HUNDREDS of thousands of Iranians marched defiantly in Tehran and other Iranian cites yesterday in solidarity with Palestine against Israeli genocide, for a Palestinian state and against the illegal US-Israeli imperialist war on Iran.
Despite the murderous and continuous US-Israeli bombing campaign, the Iranian masses defied the illegal imperialist onslaught and carried portraits of their Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, himself under death threat from the US and Israel.
In marked contrast, the UK government is so terrified of the planned al-Quds (Jerusalem) march in London on Sunday that Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has banned it, while the supine TUC leaders have acquiesced to this blatant and dictatorial attempt to deny the democratic right to protest.
After two weeks of the massive US-Israeli unprovoked onslaught, and despite the arrogant and increasingly unhinged rants of US president Donald Trump, it is the economies of the US, the EU and the UK that now face destruction from Iran’s oil and gas blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and the inflationary global shockwave unleashed by it.
Panic over the rocketing oil and LNG gas prices – up to $100 a barrel and £173 a megawatt hour respectively – has led to economists at Wood MacKenzie betting on oil peaking at $200 per barrel.
Such is the panic gripping leading economists about the bankrupt UK economy and the imperialist bombing onslaught that, according the Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard yesterday, this could be ‘Trump’s Suez crisis’.
‘Britain and France “won” the Suez war in 1956. They destroyed Egypt’s air force on the ground and gained total control of the skies within hours’, he said. ‘They crippled Egypt’s tank forces. The assault was professional and achieved all of its immediate military objectives.
‘Yet the Suez crisis degenerated into the worst humiliation since 1940 because the two powers failed to anticipate the economic fallout. Both faced capital flight and pressure on their fixed exchange rates.’ In fact, the United States, under President Eisenhower, deliberately refused to provide financial assistance to Britain during the 1956 Suez crisis, using the crisis to force a British withdrawal.
But Iran is undefeated in 2026 and on the verge of defeating the imperialist bandits as their banks and economies face devastation through rocketing inflation and shortages.
The Strait of Hormuz has not been closed for 80 years, but its current closure has stopped 20 per cent of the world’s oil and gas exports.
Trump’s empty and futile boasts that the US government will provide cheap insurance for tankers running the blockade, as commercial rates have rocketed to nearly $500,000, has not received many takers due to the issue of the lives of the crew. The US has claimed that it will provide naval escorts for the oil tankers though the Strait, providing a shooting gallery to Iran.
The alarming surge in UK bond yields over the last week has raised the cost of business credit violently and damaged collateral values across the British economy.
‘It would be utter insanity to think of raising the bank rate,’ Evans-Pritchard warned in yesterday’s Telegraph, as the UK’s economy was shown to have failed to grow in January with growth at 0.0 per cent of GDP figures, from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
‘It would be a policy error for the Bank of England to tighten monetary policy in the teeth of the current energy storm and it would be utter insanity to think of raising the Bank Rate,’ Evans-Pritchard said.
With his military chiefs whining unceasingly for increased military sending, Starmer has agreed with the EU to raise military spending to 3.0 per cent of GDP by 2030 and to 3.5 per cent by 2035, about £40bn, which can only be raised by increased taxation, increased borrowing, both politically risky, or slashing welfare spending.
The OBR expects the tax burden to reach around 37 per cent of GDP, the highest sustained level since the Second World War, and has warned that pushing taxes further risks damaging growth. Thus, the only choice for Starmer is ‘tanks not welfare’, demands Adam Smith writing in the Telegraph yesterday. The Prime Minister and the Chancellor have no choice but to look again at welfare cuts as the only sustainable way to fund higher defence spending, Smith writes.
The banning of Sunday’s al-Quds march in London by the Labour Home Secretary Mahmood must be confronted by workers in the UK who must demand the TUC call strike action to bring down this pro-war, pro-Israel Starmer government to stop war on Iran, the Israeli genocide in Gaza and the massive inflationary shock wave which is about to pauperise workers and the middle class.
Starmer’s spending cuts to welfare and the NHS must be defeated by bringing down the Labour government with a general strike to clear the way for a workers’ government and a socialist society where the banks, big industry and the utilities are nationalised and production organised to provide the means of life to all workers and their families.
Join the Workers Revolutionary Party and Young Socialists today to lead this urgent struggle!
