Oliver Kamm

Propagandists for tyranny

In a letter to The Guardian, the journalist William Shawcross writes aptly of the Galloway phenomenon:

Roy Greenslade's famous talent for cool analysis deserted him in his apologia for George Galloway (No need for balance, May 13). He claims that Galloway is not being given a fair crack of the whip by the media. What nonsense. Mr Galloway is a clever bully, brutal in his criticism of others but so thin-skinned that he resorts instantly to the libel laws to cow his own critics.

Whatever the truth about his relationship to the Oil for Food programme, much more important is that Galloway was for many years the most diligent propagandist of one of the most fascistic of modern leaders.

In 1994 Mr Galloway stood before Saddam Hussein and said: "Your excellency, Mr President, I greet you in the name of the many thousands of people in Britain who stood against the tide and opposed the war and aggression against Iraq and continue to oppose the war by economic means, which is aimed to strangle the life out of the great people of Iraq ... I greet you too in the name of the Palestinian people ... I thought the president would appreciate to know that even today, three years after the war, I still meet families who are calling their newborn sons Saddam. Sir, I salute your courage, your strength your indefatigability. And I want you to know that we are with you until victory, until victory, until Jerusalem." (The Times, January 20 1994.)

In 1994, Saddam was already well known (inter alia) for having gassed the Kurds, murdered thousands of his political opponents, practised brutal ethnic cleansing on the Marsh Arabs, attempted to expunge a member of the UN and kidnapped hundreds of Kuwaiti citizens (all later found to be murdered).

Saddam killed more Muslims than any other leader alive. Yet for years Galloway lobbied for Saddam. And now he has the effrontery to pose as a defender of Muslims. That is Mr Galloway's offence and I suggest to Mr Greenslade that it is a very good reason for people to dislike and to criticise him.

Note that Galloway's encomium for Saddam Hussein - the famous indefatigability - is even worse in context than when taken out of it. I've written before of an earlier generation of MPs who were unabashed propagandists for Stalin, and there is an inglorious tradition of Labour MPs who serve the propaganda interests of despotism. One former MP and then MEP, Stan Newens, wrote copiously in the 1970s of the progressive example set by Nicolae Ceausescu, who presented (Nicolae Ceausescu: a selection from his speeches and writings, introduction by Stan Newens, 1973, p. 6, cited in Darren G. Lilleker Against the Cold War, 2004, p. 144):

... an overwhelming case for Britain to adopt an independent foreign policy. This would ... bring us closer to countries like Rumania and would accelerate the development of the demand for the withdrawal of troops onboth sides and ultimately the winding up of both military blocs.

Of all of these propagandists, however, Galloway stands out. He was a propagandist for a tyrant whose regime was explicitly modelled not only on Stalinist Russia but also on Nazi Germany. Galloway should of course have been expelled from the Labour Party much earlier than he actually was, to make common cause with the Socialist Workers' Party, the principal pro-fascist and anti-Jewish organisation in Britain today.

Labour's master of inaction

This column appears in The Times tomorrow.

LABOUR RARELY forgives a leader for being effective. As Neil Kinnock remarked this week of his party’s post-election ructions: “They were much nicer to me when I lost than they have been to Tony when he won.”

Among those critics, none has been more rancorously unreflective than Frank Dobson, the former Health Secretary. Castigating the Prime Minister as an “enormous liability”, he went on television on Sunday to talk down Labour’s prospects in London’s municipal elections next year should Blair still be party leader.

Dobson speaks with authority: he is the single biggest net vote-loser Labour has fielded in the capital in recent years. Only three years after Labour’s 1997 landslide, he barely managed third place in the election for Mayor of London. His Holborn & St Pancras constituency recorded swings to the Liberal Democrats of 8 per cent and 11 per cent in the past two general elections.

Dobson once volunteered that he tended not to bother writing to his constituents, on the ground that they formed a largely transient population. In my experience, at least, of being a Dobson constituent this was not affable whimsy but literal truth. I wrote to Dobson a dozen times over 18 months with the same question without receiving an answer. Eventually his constituency office phoned to say Frank was irritated with my volume of letters (as was I).

A reply eventually followed, in which Frank said he would be taking no action in the case I had raised. Taking no action is something he does well.

As a minister, Dobson allowed medical priorities to be distorted by an emphasis on measurable targets (particularly on waiting lists) rather than on treating clinically more urgent cases. He has since campaigned obdurately against the Government’s “elitism” in health and education, in defiance of the facts. Allowing universities to charge top-up fees is highly progressive: better-off students lose fee subsidies while poor students receive grants.

Dobson has managed to turn his once impregnable Labour seat into a marginal. To the extent that Labour heeds his views on the party’s future, he will do the same to other nominally safe seats. At least if he chooses an overdue retirement at the next election, he will bequeath his successor an easy act to follow.

The things they say

[W]e must begin to take the accusation that the Jewish people are trying to control the world very seriously... American Jewry makes any debate on whether the 'Protocols of the elder of Zion' are an authentic document or rather a forgery irrelevant. American Jews do try to control the world, by proxy. So far they are doing pretty well for themselves at least.

Gilad Atzmon, jazz musician and defender of the 'rationality' of burning down synagogues, 'On Antisemitism', 20 December 2003

The only person who presents a real, honest and genuinely left wing alternative is Galloway and Respect. They’re the only party that is properly explicit about this criminal war.

Gilad Atzmon, on a political party he can identify with, Socialist Worker, 5 May 2005

UPDATE: I'm always pleased to have a politically eclectic readership, and welcome a new correspondent who is disgusted at the smearing of Respect that my entire site represents. I hadn't thought it necessary to spell out the point, and am conscious that doing so will will dilute any rhetorical impact, but I'm always happy to lay it on with a trowel where this organisation is concerned.

Gilad Atzmon is a boorish, vulgar, stupid bigot of worthless political opinions. But Atzmon's view of Respect is consequential in that Respect has a corresponding view of him. That is why I specifically referred to the source of the second quotation - the newspaper of the Socialist Workers' Party, for which the Respect 'Coalition' is a front organisation.

Regular readers will know of the mutual admiration of the SWP and Gilad Atzmon. Atzmon was an invited speaker at the party's Marxism 2004 event last summer, on the subject 'How can Palestine be free?' As helpful guidance for Atzmon's audience in advance of his speech, Socialist Worker commended his crude anti-Jew propaganda as "Gilad's fearless tirades against Zionism". Atzmon was, in fact, just the chap for Socialist Worker to turn to a few months later to provide not this time a fearless tirade, but instead an exhortatory encomium for the Respect campaign in Bethnal Green and Bow. Now, comrade, why would it do a thing like that?

No need to write back, for I am confident I know the answer already and search merely for the best historical parallel. My feeling is that the nearest thing to Respect is the fortunately short-lived British People's Party, founded in April 1939 (on which, see Richard Griffiths' 1998 invaluable study of pre-war British antisemitic and pro-Nazi groups, Patriotism Perverted, pp. 55-8). The BPP executive came, nominally at least, from the Left. Its General Secretary, John Beckett, had been an Independent Labour MP, and its treasurer, Ben Greene, a stalwart of the Peace Pledge Union, had been Labour candidate in Gravesend. Its stated aims included 'the security of labour in its industrial organisation' and 'the abolition of class differences' - but it was obvious what its real campaign was about. In the Hythe by-election of July 1939, the BPP issued a pamphlet called Alien Money Power in Great Britain, which attacked the Tory candidate for his work for a City firm whose directors included several Jews. The party candidate, St. John Philby (father of Kim Philby), indignantly denied the charge that Hitler was insane:

No madman had ever restored one of the greatest races in the world to the position of one of the foremost nations in the world as it was at the present time.

The BPP's time had already passed, but its pro-fascist and antisemitic ideology is a more enduring feature of British electoral politics, as we have lately seen.

The liberal prospect now

The Stepney, Bethnal Green and Shoreditch areas of East London have something of a history of intervention by charismatic demagogues linked indissolubly to a totalitarian and antisemitic fringe that prefers inflammatory street-corner agitation to democratic politics. One such figure would be recalled from time to time by my great-aunt, who was there on 4 October 1936, at what came to be known as the Battle of Cable Street, to oppose him. His name was Oswald Mosley, and he was reputedly repelled by 100,000 counter-demonstrators as he attempted to lead his British Union of Fascists through the area. In fact, left-wing mythology has it wrong: the first results of the encounter were a boost to Fascist membership and campaigning, and an increase in thuggery (the so-called 'Mile End Pogrom', in which Jews and their properties were attacked, took place just a week later). The destruction of Mosleyism as even a latent force in British politics came over the next three years, as the party system proved resilient both to his appeal and, by good fortune rather than foresight, to the economic crises of the 1930s. The notion that a totalitarian movement could be transplanted in this way and under such a figure became increasingly incredible, while fissures in the movement continually highlighted the BUF's bigoted and intimidatory character.

It's worth bearing history in mind when considering the victory of the Respect 'Coalition' in Bethnal Green last night. This organisation is not adequately described, as the BBC has it, as an anti-war party, any more than the British National Party - which also received a disturbingly high vote in areas of racial tension - is properly (or at least adequately) characterised as, say, an anti-European party. Both organisations are contemptuous of parliamentary democracy. They share almost identical views of the Iraq War with Jean-Marie Le Pen and Joerg Haider. Galloway's victory is not an idiosyncratic, let alone heroic, individual campaign (as the BBC's metaphorical, and therefore absurdly affectionate, headline 'Street-fighting man' implies): it is a force in British politics against which civilised people in all parties need to take the ideological offensive from an early stage. In the meantime, while I can see no levity in the issue, I can at least congratulate Jeremy Paxman for an apt interview with the victorious candidate just after 6.00 this morning. Do see it - rather than just read it - if you haven't already. It says implicitly and more eloquently than I can what the Galloway phenomenon is about.

The election overall has been a bad one for liberalism in its broadest sense. In individual constituencies, there is much more to regret than to welcome. I am particularly sorry that the former minister Barbara Roche lost Hornsey and Wood Green to a huge swing to the Liberal Democrats. (Mrs Roche was, I am reliably told, a constituency MP of extreme dedication, who lost the votes of Labour supporters over Iraq.) With a political instinct for serial misjudgement, I overestimated the extent to which the Liberal Democrats would make inroads in this election, having previously written that their minimum realistic expectation was 70-80 seats. I am of course not sorry at all about this (and incredulous at the Lib Dems' political ineptitude in announcing in advance their 'decapitation strategy' of targeting senior Conservatives - whose constituents generally do not like being told that they are actors in a drama planned by party strategists in London). But I am sorry that the Lib Dems made advances in urban seats that Labour will have difficulty defending next time. I am glad, however, that Labour regained, as it ought to have done, Leicester South from the Lib Dems (I grew up there, and canvassed for Labour in the 1979 election). I am pleased that Jack Straw fended off an unscrupulous campaign against him by Islamist pressure groups. I am pleased that Tony Blair increased his personal majority despite the Independent candidature of a man who has suffered tragedy but not injustice, and whose supporters appear to have overestimated his prospects on the basis of no tangible evidence. Among former comrades of mine, I am glad to see the return of Phil Woolas, David Miliband and John Mann.

Overall, I am afraid there is no escaping the conclusion that Tony Blair irrevocably damaged his political standing by committing troops to the Iraq war; had the war not taken place, we can reasonably assume that he would have enjoyed a substantial - and given its unprecedented character in Labour politics - triumphant third election victory. Many, probably almost all, Labour supporters would regard this as an indictment of the PM. I regard it as a measure of the man's political stature. Knowing that the character of the threats we face has changed since 9/11 - indeed since long before that - Blair chose to ally with a nominally conservative US administration in a war that needed to be fought, when the policy of containment of Saddam Hussein had manifestly failed, and the toleration of autocratic states in the region was an affront to our values and a gathering storm over our security.

Labour's majority is now insufficient to assure the passage of necessary reform in public services and the pursuit of liberal-democratic internationalism in foreign policy. The polarising effect of Iraq has encouraged the emergence of a culture of dissent among new Labour MPs, who make a virtue of having opposed in their campaigns the finest act in foreign policy - one that epitomises humanitarian and progressive concerns - of any British Government since Attlee and Bevin. My apprehension on this point caused me to switch my vote from a new Labour candidate who declared in advance her intention of opposing the foreign policies of the Government to a Conservative candidate who I was confident would support them (and who also holds far more liberal views on social issues than were expressed in the lamentable and unpleasant national Conservative campaign). To the extent, if any, that anyone locally will have noticed my argument, it certainly won't have helped the candidate I endorsed, who lost by a few hundred votes.

A few weeks ago I wrote of my intention to rejoin the Labour Party 17 years after I had allowed my membership to lapse. In fact I held back my application at the last minute, fearing that what has actually happened would happen, namely that the sitting MP in my constituency (who decided not to run again) would be replaced by an anti-Blair candidate congenial to the mood of Labour activists, who I perceive are no longer prepared to give the PM the benefit of their doubts. I am sorry that the Labour majority nationally has been cut so far, but not sorry that I opposed the election of an obstructionist Labour candidate. It is precisely because I wish the parliamentary influence of such people to be minimised that I chose to support a candidate far more in tune with the principles of New Labour.

As things stand, my reading of the political outlook is that the prospects for liberalism at home and in foreign policy have been damaged, and that the Labour Party (which I support as the only plausible vehicle for left-wing politics in this country, but will remain outside) will retrace its uneven progress in that direction. As PM within two years, Gordon Brown will in my expectation show his differences from Blair in a lack of leadership instinct and an unwillingness to revise his views in the light of experience. He will be the British equivalent of the Canadian PM, and former Finance Minister, Paul Martin. Because liberalism, which stresses costs and trade-offs, always loses in intuitive appeal to populism, it is a position that constantly needs advancing in public debate and the cultivation of support. My own political activity, for what it's worth, will be devoted to expounding that case, and the need continually to form alliances across movement, party and civil society to advance liberal values domestically and democratic change abroad.

In the early days of the Federal Republic of Germany, built upon the wreckage of a regime of unmitigated barbarism, an informal understanding emerged between a conservative cause that had definitively broken with its traditions of authoritarianism and nationalism, and a social democratic party that understood the nature of Soviet totalitarianism and was determined to oppose it. The understanding was known as 'Militant Democracy'; it is a concept worth resurrecting in our age, to apply to those who broadly support the ideological alliance of Tony Blair and President Bush. I shall do what I can in my writings to advance it, from a left-wing standpoint. In order to meet a deadline for a short book expounding these themes, I shall be suspending the blog for the next month, but will return.

Voting intentions - the last word

One regular correspondent, who is critical of my intention to vote for a pro-war Conservative against an anti-war Labour candidate in a Labour marginal, queries the limited character of my conclusion (I have cited only two constituencies where I would not support the Labour candidate, including my own). He argues that, given my premise, I ought to be arguing for far more widespread Tory voting, as a larger proportion of Conservative MPs voted for war in Iraq than did Labour MPs.

One new correspondent, who is very much concerned - and in an admirable way - with security issues, also criticises my reasoning. He is intending to vote for an anti-war Labour MP in another marginal, on the grounds that he cannot trust the Tories to support Blair in another contingency like the Iraq War. He also worries that if other Labour supporters follow my example, then there would be no Blair premiership for my pro-Blair Tory candidate to support. Finally, he notes that for all Blair's imperfections, he would be a better PM than the "bad Alf Garnett impersonator" who leads the Conservative Party.

I agree, of course, with every point made by my second correspondent. Blair is not merely an outstanding statesman, but the most important single figure in international relations in the world today. Having shown no obvious concern with foreign policy before becoming Prime Minister, he has been the most powerful force for good in the international order of any Labour politician since Ernest Bevin. By contrast, I have lost so much respect for Michael Howard in the course of his leadership that I would not even countenance tactical voting in his constituency to defeat the Liberal Democrats, who have hopes of the seat. I would not have thought this humanly possible, but Howard has proved a worse leader than Iain Duncan Smith. His populist campaign on immigration and asylum has besmirched his own reputation and that of his party; his feint towards the anti-war movement and his advocacy of greater state control of the universities (i.e. his opposition to student fees) fail even as electoral politics, being patently incredible.

The Tories' cynicism over Iraq and their (ironically) mendacious campaign to brand Blair a liar give weight to my correspondent's concern that the party could not be trusted to support a progressive foreign policy on matters of comparable importance to Iraq. I entirely share that concern (which is, incidentally, why I don't agree with my first correspondent's point). The Tories are so heedless of ideological bearing that they campaign even against the White House - and it is worth recalling that no post-war British Prime Minister has been so mistrusted by Washington than a Conservative, Edward Heath, while the two worst crises in post-war US-UK relations have both been engineered by Conservative Governments (Eden, over Suez; Major, over Bosnia).

Let me therefore restate the reasoning behind my own decision. I seek the return of a Blair Government with a large majority. I share the revulsion of Christopher Hitchens towards "the cretinized British Conservative Party" and "am glad to have seen the day when a British Tory leader is repudiated by the White House". But those of us on the Left who support regime change must face up to the fact that that noble cause is not widely held. It is intuitively appealing - particularly as it seems to augur a way of avoiding costs, most particularly humanitarian ones - to argue that war must be fought only for defensive reasons in response to a clear and present danger. Blair's great insight as a statesman is to have realised the import of 9/11: defensive war cannot wait on the identification of a clear and present danger, because the threats we face are no longer solely from other states. But - and this is the one point on which Michael Howard has a fair case against the Government - the arguments for this strategy have been muddied by the tactical error of reducing them to a case about WMD, the gross failures of intelligence accompanying that decision, and the incompetence of - excepting Blair himself - almost everyone involved in the UK government and US administration in arguing the case for pre-emptive war. When the most powerful arguments for an interventionist foreign policy against clerical barbarism and Baathist totalitarianism are put not by public servants but by freelance writers such as William Shawcross and Christopher Hitchens, then - with due respect and immense honour to those outstanding participants in the revolutionary cause - we're in trouble. And we're in trouble particularly because Iraq is not an isolated issue; it is a precursor of a liberal foreign policy geared to the spread of democratic government in regions with no history of constitutional process. We have to do this for moral reasons, and because our security depends on it.

I am, like Hitchens, a left-winger and sometime Labour activist. Having campaigned for the party when it was unelectable and extreme, I am faintly incredulous but very pleased that the party once led by George Lansbury and Michael Foot is now the only party meriting support on defence issues. But the support inside the party is shallow. Just as the anti-totalitarian struggle in the Cold War depended upon a rapprochement between the forces of the moderate Left and the internationalist centre-Right - what was known in Germany as 'Militant Democracy' - so this struggle against another existential threat requires a broad coalition, and the encouragement of liberal-democratic internationalism across the parties and civil society. If we forgo this coalition-building, then we'll find that support for our cause evaporates - the Conservative Party's trajectory over the past couple of years being an awful warning.

My inchoate views on our responsibilities in this election are thus that we should be looking to change the Conservatives as well as defeat them, and to maximise the representation of liberal-democratic internationalists in Parliament as well as support the Labour Party. I am in this respect a single-issue voter: if we do not get our security policy right - by which I mean a militant defence and expansion of liberal democracy - then nothing else will matter. It is for that reason that I am prepared to support particular Conservative candidates, subject to one criterion: not only that the candidate should have supported the war in Iraq (a wide category that includes several who now loudly bemoan what they consider a mistake - such as the former Shadow Foreign Secretary, John Maples), but that he is the type of politician who would defy a party whip in order to support an interventionist foreign policy. I don't know if the Tory candidate whom I shall be voting for, Nicholas Boles, comes into that category: I know too little about him. But I think he probably is. I have found his answers to my questions on this subject to my liking, and he is on record in support of a statement on foreign policy principles that I share. On the other hand, my Labour candidate would certainly defy a party whip in order to oppose an interventionist policy (I know this because she has written to me to say so). I asked her for permission to quote her private message to me, for my Times column on this subject. As she didn't give it, I naturally respect her wishes - but I think it is in order nonetheless to say that her message included reference to a type of docile canine, which I took to be not merely a figure of speech but an allusion to the Prime Minister's conduct of foreign policy. Perhaps I am wrong on this, but I fear I am not. I have voted for some highly variable Labour candidates - and one despicable one - in past elections, but I will not vote for a Labour candidate who thinks in these terms when there are plausible grounds for believing that her challenger will provide principled support for the foreign policies of a third-term Blair Government. This, then, is my answer to my correspondent's caution that if all pro-defence Labour supporters acted as I shall do, then there would be no Labour Government to support. I specifically urge and hope that Labour voters elsewhere vote Labour. The constituency where I shall vote is a highly unusual case.

But in deference to my first correspondent I will name another case, and there may be others. I can say with certainty that the long-serving Tory MP for South Staffordshire, Sir Patrick Cormack, is the type of candidate who would defy a party whip in order to support a reputable foreign and defence policy. He's already done it. The only parliamentary division on the Bosnian crisis took place (at the Liberal Democrats' request: they were better-led in those days) in November 1992. In his magnificent book Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia, 2001, p. 275, Brendan Simms records:

The motion - condemning government action as 'too little, too late' - was defeated by 166 votes to 37. Only 206 MPs actually voted. Patrick Cormack was the only Conservative MP to vote against the government.

In the debates on the Iraq war, Sir Patrick was similarly principled in defiance of his party. As Tories pressed for a judicial inquiry into the war, The Times reported:

Mr Blair received help from an unlikely quarter. The senior Conservative Sir Patrick Cormack rebuked his own MPs over their behaviour since the war ended. He told the Commons that he was ashamed of the Tories for their obsession with silly details.

“It grieves me deeply that my party, which I am honoured to belong to, should have started nit-picking when it was so right to give support on the principal issue (of going to war),” Sir Patrick said.

“It also grieves me that those young men and women in the Gulf must be wondering if we have lost our marbles in this place, spending our time on these silly accusations which have no substance.”

Sir Patrick also has the distinction of having performed the not especially onerous task of exposing the cynicism of Liberal Democrat policy on the war. In the parliamentary debate of 18 March 2003, ahead of military action, he asked Charles Kennedy, who had been professing support for British troops simultaneously with an amendment requiring a second UN resolution:

Can I therefore take it that if the amendment is lost the right hon. Gentleman will vote for the substantive [pro-Government] motion?

Kennedy fluffed it. If you read down the Hansard report, you'll see he then loses control altogether, peevishly expostulating, "We do not need moral lectures from the Conservative party."

Sir Patrick will in fact not be facing election later today, because of the tragic death during the campaign of his Liberal Democrat opponent. This means that a by-election will be held in the constituency in a month's time. Given the circumstances - with an incumbent who is no foreign-policy theorist, but an honourable man with an independent political judgement, and when the overall result of the general election will already have been decided - I would support Sir Patrick, even without knowing the stance of his Labour challenger.

Taking all these things into account, this is what I hope for from the general election (which is not to say I think this scenario will happen in any, let alone every, particular). Not all of these wishes are of equal weight (e.g. point 5 in this list is a fundamental moral issue that goes beyond party politics):

1. A large Labour majority - of at least not much below 100.

2. The shoring up of the liberal-democratic internationalist contingents of both main parties.

3. Failure by the Liberal Democrats to win their target seats - though I am no longer so exercised by this prospect that I would advise tactical voting to defeat them; the Conservatives ought not to be supported even on tactical grounds.

4. Failure of the Nationalist parties to make headway.

5. Defeat for the pro-fascist parties, Respect and the BNP.

6. Defeat for all Independent candidates. The one Independent elected at the last election, Dr Richard Taylor, has proved not so much ineffectual as invisible: he even managed to miss the division on foundation hospitals (i.e. the single issue on which he was elected). Likewise the Independent candidate running against Tony Blair in Sedgefield on an anti-war ticket, Reg Keys. I have great sympathy for Mr Keys as a father (his son was killed in Iraq), but I would not patronise him by suggesting that a large vote or even an extraordinary victory would provide him with solace. He doesn't want solace: he wants what he sees as justice. That is not within the power of any British government to give, for the only injustice involved in our decision to resume (not launch - for the first Gulf War never formally ended) war against Saddam Hussein was that it ought to have been taken a dozen years earlier.

7. The return of David Trimble in Upper Bann.

Those public intellectuals

Most people, including most academics, are confusing mixtures. They are moral and immoral, kind and cruel, smart and stupid - yes, academics are often smart and stupid, and this may not be sufficiently recognized by the laity. They are particularly likely to be both smart and stupid in an era of specialization, when academic success is likely to crown not the person of broad general intelligence but rather the person with highly developed intellectual skills in a particular field, and both the field and the skills that conduce to preeminence in it may be bulkheaded from the other fields of thought. The brilliant mathematician, physicist, artist or historian may be incompetent in dealing with political or economic issues.... But if the compartmentalization of competence, and the underlying disunity of the self, are not widely recognized - and they are not - a successful academic may be able to use his success to reach the general public on matters about which he is an idiot.

Richard A. Posner, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, 2001, p. 51

I urge everyone to vote in the election tomorrow only for MPs who voted against the war in Iraq.

Prof Stephen Hawking, Cambridge University, letter to The Guardian, 4 May 2005

Foreign Policy on Blair

There is a very thoughtful brief essay, by James G. Forsyth, on Tony Blair that has just been posted on the web site of Foreign Policy magazine. In raising the question "why has this left-wing British Prime Minister become the closest ally of a right-wing American president?", it gives a better answer than any I have seen in the British press. Forsyth additionally concludes that Blair has characteristics that would make him a far more effective US President on the global stage than either Bush or Clinton:

It is on foreign policy that Blair would have shone as an American president. Even before September 11, Blair had come up with a theory of where and when the West should intervene, called the “Doctrine of the International Community.” Unlike Clinton, Blair is prepared to use ground forces when necessary. Indeed, his insistence that they must be an option in the Balkans stretched his relationship with Clinton to the breaking-point. Blair has a broad vision that the leader of the sole superpower needs. He simultaneously—and passionately—pushes for democracy in the Middle East and an end to poverty in Africa. Perhaps the most striking example of his foresight is that Blair was raising the need for action over Afghanistan with Bush as early as February 2001, seven months before America was forced to turn its attention to that country. Blair is also a consummate alliance builder; it is hard to imagine that America would have gone into Iraq with so few allies under a President Blair.

Forsyth also concludes that Blair is accurately described as a neoconservative. I tend to avoid this term at all times, and would in any case distinguish between Blair's position, with its stress on international institutions, and neoconservatism. But the common thread of a belief in global democracy is there, and is best described not as neoconservatism - a term of abuse that was adopted by its recipients - but as liberal internationalism. It's a belief I strongly endorse.

More on electoral strategy

A number of correspondents point out that if people want a Labour Government returned, as I do, then they'll have to vote for it, which will entail voting for candidates of very different views from Tony Blair's.

Couldn't agree more. That is the right thing to do, and I hope that will be the outcome. There has never been an election - not even 1997 - in which I have been so desirous of a Labour victory or so contemptuous of the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats (and their predecessors). Recalling that Labour received (and merited) a derisive brush-off from the White House before the 1987 election, I am thankful that Labour is now the only truly Atlanticist party. Wishing for a Blair third term, I would vote in almost every case for an anti-war Labour MP if that were the required route to it. Some of them are good MPs on other grounds. The best constituency MP I have had, Kate Hoey in Vauxhall, is anti-war; the worst, Frank Dobson in Holborn & St Pancras, once roused himself to pen a statement of support for the liberation of Afghanistan that wasn't bad.

Almost every case, but not quite every case. I mentioned two in the previous post, and it's a measure of the importance of this election that I can so far think of no others (though there are individual Conservatives, and even the odd Liberal Democrat - Chris Huhne, and the existing Treasury team - whose return I would like to see). My own horror at Labour's defence policies in the 1983 and 1987 elections was mitigated by the certainty of Labour defeat, so I didn't worry too much about particular Labour candidates in those elections, other than those who were either infiltrators from the Militant tendency (Pat Wall, Dave Nellist, Terry Fields), pro-Soviet (Ron Brown, James Lamond, Renee Short), or, in one case, pro-Ceausescu (Stan Newens) - all of whom I wished to see defeated. I recall being pleased at the defeat of Tony Benn in 1983, though in truth that was the wrong response. Benn's own contribution to Labour's electoral humiliation was unrivalled, and there was justice in his suffering in the denouement; but it would still have been better if he had stood in the subsequent leadership election and been defeated. I can also genuinely claim to have urged Labour friends living in the Hillhead constituency of Glasgow to vote in 1987 for the sitting SDP MP, Roy Jenkins, in order to defeat his Labour challenger - George Galloway. (Galloway had already made his mark on Scottish politics by flying the PLO flag from Dundee Town Hall.)

In this election, where a Labour MP is in effect running an independent anti-Blair campaign, as in the case of Glenda Jackson, then - notwithstanding the tolerance of one of her constituents, the Times columnist David Aaronovitch, on the matter - I hope for her defeat. My own constituency is a special case where a Labour candidate selected only a matter of weeks ago (the sitting Labour MP, for whom I would have voted, decided not to seek re-election) sought the nomination knowing that she was opposed to the foreign policies of the Labour Government, when those policies were certain to be a central election issue and when her own position is about as extreme a statement of reactionary politics as you can get. I am not able to quote her email to me on this subject, as - though I sought it for my Times column - I don't have her permission; but it's both a political stance and a mode of political behaviour that I am unwilling to regard as merely an idiosyncrasy.

Meanwhile a local Labour activist has sent me an article that Nicholas Boles, the interventionist Conservative candidate, wrote for The Times a couple of years ago in which he argued that, "A war to defend open access to the Middle East’s oil reserves would be a just war – and a war fought primarily to defend the world’s poor." Though Boles uses the term 'Left' too much in a derogatory sense (the Left is, after all, where I stand and belong), this argument seems to me entirely correct, and I'm glad to have it.

Right again

I scarcely thought it possible that my admiration for Tony Blair could increase still further on the issue of Iraq. The Sunday Times yesterday made it clear that I had underestimated the man nonetheless:

A SECRET document from the heart of government reveals today that Tony Blair privately committed Britain to war with Iraq and then set out to lure Saddam Hussein into providing the legal justification.... It records a meeting in July 2002, attended by military and intelligence chiefs, at which Blair discussed military options having already committed himself to supporting President George Bush’s plans for ousting Saddam.

Despite the international expressions of grief and condolence after 9/11, very few public figures properly understood the import of the Islamist attacks on American (and many other) civilians. Characteristically bathetic was Charles Kennedy, who in his speech to the Liberal Democrat Assembly later the same month employed the presumptuous cliche that the role of the British Prime Minister was to be a 'candid friend' to the US, offering a 'cautionary tap on the shoulder' in matters of war. (Neither Kennedy nor his speechwriter had read much literature - both George Canning and G.K. Chesterton effectively derided the term 'candid friend'; it is our less critical and more sanctimonious generation that has revived it.)

Blair, on the other hand, saw the point immediately: the documented links between terrorism and autocracy meant that the old distinction between realism and idealism in foreign affairs no longer applied. Supporting global democracy and confronting tyranny was the right thing to do, and it was essential to our security needs as well. Overthrowing Saddam Hussein by force - for there was no other way to topple his regime - was an act of outstanding moral clarity and strategic importance. I pay tribute to the PM for having seen this point so early, and for having it carried it through despite the opposition of many in his party and elsewhere.

I hope that the election result will return a substantial Labour majority to support this outstanding statesman. There are only a few cases where voting Labour is not the best strategy for those of progressive views. I know of one unambiguous case - namely the constituency where I shall be voting - where there is a straight choice between voting for someone of Blair's party or voting for someone of his views. I take the latter option: the next Parliament will require decisions of comparable moment to the Iraq War, and I wish the forces of liberal-democratic internationalism to prevail in them. Judging by The Times' report today of the election in Hampstead & Highgate, where Glenda Jackson - by some margin the least distinguished of any minister in the past eight years - is appropriating the Labour label in order to campaign against the Prime Minister, a nominally Labour vote there is also a waste (though I do not know if there is a reputable alternative; given the trajectory of the Conservative Party in recent months, and especially in the past week, that seems highly unlikely). The constituency where a Labour vote is most important is, of course, Bethnal Green and Bow, where a party morally and politically equivalent to the British National Party is mounting a determined challenge against the sitting MP, Oona King.

Excluding the important case of Northern Ireland, that's about the sum of my election preferences.

Oona King campaign headquarters

I have amended my post on the election campaign in Bethnal Green, to give the best telephone number on which to contact the constituency office of Oona King. Mrs King's re-election as Labour MP is a singularly important requirement not only for the democratic Left but also for the very notion of democratic politics.

The number to call is 020 7729 6682. Please help if you can.