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.
