ANOTHER VOICE

How guns muddle the thoughts of British Conservatives (like Tony Blair)

MATTHEW PARRIS

Intriguing to me in a way in which the pros and cons of invading Iraq are not is an unstated assumption behind the whole debate. An assumed premise is here as piv- otal as it is overlooked.

You can argue, as Tony Blair implicitly does, that invasion is well-starred and wise; you can argue, as Tam Dalyell does, that invasion is ill-starred and foolish; or you can argue, as Bruce Anderson seems to (Politics, 7 February), that invasion is ill-starred and wise. Such views, though inconsistent with each other, do all agree (so unhesitatingly that their proposers never even raise the issue) that this is the business of the United Kingdom in the first place.

The Prime Minister and his Foreign Secre- tary, at the dispatch box, have powerfully rehearsed the principled case for `standing up' to Saddam Hussein. They have not dis- cussed (they have never been asked to dis- cuss) the question of whether, assuming Hus- sein ought to be stood up to, it is by Britain that he ought to be stood up to. Tam Dalyell and Tony Benn base their hostility to military action upon their reading of its likely results. Their case against standing up to Hussein is the case against any foreign government doing so. Both seem to assume that, were it the right thing to do, that would be an argu- ment for Britain doing it.

Bruce Anderson tends simply to talk about 'the West'. Britain is part of the West. The question whether Britain should invade becomes indistinguishable from the question whether the West — 'we in the West' — should invade.

Is this, I wonder, how they are discussing the affair in Belgium? Are Walloons and Flemings asking each other what `we in the West' should do? Does Italy ask herself what outcome 'we' ought to secure? Are Spaniards debating what 'we' want to `achieve' in the Gulf? What do the Japanese want to achieve in the Gulf? How does Australia, or Sweden, feel about 'our' objectives there? Yet the national interests of most of these countries are as linked to developments in Iraq as are the United Kingdom's. Apart from ourselves, only France among medium-sized modern democracies tends to conduct herself as though the responsibility to order the world were led by countries like her. In France we find the trait rather tiresome.

I am hardly the first to observe that post- imperial Britain retains an imperial habit of mind, or that we entertain (and fitfully realise) an ambition to `punch above our weight'. There is no mystery about the ori- gins in our history of our hankering to be one of the world's policemen. We used to be chief constable. We are chuffed if Amer- ica will let us be detective inspector, now.

But what is astonishing is that, in 1998, with our last great colony shed and our empire shrunk to a dozen pinpricks in the ocean, the hankering remains so little chal- lenged at home. For there could be a dif- ferent and rival hankering: the temptation to hold on to our money and leave the job to someone else — especially where it is clear someone else is happy to do it.

What would be unright-wing about this? There is absolutely no reason in logic why a good Tory should not remark that Saddam Hussein is a very wicked man indeed and his government a grave threat to world peace; but that, as the Americans seem well seized of the danger and itching to do something about it, and as they are infinite- ly bigger, richer and more powerful than us, we might as well let them get on with it.

It is not as if the United States needs us. Those television graphics illustrating the `Allied' forces, with hundreds of toy Ameri- can planes, ships, men and weaponry and then, if you look very hard at the screen, a tiny handful of British ones are desperately embarrassing. Commentators assure each other, and us, that even if our contribution is `token' it is a terrific fillip to the Americans to be able to present the venture as a 'West- ern response' rather than as bullying by Uncle Sam.

Oh really? Do you honestly think the rest of the planet says, 'Ooh, look! It isn't just the Americans. The British are involved too. This must be an initiative by the world community, then'? Of course not. They say, `There go the Yanks again, with their usual 'I'd like a penalty point of bitter, please.' running dogs, the British, yapping behind.' Well, as we are anyway going to be accused of yapping, might it not be better to stick to yapping? Yapping is free. Britain could give the Americans the most fulsome verbal sup- port, vote for them in the United Nations and invite them to use their military bases here — and it wouldn't cost us a penny.

Ah, cost. Is it not passing strange how British Conservatives like Tony Blair lose their wariness about state spending as soon as anyone mentions guns? All the argu- ments we have so patiently and persistently and correctly put about keeping taxes down suddenly fly out of the window when the chance arrives of muscling in on somebody else's war. Naturally, I feel as strongly as the next man about the cost of the working surfaces in the kitchen of Margaret Beck- ett's flat, but I have yet to hear a minister, a Tory spokesman or indeed a leading article so much as mention the cost of this pro- posed adventure in the Gulf. It must be colossal. It is brushed aside as irrelevant.

I have been reading Edmund Dell's The Chancellors. If the British Left have a case to answer (and they do) for having crippled our competitive performance since the war with the costs of socialism, do the Right not have a case to answer for tipping a load of bricks, in the form of defence spending, into the rucksack of the British runner in the same postwar marathon? Arguably the difference between what we did spend on defence and what we might, on a minimalist view, have spent has proved a heavier burden than the difference between what Labour govern- ments spent on welfare and what their Tory oppositions would have spent. Four months ago, on this page, I argued the Tory case for federalism within the United Kingdom. When we have, as we shall, an English Conservative party, it will begin to ask questions like whether Eng- land wishes to be involved in wars in the Middle East.

Do we? The concept of 'Britain' carries with it unconscious assumptions about a role in the world. Replace it with 'England' — or indeed 'Wales' or 'Scotland' — and those assumptions cease to be made. We shall be able to think afresh about the blood and treasure which are our inheri- tance, and whether, and where, and why, we should squander both.

Matthew Pam's is parliamentary sketchwriter and a columnist of the Times.