These were the headlines in a FT newsletter this morning:
It is the ordering of these headlines that I find interesting. Financial markets come first. Then politics is of concern, with a hierarchy of the USA, Iran, and Britain. Only then is the important issue of this war's consequences actually highlighted. If millions of people in Iran and other states are left without water, the risk of migration due to real human suffering is high, and awareness of this appears to be very low indeed.
What is more, the emphasis is upon the good news that Trump wants the markets to hear, because he is intensely sensitive to market price variations. Later in the night, he offered death, fire, and fury to Iran if the Straits of Hormuz were not reopened. The implication must be that he is threatening the use of nuclear weaponry. But the interests of the market come first. The prospect of human suffering comes low on the list if you are the FT, and the rest of the Western news media, and the point is that this does not only apply to Iran, but it would apply to any of the Gulf states.
The real cost of war is not a matter of concern to politicians who feed markets with the data they need to keep them happy. It is what matters to me.
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All I can think of is where are the UK’s desalination plants? Where are our means to collect and clean all this water we’ve had pouring down on us, ready for summer?
The real war we face is protecting our future – not this confected tripe in order to play with guns and missiles.
Excellent question. Why can’t we do this? Maybe power is the issue and they get their energy very cheaply.
Desalination plants would require investment by the water companies. Given we haven’t built a reservoir since the 1970s, (sold a few though,) it’s unlikely we would get desalination facilities unless the government footed the bill.
The energy inputs make desalination more expensive than most other sources of water – particularly in a country like ours where lots of fresh water literally falls from the sky for much of the year. They need desalination in populated places that lack fresh water but have access to sea water – or contaminated groundwater – and copious energy, ideally solar.
The UK gets lots of fresh water from the sky, albeit not evenly distributed – the people live largely in the east and the rainfall is largely in the west. Our problem is infrastructure. We need more reservoirs to support the population that has grown significantly since the last the last big one was completed at Carsington in the Derbyshire Peaks in 1992. And less leaky pipes. And less polluted water courses. All round, much more investment and less profit taking.
My view Andrew is that we need a mixed bag of solutions to help with fresh water infrastructure, and desalination cannot be ruled out.
It is the seas that are rising Andrew, and this means that salt water will advance up our freshwater tributaries. It is the sea that will reduce our livable land mass as it is doing so already. We need to urgently weigh this up.
What I can see is the Fog of War lots of things happening (perhaps)
But it seems to me that he real issue is the one that of course we dont know and thats the long term impact of all these actions.
The creation of yet another generation hating Israel – few seem to have seen that coming. The symbolism around the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader which anyone with knowledge of Islam could have seen and how that will play out in the long term.
I noticed this when watching channel 4 news last night, usually better than most. It was primarily about the financial cost to us and the globally economy and little about the immediate human cost, and nothing about the morality of what is happening. It seems that the actual victims and the human suffering are being made invisible.
Only certain victims are made invisible. The worthy ones get a lot of coverage.
And there is also the environmental disaster
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/10/bombing-of-irans-oil-infrastructure-to-have-major-environmental-fallout-experts-warn
Food security (humans don’t starve)
Water security both re supply, sewage and floods. (humans don’t die of thirst, dysentery ot drowning)
Energy security (humans don’t freeze to death, or suffer breakdown of essential services)
10-20 years ago we had the option, the finance, the skills, the material, to make major improvements and help reduce human vulnerability.
Government was advised to act. They heard, they understood, they knowingly refused. Why? Because someone else’s human suffering was not important to them and still isn’t.
I was v slightly cheered by this story, from Texas of all places:
https://www.thecanary.co/skwawkbox/2026/03/09/trump-interferes-in-texas-republican-primary/?__s=6squ6bjtxophyfzgvnew
There is a desalinaionplant at Becton on the RiverThames.
Has only worked a few days in over25 years.
I am aware
Iran were considering abandoning Tehran because of water shortages even before this conflict:
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2025-11-16/tehran-contemplates-evacuation-as-many-cities-across-the-globe-face-water-dilemmas/
The destruction of the desalination plants will probably force their hand.
Trump followed Israel, with no “plan” and no thought of the consequences.
The US military have forgotten Vietnam, it is impossible to bomb a country into submission.
Trump appears to believe that the current economic chaos benefits the US.
The Gulf states have got a lot more than they bargained for financially supporting Trump and his family.
TACO is on the cards with ” I won”. Really?
For the UK the lessons are:
1.don’t trust the USA. The Democrats are a transferrable party just like LINO.
2. the UK is an increasingly irrelevant, economically declining group of islands off north west Europe.
3. the UK elites are not interested in closer ties with Europe. Our biggest market.
4. what is the purpose of the UK state. Is the state actually going to take steps to benefit the majority of the population.
5. what are the values that the UK population is expected to defend in the future, continued neoliberalism or the politics of care.
At the end of the day the FT is called the Financial Times for a reason in that it focuses on financial issues and in this case the financial implications of the Iran conflict. So no great surprise or story really.
There is a long post by Shanaka Anslem Perera on Substack.
https://shanakaanslemperera.substack.com/p/actuarial-warfare-how-seven-insurance
The Straits are closed and shipping won’t restart until the insurers of all those carriers are willing to insure the vessels. One of the needs they have is to see that all involved in this conflict agree to peace and can make peace happen. Iran used to have a Supreme Leader. On his death, for which event, the Iranians had a plan, Iran fractured into 31 virtually autonomous commands/areas. They individually decide how to act, how to fight the war, and when it will end. It seems that Iran may have a new Supreme Leader, but can he reforge the unitary state that Trump decapitated? It will certainly take longer, if it is possible at all.
The US were the first to damage the desalination system. This act is now being taken as a sign that water can be a target. If the need arises to somehow get water to those needing it in the area, it won’t go by sea if there is no insurance for the vessels. Perhaps nations of the world who care would provide the insurance cover? But I suspect the Rubicon has already been crossed; the future seems a bit dire to me.
Desalination requires very large amounts of energy indeed. Many of the Gulf nations have invested heavily in Aluminium smelting which also requires very large amounts of energy too. It makes more economic sense to build the energy plants that serve both. There was a lot of jiggery pokery with Russian raw aluminium being refined by the Gulf smelters and re exported. You would often bump into an oligarch or two. Bahrain and Dubai would vie with each other as to who had the biggest smelter! (NRN)