What exactly is the attitude to the Iraq conflict of the politician who is regarded as Britain’s prime minister-in-waiting, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown? With the ten-year premiership of Tony Blair rapidly drawing to a close, the chancellor might have been expected to clarify his position on foreign affairs, especially in the wake of his recent trip to Washington where he had his first meeting with US President George W. Bush.
Yet last week, far from discussing the latest bloody developments in Iraq, Brown was addressing the Labour Friends of Israel fund-raising lunch in London. Widely ignored by the mainstream media, Brown’s speech was reported by that invaluable source of otherwise neglected news, the Jewish Chronicle. It’s worth noting that the story was accompanied by a photograph of the chancellor in conference with Blair’s “personal envoy in the Middle East”, Lord Levy, the Labour Party fund-raiser at the center of the “cash for peerages” scandal which has dogged Blair’s last days. The Daily Mail recently raised the issue of the propriety of Britain’s senior police officer, Sir Ian Blair, being seen dining at a Jewish charity function with Levy, who has twice been interviewed by the police and is on bail, and the same issue might be felt to arise when a prominent Cabinet minister publicly associates with such a figure.
At the Labour Friends of Israel lunch, the chancellor declared his implacable hostility to anti-Jewish prejudice, stressing that “opposition to the policies of Israel, whatever their merits, should not be used as an excuse for more general expressions of racial hatred”. What especially disturbed him is the situation in British universities, where Jewish students have reportedly been put under pressure by far left groups and by Islamic extremists.
Muslims may be forgiven for feeling that Gordon Brown could hardly have made his allegiances, his predisposition to view the world through US/Israeli spectacles, more plain. Certainly, he has done little to advertise his sympathies for Muslims in the way he has signaled them for Jews and Israel. Rather, he has given the impression of believing that the onus is on moderate Muslims to prove that they are true British patriots who share the concern of the wider society with national security and with facing down terrorism.
Though a leading Brownite, International Development Secretary Hilary Benn, called for jettisoning the essentially anti-Islamic term the “war on terror” in a speech he gave the other day in New York, there is little reason to suppose that Brown’s foreign policy is in the least degree at variance with that of Blair. Britain, it seems, is once again about to be led by a politician who may be expected to behave more like an American proconsul. It is because Brown was so centrally involved in committing Britain to the US-led Iraq war that his position in his native Scotland has become so awkward. The chancellor is now widely felt to have sold Scotland out, embroiling its people morally and financially in a war that many of them never supported. With the Scottish parliamentary and local government elections looming on May 3, he is in something of a fix. It is possible that, on May 3, the Scottish Nationalist Party led by the ebullient Alex Salmond will upstage the Labour Party, with much damage to the long-term credibility of Brown and the Labour Party alike.
It is not only Scots who feel let down by Brown. Among broad swathes of English Labour supporters, there is a sense that he has betrayed what the Labour Party used to stand for, not least by displaying such solidarity with Blair over the Iraq war. Many believe Brown is just as much responsible as Blair for repudiating the party’s socialist traditions, which included an abiding suspicion of imperialist aggression. Blair’s commitment to remaking the Labour party was clear from the outset, but Brown paraded his ties with “Old Labour” and did nothing to discourage the view that he is the keeper of the party’s conscience.
As part of his effort to promote himself in the run-up to the party leadership election, he has brought out a book entitled Courage, a series of portraits of moral paragons, which is evidently meant to underline his own fundamental seriousness of purpose, his determination to dissociate himself from the American-style “celebrity culture”.
It must be said that this intellectually gifted politician has displayed extraordinary tenacity, achieving much despite the handicap of having lost one eye in a sports injury and suffering impaired sight in the other. Yet true courage would have been to speak up for Britain at a time when the country is seen across the world as little more than an American client state. It would have been to challenge Blair’s servile endorsement of the US decision to invade Iraq as his fellow Scot, the former Foreign Secretary, the late Robin Cook, did. True courage now would be to admit that the war was a foreign policy blunder of historic magnitude. It would also be to face up to the humanitarian disaster Bush has precipitated.
There may be good grounds for Brown to address the problem of anti-Semitism in Britain. But why is he not addressing the issue of the two million Iraqis who have been driven into exile, along with the incalculable number of internal displaced persons in Iraq who are at risk of dying in sectarian attacks?
This unwillingness to confront the appalling cost of Britain’s involvement in the Iraq conflict is among the reasons why the prospect of Brown’s premiership is generating so little public enthusiasm. Seldom has a British leader been such an object of disillusionment even before entering office.
