28th September 2004 - mfp Fringe Meeting at Labour Party Conference

 

ministry for peace Fringe Meeting at Labour Party Conference September 28, 2004

 

Chair:	John McDonnell,MP
Speakers:	Tony Benn,
	Tony Woodley, General Secretary, Transport and General Workers Union
	Diana Basterfield, Co-Founder, ministry for peace

John McDonnell

"I am the MP for Hayes and Harlington and Chair of the Socialist Campaign Group. I am the MP that Diana alighted upon in developing the idea of a parliamentary strategy for a Ministry for Peace as a very concrete proposal for implementation by government. As speakers we have Tony Benn - no need for introductions - when you look at his record on campaigning on peace issues, he's been involved in virtually every peace initiative and anti-war organisation over the last forty or fifty years. In addition to that, he has undertaken developments in Parliament around the publication of Bills, discussion papers and the production of various articles around the development of peace in a very concrete way. We have tried to use Tony on a whole range of issues, if "use" is the right word, to provide advice on how we proceed in terms of winning the argument around peace and also turning it into a practical reality within government. There arenâ't many ex-Cabinet Ministers that you can go to these days who'll give you some advice on how to secure peace in the world. I am grateful to Tony for coming along.

Unfortunately we have just heard that Tony Woodley, General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union has been summoned to see the Prime Minister this lunchtime and so cannot be with us.

Diana Basterfield has been our coordinator in developing the initiative and the overall campaign.

I want to spend a few minutes talking about where we go from here in the campaign, introduce Tony, we'll have questions in between speakers and then Diana will take you through a discussion of the ministry for peace and questions.

The position we are in at the moment most of you will know. Some time ago the idea of developing a Ministry for Peace or a Department for Peace, depending on what country you are in, came about as a result of people who were anxious to promote the cause of peace looking at how do we structure this within policy making within government. This debate has been had now across the world, in America, in Japan, in Europe, in Australia, New Zealand and now in Britain - launched by us. We all have the same objective, which is to secure a peaceful world, we all have an understanding, as much as we can, about the causes of conflict and war, we all have some ideas about how we can contribute to preventing war, or if conflict breaks out how we bring it to an end and resolve conflict. What we don't have, in virtually any government at the moment, is a structured way forward in government itself. The reason that I think this debate has come about is because in all our peace campaigns over the years, Tony has been at it longer than us, and some us have been around a time, well, we're become archaeological exhibits in our own time basically. The reason this has come about is that sense of frustration that we need to build peace deep within the heart of government. The discussion is how do we move that debate on, how do we structure and restructure government with the objective of peace? It's fine having it as a generalised objective but for every objective you need very concrete action to achieve that objective. One of those actions we feel is the restructuring of government itself.

What we have done so far is that we have gone through a long consultation exercise asking people how they think government can contribute towards achieving peace within a dialogue with civil society overall. We have looked at examples of what's happened elsewhere in the world, we've looked at conflict resolution, how it has been implemented, how it has worked; also sometimes where it has failed and what lessons we need to learn. We've looked at what resources have been allocated towards securing peace. We have looked at how the issue around peace isn't just about war or no war. It is about conflict within society, within communities, within families and within individuals as well. We have looked at every aspect of how you resolve conflict. We've looked at the very practical problems that cause conflict and these can range from conflict over oil, conflict over environmental matters - whether water in the Punjab or land in Latin America. We have looked at how, in addition to that, our system gears us up to activate conflict rather than to resolve it. Some of the best examples of that is work teachers have been doing about how we teach history and also how we celebrate conflict and war, rather than celebrating peace, how we celebrate military leaders and rather than celebrating peacemakers and conflict resolvers. When Kai Brand-Jacobsen came to speak to us at the House of Commons in January, I thought one of the most telling things was when he said that he walked around central London while he was here and virtually every statue was one of a military leader: some General who had suppressed some colonial state at some point, who had put to the sword or the gun large numbers of people.

It's that sort of discussion we have been having. Then we have brought it to some concrete conclusions. First of all, we published an initial consultation paper, then we had a debate in Parliament and drafted a Bill calling for a Ministry for Peace. Then we had a further consultation on the Bill itself. What we felt was that we wanted to transform government from a vehicle, in many instances for conflict and war, into a vehicle for securing peace. We wanted to establish a specific Ministry for Peace. In America they call it a Department for Peace. Sitting round the Cabinet table there will be a specific Secretary of State who is referred to with some status, for advice on how governments secure peace, not just in their own land but across the world as well. Within that we felt that establishing a Ministry for Peace would bring not just a political dynamic to government and its objective in making sure peace was at the heart of government but also would bring resources and mobilise resources for securing peace at every level whether that be education, conflict resolution, in research or building peace organisations.

Halfway through our debate, what we found was that very quietly this Government, to give it its due, had put together its own initiative for conflict resolution. This is the Global Pool for Conflict Resolution. It brought together different Government departments in one committee - Ministry of Defence, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Treasury and the Department for International Development - coming together to discuss the role of government in conflict resolution. First of all there was a worldwide group and then they focussed on Africa because of the issues that then became current. It was interesting for us that here we were asking for a structure of government to be established, a focus on peace, and actually at least the Government was listening to a certain extent and had developed its own initiative. It had set aside some considerable sums of money for this Pool to be drawn upon to secure peaceful initiatives. We felt we were beginning to catch the wind with that particular debate. It is regrettable that three things have happened. One, the Government hasn't even advertised its own initiative. It is almost like a beneficent secret that no one talks about. Secondly, some of the resources that have been applied to this initiative are very difficult to access. In addition it's very unsure whether they might not just be reinforcing issues around conflict as well, in terms of the role of military services etc. The third issue, I suppose, which relates to that, is that it hasn't yet moved on. It has been in existence for a number of years but hasn't moved on into a dynamic structure, which really focuses all Government attention on it. It hasn't got to the level of Cabinet status that we would want.

Here are my personal ideas now. My view is that having got to this level of debate within our initiative, our own organisation, bringing groups together; having thought through a number of our ideas of how we can establish a Ministry for Peace, how that can then assist the development of ideas, research, conflict resolution, practical initiatives, bringing government together; having got our own ideas together and having recognised that Government, itself, is moving part in that direction, how do we need increase the dynamic? How do we give it more momentum?

First of all, let me throw out these ideas to you. We are in the run up to a General Election. It is the ideal opportunity to be floating new ideas, which political parties can at least consider, even if they don't initially take them up. Our job in the next six to eight months, before the next General Election, which will probably come in June, is to try and get the concept of a Ministry for Peace as part of the central debate in the run-up to the Election. In some ways we have missed a bit of a trick at the Party Conferences themselves. If we had had more time we could have had more of a build up to this Conference with resolutions coming in, and all the rest of it. To be frank about it though, we would have been squeezed off the agenda and wouldn't have had the debate anyway. It might be, in the debate on Thursday, that in the discussion around Iraq, we may be able to persuade someone at least to refer to the Ministry for Peace so that we get it floated on the floor of conference itself. We are in a bit of a conflictual situation this week so maybe it's not the right atmosphere actually to push too hard. In the run-up to the General Election, though what we should be doing now is providing a briefing to every Parliamentary candidate in the General Election from all the parties about what the ministry for peace is, what we are about and asking them to consider it and even meet us to talk about it.

Then we need to target individual MPs, in marginal constituencies in particular, (they are the ones who want to have more of a dialogue than the ones in safe seats, crude I know it is but there you are) targeting those and see if we can get a batch of MPs across party if possible, signed up to the concept in the run-up to the General Election. Even with some of them, getting them to insert it in the local manifestos they stand upon, even if we can't get it into the national manifesto. In that very practical way we make the Ministry for Peace part of the debate for the General Election. The debate about peace isn't going to go away, it is going to be part of the General Election anyway. Iraq isn't going to go away, Iraq is going to be central to the General Election campaign for all of us, whatever position people took so we should exploit that in the best form possible by saying that this is a war that could have been avoided, there could have been conflict resolution. We could have used the mechanisms we are talking about now as part of the Ministry for Peace, to resolve that situation before it even occurred. We want to use that as a practical example. That's the first thing.

The second stage, I think, now is to recognise - and we are at a Labour Party Conference - that within our own movement, the Labour Party and Trade Union movement, there is a lot of work to do. Next year we will be talking to Tony Woodley and the other trade unions to talk about whether or not we can get a resolution and debate at their conferences next year. It won't take much. To have Tony Woodley on this platform - I was trying to explain to Diana - to have Tony Woodley to agree to be on this platform was a major breakthrough. If you have the Transport and General Workers Union campaign on the Ministry for Peace we will have a Conference resolution through the TUC and the Labour Party Conference within about three years. That's the dynamic that we are into so next year we should be at every trade union conference with a resolution, with a fringe meeting securing their commitment to a Ministry for Peace. Then in September of next year see if we can get on the TUC agenda and try to get the TUC committed to it. In that way, we've almost got a majority within the Labour Party itself. I am talking about the Labour Party now because we are in the Labour Party. We can do the same exercise for every other political party, in the same way, getting it onto their agenda and try and get some unanimity about this. Try and make it commonsense. Try and make it part of the reasonable approach to avoiding war in the future. And, God help us, Blair and everyone else doesn't want to go through another Iraq for all sorts of reasons, not just a crude political calculation.

Finally, and then I'll shut up. In the Parliamentary campaign now, we've had a Ten Minute Rule Bill. We had a debate, we had cross-party support. John Randall, bless him, the Tory MP - my neighbour in Uxbridge - put his name to the Bill itself. The Liberal Democrats eventually signed up to it though there was a bit of a hiccup in advance, the Scottish and Welsh Nationalists signed up and we had a number of Labour MPs. We had that debate on the reading unopposed. Doesn't mean it becomes legislation it is just a way of getting a debate going. What was interesting - no one opposed. They could have done. You have a Ten Minute Rule Bill where you talk for ten minutes; if someone opposes they have the right to talk for ten minutes to oppose it. They didn't. What we want to do is to present a Bill again. The Whips are playing up at the moment and didn't give me a timescale before the Conference. We are going to go back and try and get other MPs to put their names in as well and get another Bill presented - in the same way as Tony did, Bill after Bill. If we can't get the debate, at least get it published again. We want a dialogue. Debbie King, who is here, is having a dialogue with senior civil servants. How would this work? What would it be like in government? We want to have the most practical, concrete, implementable Bill possible to lay before each political party, easing the path for its introduction. So in the next six months in Parliament we will be raising the debate, publishing another Bill, having an Adjournment debate, encouraging people to write to their MPs, come along and lobby. One of the things we could do before the General Election is have a Ministry for Peace Lobby Day where we invite everyone to come to Parliament to lobby their MPs asking them to sign up to the Bill itself.

That's the programme of action for the coming period which, I think, could be incredibly effective. Why? Because people are desperate, absolutely desperate for peace, at every level of our society. People never want to go through this experience again. That gives us an opportunity, I think, of securing peace in a very practical way at the heart of Government. That's my position.

Tony Benn

Can I first of all congratulate Diana who created this initiative and also congratulate John for the way he presented it because the Labour Party is a sort of link between the streets and the statute book. Good ideas begin on the streets in demonstrations and then with the help of good Members of Parliament, they end up on the statute book. To put it another way, they begin with a demonstration and end up in Downing Street! And therefore the role of the Labour Party, when it's at its best, is doing exactly what John is doing and I think it was wonderful to have taken it up.

Secondly, I know it may seem a small point but language is very important. We used to have a Secretary of State for War, now a Secretary of State for Defence. No one will remember this but Manny Shinwell was Minister of Fuel in 1947 when we had a fuel crisis and he was sacked in the middle. He then became Secretary of State for War and somebody said: Thank God, when he was Minister of Fuel we had no coal, now he's Minister for War we won't have any wars! And another thing, they don't talk about bombs any more they talk about deterrence. I was in Wales years ago and somebody came up to me and said: "Can I ask Tony what he thinks of the hydrogen bomb as a detergent" I said: "It would deal with all the problems of dirt but I'm afraid we'd go as well." Now, how about Foreign Office? I'll tell you a funny story. I have a son called Hilary, Secretary of State for International Development, you may know his name. When he was six he was always dressing up and on one occasion he rushed into the room dressed up in the most extraordinary outfit and I said: "Who are you today" He said: "I'm a foreigner from the Foreign Office" - the whole idea that everybody else is a foreigner! When you come to the House of Commons you're called a 'Stranger'. And of course, if you are killed by the Americans it's "friendly fire". Personally I don't want to meet any friendly Americans with guns. To take another example - hostages. America is kidnapping all those people in Guantanamo Bay and they are being held hostage. So I do think language - it may sound simple - is very important question.

Now the other thing about the history of this, I'm not a historian but I do like looking back. In 1935 when I was 10 I went out and distributed literature for the Labour Party. I've just published a book, funnily enough, and I put it in. "Fifty reasons why you should vote Labour" price 1d. Disarmament. Labour stands for disarmament in rapid stages through international agreement. 2. A Labour Government would maintain such defence forces as are necessary and consistent with our membership of the League of Nations but the best defence is not huge, competitive armaments but the organisation of collective security and the agreed reduction of national armaments everywhere. The nicest part of all, in the actual Manifesto, it said "The Peace Act. Once it is passed, no government, without violating the law of the land, can resort to war as an instrument of national policy". That was Labour Party policy in 1935 and then it goes on to talk about a lot of other quite sensible things! We didn't win the election. We won 100 seats. You see that was the generation who suffered in the First World War. Don't forget, the people in 1935 who were in their late thirties, they probably fought in the trenches and so there was a passion for peace. You could see Hitler coming up and people wanted peace and, of course, Mussolini invaded Abyssinia and the thing collapsed and there was the war and millions more people were killed.

Now this idea of a Ministry for Peace. I was very pleased that you have raised it with Dennis Kucinich because I met him in New York when I went to the peace demonstration last year. There were a hundred thousand people demonstrating. I’ve never forgotten, there was a group of old ladies who called themselves "The Raging Grannies". I was terribly tempted to join them and see if there was room for a Raging Grandad. Don't ever think that Bush represents the United States. They have a wonderful tradition of peace in the United States. For example, in 1918 there was a man called Eugene Dobbs who stood for the Presidency. He was against war. He had one disadvantage as a candidate, he was in prison for sedition! I've got his campaign button and it said: "For President of the United States vote for federal convict Eugene Dobbs". He got a million votes. It's not about national boundaries at all. It's about people who want peace and people who don't. When they talk about Christians and Muslims I think the real difference is between rich Christians and poor Christians and between rich Muslims and poor Muslims. If you look at it in that light you see it all quite differently.

Now we also have to be very realistic. There wouldn't be wars if people didn't want them. Without scapegoating anybody, who benefits from war? Well, first of all, aggressive people who want power and empires didn't arise by accident. They arise because very powerful people want to control others. When I was in Baghdad last year they told me that in 1258 Genghis Khan invaded Baghdad. He killed a million Iraqis. He took the books from the Library, Iraq's was the oldest library in the world, one of the ancient civilisations, threw the books in the Tigris and the Iraqis stories were of the river Tigris black with the ink of the books and red with the blood of those who defended them. Now when you are dealing with Genghis Khan you need a bit more than a Ministry for Peace, you'd need a collective movement to stop it.

The other people who want war are arms manufacturers. I think the arms trade is a really criminal trade, much worse than the international drugs trade selling opium. Not that I have ever tried opium, I'm a teetotaller. I'm keeping alcohol for my old age! People sell arms to both sides and then when the war begins, what do they do? They demand a ceasefire, mainly to see which weapons are better than the other weapons. Do you remember in the Falkands War an Exocet missile sank HMS Sheffield and, of course, after that the Exocet became one of the most successful weapons in the world because they'd tried it out. I think we've got to be clear about this, a Ministry for Peace would have to have a very clear policy on the arms trade, as I'm sure you would want it to have. I think the arms trade should be controlled by the General Assembly of the United Nations. If I may say a few words about the UN in this, talking about peace. We have got to go beyond the UN as it now is.

I'll tell you another group of people who like war and that is the media. I don't mean journalists particularly want to kill people but if you want to sell a newspaper, bomb Baghdad. There is something funny about these embedded correspondents. They meet a General in the morning and tell us what he wanted to tell us in the afternoon and they call it a 'free press'. We've got to be very careful, and I don't mean anything personal about the editors, but you can get a big boost in your circulation and a big boost for your newspaper if there's bloodshed. Then there's political leaders who say: If you knew what I know about the terrible threat, you'd support me and stand by our troops and all that. In my view the troops don't decide to go to foreign countries, it's the politicians who send them there and then say we must stand behind the troops. Well, maybe we should have the right to criticise the war.

The other thing that is so terribly dangerous and it's emerging now so clearly, is the way in which Bush has presented this as a religious war. Remember after 9/11 when Bush said it was a crusade against terrorism. I don't think in Texas they mention the Crusades in primary schools, he'd probably never heard of them, but you go to the Middle East and they all know what the Crusades were. Richard Coeur de Lion with his flags of St. George slaughtered people. And Bush said that that God wanted him to be President; it's enough to make anyone an atheist. At the same time he is building this up as a war against Islam and that is terribly dangerous. Actually Jews, Christians and Muslims all have one thing in common, they all believe in one God but then they kill somebody who believes in another God although we are all brothers and sisters according to those three religions. The impact of the Iraq war on community relations you've got to think about too. Of course Christians may find themselves in Muslim countries, and the other way round. There is a massive amount of work to do.

I do think a Minister for Peace (I'd go up and call them a Secretary of State for Peace, don't underestimate, put them at the top) or Lord President of the Peace Council wouldn't be a bad title. Whenever the Cabinet discusses anything, the peace element, conflict resolution, religious understanding, the arms trade, is brought to bear. If you did that I think it would alter the balance of argument within Cabinets. I also think that it would not be difficult at all to get it into manifesto of all three parties. I think John's absolutely right on this. We are not trying to isolate Howard on this or Kennedy. We are trying to get everybody to agree. I think it would have an impact.

Can I make one last point? The UN, which I believe in because it's all we've got, has got to be developed in a way that gives the UN greater powers than it has. I don't just mean the Security Council. You know why they have the veto? After the Second World War they said that whatever the UN does, it can't authorise a fight between the remaining super powers, America, Russia, France, Germany, China and Britain. What we've got to do is to convert the UN into a body able to go beyond the veto and the right place to do that is the General Assembly. I think the General Assembly of the United Nations should control the arms trade, should control the World Trade Organisation, the IMF and have a key role in promoting peaceful development. These are positive ideas. I don't know about you but I'm fed up with scapegoating people and I don't agree with those who say Blair should apologise. If he apologised it wouldn't make a button's bit of difference. What we want is a policy decided here in Brighton. I believe they've succeeded in bullying the delegate who was going to second the Iraq resolution into dropping it so they are trying not to have the debate on Thursday.

We have to go on being positive. What we want is peace. You can't have peace without justice. It's one thing to have the Crusades in the 11th Century but with the size of the human race now, the shortage of resources now and the chemical, biological and nuclear weapons available, you simply can't afford conflict, it would obliterate the human race.

So, Diana, I congratulate you very much and if I can help from the sidelines because that's where I am now, I'd be very happy to do so, argue for it, and I think you'll find that this idea latches on very, very quickly and it will all be attributable to someone who had the good sense to try it out for themselves, don't wait for someone else to do it because you could wait forever. Do it yourself and you'll be surprised how quickly a good idea can spread. Thank you very much.

Diana Basterfield

"I'll just say a couple of winding up comments because I know people are dying to dash back to Conference.

  A couple of points to add to what has been said. We have been talking a lot about the Ministry for Peace and we have a leaflet at the back, please do take one, but the other important point that hasn't been mentioned so far is where do we all fit, civil society, where do we fit in this? We are all well aware that the Cabinet doesn't have a role in making the decisions these days so there has to be a structure that brings together the people outside to put pressure on the Minister, to support the Minister. To do this we are arguing for a Commission for Peace - a civil society Commission for Peace. This would be our energies keeping the whole thing going. We don't want to have to be out on the streets with banners. We need to have a properly funded structure to do this work.

The second point to make, and Tony has mentioned this, it's the role of the United Nations. In 1999 the United Nations issued a Declaration and Programme of Action for a Culture of Peace. All the countries in the UN signed up to this and it covers everything from equality, nuclear disarmament, sustainable economic and social development, democratic participation and education in particular; that could be the work programme of a Ministry for Peace. Part of that work programme would be, and Tony also mentioned this, to look at why some people enjoy violence, want to use violence for their own ends. We would want to be looking at the root causes of violence as part of the educational process. The Hague Peace Agenda has been looking a lot at this.

Then there's the question of nuclear weapons. Some of us went to a very powerful talk by Mikhail Gorbachev last week with Professor Josef Rotblat, and he was talking about how we have forgotten about the threat of nuclear weapons. Next year the 1960s Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is coming up for review. At the moment Russia and the United States are saying that they would support first use of nuclear weapons although they signed up to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Again, this is a role for us, organising the ministry for peace, to alert people to write to their MPs to say that this Treaty must be re-affirmed next year. Without this the planet could be destroyed.

Finally to say that if any of you are residents of London or if you don't mind travelling to London, please on your way out leave your email address and we will invite you to come to our monthly meetings in the House of Commons. There are eight action areas in the Un Declaration and we are having fairly prominent speakers on each of these action areas to educate all of us and to give us issues to campaign on.

Thank you so much for coming. We do welcome your support and if you would like to join us there are membership forms at the back. Thank you once again for coming."

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