by Tony Benn
But as Members of Parliament, we have responsibilities which cannot simply be subordinated to the role of the government. This is not the place to deal with it, but under our constitution, military deployments, acts of war and treaties of peace come under the Crown prerogative. Parliament has no legal or constitutional right whatever to decide the matters that are before us for debate.
But we have a duty to represent people. We have a duty to represent – as far as I can make out, some Conservative Members have done it with tremendous energy – British citizens in Iraq and Kuwait. We have a responsibility for them and their families. That has hardly been mentioned except as an instrument for denouncing, quite properly, the man who is detaining them. We have service men and women in the Middle East, and perhaps more are to go there if the stories in today’s papers are right. They and their families are entitled to have Members of Parliament to represent them. There are the refugees, thousands of them without water and food, and as human beings we have a responsibility to them. I might add that the tragic pictures that we have seen of people in the desert, without proper food or shelter, would be as nothing to what would happen if war broke out. As you know, Mr Speaker, because we discussed it yesterday, I intend to oppose the motion tomorrow that the House should now adjourn. This is the one rare occasion when whether we should adjourn for another six weeks while events take their course is the real question … I remind the House that on 5 May 1940, when Hitler was at the gates, there was an adjournment debate on the handling by the government of the Campaign in Norway, and a vote. The then Prime Minister [Neville Chamberlain] won the vote and resigned, and Winston Churchill became Prime Minister. So let us not be told that the duty of the House of Commons is to unite behind whatever the government of the day does, because that is not what the House is there to do. We are here to represent people and to contribute our own opinions as best we can. I have no complaint of any speech made today about how we feel that the crisis should be handled.
I will use plain language. I fear that the United States has already decided that, when it is ready, it will create a pretext for a war. That is what I believe. I acquit the Foreign Secretary of being in that hawkish clan because, in so far as one can penetrate the inscrutable corridors of power and the minds of their inhabitants, he seems to be a bit of a dove. But let me say this, too, without offence. Britain is a minor player in this game. We have had a debate today as though everything hinged on whether the Prime Minister decided to go to war. The Prime Minister, too, is a minor player in this unfolding tragedy. She decided to go in with President Bush, perhaps because of the transatlantic relationship, the so-called ‘special relationship’, or as thanks for the Falklands, or because she did not want to get mixed up with the EEC.
But she is a minor player, and once she and the Cabinet decided to commit even a notional number of forces – including the RAF and the RAF Regiment and now the troops – she was locked into what President Bush intended to do. It is important that we should not discuss, as if we were in a position to decide the post-Cold War order, what the Prime Minister will be doing here and there. We are a minor partner in an American strategy.
It must be known by now that I am opposed to a war against Iraq. I am opposed to action outside the United Nations. I believe that it would divide the Security Council. It might not exactly unite the Arab world, but it might bring many Arab countries together against us. The outcome of such a war could not be sure, because President Saddam Hussein would certainly have the capacity, were he to choose to do it, to destroy so many oil installations that, even though he himself might be destroyed, it would inflict a burden on the world economy and the Middle East which could not be contemplated …
Governments of any colour in any country are not the main practitioners of morality. America went into Panama and 3,000 people were killed. America went into Grenada. America supported Iraq when it attacked Iran. America did nothing when Cyprus was invaded and partitioned by Turkey. America has no moral authority, any more than any other super-power. The same would be true of the Soviet Union after Afghanistan, or wherever. It has no moral authority. Nor, might I add, because these things must be said and nobody else has said them, can we defend the Emir or the King of Saudi Arabia, neither of whom practise any democracy. I am not saying that they are not entitled to the protection of the UN Charter – I have already said that they are – but, given the denunciations of the breaches of human rights in Eastern Europe by ministers, one might have expected one of them, in this dispute, to point out that a person found guilty of shoplifting in Riyadh will have his hand chopped off. Are we to live in a world where morality is seen as the product of a parliamentary majority?
The real issue is this. Everybody knows it and nobody has mentioned it. The Americans want to protect their oil supplies … The former Attorney-General of the United States, Ramsey Clark, said on the radio last night that the United States forced Saudi Arabia to accept its army there because it wanted to protect its oil.
We are experienced as an imperial power and that will not shock the Conservatives. I am not asking anyone to be shocked, only to recognise the fact that stares us in the face. America has benefited much recently from cheap Middle Eastern oil. It was reported in the Financial Times that it has reduced its oil production and increased its oil imports from 31 per cent to 52 per cent. It has become hooked on this cheap fluid that now has to be controlled by the American army. That is honestly the position. The United States wants a permanent base …
Then there is the arms trade. That has been brought out a bit. A couple of years ago, in Algiers, I met a former Egyptian Foreign Minister who told me that there had been a seminar in Cairo about the Crusades and that, during the Crusades, European arms manufacturers supplied arms both to Richard Coeur de Lion and to Saladin. Nothing has really changed. Arms manufacturers have made billions of pounds from selling instruments of mass destruction, partly to hold down those colonial people so that the sheikhs will supply cheap oil, and partly because it is highly profitable to sell arms. I shall not try to differentiate between governments, because the Labour government did it too …
The arms trade is a corrupt trade. If our troops have to fight those of Saddam Hussein – I hope that that does not happen – they will be fighting against modern weapons in part sold by Britain, France, America and Russia for profit. That is a major issue.
If we go to war – and there are those who think that we might – what will be our war aims? That is not an unreasonable question. Will it be to free Kuwait, to topple Hussein, or to destroy Iraqi weapons? My right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition [Neil Kinnock] went further than the Prime Minister in setting the objective. She said that it was to arrest Saddam Hussein and to bring him before an international crimes tribunal. The Prime Minister said that on television. Are British troops to be sent in to fight before their objective has been clarified? The government have never made clear what is their aim. However, it is clear that the United States, having helped to arm Hussein, is determined to bring him down and to establish a new base.
I do not need to dwell on the consequences of war. They include a massive loss of life and possibly an air attack on oil installations. In the peculiar circumstances, we would to some extent, if not in every sense, be taking on Islam. There are 105 million Muslims in India alone.
The Prime Minister courteously gave way to me when I asked what I hope was a relevant question. She said three times – so she must have meant it – that she already has the legal right to attack Iraq and that no further stages are necessary. The only consideration is that that will be done not at her discretion, but at that of President Bush. I say to my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition that anyone who goes into the Lobby with the government tomorrow night will be endorsing the view that no further action is needed to legalise an attack on Iraq.
Those who vote with the government tomorrow will be voting for giving the Prime Minister a free hand or a blank cheque. Those who v
ote against the government will be accepting the view expressed in my early-day motion, which calls on the government ‘to make a clear and unequivocal statement that it will not commit British Forces to offensive military operations against Iraq that have not been explicitly authorised by a Resolution passed by the Security Council, and under the provisions of the UN Charter, which deal with the use of force by the United Nations and under its military command’ …
There has been a 7 per cent fall in oil production worldwide but a 100 per cent increase in its price. How is that justified? Thank God for Winston Churchill, who in 1914, when he was First Lord of the Admiralty, nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Petroleum Company for £2 million. His speech on that occasion made the strongest case for public control and ownership of oil companies that one can find. Winston Churchill said that countries were being squeezed by the oil companies.
If there is to be a peace-keeping force, it would be better if it were Arab, but I turn to the longer, post-Cold War perspective, to which our attention has been properly drawn by a number of speeches. One cannot have a new order for the Middle East based on the redeployment of white power in the form of a permanent American army in Saudi Arabia. That will not work. One is no longer dealing with the natives who featured in Rudyard Kipling’s poems, but with a quite different world. For me, the United Nations is the General Assembly, not the bigwigs, permanent and rotating members who sit on the Security Council. I personally would like to see direct elections to the General Assembly. They might only return one British Member of Parliament, but I would certainly be a candidate, if that were possible.
We are always being told that we must come to terms with reality and that we must not live in the past. The fact remains that we live in a very small world of many religions. There are fundamentalist Christians. When President Reagan spoke of an evil empire, he was declaring a Christian jihad against communism. Anyone who has visited America and listened to those Christian fundamentalists, who have not got into trouble and been removed, will know that they make their reputations out of their religious wars against communism. However, as right hon. and hon. Members know very well, the Americans stimulated Islam to defeat communism – but when communism changed, fundamentalism remained.
We shall have to plan and share the world’s oil. America has only 2 per cent of the world’s population, but uses 25 per cent of the world’s resources. That situation cannot be allowed to last, even if America has a big army. The real function of the United Nations is to act as the custodian of social justice. It should not serve just as a policeman … I urge caution, because many other Western European nations are being very cautious and have not sent troops. Many of the non-aligned countries are not really behind the action being taken by America and Britain. It is time to try to take some of the hatred out of the situation …
I urge caution because it is not the hardware of military weapons that frightens me. A gun cannot go off by itself. It is the hatred which makes people want to use weapons. That is the fuel of war and in the past few months we have had the most vicious war propaganda pumped down our throats. The temper of peace, of which Pandit Nehru used to speak, is what we need, and we want to be cautious and to let it work its way through the United Nations.
HOUSE OF COMMONS DEBATE ON NUCLEAR DEFENCE, 14 JANUARY 1992
When the election comes, I shall present myself to the people of Chesterfield as a candidate who is committed to the ending of nuclear weapons and bases in Britain. I shall do that because that is what I put to the electors in 1987 and 1984. I resigned from the Front Bench in 1958 because I could not support a policy of using nuclear weapons. That is my position …
At the end of the Cold War, it is necessary for those of us who take the view that I take to restate our position, given contemporary circumstances …
When I listened to the Secretary of State’s [Tom King’s] arguments, I became even more convinced of the rightness of what I have been saying. The Soviet Union had nuclear weapons on a huge scale, but they did not protect the Soviet Union. It collapsed. Indeed, it collapsed partly because it had wasted so much money on nuclear weapons, but I shall return to that point in a moment. Nuclear weapons do not guarantee the integrity of a state against either internal or external enemies.
If it is really true that some nuclear weapons are now in the hands of hungry, riotous and underpaid soldiers and are being serviced by nuclear scientists who are not receiving any money, what effect can a British deterrent have? Those people probably do not have sufficient communications to know of the existence of such a deterrent.
I put it to the Secretary of State that it was the policy of the West to bankrupt the Soviet Union … The fact is that the Soviet Union was bankrupted by its military expenditure. That, more than anything else, probably explains why changes have occurred in the Soviet Union. I hope that no one thinks that what has happened in the Soviet Union happened because people in Moscow went around whispering to each other, ‘The British government are ordering Trident: we had better abandon communism.’ That had nothing to do with what happened. The Soviet people wanted freedom. What happened had nothing to do with the threat from the West.
I must say something else so that it is put on the record before it passes into history. The Western intelligence agents used Islam to undermine communism …
We are also told that it is wicked for Russian scientists to leave the Soviet Union to get more money elsewhere. I thought that that was what market forces are all about. The Conservative Party says that one cannot interfere with market forces, but if a Russian scientist goes to Tehran to work on nuclear matters, Conservative Members say that that must be stopped – if necessary by having more Trident missiles. What nonsense the whole business is.
Turning to arms sales, are we not the world’s second-largest arms exporter? But if the Russians cannot get enough food and sell a few weapons to buy food, Conservative Members say that that must be stopped.
I fear that at the end of this period we shall see a repetition of the Gulf War – against Libya and Cuba and, possibly, the toppling of Castro and Gaddafi – because the Soviet Union’s weakness has led the Americans to believe that they can run the world. That is what the new world order is about.
Mr Viggers [Conservative Member for Gosport]: The whole House respects the integrity of the right hon. Gentleman, who is a signatory to the amendment tabled by the hon. Member for Islington, North [Mr Corbyn]. How many of his hon. Friends does the right hon. Gentleman think will put before their electors the clear policy that he intends to put before the voters of Chesterfield? How many Labour Members and Labour candidates does the right hon. Gentleman think would support the amendment that has been tabled by his hon. Friend the Member for Islington, North? Does the right hon. Gentleman regard himself – I say this in a friendly manner – as something of a political dodo?
Mr Benn: My position is unilateralist and always has been. The hon. Gentleman has asked a very silly question because a substantial number of people in this country share my view – far more than might be suggested by the number of their parliamentary representatives. Let us start with the argument that the Cold War was ended by the nuclear deterrent and that we did not have a war because of that deterrent. It was not until I went to Hiroshima that I learned that, far from the bomb being dropped there to bring the Japanese to the peace table, they had offered to surrender weeks before. The bomb was dropped on Hiroshima to tell the Russians that we had such a weapon. That all came out at the war-crimes tribunals in Japan.
I have never had any sympathy with the Soviet system and its lack of democracy, but I never believed that the Russians were threatening to invade Western Europe. Like, I am sure, most people in this country, I never believed that. Does anyone honestly think that the Russians, with all their domestic problems, planned to take over West Germany, Italy and France and come to London to ‘deal with Ken Livingstone’ or go to Northern Ireland to ‘deal with Ian Paisley’? Does anyone honestly think that that wa
s their strategy? That threat was the most convenient political instrument ever used in domestic politics because those who criticised the Conservative government were regarded as agents of the KGB.
Indeed, when the Secretary of State for Defence talks about the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, he ought to know. His Department ordered the bugging of CND and treated its members, who were honest, decent people, as though they were enemies of the state. Cathy Massiter resigned from MI5 because she would not go along with its KGB tactics. So of course the Secretary of State knows a lot about CND. He probably knows a lot about what we say to each other on our telephones today. I hope that he does, because my telephone is the only remaining link that I have with the British establishment. So I speak clearly and I hope that those who are listening understand what I am saying.
The second argument against nuclear weapons is that we cannot afford them … When we look back at the reasons why the British economy has been weak in the past forty years, one of the main ones is that we have wasted too much money on weapons of war that are not necessary.
I think that I am right in saying that six out of ten scientists in Britain still work on defence or in defence-related industries. Let us consider the country which now has the most powerful nuclear arsenal in the world – America. Bush has to go to Japan to plead with the Japanese to buy a few more gas-guzzlers from Detroit. Why is Japan so rich? Because it has not wasted all that money on nuclear and other weapons. Neither have the Germans. We would not let them do so at the beginning. But the shops are full of Japanese cameras, videos, cars and Japanese this-and-that. All that we can offer to sell is a few missiles to a sheikh. That is our major export drive as a major arms supplier. We cannot afford those weapons. That is a powerful reason for not having them.
