Ann Clwyd, who has died aged 86, never held ministerial office or high office of any kind. Unless, of course, you count a stint as chair of the parliamentary Labour party, though that is more of a penance than a power trip. She did a few tours on the opposition front bench under Neil Kinnock, John Smith and, briefly, Tony Blair, but she was too independent-minded and probably not metro enough for a New Labour red box. That she was rebelling against the government a few months into its first term only confirmed that. Voting against an early Harriet Harman benefit cut, designed to force single parents into the labour market, Clwyd pointed out there were ‘about 1,500 single parents and only 200 jobs available’ in her Cynon Valley constituency.
It was one of many instances in her 35-year parliamentary career where she harmed her chances of promotion to stick up for people on the sharp end of life. Another was when she and local miners staged a sit-in at closure-threatened Tower Colliery in 1994. For 27 hours, blasted by coal dust and fortified by Mars bars, she refused to budge, insisting the colliery should stay open while there was still coal to mine. The government eventually backed down to get her out but within days the Coal Board cut the miners’ pay.
Clwyd then turned to John Redwood, of all people, and secured his backing as Welsh secretary for a workers’ buy-out. The miners clubbed together their redundancy, took over the colliery and ran it for another 13 years until the coal ran out. The miners’ collective not only kept hundreds in work but, as Clwyd later pointed out, it managed to sell coal to foreign markets that British Coal had failed to break into.
Clwyd may not have risen through the ranks but, as those anecdotes show, she used her position as an MP to try to help make life liveable for the people she served. But her commitment to human dignity was not limited to her constituents. Clwyd took a particular interest in Iraq, having met Iraqi students of Cardiff U\university in the late Seventies and heard their accounts of the repression and cruelty of the regime. She would also come to be a great friend of the Kurdish people.
It was her affinity for this part of the world that got her sacked from Blair’s shadow Foreign Office team after she and another MP made an unauthorised trip to northern Iraq in 1995, during a Turkish campaign against Kurdish fighters. She maintained strong ties with the Kurds and visited the region shortly before the second Gulf War, when locals were braced for Hussein to once again deploy chemical weapons against them. Clwyd met desperate mothers who were buying nappies to use as makeshift gas masks.
The Welsh left-winger broke with her comrades to support the 2003 invasion of Iraq, though she believed the casus belli was Hussein’s brutal record of human rights abuses rather than any claims about weapons of mass destruction. In the run-up to the war, Clwyd made a series of speeches in the Commons describing the horrors of the Hussein regime. The former torture chambers she had walked through, their walls still flecked with prisoners’ blood. The female academic forced to give birth in a cell then denied milk for the baby, so that she had to watch her newborn child die in her arms. The 15-year-old boy who fainted during a torture session and was crucified on a window frame as punishment.
The kind of humanitarian intervention Ann Clwyd believed in has fallen out of favour on both the left and the right
One aspect of her humanitarian case was challenged in The Spectator by Brendan O’Neill. Indict, the human rights group she chaired, collected witness testimony describing prisoners disposed of in an industrial shredder. Clwyd wrote about the testimony in a Times article that was picked up worldwide, though O’Neill could find no corroborating evidence. Whether the witness was mistaken, made it up, or just traumatised, or whether the shredder existed and was moved on the eve of invasion to cover up evidence of Hussein’s depravity, we will probably never know.
Shortly after the war began, Clwyd was appointed Blair’s special envoy to Iraq. Although other advocates of the war have since recanted, Clwyd never did. Because she had not given WMDs as a reason, their non-existence did not affect her support for the intervention, though she was critical of how the Americans handled reconstruction and their failure to bring on board the anti-Saddam sections of the Iraqi army. These criticisms, it must be said, had little if any impact. The moral case for ousting Hussein was not matched by a practical plan for quickly establishing order, democracy, prosperity and human rights in Iraq.
Clwyd told the Chilcot Inquiry that she stood by her support for the war. She described her many times visiting the Kurds and how, on her final visit before coalition forces began their operations, they kept telling her there was ‘no other way’ than war to stop Hussein. They had never said that before, eager for international support but wishing to avoid a full-scale war. The fact that the Kurds believed force was now needed carried a heavy influence on Clwyd’s decision-making. Speaking seven years after the war began, she told Chilcot: ‘I felt myself there was no other option. I didn’t feel that I could go back and face the Kurds and say that I had argued any other way because I couldn’t on the basis of what I had heard.’ It was an unpopular stance to take by 2010, when British politics and especially Labour wanted to move on, but Clwyd spent her life attaching herself to unpopular causes.
Her commitment to human rights drove her to author the Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003, which tightened up the law and created a specific offence of taking a girl from the UK to undergo FGM in another country. When she introduced the Bill, Clwyd noted that FGM was ‘not reported for many reasons, including ignorance, fear or community or cultural pressure to remain silent’. The fate of her law would go on to demonstrate this point. In her final parliamentary remarks on the matter, she complained bitterly that there had been just one successful prosecution in 16 years.
When her husband Owen died from a hospital-acquired infection in 2012, Clwyd spoke about his final hours with an unvarnished candour about the NHS that a Labour MP probably couldn’t get away with today. She said Owen, who suffered from multiple sclerosis and was in a wheelchair, ‘died like a battery hen’, squashed up against the bars of an unsuitable hospital bed. Watching nurses consistently treat the dying man with an ‘almost callous lack of care’, Clwyd said she feared a ‘normalisation of cruelty’ had taken hold among NHS nurses. She described how an ill-fitting oxygen mask pumped cold air into her husband’s infected eye and recounted how she had to acquire a towel to cover him because of insufficient blankets as well as having to jam a pillow between him and the bed bars. The nurses, she said, behaved towards Owen with ‘coldness, resentment, indifference and even contempt’. Clwyd spend her remaining seven years in Parliament campaigning for better patient care.
Paying tribute on Saturday, Sir Tony Blair said his former envoy’s politics ‘remained steadfastly wedded to representation of the poor and oppressed wherever in the world she found them’. The kind of humanitarian intervention Ann Clwyd believed in has fallen out of favour on both the left and the right, but the instincts that fuelled her support for the Iraq war — her solidarity with the oppressed, no matter where that oppression was taking place — were and still are noble. Ann Clwyd was the very best kind of internationalist: one who believed in it everywhere.
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