Causes to fight for: a strong Britain in the world

By Brian Duggan

In The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell wrote that without the empire Britain would be, “…a cold and unimportant little island where we should all have to work very hard and live mainly on herrings and potatoes.”

While the empire may have crumbled and the recession is hitting our food costs, we haven’t yet been reduced to an existing of herrings and potatoes.

The reality for Britain and the rest of the world in the twenty first century is that the authority shifted away from the old colonial empires moved towards a better, more balanced model. New regional and global institutions were founded to improve trade, foster better diplomacy, tackle world poverty, and address economic disparities and so on.

The world replaced its old hierarchies of power with a broader network of institutions set to govern the interaction of our nations. These institutions were founded to address the changing nature of the world. As well as ensuring that the British diet consisted of much more than just herrings and potatoes they helped forge a more equal and secure relationship between the nations of the world.

One organistion which has done much for British trade, jobs and standing in the world is the European Union. A key component of Labour’s European policy has been to recongise that the EU is more than just a market to trade with and that it should be used to strengthen Britain’s role in the world.

But pro-Europeans within the Labour movement must all recognise that ‘Europe’ as an institution, like ‘Westminster’ or ‘No 10 Downing Street’, is not a vote winner on polling day. The process and the mechanism for achieving the policy is not the point. The policy, the progress and the outcome is what Labour should be talking about.

British voters stand much to lose if a Tory government were to represent Britain in Europe again. Many of today’s Tories are obsessed by ‘process Europe’ and rarely by ‘policy Europe’. Labour has shown strong influence on the European stage, both within the centre left and on the centre right, and has acted with those who want to tackle our energy and climate policies, to forge a fair way out of the economic crisis, to protect us from threats of terrorism, to continue to build a European economic area of shared prosperity and stable growth and to promote a positive agenda for the developing world.

The Tories meanwhile are alienated on the wrong side of the argument. Their position on Europe may not lead us to Orwell’s predicted diet but the prospect of being an “unimportant little island” certainly could ring true.

For the General Election in 2010, my cause to fight for will be to keep Britain strong in Europe and strong in the world, not because I want to wear a blue flag with gold stars, but because I believe that the world has changed since the fall of the empires and that to achieve for one nation, you have to work with others.

Labour’s foreign policy is a policy for a better Britain and a fairer world and that’s a cause well worth fighting for.