Munich (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Everything is going well in the “Special Relationship” between the US and the UK. After an American chemist dared to suggest that adding salt to the quintessential British cup of tea could represent an improvement, the US embassy stepped in and calmed restless audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. “We cannot stand idly by as such an outrageous proposal threatens the very foundation of our special relationship,” posted the US embassy in London in January 2024. The embassy noted that “the unthinkable notion of adding salt to Britain’s national drink is not official United States policy. And never will be.”

There was never a risk of a diplomatic conflict, of course, because two countries that agree to jointly strike Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen continuously for almost two months are not likely to create a tempest in a teapot. The long-running dynamics in the US-UK relationship that help explain their joint strikes in Yemen, not frivolous discussions on tea, are part of Tom Stevenson’s latest book, “Someone Else’s Empire: British Illusions and American Hegemony”, a collection of articles published by the author over the years for the London Review of Books (LRB).

Stevenson, a contributing editor at the LRB, discusses Yemen in the book concerning the US-UK support for the bombing operations Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have carried out in Yemen for seven years. Stevenson obviously could not have had the US-UK joint strikes against the Houthis in mind when his book went to press at some point in mid-2023. Still, his assertion that, within the British establishment, “nostalgia for global influence has produced a compulsive Atlanticism and a reflexive resort to military actions that the UK is near incapable of actually performing”[1], could also serve as a clever analysis of the most recent events.

Facing its decline as a global power, “the dominant trend of late twentieth-century Britain was not resurgence as an independent power but a new surrogacy” to the US.[2] With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the supposed “end of history”, following Washington’s lead seemed more self-evident than ever. This was the case even if it implied invading Iraq under the false premise that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Tom Stevenson, Someone Else’s Empire:British Illusions and American Hegemony. Click here.

Tony Blair was perfectly content to become George Bush’s junior partner. He was not alone among European leaders in embracing America’s turbocharged bellicosity after the 9/11 attacks. In Spain, for instance, Prime Minister José María Aznar from the center-right Popular Party was only too happy to meet Bush and Blair in the Portuguese Azores archipelago four days before the invasion to support the US-UK alliance. The Spanish press referred to Bush, Blair, and Aznar as “El Trío de las Azores” (The Azores Trio) and Spain sent 2,600 soldiers to Iraq between August 2003 and May 2004. Eleven of them would die there.

The Spanish participation in the Iraq War ended after the Socialist José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who had campaigned on the promise to withdraw the troops from Iraq, defeated Aznar in the national elections of March 14, 2004. The Iraq War was key in Zapatero’s victory. It will soon be exactly two decades since March 11, 2004, when Madrid suffered a series of terrorist attacks in commuter trains that killed 193 people.

Aznar’s government blamed the Basque separatist group ETA for the attacks despite knowing early on that everything pointed at al-Qaeda. The terrorist group had attacked Spain due to its involvement in the Iraq War. When the truth was eventually revealed right before election day, Zapatero’s Socialist party won a surprise victory. In an interview three years ago, Aznar continued to defend that his decision to join the conflict in Iraq “represented Spain’s most important role in many decades.”

In the early 2000s, the UK was not the only country with a vanished empire overplaying its relevance at the international level by seeking to stay close to the US. Whereas Spain soon shifted course, the UK has tied its future even closer to the US after Brexit, notes Stevenson. One of the examples the author provides is the trend in British weapons acquisitions. During the last twenty years, the UK has almost uninterruptedly procured more than 50% of its weapons imports from the US. However, this has recently only intensified. The data offered by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) shows that in the period from 2020 to 2022, the last year for which data is available, weapons imports from the US represented 95% of British total expenditure on weapons produced abroad.

One of Stevenson’s main arguments regarding the US-UK relationship is that London has often been conducting a foreign and defense policy that makes little sense in terms of promoting British national interests. For instance, Stevenson points to Britain’s commitment to deploy patrol vessels and a frigate in the Indo-Pacific area with the vague objective of “projecting power.” This is the kind of investment London has often committed to despite it more likely benefiting the US than the UK, if at all.

In this sense, the case of the US-UK joint strikes against the Houthis is exceptional. If we accept, for the sake of the argument, that US-UK attacks against Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen are the most effective way to ensure freedom of navigation in the Red Sea, then it would be the UK that would profit more from this. The economic interests of the US are hardly directly affected by the attacks on ships in the Red Sea, whereas the Suez Channel is a key trade artery for cargo either coming from or going to Europe.

Some exceptions notwithstanding, there is a clear general dynamic of British subordination to Washington. As Stevenson argues, this can also be observed in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance that comprises the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Whereas the US National Security Agency (NSA) automatically receives the feed from intelligence stations in other countries, the NSA “sometimes withholds what it knows.”[3]

Stevenson discusses the changing character of war from the perspective of the US and the UK. The author is deeply knowledgeable of varied topics such as the overuse of economic sanctions by Western countries, the details of nuclear competition, or the militarization of space, with satellites and space missions becoming increasingly important.

But Stevenson often pushes too far the book’s generally convincing main argument, that Britain has become subservient to American power. For instance, he writes that “one must wonder whether Britain retains an independent foreign policy at all itself.”[4] “Someone Else’s Empire” also tends to overplay the influence of Washington, and by implication London, in the Middle East. Writing about the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, Stevenson argues that “since the West installed the monarchs, and its behavior is essentially extractive, I see no reason to avoid describing the continued Anglo-American domination of the Gulf as colonial.”[5]

It is difficult to see how a colonial power would not have replaced Crown Prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman following his implication in the murder of the Saudi journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul. Bin Salman’s role in the assassination of Khashoggi was a huge embarrassment for his Western supporters. Neither would a colonial power have allowed Saudi Arabia and the UAE to impose a blockade on Qatar, a Western ally, between 2017 and 2021.

Stevenson is sometimes hyperbolic about US power. Still, it is true that, for all talk of American decline, “the shadow of American power still casts over the rest of the world is unmistakable.”[6] The UK has been enveloped by this shadow while also contributing to making it larger. From Iraq to Yemen and, once the controversy around Britain’s national drink has been happily resolved, over a cup of tea.

[1] Tom Stevenson, “Someone Else’s Empire: British Illusions and American Hegemony” (London: Verso, 2023), p. 4.

[2] Ibid., p. 15.

[3] Ibid., p. 55.

[4] Ibid., p. 234.

[5] Ibid., p. 160.

[6] Ibid., p. 232.

The U.S.- and U.K.-led strikes on the rebel Houthi group in Yemen represent a dramatic new turn in the Middle East conflict – one that could have implications throughout the region.

The attacks of Jan. 11, 2024, hit around 60 targets at 16 sites, according to the U.S. Air Force’s Mideast command, including in Yemen’s capital Sanaa, the main port of Hodeida and Saada, the birthplace of the Houthis in the country’s northwest.

The military action follows weeks of warning by the U.S. to the Houthis, ordering them to stop attacking commercial ships in the strategic strait of Bab el-Mandeb in the Red Sea. The Houthis – an armed militia backed by Iran that controls most of northern Yemen following a bitter near-decadelong civil war – have also launched missiles and drones toward Israel.

As an expert on Yemeni politics, I believe the U.S. attacks on the Houthis will have wide implications – not only for the Houthis and Yemen’s civil war, but also for the broader region where America maintains key allies. In short, the Houthis stand to gain politically from these U.S.-U.K. attacks as they support a narrative that the group has been cultivating: that they are freedom fighters fighting Western imperialism in the Muslim world.

For Houthis, a new purpose

The Israel-Gaza conflict has reinvigorated the Houthis – giving them a raison d’etre at a time when their status at home was diminishing.

By the time of the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas militants in Israel, the Houthis’ long conflict with Saudi Arabia, which backs the Yemeni government ousted by the Houthis at the start of Yemen’s civil war in 2014, had quieted after an April 2022 cease-fire drastically reduced fighting.

Houthi missile strikes on Saudi cities ceased, and there were hopes that a truce could bring about a permanent end to Yemen’s brutal conflict.

Guardian News: “Explosions in Yemen as US and UK launch airstrikes on Houthis after Red Sea attacks”

With fewer external threats, domestic troubles that surfaced in Houthi-controlled areas – poverty, unpaid government salaries, crumbling infrastructure – led to growing disquiet over Houthi governance. Public support for the Houthis slowly eroded without an outside aggressor to blame; Houthi leaders could no longer justify the hardships in Yemen as a required sacrifice to resist foreign powers, namely Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates.

But Israel’s attacks in Gaza have provided renewed purpose for Houthis. Aligning with the Palestinian cause has allowed Houthis to reassert their relevance and has reenergized their fighters and leadership.

By firing missiles toward Israel, the Houthis have portrayed themselves as the lone force in the Arab Peninsula standing up to Israel, unlike regional powers such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The militia is presenting to Yemenis and others in the region a different face than Arab governments that have, to date, been unwilling to take strong action against Israel.

In particular, Houthis are contrasting their worldview with that of Saudi Arabia, which prior to the October Hamas attack had been looking to normalize ties with Israel.

Houthi’s PR machine

The U.S. and U.K. strikes were, the governments of both countries say, in retaliation for persistent attacks by Houthis on international maritime vessels in the Red Sea and followed attempts at a diplomatic solution.

The aim is to “disrupt and degrade the Houthis’ capabilities,” according to U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.

But regardless of the intent or the damage caused to the Houthis militarily, the Western strikes may play into the group’s narrative, reinforcing the claim that they are fighting oppressive foreign enemies attacking Yemen. And this will only bolster the Houthis’ image among supporters.

Already, the Houthis have managed to rally domestic public support in the part of Yemen they control behind their actions since October 2023.

Dramatic seaborne raids and the taking hostage of ships’ crews have generated viral footage that taps into Northern Yemeni nationalism. Turning a captured vessel into a public attraction attracted more attention domestically.

Following the U.S.-U.K. strikes on Houthi targets, Houthi spokesperson Yahya Saree has said the group would expand its attacks in the Red Sea, saying any coalition attack on Yemen will prompt strikes on all shipping through the strategic Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which connects to the Arabian Sea at the southern end of the Red Sea.

Weaponizing Palestinian sympathies

Meanwhile, the Houthis have successfully managed to align the Palestinian cause with that of their own. Appeals through mosques in Yemen and cellphone text campaigns have raised donations for the Houthis by invoking Gaza’s plight.

The U.S.-U.K strikes may backfire for another reason, too: They evoke memories of Western military interventions in the Muslim and Arab world.

The Houthis will no doubt exploit this.

When U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin initially announced the formation of a 10-country coalition to counter Houthi attacks in the Red Sea on Dec. 18, 2023, there were concerns over the lack of regional representation. Among countries in the Middle East and Muslim world, only Bahrain – home to the U.S. Naval Forces Central Command and the U.S. 5th Fleet – joined.

The absence of key regional powers such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Djibouti – where the U.S. has its only military base in Africa – raised further doubts among observers about the coalition’s ability to effectively counter the Houthis.

Muslim-majority countries were no doubt hesitant to support the coalition because of the sensitivity of the Palestinian cause, which by then the Houthis had successfully aligned themselves with.

But the lack of regional support leaves the U.S. and its coalition allies in a challenging position. Rather than being seen as protectors of maritime security, the U.S. – rather than the Houthis – are vulnerable to being framed in the region as the aggressor and escalating party.

This perception could damage U.S. credibility in the area and potentially serve as a recruitment tool for terrorist organizations like al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and similar groups.

The U.S.’s military and diplomatic support for Israel throughout the current conflict also plays into skepticism in the region over the true objectives of the anti-Houthi missile strikes.

Reigniting civil war?

The Houthis’ renewed vigor and Western strikes on the group also have implications for Yemen’s civil war itself.

Since the truce between the two main protagonists in the conflict – Saudi Arabia and the Houthis – fighting between the Houthis and other groups in Yemen, such as the Southern Transitional Council, the Yemen Transitional Government and the National Resistance, has reached a deadlock.

Each group controls different parts of Yemen, and all seem to have accepted this deadlock.

But the U.S.-U.K. strikes put Houthi opponents in a difficult position. They will be hesitant to openly support Western intervention in Yemen or blame the Houthis for supporting Palestinans. There remains widespread sympathy for Gazans in Yemen – something that could give Houthis an opportunity to gain support in areas not under their control.

The Yemeni Transitional Government issued a statement following the U.S.-U.K. strikes that shows the predicament facing Houthi rivals. While blaming the Houthis’ “terrorist attacks” for “dragging the country into a military confrontation,” they also clearly reaffirmed support for Palestinians against “brutal Israeli aggression.”

While Houthi rivals will likely continue this balancing act, the Houthis face no such constraints – they can freely exploit the attacks to rally more support and gain a strategic advantage over their local rivals.

An emboldened Houthi group might also be less likely to accept the current status quo in Yemen and seize the moment to push for more control – potentially reigniting a civil war that had looked to be on the wane.

The Houthis thrive on foreign aggression to consolidate their power. Without this external conflict as a justification, the shortcomings of the Houthis’ political management become apparent, undermining their governance. During the civil war, Houthis were able to portray themselves as the defender of Yemen against Saudi influence. Now they can add U.S. and U.K. interference to the mix.

Mahad Darar, Ph.D. Student of Political Science, Colorado State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In this article I’m going to outline why it is wrong for the British government to pursue such dangerous policy and why supporting the BDS is important for peace and democracy for Palestinians and westerns alike.

The BDS movement is a Palestinian-led global campaign for freedom, justice and equality. It upholds the simple principle that Palestinians are entitled to the same rights as the rest of humanity. It was established in 2005 in response to the failure of the international community to hold Israel to account especially after the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice which declared the wall being built around the West Bank by Israel as violation of the International Law. The BDS movement includes unions, academic associations, churches and grassroots movements across the world. It uses non-violent pressure on Israel to end its occupation of all Arabs land and dismantle the wall, to recognize the rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel and to respect the rights of the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes according to UN resolution 194.

Novara Media: ” MPs Vote To Protect Israel; We Speak To The Founder Of BDS | #NovaraLIVE ”

Some of the notable supporters of the BDS movement include Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Pink floyd musician Roger Watters and the renowned physicist the late professor Stephen Hawking who joined the academic boycott of Israel when in 2013 he famously puled out of a conference hosted by former president of Israel the late Shimon Peres in protest against Israel treatment of the Palestinian.

I find the British government move to prevent public bodies from engaging with the BDS disgraceful for several reasons. To start with, by its peaceful nature, the BDS movement allows larger public participation in politics and humanitarian issues where ordinary people and institutions can express their objection to Israeli policies, especially the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Putting increasing pressure on Israel peacefully including through cultural, economic and academic boycotts, is more likely to make Israeli politicians reconsider their inhumane treatment of the Palestinians. This has the potentials to prevent or at the least reduce bloodshed and save lives.

For any government to outlaw such harmless methods of protest and resistance means to push them in the opposite direction and to encourage more violence and bloodshed. This stance is astonishing, especially for the British government, considering Britain’s moral and historic responsibility in creating the suffering of the Palestinians. London accomplished this through the infamous 1917 Balfour Declaration in which it gave Palestine to the Zionist movement and allowed it to ethnically cleanse most of the Palestinians and turn them into refugees in order create Israel in 1948 based on ideas of supremacy, racism and bloodshed.

Inasmuch as it outlaws civil protest, the British government’s bill gives a green light to extremist Israeli politicians such as the Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Elyahu, who said that “one of Israel’s options in the war in Gaza is to drop the nuclear bomb.”

The legislation is also a threat to British democracy as it seems to be the case that supporting Israel oppression of the Palestinians by western governments is increasingly becoming a threat to free speech and therefore to democracy. Denying public sector organizations the right to decide their own policies in relation to ethical procurement of services and goods is an attack on their basic right to make their own decisions to reject dealings with governments and businesses involved in human rights violations.

For us as Palestinians, boycotting Israeli goods has been a method of non-violent resistance for many decades, wielded against illegal occupation, colonization, ethnic cleansing, land theft, killing, persecution and apartheid. Now, defending the right to boycott Israel and to stand for justice for the Palestinians is becoming a new battle ground in defending democracy and free speech in the west.

(The Conversation) – At the start of 2016, in an article noting some exciting changes in British energy, The Conversation published the following paragraph:

Wind, solar and hydro – the weather-dependent renewables – together generated 14.6% of Great Britain’s electrical energy in 2015, the highest ever annual amount. Wind stormed (literally) past the 2014 record to break through the 10% milestone. Solar more than doubled to 2.5%.

Eight years on, those numbers look tiny. Wind is now up to 29% and solar has doubled again. In 2015, coal still generated a quarter of British electricity, but last year it was down to 1%. Indeed the same author, energy analyst Grant Wilson, recently noted that 2023 was the first ever year when Britain would get more electricity from renewables than fossil fuels.

This roundup of The Conversation’s climate coverage comes from our weekly climate action newsletter. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 30,000+ readers who’ve subscribed.

If you include electricity generated by “biomass” plants (which burn wood pellets, often imported from forests in America) then, as Wilson notes along with his University of Birmingham colleagues Joseph Day and Katarina Pegg, renewables actually first overtook fossil fuels in Britain in 2020.

Channel 4 News: “Can onshore wind revolution lower energy bills in the UK?”

“Trees can of course be regrown, so biomass counts as renewable,” they write. “But the industry has its critics and it’s not globally scalable in the same way as the ‘weather-dependent’ renewables: wind, solar and, to a certain degree, hydro power.”

In other words, if everyone started burning wood pellets for electricity we’d soon run into major problems, whereas one country installing more wind turbines or solar panels doesn’t mean there is less wind or sun left for others. They are effectively infinite resources.

That’s why “weather-dependent” renewables are more appropriate for a global transition, and why 2023 was such a significant milestone year for Britain.

However, this transition may be grinding to a halt. Britain’s electricity decarbonisation is mostly thanks to wind power getting cheaper and cheaper. But what happens if it’s suddenly not cheap anymore?

Phil McNally, an electricity markets researcher at UCL, wrote in September last year about the failure of the latest round of “auctions” to bring forward any new offshore wind projects. “Consequently,” he writes, “the government’s own target of achieving 50 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2030 is hanging by a thread, and investor confidence has hit a new low.”

But this isn’t because the technology itself has become more expensive. Indeed, “offshore wind remains one of the cheapest and most suitable technologies available to the UK”. Rather, McNally explains:

The primary factor driving up the cost of delivering a new offshore wind project mirrors a predicament that is currently facing us all – inflation has made things more expensive to buy and money more expensive to borrow. The rate at which prices are rising is starting to fall, but remains significantly above where it was two years ago. For those involved in the construction of an offshore wind farm, this means the cost of both the physical parts (such as the turbines) and the debt (bank loans) has gone up.

This isn’t specific to wind power – prices have gone up for new gas or solar plants too. But given electricity generation is a must, “what truly matters is the relative cost, and offshore wind remains cheap relative to other technologies”.

McNally also notes that the supply chain – the companies that provide everything from turbine blades to installation vessels or trained engineers – has been slow to catch up with demand and can therefore command higher prices.

Given these economic and supply chain issues, he says the UK government should focus on producing a long-term delivery plan for the offshore wind sector that “includes the amount of offshore wind it wishes to procure in each auction, delivering confidence to industry and allowing the development of a healthy supply chain”. In addition:

It could also include standardisation of technology to maximise further cost reductions and accelerate delivery. And it should […] make auction caps more reflective of current costs, so that consumers do not miss out on the cheapest forms of electricity.

The companies that generate Britain’s electricity are doing well, at least. Michael Grubb and Serguey Maximov Gajardo at UCL estimate the total annual revenue to British electricity generating stations increased by £29 billion as a result of the 2022 energy crisis.

“The indications are that these revenues increased by about twice as much as overall generation costs,” they write. While “getting at the numbers is not easy”, their research backs up the widely believed view that firms generating electricity from gas were able to exploit a global increase in gas prices.

Since these companies’ costs shot up following the start of the Ukraine war, it seems no surprise that their prices did too. We estimate their total annual revenue rose by about £13 billion, roughly trebling from the pre-COVID average of £6.3 billion. But the evidence suggests this increase was, in fact, much bigger than the increase in their costs.

Renewable generators also saw profits increase: “We estimate their revenue doubled from £7.7 billion pre-COVID to £15.5 billion in 2022 – yet there is no reason to think their costs increased.”

What happened? A lack of real competition in a market where gas still sets the overall price of electricity, combined with a decline in imports from mainland Europe (which helped regulate prices) and a continent-wide gas shortage, meant “electricity generators in Britain were able to raise prices further above costs”.

And to go back to where we started, Grubb and Gajardo point out:

The real paradox is that all this happened just as non-fossil sources, with stable costs, started to account for more than half of Britain’s electricity (56% if we include nuclear) … For how long can the declining fossil fuel tail continue to wag the dog of Britain’s renewables-based electricity system?

Will de Freitas, Environment + Energy Editor, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Munich (Special to Informed Comment) – After the death of British monarch Elizabeth II in September 2022, then president of Kenya Uhuru Kenyatta ordered 4 days of national mourning. The president’s decision was not well-received among many sectors of the Kenyan population. Elizabeth II was already queen during the Mau Mau Uprising, a rebellion against British colonial rule in Kenya in the 1950s that was suffocated at the cost of 11,503 official deaths but up to three hundred thousand dead and missing according to historian Caroline Elkins in her book “Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya.”

Last October, Elizabeth’s son and current monarch Charles III visited Kenya. While in the Eastern African country, King Charles offered no direct apology or reparations. The closest he came to condemning British colonialism in Kenya was saying that “there were abhorrent and unjustifiable acts of violence committed against Kenyans” during their fight for independence.

The territory we now know as Kenya moved to British hands after the creation of the Imperial British East Africa Company in 1888. By the point the Imperial British East Africa Company was created, the company represented nothing but a short chapter in Britain’s centuries-long history of combining private capital and royal prerogatives to expand its imperial designs around the world. This is a history whose origins and development are covered in depth by Philip J. Stern in his recently published book “Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations that Built British Colonialism.”

Stern, an Associate Professor of History at Duke University, explains that British corporations, whose origins lay between the end of the 16^th century and the beginning of the 17^th century, represented the foundations of British colonialism. The corporation emerged as a particular legal entity funded by the joint stock of its members who, upon being granted the power by a royal charter, were allowed to engage in “overseas trade, exploration, predation, and settlement,” writes Stern.[1]

The men behind these corporations were a mixture of entrepreneurs, explorers, and dispossessors of natives, although not necessarily in this order. Whereas many of those who pushed the corporations further never left Britain and their contributions were merely financial, others came to settle and live in lands stolen from the native populations. The corporations first set their sights not far away from home, in Ireland, but they were soon securing royal charters to depart for Russia, Western Africa, or Northern America.

Philip J. Stern, Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism. Harvard University Press, 2023. Click here.

Some of these charters still help understand the political geography of the United States. In 1632, for instance, King Charles I granted a charter to Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore. The new colony established by Cecil Calvert was named Maryland after the wife of Charles I, Henrietta Maria of France. In the US State of Maryland, Baltimore is the most populous city.

British corporations expanded their reach around the world through a process that was neither linear nor free of complications. Instead, it was a complex dynamic dominated by competition against the companies and imperial projects of other European countries and between British corporations themselves. The royal court became an arena for different corporations to challenge each other’s rights over certain economic activities and geographical areas. As Stern explains, this was somehow inevitable because overseas charters given to corporations “were not terribly well-written ones. They were remarkably ambiguous, aspirational, and open to interpretation.”[2]

New corporations were constantly founded while others disappeared, sometimes to re-emerge under a different name and supported by a new royal charter. The political uncertainty of 17^th-century England, with its Civil War and the Glorious Revolution in 1688, led to unease among those invested in the corporations. Nevertheless, the process of further intermeshing between British corporations and imperialism continued unabated.

There is probably no greater exponent of this sometimes-uneasy alliance than the East India Company (EIC), to which Stern dedicated a book in 2011 aptly titled “The Company State.” Because the EIC became indeed the perfect hybrid between the commercial and the political. The Anglo-Irish politician and philosopher Edmund Burke famously described the EIC as “a state in the disguise of a merchant.”

When the British first arrived in India in the early 17^th century, the Mughal emperor Jahangir presided over one of the largest empires in human history. By 1815, the EIC had assembled an army of a quarter of a million men and claimed hegemony in the Indian subcontinent. The company’s trajectory was not without its setbacks, however. In 1772, the EIC had incurred enormous debts, and the directors of the company asked the British government for a £1.4 million loan, an extraordinary sum at the time. The government obliged as the EIC was so closely intertwined with the British domestic economy that it had become “too big to fail”, explains Stern.[3]

In Empire, Incorporated, Stern always remains in the realm of history. However, the enormous economic power of the EIC at that time, together with the company’s practice of bribing British parliamentarians to secure a favorable political environment, can only bring to mind the 2007-2008 Global Financial Crisis and its strong connection to the governmental deregulation of financial markets. The EIC survived its biggest crisis thanks to the government’s bailout but, in exchange, the British parliament enforced “a new principle of government oversight” on the EIC.[4] The company would finally be nationalized after the Indian Rebellion of 1857 against the EIC.

Around the time India was put under the direct rule of the Crown, corporate imperialism, which had previously already shown its adaptive capabilities, underwent a process of formalization. With the passing of new legislation by the British parliament, “incorporation had now become a bureaucratic process not a political one.”[5] It was this new/old corporate imperialism that would fuel the expansion of the British Empire in Africa and Australasia and put Britain, at the end of the First World War, in control of around a quarter of the world’s population and territory.

It would take another world war for the formal dismantlement of the empire to begin. Stern describes how “there was no single corporate reaction to the impending end of empire.”[6] Many corporations lobbied against de-colonization. Others waited until the emergence of politically independent countries to engage in the recolonization of the newly nationalized companies seeking capital and commercial partners. And, in a good number of cases, “formerly colonial corporations still endured in some shape or form.”[7]

Unilever, the modern British multinational behind many household brands, built its Western Africa business after the acquisition of the United Africa Company, which in turn was founded in 1929 as a result of the merger between different companies, among them the Royal Niger Company, which played a fundamental role in imposing Britain’s rule over what is today Nigeria.

“Empire, Incorporated” is the result of painstaking research by a historian who impressively explores how Britain’s empire and its corporations became almost undistinguishable. And yet, as Stern himself explains in the introduction, there are no clear historical turning points in the book. The history of the British Empire, for all the suffering it caused, was not the result of any grand design, and there is more messiness than order in it. This is obviously not Stern’s fault, but it helps explain why the book is not an easy read and might be more appealing to historians than to the general reader.

The book could also have benefited from a more comparative perspective, for instance in regard to the Dutch East India Company, founded in 1602. We are left to wonder how unique the British alliance of corporation and empire was as compared to other European imperial projects. If we are to focus on one key insight of the book that advances our general understanding of the British Empire, this is that the British Empire as we know it was “an incorporated empire, built in no small part by absorbing and assimilating those corporations and other forms of non-state enterprise that often laid the foundations of the colonial enterprise.”[8]

[1] Philip J. Stern, Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism (Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 2023), p. 7.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid, p. 177.

[4] Ibid, p. 183.

[5] Ibid, p. 256.

[6] Ibid, p. 315.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid, p. 10.

Munich (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Amid Israel’s assault on the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank in early July, the House of the Commons passed a bill  with significant implications for the United Kingdom’s relations with Israel/Palestine. If it becomes law, the innocuously named Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill will dramatically reduce the freedom of public bodies, including local councils, to support boycotts against foreign governments on moral or political grounds. There is no denying that the bill aims at outlawing the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, launched in 2005 to end international support for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians and pressure Israel to comply with international law.

The Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove, who introduced the bill to the British Parliament, made clear that the BDS movement is the main target while dangerously conflating pro-Palestinian activism with antisemitism. In his presentation of the bill, Gove announced that the legislation he was proposing would provide “protection for minority communities, especially the Jewish community, against campaigns that harm community cohesion and fuel antisemitism.” Michael Gove, a notorious Islamophobe deeply influenced by the vision of a ‘clash of civilisations’ between Western European civilization and Islam, is a paradigmatic example of the characters that populate Hil Aked’s recently published book, Friends of Israel: The Backlash against Palestine Solidarity.

Aked, a writer and researcher with a PhD from the University of Bath, makes a smart use of open-source data and freedom of information requests to present the first book-length study of the Israel Lobby in the United Kingdom. The choice of the term ‘Israel Lobby’ is a very careful one. As they explain, “the Israel lobby is very far from incorporating all Jewish people and is, moreover, far from exclusively Jewish.”[1] Evangelical Christians have become increasingly prominent in pro-Israel activism in the UK.

In its wording, Aked’s ‘Israel Lobby’ parallels that of International Relations scholars John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their famous 2007 book “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.” Mearsheimer and Walt see the Israel Lobby in the US as a product of foreign influence that works against what they understand as the US national interest. Instead, Aked describe the Israel Lobby in the UK as part and parcel of a long history of British state racism, still deeply ingrained in the country’s establishment, that has led British Zionists to be complicit in the plight of the Palestinians for well over a century.

The foundations of the Israel Lobby in the UK are to be found in institutions that predate the creation of Israel such as the Zionist Federation of Great Britain, the Jewish Agency in Britain, or the United Jewish Israel Appeal. These institutions continue to exist and retain close ties with the Israeli government. However, new organizations have proliferated in the last decades as a response to a different context. In the early 2000s, with the failure of the Camp David summit, the outbreak of the Second Intifada, and the increase of illegal settlements in the West Bank, the popularity of Zionism in the UK among both Jewish and non-Jewish people entered a period of crisis.

At this time, successive Israeli governments started to explore new options to promote Israel’s image abroad. Israel’s strategy in the UK was importantly influenced by research on the concept of ‘new public diplomacy’, which defends the effectiveness of involving non-state actors in reaching foreign publics that have grown increasingly skeptical of state power. As Aked explain, Israel decided “to enlist civil society organisations to help wage its propaganda war, believing their Israel-advocacy work to be complementary to official efforts.”[2] Apart from supporting already existing Zionist groups with direct or indirect funding, the Israeli government also helped to establish new pro-Israel civil society groups in the UK. Although they were introduced themselves as ‘grassroots’ movements, the Israeli embassy in London had an instrumental role in their creation.

Hil Aked, Friends of Israel: The Backlash against Palestine Solidarity. Click here

The Israel Lobby in the UK has been active on several fronts. The British parliament is unsurprisingly one of them. Although public support for the Palestinian people has increased in the UK in the last decades, this change has not been mirrored in the country’s parliamentary politics. The parliamentary groups Labour Friends of Israel and Conservative Friends of Israel boast a numerous membership. Meanwhile, the Israel Lobby has put the focus on university campuses around the UK. Aked describe a two-pronged approach in the Israel Lobby’s strategy toward universities. On the one hand, it has provided private funding for chairs and centers of Israel studies. The donors, as Aked document in the case of the late Lord Weidenfeld, a Zionist publishing magnate who co-founded an Israel studies post at the University of Sussex, often sought to influence the academic appointments for the new positions.                                                              

On the other hand, conscious that Israel’s popularity among student activists is diametrically opposed to that it enjoys in the Parliament, the Israel Lobby has sought to stymy grassroots efforts at expanding the BDS movement in British universities. The Britain Israel Research and Academic Exchange Partnership (BIRAX), launched in 2008 by the Israeli and British prime ministers at that time, Ehud Olmert and Gordon Brown, closely cooperates with the British Council in anti-BDS activities. This is something Aked was able to prove after examining documents accessed through freedom of information requests.

Zionist groups have also aimed at influencing the depiction of Israel in the broadcast media and the press. As Aked importantly note, it is not that “pro-Israel media pressure groups somehow nefariously impose their will on reporters who would otherwise be sympathetic to Palestinians and fearlessly hold Israel to account.”[3] The upper-middle-class status of most British journalists, as well as the structural constraints of the largest media institutions in the country, are already conducive to conformity with the status quo. Even so, the Israel Lobby has worked hard to ensure that the general pro-Israel tendency in British media does not decline. It has done so, Aked explain, with a combination of carrots and sticks. An example of the use of positive incentives are the free trips to Israel, touring areas such as the occupied Golan Heights, offered to twenty to thirty leading British journalists annually by the lobby group Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM). At the same time, the Israel Lobby continuously monitors the British media landscape and issues formal and informal complaints about their coverage of the Middle East if they perceive it as critical of Israel.

Very often the complaints do not have an immediate and tangible result, but they certainly put pressure on journalists who might end up self-censoring. On other occasions, the consequences of the Israel Lobby’s efforts are easier to observe. In 2007, after pro-Israel US and UK organizations complained against an article by then BBC Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen, the governing body of the BBC forced Bowen to alter his original article, which could only appear as biased against Israel to the eyes of the most ardent Zionist.

As Aked writes, the Israel Lobby “deserves to be scrutinised and opposed because of its role defending Israeli apartheid.”[4] At the same time, Aked maintains that the case of the Israel Lobby reflects broader problems in British and other Western societies. Politics in general and foreign policy in particular are vulnerable to the actions of single-issue lobby groups that succeed in pushing their agendas even when their support among the population is limited. In May 2021, almost 200,000 pro-Palestinian protesters mobilized in London against Israel’s attacks on the Gaza Strip. Polls conducted by You Gov show that sympathy for the Palestinians among the UK’s population has increased during the past few years.

The generational divide is also remarkable. A May 2023 report shows that citizens older than 65 are four times more likely to express sympathy for Israel than citizens between 18 and 24 years old. Thus, the bill to outlaw the BDS movement in the UK recently passed by the Parliament is clearly at odds with the changes undergone by British public opinion concerning Israel/Palestine. Friends of Israel is, above all, a necessary book. It touches upon multiple dimensions of the Israel Lobby in the UK that had long needed investigation. Future critical writers on pro-Israel networks in the UK will certainly build on Aked’s work. They will be departing from safe ground considering the author’s trailblazing research and sharp analytical skills.

[1] Hil Aked, Friends of Israel: The Backlash against Palestine Solidarity (London: Verso, 2023), p. 3.

[2] Ibid., p. 108.

[3] Ibid., p. 180.

[4] Ibid., p. 206.

The 1953 coup d’etat in Iran ushered in a period of exploitation and oppression that has continued – despite a subsequent revolution that led to huge changes – for 70 years. Each year on August 19, the anniversary of the coup, millions of Iranians ask themselves what would have happened if the US and UK had not conspired all those years ago to overthrow Iran’s democratically elected leader.

Iran, the Middle East and, arguably, the whole world may well have been profoundly different. Apart from rewriting the destiny of Iran and its neighbours, the coup paved the way for a series of imperialist interventions and the toppling of democratically elected governments across the global south. Perhaps Washington might have thought twice before plotting coups in Guatemala in 1954, Congo in 1961 or Chile in 1973, if they’d been unable to overthrow Iran’s prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, so easily and profitably.

As the democratically elected leader of Iran from 1951 to 1953, Mosaddegh championed nationalisation of Iran’s oil industry. This had previously been in the hands of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company – a British company, founded in 1909 after the discovery of a large oil field in Iran, which would later become BP.

In March 1951, Iran’s parliament voted to proceed with nationalisation. This caused consternation in the west – most notably in Britain, where the prospect of nationalisation was seen as potentially hugely damaging to the economy. Furthermore, it would have undermined Britain’s influence in the Middle East. Plotting to depose Mosaddegh began in earnest.

In the event, the coup – named Operation Ajax – was a joint venture between the CIA and MI6. The shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who had recently fled the country after an earlier plot to remove Mossadegh had failed, returned to Iran.

Within a short period, he had tightened his grip on the country’s security services and imposed a dictatorial regime which ruled through brutality and fear. Pahlavi banned all opposition political parties, and many of the activists who participated in the movement for nationalisation of oil were arrested or fled the country.

Government by fear

In 1957, the shah established an internal security service, Sazman-e Ettel’at va Amniyat-e Keshvar (Savak), which essentially ran Iran at the shah’s bidding. From then until 1975, only two major political parties were allowed to operate, the People’s Party (Ḥezb-e Mardom) and the New Iran Party (Ḥezb-e Iran-e Novin), and all parliamentary candidates had to be approved by Savak.

Both parties in reality were wholly under the shah’s control. The parliament only existed to rubber-stamp his decisions, as did the prime minister – who the shah appointed.

In 1975, the shah took his domination of Iranian politics further, establishing a single party, the Party of Resurrection of the Iranian Nation (Hezb-e Rastakhiz), which all Iranians were obliged to join. By 1979, when Iran rose up in a popular revolution, it was a virtual absolute monarchy, with the shah’s will enforced by the dreaded Savak secret police.

Within months of the revolution, though, Iran’s religious authorities took control under the leadership of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The Islamic Republic quickly established its own secret police, Savama – [Sazman-e Ettelaat Va Amniat Meli Iran](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Intelligence(Iran))_ – which used many of the same brutal methods as Savak.

‘Woman, Life, Freedom’

This week, Iranians will recall the 1953 coup as they prepare protests ahead of the anniversary of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising. This movement began in September 2022 after the death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of the morality police – who patrol the streets tasked with enforcing the laws on Islamic dress code in public – for the “crime” of not wearing her hijab (headscarf) in the approved manner.

The resulting explosion of unrest has posed the most serious challenge to the Islamic Republic in its history. Although the state tried to crush the demonstrations from the beginning, the protesters have defied police brutality and the prospect of severe punishment, which included public executions and hundreds of deaths of protesters at the hands of the security forces.

At the same time as battling the oppression of their own state apparatus, ordinary Iranians are also suffering under the brutal US-imposed regime of sanctions. In the past five years, these sanctions – reimposed by Donald Trump after he unilaterally pulled the US out of the Iran Nuclear Deal, which had been signed by his predecessor Barack Obama in 2015 – have devastated the Iranian economy. Soaring inflation and devaluation of the national currency have caused serious hardship for ordinary Iranians.

As they fight for a better future, Iranians clearly grasp how, 70 years after the coup snuffed out their fledgling democracy, their internal struggles are still being influenced by foreign powers.

And they ask themselves if Mahsa Amini, and also Nika Shahkarami and Sarina Esmailzadeh – two other women beaten to death by members of the state apparatus for protesting – as well as hundreds of other young Iranians, would still be paying with their lives in Iran’s struggle for basic rights today if the 1953 coup had not happened.

Simin Fadaee, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University of Manchester

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Just about one third (32.4%) of the United Kingdom’s electricity was sourced from wind power during Q1, while fossil gas only generated 31.7%

Britain got so much power from wind in those three months that it could have charged 300 million Teslas.

Drax quotes one of its power station plant directors, Bruce Heppenstall, as saying, “This is a remarkable achievement for the UK, and it comes at a vital time when cutting the use of foreign gas is critical to our national energy security.”

This quote helps provide some context for why it is so important that British wind outdid imported fossil gas. This development comes in the midst of the Ukraine War, which has caused a huge spike in fossil gas prices that has hurt the pocketbook of every European this winter. Without wind power, Britain would have seen even bigger outlays for fossil gas. The UK banned Russian gas imports as of the first of this year.

Britain gets 50% of its fossil gas from its own North Sea fields, but imports the rest from Norway, the US and Qatar, among other countries. Russia used to be a supplier, but PM Rishi Sunak has stopped imports from Moscow, which nowadays often come with political strings attached.

Over all, 42% of British electricity derived from renewable sources.The United States gets only 23% of its electricity from renewables.

Wind power in the UK has already killed coal, which has dwindled to insignificance in the British grid after having dominated it for over a century. Could fossil gas be its next victim?

Drax quotes Professor Iain Staffel, the lead author of the study, as saying “wind out-supplying gas for the first time is a genuine milestone event, and shows what can be achieved when governments create a good environment for investors in clean technology.”

The UK has 28 gigawatts of wind power now, 14 gigs onshore and 14 gigs offshore. It wants 50 gigawatts from offshore wind alone by 2050.

But it is estimated that Britain already has 99.8 gigawatts of offshore wind power in the pipeline, across 130 projects.

In other words, fossil gas will go on shrinking as a source of electricity for the U.K.

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – We can argue about the character of Charles’s philosophy of nature and whether it is conservative or not. I don’t really care about the origins of his concern for the dangers we face from the climate emergency. I’m just glad he takes this stance, unlike so many of his peers among the Judas American and British billionaire class who have actively attempted to wreck our planet in order to eke out their thirty coins of silver.

In his 2010 book, Harmony, Charles called for a “sustainability revolution.”

In Harmony, Charles wrote that “there is now a strong consensus that, in order to avoid the worst consequences of what we have put in train, it will be necessary for us to limit global average temperature increase to no more than two degrees Celsius [3.6F].” More than that, he writes, has the potential for very steep sea level rises and tropical heat throughout the planet, making human civilization difficult to maintain. His understanding of the science and of past geological epochs in which we saw similar concentrations of CO2 seem to me to be sound.

He said that he visited the Met (Meteorological) Office Hadley Centre for climate research at Exeter and the scientists warned him that if we go on with business as usual, we will likely hit 4 degrees C. (7.2F) average temperature rise over the pre-industrial norm by the end of this century. They told him that we could even hit a 6 degree C. increase (10.8F). Charles pointed out that a six-degree C. increase in the average temperature of the surface of the earth is believed to have brought about the mass extinction at the end of the Permian period, 250 million years ago.

Charles spoke at the UN Conference on Climate Change at Copenhagen in December, 2009, and had a front-row seat at the spectacle of the climate change deniers’ campaign of disinformation, at which he was deeply dismayed.

He takes an intense interest in technological fixes to the greenhouse gas emissions problem, showing that he is not a glib technophobe. He wrote in 2010, “From wind energy to concentrating solar power and from photovoltaic electricity to wave power, there is a vast range of design solutions out there that could help us cut greenhouse emissions very quickly.” That was prescient, since wind and solar were more expensive and less competitive then than they are now. In 2023 in the US, wind-powered electricity can be had for 4 cents a kilowatt hour, less than fossil gas or coal, and solar has fallen in price to only between 6.5 and 8 cents a kilowatt hour, which also makes it highly competitive. Charles has also been a vocal critic of the coal industry and has spoken of the need to transition away from that most polluting of energy sources.

As king, Charles III may have to be more circumspect in his advocacy on climate change than he was as crown prince. The newly crowned king of England, despite being a booster of green energy and a foe of the climate emergency is not in a position to set government policy on these issues. Unfortunately, that is the prerogative of the prime minister, Rishi Sunak. Nor can Charles any longer, as king, decide on his own to jet off to a climate summit, since the prime minister wouldn’t want him speaking against British government policy.

Still, Charles III’s environmentalist views are likely to be broadly influential with the British and Commonwealth publics, and perhaps in the United States, as well. He underlined the climate emergency in a major speech to the 2.5 billion people who live in the Commonwealth countries just this past March.

His philanthropies lie at the nexus of a vast global network of charities and nonprofits among whom he is also listened to with respect. As king, he will have the opportunity to attempt to persuade private powerful leaders in politics and business. It is a far cry from the 1970s when he was often dismissed as a touchy-feely prince moonbeam.

There are lots of dimensions of the British royal family, both good and bad, that one could discuss. I think another of our crises is the growth of wealth inequality globally, and on that question I don’t expect much help from Buckingham Palace. Here, I’m just asking whether, under Charles’s leadership, the monarchy can help make a difference on the central issue facing humanity in the twenty-first century, that of the climate emergency. It won’t do us any good finally to achieve a more just and equal distribution of wealth in a society if it just goes underwater soon thereafter.

Charles, in his typical mystical fashion, called green energy technologies “working with the grain of Nature in meeting our energy needs.” We may conclude that he sees burning fossil fuels as working against nature, since they introduce so much damaging heat into the atmosphere, disrupting the ecology. He also advocates constructing sustainable buildings, based on cooling techniques seen in termite structures.

My title references the medieval Arthurian tale of Sir Gawain, one of the knights of the round table. In the story a stranger comes to Camelot, the Green Knight, who offers to take the blow of any adversary if he could return it the following year. Sir Gawain beheads him. He is able to pick up his head and leave, however, by some sorcery. A year later Sir Gawain keeps his part of the bargain, but stops off at a nearby castle where he spends three nights. The lady of the castle attempts to seduce him three times, but he fends her off each time. After the last failed attempt, she gives him a green sash that she says will make him invulnerable, and he accepts it out of fear of the harm the enchanted Green Knight might wreak on him. He conceals the lady’s gift from the lord of the castle. When he meets the Green Knight at the nearby Green Chapel, he discovers that he is the very lord who had been hosting him at the castle. The lord, pleased with Gawain’s chastity and honor, declines to behead him, but nicks his neck with his sword for having concealed the gift of the green sash.

If we wanted to make this a parable for the climate emergency, the Green Knight is clearly Mother Nature herself, whom we can harm but not kill, but who will then have a rendezvous with us to return the harm at a later date. Only by being honorable, that is, by fighting the temptations of fossil fuel use and profits, can we hope to escape that retaliatory beheading.

Charles’s critics point out that the royal family has an enormous carbon footprint, despite his green philosophizing. But we should be wary of these arguments, which often come from the fetid marshes of Big Carbon think tanks. The whole idea of an individual “carbon footprint” was an invention of the oil companies, as a means of shifting the blame for greenhouse gases onto the individual consumer. The big companies did that in the 1960s regarding pollution, using clever ads to suggest that individuals could stop it just by not littering. The big pollution is done by chemical factories and is not at all like an individual tossing a candy wrapper in the street.

Individuals, even rich and powerful ones like the British royal family, don’t have control of the systems that produce carbon pollution. Only governments are wealthy and organized enough to change those systems. That is why the most powerful lever environmentalists have is the ballot box. The Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act is leveraging trillions of dollars of investments in sustainability, before which any individual philanthropist’s or entrepreneur’s contribution pales in comparison.

Indeed, Charles has pointed out that individual countries aren’t even in a position to move to sustainability by themselves– that we need a multinational coalition of governments who are jointly spending trillions.

The royal family will over the next few years rent out offshore sea beds to wind farm companies. Even its critics admit that “The Crown Estate, which manages the Queen’s property portfolio, has sold sites in six areas off England and Wales to energy companies. When the farms are built, they will supply green energy to seven million homes by 2030 while saving 19 percent of the UK’s household carbon emissions. Former Energy Minister Anne-Marie Trevelyan said at the time of the announcement. The energy delivered will help power seven million homes.'”

There are 19.6 million households in the UK, and wind farms on Crown Estate properties will fuel 35% of them sustainably, with wind power. That’s significant, and is walking the walk.

Charles has also adopted solar panels and other green energy sources for his own office and domestic establishments. “Around half of his office and domestic energy use comes from renewable sources such as woodchip boilers, air-source heat pumps, solar panels and ‘green’ electricity.”

The important thing is that Charles III is committed to a sustainable world that restores respect, even reverence, for nature to pride of place in planning, design and engineering. Humanity is in big trouble, and the question we have to ask of each of the powerful people on the planet is whether they are on our side in dealing with the climate emergency and the pollution crisis.

Charles III is on our side on this key issue, and that is something to celebrate.