Ed Miliband has to go – before his net zero obsession wipes out our factories
Taxes were pushed up too much in the Budget. Global stock markets have been rattled by Donald Trump. And business and consumer confidence has collapsed.
There were plenty of different factors that could explain the unexpected 0.1pc drop in Britain's GDP reported on Friday. And yet, you hardly need to be Hercule Poirot to figure out who the real culprit is: the climate-obsessed Ed Miliband, our Energy Secretary.
The decline was led by a massive drop in manufacturing production. In reality, the collapse of Britain's industrial base is turning into a national emergency – and Miliband has to go before he wipes it out completely.
According to Rachel Reeves, Donald Trump was to blame for the disappointing and unexpected fall in output reported this week. Without naming the US president directly, she argued that 'the world has changed, and across the globe we are feeling the consequences' – as she attempted to deflect the blame away from the government she is a part of.
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Telegraph
19 minutes ago
- Telegraph
With the US strikes on Iran, the old international order is under threat
SIR – Will the American bombing of Iran lead to another Iraq-style conflict? It is certainly a major breach of the rules-based international order which has largely prevailed since 1945. No doubt Donald Trump and his apologists will continue to justify what has happened. However, it is clear that if there is to be any hope of a return to a better settlement of world affairs then work towards this must start now. At least three things need to happen: a major reconstitution and strengthening of the United Nations (especially in relation to the Security Council); the recommitment by its originators to the 1941 Atlantic Charter; and serious talks on universal nuclear disarmament. Things certainly cannot go on as they are. Andrew McLuskey Ashford, Middlesex SIR – A few days ago, Sir Keir Starmer was adamant that Donald Trump would not get involved in Iran. The US president, along with Israel, has now taken a vital step towards long-term peace in dealing a blow to the nuclear capabilities of the primary sponsor of global terrorism. Now that our Prime Minister has demonstrated his irrelevance on the world stage, let him concentrate on making our country secure. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps should be proscribed, hate marches in our capital should be prevented and the small boats should be turned back to France. Tim Coles Carlton, Bedfordshire SIR – In light of the bombing of Iran's key nuclear sites, Sir Keir Starmer shows himself to be naive at best when claiming that the Chagos treaty his Government negotiated guarantees the effectiveness of the US-UK military base on Diego Garcia for the next 100 years. As a reminder, Annex 1 section 2 of the treaty states '... the United Kingdom agrees to expeditiously inform Mauritius of any armed attack on a third state directly emanating from the base on Diego Garcia'. Had the B-2s been deployed from Diego Garcia it stands to reason that Mauritius would have instantly warned Iran, one of their key regional allies, of the imminence of the military operation, thus gravely jeopardising its success. Jean Maigrot London SW6 SIR – The protesters who sprayed red paint on the engine of a RAF refuelling aircraft (report, June 22) deserve our sincere thanks. At a stroke, they have revealed the sheer inadequacy of the security of Brize Norton airbase. Having regard to current world events, including the destruction of so many aircraft across Russia, and the situation in the Middle East, the lack of effective security is truly mind-blowing. One can only hope that this warning leads to immediate and effective action across all our Armed Forces everywhere. Jonathan Fogg Loulé, Algarve, Portugal
Telegraph
an hour ago
- Telegraph
Did Trump's strike pay off? New images show Iran's nuclear ambitions in ruins
US strikes on Iran may have set the country's nuclear programme back by several years, according to preliminary expert analysis. Donald Trump's claims that Iran's nuclear sites had been 'completely and totally obliterated' were likely to be an overstatement, serving and former US military officials said – but it is probable that all three facilities targeted suffered extensive damage. Under best-case assessments, Iran's capacity to enrich uranium has been severely degraded, if not destroyed. However, the country's existing stockpiles of uranium enriched to near weapons grade – enough to fuel 10 nuclear bombs – is thought to have survived. Understanding the extent to which the US has damaged Iran's nuclear programme is a vital in determining whether the strikes were a one-off or merely the opening salvo of a wider conflict US B-2 stealth bombers and cruise missiles struck Iran's three most important nuclear sites: Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan. If the strikes succeeded in destroying centrifuge halls at the facilities, they would prevent Iran from further enriching its uranium stockpiles to a purity of 90 per cent – something it has not done so far, according to UN inspectors. Satellite images of convoys leaving all three sites in recent days support Iran's claims that it moved its 400-kg stockpile – much of it previously held at Isfahan – to a secret underground location shortly before the strikes. Even if that were the case, however, the damage inflicted elsewhere would still make it difficult to turn the uranium into a bomb. Even if Iran had retained its fissile material, it would be 'like having fuel without a car,' said Ronen Solomon, an Israeli intelligence analyst. 'They have the uranium – but they can't do a lot with it, unless they have built something we don't know about on a small scale.' That is not beyond the realm of possibility. Iran succeeded in keeping its Fordow facility a secret for seven years before it was dramatically exposed, by Barack Obama, Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy – then the leaders of the US, UK and France – at a joint press conference in 2009, following a joint intelligence operation. Fordow Of the three sites attacked, Fordow was by far the most important. The last-known site developed by the Iranians was deliberately designed to withstand aerial attack. An 'engineering marvel', in the words of one Western official, its main centrifuge halls lie buried up to half a mile inside a mountain. Not only does a layer of solid rock act as a natural shield impervious to most bombs, but additional artificial layers of reinforcement are also believed to have been added. The GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator bunker-busting bomb – 12 of which the US dropped on Fordow – is capable of penetrating 60 metres of standard concrete before exploding. But Iran is believed to have reinforced the centrifuge halls at Fordow with ultra-high performance concrete (UHPC), which can withstand six times the amount of pressure of normal concrete – up to 30,000-lb per square inch. If Iran used the best quality UHPC, Fordow would have been significantly harder to destroy. Given that the site is underground, it remains difficult to assess the scale of the damage yet, with both Iranian and US officials saying they are still conducting evaluations. Natanz Above-ground facilities at Natanz, Iran's largest enrichment site, had already been damaged by extensive Israeli strikes, as shown by satellite imagery. The destruction of the site's electric substation may have knocked out power, potentially damaging centrifuges by causing them to spin out of control, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN's nuclear watchdog. Natanz also housed an underground centrifuge hall thought to have been the target of two US bunker-busters. The site was additionally struck by cruise missiles fired by a US submarine in the Arabian Sea. Isfahan Much of Iran's mostly highly enriched uranium is thought to have been stored at the nuclear research and production centre near the city of Isfahan, the ancient capital of Safavid Persia. International inspectors verified the fuel was there a fortnight ago, but satellite imagery suggests Iran may have moved it in recent days. Israel had previously struck laboratories and three other buildings at the facility. The US did not use bunker-busters on Isfahan – which is thought to be mostly above ground – and instead attacked with cruise missiles. The strikes are thought to have damaged six additional buildings, including a fuel rod production facility. Overall assessment A fuller picture of overall damage may emerge in the coming days, with experts urging caution about attaching too much credibility to the US president's more optimistic pronouncements or to Iran's defiant claims that its nuclear capacity remains largely intact. Clionadh Raleigh, head of the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), a conflict-monitoring group, warned that although the strikes might alter the timeline of Iran's nuclear programme, they would do little to alter its ultimate trajectory. 'The regime's broader power and intentions are likely to remain intact,' said Ms Raleigh. 'Iran's military and intelligence systems are designed and built to survive. The structure is deeply layered and resistant to collapse. Even if key infrastructure is destroyed, the system adapts – and in some cases, becomes more dangerous in the process. 'There's no evidence that the strikes will permanently end Iran's pursuit of nuclear capabilities. What they may do is shift the timeline.' Others were less cautious. Mick Mulroy, a former Pentagon official who served in the first Trump administration, told the New York Times that the US strikes will 'likely set back the Iranian nuclear programme two to five years' – an assessment shared by Jason Brodsky of United Against a Nuclear Iran, a US-based pressure group. The setback stems not only from the strikes themselves. Repairing the damage will be far harder following the assassination of more than a dozen nuclear scientists in the past 10 days, Israeli officials said. 'Several of the eliminated scientists had spent decades advancing nuclear weapons, constituting a significant part of the Iranian regime's plans to annihilate the State of Israel,' one official said. 'These scientists had diverse professional expertise and extensive experience.'
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Like George W Bush, Trump has started a reckless war based on a lie
In May 2003, George W Bush landed on the deck of a US aircraft carrier to deliver a triumphant speech, declaring that major combat operations in Iraq had ended – six weeks after he had ordered US troops to invade the country. Bush spoke under a now infamous banner on the carrier's bridge that proclaimed, 'Mission Accomplished'. It would turn into a case study of American hubris and one of the most mocked photo-ops in modern history. As Bush made his speech off the coast of San Diego, I was in Baghdad covering the invasion's aftermath as a correspondent for a US newspaper. It was clear then that the war was far from over, and the US was likely to face a grinding insurgency led by former members of the Iraqi security forces. It would also soon become clear that Bush's rationale for invading Iraq was built on a lie: Saddam Hussein's regime did not have weapons of mass destruction and was not intent on developing them. And Iraq had nothing to do with the September 11 terrorist attacks on the US, despite the Bush administration's repeated attempts to connect Hussein's regime to al-Qaida. Today, Donald Trump has dragged the US into another war based on exaggerations and manipulated intelligence: the Israel-Iran conflict, which began on 13 June when Israel launched a surprise attack killing some of Iran's top military officials and nuclear scientists, and bombing dozens of targets across the country. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, claimed that Israel had to attack because Tehran was working to weaponize its stockpile of enriched uranium and racing to build a nuclear bomb. 'If not stopped, Iran could produce a nuclear weapon in a very short time,' Netanyahu said, as the first wave of Israeli bombs fell on Iran. 'It could be a year. It could be within a few months.' Before dawn on Sunday, US warplanes and submarines bombed three major nuclear facilities in Iran. In a speech from the White House, Trump declared the operation a 'spectacular military success' and said the sites had been 'totally obliterated'. Trump added that his goal was to stop 'the nuclear threat posed by the world's number one state sponsor of terror'. But does Iran pose the immediate threat that Netanyahu and Trump have claimed? US intelligence officials, along with the UN's nuclear watchdog and independent experts, say that while Iran has dramatically increased its supply of uranium enriched to nearly weapons grade, there is no evidence it has taken steps to produce a nuclear weapon. In March, the US director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, told Congress that America's intelligence agencies continued 'to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon'. She added that Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 'has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003'. Gabbard also noted that Iran's stockpile of enriched uranium was 'at its highest levels' and 'unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons'. That's largely because, in 2018, Trump unilaterally withdrew the US from the Iran nuclear deal that was negotiated in 2015 between Tehran and six world powers. Under that agreement, Iran agreed to limit its uranium enrichment in exchange for relief from international sanctions. A few years after Trump tore up the deal that was signed by his predecessor, Barack Obama, Iran began to enrich uranium up to 60% purity – a short step away from the 90% level required for a nuclear device. Still, in a report issued last month, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN watchdog that has monitored Iran's main nuclear enrichment sites for years, said it found no evidence that Tehran was actively developing a weapons program. The agency criticized Iranian officials for failing to provide access to some sites and to cooperate with UN inspectors, especially over Tehran's past secret nuclear weapons program, which is believed to have ended by 2003. Despite these criticisms, the IAEA report said it had 'no credible indications of an ongoing, undeclared structured nuclear program'. Recent US intelligence assessments found that Iran was not actively pursuing a nuclear weapon and was up to three years away from being able to develop an actual warhead and deploy it on a missile. (Under pressure from Trump, who said twice last week that Gabbard's testimony to Congress in March was 'wrong', the intelligence chief changed course on Friday to say that Iran could produce a nuclear weapon 'within weeks to months'.) Of course, there's one state in the Middle East that has an active nuclear weapons program: Israel, which doesn't acknowledge having a nuclear arsenal. But in January, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute identified Israel as one of the world's nine nuclear-armed states, and estimated that it currently has 90 warheads. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Netanyahu continues to insist that Iran was dashing to produce a nuclear weapon. 'The intel we got and we shared with the United States was absolutely clear – was absolutely clear – that they [the Iranians] were working in a secret plan to weaponize the uranium,' Netanyahu told the Fox News anchor Bret Baier (who hosts one of Trump's favorite news shows) in an interview on 15 June. 'They were marching very quickly. They would achieve a test device and possibly an initial device within months and certainly less than a year.' Netanyahu's statements echo the exaggerated intelligence and sense of fear peddled by the Bush administration ahead of the US invasion of Iraq – and it's exactly the kind of open-ended conflict based on lies that Trump promised voters he would avoid as president. In September 2002, Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said in a CNN interview that 'there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly' the Iraqi regime could acquire nuclear weapons. 'But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,' she added in a reference that would be repeated by other US officials, including Bush himself. Not surprisingly, Netanyahu had also lobbied the Bush administration to attack Iraq – and insisted that the Iraqi regime was developing a nuclear bomb. After his first term as Israel's prime minister, Netanyahu testified before Congress as a private citizen in September 2002, warning of the danger posed by a nuclear-armed Iraq. 'There is no question whatsoever that Saddam is seeking and is working and is advancing toward the development of nuclear weapons,' Netanyahu confidently told Congress. He added: 'Once Saddam has nuclear weapons, the terror network will have nuclear weapons.' Netanyahu, who has always had a flair for the extravagant soundbite, also claimed that Hussein no longer needed one large reactor to produce nuclear fuel, but could do so 'in centrifuges the size of washing machines' that could be hidden throughout Iraq. The Israeli leader was not only wrong about Hussein developing weapons of mass destruction, but he also insisted that a US war on Iraq would be a boon for the Middle East and would inspire Iranians to rise up against the Islamic republic. 'If you take out Saddam's regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region,' Netanyahu said. 'I think that people sitting right nextdoor in Iran, young people and many others, will say the time of such regimes, of such despots, is gone.' It's also important to remember that Netanyahu has practically made a career out of warning that Iran is years (or months) away from developing nukes. Over the past 30 years, he regularly issued some variation on this threat – and often wildly overestimated how close Iran was to having a bomb. In 1992, as a member of Israel's Knesset, Netanyahu cautioned that Iran was 'three to five years' away from developing a nuclear weapons capability. In 1996, as prime minister, he addressed a joint session of Congress and urged the US to 'stop the nuclearization of terrorist states'. He added, 'The deadline for attaining this goal is getting extremely close.' In February 2009, as leader of the Likud party and a candidate for prime minister, Netanyahu told a congressional delegation visiting Israel that Iran was 'probably only one or two years away' from developing a nuclear weapons capability – attributing the claim to Israeli 'experts' without offering other evidence. The conversation was summarized in a US state department cable released by WikiLeaks. Later in 2009, when he was back in office as premier, another leaked cable revealed that Netanyahu told a separate group of visiting members of Congress that 'Iran has the capability now to make one bomb' or it 'could wait and make several bombs in a year or two'. But the most memorable example of Netanyahu exaggerating the threat of Iran's ability to develop a nuclear weapon came in September 2012, when the Israeli leader took to the UN general assembly podium armed with a cartoon-style drawing of a bomb with a lit fuse. Netanyahu warned the world that Iran was enriching uranium so quickly that it was on track to be able to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear device within months. He then used a marker pen to draw a red line across the cartoon bomb, to highlight the stage of the nuclear process where he claimed Iran had to be stopped. Netanyahu warned that Iran could produce a working weapon by the following spring or 'at most by next summer'. Nearly 13 years after Netanyahu stood before the world to cry wolf about Iran's ability to develop nuclear weapons, he used the same pretext – that Iran is 'within a few months' of having a bomb – to launch a devastating war against Tehran. Netanyahu then successfully pulled the US into the conflict, promising Trump a quick victory if the US used its 30,000-pound bunker buster bombs to destroy Fordow, Iran's most heavily fortified nuclear facility. Unfortunately, Trump heeded the siren call of a US ally who has spent decades manipulating intelligence and public fears to exaggerate the nuclear threat posed by Iran. And the people of the Middle East will pay the highest price for yet another reckless war built on a lie. Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and an associate professor of journalism at New York University
