Labour’s woman of the year and the struggle to remake foreign policy

By Larry Smith

Ask Labour members which of its politicians enjoyed the best 2010, and many would probably answer Yvette Cooper. The 41-year old mother of three began the year widely regarded for her work at the Department for Work and Pensions, was briefly considered an outside bet for the leadership of the party before sweeping all before her in the shadow cabinet elections to take up the post of Shadow Foreign Secretary in October. Along the way she won plaudits for taking the new government to task over welfare, and was praised for leading the fight against the Coalition’s attempt to quietly roll back advances on equality.

But for all her progress, Cooper now faces a daunting test: a brief in which she has little previous experience, as well as the challenge of remaking Labour’s international policy at a time when multiple crises are stretching the global community. And on the evidence so far, she still has much left to accomplish.

In assessing Labour’s approach to foreign policy under Cooper to date, the first and most obvious problem is the party’s lack of engagement with the war in Afghanistan. In her first major speech on international affairs at the Chatham House think tank on December 13th, Labour’s approach to the conflict was referenced only fleetingly, with Cooper merely stating that the party ‘welcomed the continued mission in Afghanistan’ and would support increased aid to the country. She has offered no comment on the catastrophic decision to rush headlong into negotiations with a bogus Taliban commander and while her response to the murder of aid worker Linda Norgrove in the House of Commons was well-judged, Cooper has not used her appearances in parliament to raise major qualms with the government’s long-term strategy. The shadow foreign secretary has not followed her predecessor’s example of using Foreign Office questions to challenge William Hague about the development of the war and has submitted just three written questions on the subject, covering police recruitment, electoral fraud in Helmand and the High Peace Council respectively. It’s possible this lack of activity is a deliberate ploy while Cooper attempts to reconcile differences within Labour about Britain’s involvement in the region, but such disagreements should not preclude her from showing the party still understands the intricacies of the problem.

The shadow foreign secretary has also said little about the precarious situation in Pakistan, something that has huge implications for the fight against terrorism and the stability of the Asian subcontinent. Cooper’s only real intervention on Pakistan so far came when she replied to a statement by Hague on Afghanistan on the 27th October, during which she asked the Foreign Secretary if he had met with President Zardari’s administration to discuss security in the region. Junior spokesman John Spellar made brief intervention on Pakistan in an unrelated debate in Westminster Hall on the 20th October, but Labour’s foreign affairs team hasn’t focussed on the way in which political divisions in Pakistan are helping to fuel continued chaos in the area and unlike her predecessor, Cooper has yet to highlight the need to improve the country’s moribund institutions and the limited authority it holds along the northwest frontier. She has additionally neglected to follow David Miliband in pointing to Kashmir as a motor for radical Islam in the region and has not sustained his criticism of David Cameron for pandering to New Delhi over Pakistan’s involvement in terror plots when he visited India last summer.

Iran’s attempt to acquire weapons of mass destruction is another issue that has fallen by the wayside since Cooper assumed the foreign affairs portfolio in October. In her Chatham House speech, the shadow foreign secretary did not mention Tehran’s nuclear ambitions once, let alone hint at where a future Labour government might stand on inspections, the effectiveness of existing international sanctions or the rights or wrongs of military action against the Islamic Republic. Cooper’s press statements on Iran have been limited to the condemnation of unpleasant – but unrelated – human rights abuses in the country, and her office gave no response to inconclusive talks held by the E3+3 (of which Britain is a member) and Tehran in December. It would be naïve to expect even the most formidable of politicians to master nuclear diplomacy so soon but given Britain’s role in negotiations and a split between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats over how to deal with Iran, this is something that Labour cannot avoid thinking through.

Away from the traditional hotspots, Cooper has also been evasive about some of the fundamental concepts that lie at the heart of foreign policy. Her office has routinely condemned threats to freedom around the world, with releases criticising the behaviour of the military junta in Burma, the mistreatment of women and political prisoners in Iran and the actions of Israeli settlers in the West Bank. But she has not articulated whether she believes humanitarian issues should determine the UK’s foreign policy above all other factors, as Tony Blair argued in his 1999 Chicago Speech. It may be unfair to expect someone who has spent their entire career thinking about economics to develop foreign policy doctrines overnight, but Cooper’s lack of grounding in its complex disputes is a problem and can be already seen in her attitude to certain countries, most notably China. At once the shadow foreign secretary emphasises the importance of economic ties and places a high priority on trade with the People’s Republic as a means to boosting Britain’s sagging exports while castigating it for mistreating Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo. Aside from the fact that some members of the politburo don’t need an education in the painful cost of political oppression, this is a slightly contradictory approach, one that doesn’t really provide the Labour Party with a clear framework in dealing with general foreign policy problems as they arise in the future.

Cooper’s short tenure has been far from a disaster, and the success with which she tackled previous briefs suggests she’ll come to master her new portfolio in time. But as Labour’s brightest talent seeks to cap an extraordinary year, she must not be afraid to think deeply about global challenges and speak with confidence about them. The world is waiting.