Why are we importing foreign conflicts?
The bitter conflicts in the Middle East and South Asia are in danger of becoming touchstones of domestic politics
You’ll have to bear with me a little while I explain how I got here. I had lunch with a former ambassador and we were talking—somewhat inevitably—about international affairs. We touched on Cuba, and I explained that I found it odd that there was still an American embargo on trade with the island, given that it had started 60 years ago and the communist régime hardly poses an existential threat to the US any more. Indeed, it hasn’t since Khrushchev withdrew the Soviet missiles in 1962.
Of course, Cuba isn’t about a credible national security threat to the US. The reason that it remains such an emotive issue in Washington DC, and that relations between the two countries remain frosty at best, is because there is a significant and influential community of émigré Cubans and their families who are wholeheartedly and implacably opposed to the government that Fidel Castro established in 1959. Foreign policy is driven by domestic policy.
This is true of many stances the US takes in international affairs. While other factors undoubtedly come into play, policy towards Israel is influenced by the partisans of Israel and her government; the Irish-American community defines the US approach to Ireland, Northern Ireland and the peace process; and exiled Iranians hold considerable sway when it comes to relations with the Islamic Republic. So far, so distant: in the UK, we can look down on our transatlantic cousins for their transparent special interests. Or so I had blithely assumed.
It was once true of us too. One argument raised against our accession to the Common Market in the early 1970s was the potential disruption or damage to our trade in lamb with New Zealand, a dominion then as it still is now, though the term is hardly used since the adoption of the Statute of Westminster. In the decades before that, there had been the migration from the UK to the Antipodes under the Assisted Passage Migration Scheme, the so-called “ten pound poms”. Our special interests went outward, not inward; we still felt our ties to the Commonwealth and the old Empire much more strongly than we do now.
For 40 years, we were attached, sometimes reluctantly, to Europe. Although the EEC and its successor, the EU, had no competence in foreign affairs, even when the Union’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy was a Briton, Lady Ashton of Upholland, nevertheless our membership was a constant thread running through the way we did diplomacy. We talked about overlapping circles: our EU membership, our ties to the Commonwealth, our “special relationship” with US. But our geopolitical stance was never determined by considerations of migrant communities, or pressure from other countries directly upon our voters.
Perhaps—no, definitely—this has been changing for some time. But the recent by-election in Batley and Spen, a bitter, divisive, nasty little contest, has brought into focus how we have changed. George Galloway, that bilious and souring presence in public affairs, appealed directly to the Muslim voters of West Yorkshire with his long-standing commitment to Arab causes and especially to the championing of the Palestinians. So potent was this appeal, or so potent was it feared to be, that the Labour leadership and their local candidate, Kim Leadbeater, had to make public statements on the Israel/Palestine issue to avoid being outflanked by the odious Galloway. On the far Left, there was talk of a Galloway win, as there had been in Bethnal Green and Bow in 2005 and then Bradford West in 2012. If there was a sectarian Muslim audience, it seemed, Galloway would travel anywhere.
It is a maxim of politics that by-elections are never won on foreign policy. Even momentous contests have their roots at home: Orpington in 1962 was a sign of the Conservative government’s waning appeal among the middle classes, Glasgow Hillhead in 1982 was a high point for the nascent SDP and a nadir for the Labour opposition, Eastbourne in 1990 was a judgement on the failing community charge, or “poll tax”. Hartlepool in May was a beating for Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party and a sign that the Conservatives were still eating into the Red Wall of Northern urban seats.
Batley and Spen should have followed the same pattern. It was another key test for Starmer, another Northern seat which the Labour Party had held since 1997, and they were widely predicted to lose. Once Galloway intervened, his appeal was thought likely to set the seal on Labour’s defeat and see the retaking of Elizabeth Peacock’s old seat by the Conservative Party she had represented. The Labour Party threw what it had at the contest: short-circuiting the usual selection process, they drafted in Kim Leadbeater, the sister of the former MP Jo Cox who had been murdered, shot and stabbed in the street outside a public library, in 2016.
Ms Leadbeater was a symbolic choice. A personal trainer with no deep involvement in politics (save the tragic death of her sister), she had only joined the Labour Party a few weeks before. The opposition were all but wrapping their candidacy in Cox’s shroud, and it was at least in part a measure of how anxious they were that they would lose the seat.
The contest revealed how far foreign affairs, twisted through a domestic lens, have worked their way into our national politics. With more than a fifth of the voters coming from a South Asian background, Galloway dwelt heavily on Palestine and Kashmir, his sympathies—with the Palestinians and the Muslim population of Kashmir—no secret to anyone. (Very few of Galloway’s views are a secret.) This was playing with fire: the constituency had been in the news months earlier when a teacher at Batley Grammar School had used a cartoon of Mohammed in a lesson about press freedom and religious extremism. Missing the obvious irony, local members of the Muslim population had protested outside the school, and the teacher was suspended, the headmaster, Gary Kibble, apologising for the incident. An investigation ended in the suspension being lifted but reiterated that images of Mohammed should not be used.
As this fire smouldered, Galloway was on hand with fuel. He told his supporters that he did not wish his young children to be taught about anal sex. “I don’t want them taught how to masturbate. I don’t want them taught there are 99 genders.” He argued that people had a right to have their religious sensibilities protected and a right to be offended by “gratuitous egregious insults”. Palestine and social conservatism were, he hoped, a potent mix which would recommend him to the Muslim community.
The Labour Party did not help the situation either. Having taken the Indian vote for granted for years, but seen David Cameron’s blandishments chip away at their standing, they had under Keir Starmer tried to appear neutral on the incendiary issue of Kashmir: it was, the new policy stressed, a bilateral matter for India and Pakistan.
That did not play well in Batley and Spen. In a dash for votes, what had been a neutral and measured policy was abandoned in favour of a bitterly partisan attack on the Conservatives as a pro-Indian party. A leaflet featured a photograph of Boris Johnson shaking hands with the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi. The picture was intended as condemnation enough, but the message was rammed home by the text: Ryan Stephenson, the Tory candidate, would be a Member of Parliament who was “not on your side” and who would be “silent on human rights abuses in Kashmir”.
As trimming goes, it was a fairly transparent change of political direction. The conflicts in Palestine and now Kashmir were set out as important, perhaps defining, issues in an individual constituency, based on the demographics of the electorate. Make no mistake: this was no carefully analysed shift in policy by Keir Starmer based on weighing of the political facts on the ground in global conflict zones.
The leader of the opposition knew already that Palestine was a touchstone for supporters of his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn. It was impossible to be a faithful acolyte of the king over the water and an adherent of impeccable Leftist organisations like the Stop the War Coalition without holding passionate sympathies with the Palestinian cause and condemning the state of Israel. That was baked in, and it translated into a crude but not necessarily inaccurate view that Muslim votes came from being pro-Palestinian.
The addition of Kashmir, of a stance against the Indian government, was new, and hasty. It came against a background of the government identifying India as a major strategic partner for ‘Global Britain’; one observer suggested that high commissioner in Delhi would henceforth be the diplomatic service’s second most important posting after ambassador to the US. It was a crude play, but, by basic metrics, it was successful. The Labour candidate was, after all, elected.
This will not be the last time that foreign conflicts—setting aside the matter of Iraq for a moment—are prayed in aid in local and domestic contests. Future by-elections will be scrutinised, the demographic breakdown of the electorate calibrated carefully, and Palestine and Kashmir will arise again as shibboleths. Perhaps other long-standing sectarian grievances will join them. Might a party appeal crudely to the Turkish Cypriot community in north London to win a seat? Will partisans play more heavily than they have in the past on support for India in parts of west London? Might candidates tack towards Pakistan in parts of Glasgow or south Yorkshire?
It is fashionable to blame the legacy of empire for some of the world’s most intractable conflicts: Ireland, the Middle East, Cyprus, India/Pakistan, parts of central and east Africa. Whether it is fair or not, how deep an irony it would be if these conflicts which we supposedly sowed now scattered their crops across our own country, and embed themselves in our own politics. Special interest groups may be here to stay.