THE destructive synergy that turns every crisis of imperialist aggression into a domestic crisis for working people has been made plain by the last report from the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR). We are told that we can expect a recession later this year if the Middle East conflict is not sorted.

Tie this in with the word emerging from US military and intelligence sources, and reflected in the US media, that the conflict with Iran has as much future as it has a past and we are in the disaster zone for working people.

NIESR has produced its latest quarterly projection which suggests that Britain is set for slower growth and rising inflation. It predicts that the Bank of England will impose higher interest rates — already set at 3.75 per cent — to deal with this situation.

As ever, the powers that be act in the interest of the rich, the corporations and finance capital, where every hike in interest rates imposes disproportionate burdens on people in debt to mortgage companies and banks and thus, inevitably, suppresses demand while feeding profits.

Britain’s complicity in this US and Israeli war is visible to all who would look. US warplanes are based in airfields only nominally designated as belonging to the RAF. British war materials flow to the belligerents. GCHQ and the intelligence services are at the disposal of the United States and our government’s silence on the Gaza and Lebanon bombardments is evidence of complicity the more compelling because it is clothed in Keir Starmer’s hypocritical words.

Britain is bound to Donald Trump’s foreign policy by factors that vastly outweigh any reservations our government might have about his bizarre and capricious behaviour.

By now you would think that even the dimmest bourgeois politician — even those who think the British empire can be reconstituted for the 21st century — might wonder if their “special relationship” with the US might be reclassified as abusive. But not Starmer, or that buffoon David Lammy, once a foreign secretary so marginal to affairs that he was not consulted over who might be our country’s ambassador to what is nominally our principal ally.

Britain’s present ambassador to the Court of King Donald was spot on when he speculated that the only special relationship the US has is with its client state Israel.

The Middle East is the place where Britain’s imperial delusions came unstuck. Deeply in hock to the US for its wartime debts, British imperialism discovered its subaltern status when the bid to topple the Iranian leader Mohammad Mossadegh — who had the temerity to take control of his country’s oil industry — was big footed by the CIA.

We can imagine that the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (aka British Petroleum) has not forgiven the present Iranian regime for asserting its sovereignty.

Just in case delusions of imperial grandeur persisted, in 1956, the US blocked the Anglo-French and Israeli bid to take back control of the Suez Canal. Dispel any idea that this was a sudden attack of anti-imperialist virtue. The US was simply telling its subordinates that its interests were now primary.

Lord George Robertson, former secretary-general of Nato, has made it clear that our rulers have decided that the drive to prepare for a war with Russia (and possibly China) means the remnants of the welfare state are to be sacrificed to fund the EU scheme to form a continental strike force. Never an original thinker, this Labour imperialist is merely echoing Chancellor Friedrich Merz who said Germany cannot afford both rearmament and a welfare state.

Left unchecked, these people will impoverish us before getting us killed.