This is with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.
“Chutzpah” is a useful Yiddish word meaning “brazen cheek” or “shameless effrontery”, the classic example of its use in this sense being the young man who murders his parents and at his trial asks the court to show mercy on the grounds that he is an orphan.
Reform UK shows a similar chutzpah in presenting itself as a patriotic party representing the British common man and defending British culture against foreign incursion – all without possessing a single idea or policy not generated by the American right.
Within days of Nigel Farage being secretly filmed ordering oysters and Black Velvet (chilled champagne and Guinness) as he butters up a big-business American donor (in fact, an actor who is part of an undercover investigation by the Verbatim group for Channel 4), he is “humbled” by the gift of £72n from by two crypto billionaires until recently resident in Thailand and Hong Kong.
Yet this shallow bunch at the head of Reform intend nothing less than the demolition of British liberal democracy, and its replacement by an authoritarian regime bulldozing through centuries of ancient restraints on state power. Though the media understandably fixated on the donations, Farage frankly outlined in his conference speech how the first 100 days of a Reform government would see a national emergency declared, parliamentary opposition overwhelmed, non-compliant judges replaced, and civil servants who “try to obstruct us” sacked. After two years of Trump quasi-dictatorship, it takes real chutzpah on Farage’s part to say he wants much the same thing for Britain.
Also deeply un-British is the paranoid political culture of Reform, for all their Union Jack waving and national anthem singing. In Medway, Kent, a Tory councillor called Robbie Lammas who defected to Reform last October, then redefected eight months later, says how struck he was by the suspicion with which he was viewed in Reform for getting much of his news from the mainstream media, and not from dark corners of the web where conspiracy theories are rife and taken as proven fact. He noted that day-to-day talk in Reform circles consisted largely in blaming others for anything that went wrong, though without any idea how to put it right.
This addiction to seeking out scapegoats and hidden enemies by the British hard right was graphically illustrated by an incident in Doncaster one Saturday afternoon late in August when anti-immigrant speakers at a rally were interrupted by the ringing of church bells.
Some 15 of them stormed into the nearby church to accuse the vicar, the Rev Canon Dr Richard Firth, of deliberately ringing the bells to drown them out. “You’re supposed to be a Christian preacher,” said one. “Yet you clearly don’t support British values and you don’t support Britain, because you’re happy to see this country being invaded.” To this the Rev Firth mildly replied: “It’s Saturday. The bell ringers practice on Saturday.”
It may be too easy to highlight the phony patriotism of Reform, and an emboldened British far right, and expect that British voters en masse will inevitably feel collective revulsion at toxic ideological transplants from Trump’s America. Grim experience shows that the anti-foreigner and anti-minority core beliefs of populist nativists the world over are proof against scandal and open hypocrisy. “Nobody ever went bust betting against the intelligence of the American people,” runs the cynical old American political adage – and one should be none too sure the same does not apply to Britain.
Opponents of Trump and Farage are feeling hopeful for now. The US President is being swallowed up in an expanding, unwinnable and unpopular war against Iran. Farage and Reform are being battered by successive scandals and their support is declining gently in the polls. But neither Trump nor Farage are going out of business and the rot in the American and British political ecosystem that engendered them is still spreading its poison.
The future strengths and weaknesses of the hard right are being endlessly assessed, but it is more rewarding to ask why it faced such feeble resistance in the past and whether that resistance will be stronger in future. A striking feature of the American political landscape in Trump’s second term has been the speed with which individuals and institutions crumbled and collaborated in the destruction of American liberal democracy 250 years after the Declaration of Independence.
Why did the elites cave in so swiftly to Trump in 2025, and do we see something of the same cowardly process at work in the UK?
Rich and powerful give servile obeisance to Trump
I have been reading Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era by Jacob Weisberg. The title is an obvious but telling play on John F Kennedy’s book Profiles in Courage, published in 1956 when he was a senator, which was about eight US senators who took unpopular stands on matters of principle.
Weisberg writes that from the start of Trump’s “second term we were suddenly participating in an anti-liberal experiment and able to see how all manner of people responded to it.” He shows that for the most part, rich and powerful figures gave immediate and servile obeisance to the new autocratic power in the White House.
Law firms that had made their reputations fighting civil rights cases ran up the white flag with unseemly haste; television stations purged their ranks of Trump critics and paid millions in bogus lawsuits; famous universities dropped any pretence of defending academic freedom; West Point military academy removed novels by famous black writers from its library.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos had bought the during the first Trump administration under the motto “Democracy Dies in Darkness”, but in 2024 he intervened to stop the editorial board endorsing Kamala Harris as presidential candidate, and in 2026 a third of the paper’s newsroom lost their jobs. Leaders of the Democratic Party were notorious in their passivity as Trump’s acolytes sent ICE paramilitary into cities to terrorise people of colour and intimidate protesters.
How does the UK measure up against the US in resisting the anti-liberal wave? Parliament and the courts have fought back against authoritarianism with a fair measure of success, but then they have not come under the same pressure as their American counterparts. Overall, their record in defending liberal democracy is spotty: few spoke up for Julian Assange during his long years of harsh imprisonment, though the most famous newspapers had published the files he was accused of abstracting.
Sir Keir Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, disgracefully banned Palestine Action as terrorists and police arrested retired headmasters and doctors who peacefully protested. Ed Sheeran is rightly being targeted for his craven kowtow to the powers-that-be during his tour of the US, but the BBC has for several years adopted a similar self-serving neutrality between those who approve the killing 75,000 civilians, including 20,000 children, in Gaza, and those who denounced this as a terrible crime. I doubt if the reputation of either singer or broadcaster will ever truly recover.
The real test for the Andy Burnham Government will be its willingness to denounce Trump root and branch, which it must do if it is to portray Farage as an unpatriotic proxy of a foreign power abroad and the instrument of billionaire donors at home. Farage and Reform may find that chutzpah is not enough.
The US and Iran escalate and counter-escalate but their war has now reached a crucial stage. In the late summer, the US had been trying to erode Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz by shepherding oil tankers with their transponders switched off through Omani waters. They were having some success and tankers were getting through, though not as many as Trump and his weird White House pretended.
The Iranian counter-stroke was a long-premeditated operation whereby the Houthis, Iran’s allies in Yemen, advanced swiftly along the Red Sea coast, first capturing the port of Mokha, and then Perim island in the Bab al-Mandab – giving the Houthis full control of the southern entry and exit from the Red Sea. The Saudis responded with 450 air strikes, but so far there is little sign of Yemen’s pro-Saudi Internationally Recognised Government (IWG) forces rallying to make an effective counterattack.
At the same time, a paramilitary group allied to Iran and based in or near Basra, in southern Iraq, fired drones or missiles at Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline, through which had been flowing much of the Saudi oil that could no longer be exported through the Strait of Hormuz.
The 750-mile-long pipeline to Yanbu on the Red Sea has been Saudi Arabia’s plan B, its alternative route for exporting oil, ever since it was built at the start of the Iran-Iraq war in 1981. After the attack from Iraq, the pipeline is now closed for an estimated four to six weeks, with satellite images showing black plumes of smoke 50 miles long drifting across Saudi Arabia. The Saudis and the US have been demanding that the Iraqi government clamp down on pro-Iranian paramilitaries, but, since Iraq is 60 per cent Shia – and the last US forces leave on 30 September – nothing is less likely to happen.
The strategic situation in the Middle East has been transformed by the Yemen-Saudi war. Iran now controls, directly or indirectly, two of the greatest trade chokepoints in the world. It would need a full-scale ground offensive to dislodge the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from Hormuz and the Houthis from Bab al-Mandab.
Iran has won another strategic victory. Washington had hoped the regime in Tehran was getting weaker seven months into the war, but instead it has just become stronger. Moreover, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman twice asked for US air support and was turned down – another blow to American credibility as a friend and ally in the region.
Saudi Arabia is today under attack from three sides: Iran from the east, Houthis from the south, Iraqis from the North. There may not be much MBS can do about it. The US does not want the Saudi kingdom and other Gulf states to talk directly to Iran, but at some point they will have to do so.
How will Trump – and in the background Israel – react to this latest strategic setback? Will they counter-escalate?
This would have to be something close to total war to counterbalance the latest Yemeni-Iranian success: Trump could double down on his stakes and relaunch an air campaign – probably aided by Israel – after the midterm elections in the US. This would be heavy bombardment aimed at destroying Iranian infrastructure: electric power plants, oil refineries, desalination plants, bridges. Destruction would certainly be great and many would die, but Iran would not surrender and would counter-escalate.
The Iranian infrastructure is vulnerable, but the same is even truer of Arab Gulf states. It may also be that Iran has missiles capable of hitting US naval vessels but has not yet used them.
Beneath the Radar
Saudi Arabia has a military budget of about $80bn a year, yet it is currently being bested on the battlefield by impoverished Yemen. The US has the largest military budget in the world at $954bn, but it has notoriously failed to defeat – and in many respects has been outfought by – Iran.
Yet these striking developments in real-world warfare have largely been ignored by those engaged in the furious debate about raising the British defence budget. Instead, there is a general presumption, shared by an uncritical media, that more defence spending guarantees enhanced military capacity, though the evidence is all to the contrary.
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch proudly pledges to push UK defence spending, currently £62bn in 2025/26 or 2.3 per cent of GDP, up to 3 per cent by 2030. To this end, she would reimpose the two-child benefit cap, reform housing benefit, and end VAT exemption for Motability cars. “Conflict is coming,” warns Badenoch. “We must act now.”
In reality, Iran perceived 20 years ago that it could not match the US and Israel in vastly expensive military aircraft, but it could compete in drones and precision guided missiles. By 2019 it had become a drone superpower, as demonstrated when it successfully targeted Saudi oil facilities in that year, briefly cutting Saudi oil output in half. This strike ended American dominance in precision guided bombs and missiles, which it had enjoyed since the first Gulf war against Iraq in 1991.
Ignoring these developments, the UK and other Western states were still ploughing money into developing vastly expensive armoured vehicles that will be death traps in the age of the drone. Remember how only a few years back, Britain, Germany and the US were giving Ukraine ultra-modern tanks – the Leopard 2, the MI Abrams, the Challenger 2 – which were billed as battle-winning at the time, but today are probably rusting in some Ukrainian depot far from the front line.
Another change in the age of the drone is that these weapons are cheap and can be mass-produced at low cost. Defences can be overwhelmed by drone swarms. Sea warfare as well as land warfare is being transformed. British aircraft carriers HMS and HMS Prince of Wales cost £6.2bn altogether, but are vulnerable to missiles costing a fraction of this. Naval forces in their present form are becoming obsolete.
Some experts hold that Iran could hit US naval vessels with missiles if it wanted to, but is holding back because this is an option it wants to retain for a later escalatory phase of the war with the US.
Despite Japanese aircraft attacking Pearl Harbour on 7 December 1941, the US navy went on using it as a base (the Japanese had missed the American aircraft carriers and fuel storage tanks). Not so at the giant US navy hub in Bahrain, which was the base for the US Fifth Fleet, after Iranian drone and missile attacks wrecked it.
Instead, the US has to use its base 2,140 miles away at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, which explains why American military logistics are so stressed. The Pentagon inspector general’s report last week started to admit officially for the first time the extent of US losses. It reads: “USCENTCOM [US Central Command] reported that Iranian strikes damaged and destroyed hundreds of buildings and structures at U.S. bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman, and Jordan during the conflict. In addition, dozens of US aircraft were destroyed or damaged during OEF [Operation Epic Fury].”