Murphy talks the talk; Jarvis has walked the walk

The Paul Richards column

At lunchtime today the shadow secretary of state for defence Jim Murphy will take the short walk from Parliament to the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) on Whitehall to deliver a speech restating Labour’s liberal internationalism. Some hours later tonight, Dan Jarvis, the 38-year old former major in the parachute regiment will be elected, God willing, as Labour’s newest MP. There is a direct connection between the two events: Murphy will spell out the doctrine that Tony Blair articulated in his speech in 1999 at the Chicago Economic Club, that liberal states have a duty to intervene in failing or rogues states for the good of the whole global community. Jarvis, whose 15-year military career took him to the Balkans, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, and Iraq, has experience of the tough, bloody impact of a political theory. Murphy talks the talk; Jarvis has walked the walk.

It is right for the shadow secretary of state to make such a speech. The detail of policy is a matter for Labour’s policy review, currently being undertaken by Liam Byrne. But the broad outlines of policy can, and should, be made clear by shadow ministers. Labour believes that Britain, as one of the five permanent members of the UN security council, as a leading partner in Nato and the EU, and as a nuclear state, has a significant role to play on the global stage. Our imperial past, and our role in the Commonwealth, gives Britain a range of international connections and shared history with many nations and regions. Our close relationship with the USA is another source of strength. All of this places a unique duty on Britain to be internationalist, and interventionist, in outlook. Murphy will make the point that the anger over Iraq or Afghanistan should not obscure the successes in Kosovo and Sierra Leone. Nor should people’s opposition to the invasion of Iraq mean that British politicians fail to act in the future.

Remember Kosovo? In 1999 millions of ethnic Albanians (mostly Muslims, by the way) were displaced by Milosevic’s Serbian forces, with the aim of removing all ethnic Albanians from Kosovo. Tony Blair said at the time “each renewed act of ethnic cleansing is for me just one more reason to stand firm, to insist this policy of racism and devastation will be defeated.” Labour Britain led calls for increased Nato bombing of Serbian targets to persuade Milosevic to change course. Nato aircraft flew 38,000 bombing sorties, including, for the first time since the Second World War, the Luftwaffe. I was in Belgrade shortly afterwards to see the results of Nato’s precision bombing. It was the second time I had seen the results of aerial bombardment of a major city (after London, which still had bombsites in the 1970s). This intervention saved millions of lives, and ensured that a fascist dictator was not allowed to prosper. Slobodan Milošević was eventually indicted for war crimes, and died before sentence in his prison cell at the Hague in 2006.

Perhaps we’ve forgotten Sierra Leone? This country, founded as a colony of liberated slaves in 1792, was being torn to bits by a civil war which lasted nearly a decade and cost 50,000 lives. The Revolutionary United Front (RUF), the ‘rebel’ army fighting the government, used child soldiers, rape, and amputation of legs, hands and arms to pursue its aims. By Spring 2000, the RUF rebels were on the outskirts of Freetown, uncowed by a weakening government and ineffective United Nations presence. Tony Blair and Robin Cook took a bold decision. They launched Operation Palliser led by Brigadier David Richards, which landed British troops on the coast off Freetown. An action billed as a rescue mission for UK nationals in reality was a decisive military intervention to defend the capital and defeat the rebels. British troops brought the civil war to an end. Tony Blair is a national hero in Sierra Leone; people still name their children after him.

Naturally, military action, with its bloodshed and civilian casualties, is last on a list of actions that liberal states should undertake when faced with unstable dictatorships or man-made humanitarian disasters. But the threat should be ever-present. The alternative is to stand on the sidelines whilst genocide such as that in Srebrenica in 1995 takes place. In 1995, the British Conservative government did nothing to directly intervene in the Bosnian War. Thousands died in the ethnic cleansing. Many, including Michael Foot, a veteran anti-appeaser, called for military action to stop it. But the UN failed to act in time.

As Jim Murphy takes the stage, he will speak to an essential truth: that globalisation is not merely economic: it is political, social and cultural as well. It binds humanity together. It means we are responsible for one another as never before. Today no-one is ‘foreign’; nowhere is ‘far-flung’. Labour’s foreign and defence policy must always recognise that reality. That’s why Jim Murphy’s speech today matters more than most, not least as we contemplate the future of states such as Libya and Iran. If Mr Murphy is looking for an able junior shadow minister with some experience of what liberal internationalism means, then I nominate the new MP for Barnsley Central.