When Australia, Britain and Canada declared recognition of Palestine this week, they presented it as moral clarity, a high-minded gesture to revive the two-state solution. In reality, it looked less like diplomacy than piracy – an English-speaking flotilla divvying up symbolic treasure on the high seas. Instead of Spanish silver, the loot was recognition itself, doled out by comrades across three continents as though legitimacy were just another coin in the barrel.

Labor loves redistribution. At home it takes the form of taxes and subsidies; abroad, it now extends to sovereignty itself. If Israel clings too tightly to statehood, the ALP will redistribute it – as if recognition were an unclaimed doubloon ready to be shared among deserving allies. It’s socialism with a cutlass: swashbuckling, theatrical, and strangely cost-free.

The partners in this escapade were telling. Britain under Keir Starmer, a would-be Blackbeard of Islington: no wild beard or smouldering fuses under his hat, but the same reliance on intimidation and spectacle – though in his case it means intimidating little old ladies on Twitter rather than merchants in the Caribbean. At his side stand Mark Carney and Anthony Albanese – his mates and flunkeys, the banker-pirate and the Deloitte buccaneer – the ‘me hearties’ who clap as the captain ties his cravat and declares another blockade of legitimacy. Together they sail under a curious flag that, on closer inspection, shows the skull and crossbones crossed not by bones at all, but by a hammer and a sickle.

Yet every Blackbeard attracts his hunter. While Carney and Albanese cheer from the deck as loyal crewmates, somewhere in the Channel lurks Nigel Farage, a latter-day Robert Maynard, bottle of claret in hand and a gift for bravado – ready to board, cutlass flashing, and hang the pirate’s head from the bowsprit.

His ship of the line, HMS Reform, has just been hauled into dock, refitted, and crewed anew – its fresh hands drawn from Tory deserters, its sails fat with polling wind.

Carney is the delicious irony: the man who once set interest rates in London now redistributes sovereignty like pirate spoils. A banker turned buccaneer, he hands out recognition as if it were carbon credits.

Even pirates had codes. Loot was tallied, captains elected, punishments agreed upon. Labor’s recognition came hedged with similar caveats: elections must be held, Hamas excluded, institutions reformed. Palestine is recognised, provided it first becomes a different Palestine. This is like Blackbeard promising equality once the treasure has been laundered through the Admiralty.

Caesar once vowed to crucify the pirates who captured him – and kept his word. Trump, railing on Truth Social at Pam Bondi about the delay in hauling in his own ‘pirate captors’, shows the instinct endures. The crosses are gone, but the urge to punish remains.

For Labor, meanwhile, the gesture is bold enough to thrill its activist base, yet hedged enough to protect the diplomats when reality intrudes. Recognition socialism: redistribution with conditions attached, the pirate’s share tempered by the bureaucrat’s memo.

Labor loves the theatre because piracy and socialism share a myth: both exalt the common man and promise equality of spoils, however short-lived. A flourish of parchment delivers applause at conferences, even if actual lives in Gaza and Tel Aviv are shaped not by communiqués but by rockets and checkpoints.

For Albanese, the domestic spoils are obvious: Greens pacified, unions pleased, left flank reassured. No ships dispatched, no soldiers risked, just a declaration – cheap enough to please the crew, grand enough to appear statesmanlike. In the theatre of piracy, the cannon flash matters more than the cargo.

But recognition is like pirate gold: easy to seize, hard to spend. What if Palestine fails to meet the conditions? Will Australia rescind its recognition, or shrug and move on? Hamas remains entrenched, elections distant, institutions fragile. Recognition without substance is a treasure chest filled with sand. It looks heavy on stage, but collapses when opened.

And the imperial arrogance is hard to miss. Once it was colonial governors drawing borders on maps; now it’s progressive premiers drawing legitimacy from thin air. Palestinians may be no closer to sovereignty, but in London, Ottawa and Canberra, leaders feel virtuous. The empire has reinvented itself as moral theatre.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, a different kind of piracy unfolds. Donald Trump has been staging his own Pompeian campaign against modern corsairs in the Caribbean. When Rome tired of Cilician pirates, Pompey swept the Mediterranean clean with overwhelming force. Trump, freshly returned to power, channels the same spirit. His Truth Social videos of speedboats exploding in flames look like dispatches from an 18th-century sea battle. ‘Be warned – if you are transporting drugs that can kill Americans, we are hunting you!’ he thundered, like an admiral promising crucifixion.

The recent strikes against Maduro’s narco-traffickers – eight warships, F-35s, 4,000 Marines – represent the largest US naval show in the region for decades. In Venezuela, socialism dissolves into piracy like lime juice into grog: traffickers run floating republics with their own codes of loyalty and profit-sharing, claiming victimhood even as they smuggle poison into American ports. Nicolás Maduro directs gangs like a pirate king, railing against ‘undeclared war’ while mobilising thousands of troops across hundreds of ‘battlefronts’. Pirate socialism has hoisted the Jolly Roger, and Trump answers as Pompey once did – this time with drones instead of galleys.

Every pirate crew needs a battle-scarred quartermaster who’s tasted real combat, and in this flotilla the role falls to Dan Crenshaw, the Texas congressman and former Navy Seal who lost his right eye to an IED in Afghanistan. With his black patch, he looks every inch the part – a genuine buccaneer on this ship of state. Crenshaw is no socialist; his hawkish foreign policy earned him the sneering nickname ‘Eyepatch McCain’ from Tucker Carlson.

The truth is pirates never disappeared; they merely changed costumes and claimed higher purposes. Some run drugs, some run parties, some run governments. They promise equality of spoils, then hoard treasure for the captain’s cabin. They are romanticised as rebels but remembered as criminals. Labor’s recognition of Palestine fits the pattern: theatre, redistribution, piracy under the banner of virtue.

Pompey succeeded because Rome had fleets and legions. Today’s Labor has communiqués and hashtags. Canada has a banker-pirate prime minister. Britain has a Labour leader desperate for swagger. The little men of the ALP, puffed up like parrots on a rum barrel, strut as if they command armadas; in truth, they’d be lucky to commandeer the Manly ferry. Together they can hoist a flag and declare moral victory, but they cannot hold the seas.

Meanwhile, Trump hunts narco-pirates with actual warships, and Crenshaw glares at his critics from behind his patch. The pirate spirit endures: in socialism’s redistributive romance, in drug lords’ floating republics, in American populists’ calls for vengeance.

Rumour has it Andrew Hastie has a treasure map…