LORD CAMERON has form when it comes to imperial sabre-rattling. In his previous incarnation as premier, he wanted the RAF to take on the Syrian and Russian air forces.

It was the unlikely combination of Barack Obama and Ed Miliband that stayed his hand. Miliband led a cross-bench rebellion against British support for US-led air strikes on Syria in 2013.

Now Foreign Minister Cameron trots out the the timeworn justification for the deployment of imperial gunboats (and cruise missiles) as “self-defence.”

Having endured a decade of bombing by the empire’s proxy power Saudi Arabia — logistics, aircraft, maintenance, training and munitions supplied by Anglo-American big business and the RAF — the Yemenis know something about self-defence.

Even the BBC acknowledges that Yemen’s Houthis are no proxy for Iran. The size of Yemen’s Palestine solidarity demonstrations, which are replicated throughout the region, shows the depth of anger.

The Yemeni interdiction of ships at the service of the Israeli war machine and Israel’s allies is understood by millions as direct material aid to the Palestinians’ defence.

According to Campaign Against Arms Trade, the (US- and British-supplied) war on Yemen has killed an estimated 377,000 people through direct and indirect causes. Over 150,000, including tens of thousands of civilians, have been killed.

British and US politicians don’t really get the mood on the Arab street or for that matter throughout the global South — but the range of international support for South Africa’s case against Israel shows just how isolated from the international community Britain and the US are.

In the language of imperial power, the Houthis, Hezbollah and Hamas constitute an “axis of evil.”

Each of these formations is, of course, the product of distinct national realities. That important elements in what is a much broader “axis of resistance” assume a religious, even fundamentalist, form is inevitable given the real conditions in this part of the world. Israel in particular has long had the strategic aim of sustaining a divisive religiosity against secular forces in the Palestinian resistance. And the world historic setback experienced by socialism in the last century is a factor.

In these conditions we cannot reasonably expect oppressed nations to conduct their struggle according to the courtly rituals of a trade union negotiation.

It is, of course, too much to expect Sir Keir Starmer — the Establishment’s man in Labour — to echo William Morris who made the essential anti-imperialist point when mobilising support for the Sudanese rebels against British power. On March 23 1885 our colonial army, equipped with machine guns, mowed down 1,500 courageous but traditionally equipped Muslim fighters.

Our pioneer anti-imperialist wrote: “I will take you out of England for a moment or two, to the scene of these desperate skirmishes which have been going on on the shores of the Red Sea: Nobody I think finds it very difficult to understand why those Arab men — and boys — threw their lives away so resolutely: we may give the feeling different names, and call it fanaticism, patriotism, love of liberty: for my part it seems to one much the same spirit as that which held the long-haired Greeks at Thermopylae . . . . and if we praise these for the manner of their death, and the cause they died for, I cannot see how we can withhold praise from the desert warriors whom we have been slaughtering lately: it is no paradox to say that they died for the life they knew and loved, the only life which they could bear for the life that made them a real living part of humanity and not drilled and ordered machines.”