Progress is pleased today to launch The Future of Labour’s Foreign Policy, a new pamphlet looking at new approaches for Labour and Britain on the international stage.
Drawing on 30 interviews with senior foreign policy figures such as former foreign secretary David Miliband and current shadow defence secretary Jim Murphy, as well non-party-affiliated commentators such as Mark Leonard of the European Council on Foreign Relations and Robin Niblett, director of Chatham House, this report finds that:
• Thirty senior party figures and foreign policy experts claim that being strong and central player in the EU is in Britain’s long-term national interest
• Being a peripheral player in a two-speed Europe means Britain is seriously damaging its image in Beijing, Delhi and Brasilia
• Thirteen years of ‘open internationalism’ is being replaced by the introversion and isolation of the ‘Major years’
• The Labour party should form a taskforce of experts to address the legacy of Iraq by using the experience to create a new ‘set of rules’ on ‘when and how’ to intervene abroad
While in ‘every other area of the world the nation-state is being empowered’, the report says, ’the only exception is the EU where member states will become increasingly reliant on its collective leverage. The bottom line for the UK is that as the world’s power shifts east the only way to remain influential is by being at the leading edge of the EU.’
Away from Europe, the report also calls on Labour to continue to support the doctrine of humanitarian intervention even after Iraq, but to drop the toxic language of ‘liberal interventionism’. It goes on to underline the need for Labour to put stricter parameters in place ‘to ensure humanitarian intervention is not used as a justification for regime change’. This, the report claims, would help to re-emphasise the original meaning of Tony Blair’s Chicago speech, which was about intervening to protect people, not enforce new forms of governance on them. The researchers suggest the formation of a taskforce of former and shadow Labour ministers, bipartisan experts and even a ‘citizen jury’ to formulate the criteria for intervention.