THE IRANIAN ambassador in London, Seyed Ali Mousavi, has spoken to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg in a pre-recorded interview in which he correctly warned his country would have a ‘right to self-defence’ if the UK directly joined the US-Israeli attacks on Iran.
He warned that Iran expected the British government, and others, ‘to be very delicate, very careful’ in their actions.
In fact, the UK has already given permission for the US to use British bases for what ministers describe as ‘defensive strikes’ on Iranian facilities, but has not as yet taken part in any direct attacks itself.
The Iranian ambassador said it was ‘good’ that the UK was not ‘involved with this aggression’, adding he believed the British government had learnt lessons from the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Meanwhile, the Israeli President Herzog when asked for his reaction to Donald Trump’s comments that the war is over says he ‘did not hear him say that the war is over’. He added: ‘I heard him saying he expects full surrender by Iran.’
Finally, Herzog asked by Kuenssberg about whether the UK-US relationship is at risk – says he ‘does not want to get involved with the relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom’.
Kuenssberg says Iran was ‘moving quickly’ towards a stockpile of 20,000 ballistic missiles. This is part of the reason Israel and the US decided to ‘move swiftly’ to ‘remove the threat’, he says.
Kuenssberg asks how he can justify this when Iran was at the negotiating table.
Pressed by Kuenssberg about why Israel has the right to strike countries outside of Iran, like Lebanon, Herzog says: ‘We didn’t do that, we were attacked vehemently by Hezbollah. We have the full right to defend ourselves,’ he says.
We’re now hearing from the UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg.
Kuenssberg pressed the UK Foreign Secretary: ‘Are we at war?’
Cooper replies: ‘We are providing “defensive” support in a conflict and that is the way to describe it. We want to see a resolution of this conflict swiftly as possible.’
Pressed by Kuenssberg on whether the UK-US special relationship is ‘in trouble’, Cooper says the countries work closely together on a range of issues and ‘will continue to do so’.
Kuenssberg then asks about a comment from former prime minister Tony Blair, that the UK should have been alongside the US from the start.
Cooper says that there is a range of opinion in politics, and that it’s ‘not in the UK’s national interest’ to ‘unquestioningly agree with the US’.
She adds that she thinks it’s ‘important to learn lessons’ from what went wrong during the Iraq war.
Asked if the UK has been too slow to respond in this conflict, Cooper says that the government initially wanted to pursue diplomatic means, but once they saw ‘the reckless nature of the Iranian response’, the government decided it was right to respond.
Kuenssberg asked her about Donald Trump’s social media posts, where he criticised the UK’s support for the war.
Cooper says PM Keir Starmer’s job is to ‘take decisions in the UK’s national interest … not in interest of any other country’. She says Starmer has done that ‘every step of the way’.
The UK doesn’t agree with Trump ‘on every issue’, Cooper says. The US is going to think about US interests, while the UK will focus on UK interests, she adds.
Yvette Cooper says: ‘Some repatriation flights are already operating from Qatar to European cities.’
Meanwhile, Qatar Airways say scheduled flights for Sunday remain temporarily suspended due to the closure of Qatari airspace. But the airline also says it operated repatriation flights today from Doha to Amsterdam, Berlin, Frankfurt, London and Zurich.
The TUC must be made to speak up for the working class and take action in its interests.
The TUC must call a UK general strike to insist that the working class of the world, not the bosses, takes control of the oil and other resources of Africa and the Middle East.
