AS I type this, thousands of children in Gaza are facing an agonising final few moments on Earth, having spent their short lives being told by the world, in word and deed, that they don’t deserve to be in it.

If they’re lucky, they’ll know nothing of it. But we do.

We’ve known since the first bomb of Israel’s latest criminal offensive dropped. Who am I kidding? I’ve known about it all my life.

Vast open-air prisons, blockades of food, medicine, and the most basic of needs. Imprisonment without trial that is as random as it is routine. Bulldozers, evictions, mass surveillance, torture, rape, and murder.

Life under occupation.

Every single day.

For decades.

Watching the despicable creature that is David Lammy standing at the dispatch box in recent weeks has been to watch a performance so bad that it is good.

A man who once called for recognition of the state of Palestine has for months not only defended Israel’s racist regime, but met with members of it, posing for pictures sporting his best “serious face.”

The passion of his delivery as he called off negotiations on a free-trade deal this week — telling us “the actions of the Netanyahu government have made it necessary” — was matched only by his passionate dismissal days earlier of Zarah Sultana’s call for an arms embargo as “clickbait.”

Announcing other inconsequential sanctions, Sir Keir Starmer, told MPs “the level of suffering — innocent children being bombed again is utterly intolerable.”

“Again.”

What an admission that was. Eleven weeks of no food entering Gaza, a years-long bloodbath, people being burned alive in tents, bombs being dropped on innocents to announce the sex of the unborn children of Israeli troops, and only now the Prime Minister is getting upset.

Maybe it was the UN’s under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs — and former British diplomat — Tom Fletcher telling the world that 14,000 would die in 48 hours unless food got through?

We have all watched this is happening live on TV, on our phones, in front of us, around the world in real time, for months, but we are expected to believe that a Prime Minister who portrays himself as a human rights lawyer and his Foreign Secretary — both in receipt of daily intelligence briefings on the catastrophe — have suddenly noticed a line might have been crossed.

No amount of “serious face” at the dispatch box in recent days, nor persecution and prosecution of those who had told the truth all along, can drag the government out of complicity with this genocide.

If all ties with Israel were cut tomorrow, they’d still be up to their necks in the blood of innocents, but those ties are as strong as ever they were. The British government still supplies the Israeli forces with intelligence, and happily signs off on exports of arms and components which make it all possible without missing a beat.

I’m old enough to remember when a Labour government talked about an “ethical foreign policy,” even if it did crash and burn with the resignation of the man who uttered the phrase — Robin Cook — on the eve of the invasion of Iraq.

The very thought of a Cabinet minister saying such a thing today is laughable, not least when the chair of Cabinet has told the country he intends to build a war economy to deliver growth. That immoral idea is, of course, economically illiterate — such spending doesn’t create the kinds of jobs and multipliers that social investment does.

Nonetheless, it underpins everything the government now does. Anyone who thinks that — three decades on from the last plant opening — the recent enthusiasm for a new wave of nuclear power stations among the present leaderships of both Tory and Labour is unconnected to Trident renewal is either a fool or a tool.

Billions being diverted not just from renewables, but the social wage, to spend on technology that will either never be used or end life on Earth doesn’t exactly fill my heart with joy.

It’s not all about the “big one” though, and even the SNP politicians have abandoned the beloved “bairns not bombs” slogan to embrace 2.5 per cent of GDP being spent on ways to kill people, as long as those ways aren’t nuclear.

Thank goodness for that, because I’m sure the children bleeding to death right now on what used to be the streets of Gaza can take comfort in knowing they weren’t atomised in a nuclear blast instead.

This week, though, First Minister John Swinney was “concerned” at Sir Keir’s arms-for-fish deal with the EU.

The Keeper of the Great Seal of Scotland flapped for fish, as they nonchalantly browsed British waters, unaware that they and their brethren could continue to be delivered from EU vessels to plates across Europe until 2038, rather than 2026.

Swinney bravely made this stand 24 hours after calling for re-entry into the EU, which would of course extend that additional 12-year period to eternity.

The position is about as logical as the now tattered “bairns not bombs” one for the First Minister, but isn’t it telling that neither he, nor indeed anyone else in power, seems to have noticed why the deal was done at all?

They did notice, of course, it’s just too awkward to talk about.

Is it about access to e-gates at EU airports for British holidaymakers? Don’t be daft.

Is it about pet passports? Ludicrous.

Is it perhaps about opening negotiations on a Britain-EU “youth experience scheme?” Exporting young people fits with the hostile environment being made for them at home, but no.

Maybe it’s about selling sausages and burgers on the continent? Guess again.

Is it about lifting steel tariffs? Close … 

It’s about bombs, silly!

The deal will bring Britain closer to the EU where it really matters: blowing things up.

There’s an agreement to join what’s known as the Pesco project, to enable various European militaries to roam the EU continent unimpeded — not unlike Nato, oddly enough.

Even that isn’t the real prize, though, there’s no money in that, and the EU is about nothing if it’s not about making enormous corporations lots and lots of money — everything else is propaganda.

In this case, the money is locked in the Safe — Security Action for Europe — fund.

The agreement “paves the way” for Britain-based companies to access €150 billion in EU loans in the fund to spend on militarism.

Thirteen years on from winning the Nobel Peace Prize, the EU is choosing to divert an almost unimaginable sum to re-arm the continent, but Sir Keir has his eyes on the main prize.

So too does the Trump White House. The game may well be driven by the arms manufacturers’ urge to become even wealthier, but his threats to slash US military spending in Europe are as much about bouncing its leaders into cutting, with more or less enthusiasm, the social wage.

The old imperialist drive to open and rig new markets is about to come home to roost in Europe, and all aided and abetted by an EU constitution more committed to serving private capital than any on Earth — the US included.

Unless, of course, we do something about it. The visions of hell appearing on our screens from Gaza happen because world leaders allow it to happen, because they expect no consequences for their actions and inactions in lands where they have relied on no-one looking.

Building roads to war may create a few jobs, but enabling politicians with no imagination to kill people whose capabilities we’ll never know is a monumental waste of workers’ talent.

If “welfare not warfare” is to live beyond this page or the chant on a march, we need a plan and a plan built by those workers and their unions.

There’s no time like the present.