Unions demand Burnham revoke Iran bombing base access
Ten union leaders representing 2.3 million workers have told Andy Burnham to pull UK bases out of the US bombing campaign against Iran.
More than a thousand Iranian civilians, including 181 children under ten, were killed in the first five days of the bombing campaign that began on 28 February, according to Iran’s Ministry of Health. British households, meanwhile, have seen energy bills rise by £221 a year and food bills by £32.80 a month since the war started, according to the unions’ own citation of Joseph Rowntree Foundation modelling. Two bills, one war, and Iran bombing base access ran through RAF Fairford and Diego Garcia, both open to the US bombers behind both of them.
That is the case ten trade union general secretaries put to Prime Minister Andy Burnham last week, in an open letter demanding he revoke UK permission for the two bases to be used against Iran. The signatories, representing more than 2.3 million workers, include Andrea Egan of UNISON, Eddie Dempsey of the RMT, Dave Ward of the CWU and Daniel Kebede of the National Education Union. Their argument is blunt: a government elected to fix the cost of living cannot keep helping to wreck it.
Iran bombing base access: what unions are demanding The letter does not call for a statement of concern. It calls for Burnham to withdraw UK approval for the two bases, the same demand that has sat unanswered since Keir Starmer first granted it in March. Citing modelling from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the unions say the war “has undone the marginal improvements to living standards made since 2024” and that “opposing this war is a necessity if the cost of living agenda is to succeed.” Ending the war, they write, is “essential for the government’s affordability agenda to be a success.”
No union letter turns off a war on its own, but this one lands on a lever that actually exists. RAF Fairford hosts the B-1 bombers central to the campaign, and Diego Garcia sits close enough to the theatre to matter operationally. The unions’ point is that withdrawing British base access would have, in their words, “a significant impact” on the US’s capacity to keep escalating. It is a demand aimed at the switch, not the rhetoric.
How Britain ended up hosting the war
To understand why that switch is still in the “on” position, it helps to go back to the start. The war opened on 28 February, when the US and Israel struck Iran while diplomatic talks were still under way, a decision the United Nations’ own human rights experts have since called twice, in March and again in July, an act of illegal aggression carried out without Security Council authorisation. More than a hundred international law scholars reached the same conclusion in a letter of their own, warning the strikes may amount to a crime of aggression.
Starmer’s government initially refused Diego Garcia to US forces on those grounds, then reversed the decision within 48 hours, permitting the base for what it called “specific and limited defensive purposes.” That formula has outlived the prime minister who coined it. Starmer resigned as Labour leader in June after losing his MPs’ confidence; Burnham took over on 20 July, Britain’s seventh prime minister in a decade. On only his second full day in office, before he had settled into Downing Street, his government confirmed at a COBR meeting that the Fairford and Diego Garcia arrangement would continue exactly as before.
The “defensive strikes” line meets the lawyers
That continuity is what the union letter is aimed at breaking, and it puts Burnham’s government directly at odds with its own foreign secretary’s public defence of the policy. On a visit to Washington last week, Ed Miliband told his US counterpart Marco Rubio that “we did not join offensive action in this war. We’ve allowed our bases to be used for defence by our allies, our Gulf allies, and that’s absolutely the right thing to do.” It is a real position, and one Miliband has reportedly resisted inside Cabinet even as he defends it in public.
It is also a position the UN’s own experts and the international law scholars who examined the war have already rejected, because the distinction between “offensive” and “defensive” use collapses once the underlying war itself is judged unlawful. A base cannot be neutral in a war of aggression simply because the aircraft flying from it are described as defensive. Public opinion has moved with that argument rather than against it: YouGov found opposition to the war climbing from 49 to 28 against in early March to 59% by 9 March, with support for British base use falling to just 23% by April and disapproval reaching 65%. That opposition is not uniform, Reform voters remain the one group where a majority, 57%, back the strikes, but among Labour, Liberal Democrat and Green voters it runs at 76%, 81% and 87% respectively.
Who pays, who’s exposed, what happens next
The unions’ own £221 and £32.80 figures are their costed claim, drawn from Joseph Rowntree Foundation modelling rather than an independently audited government estimate, and global energy and food prices have more than one driver. But the direction of travel, a war disrupting Gulf oil and gas flows pushing British bills upward, is not in serious dispute, and it is precisely why the unions have folded their anti-war demand into their cost-of-living one rather than keeping the two arguments apart.
For Burnham, the exposure is direct. He was elected Labour leader with 94% of his MPs’ nominations on a cost-of-living prospectus, and the same union movement that helped put him there is now telling him the two commitments, ending the squeeze on households and continuing to host the bombers, cannot both hold. No response to the letter from Burnham or Downing Street had been recorded at the time of writing. Stop the War Coalition has already scheduled a protest at RAF Fairford for 15 August, four days after the letter became public, with the war’s death toll estimated by Iran Human Rights (IHR), the Oslo-based monitoring group, at between 9,000 and 18,000.
