The truth is out. It always does in the end – usually when the damage is done. Which is why people lie but don’t care. They get what they want, and being found out is a minor issue by comparison.

Michel Barnier and Martin Selmayr confirmed to the BBC this week that Theresa May never pressed the No Deal option. Never. She told us continually that No Deal was better than a bad deal, but her diplomatic dealings with the EU show otherwise. The definitive proof is her so-called “Withdrawal Deal”. It is prima facie evidence that the UK was to be prevented from escaping EU control.

May had no intention of taking the UK out of the ambit of the EU.

Further prima facie evidence is provided by the Security and Defence arrangements around PESCO. Despite the Brexit vote on June 23rd 2016,  May pressed ahead with military and security integration with the EU. British soldiers were photographed last year bearing the EU insignia on their uniforms.

Sooner than quit the EU on March 29th as she had publicly promised time and time again, May took it on herself to write to the EU and get two extensions to the date of UK withdrawal.

The public record shows that May and her Remainiac allies in the government have lied repeatedly to the British public, have brought public confidence in politics to an all time low, and have deliberately sought to reverse the Brexit Referendum instruction to leave the EU.

Yet it is all presented in the media as the fault of Brexit and the 17.4 million extremists who voted for it !

I rehearse all this because it provides one of the key perspectives on the current crisis with Iran.

This last Friday evening, Iranian forces took control of a British flagged oil tanker in the straits of Hormuz. Their action was a direct response to the British detention of an Iranian oil tanker off Gibraltar a couple of weeks ago. British forces took the ship on the basis that it was breaking EU sanctions on the supply of oil to Syria.

That brings me to the perspective in question: the EU and its imperialist ambitions. The Remainiac British Establishment has allied our foreign policy and our military with the imperialist pretensions of the EU. There may, or may not, have been an explicit decision taken by May with Macron and Merkel; but the new culture and institutional development on Security and Defence make such an intervention for such reasons inevitable.

Our democracy is being openly flouted by a Remainiac Establishment and they are taking us down a path to imperialism and possible war against our will.

The incoming Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, will have to make a conscious decision to throw all this military and security “co-operation” into reverse, and deliberately take the Iran situation in hand by backing off – a public but necessary humiliation.

A situation deliberately generated by May in her final days to tie her successor to an agenda she has already set. She has done likewise with recent decisions to increase public spending – eg the promised pay increase to public sector workers.

But then Johnson had already made such an announcement – a Quixotic decision in the midst of canvassing Tory party members support. Just how different will his premiership prove to be ?

Johnson’s first 100 days will indeed be decisive for his own career, the survival of the Tory party and for our country’s independence.

Incidentally, I don’t use words like Remainiac lightly or for literary effect. I use them advisedly to reflect the reality of the situation. The Home Secretary and a Commissar – sorry – Commissioner for Countering Extremism talked this week about combating extremism.

I suggest that they take a good hard look at the British Political Establishment, its attitudes, its values, its record in the past 5 years and compare it with the Sovereign Vote of the people in June 2016.

I suggest they look to the root of the problem, not to the symptoms. Until they do, they will not solve the most fundamental problem we have in our democracy,  i.e.  a serious failure of public confidence in senior politicians,   officials and the BBC.

But I digress. The situation in the Gulf and the foolish pretensions of the EU to be a Super Power. [Don’t we have enough of those already ? Wasn’t the economic and non military EU project supposed to be the reason for the Peace in Europe these last 60 years ?]

That’s one key perspective on the current crisis.

The other is historical record since the Second World War.

The Americans took on the Imperial mantle as the Europeans divested themselves of it. [British Imperial Economic and therefore political power was crippled by the First World War, and finished off by the Second].

The Americans intervened in Iran when it was called Persia to effect regime change. They were also responsible for the rise of the Saud family in a patch of desert with a lot of oil …

We now have a regional conflict between two Powers in a part of the globe where first the Europeans, then the Americans sought to define and control events – despite their own democracies at home….

Having poked their noses into Arab affairs, these same Western powers continue with a failed and an outmoded Western view of the world.

And that foolishness could so easily tip us into War ….

BACK OFF is my advice, and GET REAL ABOUT WHERE WE ARE IN HISTORY !

But, but, but – won’t the Iranians get the nuclear bomb if someone does not stop them ?

Possibly. So what ? The Israelis have it.

Nuclear weapons are a zero sum game. No one dare use them …. time has proven that the  mindset of nuclear weapons possession is paralysis – mutually assured destruction – MAD.

For western powers to pursue this current intervention is to repeat past failure,  pursue vain imperialist ambitions, and fail to solve the problem without resort to War – which is what Sanctions are supposed to avoid.

Why enforce Sanctions by force –  they are an economic device intended to avoid military intervention.

Moreover, to purse action against Iran is to side with Saudia Arabia – hardly a moral choice in view of the record.

It is to ally with one side which is no better than the other.

That is a mistake.

Don’t side with either power – back off from a regional dispute. A regional dispute between two principal protagonists for regional control; a dispute reinforced by Sunni and Shi’ite divisions in the Islamic world.

These are not matters for the West in the 21st century.

But what about our vital oil supplies ?

Number One, we should have been reducing our oil dependency years ago, for economic, political and ecological reasons. We didn’t because major multi national businesses in league with hypocritical governments were too self interested and undemocratic to address the real world fundamental issues we must get sorted in the 21st century.

Number Two, western intervention now can only precipitate war, and war will bring the very disruption we fear. It will not solve the problem of regional control either. Have we learnt nothing from western interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya ?

Number three, it is a mistake to assume that Iran and Saudi Arabia are not alive to the threat posed by war to their own economic interests.

The time to intervene is long gone. There was possibly a moral case in Syria back in 2011, but western powers prevaricated. They did nothing for two years so Isil then moved in; another two years went by, and the Russians realised the West would do nothing, so they intervened in Syria.

the days of Western intervention in the Middle East are over

It is for the Arabs to resolve Arab problems, and it is high time the Western powers stopped playing hypocritical games on the World stage – and stopped misleading their own electorates.

Mrs May please note

Ray Catlin

NB  Commission for Countering Extremism Report of 19th July 2019 is at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/commission-releases-first-round-of-evidence-of-extremism