by Rob Marchant
Things like this make me wrestle with myself. My instinct as an activist is to be supportive and I feel like we all need cheering on. But I also need to understand why this trip was a good idea. I felt uncomfortable watching the footage of Labour’s Afghanistan trip and I have this uneasy feeling that those on the receiving end did, too. In pictures, we saw a gung-ho Ed, Jim Murphy smiling supportively, a slightly sheepish-looking Douglas Alexander, and a bunch of impassive soldier faces. The media coverage seemed neutral, if a little light, because of the tight security and Egypt. But maybe that was just as well.
Perhaps, having grown up in a forces household, I have an over-developed sensitivity to how these things are perceived. Perhaps everyone else involved, here and in Afghanistan, thinks it was a great idea and saw a clear rationale. I understand the need to show we are not “soft” on defence, but are solidly behind our troops. It is also legitimate, up to a point, to try and emulate the prime minister in the things you do, so that voters can visualise you in the role.
But now we have to ask: what was Ed actually doing in Helmand? What were we hoping to achieve? What did we think the reaction of the troops and local politicians would be? And what do we think we could “do to help”?
Spare a thought, for example, for General Petraeus, the allied commander. Does he think, “great, here’s a senior British politician come to give some moral support to the troops”? No. In fact, he probably thinks, “hey, here comes some British guy I’ve never heard of, to have a meeting which can’t be of any help to me, since he’s not in government and can’t be for at least four years”. How does he feel?
Might it not be that both Petraeus and Afghan leader Karzai simply feel obliged to meet him out of politeness? (I suspect the “action points” section of the meeting minutes must have been pretty short). And would they not naturally have compared the meeting with their prime minsterial meetings, where they had real issues to deal with, and found it wanting: a mere photo-op? And how does that make us look?
Which is not to decry all opposition visits to war-zones, just most of them. But, politically, is not a visit with bigwigs best done closer to a general election, when the leader can be seen as a potential PM? Or, at least, when we have some policy meat to road-test in the field? The fact is that we have neither a defence policy, nor the proximity to an election, to make these meetings weighty. And, were it simply a fact-finding mission, surely we could have kept things low-key.
Like, in fact, David Cameron: who waited 9 months before his first, “fact-finding” Afghan visit after becoming Opposition leader; there was no public meeting with Petraeus and no Karzai; and all in the company of British servicemen who might reasonably have expected to be more pro-Tory than pro-Labour. It was a modest PR success. We, in contrast, managed a trip which seemed hasty, ambitious in its scope and less well-executed.
Furthermore, crucially, when we say to soldiers in combat that we want to “do more to help”, how do we intend to keep that promise – write a letter? Table a question?
The problem is that when both you and they know that you are unable to change their situation, the warm noises about what you’d like to do, but don’t or can’t, sound like just that, warm noises. It’s a lesson we might have learned from the Today interview, where Ed was “tempted” to join the student protests.
To say so may be picky and superficial but we must learn to stop hyperbolising everything as “brilliant”, “fantastic” or “incredible”. When you are speaking to a platoon of soldiers who may not all come home, to describe their mission as “incredibly important”, with a gushing emphasis on the “incredibly”, sounds, well, patronising.
I raise this perhaps trivial point because, ultimately, what do we think the soldiers’ reaction must have been? We can be pretty sure it was – at best – a puzzled “what’s this all about, then”? Picture the scene: a politician, who many may not have recognised, for whose party probably few have voted, comes to tell them that he really supports them. It is as if we are somehow willing these soldiers to go dutifully away with a warm feeling, heartened by the earnest thanks of a man who doesn’t run the country and isn’t in charge. They won’t. It’s not the same.
If this sounds hard, it is so with the best intentions: some of us really want our presentation to get better, and want Ed to succeed. But I am struggling to see how this visit has helped.
Rob Marchant is an activist and former Labour party manager who blogs at The Centre Left.
Tags: Afghanistan, Ed Miliband, Helmand, Rob Marchant
Well it looks good, to Newer labour, but the fact are all the troops no matter how severely disabled sitting in wheelchair with legs buried in Iraq and Afghanistan, are to go through the new medicals, their DLA will also stop, they fought they died on the cheap, they came back crippled on the cheap, while on little creep was making millions from the war.
Pay them decent wages, look after them when they are crippled, then talk about how much of a hero they are.
I must say I agree with you Rob, though in perhaps stronger terms. I can’t see how Ed plus two shadow cabinet ministers spending a day in Afghanistan helps anyone. Coupled with the neutral questions about Egypt and Afghanistan in PMQs afterwards it all looks a bit contrived and an attempt to look (or even, become) statesmanlike. If we essentially agree with the government on both issues, what’s the point of dedicating six PM questions to them? Especially when out here in the country people are actually starting to wake up and give a damn about what the government is doing with its cuts agenda.
If I’d just been on a visit to Afghanistan, I’d’ve asked Cameron “is this the fourth or fifth time Britain has been involved in a war in Afghanistan? Since when has Afghanistan been in the North Atlantic? Wouldn’t we save money and the lives and limbs of our armed forces if we brought them home from a foreign war?”
If there was any realistic *military* threat to the UK, there would be an obvious need to show that the party isn’t soft on defence. As it stands, we look soft in the head – backing up a deployment which is continuing despite strong public support for bringing the troops home existing for at least two years.
@James, the article doesn’t posit a view either way but are you saying we should base our foreign policy on opinion polls? Or, living in a democracy as we do, the fact that the vast majority of voters voted for parties that had a foreign policy which was to stay there? A thought, surely.