We should have intervened in Spain

29 July 2006

The politics of non-intervention returned to haunt Chamberlain’s successors in the 1990s when John Major and his last foreign secretary, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, refused to put any effective pressure on Milosevic and the Serbs to stop their butchery of European Muslims. And today, of course, Tony Blair is under a torrent of criticism because he chose to intervene in Iraq and Afghanistan rather than stay home.

If Suez in 1956 was when we should not have intervened, surely Spain 20 years previously was when Britain should have ditched foreign policy realism for some muscular idealism and a willingness to act. No one knows what happened to Lorca’s body after the gay poet was killed by Franco’s men in August 1936. A few miles north of Granada, in a pine grove high in the hills under the relentless sun of al-Andalus, is a modest block of stone marking the place where the poet was murdered. It reads ‘Lorca eran todos’— ‘We were all Lorca’. Oh no, we weren’t. Britain’s darkest hour before 1940 was when we stood by as Francoism imposed terror and tyranny on Spain. A few defied the conventional wisdom of the non-interventionist and the stop-the-war petitioners of the day. Most left their bones in Spain.

Denis MacShane is Labour MP for Rotherham and former minister for Europe. His biography of Edward Heath, who supported the Spanish Republic and visited the International Brigade in Spain in 1938, will be published in September.