UK starts a war with Yemen days after British schools beg for food.
wealth inequality hits Victorian-era heights in the UK and Starmer's Labour thinks bombing Yemen will make everything better.
Good day, spectators,
And it took just eight months for ‘Labour’ leader Keir Starmer to embrace Britain’s oldest imperial tradition: bombing brown people without parliamentary approval.
A few nights ago, RAF Typhoons met up with their American counterparts and brutally bombarded Yemen. It marks Labour’s first act of aggression and proves once again that when it comes to bloody Middle Eastern adventures, there’s truly no difference between Red and Blue Tories.
The Ministry of Defence claims they ‘precisely’ targeted Houthi ‘drone factories’ near Sana’a and this might be believable if it weren’t for the fact this same ministry has spent two decades lying about civilian casualties from Iraq to Afghanistan. Also, if the Houthis hadn’t just reported 68 African migrants slaughtered in a US strike on a detention centre, and if Parliament hadn’t been completely bypassed…again.
Defence Secretary John Healey had the gall to claim this was about ‘freedom of navigation’, as if the Houthis’ blockade exists in a vacuum rather than as direct resistance to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza—a genocide Labour continues to arm and support. The sheer hypocrisy would make me sick if I weren’t used to it being so predictably British.
Small, on-topic insert here: Watch this fantastic piece of journalism as Admiral Radakin, Britain’s most senior military official squirms when pressed by Declassified UK about sharing intelligence with Israel to bomb Palestine:
Meanwhile, Trump’s Pentagon continues its ‘Operation Rough Rider’ (a name so cringeworthy and imperialist that it would make Cecil Rhodes blush), having already struck 800 Yemeni targets since March. Their stated goal? ‘Lethality, lethality, lethality,’ according to Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth who is probably more concerned with his Signal chat leaks than civilian body counts.
It’s worth mentioning at this point that, to my knowledge, Yemenis have not targeted a single civilian cargo ship in six months.
Labour’s ‘progressive’ priorities are bombs over bread.
Here’s what Westminster doesn’t want you to think about: the 55% drop in Red Sea shipping Healey is mentioning is nothing compared to the 80% drop in food reaching Gaza under Israel’s siege.
UNICEF has just warned us that 335,000 Palestinian children under the age of five are on the brink of death due to severe malnutrition. That’s literally all the babies and toddlers in Gaza.
They also don’t want you to think about how Labour’s ‘progressive’ government just approved £500 million in new arms sales to Saudi Arabia and this is the same regime starving Yemen for nearly a decade prior to all of this.
Not a single MP voted to authorise the strikes on Yemen because, like Blair before him, Starmer knows democracy is a hindrance when it comes to his neoliberal warmongering.
But let’s not pretend that it’s just Labour’s foreign policy which is crap. At home, they wasted no time proving they’re just Tories sporting red ties. While the working class grapples with the worst cost-of-living crisis in decades, Starmer’s government has…
…increased military spending by £6 billion.
Even as local councils collapse.
Labour is also doing nothing whilst primary schools beg parents to fund meals. (Yes, really—Westminster instead subsidises beer on tap in its bars and kids in Rochdale get food bank vouchers.)
…joined the Tories’ culture war distraction.
attacking ‘woke’ universities and trans rights while refusing to tax the rich properly or renationalise utilities. The UK needs good housing, transport and healthcare. Not division and distractions.
…courted far-right voters to zero success.
They’ve adopted Reform UK’s rhetoric on immigration, all while refusing to raise wages or restore workers’ rights gutted by 14 years of Tory rule.
It's not really done them much good though because reform is stealing seats from them as we’ve seen in recent local elections.
Starmer has fully inherited Blair’s bloodstained apron proving that ‘change’ under Labour simply means changing which Global South nation gets the luxury of being bombed next. The names may change (Iraq, Libya, now Yemen), but Britain’s role remains the same: America’s attack dog, unleashed whenever profits are threatened.
the threat isn’t in Yemen, it’s in the working class waking up.
The only question left is how long before Labour starts calling these strikes ‘humanitarian interventions’. But here’s the deeper worry: as living standards crumble and the far right rises, Starmer’s Labour is more focused on proving its ‘toughness’ to the security state than on rebuilding a gutted welfare system.
I really hate to say it but when schools can’t afford textbooks and computers but the MoD gets blank cheques, when middle-class MPs lecture us about ‘fiscal responsibility’ while sipping subsidised champagne, and when a so-called ‘workers’ party’ that we voted for spends our money bombing Yemen instead of taxing billionaires—it’s no wonder Nigel Farage’s Reform is gaining ground.
I don’t need to tell most people this but I will anyway, just in case: Reform is no friend of you and I. They are not for the working-class majority. Its rhetoric is a trick, just like many other opportunistic right-wing parties. It’s a reheated UKIP stew of immigrant-blaming and faux populism, designed to redirect rage away from the real architects of austerity: the landlords, the arms dealers, the privatisers and arseholes like Starmer who maintain that. But Labour’s betrayal has left a vacuum. Disillusioned voters—many of them lifelong Labour supporters—are drifting toward Reform…not because they’ve suddenly embraced Farage’s light Nazi nostalgia, but because Starmer’s party offers them nothing but empty slogans and imperial nostalgia.
And is that not the point? The establishment wants this divide. They need the working class split between a Labour Party that despises its base and a far-right movement that serves as controlled opposition. Because the moment workers—left-wing, right-wing, or just plain exhausted—realise they have more in common with each other than with the billionaires hoarding wealth while hospitals collapse, the game is up.
And it is up.
Labour and the Tories aren’t simply flaccid parties that fail to offer an alternative. They’re actively accelerating the decay that makes fascism appealing. Every bomb dropped on Yemen, every cut to school meals and benefits, every culture-war distraction is another brick in the wall separating a united working class.
The tragedy isn’t that Reform exists. It’s that Labour made it inevitable.
If you found yourself nodding along to this one, you’ll love my new magazine, the Starry Plough—a bit rougher, a bit rowdier, and a whole lot more revolutionary. The time is now.
Have a read:
And on that note, I will let you go until the Digest on Sunday. What do you think? Has Starmer’s Labour betrayed its true social roots, or was it always this rotten and I am just romanticising?
(Drop your thoughts below—and if you enjoyed this, don’t forget to ❤️ and restack.)
(And as always, thanks for reading, make sure to subscribe and do please give this post a ❤️ and restack below too.)
the spectacle is only possible because of its committed readers. I tackle the geopolitical and world stories mainstream news channels ignore, distort or simply lie about. Help keep it going and supporting independent journalism by becoming a paid subscriber to get full access to the magazine.
Or, buy me a sandwich for 3 euro below! If everyone reading this made a small contribution, I could dedicate myself to this work full time, bringing you even more unfiltered, independent journalism.
Every contribution counts and is deeply appreciated. Thank you for being part of this community.
Read more from the spectacle:
Yeah, you're fantasising. Labour haven't worked for the working class since I was young and I am sixty now.
Reminder: the attacks on Yemen have a strategic purpose: to force an end to the Red Sea blockade imposed by the Houthi *entirely* to disrupt Israel’s genocidal aspirations in Gaza. Saying all this and failing to mention that is a moral failing at a critical moment.