IT ISN’T often I end up singing Keir Starmer’s praises, but keeping Britain out of an illegal war on Iran deserves some recognition. It is a war everyone will lose.

In one sense Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu pretend they are winning. The media circus no longer mentions Gaza, or settler land-seizures within the West Bank. Scrutiny of Jeffrey Epstein’s scandalous sexual abuse network of young girls has been suspended. And the organised web used to corrupt and compromised Western politics slides effortlessly behind a warmongering facade.

But as Iran fails to collapse under unremitting US-Israeli bombardment, and wider retaliations cascade around the Middle East, saner voices are asking where on Earth this will end up?

It wasn’t long ago that Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, turned the Davos conference agenda upside down; proclaiming that the international order had reached a state of rupture not realignment. He was right.

All the norms of a rules-based international order are being thrown out of the window. And Trump (often on Netanyahu’s instructions) drags us from one whimsical crisis to another.

You don’t have to defend anything about the ayatollahs to acknowledge there was no legal basis for the US-Israeli war on Iran. Nor is there any plan of where or how it will end.

Chaos and collapse

After less than a week Trump became bored with its aftermath. If Iran is left in ruins, so be it. Israel can turn its ire towards other parts of the region and the war will move elsewhere. A region in disarray is part of the plan.

Mossad may arm and train Kurdish groups in Iraq and Iran but this won’t resolve anything. The disruption will simply spread across into Iraq and Turkey (Netanyahu’s next target). Trump will then find other collisions to distract from his crumbling domestic popularity.

It is in that sense that Starmer should wear Trump’s denunciations as a badge of honour. Far better to pitch himself closer to Harold Wilson — who had the sense to keep Britain out of Vietnam — than to any Trump loyalist being led to the slaughter.

This won’t be easy. Already, Starmer is being lured into the fray by assaults on whatever UK bases Trump is allowed to make use of. And if Iran isn’t the source of the attacks Mossad will help make it looks that way: a destabilised and divided Middle East is part of the plan.

Ultimately, the war on Iran will be lost by everyone. A different approach to internationalism and stability has to be written. But where do you start?

A different internationalism

For Britain, it means thinking more about European realignment and security than reviving the US-Britain relationship. It also requires a different “security” conversation; one focusing on defence and diplomacy rather than just military spending.

The silences following Trump’s declaration that “anyone who would be leader in Iran can expect to be dead” offer the most brutal example the New World Disorder we are drifting into.

Britain takes issue with state spying on the West. We take issue with Putin’s poisoners. But the West’s acceptance of state-based assassinations across the Middle East (and beyond) marks a decent from diplomacy into piracy that damages us all.

When Mossad turned Hezbollah’s pagers into mobile assassination kits it showed how arbitrary killing has become and how technology is changing the face of modern warfare.

Dispose of the leadership and you destabilise the state, often without resorting to conventional warfare at all. Sometimes today’s weapons of mass destruction fall completely outside the military ambit.

The grotesque network of abuse that funded Jeffrey Epstein was underpinned by the power of blackmail. In the US, it topped up the venal tradition of simply buying the loyalty or obedience of elected representatives.

In Britain, it was done more subtly — funding entryist groups of “purgistas” to turn Labour into a party of bland and blind lobbyists for corporate takeovers and external tyrannies.

In an era drifting steadily into corporate feudalism, this battleground has become an everyday war between rich and poor; between the corporate and the collective.

However, resistance itself soon becomes asymmetric. You don’t need an agency as well funded as the CIA or Mossad. At some stage, poorer (notably Islamic) countries will announce a “fatwa” against The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) members (or funders of the Trump campaign bandwagon) and leave their devotees to just get on with it as best they can.

It won’t rely on any elaborate collection of drones or Putin’s poisons. It will just need an instruction to take revenge wherever you can find it. This is a state of anomie, where the collapse of inclusive, rules-based systems is replaced by tribalism or feudalism. It is where we are heading.

Beyond tantrum economics

Tariff threats have been Trump’s main economic lever. But the Gulf in chaos will soon become everyone’s nightmare. Energy prices will spiral. So will the cost of food. And as markets get spooked, money will race from production of things to the ownership of gold and silver. As we know from history, a world without work and distributed wealth soon becomes a very ugly place. So what is the alternative?

First, the anti-war majority of states within the United Nations need to re-found it. They should follow the advice of Professor Jeffrey Sachs and begin plans to relocate both the UN and the World Bank as far from the US as possible. It has to be a pragmatic discussion, to a state strong enough to survive being undermined by a vitriolic Trump vendetta.

But for the World Bank, relocation isn’t enough. It has to revert to the template originally advocated by John Maynard Keynes at the end of World War II. He wanted it to be a unifying institution, capable of both stabilising international currency exchange and redistributing global wealth. The USA ruled this out. We have paid the price ever since.

The new Home Front

Domestically, industrial nations must also reclaim control of their domestic economies. Britain could gang up with other European states wanting stricter controls over corporate fiefdoms.

Taking a Golden Stake in all critical state services would be a start. Kicking Palantir out of the NHS would be a better one. But the critical steps must also involve a re-founding of accountable democracy.

If Britain is anything to go by, today’s parliaments are all too easy to buy. New models of public accountability have to be found. Old models of collective ownership have to be revisited. And this is where Labour has to start.

Forget slagging off the Greens. Forget the flirtation with Reform’s factionalism. Give the poor a stake in the game and make them a part of an inclusive security agenda. Goodness knows this will be hard enough because, in Parliament, it will also need a race into circular economics.

Obsessions with “growth” have been throwing people out of work in order to reward the owners of capital. Circular economics puts people back at the centre. It also requires us to reconnect with ourselves (and our neighbours).

In a world tossed about by climate upheavals increasingly beyond our control, such solidarities will be central to our survival.

These are also the keys to a world Trump will never understand. So go on, Keir. Give it a try. It could be Labour’s salvation.

Alan John Simpson was Labour MP for Nottingham South from 1992 to 2010.