The rise of unthinking pacifism and kneejerk isolationism in Britain have dangerous consequences for the safety of people around the world, according to a report started by Labour MP Jo Cox, who was murdered in June 2016.
The report, which was finished by Cox’s colleague and fellow MP Alison McGovern and Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat, makes the case that doing nothing can have a greater cost than intervention.
The findings are to be launched by the former prime minister Gordon Brown and former Tory foreign secretary William Hague on Thursday, at an event for the Policy Exchange thinktank in London.
The paper was intended to be jointly published by Cox, a former aid worker, and Tugendhat, a former soldier, before the Batley and Spen MP was shot and stabbed by far-right terrorist Thomas Mair.
It points to a number of global conflicts where intervention has been deemed successful, including a no-fly zone in Iraq in 1991 to protect Kurds from Saddam Hussein’s air attacks, the 1999 intervention in Kosovo to save civilians from ethnic cleansing and the British intervention in Sierra Leone in 2000 to help repel the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) advance.
The paper, released with the permission of Cox’s husband, Brendan, argues that intervention overseas has been an “irreducible part of British foreign and national security policy for over 200 years”.
It says that while the recent lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan must be learned, a retreat from playing a proactive role in world affairs heightens the risk of further global instability.
Ahead of the launch, Brendan Cox said his wife “was passionate about this piece of work”.
“She felt deeply that the UK had a duty to stand up for civilians threatened by war and genocide,” he said. “Her commitment wasn’t theoretical, it was forged by her experience of meeting survivors of genocide in Kosovo, Bosnia, Rwanda and Sudan.
“Last week I was clearing some of Jo’s things and found the first draft of the report that she had scribbled all over. At the top she had written ‘Britain must lead again’. Although she isn’t here to advance that argument, she’d be delighted that her colleagues and friends are able to do so in her stead.”
The report comes at a time when Donald Trump has made clear that the US lacks the appetite for acting as policeman of the world in foreign conflicts, and more than three years after the UK parliament backed away from military intervention in Syria against the president, Bashar al-Assad. The Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has won huge backing from party members by standing on a platform of “ending support for aggressive wars of intervention”.
Brown, who will launch the report, pointed to Cox’s last speech in the House of Commons, in which she said that “sometimes all it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing”.
“Nothing is more important than the responsibility of each state to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing, and the responsibility of the international community to act if a state is unwilling or unable to do so,” he said.
Hague, who recorded a video message for the launch event, made the case that it was “vital to defeat the temptation that has grown in recent years to turn our backs on the rest of the world”.
“This is neither strategically sound, nor in keeping with British traditions and values,” he said. “Hard as it may be, we have to be prepared to use all the tools in our toolbox to prevent war crimes and crimes against humanity and advance the causes of universal human rights and development.”
