An SNP MP tried to align our party with Keir Starmer. Why?
The National Council meeting on June 21 in the Perth Concert Hall was of the latter type.
In the background, subsequently confirmed days later, was the prospect of the US weighing in on the Israeli side in their war with Iran. An act, as the general secretary of the UN pointed out, that ran a coach and horses through the international rules-based order.
READ MORE: Keir Starmer backs US strikes on Iran ahead of Nato summit
In Perth, on the auditorium screen was a topical motion on the issue in the name of Stephen Gethins MP. Had it passed unamended it would have upended SNP policy in several areas. Not only on the party's position on international nuclear disarmament treaty architecture, but broader issues of national security and indeed adjacent economic policy.
Unamended, it would have positioned the SNP Group at Westminster behind Keir Starmer and David Lammy's position on the Israel-Iran crisis.
It would have also represented a softening of the tone, possibly even the substance, of the critical statements made by other SNP parliamentarians at Westminster and in Holyrood.
The unamended motion read:
MIDDLE EAST SITUATION
National Council abhors the ongoing violence in the Middle East and that destabilisation in the region is a threat to us all; calls for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and full access for humanitarian relief; further agrees that Iran should not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons but that the best means of stopping that and finding a sustainable solution is through diplomatic means.
Stephen was not in attendance, so his motion was subsequently moved by another delegate.
I proposed that three words – 'be allowed to' – be excised. In the end, my suggestion was acceded to and political embarrassment averted.
Other amendments pertaining to the, frankly, barely condemnatory tone on what is going on in Gaza, would have been appropriate, but timescales and procedures precluded that.
At first, I wanted to accept the cock-up theory.
However, after a few days of reflection and being faced with some irrefutable facts, the record needs to be put straight. This must be reflected upon by SNP spokespersons who speak on the members' behalf, particularly on matters of war and peace.
Fact one: the motion only mentioned Iran and not Israel.
Fact two: it was presented in the name of a former professor of international relations.
Fact three: if passed unamended, the SNP position on the subsequent bombing would have been in lock step with Starmer and Lammy.
It's interesting how in the repertoire of those who used to promote a 'rules-based order that's not the United Nations' they and the mainstream media are very quick to gaslight anyone who says that historical context is important.
However, when the historical airbrush is to be applied to the signature diplomatic achievement of President Barack Obama I must speak out.
US president Donald Trump (Image: Getty) The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the deal that ensured Iran gave up any notion of developing nuclear weapons, was ditched by Donald Trump. My 'textual amendment' reaffirmed SNP adherence to the spirit of the Obama plan.
During his first term as president, Trump of course trashed the JCPOA. Now bizarrely, he appears to want to bomb Iran into a JCPOA-without-the-safeguards.
The Scottish National Party seeks to achieve the restitution of a sovereign Scottish state. It will be a small state and, as such, on the journey to independence the recognition of the United Nations will be indispensable.
READ MORE: Richard Walker: Good journalism has never had a more vital role
However, I am no naïve idealist when it comes to matters of international relations. The world is indeed a dangerous and uncertain place, particularly when you share a border with the Russian Federation or Israel.
Only politicians with links to the arms trade would want to use fear as a key electoral driver. Arguing that man-made global dangers and instability are uniform throughout the world is an understandable though rather unethical marketing tool for arms companies.
The truth is, in the bigger scheme of things, some places are a bit safer than others, and Scotland is one of those places.
A fortunate reality that the independence movement should unapologetically make more of it.
Bill Ramsay is the SNP Trade Union Group convener and sits on the party's National Executive Committee.
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The Guardian
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- The Guardian
Europe is scrambling to form a united front and regain relevance in the Iran crisis
Exposed as divided and marginalised during the Iran crisis, European nations are scrambling to retrieve a place at the Middle East negotiating table, fearing an impulsive Donald Trump has diminishing interest in stabilising Iran or the wider region now he believes he has achieved his key objective of wiping out Tehran's nuclear programme. On Tuesday the EU's top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, was the latest senior European figure to phone the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, offering to be a facilitator and urging Tehran not to leave the crisis in a dangerous limbo by keeping UN weapons inspectors out of Iran. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has even broken a three-year silence to speak to Vladimir Putin about the risk of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, including how a deal could be struck between Iran and the US on a restricted civil nuclear programme. Macron has been involved in Iranian diplomacy for a decade and came close to engineering a rapprochement between Trump and the then Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, at the UN general assembly in 2018. But Iran, faced with what it regards as craven European support for Israeli and American airstrikes that killed more than 930 people and injured as many as 5,000, is not placing much faith in the continent's ability to influence the White House. For Europe, this signals a slow slide into irrelevance. The three major European powers known as the E3 – France, Germany and the UK – were once key fixtures in Iran's diplomacy and played a central role in brokering the Iran nuclear deal, which they signed alongside the EU, the US, China, Russia and Iran in 2015. Europe had little input in the US's recent negotiating strategy with Iran, led by Trump's special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, and was given just over an hour's official warning before the Israeli and US attacks. The one meeting that the E3 foreign minsters held during the crisis with Iranian diplomats in Geneva on 20 June proved a failure and was followed by the US strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities. France claimed it helped Israel repel Iranian drones. Trump crowed afterwards that 'Iran doesn't want to speak to Europe. They want to speak to us. Europe is not going to be able to help in this one.' From the Iranian perspective, Europe has long been a disappointing negotiating partner, repeatedly failing to show any independence from the US. When Trump withdrew the US from the nuclear deal in 2018, the E3 condemned the move in a joint statement issued by its then-leaders, Angela Merkel, Theresa May and Macron. But it did nothing effective to pursue an independent strategy to lift European sanctions on Iran as it had promised. The fear that European firms trading with Iran would be put under US sanctions was too great. The view from Tehran, it was felt, was that Europe's timidity left it with no choice but to follow the policy of nuclear brinkmanship, including gradually increasing its stockpile of enriched uranium. At the start of Trump's second term, the E3 plus Kallas tried again to insert themselves into the process by holding three low-key meetings with Iranian negotiators. But Araghchi was always angling to speak to Washington, telling the Guardian of his discussions with the Europeans: 'Perhaps we are talking to the wrong people.' After Trump indicated he was willing to speak to Iran bilaterally and showed some flexibility about Tehran's right to enrich uranium, Iran cast Europe aside. Iran believes Europe played a role either through naivety or complicity in opening the door for the Israeli attack by tabling a motion of censure at the board of the UN nuclear inspectorate, the International Atomic Energy Agency. Such motions have been passed before at the IAEA and usually led to Iran retaliating by increasing its stocks of enriched uranium. But the 12 June motion was different – for the first time in 20 years the board found Iran in breach of its obligations under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Europe had to take that step to use its right as a signatory to the 2015 deal to reimpose sanctions on Iran before expiry of the deal on 15 October. Because of the way the deal was negotiated, neither Russia nor China can veto Europe reimposing sanctions. America is no longer party to the deal so this power to reintroduce UN sanctions is Europe's diplomatic re-entry point into the Iranian file. European diplomats insist that the IAEA censure motion was necessary, and that they had no option owing to Iran's mounting stocks of highly enriched uranium that had no possible purpose in a civilian nuclear programme. Europe also still hoped the talks between the US and Iran, mediated by Oman, would bear fruit, and had not foreseen the US giving Israel the green light to attack. Since the Israeli strikes, European unity has frayed further. Britain has largely opted for opacity, but it was obvious from what ministers did not say that the government's legal advice was that the Israeli attack could not be justified as an act of self-defence under the UN charter. France openly asserted that the attack was unlawful. By contrast, Germany endorsed all that Israel has done. At the G7 summit in mid-June, the chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said: 'This is the dirty work that Israel is doing, for all of us.' Germany's foreign minister, Johann Wadephul, told parliament that 'Israel has the right to defend itself and protect its people. Let me say clearly that, if Israel and the US have now managed to set back the Iranian nuclear programme, it will make Israel and its neighbourhood more secure.' Asked by the newspaper Die Zeit if he believed Israel's actions were lawful, he said Germany did not have the same quality intelligence sources as the US and Israel, but he had to trust their belief that Iran was close to acquiring a nuclear weapon. 'They told us that, from their perspective, this is necessary – and we must accept that.' Such remarks have left Iranian diplomats spitting about European double standards over the sanctity of international law. By contrast, Enrique Mora, the EU's point person on Iran from 2015 to early 2025, has written a scathing piece in which he says Israel has killed nuclear diplomacy and Iran's nuclear knowledge cannot be destroyed. He wrote: 'If Iran now chooses the militarisation of its nuclear capabilities, if it now decides to move toward a bomb, it will do so following a clear strategic logic: no one bombs the capital of a nuclear-armed country. June 21, 2025, may go down in history not as the day the Iranian nuclear programme was destroyed, but as the day a nuclear Iran was irreversibly born.' There are different strategies Europe can pursue. It can, like Germany, show Iran there is no daylight between the E3 and Israel and assert that Iran can only have a civil nuclear programme that excludes domestic enrichment of uranium. It can press ahead with the reimposition of sanctions and hope that Iran buckles. Alternatively, it can champion a compromise that Tehran can wear. In a recent statement, the European Council on Foreign Relations said 'maximalist demands on Iran – including negotiating over missiles now viewed by Tehran as its main deterrence umbrella – will likely push the country to use every means still available to reach nuclear breakout. A more viable endgame would involve a return of wide-scale inspections by international monitors and an immediate, substantial roll-back of Iranian uranium enrichment. The goal should be Iran pursuing this enrichment through a regional consortium backed by the United States.' That is broadly closer to the French position. Europe will never hold sway like Israel or the US, but it has one last chance to help create something durable, and prevent the Iranian crisis becoming a nuclear proliferation crisis for the whole region.
The Guardian
15 minutes ago
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Who's really to blame for Labour's troubles – Rachel Reeves or the invisible PM?
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Intent on the Tory benches opposite, the prime minister simply ploughed on, not realising that his closest political ally was dissolving beside him. Though within hours, a clearly mortified Starmer had thrown a metaphorical arm around her, and Reeves herself was back out talking up her beloved fiscal rules as if nothing had happened. But it's the kind of image that sticks: her distress and his oblivion, an unfortunately convenient metaphor for all the times he has seemed oddly detached from his own government. Quite aside from whatever private grief she is now carrying, Reeves has for years been shouldering an exhausting load. From the start, she and Morgan McSweeney, Starmer's chief of staff, did an unusual amount of the heavy lifting on behalf of their oddly apolitical leader – and in government the stakes have only risen. McSweeney, a natural fixer now jammed faintly awkwardly into a strategist's role, was once credited with near-mythical influence over Starmer, but for months is said to have been struggling at times to get the boss's ear. Reeves, meanwhile, has ended up by default running much of the domestic agenda, while Starmer focuses on foreign policy crises and a handful of big issues that passionately exercise him. Since even close aides and ministers complain of never really knowing what he wants, the result is a Treasury-brained government that tends to start with the numbers and work back to what's possible, rather than setting a political goal and figuring out how to reach it. Perhaps that makes sense to the City, but not to Labour MPs frogmarched through a series of politically toxic decisions with no obvious rationale except that the money's got to come from somewhere. 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It's exactly what the markets fear, judging by their reaction to Reeves' temporary wobble. But even Labour MPs who'd never go that far are growing restless for change. Just raise taxes, cries this week's New Statesman magazine, echoing a widespread view that the fiscal straitjacket imposed by Reeves is killing the government. I argued for the same thing in the Guardian back in March, and haven't changed my mind. But the political cost of doing so is arguably higher now than it would have been then, when tax rises could plausibly still have been framed as an emergency response to Donald Trump pulling the plug on Europe's defence and forcing Britain to rearm, rather than as an admission that the government can no longer get its spending plans past its own backbenchers. In their understandable frustration, however, some fail to ask why Reeves holds the iron grip she does; why Treasury thinking isn't more often challenged by No 10. 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It's everything a Labour government exists to do, but as with so many unseen good things happening – on green energy, say, or transport – the money didn't fall from the sky and won't be there in future if an ageing and chronically unfit population carries on consuming welfare spending or health spending (the next big battleground, judging by the detail of Wes Streeting's 10-year plan) at current rates. To a frustrated Treasury, this week's rebellion was evidence that Labour MPs don't live in the real world, where hard choices must be faced for good things to happen. But, to the rebels, it's evidence that the Treasury doesn't live in their real world, where vulnerable people struggle with deep-rooted health problems only aggravated by being pushed into poverty, and the Greens as much as Reform are threatening to eat them for breakfast over it. There is some truth in both arguments. But that's precisely why it is ultimately a prime minister's job, and nobody else's, to draw all the threads of the government together: to balance political yin against economic yang, such that neither dominates or bends the project out of shape. Chancellors come and, eventually, even the best go. But sometimes it's only then that you can really tell whether the problem was ever really the chancellor. Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
The Guardian
20 minutes ago
- The Guardian
A ceasefire in Gaza appears to be close. Here's why it could happen now
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