[A-List] UK state: Tory alarm at Conservative Party foreign policy

["Michael Keaney" <michael011@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Cameron stands encircled by zealous Anglo-neocons

An influential coterie of Tory MPs is bent on a foreign policy driven
not by Britain's interests, but those of the US and Israel 

Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Thursday March 22, 2007
The Guardian 

Last September, David Cameron queried Tony Blair's unwavering (and
unrewarded) loyalty to the Bush administration. The speech made Cameron
unpopular in Washington, but that should have done him no harm with the
British electorate, given what most of them think of George Bush. Yet
however welcome Cameron's apparent turn in foreign policy might be with
the public, he has a problem with his own parliamentary party. For years
past the Tories have been infiltrated by Anglo-neoconservatives, a
species easily defined. Several of the younger MPs are fanatical
adherents of the creed with its three prongs: ardent support for the
Iraq war, for the US and for Israel.

You might think that the first of those prongs was dented after the
disaster which has unfolded. What would have happened if the Tories had
opposed the war is one of the more fascinating "ifs" of history; but
they didn't, and the moment has passed when they could have adroitly
dissociated themselves from the war because of the false claims on which
it was begun and the incompetence with which it was conducted.

Even then, Iraq might have made Tories hesitate before continuing to
cheer the US, but Stephen Crabb does just that. The MP was in Washington
at the time of Cameron's speech, where, he said, there was
"disappointment expressed". Many would have taken that as a compliment,
but not Crabb, who says in best Vichy spirit: "We do need to be careful
about how the Americans see us."

In most European countries there is a party of the right whose basic
definition is its attachment to the national interest of that country.
Only here is there a Conservative party, and Tory press, largely in the
hands of people whose basic commitment is to the national interest of
another country, or countries.

There was once a vigorous high Tory tradition of independence from - if
not hostility to - America. It was found in the Morning Post before the
war, and it continued down to Enoch Powell and Alan Clark. But now
members of the shadow cabinet, such as George Osborne (whom even Cameron
is said to tease as a neocon), vie in fealty to Washington - and this
when US policy is driven by neocon thinktanks and evangelical
fundamentalists, with whom Toryism should have nothing in common.

Attempts by younger Tories to justify their allegiance to Washington and
Israel are curious. One more from the latest vintage is Douglas Carswell
MP, who insists that "it is in our national interest to support Israel".
He would never wish to say anything critical of Israel, "because I
believe they are a front-line ally in a war against people who wish to
destroy our democratic way of life. Others may take a nuanced view. I
don't."

This is extreme, but not unique. The Conservative Friends of Israel
(CFI) are a successful force, now claiming a large majority of Tory MPs
as members. It is frankly perverse for Charles Moore to complain in the
Daily Telegraph that the Conservatives have gone awry since the good old
days, when the natural Tory outlook included "a greater sympathy for
Israel than for those who were trying to destroy her", since if anything
the change has been the other way round.

When does he think that greater sympathy for Israel was ever a
distinctively Conservative position? In the days when I attended Tory
conferences, you could be entertained one evening by the CFI, with the
late Duke of Devonshire in the chair, but on the next by the Council for
Arab-British Understanding and such luminaries as Ian Gilmour and Dennis
Walters. Going further back, AJ Balfour was the Tory premier and then
foreign secretary who signed the eponymous declaration in 1917 favouring
a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and came to favour a Jewish state (as
with many gentile Zionists, his attitude to Jews was highly ambiguous;
he described privately how uneasy he once felt at a dinner party where
"Hebrews were in an actual majority"). And yet his successor as foreign
secretary took the opposite view. That highest of high Tories Lord
Curzon deplored the Balfour declaration. He thought that a Jewish
homeland could only mean a grave injustice to the inhabitants of
Palestine. It would inflame hundreds of millions of Muslim subjects of
the British empire. And as to the Jewish people themselves and the idea
of transporting them to the Levant, "I cannot think of a worse fate for
an advanced and intellectual community," Curzon said.

In his day Curzon might have seemed the truer Tory than Balfour, and
it's only recently that his spirit has been stifled in his old party.
That is all the more so with the arrival of MPs such as Crabb, Carswell,
and the egregious Michael Gove, the Times columnist and MP for Surrey
Heath, a copy of whose Muslim-bashing diatribe Celsius 7/7 is given to
every lucky person who joins the CFI.

Despite these Anglo-neocons, many people would say that endorsing every
US action has damaged British interests. As to Carswell's "in our
national interest to support Israel", the words are plainly absurd, and
his "frontline ally" comment is terrifying. Cameron himself is "proud
not just to be a Conservative, but a Conservative Friend of Israel," he
says; but does he share Carswell's belief that the British army in Basra
and Helmand is fighting on behalf of Israel? And does he imagine that
our troops want to be told that? They have enough problems as it is.

What Cameron might by now have grasped is that the position represented
by those zealous Anglo-neocons on his benches doesn't actually enjoy
much popular support. No US president has been more disliked in this
country than Bush the Younger, no adventure more regretted than the Iraq
war. Most British people are neither enemies of Israel nor "friends" in
the CFI sense. They hope for a just settlement and deplore needless
violence: during the bombardment of Lebanon last summer, one poll found
that only 22% thought the Israeli response was justified. When Crabb
says that the Anglo-US alliance has been "the single most important
foreign policy relationship since the second world war", he could also
recognise that never since then has the British electorate felt less
enthusiastic about it.

No one expects Cameron to become the Hugo Chávez of Notting Hill. But if
he's serious about winning an election, he could at least begin to forge
a foreign policy which, unlike Blair's, is based on the national
interest of this country and not another, and which expresses the views
of the British people.


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