Bahrain air defences have destroyed 75 missiles and 123 drones since the start of the conflict, the Bahrain Defence Force said on Thursday. The general command urged residents to stay home and not go out unless absolutely necessary.
in Berlin Meanwhile, the first government-organised flight carrying German travellers stranded due to the US-Israeli military operation in Iran landed at the country’s busiest airport on Thursday morning, More than 250 relieved passengers touched down in Frankfurt on an Airbus A340-300 operated by Lufthansa from Oman with a nearly two-hour delay due to a late departure. The evacuees were handpicked by the German government among tens of thousands waylaid in the Gulf. The group whose transport was deemed most urgent were first driven over land to Muscat from various points in the region. Foreign minister Johann Wadephul, who has faced criticism for a muddled reaction to the traveller crisis, identified particularly vulnerable groups to get priority for the flights including the pregnant, the ill and children. Further evacuations are planned in the coming days. Other German nationals had managed to get on a severely limited number of flights offered by commercial airlines in recent days, primarily from the United Arab Emirates. A heated debate broke out in Germany this week about the extent to which the foreign ministry was responsible for ferrying nationals out of the crisis region and whether the ministry’s travel advisories in the run-up to the outbreak of war were sufficient. Wadephul had falsely claimed in a television interview that a travel warning had been in place for Gulf states for several days when one was only levelled for Dubai, a popular German destination, on Saturday, the day the US-Israeli military action began. A travel warning includes a formal urgent call for nationals to leave an affected area based on a concrete threat to their wellbeing.
The Trump administration’s attempt to sink a UN resolution demanding countries act on the climate crisis has caused cuts to the proposal but hasn’t entirely killed it, according to the tiny Pacific island country spearheading the effort. The US has demanded that Vanuatu, an archipelago in the south Pacific, drop its UN draft resolution that calls on the world to implement a landmark international court of justice (ICJ) ruling from last year that countries could face paying reparations if they fail to stem the climate crisis. Vanuatu, one of several Pacific island countries that consider themselves existentially threatened by the climate crisis despite doing little to cause it, said it had to remove sections of its proposed resolution in the hope that a reduced version could be adopted at the UN in a vote later this month. “Having the Trump administration actively intervening in the market to stop the phase-out of fossil fuels is very frustrating, it’s beyond what you’d expect a government to do,” Ralph Regenvanu, Vanuatu’s minister for climate change adaption, said. “It’s going to have a huge harmful effect on the world and future generations.” The resolution to fulfill the opinion issued by the ICJ is non-binding but “could pose a major threat to US industry”, the Trump administration said in guidance to American embassies and consulates last month. “President Trump has delivered a very clear message: that the UN and many nations of the world have gone wildly off track, exaggerating climate change into the world’s greatest threat,” the US state department cable added. This opposition, alongside those of other major fossil fuel producers such as Saudi Arabia and Russia, has resulted in the proposed UN resolution being watered down. The resolution previously called for countries to submit a registry of the “loss and damage” they suffer from the impacts of an overheating world, such as storms, floods and droughts. This accounting of damages was strenuously opposed by the US, the world’s second-largest carbon emitter, which has long feared legal liability for its pollution, and has now been dropped. However, a new version of the resolution’s draft shared for debate this week still outlines that UN member countries “comply fully with their obligations under international law as they relate to climate change” consistent with the ICJ ruling, and restrain the global temperature rise to 1.5C above preindustrial times via “a rapid, just and quantified phase-out of fossil fuel production and use”. Regenvanu said: “The US asked us to withdraw the resolution, which is disappointing, and pushed back on the language.” He added: “We are hoping the compromise on the loss and damage registry will mean some of that other language will stay in. It’s concerning but we don’t think it will derail the resolution completely, and I hope it will pass with more than just a simple majority.” Vanuatu has been supported by a coalition of countries, including the Netherlands, Colombia, Barbados, Kenya, Jamaica and the Philippines in pushing for the non-binding resolution. But opposition to the resolution has been “more effective than from those in support”, said Regenvanu, who added that the EU has “not been as helpful as we expected”. It is the US, though, that stands as the lead threat to the proposal and global climate cooperation more broadly. Trump has told other world leaders that clean energy is a “scam”, dismissed climate science as a “con job” and urged countries to remain wedded to the fossil fuels that are dangerously heating the planet. His administration has torn up environmental rules in order to “drill, baby, drill” in the US while making extraordinary interventions internationally, such as withdrawing the US from the foundational UN climate treaty and taking control of Venezuela’s oil industry after seizing the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro. Trump has sought to sabotage global initiatives aimed at cutting planet-heating pollution, such as a levy on shipping emissions, and excoriated the International Energy Agency for accounting for the climate crisis in its energy outlook scenarios. Unlike the planned shipping carbon levy, Vanuatu’s UN resolution would not impose any specific fees or regulations on countries such as the US and will probably be ignored by the Trump administration should it pass. But the resolution represents the “beginning of the world building up a body of law for when the politics are different and the world takes more serious action on climate”, said Noah Gordon, an expert in global climate politics at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Judges and lawyers will look back at this as the foundation of international climate law that has teeth.” He added: “The Trump administration has tried to blow up climate diplomacy but other countries are still trying to move forward. We are seeing a big divide between countries that produce fossil fuels, and those who consume them.” While the world’s attention is drawn to Iran after the US and Israel’s attack, on the heels of other armed conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, the primary threat to many countries is the climate crisis, said Regenvanu, who noted that a tropical cyclone in 2015 wiped out 64% of Vanuatu’s GDP. More recent storms, fueled by hotter ocean and air temperatures, have caused similar economic and humanitarian catastrophes in other countries. Such disasters are taking a growing toll in the US, too, where home insurance is becoming unavailable in some places due to a growing barrage of extreme weather events. “This is the single greatest threat to our continued existence, security and livelihoods,” Regenvanu said. “The world needs to be brave and move away from entrenched fossil fuel interests and find a path for future generations. But the state of multilateralism is pretty terrible at the moment, it’s at one of the lowest ebbs ever. This is reflected in climate negotiations, too.” A US state department spokesperson said that the US asked Vanuatu to “withdraw this performative resolution that if adopted, could pose a major threat to US industry. “The United States did not support seeking this advisory opinion from the ICJ and has strong concerns about its conclusions,” the spokesperson added. “Furthermore, the ICJ’s advisory opinion does not provide a basis for the demands included in the draft resolution, which could have broader legal and economic impacts.”
Planes are always urgently sought out when a crisis strikes somewhere in the world. Since the US-Israel war against Iran started on Saturday, demand has outstripped supply with thousands of people stranded in the Middle East frantically searching for an exit route. While many are reliant on governments to dispatch aircraft to evacuate them, those with the financial means can look at a more expensive and much speedier option – a private jet. Matt Purton, the director of aviation services at UK-based global company Air Charter Service, is the man some of them have on speed dial. Purton not only organises for the rich and the famous to be ferried around the world, he also assists governments, fielding requests from everyone from the UK Home Office to the US government seeking planes to deport migrants or carry out evacuations from collapsed countries such as Libya. While his company does not accept all requests for private planes from anyone who can pay, he admits that the latest Middle East war has not been bad for business. “Requests for planes are probably up 200-300% on what’s usual for this time of year,” he says. “We’re going gangbusters.” While the company does not automatically inflate prices at times like this, the fact that demand outstrips supply means that its prices are aligned with the current market rate. Most government work is done for a pre-agreed fixed fee. He is cautious about how the war is going to unfold irrespective of any impact on his company. “The air corridors are quite narrow as it is,” Purton said. “If any more get closed down it will make getting planes in and out of the region much more difficult. The only constant in this situation at the moment is the fluidity of the whole thing. It feels like turning up after an earthquake with a dustpan and brush. “We’re getting calls from absolutely everyone – from stranded honeymooners in Dubai and holidaymakers who want to club together to hire a plane to get home, to corporates and wealthy individuals and everything in between. When there’s a war happening it doesn’t really distinguish between millionaires and billionaires.” He says that at the moment there are at least half a million people stuck in the wrong place who want to leave. But many planes and crews are also not in the right places around the world to get to the Middle East and fly people out. “I think European governments need to work together on this. If they set up an air bridge somewhere like Oman they can move more people out more quickly, flying them from Muscat or Fujairah international airport to somewhere like Larnaca or Malta.” While his company usually hires out entire planes it occasionally sells seats on them, something it has decided to do to airlift stranded people out of the Middle East. An estimated 300,000 Britons are believed to be in affected regions of the Middle East and thousands of flights have been cancelled since the joint US-Israeli operation was launched. More than 130,000 Britons have registered their interest in being helped to leave the region. British nationals were due to return home on the first government flight from Oman on Wednesday evening. However, the flight was delayed due to “operational problems”, and is now due to take off later on Thursday. Two more flights are planned in the next few days. The flight is due to take off from Muscat, the capital of Oman, and a 280-mile drive from the UAE’s biggest city, Dubai, where many British tourists and expats are currently based. The Foreign Office advises against all but essential travel to Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and UAE, and against any travel whatsoever to and from Israel and Palestine. “This is the worst air crisis we’ve had since Covid,” says Purton. “We can often make decisions more quickly than governments can, but we work alongside governments who can provide us with diplomatic and other support. Companies like ours are called on to pick up the pieces in these situations.”
A second Iranian ship has been reported in waters close to Sri Lanka and has sought emergency permission to dock, a day after a US submarine sank an Iranian frigate killing more than 80 people onboard. The Sri Lankan minister Nalinda Jayatissa told parliament that another Iranian vessel was sailing close to Sri Lanka’s territorial waters on Thursday morning. “We are making necessary interventions to resolve this issue, restrict the threat to lives and to ensure regional security,” said Jayatissa. Sources told the Guardian the ship was a logistical pipe-laying vessel, which is not categorised as a warship. It may be as close as 10 nautical miles from the western coast of Sri Lanka, putting it within the country’s sovereign waters. The sources said the ship, which is reported to have a crew of more than 100 onboard, had made an urgent request to dock at Colombo port for engine repairs. On Tuesday, a US torpedo destroyed the Iris Dena, an Iranian warship, as it headed back home after taking part in a military training exercise in India. The deadly submarine attack quickly sank the vessel and killed at least 87 sailors. According to the Sri Lankan opposition MP Namal Rajapaksa, the ship has sought the government’s permission to make an urgent port call but is yet to be given clearance. The president of Sri Lanka, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, was meeting with his cabinet and defence officials on Thursday to decide on a response. The targeting of the Iris Dena marked an escalation of the US-Israeli assault on Iran which began over the weekend and was the first incident of the conflict to spread beyond the Middle East. In the first Iranian response to the attack, the country’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said the US would “bitterly regret” the attack. “The U.S. has perpetrated an atrocity at sea, 2,000 miles away from Iran’s shores,” he said, in a statement on X. “Frigate Dena, a guest of India’s Navy carrying almost 130 sailors, was struck in international waters without warning.” The Sri Lankan navy and coastguard had responded to a distress call from the ship in the early hours of Wednesday morning, but by the time they arrived, the vessel had sunk and there was only an oil slick remaining, with survivors clinging on to life rafts. The navy’s rescue operation for missing sailors onboard the Iris Dena continued on Thursday, with at least six more bodies retrieved from the sea. Officials at the main hospital in Galle, where survivors were taken, said 32 rescued Iranians were still being treated under tight security provided by police and military personnel. Authorities were also making preparations to hand over to Iranian diplomatic officials the remains of 87 Iranian sailors killed by the US torpedo attack. The Sri Lankan government confirmed that Iran had requested assistance in repatriating the bodies of sailors recovered from the Iris Dena.
Intense waves of airstrikes have hit dozens of military positions, frontier posts and police stations along northern parts of Iran’s border with Iraq in what appears to be preparation by US and Israel for a new front in their war. A US official with knowledge of the discussions between Washington and Kurdish officials said the US was ready to provide air support if Kurdish fighters crossed the border from northern Iraq. A spokesperson for Israel’s military said the air force had been “heavily operating in western Iran to degrade Iranian capabilities there and to open up a way to Tehran and create freedom of operations there”. With the remote border regions of Iran threatening to become a new front, Iran has warned “separatist groups” against joining the widening conflict. Tehran said on Thursday it had launched strikes against Iraq-based Kurdish groups “opposed to the revolution”. “Separatist groups should not think that a breeze has blown and try to take action,” said the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Ali Larijani. Khalil Nadiri, an official with the Kurdistan Freedom party (PAK), based in northern Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region, said on Wednesday that Kurdish opposition group leaders had been contacted by US officials regarding a potential operation, and that some of their forces had moved to areas near the Iranian border in Sulaymaniyah province and were on standby. Meanwhile, Baloch militant groups opposed to the Tehran regime have also moved from remote mountain bases in Pakistan across the border into Iran, according to local officials. Experts predicted that backing armed groups from Iran’s ethnic communities would “open up a hornet’s nest”, aggravating divisions within the diverse country and increasing the risk of a chaotic civil war if the current regime collapses. Donald Trump called two leaders of Iranian Kurdish factions based in northern Iraq earlier this week and is open to supporting groups that are willing to take up arms to dislodge the regime, US media have reported. Clandestine operations in north-western parts of Iran where Kurdish communities are most numerous were “ramped up” after the brief war between Iran and Israel last summer, according to former intelligence and defence officials in Israel, the US and elsewhere in the region. There were reports in January of clashes between Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and groups of Kurdish peshmerga fighters who had entered Iran from Turkey and Iraq. Two weeks ago, five rival Iranian Kurdish organisations led by the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (KDPI) formed a new coalition dedicated to overthrowing the regime in Tehran. “Getting your groups aligned and united is the first play in the playbook,” said one former US defence official with experience of clandestine operations. A spokesperson for the KDPI would not confirm or deny that its leader, Mustafa Hijri, was one of the two Iranian Kurdish leaders Trump called but said it was the duty of “free, democratic societies around the world to help [Iranian Kurds] win freedom”. “We think that the regime is in a deeply weak situation … and will soon see its end days,” the spokesperson said. Hijri called on Iranian military personnel on Wednesday to abandon their posts and “return to their families”. The KDPI said Hijri had issued the call “in light of ongoing US and Israeli strikes against the regime’s military and security installations, [which] pose a direct and serious threat to the lives of the soldiers, particularly in Kurdistan”. The US has repeatedly used Kurdish fighters as auxiliaries providing vital assistance to US troops in the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and in the fight against Islamic State there and in Syria from 2014 to 2019. Alia Brahimi, a Middle East expert at the Atlantic Council, cautioned against using local forces. “If the ground fighting is outsourced to ethnic separatist groups, that will leave the US with even less ability to shape developments on the ground than in the conflict 20 years ago. If other separatists join the fray, the Iranian public may then rally around the regime in Tehran,” she said. “We’re only five days into the conflict, and we’re already seeing the dangerous consequences of the Trump administration’s lack of a strategic plan and the total absence of clarity over both rationales and objectives.” Operatives from the Israeli foreign intelligence service were already active inside Iran, according to one former Mossad official, while two analysts said that a series of short-range drone attacks launched against IRGC units and posts along the border in recent days also bore the hallmarks of Israeli intelligence. The drone attacks and other recent airstrikes along the Iran-Iraq border suggest an effort to open “access points” that would allow lightly-armed Kurdish fighters to cross into Iran and establish strongholds on the other side, said a former US defence official with recent experience of clandestine operations in northern Iraq. Such an operation would follow a well-established US strategy of embedding small teams of military or CIA specialists who can direct airstrikes with locally recruited ground forces. Such strategies were employed in Afghanistan in 2001 and in Syria and Iraq against IS. “If you have enough air power, and it is well coordinated, then [the Kurds] would just be walking through smoking rubble, and any regime counterattacks would be broken up well before there needed to be any shooting,” the former official said. The aim would not be to “march on Tehran” but to distract and drain Iranian military units, however, because US intelligence officials do not believe the lightly armed peshmerga could take on regular Iranian forces and IRGC units. The US has had a clandestine presence in northern Iraq for many years, with communication hubs, surveillance posts and training programmes for Kurdish and other Iraqi fighters. Israel is also thought to have a presence there. Both Axios and Fox News, citing a US official, on Wednesday reported that the militias had begun their offensive inside Iran. However, there was no official confirmation of that. Iran’s Kurds – who make up between 5% and 10% of the population – have a long history of separatist activism and broader opposition to the radical clerical regime. Kurds also fought alongside US forces in Syria, building close personal connections within the US military and intelligence services. They include many fighters from the KDPI and the other faction Trump reportedly contacted, the Kurdistan Free Life party (PJAK). Reports that the US had provided weapons in recent months are likely to be unfounded, however, with light arms and ammunition already widely available locally, analysts said. Support for Kurdish armed groups is likely to provoke deep concern in Turkey, Iraq and Syria, which also have sizeable Kurdish minorities. “If the administration is seriously mucking about or contemplating mucking about with the Kurds in Iran, they’re opening up a hornet’s nest. I think that Recep Erdoğan [Turkey’s president] will have a lot to say about it and so will others – count on strong reactions from Iraqi PM [Mohammed Shia al-] Sudani and Syrian president [Ahmed al-] Sharaa,” said Barbara Leaf, the former assistant secretary of state for near eastern affairs until 2025 and a distinguished diplomatic fellow at the Middle East Institute based in Washington DC. “Gulf leaders are likely to be very queasy about the prospect of such a US move.” Qubad Talabani, the deputy prime minister of the self-governing Kurdistan region of Iraq, said on Wednesday that the region was not part of the current conflict and would maintain its neutrality. There has been intensifying violence from separatist groups among Iran’s Baloch minority in the south-east of the country. Militants attacked an IRGC border patrol and a police checkpoint in December. Around the same time, the most active Baloch separatist group, Jaish al-Adl, announced a new coalition of armed factions that would seek to “strengthen the effectiveness of the struggle” against the “tyranny” of the Iranian regime. The coalition claimed responsibility on Tuesday for the assassination of the commander of a police station in the city of Zahedan, and issued a statement calling on “military personnel to … surrender to their fellow citizens so that no harm comes to them during these critical times”. Nasser Bouledai, an Iranian Baloch leader in exile in Europe, said he believed all Iranian communities would welcome US help, but that Washington had followed inconsistent policies in the past. The US was accused only months ago of cynically sacrificing the interests of Syrian Kurds in clashes with Syrian government forces. “I think [everyone] who is against the brutal cleric regime would accept support from the US but it should be a consistent and permanent support that resolves the issues of minorities – unlike, for example, when the US gave support for Syrian Kurds and then betrayed Kurds,” Bouledai said. “It is high time the US supports Iranian ethnic and religious minorities against the cleric regime and settles the question of Iran once and for all.”
In retaliation for the US-Israeli missile attacks, Iran has launched what amounts to all-out economic warfare. Should the conflict continue even for another week, its impacts will start to be felt around the world as the third price surge since the pandemic washes through global markets. For Britain, a further turn of the screw on living standards arrives just as political instability mounts at home, with the Labour and Conservative parties facing existential challenges to their left and right. Keir Starmer’s half-cocked response to war reflects a deeper, strategic problem for the UK: an economy built over decades for a globalised world cannot fit into a world where globalisation is falling apart. The creation of a tightly woven, world-spanning economy has also created points of huge stress and tension, where the flows of manufactured goods, people and raw materials that sustain it must pass through the narrow spaces of our globe. These include the 40-mile-wide Malacca strait, a channel for 80% of China’s imported oil flows; the Panama canal, only 91 metres at its narrowest point; the Bab el-Mandeb strait, between Yemen and Eritrea, through which 40% of trade between Asia and Europe passes; and the strait of Hormuz, a route for one-fifth of the world’s oil. Accidental, natural or intended, the effect of a blockage on any of these channels is the same. When, in 2024, the Panama canal was restricted by drought and the Houthis were blockading Bab el-Mandeb, the combined effect was to contribute 0.6 percentage points, or about one fifth of the global inflation over the year as shipping companies diverted away from both routes. The climate crisis has become a force multiplier for asymmetric warfare: extreme weather, such as central America’s multi-year drought, amplifies the disruptive potential of choke-point closures elsewhere. Today, the straits of Bab el-Mandeb and Hormuz, narrow apertures either side of the Arabian peninsula, are in effect under a blockade. But now it is the other great, global system of the world economy – its financial network – that multiplies the pure military threat. The decision by major insurers to cancel war-risk cover across the Gulf in effect closes both straits to shipping. Washington, scrambling for a response, has pledged to provide its own insurance, plus navy escorts – but both could take weeks to organise. Those shocks ripple around the world, but few developed countries are as exposed to choke points and raw material pressures as Britain. In a brilliant essay, the political economist Helen Thompson details how the wrenching turn to embrace a globalised world, encompassing the unleashing of the City of London on one side and the deindustrialisation of the north of England, Scotland and Wales on the other, left the UK uniquely vulnerable to the kinds of pressures today being exploited so mercilessly by Iran. Britain buys far more from the rest of the world than it sells to it, which means, in practice, it is reliant, collectively, on the rest of the world to maintain what passes for the standard of living in the UK. This external dependency is in two parts. The first is less serious and has, especially since the 2008 financial crisis, tended to attract more attention. Because Britain has so little to sell to other countries but wants to buy from them, it ends up in effect borrowing from everyone and selling off assets to try to cover the difference. As a result, the UK is dependent on what Mark Carney, the former Bank of England governor turned Canadian prime minister, called the “kindness of strangers”. In other words, Britain can carry on running this imbalance for as long as the rest of the world is prepared to finance it. The result, over time, is that the UK has built up extraordinarily large debts, concentrated in its financial institutions. According to Bank of England figures, Britain owes about 550% of UK GDP to the rest of the world, far above any other G7 country. If the kindness of those strangers ever wears thin, the UK could face some combination of rapidly exiting capital, a collapse in the value of the pound and soaring interest rates. In principle, this dependency is solvable because it depends not on real, physical stuff, but on agreements about pieces of paper and numbers in computer systems. Supporters of modern monetary theory take this truth and use it to talk up the ability of the British government to issue money or ignore its debt. Monetary constraints, they argue, are ultimately not a real constraint on economic activity, and at least in principle, it is possible to imagine a world in which the UK agrees to renegotiate its various debts with everyone else and so reduces this overwhelming external exposure. Unfortunately, this hideously complex problem is the easy part of Britain’s external dependency. The hard part, the one that Thompson zeroes in on, is something approaching an intractable issue. The UK is not only dependent on financing from the rest of the world; fundamentally, it is dependent on material resources from other countries to keep people fed, warm and with the lights on. This became dramatically apparent only a few years back, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine resulted in a catastrophic spike in Eurasian gas prices. Britain imports about 50% of the natural gas it uses, for electricity and for heating, and this is the “particular vulnerability” that Thompson highlights. It means war at the other end of Europe became, in the space of a few months, a disastrous worsening of living standards for most people as gas prices soared. Britain directly imports about 40% of the food it consumes, a percentage that is steadily rising, leaving it exposed to upsets in food markets around the world – whether from extreme weather disrupting harvests or, as today, geopolitical shocks. Worse, since the UK has to import virtually all the artificial fertiliser its intensive agriculture demands, as well as the energy needed to fuel tractors and warm greenhouses, the true dependency of food consumption on imports in Britain is far higher. Swati Dhingra, a Bank of England rate-setter, estimated the figure was closer to 80%. Defra’s national security report, finally released in January, emphasised the severe vulnerability of Britain’s food systems to climate breakdown and biodiversity loss. We are today in the early stages of a Ukraine-style shock. European spot prices for natural gas have risen 40% in the last few days; in the UK, where the market is inevitably tighter, the price spike is far larger, with spot prices almost doubling since the weekend. For now, households are somewhat protected, thanks to the haphazard mechanism of the energy price cap, introduced in 2019. But the next move in that cap is due in July, and Ofgem, mechanically processing the data and duty-bound to protect privatised profits, is likely to announce a dramatic jump in domestic energy prices. Meanwhile, about 15% of the world’s grain trade moves through the Bab el-Mandeb strait, and we can expect hydrocarbon-intensive fertiliser prices to rise closely with fossil fuels. Compounding the risks of poor harvests seen in the Mediterranean, food prices in the UK could soon start to rise. But these prices are not about bits of paper or numbers on a computer screen. They represent a real balance of material resources and consumption, and that makes them incredibly hard to shift. Britain could, over time, try to reduce its dependency on imported oil and gas, and this is a very solid argument for pushing for a China-style transition to renewables – something Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, stresses. The UK could also support a transition of its food system away from its import dependencies, for example, reducing dependency on artificial fertiliser, making greater use of new farming techniques – from drones to vertical farming – and encouraging more home and allotment use. Perversely, climate breakdown, disruptive as it is, may be making some parts of this shift easier in Britain, for a while. The first rice has been grown in Cambridgeshire, for example; the first pressing of olives from Essex took place last summer; populations of at least some sea creatures, such as native oysters, are booming. As the balance of economic activity shifts northwards, including the opening up of Arctic Sea routes to trade, the UK’s deindustrialised northern towns and cities could experience new leases of life. But all of this takes time. And it will take major investment, which is far harder to finance today than before thanks to rising inflation and the increasing costs of borrowing. The “big push” this needs to start with has to be met with redistribution downwards – first in tax terms, via wealth taxes and a broader overhaul of the system, chasing down profiteering and rent-seeking, and second, in shifting market prices. The latter will require breaking the outdated taboo on price regulations and caps – and any surge in energy prices today should be met with controls that protect households while respecting climate ambitions, taxing super-profits in energy and defence. If the situation worsens and the price of basic food surges once more, the demands for government to intervene will also grow louder and more determined. This is the secret that ties rural East Anglia to urban Hackney: a visible environmental crisis in the countryside is linked to a silent food-price crisis in cities, and both are left exposed to geopolitical shocks. The politics that can tie both sides of this equation together are the politics of the future. James Meadway is the host of the Macrodose podcast
John Healey has flown to Cyprus to calm the diplomatic fallout over a drone that evaded detection and hit an RAF base, which has prompted fury from local ministers. UK officials believe a drone that hit an RAF base in Cyprus evaded detection by flying low and slow when it was launched by pro-Iranian militia in Lebanon or western Iraq. But an investigation has been unable to establish conclusively where the Shahed-type drone was launched from. The attack occurred during the Iranian retaliatory bombardment over the weekend after the US and Israel launched a wave of strikes on Iran, killing the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The defence secretary arrived in Cyprus on Wednesday night amid a backlash there over the drone attack on RAF Akrotiri, which has led to the evacuation of families living on the bases and a bolstering of its defences. The attack on Sunday, and the two others intercepted later on Monday morning, are likely to have been launched by the Shia militia group Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran. The drone, a cheaply made Iranian design, is used as a one-way attack vehicle. Though there were no injuries and damage was limited, the attack and the failure to stop the drone hitting the base has prompted anger from the Cypriot government. The Cypriot defence minister met Healey on Thursday morning in Nicosia. The drone strike was the first against a British military installation at the bases on the island in 40 years. Keir Starmer, the prime minister, has said the drone was launched before the UK announced on Sunday evening that it would allow the US to use two of its bases for defensive action against Iran. No RAF bases on Cyprus are being used by US bombers. The Cypriot high commissioner in the UK, Kyriacos Kouros, said the country was “disappointed” with British failures to warn people on the island of the impending strike. “Let’s say the people are disappointed, the people are scared, the people could expect more,” he told BBC Newsnight. “More cooperation with the government of Cyprus to safeguard that such incidents won’t happen again.” On Monday, Cyprus’ president, Nikos Christodoulides, openly criticised the failure to stop the drone and said the country had no intention of participating in any military operation. “This is something that we must say we view with dissatisfaction,” the president’s spokesperson, Konstantinos Letymbiotis, said on Tuesday, adding that there was “no clear clarification that the British bases in Cyprus would under no circumstances be used for any purpose other than humanitarian reasons in Sunday’s statement by the UK prime minister”. He added: “All necessary steps will be taken to communicate our dissatisfaction, both with the way this message was communicated and the fact that yesterday there was no timely warning to citizens of Cyprus living near the Akrotiri bases.” The UK has sent a Royal Navy destroyer, HMS Dragon, which is expected to arrive in Cyprus next week, alongside two Wildcat helicopters with counter-drone capabilities. Defence sources said the Wildcats would improve the ability to spot and intercept the type of low-flying drones which evaded detection on Sunday night. Both France and Greece have deployed military support to the country including F-16 fighter jets and anti-missile and anti-drone systems. Families have been evacuated from RAF Akrotiri and several other areas. They are expected to remain away from the base for some time.