@ZackPolanski, Iran fired two ballistic missiles at Diego Garcia, the joint US-UK base in the Indian Ocean. Neither hit their target but the significance goes far beyond this engagement. Diego Garcia is a 4,000 kilometres from Iran. Iran's foreign minister said last month that Iran had limited its missile range to 2,000 kilometres. That was a lie. And the implications of that lie are ones that every European leader, every Green Party politician and every opponent of this operation needs to confront. Missiles that can reach Diego Garcia can reach virtually every capital city in Europe. London. Paris. Berlin. Rome. The threat you are demanding Britain appease just revealed it can hit further than anyone publicly acknowledged. Now let's address who started this war since you seem confused. Iran built, funded and directed Hezbollah for thirty years. Iran built, funded and directed Hamas, which carried out the October 7th massacres. Iran built, funded and directed the Houthis, who have been attacking international shipping for over a year. Iran supplied the drones and ballistic missiles Russia has been using to kill Ukrainian civilians. Iran plotted twenty assassinations on British soil in two years, every one of them thwarted by British security services. Iran hit RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus. Iran has been blockading the Strait of Hormuz, collapsing Gulf oil exports by sixty per cent and driving up the energy bills of the British households you claim to represent. And lest we forget what this regime does to its own people: it has massacred over thirty thousand of its own citizens who dared to protest against it, hanged dissidents in public, executed gay people and imprisoned women for removing their hijabs. This is not a government that deserves the benefit of the doubt. It is a theocratic killing machine that has been at war with its own people and the wider world simultaneously. Iran started this. It has been starting it, in one form or another, since 1979. On the promise of a parliamentary vote: Starmer made that commitment as Labour leader running for his own party's leadership in 2020. He was not Prime Minister. He had no constitutional authority to bind future governments. The convention, as he has explained, is that votes apply to offensive deployments of troops, not defensive operations conducted at speed. You know this. You are citing it anyway because it is the only procedural argument left when the substantive ones have collapsed. You lead a party that has never condemned Hamas. Never condemned Hezbollah. Never condemned the Iranian regime that funds both and has just fired ballistic missiles at a British base. Your concern for British military personnel and civilians rings hollow this morning. The regime you have consistently refused to condemn just tried to hit a base housing British forces. That is the context in which your statement lands. And it lands very badly indeed. "This is not a government that deserves the benefit of the doubt. It is a theocratic killing machine that has been at war with its own people and the wider world simultaneously."