“The world as we know it is gone.”

So wrote British Prime Minister Keir Starmer a few days ago, in a Sunday Telegraph opinion piece.

Sound frightful? Take a close look.

Sir Keir was contemplating the consequences of Donald Trump’s global on-again, off-again, on-again tariff war, now savaging financial markets from Wall Street to Taipei.

The financial world, in Keir Starmer’s mind. The world of Big Business, powerful corporations, and several thousand fabulously rich men, some of them British; the world of trade balances, exchange rates, and ceaseless, unrelenting economic growth — a fraudulent fiction in our closed planetary system.

Starmer, a lawyer, was not thinking about the unspeakable crimes Israel and the US, his dearest friends, have been allowed, indeed enabled and encouraged to commit in Gaza for the last eighteen months, laying waste to the global community’s most cherished legal canon — the UN Charter, the 1948 Genocide Convention, the four Geneva Conventions of 1949.

Shells cracked open, emptied of all meaning.

Starmer was not bemoaning the UN Security Council’s inability or refusal to take action in the face of the most egregious human rights crimes since the outrages of World War Two — in occupied Palestine, Ukraine, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo — aided, abetted or simply ignored by the world’s most powerful states and state institutions, including his own.

Rotterdam protest (David Kattenburg)

The end of law in today’s permanent global war — war on humanity; war on the planet — is not something Keir Starmer is likely to grieve over in the editorial section of the Sunday Telegraph.

Global commerce, yes. A healthy trade balance for Britain and its wealthiest entrepreneurs, for sure. A bit of trickle-down for ordinary British women and men, you bet.

The fate of the planet and its human inhabitants — not yet.

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For thoughts about Sir Keir, his public hand wringing about the global economy, and related legal matters, the GPM reached out to an old friend, Dimitri Lascaris. 

Dimitri Lascaris is an activist, journalist, polemicist, and a lawyer – now fully independent, after quitting his law firm. We reached Dimitri, in Kalamata, Greece.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Or watch here: