The Conservatives must reject neo-Conservatism

12 August 2006

Tony Blair’s liberal interventionism is not for the Tories, says Malcolm Rifkind. It’s high time the party came up with new foreign policies on the war on terror — and on the EU

John Major once said to me that foreign policy doesn’t win elections. I replied that that was true, but it could lose them. That is the spectre haunting the Labour party today. The Prime Minister is derided around the world as George Bush’s lapdog. His parliamentary colleagues have the albatross of Iraq around their necks. Tony Blair’s aspiration for Britain to be at the heart of Europe has become a cruel farce.

Governments, of course, will fall only when two conditions have been met. The incumbents must be seen to have failed; but there must also be an alternative government with a credible and attractive vision for Britain’s place in the world.

No one knows for certain what the world will look like in detail in three years’ time, but the challenges that we will face are already reasonably clear and it is necessary for the Conservative party to spell out its strategy and analysis. Put simply, we will need a foreign policy that is Conservative and not neo-Conservative, principled but not ideological, and rooted in the real world of cultural diversity and competing interests.

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