When Keir Starmer told the nation on Sunday that Britain would not join offensive operations against Iran, he was speaking a lawyer’s truth. Yes. British forces have not dropped a single bomb on Iranian soil. At least yet.
The RAF has not flown strike missions over Tehran. At least yet.
So, in the narrow, legalistic sense the Labour prime minister described, Britain is not a co-belligerent. Yet in almost every other meaningful sense, the United Kingdom is complicit in this war.
The clearest evidence of Britain’s practical involvement lies not in what its forces have done, but in what they have made possible.
The BBC has reported that the United States is expected to use two British-controlled facilities (RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire and the joint UK-US base on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean) as staging points for strikes on Iranian missile sites.
To be clear, these are not peripheral installations. Fairford is one of only a handful of airfields in the world capable of handling B-2 Spirit stealth bombers, the aircraft of choice for penetrating hardened underground targets. Meanwhile, Diego Garcia, an atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean, sits roughly 2,500 miles from the Strait of Hormuz. It’s close enough to serve as a logistical hub, far enough to be out of range of Iran’s ballistic missiles.
Sir Keir framed the decision in terms of collective self-defence and burden-sharing with allies.
Britain, he said, had agreed to a “specific and limited defensive purpose”. It’s a formulation that sounds modest until one recalls that America’s stated objective is the destruction of Iran’s capacity to launch further ballistic missiles.
Enabling that destruction, whatever one calls it, is a form of participation.
The conflict began on Saturday morning when Israel and the United States launched co-ordinated strikes against Iran’s leadership and military infrastructure. Among those reported killed was Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; it’s a development of historic proportions, and one that Iran’s surviving leadership has vowed to avenge. Iran responded within hours, firing salvoes of ballistic missiles and drones at American assets and allies across the region: Israel, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan all came under fire. The logic of collective defence that Mr Starmer cited is not merely rhetorical; British installations and personnel were already under direct threat before he made his announcement.
There have been attacks on British interests in the region. On Sunday evening, a suspected drone struck RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus: the base Britain uses to project air power across the eastern Mediterranean. The Ministry of Defence confirmed the attack around midnight local time, saying force protection across the region had been raised to its highest level.
Separately, Defence Secretary John Healey said that two ballistic missiles had been fired in the direction of Cyprus, though he claimed the island itself was not the intended target. A Cypriot government spokesman subsequently confirmed that Sir Keir had reassured President Nikos Christodoulides that Cyprus was not being deliberately targeted. This seems hard to prove either way.
British forces have already been drawn into direct action. An RAF Typhoon operating from Qatar shot down an Iranian drone during a defensive air patrol. This is the first time a British fighter has engaged an Iranian drone since the current campaign began. A UK counter-drone unit in Iraq destroyed a second Iranian drone heading towards a coalition base housing British personnel. In both cases, the ministry described the actions as defensive.
The deeper question is whether Britain’s chosen posture, which appears to be operational support without formal co-belligerency, is coherent, either strategically or legally.
International lawyers seems divided. Some argue providing basing rights for offensive strikes places Britain within the definition of a party to the conflict under the laws of armed conflict. Others say that sovereign states may lend facilities to allies without thereby assuming combatant status themselves, provided their own forces are acting only in self-defence.
Historically, this distinction has been observed more in theory than in practice. And countries that host strike aircraft tend, over time, to find themselves drawn into the conflicts those aircraft are waging.
Sir Keir is acutely aware of the political risks. His invocation of lessons learned from the “mistakes of Iraq” was carefully calibrated for a Labour Party that remains haunted by Tony Blair’s decision to join the 2003 invasion and by the subsequent Chilcot report’s damning verdict on British decision-making. The prime minister is determined not to repeat that trajectory. But there is a difference between avoiding the errors of 2003 and pretending that Britain is merely a spectator to a war being waged partly from its own territory.
The irony of Sir Keir’s current position is sharpened considerably by his own political history. When running for the Labour leadership in 2020, he campaigned on an explicit pledge to introduce a Prevention of Military Intervention Act. This was a commitment he signed and promoted on social media alongside the slogan “no more illegal wars.” It was, in retrospect, a promise defined by a particular moment: a Labour Party still processing the trauma of Iraq, still suspicious of liberal interventionism, and deeply sceptical of the Atlantic alliance as a vehicle for American power projection.
Six years later, the man who made that pledge now finds himself permitting American B-2 bombers to stage from British soil for strikes on a sovereign nation. He has not introduced a Prevention of Military Intervention Act. He has not, as far as anyone can tell, seriously considered one. His defenders will argue that governing is different from campaigning, that the world of 2026 is not the world of 2020, and that a prime minister cannot afford the luxury of the pledges made by a leadership contender. All of that may be true. But it does mean that when Sir Keir reaches for the language of “lessons learned from Iraq,” he is doing so while standing in a position that his former self would have found, at minimum, deeply uncomfortable.
As for the now, Downing Street appears to have settled on a formula that keeps Britain involved enough to satisfy its most important ally while maintaining just enough political distance to preserve domestic support. Whether that formula holds depends on how the next few days unfold. Iran has declared that its retaliatory campaign will continue until its own, as yet unspecified, objectives are met. The United States has warned there will be more American casualties. Already jets appear to have been downed. RAF Fairford is being prepared. And the distance between a base and a battle is, in modern warfare, rather shorter than it looks on a map.
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