Not Taken In

By hosting the American bases, Britain is up to its eyeballs in the war on Iran, and Iran is reacting accordingly, as it has always been clear that it would. The court media are being allowed to fly a helicopter over RAF Fairford, which ought in any case to be called USAF Fairford to end the pretence, and to convey the images obtained to the users of social media, complete with the locations of, well, pretty much everything on the site. As even Frank Gardiner puts it, “I don’t understand why Donald Trump is saying we had these people under view for a long time. I don’t know where he got that from, because if they did then how on earth were they allowed to wander round Gloucestershire putting on masks and driving vans allegedly with explosives in them?” As Paul Knaggs writes:

At a quarter to one on Sunday morning, ‘police got a call’ about three vehicles heading towards RAF Fairford. By breakfast, around 85 households in Whelford had been told to leave their homes. A 400-metre cordon surrounded the vans, and an Army bomb-disposal team was working through them. Five men were in custody. They were arrested first under the Explosives Act, then on suspicion of preparing a terrorist act. Counter Terrorism Policing has taken over the investigation. Two months earlier, the man responsible for the defence of this country told us not to worry too much.

On Sunday 26 July, Iran’s foreign ministry had just warned that Britain would “bear responsibility” for letting American forces strike Iran from British soil. BBC Breakfast asked Wes Streeting whether Iran could target the UK. “I think we shouldn’t put too much stock in the sabre-rattling of Iran,” he said, and added that Britain would not be intimidated. That same month, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards were more specific. According to the Tasnim news agency, they declared any base used to invade Iranian territory a legitimate target, and they cited bomber flights from Fairford by name.

RAF Fairford Iran Threat Was Explicit in July 

It is worth being precise here, because precision is what was missing in July. Nobody has established that Iran had anything to do with Whelford. Police have not said who the five men are or what was in those vans. Reports say a possible Iranian connection is one line of inquiry. That is all it is. If this turns out to be something else entirely, this publication will say so. But the case against Streeting’s answer never depended on how Sunday turned out. There is a fair defence of what he said: a Defence Secretary should not give a hostile regime the satisfaction of visible British panic, and some composure comes with the job. Agreed. But refusing to be intimidated is one thing, and telling the public not to take a threat seriously is another. The first is resolve.

The second is a judgement about risk, and it was a poor one. British security officials have repeatedly said that proxies linked to Iran were behind arson and sabotage attempts on British soil, and they have warned that Tehran could widen its targets if the war dragged on. The threat was not theoretical when Streeting dismissed it. It was already in the government’s own intelligence reporting.

Then there is the part Westminster would rather we skipped. Fairford is not a random dot on a map. It became worth threatening because of a political choice. In March, Keir Starmer allowed American bombers to fly what he called “specific and limited defensive” missions against Iran from Gloucestershire. Burnham inherited that arrangement and kept it. There was no vote in Parliament, and no honest conversation with the people living beside the runway. Nobody asked Whelford whether it wanted to host the launch pad for a war the government insists it is not fighting. The residents were simply woken in the night and sent to the leisure centre. 

That is the real charge. The problem is not one clumsy phrase from a minister. It is that a government put British soil in the line of fire and then told the public the fire was mostly noise. Streeting should now answer three questions, in Parliament rather than on a breakfast sofa. What security assessment lay behind his July remarks? What was done to protect Fairford and the villages around it? Does he still think the threat deserves so little attention? And MPs should finally get a vote on whether British bases go on serving this war. You cannot lend out the runway and then call the consequences sabre-rattling.

And as Ricky D. Hale writes:

For the past few months, we’ve been told by people with a crystal ball that an attack on UK soil was imminent, and now it’s finally happened. There was an incident at RAF Fairford last night that resulted in 85 homes being evacuated. The media would like you to know this incident was terrifying. So terrifying, in fact, that you should probably get ready for war. This is an emerging story, but here’s what I’ve managed to piece together so far. Given the media seems to be making this up as it goes along, some of the details are probably gonna change. Needless to say, they have plot holes to fill.

A farmer was driving home in the early hours of the morning and she noticed three white vans blocking the road. No one was inside them. She turned around and spotted a bunch of Middle Eastern-looking boys running off into the woods. Those woods were incredibly dark, but thankfully, she has the eyes of an owl. She was able to work out their ethnicity through the shadow of the trees, despite the fact they were wearing masks. She called an emergency line that locals had been given for just such a scenario, but no one could be bothered to answer. She called 999 and police came out within ten minutes of her call. When they arrived, they said they’d first been notified nearly an hour ago, but hadn’t bothered doing anything. There were no routine security patrols around the base either. It’s basically the sloppiest security effort since Netanyahu gave standdown orders on October 7.

Luckily for the police, those Middle-Eastern-looking boys were still hanging around 25 minutes later and were arrested under the Explosives Act. We are told the vans had been driving around the base for hours before they parked up. It’s like they were making their arrival as visible as possible and then they just waited around to be caught. Either it was deliberate or they were just as useless as base security. Somehow it gets even worse. The vans were parked just six metres from houses, and the company names and telephone numbers on them were fake. Yet it took police around five hours to give evacuation orders. Maybe they knew the vans weren’t a threat, or maybe they’re staggeringly incompetent. I guess it could be both.

Prior to the incident, the base was on its highest alert, and one local said they’d been stopped at gunpoint by Americans. If you didn’t know, this is an American base on our soil, or a “fort” as Trump called it. The US president was giving interviews about the incident shortly after it happened. He said “it worked out great”, which is an odd choice of words, don’t you think? Trump said the US had been investigating the suspects for a long time. Not sure if he meant “investigating” or actually meant “working with”. All I know is the British are insisting the arrests weren’t intelligence-led and that a farmer basically saved the country.

We are now being told by the war-hungry media it was Iran, Iran, Iran… or maybe Russia, according to one news reader who mumbled something about this is why we need tactical nukes. Yelp. Now I’m still not clear what these “Iranians” were hoping to achieve. Park vans packed with explosives near a base and blow the whole thing up? Unless they had a nuke, best they’d achieve is damage to a few nearby houses and trees. If the Iranians wanted to pull this off, they would not hire a bunch of kids to drive in circles for hours around a base that’s on its highest alert and then hide in the woods until they were caught. They would quickly launch drones and disappear.

It seems more likely this was a performance rather than a serious attack. Shortly after it happened, we had a news crew flying above Fairford in a helicopter, showing the location of B1 Stealth Bombers and other sensitive things. If there was a real threat, that’s the last thing they would allow. Now you have to ask yourself which parties would benefit from this. Israel needs us to join its war, the US needs to keep using Fairford to bomb Iran, and the UK needs to justify its involvement. Even though we attacked Iran first, they will probably spin it into something like this: “Iran is attacking the UK, even though we are a neutral party. Therefore we have no choice but to get involved”. This would be a terrible legal and moral argument, but it just needs to convince stupid people. We have to make sure stupid people are not taken in by this crap.

The only way to have these questions asked in Parliament is for Holborn and St Pancras to elect George Galloway.