Lord Hannan of Kingsclere was a Conservative MEP from 1999 to 2020, and is now President of the Institute for Free Trade.
I have not backed a British military operation so wholeheartedly since the Falklands War. If we are not prepared to use the Royal Navy to punish attacks on civilian ships, there is no point in our having warships at all.
I am generally sceptical of overseas military ventures. I was a rare conservative opponent of the Iraq invasion, and disliked our interventions in Afghanistan and Libya.
But I notice that most of my fellow peaceniks from those earlier conflicts are fully behind the strikes against the Houthi brigands. And with good reason.
If there is a permanent British interest, it is in unhindered maritime commerce. We live on a set of islands, and depend on the constant flow of containers through Felixstowe, Grimsby, Belfast, Southampton, and Liverpool.
Indeed, when you tot up all the overseas territories that make up our extended archipelago, we are responsible for 4.2 million square miles of ocean – an area around twice the size of India or 30 times the size of the UK.
Global insurance, law, and shipping are headquartered in London. More than any other nation on Earth, we have an interest in open sea lanes. We also have the capacity to defend that interest. For all that we moan about cuts, the Royal Navy remains the second most powerful fleet on the seas.
Some complain that we are again acting as a reflexive American proxy, backing a military venture from a country that won’t give us so much as a trade deal in return. But the viability of the Red Sea shipping route matters vastly more to us than to the US. This time, the Americans are helping us rather than the reverse.
Then again, the openness of the Red Sea matters even more to other countries. Jordan is almost wholly reliant on freight brought through the Suez Canal. Egypt depends on the revenue from the tolls paid by transiting tankers. We and our American allies are doing our friends in the region an immense favour.
Indeed, our action will benefit almost the entire world except the Houthis who, it cannot be repeated too often, engaged in an act of war against us when they launched 21 drones and missiles at HMS Diamond, making retaliation inevitable.
Incredibly, there are people in this country who are so reflexively anti-British that they line up with any enemy, however vile, that presents its fight as anti-colonialist. “Yemen, Yemen, make us proud, turn another ship around!” chanted left-wing demonstrators in Trafalgar Square at the weekend. The strikes against the Houthi terrorists were “shameful, deplorable, and beyond unacceptable,” Labour’s Zarah Sultana told protesters.
If you have been conditioned to see Britain as a wicked and predatory imperial power, you will fit any conflict, however implausibly, into that narrative. The official Houthi slogan – “Death to America! Death to Israel! A curse upon the Jews!” – will not put you off in the least. All you will see is another colonialist war.
In fact, many of our supposedly colonialist wars were exactly like this one: campaigns undertaken by the Royal Navy for the benefit of humanity at large. We were forever going after corsairs and slavers. That, indeed, is how we came to have a presence in Aden, established in 1839 as an anti-piracy station.
Most of our African dependencies were acquired in the teeth of government resistance following pressure from abolitionists and evangelicals. The British Museum’s Benin Bronzes, for example, which woke campaigners want to send to Nigeria, were seized and sold to defray the costs of a punitive expedition against a vicious slave state that had massacred envoys.
Instead of seeing the Houthi strikes through the prism of colonialism, try reassessing colonialism through the prism of the Houthi strikes. We were acting then as we are now: as the grown-up in the room.
Sure, some British colonies were acquired out of opportunism and rapacity, but many more were conceived as temporary mandates, to be abandoned once slavery had been eradicated and roads, schools and clinics built – which is more or less what happened.
None of this is to say that the Houthis will be easily beaten. Like the Taliban and Hamas (who were the Houthis’ mortal enemies until five minutes ago) they are embedded in a largely sympathetic population. Indeed, their sudden sympathy for Hamas is chiefly a bid for popularity in Yemen. Attacking Israel is the easiest way to extend their support beyond that country’s Shia minority.
For nine years, Saudi and Emirati forces, armed by the US, have sought to eradicate the Houthis, displaying little of the squeamishness that Western countries have about civilian casualties. Yet, not only are the Houthis still in place, they are closer than ever before to becoming the government of Yemen. Seeing off an Anglo-American attack would only enhance their prestige.
So we need to hit them hard – hard enough, at least, to weaken them vis-à-vis their rivals within Yemen.
And we must make clear that our action has nothing to do with the conflict in Gaza. People of good will can disagree about the Israel/Palestine dispute. But no decent person can support piracy or missile attacks on peaceful ships.
Someone has to defend the global order. Not for the first time, that someone is the Anglo-American alliance.