Tribune leader, 6 December 1991
Labour’s opposition to common European Community defence and security policies, whether based upon the EC itself or the Western European Union, is long-standing and commands widespread assent in the party.
On one side, the Atlanticist Right believes that common European defence and security policies would hasten American military withdrawal from Europe and the collapse of NATO. On the other, the Left, still essentially anti-nuclear (if, in many cases, only in private), believes that they would result in the creation of a new nuclear-armed super-power – particularly if based on the WEU, a relic of the cold war which excludes the EC’s neutrals and NATO’s least enthusiastic members.
Both sides fear that France and Germany would call the shots on common EC defence and security policies, that there would be an expansion of capacity for military interventions “out-of-area” if the EC took up a defence role and that an EC defence role would put off neutral countries which want to join the EC.
There are some sound arguments here. In particular, it is crucial that Labour continues to resist creation of a new nuclear super-power, with its own rapid deployment force to police the Middle East and with the French force de frappe playing the role that American nuclear weapons played during the cold war.
Nevertheless, there are good reasons for reconsidering Labour’s antipathy to the EC taking on a defence and security role. It is becoming more and more obvious that NATO is moribund, incapable of working out its raison d’etre in the post-cold-war world and utterly closed to the former communist countries of Eastern Europe. The Americans, meanwhile, are already withdrawing from Europe: soon their military presence will be little more than symbolic. With the whole of Eastern Europe increasingly unstable and the former Soviet Union breaking up, the creation of a new European security structure is an urgent necessity.
The best means of achieving this would be a transnational body including the United States and Russia as well as the countries of central and western Europe: the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) has frequently been suggested for such a role. The problem is that the other countries of Western Europe show no enthusiasm for any such thing – which effectively rules it out. As time goes by, a defence and security role for an EC open to the east is looking more and more like the only viable basis for a peaceful continent.
Defence of privilege
There is no doubt that Greville Janner, the Labour MP for Leicester West, was the subject of an appalling slander during the Leicestershire children’s home child abuse trial, to which he could not respond because of the law of contempt of court. He deserves every sympathy. But it would be a mistake to conclude from his ordeal that the principle of absolute privilege, which means that reporting of proceedings in open court is not open to prosecution for defamation, should be abandoned. The Solicitor-General, Sir Nicholas Lyell, is right, for once. The right freely to report proceedings in open court, like the right freely to report parliamentary proceedings, is a crucial press freedom that must not be ditched simply because of the irresponsible actions of certain newspapers.