Dirty dossier exposes Britain’s involvement in Iran war as illegal

Britain’s role in the Iran war has been branded potentially unlawful by legal experts, fuelling demands for ministers to reveal what evidence justified allowing US forces to use UK bases

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BRITAIN’S involvement in the Iran war is unlawful, legal experts have said, raising concerns that a new “dodgy dossier” compelled Sir Keir Starmer into the disastrous Middle East conflict.

A legal opinion by law firm Leigh Day concluded that there were serious grounds to question whether Britain is facilitating unlawful military action.

In March, the US and Israel attacked Iran without telling their allies, sending global fuel prices soaring — with no end to the war in sight.

Then-PM Sir Keir was criticised by US President Donald Trump after refusing his demands to allow the US to use British bases for the initial wave of attacks.

A day later, the Labour leader said that he had been moved to allow the “limited” use of British military bases for so-called defensive operations. Sir Keir told MPs that he had been guided by law and the “national interest” following retaliatory strikes by Iran.

The legal opinion states: “We have been advised that there is an argument that the US’s status as the aggressor in the conflict means that any operations justified on the basis of collective self-defence are likely to fail to meet the necessity criterion. 

“This is because the US need not conduct defensive strikes in response to the armed attacks on the Gulf states: it could bring Iran’s attacks on the Gulf states to an end by ceasing its own military action against Iran.

“If this is right, the US has no right under international law to act in defence of the Gulf states, and the UK’s purported justification for the US’s use of UK bases entirely falls away.”

The TUC has repeatedly called the Iran war illegal, and the legal opinion commissioned by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) concludes there are “significant questions” as to whether Britain is breaching international law by relying on US claims that it is acting out of “collective self-defence.”

Leigh Day’s head of human rights Tessa Gregory said: “Calling a strike ‘defensive’ does not make it lawful. 

“Our advice raises serious questions about the government’s justification for allowing US forces to use UK bases. 

“The UK cannot treat this as someone else’s legal responsibility: if it knowingly facilitates unlawful military action, it risks responsibility under international law. 

CND general secretary Sophie Bolt said: “Given the serious risks of further loss of life should the US and Israel launch another military assault, and the challenges to Britain’s legal justification for its involvement in the war, PM Andy Burnham must revoke Trump’s permission for the use of British bases in any further military action on Iran, and help facilitate diplomatic efforts to end the war.”

A Stop the War Coalition spokeswoman added: “Andy Burnham is the latest in a long line of British prime ministers needing very little encouragement, by way of evidence, to support illegal US military action. 

“When he and other ministers claim that Britain is not involved in Trump and Netanyahu’s Middle East wars, they are lying. While British bases continue to be used by US bombers, Britain is involved.”

A Unison spokesperson said: “There was never anything ‘defensive’ about Trump’s illegal war of aggression on Iran. So the whole rationale for letting US bombers launch from UK soil was a fiction from the start.

“This war is causing both mass destruction abroad and, as the Prime Minister and Chancellor have stressed repeatedly, economic misery at home. It’s time for the British government to end its involvement.”

Leigh Day said that even if the argument of self-defence was available, “every military strike must still be necessary and proportionate” and there is “very little public information about how targets are selected, what intelligence is being relied upon, or whether strikes remain limited to genuinely defensive objectives.

“We still do not know what information ministers have received from the US in support of the government’s grant of permission in the first place, what legal and factual assessments have been undertaken by the government” and whether “sufficient due diligence is being carried out.”

Communist Party international secretary Kevan Nelson said: “It would seem that the Labour government, including some who were in Parliament at the time, has forgotten the lessons of the Chilcot inquiry into dodgy intelligence and misinformation used by its predecessors in 2003 to justify the war on Iraq.

“The British people are entitled to full disclosure of the purported evidence used by former PM Starmer to justify initial assistance to the US military in Iran.” 

Green Party leader Zack Polanski said: “It is deeply concerning that the government has not published any evidence that US war planes taking off from UK airbases are in fact involved in only ‘defensive’ operations.

“The Prime Minister and Keir Starmer need to come clean about whether they have put UK citizens at risk by participating in Trump and Netanyahu’s illegal war against Iran.

“The war has been widely condemned as a disaster and has ended up being the main driver of the global cost-of-living crisis.”

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