JEREMY CORBYN’S Bill demanding parliamentary oversight of the use of British bases for foreign countries’ wars is urgent and necessary.

Our craven Prime Minister has already given the United States permission to use British bases in the Middle East for its war of aggression against Iran.

Reversing that is essential to keep Britain out of a war we did not choose and which most British people oppose. It is also the most immediate practical step we can take to limit the escalation of the war we are already seeing across the Middle East.

Donald Trump was emboldened to start war with Iran because no US ally was prepared to stand up to his illegal aggression against Venezuela at the start of the year.

Having kidnapped the leader of one country, he has now killed the leader of another; still our government won’t acknowledge that the Trump White House is the biggest threat to peace and stability worldwide.

War crimes of the worst sort are normalised by the refusal to hold perpetrators to account. Having watched his allies make excuse after excuse for the mass murder he has inflicted on Gaza, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu fears no retaliation for incinerating 150 schoolgirls in Iran.

This impunity is dangerous: it leads the US and Israel to conclude they can do what they like. That means more atrocities and more wars.

Turning our bases into targets by allowing the US to use them to strike Iran increases the risk the war will spread.

And escalation is inherent in this war, started without defined aims or an exit strategy.

So poorly planned, in fact, that Trump himself admits the US didn’t make arrangements to evacuate its embassies in the region because “it happened very quickly” — a poor excuse in a conflict you started yourself. US Senator Elizabeth Warren, after a classified briefing, is blunt: “The Trump administration has no plan in Iran.”

It hopes for regime change, but this has never been achieved by bombs, and Iran’s size and geography would make a ground invasion a nightmarish prospect even if Iran’s neighbours were co-operative, which is unlikely given the risks. So the temptation will be to keep hitting Iran with ever more destructive weapons, provoking in turn heavier retaliation.

Restricting US options in this scenario — as Spain has done by refusing permission for its bases to be used — makes a difference.

And it would reflect public opinion. Most people do not want to be dragged into a Middle Eastern war. Indeed most people oppose Britain’s role in arming and supplying the Israeli war on Palestine, and giving MPs a say over the use of bases like RAF Akrotiri on Cyprus would help stop that, too.

Not because most MPs support peace — or are “very silly,” as Tory leader Kemi Badenoch claims while arguing Parliament should not get to decide on issues of war or peace, an admission that suggests hostility to the very principle of elected government.

Badenoch’s fears reflect ruling-class trauma over Parliament’s refusal to endorse bombing Syria back in 2013, when a Labour opposition under Ed Miliband defeated a Tory government. That itself was the fruit of years of extraparliamentary pressure, the mass anti-war movement of the Blair years, the prevailing scepticism about wars our leaders say are necessary which has been won and maintained across much of British society.

So it is extremely welcome that, alongside independents and left Labour MPs, Greens including the newly elected Hannah Spencer have co-sponsored Corbyn’s Bill. It offers the prospect of building a broad anti-militarist coalition and stronger links between the Greens and the peace movement outside Parliament.

That movement, gigantic on the streets as we have seen on the Palestine demos, is barely reflected at Westminster. But it needs to make itself felt there, if Iran is not to be a stepping stone to a new world war.