This war has made me a conservative
By Stephen Pollard
Daily
Telegraph 2001-10-28
Like most readers of The Sunday Telegraph I knew nothing of the existence of Paul Marsden until last week when he published a description of his encounter with Hilary Armstrong, the Chief Whip. By all accounts he is a hard-working, decent MP for Shrewsbury and Atcham. All things being equal, however, he could now be expected to return to his former obscurity, having had his week of fun as the voice of Labour’s anti-war MPs.
But all things are not, of course, equal. Mr Marsden may be no more substantial a figure than he was a week ago, but he represents something important. He represents the opinions which most of his colleagues on the Labour benches are unwilling to make public.
Whenever any issue of importance arises, one should always remember that when Labour elected Tony Blair as its leader it did so for one single reason - he would deliver power. At no point has the party ever taken him to its heart. Nor, at its foundations, has it ever undergone a “Blairite” transformation. For all the changes which most Labour MPs have made - few, for instance, consider nationalisation of anything beyond Railtrack to be practical politics - they none the less retain the mindset which prompted them to join the Labour Party, long before any of us had heard of Tony Blair.
A critical part of that mindset is a profound loathing of the United States. There are, of course, exceptions. Peter Shore, whose recent death robbed the party of one its few genuine Atlanticists, enraged his party in 1980 when, as shadow foreign secretary, he supported the US boycott of the Moscow Olympics. And for many years George Robertson, now the Secretary General of Nato, fought a lonely battle to convince his colleagues that America was overwhelmingly a force for good.
But the attitude of most Labour MPs is very different. Just as, during the Cold War, most of them felt that there was not much to choose between the two superpowers, so today the party has identified another bogus “moral equivalence”.
Superficially the Parliamentary Labour Party is fully supportive of Tony Blair’s backing for US action. But one need only scratch lightly below the surface to see how misleading that appearance is. We don’t even have to restrict ourselves to the usual suspects or hint at hidden views: otherwise sane, sensible figures such as Doug Henderson, the former Army minister, and Peter Kilfoyle, also a former defence minister, have been among the most vocal in their “concerns”, as they put it. Their argument “that their only dispute is that action is not being taken by United Nations controlled troops” is pure sophistry. What they mean, is that they can’t stand the sight of their long-time bogeyman America defending herself, and want to see her as shackled as possible.
Since September 11, whenever I have made clear my disgust at the attitude of most of my fellow Labour Party members, the reaction has usually been to attack me as a “closet Tory”. So close an identity is there between being on the Left and hating America that any support - even after she has just lost thousands of people in a terrorist attack - is, of itself, seen as evidence of being on the other side of the political divide.
It’s an accusation I have long had to put up with. Until September 11, I have always treated it with derision. Now I am not so sure. Last week I dined with a group of Left-wing friends, one a prominent Labour backbencher, another a senior minister. Out came the familiar stuff: killing thousands of people is terrible but if America had not been such a malign presence in the world it would never have happened; bin Laden may be an evil criminal but he speaks for large numbers of the dispossessed. Blah blah blah. We’ve heard it all before, we’ve read it all before.
But the unpleasant truth for someone like me, who has spent his entire adult life on the Left, is that such reactions are not restricted to a few Guardian readers: they are shared by Labour MPs, ministers and almost everyone I know on the Left. I feel like Norman Podhoretz’s definition of a neo-conservative: a liberal mugged by reality.
There is, it seems, a fundamental divide in this world between those with instincts on the side of freedom and decency - and prepared to defend it - and those who live in a different moral universe. What else can explain the grotesque, shameful remarks of Peter Hain, the Foreign Office minister, on Thursday? According to Mr Hain, “We are just as horrified as Arab leaders and Arab peoples about the atrocities in the occupied areas - and indeed in Israel . . .. We deplore all terrorist attacks, whether suicide bombs in Tel Aviv or terrorist acts in the occupied areas.”
So in the warped world-view of the Left, a democratic state taking action to apprehend the murderer of a cabinet minister is terrorism - the equivalent of the events of September 11. I feel ashamed to be a member of the same party as Mr Hain. If being in favour of democracy, peace and freedom means being on the Right, then I would wear that badge with pride.