by Tony Benn
Over the centuries Europe has seen many empires come and go: Greek, Roman, Ottoman, French and German, not to mention Spanish, Portuguese and British. Many of the conflicts between European states have arisen from colonial rivalry between imperial powers.
The concert of Europe after the fall of Napoleon, in which countries would negotiate alternatives to war, gave way after 1919 to the League of Nations, dominated by the old imperial powers, and broke down in part because Mussolini’s Italy launched a colonial war against Abyssinia in breach of the Charter of the League.
After the Second World War, western establishments had to consider how best to cooperate in rebuilding the continent and, as the Cold War began almost immediately, one of their objectives through NATO was to provide armed forces to prevent the Soviet Union from launching a military attack. It could therefore be argued that the EEC was set up to rebuild Europe on safe capitalist lines, and that NATO was set up to arm the EEC against the military threat that we were told was materialising.
Indeed, a few years ago I heard the former American Ambassador in London speaking at a reception in Speaker’s House about the Marshall Plan, which, he openly declared, was an investment to prevent the spread of communism.
As Minister of Technology in 1969, facing the massive multinational corporations and wondering how a nation state could cope with them, I did begin to wonder whether the existence of the EEC might offer some opportunity for political control and ought to be considered for that reason. Such a huge step required popular consent, and that was why in 1970 when we were in opposition and I was free to speak, I argued the case for a referendum to seek the consent of the British people. I discovered that the idea of a referendum was absolutely unacceptable to the establishment, which was totally opposed to giving the people direct say in any decisions, least of all one that might frustrate their dream of a Europe controlled by the political elite.
The referendum itself, held in 1975 after Heath had lost the 1974 election, was fought in a way that revealed the imbalance of money and influence on the two sides – the pro-Europe campaign having the support of the establishment and every single newspaper except the Morning Star, and able to command enormous resources; while the anti-campaign even had to struggle to find the cash to hold press conferences and meetings.
Wilson moved me from Industry to Energy immediately afterwards and I found myself on the council of energy ministers, where I served until 1970 and had the opportunity of seeing how the Common Market mechanism worked.
During the British presidency in 1977 I was the President of the Council of Energy Ministers. It is the only committee I have ever sat on in my life where as a member, or even as President, I was not allowed to submit a document – a right confined to the unelected Commission, leaving ministers like some collective monarch in a constitutional monarchy, able only to say Yes or No.
The Council of Ministers is of course the real parliament, for the directives and decisions take effect in member states without endorsement by the national parliaments. Because it is in effect a parliament, I proposed during my presidency that it should meet in public, so that everyone could see how decisions are reached and what arguments are used. This sent a chill of horror through the other ministers, who feared that it would bring to light the little deals that were used to settle differences, and I lost.
I also came to realise that the EEC – far from being an instrument for the political control of multinationals – was actually welcomed by the multinationals, which saw it as a way of overcoming the policies of national governments to which they objected.
For example, I was advised by the Energy Commissioner that the North Sea oil really belonged to Europe and was told by my own officials that the 1946 Atomic Energy Act in Britain, which gave the then government control of all atomic operations, had been superseded by Euratom (the European Atomic Energy Community) and that we no longer had any power of control.
I was warned that national support for industrial companies was a breach of the principle of free trade and was threatened with action if I disregarded their rules.
It became clear over the succeeding thirty years that the European Union, as it became, is a carefully constructed mechanism for eliminating all democratic influences hitherto exercised by the electors in the member states; it presents this as a triumph of internationalism, when it is a reversal of democratic gains made in the previous hundred years.
Now, with the Maastricht Treaty, the Single Market and the Stability Pact, the Frankfurt bankers (who are also unelected) can take any government to court for disregarding the Maastricht Treaty, while the Commission is now engaged in pursuing cases against the elected German and French governments for breaking the strict limits on public expenditure under the Stability Pact.
If the new European constitution comes into effect, other powers will pass from the parliaments we elect to the Council, Commission and Central Bank, and people here and everywhere in Europe will come to realise that whoever they vote for in national elections cannot change the laws that they are required to obey.
This is the most deadly threat to democracy and, if qualified majority voting removes the current veto system, any government could be outvoted and overruled and the people it was elected to represent would have no real say. Moreover, if the development of an independent foreign and defence policy takes place, we could be taken to war by decisions made elsewhere than in our own parliaments.
Not only is this a direct denial of democratic rights, but it removes the power of governments to discourage revolution or riot, on the grounds that a democratic solution is possible. Then the legitimacy and the stability of any political system come into question.
I am strongly in favour of European cooperation, having presented a bill for a Commonwealth of Europe that would include every country in our continent, as the basis for harmonisation by consent of the various parliaments, just as the UN General Assembly reaches agreements that it recommends should be followed.
The case for a European constitution and currency is also presented as a move beyond nationalism, which has brought such anguish to Europe. But I fear that it will stimulate nationalism when angry people discover that they are forced to do things they do not want to and are tempted to blame other nations, when the fault actually lies with the system itself.
Federations come and go, as we have seen in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, and I do not rule out the opportunity that the European Federation may break up amidst hostility between nations, which is the exact opposite of what we are told will happen.
4
A New Foreign and Defence Policy
BRITAIN IS NOW in effect an American colony, seen in Washington as an unsinkable aircraft carrier giving the US important military bases off the coast of Europe, and as a reliable political ally. British support permits what would otherwise be entirely unilateral actions to be presented as part of a ‘coalition of the willing’, purporting to be the international community around which the rest of the world has to revolve.
This came out clearly during the three most recent wars: in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq, when London obediently followed the American lead and the ‘special relationship’ was defined by the Prime Minister as meaning that Britain has to be there ‘when the shooting starts’.
To make this acceptable we were asked to believe something that was not true – namely that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that could be mobilised in forty-five minutes and threaten world security. That lie has now been brushed aside by the simple statement that Iraq under the Ba’athists was a rogue state and we have liberated it by invading and occupying it.
As a part of this policy, Britain has abandoned its commitment to the Charter of the UN and now does what it is told by President Bush, just as it did for Clinton before him, when he bombed the Sudan, and for President Reagan when Margaret Thatcher was in Downing Street.
The American empire now spends more on defence than the next ten most powe
rful countries in the world put together. It was when Clinton was in the White House that his defence department issued a statement of its policy in crude and simple terms, calling for Full Spectrum Dominance, under which the United States would dominate the world in space, land, sea, air and information. This dominance reflected the thinking of those involved in drawing up the project for the new American century, guided by the neo-conservatives who are now responsible for American foreign policy and who are followed loyally by the Prime Minister, whose special relationship with President Bush is now the central feature of his thinking.
The language of imperialism invites us to accept that the US has a God-given right to run the world, and that the future of democracy and human rights depends on American missiles in space, their bombers, rockets and naval dominance. We in Britain are well placed to understand this because we were an empire ourselves.
In 1945 the British empire was on the eve of its final demise, partly because of the weakness of our economy, partly because of the rise of powerful liberation movements and partly because the post-war Labour government included those who had been brought up in the anti-imperialist tradition and who recognised the inevitable. They cooperated intelligently with the leaders of those colonies who wanted to be free, and thus avoided the folly and bloodshed that characterised the end of the French empire with the Algerian and Vietnam Wars.
My early years in Parliament involved me directly in many of these colonial and liberation movements. I had the privilege of knowing personally many of the leaders, including Gandhi and Nehru, Nkrumah, Cheddi Jagan, Kenneth Kaunda, Ben Bella and others, who had been imprisoned by the colonial powers as troublemakers and terrorists and who ended up as heads of state, some having tea with the Queen as leader of the Commonwealth. I little thought at the time that at the end of my life I should see imperialism rise again and be embraced with such enthusiasm by Labour leaders now seeking power by piggybacking on top of a new empire possessing industrial, political, economic and military strength that we had lost.
Of course our relationship with the US began to develop under very different circumstances in two world wars and, without the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt might have found it difficult in an isolationist America to take the US into the war. At that critical period we were glad to welcome American troops into Britain to mount the invasion of Europe from bases here.
But almost as soon as the war was over, the Cold War began and our Russian allies, who had borne the brunt of the German attack, were represented as a threat to our survival – a process that began with the use of atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, falsely justified as the only way to save American lives that would have been lost in a land invasion of Japan. In truth, the Japanese had already offered to surrender, provided that the Emperor was saved, which suited the Americans quite well since they feared that if the Emperor were to be displaced, Japan might become communist.
From 1945 until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Cold War dominated the politics of Britain. It was the first rearmament programme launched in 1951 (over which Nye Bevan resigned) that weakened that post-war government and created the inflation that contributed to its defeat six months later. In his resignation speech, which I heard, Bevan dismissed the Soviet threat on three grounds: that the Soviet Union had no intention of attacking the West; that it did not have the military power to do so; and that it would lead to the very McCarthyism that later gripped the United States.
That rearmament programme also led us to divert essential resources from civil manufacture into military expenditure, which gravely weakened our economy while Germany and Japan, prohibited from rearmament, were able to concentrate their efforts on civil manufacture and eventually overtake Britain in exports.
The post-war Labour government took this decision under pressure from America and had earlier entered into arrangements with the US that were never revealed to Parliament, namely to accept permanent American air bases in Britain by explaining that they were part of US training missions, when in reality Attlee had secretly agreed to a long-term arrangement.
Attlee also concealed from Cabinet and Parliament his decision to build the atomic bomb for Britain – the UK having been a minor partner in the development of atomic weapons. Attlee considered that Britain too needed to have what became known as ‘the deterrent’, when we had the means of dropping those bombs by air.
When Britain adopted the American Polaris missile and submarine system (now replaced by Trident), this locked us permanently into a dependence on the United States, since the technology was beyond the capacity of Aldermaston to provide and the global satellite guidance system was also under sole American control.
The establishment of NATO consolidated and concealed these arrangements because, of all the NATO countries, Britain was the only one that had some unofficial form of consultation with America, which supposedly requires them to notify us before the American bases here are used for operations. But, as we learned when America bombed Libya from Fairford in Gloucestershire, these consultations were never genuine and the arrangements themselves were never written down; I learned this from Fred Mulley, when he was Minister of Defence, who told me that they were simply reaffirmed orally by each incoming President and Prime Minister.
Thus Britain lost the power to act independently. This is the most important single feature of our defence and foreign policy, which is now locked – apparently irrevocably – into the White House and the Pentagon.
Field Marshal Carver, when he retired, said that over the centuries British military operations had been almost exclusively concerned with imperial expansion and colonial wars. It looks as if that situation has returned as part of our role as junior partner in the American global strategy to seek out ‘rogue’ states, remove their weapons of mass destruction and establish US bases around the world – now amounting to more than 740 bases in 134 countries.
In that sense, New Labour is firmly unilateralist in its attitude towards nuclear weapons, so long as unilateralism is imposed on the ‘rogue’ states and cannot under any circumstances be applied to Britain, with our weapons of mass destruction under American control.
Now that the Soviet Union has disappeared, American power is reaching into the heart of the old USSR, partly to guarantee the supply of Caspian oil to the West and partly as a long-term strategy for the encirclement of China, which, before this century is halfway through, will be as powerful as the United States. Communists have now been replaced by Muslim fundamentalists as the enemy – the same Muslim fundamentalists who, during the height of the Soviet empire, America was arming as its allies in fighting communism; as when Osama bin Laden was funded and armed to get Soviet troops out of Afghanistan.
The emergence of plans for an extended European union, with its own defence force capable of acting independently if the need arose, has caused some anxiety in Washington, and is only hesitantly supported by New Labour for that reason. The policy is based on the totally illusory idea that the new Europe could in some way be a rival to, and a check on, the all-powerful United States.
The one question that is never asked or seriously discussed in Britain is whether this new defence and foreign policy is the right one for this country to follow. Or whether we should be thinking of a totally different policy, based on a non-nuclear Britain, without US bases, with Britain using its influence (both political and military) to strengthen the United Nations, which desperately needs support to prevent it being sidetracked and virtually destroyed by American power. In 2003 the UN was brushed aside by the Anglo-American decision to launch a pre-emptive war against Iraq in defiance of the Charter.
A new purpose to make real the hopes of the founders of the UN Charter, the declaration of human rights and UNESCO, and the relief of poverty is so exciting for a younger generation, and for me. It would be far more likely to make the world a safer place than would Star Wars and a huge nuclear arsenal, which could not protect the Twin Towers against suicide bombers
.
I have never been a pacifist, but I do believe in the peaceful settlement of international disputes, which is how ‘pacifism’ is described in the Oxford English Dictionary. Having lived through the Blitz, I know how frightening an air bombardment is. And I bitterly resent the way in which the media and politicians use war to boost their power and popularity, when the real problems of humanity remain neglected, because of the money and skill poured into dangerous and irrelevant arms programmes.
That is why the world peace movement that organised the massive demonstrations across the globe in the last few years offers the best hope for the future of humanity and deserves our support. This is a view widely shared by younger people, who understandably do not believe what they are told about the threats we face or the policies we are instructed to follow in order to deal with them.
These are the issues my children and grandchildren will have to face. And, in my considered view, that is the only rational way to proceed.
5
Peace
My hatred of war and passion for peace and justice I first learned at home. But they became stronger as a result of my own experience, living through a world war and witnessing many others since 1945. The arguments for just wars, and the supposed merits of globalised capitalism, form the basis of a political consensus that infects virtually all media coverage. That consensus must be challenged if the human race is to survive.
HOUSE OF COMMONS DEBATE ON THE GULF WAR, 6 SEPTEMBER 1990
MANY HON. MEMBERS have said that this is the gravest crisis that we have faced since 1945, and I share that view … There has been a demand – quite properly in a crisis – for a degree of unity, and that unity has been present in a number of important respects. No hon. Member supports the act of aggression by Saddam Hussein against Kuwait. So far as I know, no hon. Member is other than strongly supportive of the sanctions taken by the United Nations against Saddam Hussein and the resolution for their enforcement. We also have something else in common – none of us will be killed if a war breaks out.
