Britain is growing stronger as America slides into the abyss

This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here. When the Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband stood up in the House of Commons to denounce Israel for having “turned a blind eye to” the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians living in parts of the occupied West Bank and imposed sanctions on illegal settlements, he brought an end to Britain’s shameful complicity through silence in the crime of the century. Criticism of the UK Government’s action ranges from the feeble to the toxic. Supporters of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pretend that any attack on him and his policies is an antisemitic attack on Jews as a whole, though this is obviously not the case. Those who equate the two give a green light to what former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, quoted with approval by Miliband, calls “a violent and criminal effort to ethnically cleanse territories in the West Bank”. Cynics write off British action as ineffectual, but the hysterical reaction of the Israeli Government shows this to be mistaken. Advocates of inaction invariably argue that the top dogs, right or wrong, will ignore the puny efforts of their opponents, but the opposite is usually true. To give a concrete example, I was struck when looking at official files in the National Archives at Kew, how British ministers appeasing Germany in the 1930s were outraged by any hint of public criticism and worked hard to suppress it. Had the UK and other Western governments reacted more strongly against the slaughter in Gaza, then some of the 75,000 dead, including 20,000 children according to the UN, might still be alive. Others absurdly argue that criticism of Israel by the UK will work to Netanyahu’s advantage come the Israeli general election because he can claim he is the target of Israel-hating enemies. But taken to its logical conclusion, this approach would mute all criticism of Netanyahu, on the risible grounds that this is the best way to get rid of him. Some pundits see all government actions through the myopic lens of party politics, so they suspect that sanctions on Israeli settlements are simply a bid to dash the Greens and steal their pro-Palestinian political clothes before the Holborn and St Pancras by-election. Another way of looking at it would be recognition that the Government is going with the flow of public opinion, which a YouGov poll shows approving the ban on trade with Israeli settlements by 52 per cent to 17 per cent against. Some may feel that Andy Burnham and Miliband are getting too much applause for doing what should have been done long ago. It is extraordinary to recall that Sir Keir Starmer appeared to have said in 2023 that he approved of Israel depriving Gaza of water and power – and then taking a week to decide he had misspoken. Burnham and Miliband are simply filling a vacuum of leadership and policy by doing the right thing now. But there is an important lesson for Britain here because vacuum of leadership and policy are a recurrent feature in the contemporary political landscape. These create uncertainty and even anarchy but also offer Britain an opportunity to reset and replace relations with many countries other than Israel which are out of date or have turned sour. The most important of these is the giant vacuum created by the implosion of America as the world’s political, cultural, economic, diplomatic and military leader. As so frequently happens with declining powers, the Trumpian show remained shakily on the road until it became involved in a failing war which promptly exposed Donald Trump’s fantasies of omniscience for the fakery they are. Yet, easy though it is to demonise Trump as a sort of mobster/entertainer, a bizarre mix of Al Capone and Charlie Chaplin, the country that twice elected him is disintegrating at so many levels that it is unlikely to snap back to its old status any time soon. In the Anglosphere, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has been the most combative in resisting Trump, while Starmer went to humiliating and ineffectual lengths to conciliate the US President. Yet not everything can be blamed on Trump. The old Foreign Office cliché that the alliance with the US enabled Britain “to punch above its weight” has long been obsolete. Ten years ago, the Chilcot inquiry on the Iraq war concluded that Britain had little influence on US policy despite committing 46,000 military personnel to the war. As Trump offers US voters $5,000 (£3,698) a head to vote Republican and suggests renaming the Strait of Hormuz the Strait of Trump, ignoring Iranian control, it is becoming evident that America is not going to bounce back easily from the Trumpian debacle. Britain will have to change its relationship with America whether it likes it or not, just as it has done with Israel. Absence of leadership and policy in Europe is not as stark as in the US, but it is not far behind. The European elites have not been able to cope with any of the great challenges facing them. They have no practical policy to win or end the war in Ukraine. They leave negotiations with Russia to Trump’s weird and amateur acolytes. Though Trump’s war with Iran fundamentally affects European interests, they remain unhappy spectators to the escalating conflict. It is surprising to realise that for all gloomy talk from some politicians of Britain being broken, the country is in a better state to lead than most other great powers. Those lamenting the swift turnover of dud prime ministers forget that if the duds were allowed in, they were also promptly booted out. This has not happened in the US or Russia. By contrast, Burnham comes across so far as a sane, practical, experienced political professional who knows approximately where he is going and how to get there. I have been travelling around the UK since just before the 2024 general election, writing long essays with plenty of interviews everywhere from Herefordshire to Barrow-in-Furness and Dover to the Scottish Highlands. It is often said the biggest problem facing Britain is lack of economic growth. This is something that might take decades to put right – and is largely dependent on international economic factors outside UK control. I have come to feel that the most immediate, but also most fixable British weakness, is a loss of national self-confidence to a degree unjustified by real adversity. Of course, Reform UK, as is invariably the way with populist nativists everywhere, present themselves as saviours from a national calamity, but this is a self-serving myth. Napoleon famously said that morale was more important than material advantage “as three is to one”. He was speaking of soldiers and war, but the same is true of civilians in peacetime. A similar point was made by my late friend Johnny Apple in a retrospective on the state of Britain written in 1985 after ten years as New York Times correspondent in the UK. He identified the biggest British failing as “low expectations”. Burnham may not be able to help people in Britain materially as much as he or they would like, but he can restore self-confidence and raise expectations – which may be all that is needed to avoid the Trumpian abyss. Further Thoughts Channel 4 News is rightly cock-a-hoop about its scoop, which appeared to reveal Reform’s top aides allegedly attempting to tap into huge funds from a sympathetic American donor. Nigel Farage produces ever more humiliating and unlikely evasions, claiming that he did not listen to what the purported big-shot American donor – in reality an American actor – was saying to him over lunch. Future donors may be less than enthusiastic about a face-to-face with Farage knowing that he may not hear a word they say to him. Another Farage excuse is to explain away the ill-advised recorded words of his sidekicks by saying that when they speak of schemes it was simply “pub talk”, as if anything said in a pub can be automatically discounted as empty boasts and outright lies. Farage has long cultivated his image as a beer-guzzling man of the people, but when he sat down with the pretend donor and his son for lunch, he promptly orders oysters and discussed his love of Black Velvet – chilled champagne mixed 50:50 with chiller Guinness. Is it a fatal hit below the waterline for the good ship Nigel Farage and his party? (Photo: Stefan Rousseau/PA) It is worth watching the full Channel 4 News documentary to appreciate the undiluted sleaziness of the Farage gang. Is it a fatal hit below the waterline for the good ship Farage and his party? The British commentariat is far too respectful of his political guile, since he displays an Inspector Clouseau-like capacity for serial pratfalls. Presumably he will be kept afloat by Reform’s anti-immigration bedrock support. But the self-confident rhetoric of six months ago about replacing the old corrupt British establishment with Reform looks ever more cynical and hypocritical. “People do not care,” Farage declares, but, like former prime minister Boris Johnson during Partygate, he may find that they care rather a lot. Beneath the Radar The US-Iran war is fast combining with the Yemen-Saudi war with a potentially devastating impact for the rest of the world. On Thursday, the Houthis, who are allied to Iran, captured the port of Mokha on Yemen’s Red Sea coast. They chanted “Death to America, Death to Israel” as they entered the city, their advance tightening Houthi control 50 miles to the south of the Bab al-Mandab Strait linking the Red Sea with the Indian Ocean. The Houthis had already stopped all Saudi oil tankers in the first week of September. They will now be better able to keep it closed as the price of crude oil surges above $100 (£74) a barrel. We cannot call Yemen a forgotten war because few in the rest of the world ever knew about the war in the first place. But history is made by wars and massacres that all except the victims have conveniently chosen to ignore, but then erupt with devastating consequences. Remember that four years ago, Israel, the West and the Arab world had decided that the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank were a defeated remnant who could be safely marginalised. The Houthis, who control the Yemeni capital Sanaa and heavily populated north-west Yemen, are Iran’s most important ally in the region. Yemeni politics are of fiendish complexity, but in the last week the Houthis launched an offensive against Saudi-supported and the internationally recognised but Saudi-dependent Yemeni government forces along the Red Sea coast. As many as 500 people have been killed. The Houthis launched missile attacks on Saudi oil facilities and population centres close to the Yemen-Saudi border. Fighters loyal to the Houthi authorities march during a rally to recruit more fighters in Sanaa, Yemen (Photo: Mohammed Huwais/AFP) Yemen fell off the Western media map long ago, but soon the Bab al-Mandeb Strait may be as famous as the Strait of Hormuz. The Houthis are allies rather than proxies of Iran, but there is no doubt that Iran wants to escalate and spread its war horizontally with the US to the whole of the Arabian Peninsula. The oil crisis so long expected may be about to happen. I like Yemen more than any country in the Middle East because of its rich and fascinating culture, its unique traditional building style, and the beauty of its mountains with green terraces clinging to their sides. I liked Yemeni people because of their independent spirit, unbowed by poverty, oppression and war. A Saudi-backed invasion in 2015, optimistically code-named “Decisive Storm”, failed to defeat the Houthis but continued until a shaky truce in 2022, which is now collapsing. When I heard that Mokha had fallen to the Houthis, I suddenly remembered that I had been there in the late 1970s. Under the Ottomans, from the 17th century on, it was an entrepot for buying and selling coffee – giving its name to one type of coffee – from inland Yemen and Ethiopia, and it was the port for the capital, Sanaa. I remember in the late 1970s driving through the roasting hot coastal strip called the Tihamah, watching farmers at work in large straw hats. Even then Yemen was a violent place, with some estimating that there were three guns for every inhabitant. At one time, Sanaa International Airport had the usual security checks for passengers, but in the departure lounge there was a gift shop where it was possible to buy the jambiyah, the sharp-pointed curved Yemeni dagger that Yemeni men wear. Lufthansa, one of the few European airlines then flying to Sanaa, insisted that each passenger hand over his jambiya before entering the plane – and the dagger was then placed in a plastic bag to be returned to Frankfurt or wherever we were going. Yemenis saw this as absurdly overcautious. In the 1990s, I would drive from Sanaa to Aden in a reunited Yemen, though the road was never entirely safe. I would buy a bundle of good quality Qat – a flowering plant traditionally used as a mild stimulant by Ethiopian, Somali and Yemeni communities – to give to soldiers at checkpoints. On one visit I had a guide who had written his PhD in tribal poetry which he would recite at different checkpoints, his chosen verses depending on which tribal territory we were in. Kidnapping of foreigners passing on the main road became rife. Mostly it was for ransom, but also to underline grievances and put pressure on the Government. A beekeeping tribe kidnapped a Polish engineer – Yemen is famous for its honey – wanting compensation from the Government for the destruction of hives in tree trunks by marauding soldiers. I thought this funny – because it wasn’t real or because the man wasn’t in real danger – but then a woman who had been telling me that the threat to foreigners was exaggerated was kidnapped herself and the joke soured. The Yemenis are a tough lot. Here is a piece of tribal poetry illustrating the point: We are the Awaleq Born of bitterness We are the nails that go into the rock We are the sparks of hell Cockburn’s Picks 9/11 produced a torrent of literature but the best book I have read on it is The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan.