Is Britain trapped by the "special relationship"?
Rock & Roll Politics with Steve Richards
Podmasters
4.7 • 909 Ratings
🗓️ 10 March 2026
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Leaks from a national security council meeting suggest cabinet ministers challenged the assumption that Trump should have the automatic right to access British military bases. The grown up discussion was portrayed by some newspapers as a sign of weakness, which says more about those newspapers than Starmer and his ministers. Isn’t the Iran crisis showing that the ‘special relationship’ is largely a humiliating one for Britain and needs to be challenged more fundamentally once the current crisis is in some way resolved? If resolution is possible…
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to rock and roll politics, the podcast with me, Steve Richards. |
| 0:20.3 | Thank you so much for tuning in. |
| 0:22.2 | We've got a lot to cram in in our time together, some brilliant emails from the Rock and Roll Politics Cooperative. |
| 0:28.7 | But if it's okay with all of you, I'm going to reflect a bit on what is so interesting about kind of crises, emergencies, is light is shone on so many different aspects of almost the working assumptions of the media, the right in politics in Britain and elsewhere, and much else. |
| 0:52.6 | And I'm going to reflect on some of these elements of the ongoing |
| 0:58.0 | crisis, which was both predictable and predictable that Trump and Netanyahu hadn't thought |
| 1:06.1 | through the consequences. Just on that, we know that Trump doesn't think through consequences. We see him |
| 1:12.9 | live on television around 24 hours a day reflecting on international events of one sort or another. |
| 1:21.8 | And it's clear that that capacity to think through what you are doing and what might follow from it is not |
| 1:29.6 | part of his armoury, to put it at its most polite. And similarly with Netanyahu, who, I mean, |
| 1:38.8 | what a combination of that kind of character of Trump and Netanyahu, who will stop at nothing to remove a regime |
| 1:47.8 | without wholly thinking through again what follows. The same applies, by the way, in Gaza, |
| 1:54.2 | what's happening with this peace board. Well, that's a whole other issue. But here in Britain, |
| 2:04.3 | huge amounts of light has been shown on all sorts of different things and the assumptions that go with it. First of all, I want to look in a bit more |
| 2:10.1 | detail because at the end of last week, it had only just broken. You know that story? Some of you |
| 2:16.6 | might not have been following it, |
| 2:18.1 | but there was a leak from the first meeting of Britain's Security Council. On the Friday, |
| 2:25.7 | the launch against Iran happened on the Saturday. And the leak generated huge headlines. |
| 2:34.1 | It was a Tim Shipman's story in The Spectator. |
| 2:37.1 | The hard-right telegraphs splashed on it the next day and so on. |
| 2:41.8 | And what the leak from the Security Council, |
| 2:44.8 | some official, whoever it is, reveals again a set of default assumptions. |
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