Iran ‘is our war,’ says UK lawmaker Greg Smith — contrary to PM Starmer’s claims

LONDON — Ever since the United States and Israel jointly launched strikes on the Iranian regime in late February, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has repeated the mantra: “This is not our war.”

Polls suggest Starmer’s position may be popular, but it’s not shared by his Conservative opponents.

“This is our war. It has already reached the United Kingdom,” says Greg Smith, the newly appointed chair of Conservative Friends of Israel, citing the 20-plus Iranian-backed terror plots in Britain detected by MI5 between late 2024 and late 2025. “It’s fantastic that our security services have foiled those plots, but at some point, if they keep trying, one will get through,” said Smith.

Overnight Sunday, northwest London’s Kenton United Synagogue was targeted in an arson attack. A pro-Iranian government Islamist group claimed responsibility for this and a recent spate of attacks across Europe on US, Israeli and Jewish targets.

Smith, the Conservative MP for the constituency of Mid Buckinghamshire in southern England, tells The Times of Israel in an interview that “nobody wants war.” But, he adds, he does not doubt that getting rid of the regime in Tehran is “a fundamentally good thing.”

“That Iranian regime is the root of all evil when it comes to the financing of terror, the [main] victims of which are Israel,” Smith says. “This is a regime that massacres its own people for having the audacity to protest in the tens of thousands.”

Smith welcomes the two-week ceasefire between Iran and the US, but says “the real test” is whether the Iranian regime “ceases all hostility towards Israel, stops funding terror organizations across the region and desists in its own malign behavior towards the West.”

Since Smith sat for the interview, the US has imposed a naval blockade on Iran as talks yielded little movement on the issues of the Strait of Hormuz and the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program.

US President Donald Trump has expressed confidence that the pressure tactic could push Iran into accepting an agreement that would bring with it better ties with the West and a level of prosperity not seen in decades, but Smith seems less optimistic that the current hardline regime can be successfully negotiated with.

“This is not a regime that is interested in talking,” he says, adding that negotiations over its nuclear program simply resulted in a “level of enriched uranium that is near as, damn it, a nuclear weapon. Talks didn’t work very well in that, did they?”

His position on the conflict reflects the more hawkish stance adopted by the Conservative leadership towards the conflict. Opposition leader Kemi Badenoch welcomed the US-Israeli strikes and attacked Starmer for failing to give the US permission to use American bases on British soil for its initial operations. As the domestic economic fallout of the war has mounted, and public opposition to it has stiffened, the Tories have moderated their tone without substantively altering their position.

The Conservatives are especially critical of the Labour government’s preparedness for a conflict in the region. The British military, charges Smith, appears to have been held back, and Starmer “seemed to be taken by surprise” by the initial US strikes, despite Trump signaling “for weeks” that he intended to take action.

“The UK had no assets in the region; nothing there ready to defend our own bases if nothing else,” Smith says. “When the [Iranian] missile was launched at [joint UK-US military base] Diego Garcia, we were essentially defenseless. We had to rely on the Americans to defend… our own asset.”

British allies, such as the UAE and Bahrain, which have come under sustained Iranian bombardment, he believes, “are right to feel let down that the United Kingdom wasn’t there to help them.”

While Starmer eventually compromised, allowing the US to use UK bases for defensive operations, Smith contrasts the prime minister’s approach to the manner in which his predecessor, Rishi Sunak, used British forces to help defend Israel when it came under attack from Iran in April 2024.

‘The UK had no assets in the region; nothing there ready to defend our own bases if nothing else’

Smith is equally frustrated by the government’s failure to proscribe Iran’s paramilitary Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, despite a pre-election commitment to do so, and readily concedes the Tories failed to act during their 14-year stretch in office.

“I called for the last Conservative government to do this … and I’ve carried on calling on this government to do it,” Smith says.

“It’s not even contentious in the House of Commons,” he says, noting that, aside from the Tories, many on the Labour backbenches and even the dovish Liberal Democrats are supportive. “It is actually beyond me, not least given the foiled plots on United Kingdom soil… why no government has been willing to go there [and ban it].”

Unsurprisingly, Smith is highly critical of Labour’s approach towards Israel, attributing it to domestic political pressures. Within months of the party taking office, its backbenchers became “very irritable,” Smith says.

Amid what he calls a “constant flow of misinformation” about the war in Gaza, Smith believes the government began to increasingly give ground to a restive Labour party.

The partial ban on arms exports to Israel and the decision to suspend negotiations on a free trade agreement culminated last summer in Starmer’s decision to recognize a Palestinian state.

It was, Smith says, “a deeply domestic political decision.” Similarly, he adds, the UK continues to refuse to follow Germany in lifting its arms embargo, despite the ostensible end of the Gaza conflict. Again, the only explanation, he believes, is “domestic political pressure.”

Smith is adamant that, had the Conservative government been re-elected in July 2024, it would not have followed Australia, Canada and European allies like France down the path of recognition.

“There is no way on earth a Conservative government would have recognized a state of Palestine at a point where Hamas was still actively militarized… still clearly rearming for a wider offensive, still with the threats from the Houthis, Hezbollah in Lebanon, [and] the IRGC in Iran,” Smith says.

‘You can’t get into a two-state solution when one of the key components of one of those states is still run by terrorists’

The Tories, says Smith, maintain their “broad support for a long-term two-state solution” while recognizing “you can’t get into that two-state solution when one of the key components of one of those states is still run by terrorists.”

None of this is likely to improve, believes Smith, with the fiercely anti-Israel Green party competing hard with Labour for left-wing voters. Starmer’s loss of a special election to the Greens in a formerly solid Labour seat in northwest England in March left the party reeling.

“The level of sectarian politics there was off the charts,” says Smith. “It’s like we’ve never seen before in the United Kingdom. Anyone would think that the Green candidate was the Gaza candidate.”

As he notes, Labour’s defeat followed a series of politically bloody local battles during the 2024 general election, which saw four “pro-Gaza” independents snatch seats from the party in districts with a large Muslim population.

“I think Labour have just become too afraid of their own shadow,” Smith says.

Smith believes the Israeli-Palestinian issue is disproportionately raised by MPs in the UK parliament and says “it seems to be all some Labour MPs want to talk about.”

The focus, he says, is “ideological.”

“It’s not just the parliamentary time that’s spent on it,” he says. “It’s the narrative that ministers themselves are having to push out in order to satisfy that appetite from their own backbenches.”

Smith worries that some of that parliamentary focus and narrative around Israel has a negative impact beyond the corridors of Westminster, impacting the media and wider public perceptions with “knock-on effects” in terms of antisemitism “on our own shores.”

While headlines are made by “appalling incidents” such as the Yom Kippur terror attack on the Heaton Park synagogue and last month’s arson attack on four ambulances belonging to a Jewish-run volunteer organization in north London, Smith believes it’s important to recognize the pervasive sense of insecurity affecting the Jewish community. He was appalled, for instance, to attend a Hanukkah event in his constituency in December 2024 and hear the local rabbi remark that “we no longer feel safe to meet as a community.”

“How on earth have we got to that point as a country where Jewish people don’t feel safe to congregate?” Smith asks.

Emails from Jewish constituents are “some of the most heartbreaking emails I’ve ever received as a member of parliament,” he says. “A Jewish lady [who] was marrying a Christian guy wrote to me basically saying she felt the need to completely remove all symbols of her Jewish faith, all parts of her Jewish identity in order to keep her future husband safe.”

Smith admits there is no “magic bullet” for tackling antisemitism.

“It’s going to take years of hard work to put right again,” he says, but believes the focus must be on addressing the “root causes,” especially in parts of society where antisemitism is tolerated.

‘How on earth have we got to that point as a country where Jewish people don’t feel safe to congregate?’

The first priority, he says, is places of higher education, where he believes “some of the worst antisemitism” occurs. He is angered by what Jewish students tell him they have to endure on campuses and by the fact that “university vice-chancellors don’t seem to even think it’s a problem.”

And Smith is adamant that antisemitism can’t be fully tackled while misconceptions about Israel are so rife. Late last year, he met with juniors and seniors at a local school in his constituency. When his support for the Jewish state was raised, Smith asked his audience whether any of them had ever visited Israel — none had — and then asked how they pictured the beach in Tel Aviv.

“I told them it is a postcard, a symbol of the most tolerant, diverse place I have ever been, where you’ve got Jewish people, Christian people having a few beers or playing volleyball, a Muslim family, some in full burqas, sitting maybe having tea or a picnic or equally playing games on the beach, a couple of gay guys kissing. Nobody bats an eyelid. It’s just normal. It’s open, it’s tolerant, it’s democratic, it’s freedom-loving,” he says.

The problem, says Smith, is that the idea that this was Israel was “just beyond” his young audience.

“That feeds into this narrative that exists in so many people that then becomes antisemitism,” he says. “It is so deeply disturbing and challenging.”

Smith admits it’s a difficult time to be a supporter of Israel in the UK, but doesn’t allow that to deter him.

“It is an important time for those of us who are friends of Israel, supporters of Israel, to stand up and be counted in what is a very hostile environment in the United Kingdom and in many Western countries at the moment,” he says, adding he was a member of CFI long before becoming an MP in 2019.

When the call came inviting him to chair the organization, Smith knew he couldn’t duck it: “I thought, ‘If I don’t do this now, that’s just wimping out.’”

He admits that there may have been “a politically easier path” for him. But, he quips, “I’m not known for taking easy paths.”

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Iran ‘is our war,’ says UK lawmaker Greg Smith — contrary to PM Starmer’s claims

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