Hassan Akram (Cambridge): The search for a replacement for Gordon Brown is slowly becoming public. Last week Brown lost a second member of his Government after David Cairns followed Siobhan McDonagh in openly demanding that Labour look for a new leader. McDonagh said she wanted to start the party thinking about who should replace Brown and refused to be drawn on who she thought might do the job best. But Cairns went further, hinting that he “had someone in mind” although he refused to say who it was. Of course, it is an open secret that a large group of MPs, worried about losing their seats in the next election, want to replace Brown with David Miliband. Miliband is seen as the only candidate youthful and vigorous enough to challenge David Cameron’s slick new Tory brand. The Party Conference is likely to put this on hold, but there can be little doubt that Milliband is hoping to be rewarded for "good behaviour".
But as the adverse global environment hits Britain hard, with both unemployment and inflation rising, a new Labour leader will need more than a fresh and engaging personality, he will need a distinctive policy agenda as well. Under Blair, New Labour became the chief cheerleader for the financial deregulation that has been totally discredited since the collapse of Northern Rock and Lehman Brothers. Gordon Brown could hardly distance himself from the policy he masterminded and this is why so many Labour members want to have him replaced.
If Mr Miliband is to rescue Labour he would have to make a clear break with the past. Sadly (as Jeremy Gilbert has pointed out in his contribution to the OurKingdom debate ‘Labour After Brown) this looks unlikely. The trouble with Mr Miliband is that, despite the youthful looks, his ideas are still rooted in the tired Blairite consensus. While he can hardly be expectced to give us any detail about the direction he would take the country until a leadership contest is declared, his conduct as Foreign Secretary, brief as it may be, shows he has yet to make the necessary break with New Labour and neoliberalism.
As Foreign Secretary, Miliband has been notable for the bellicosity of his words despite the good-natured appearance of his smile. He has condemned Mugabe for the crisis in Zimbabwe and attacking the Iraqi insurgency as terrorists. Of course, Mugabe has done terrible things in his country, and the Iraqi rebels include radical Islamists and other groups with an ideology of terror. But the key question for a foreign secretary is whether attacking such groups will make life easier for those elements inside the Zimbabwean government and Iraqi insurgency that are in favour of peace and equity. Miliband may believe that his strong words can bully the government of Zimbabwe or the Iraqi rebels into making peace on Britain’s terms. If so his assumption exhibits a familiar New Labour arrogance in foreign policy rooted in Tory attitudes.
Britain has had the same basic foreign policy since the end of World War Two. It holds as an article of faith that Britain’s so-called ‘national interest’ is served via an unquestioning alliance with the USA. The Anglo-American alliance has murdered democratically elected politicians, replaced them with dictators and plundered the natural wealth of poor countries, supposedly to protect Britain from some imagined ‘Foreign Threat’. Yet if Britain had not supported the USA much of this so-called threat would vanish.
The arrogance of the New Labour elite is frightening: do they really do not understand why their actions provoke so much anger? When asked if Anglo-American government policy had provoked Islamic terrorism Jack Straw (a former foreign secretary) replied “people need to remember that September 11th happened before the Iraq War”. His argument was that Islamic terrorism is an unprovoked attack on the West. But the Iraq War was not the first attack on the Middle East by the Anglo-American alliance. And when Jacqui Smith, the current Home Secretary, was asked if locking suspects up for 42 days without charge might be a ‘recruiting sergeant for terror’ she replied “with Islamic extremists everything is a potential recruiting sergeant". Again, the clear implication is that terrorism is an unprovoked attack on the West. And similarly, when Mugabe denounces the West, Mr. Miliband assumes that this is another unprovoked attack. This is wrong. The fact is that Mr Mugabe is quite right to denounce Britain, not because of the Empire (which is now ancient history) but because of current policy which bears a direct responsibility for the chaos in the country.
Zimbabwe has never been a perfectly democratic and liberal place, but it has not always suffered the violence and poverty that blight it today. The country’s decline can in fact be dated to 1997 when Tony Blair’s government decided to stop funding the ‘Willing Buyer, Willing Seller’ programme. This programme provided British government funds to buy out any white farmer who was willing to sell his land. Since the vast majority of Zimbabwe’s farmland was owned by a tiny ex-British colonial minority the programme was a way for poor Zimbabweans to get a chance to grow their own crops and lift themselves out of poverty. When Clare Short, Blair’s International Development Secretary decided, unilaterally, to stop the money, the Mugabe government replaced this peaceful farm-transfer process with a series of violent land invasions that have led the country to ruin. The land invasions were a mistake, the chaos and hyperinflation they caused shows this clearly enough, but they were a mistake provoked by the British government’s own arrogance.
The British government’s position had a certain logic to it, the land redistribution programme was being abused: when compulsory purchase replaced freely arranged transactions to speed the reform process many of the farms being bought from the old British colonists were handed out to President Mugabe’s political allies. Clearly the Blair government had a responsibility to ensure that the land then occupied by rich people of ‘British stock’ was given to the poor Zimbabweans who so desperately needed it rather than to a corrupt new elite. But cutting the funding to the land purchase programme was not the way to do this.
What New Labour has so catastrophically failed to understand is that you cannot intervene in a country successfully if you have been previously responsible for the suffering of its people. Clare Short tried to abnegate such responsibility in the letter she wrote terminating the land payments programme: “We are a new Government from diverse backgrounds without links to former colonial interests. My own origins are Irish and as you know we were colonised not colonisers”. But the Zimbabwean government, and a goodly proportion of the Zimbabwean people didn’t see it this way. And their lack of trust meant the British intervention was bound to fail.
To anyone but an Anglo-American foreign policy ‘expert’ it was obvious that pulling support from the peaceful land purchase policy would force the government into more desperate means to remove the ex-colonial elite from the farms. But the British government did not believe the Zimbabweans would go to such desperate lengths.
There is a parallel with Iraq. Blair may have thought that the violence and brutality of Saddam Hussein’s government was so awful the population would welcome the Anglo-American forces. But people have long memories. The Iraqis knew who had helped Saddam Hussein into power in the first place, who had encouraged him to fight a terrible proxy war against Iran and who had finally been the mastermind behind devastating sanctions, that killed over a million people. Given this history it was inevitable that the intervention in Iraq, like the intervention in Zimbabwe, would provoke resistance and thus create a humanitarian catastrophe.
Zimbabwe is undeniably worse off now than it was before Clare Short decided to interfere so disastrously in that country’s politics. And Iraq is also worse off than before Tony Blair decided to help the Americans interfere there.The Saddam Hussein regime was horrific, the Mugabe administration was always fairly authoritarian, but the result of ‘ethical’ or ‘liberal’ intervention has been to plunge those countries into far worse horrors than they suffered before Western meddling began. However desirable it may be to remove dictators, this can only be done effectively by a force trusted by the general population. With our historical record, Britain does not enjoy that trust.
The Zimbabwe crisis may now finally drawing to a close, thanks to the timely and effective intervention of South African President Thabo Mbeki. Mbeki has worked with both Mugabe and Tsvangirai (the chief opposition leader) to set up a power sharing agreement that had ended the violence in the country. Although still at a delicate stage, Tsvangirai’s new role as Prime Minister (with Mugabe filling the more ceremonial post of President), should allow the country to overcome its difficulties. The major problem now is the European and American sanctions on Zimbabwe which have still not been lifted. If Mr. Miliband really wants to help solidify peace in Zimbabwe at this stage he should work towards the lifting of these sanctions.
Mugabe could easily start attacking the MDC again, and pulling back from the commitments he has made. But here again It cannot be the role of the British to police the Zimbabwean situation. Rather, given our appalling record in the country our engagement must be of a different kind. The first step must be a public apology to the Zimbabwean people for the suspension of the land-purchase programme and the creation of a fund to rejuvenate the economy. This fund should be paid for by the British but controlled not by the British but by the South Africans. Only in this way can Britain contribute to a better Zimbabwe, anything else would play straight into Mr Mugabe’s hands.
This kind of fresh approach to foreign policy, based on working with regional powers rather than trying to bully other countries as we used to do in the Empire days, is something Mr Miliband has sadly failed to consider. Just as he maintained the Blairite strategy towards Zimbabwe, he has failed to think imaginatively about the problems of Islamic terrorism.
Decisive government action could in fact play a major positive role in combating terror – but only by leaving behind the Bush-Blair consensus. When President Zapatero made a clear break with the Americans after the Madrid bombings (pulling Spain’s troops out of Iraq) he made that country safe from terrorism. Islamic terrorists might be at war with the USA, but they are no longer at war with Spain. If the British government really want to end the terrorist threat here in the UK they just need to publicly apologise for the invasion of Iraq and pull the troops out of that country. At the same time they should start negotiations with Iran in earnest. Again for the British, whose relations with Iran have been poisoned for so long, the best way to do this is by apologising to the Iranian people for the actions of the British government in the 1950s and then ask for their help in Iraq.
It is not in Iran's interest to see Iraq collapse into anarchy, but neither is it in their interest to see it become an American puppet state. The quid pro quo here is pretty clear: the Iranians can be convinced not to support the terrorists who are encouraging the former option, if they can be assured that the latter option will not occur either. The Maliki government is already taking the first tentative steps towards such a pact but the British and the Americans are dragging their feet. If Mr Miliband wants to help heal the situation in Iraq he should be attempting to build bridges with Iran rather than attacking it. Doing this would require real humility, and a transformation of current Labour party thinking. But it is this kind of courage and boldness that Mr Miliband will need if he is to win the next election for Labour. So far it seems he has not learned the lessons he needs to take the party and the country forward.
