Government and Military

The paper says lots of laudable things about world poverty and the abolition of inequality worldwide but unfortunately it is not based on any coherent vision of a world community founded on the principles of peace, equality, justice and sustainability. This is a piecemeal approach to key world issues without any sense of the thinking being joined up.

The lack is particularly obvious in the failure of the paper to deal with international humanitarian law (IHL) and what that might mean for establishing the ground rules of our global interdependence. This is particularly disappointing due to the UK’s strong role in promoting the International Criminal Court. Is IHL being airbrushed out of the policy statements because it is becoming ever more apparent to the people in the street that the references to it by our government are essentially partisan? Britain has claimed to ground our actions on IHL when it suits British interests and has ignored it when it does not. Headway towards a sane world community demands integrity on this issue - the simple principle of one law for rich and poor alike.

Britain’s distance from such integrity is of course especially well illustrated by the fact that it maintains a massive nuclear arsenal in active deployment and regularly threatens to use it.¹ On any unbiased reading of the Opinion of the International Court of Justice in 1996 on nuclear weapons and the law, and on any honest consideration of the long established principles that went into the making of that Opinion, Trident breaches IHL. There is no escaping the simple conclusion that it is an indiscriminating weapon of mass destruction. Britain’s paper commitment to the unequivocal abolition of its nuclear arsenal made in New York in 2000 at the NPT conference is simply that, a series of words on paper that have no actual policy meaning and only boost our reputation for cynicism.

A fundamental move towards integrity on IHL and away from the racist and neo-colonialist preoccupations that still lurk within British attitudes to the rest of the world is required before real reforms to international relations can be undertaken. At present the sad truth is that Britain is rightly seen by much of the world as a key, if junior, member of the group of playground bullies who make up the western powers - albeit a member occasionally troubled by conscience and a vestigial insight that there might be a better way to look at things than the Neighborhood Watch Gone Mad ideology that underpins the group. In that context it is especially sad that the paper gives implicit support to British involvement in Missile Defence.²

How different it can be. We recall that when Robin Cook in 1998 spoke about an ethical foreign policy for Britain, people were moved to tears with the hope that gave of a shift towards sanity. We could see it all: Trident decommissioned; a serious programme for arms conversion; a strategy for speedy reduction on economic reliance on the arms trade; our voice calling for a real UN based on equality and inclusion for all; the acknowledgement of our racist and neo-colonialist (recent) past; investment of 5% of current military spending on the education of a generation on the skills of conflict resolution and mediation for use at home and abroad; taking the world lead on issues of sustainability; supporting grassroots and labour related movements to abolish poverty, rather than the WTO; dropping the debt for all countries, etc, etc.

That is not woolly idealism. It’s the only thing that’s going to save this planet. And time is running out.

Notes

1. In March Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, told the House of Commons that the UK reserved the right to use nuclear weapons if British troops in the field were threatened by biological or chemical weapons.

It is possible that legal advisers to the Ministry of Defence were invoking an alleged right of pre-emptive action. However, this is a very limited exception to the normal occasion for military action - that the Security Council takes measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. It could only be conceivably lawful if the UK itself were in clear and immediate danger of attack.

It may be argued that the emergence of Weapons of Mass Destruction lowers the threshold of imminence regarding self-defence. If this plays a part in Government thinking on the issue, it should be put to public examination.

The involvement of nuclear weapons exacerbates this misleading interpretation of international law.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has confirmed that to threaten, let alone use, nuclear weapons would be generally contrary to International Humanitarian Law. The judges were unable to pronounce on whether they could be lawful "in an extreme circumstance of self-defence, in which the very survival of a state would be at stake". Even then, any such threat or use should never violate the law.

Recent Government statements on the possible use of nuclear weapons refer only to "an extreme circumstance of self-defence". The second part of the equation, "in which the very survival of a state would be at stake" has been notable by its absence. A biological or chemical attack on British troops in the field could never qualify as a threat to the British state’s survival. We would therefore welcome an assurance that British nuclear weapons could never be used unlawfully, and especially in a situation where the UK itself was not under severe and immediate threat of extinction.

2. See the paragraph "Non-proliferation and arms control" and the ominous reference in line 7 to "defensive systems".

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