resolved. This was easy to do if you do not care how much it costs. The political benefits to Labour are considerable, especially now it has ended the very unpleasant and dangerous junior doctors’ dispute in England.

Such a primrose path which has started merrily will end in tears and trouble. That is a given. Perhaps Sir Keir and his government ministers have forgotten their party’s own history, and the story of how it was undone in the 1960s by an unstoppable round of pay claims, one group leapfrogging another. This did huge damage both to private industry and the great nationalised concerns which took up so much of the landscape.

Unions today, it is worth remembering, do not have the power, wealth, or strength of their 1960s and 1970s forbears. They tend to pester and annoy the public with short and frequent protest strikes, rather than marathon walkouts lasting months at a time. We should be grateful we are not contending with that.

But even so, strikes do great mischief. They slow down the economy, they can wreck the education of the young, they can get in the way of the very necessary movement of getting people away from “working from home”, and they keep inflation and prices on the boil.

Free trade unions are an integral part of any open and proper free country. But with freedom comes responsibility, and a combination of militant-led unions and an increasingly spendthrift Labour government does not encourage such responsibility.

If he is not careful, the PM will soon find that he has made a rod for his own back. He may think that he can pass on the costs of this policy to hard-pressed taxpayers. But experience shows he will instead destroy the very businesses he needs to pay for his largesse. We need real change before the bad times start rolling again.

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