Will the UK get dragged into the Israel-Iran war?

0:02Hi, I'm Charlie Duffield and welcome back to The Standard Podcast. If you're new here, hit follow and give us a rating. For all the latest news, head to standard.co.uk. Coming up later in the show, the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition has packed in more than ever, but is it too much to get a handle on? The thing to do is to go around without looking at the catalogue so you see the work in its own right. So without even looking, of course, you can recognise a Quentin Blake a mile off. But first, after five days of Israeli bombing and retaliatory Iranian missile strikes, the Middle East has been plunged into an incredibly dangerous moment today, Britain has warned.

0:49Donald Trump is considering joining Israel's strikes, targeting Iran's underground nuclear sites, as the two nations exchange fire for a sixth day. Donald Trump has said, I may do it, I may not, and that he will see what happens. Joining us now is The Standard's news reporter, Bill Bauket. Bill, can you tell us more about the latest attacks? Yes, so the latest is it doesn't seem to be ending this tit for tat between Iran and Israel. Little sign that Eva's willing to back down. On the Israeli side, today they hit two centrifuge facilities, one in Tehran and then another in Karaj. Now, these facilities are used to accelerate uranium production specifically for these alleged nuclear weapons, which Iran's critics said would be constructing.

1:44But then on the Iranian side attacking Israel, there were further missiles that were fired in Tel Aviv, which is the second largest city in Israel. Just now we've had a press conference from the Ayatollah, the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Kamendi. And he has warned Donald Trump, the US president, that there could be irreparable harm if the United States decides to intervene in the conflict, specifically on this Operation Rising Lion to target Iran's nuclear and military facilities. facilities. We know that Donald Trump is not a fan of war, but today it looks like he might join Israel's strikes with this bunker buster bomb.

2:30Is that right? Yes, it's exactly that. But the technical term for this specific missile is the GBU-57, also known as the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or MOP, as is how you want to call it. Now, this is designed to destroy bunkers. It weighs about 30 ,000 pounds, and it can be only launched by the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber. It can penetrate 200 feet underground before exploding, navigating through materials like concrete and rock. There's a suggestion that this can be provided to the Israelis, or if the United States does wish to intervene, they may use that to specifically target the underground layers for these nuclear facilities.

3:19However, there is a little bit of a discussion as to whether that will actually happen. The Pentagon has understood to have limited supplies of these NOPs, perhaps as little as 20 that were initially ordered and constructed by Boeing. And there's also the cost effectiveness given the estimated price tag for one of these, if it's around$20 million or about£15 million a piece. If they decide not to use these, they may, this is the Israelis, they may have to continue what they're doing. And that's pummeling the outside of the of these facilities may have to hit the entrances or cut their electricity supply in order to actually enter the complexes themselves and also to try and approach the scientists, the brains behind these alleged nuclear weapons.

4:11And there's also a bit of fear as well from the United Nations. It's Atomic Watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency. They say in one particular plant before the plant, uranium is now rich to about 83%. And for a nuclear weapon, it needs to be around 90 % purity. So there's sort of fears from environmentalists and also from politicians about radiological as also chemical contamination, if there was a strike and it were to specifically hit the nuclear itself. So we'll have to just wait and see what steps Mr. Trump's going to take. The question a lot of people are asking is whether the UK will get dragged into this war.

4:50What are your thoughts on this? Interestingly, the Prime Minister today is going to be chairing a COBRA meeting, the crisis management system in the Cabinet Office, to discuss the situation in the Middle East and whether the UK will indeed decide to intervene in this conflict. Now, the Israeli embassy in Britain say that the UK is not going to be involved despite allyship. Downing Street have also said that they want to de-escalate the situation amid fears of a full regional fallout in the Middle East. After last Sunday, Rachel Reeves was on Laura Kunzberg's show on the BBC, and she insisted that Britain is not at war with Iran despite sending RAF jets to the Middle East, despite warnings from Tehran that doing so could lead to British bases in the region being destroyed.

5:39And Reeves herself says, we're not at war because of our military support. Obviously, the situation is ever-changing. There's also the worry, as I said, about British bases being attacked and also American bases. Very close ally, obviously a member of NATO as well. The Article 5, attack against one member is an attack of another, so they would have to intervene in that respect. there's also the fear of what impact this wider conflict could have on things like oil prices and also in key trade routes we saw this happen quite recently with the intervention in Yemen against the Hufy rebels obviously we saw during the war in Ukraine and oil prices started shooting up and there's also you know the possibility of what this could mean for other UK and US assets in the Middle East as well, particularly close to the Persian Gulf and also the likes of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates as well.

6:37In my view, the UK, I would understand, you know, they've got lots of priorities. They wouldn't want to see themselves being directly involved in this conflict. But whether that will mean more diplomatic support or military support in jets or weaponry, that might be the approach that they wish to take. And finally, do you have anything else to add? This hard talk from Mr. Trump himself, in which he posted on his true social media platform, unconditional surrender, calling on the Ayatollah, who is now in hiding, actually, to give up and stand down from this, which is a massive change from when he was first seeking to become president of the United States.

7:20He is in many ways what we call in the world of politics an international realist. He doesn't really want to be involved in foreign conflicts and war. He'd rather focus on his own interests back at home, like the economy or fixing the Mexican border. And he indeed has criticized Barack Obama, his democratic predecessor in the past, for funneling what he described as the age of terror for his military interventions in Libya and also the fight against the Islamic State during the 2010s. Let's go to a break. Coming up in part two, our art critic on whether this year's summer exhibition is hit or miss.

8:01We'll see you back here in just a moment.

8:10Welcome back. If you're in need of some creative inspiration, you might be tempted to visit the Royal Academy of Arts infamous summer exhibition. You'll find new paintings by Tracey Emin and a playful large-scale installation by Ryan Gander in the courtyard, featuring five three-metre inflatable balls. The Standards art critic Melanie McDonagh has visited herself and is here to tell us more. Yes, it's really the central event in the art calendar. They're very proud to say that It's been held without interruption since 1769, almost. It's the foundation of the Royal Academy. And it brings together kind of a very diverse selection of work, chiefly paintings, print, and in more recent years, films, photography, and architectural works.

8:59So it's got kind of small models of architectural projects. It's got sculpture forms. It's got, obviously, work on canvas, but also textiles or mixed media. and it brings together what's happening on the art scene in Britain today. And in that respect, it's quite useful simply as a snapshot of where we are now. And what was your impression of this year's exhibition? There was no real sense of erection, very few big beasts. I can remember actually quite a long time ago now, the young British artists sort of moment at the Royal Academy where you had Tracey Meadon's famous Unmade Bed and Damien Hirst as both shocking.

9:42And that period did actually have a certain joie de vivre and a certain sense of direction. And then there were sort of periods when you still had David Hockney exhibiting. And more recently, just a couple of years ago, in fact, you had people like Paul Orego, who was genuinely a substantial artist. There's a lot of pieces that are interesting, and there are many pieces that are accomplished, and some pieces that are amusing and some are just risible. But overall, such an abundance of work that it's very hard to get a grip on what's happening in the contemporary art scene. And one looks in vain for the large sets of direction that you might have had even 20 years ago, let alone immediately after the war.

10:26Tell us more about some of the exhibits. It's meant to be about dialogue, which is one of those very useful categories which can embrace absolutely anything. Though here it's associated with various faintly political aspects of the world, like migration and other cultures and immigration and the natural world. There's a whole room given over to overtly the political work. So it's to do with race and migration, political tensions. You've got a number of politicised photographs, say a building with not my president to mark the Trump presidency. and you've got what looks like a glorified pincushion with pictures of people like Malala and Greta Thunberg on.

11:10And one thinks that this isn't really the height of artist political descent. It's not really there in the Goya League. And there is indeed nobody of the stature of Goya now to be able to articulate the passions of our own day. And many of those passions do deserve an artistic outfit. What else might someone see if they take a visit? There's also rather silly things, I think, like showpiece settings in the courtyard where you've got Ryan Gander's inflatable balls, giant black balloons posing unanswerable questions like, are there any rules to abstraction? Well, you tell me. But it's meant to be what passes through dialogue.

11:47And there's a lot of rather irritating stuff that remains like that now, whereby you can actually use slogan making as a substitute for art. And I think as a trick, it doesn't work anymore. We've had enough of it. It's lazy and silly. So without just respect to the individual artists as a genre, I think we should expel it in future. and then there's the abstraction and there was one time where I actually started laughing because there was an all-black canvas and the notion of the monochrome, the single-collar canvas is one that's been with us for about 100 years and so we got a picture of girls in their fresh communion dresses in the snow that's a good joke first time but it really doesn't replay so I think that we can set the bar rather higher than we do for admission to the gallery Back in 2010, there were 1 ,140 exhibits.

12:39Now there are almost 2 ,000. Among all those, did any actually stand out to you? As I say, there are over 1 ,700 works. It's far too much for anyone to take on board in a single sitting. There are some perfectly competent nature artists, for instance, but I wouldn't have said that the quality there is invariably such as you'd expect from the Royal Academy, given the number of entries that they would have had. It does end up to rather an incoherent, if sometimes amusing, vista of what's actually happening in Britain today. The dispiriting thing is that it's everything everywhere all at once, as indeed was the case last year.

13:16Some years, and even in quite recent years, as I say, there have been sufficient numbers of big beasts to give a sense of overall direction about what's happening in those parts of the art world which can set a direction for the rest. But I looked rather in vain for that. When it comes to kind of setting our stamp on this particular year, I don't think that anybody stands out from the crowd.

13:43and that's the standard for all the latest news head to standard.co.uk if you'd like to get in touch please do drop us a line at podcasts at standard.co.uk we'll be back here tomorrow at 4pm we'll see you then