Posted on July 21, 2009 - by Venik

The Tories’ path to disaster | Denis MacShane

The Conservatives were once the party of world and European affairs but, as William Hague has shown, they aren’t any more

What is David Cameron’s foreign policy thinking? We know he does not like Europe and barely refers to America. Unlike previous party leaders who did extensive foreign travel before elections, Cameron has limited himself to forays to Afghanistan or photo shoots in the Arctic.

In the past, the Tories were the party of world and European affairs, strong on defence and the intelligence services. Harold Macmillan dismantled the colonies. Ted Heath took us into Europe. Margaret Thatcher forged an alliance with Ronald Reagan that gave us neo-everything and saw communism collapse.

But today’s Tories? William Hague has outlined a doctrine of neo-realism, but its core content seems suspiciously like the foreign policy of the John Major years – with the coddling of petty tyrants like Slobodan Milosevic, ending in the Srebrenica massacres, combined with a willingness to promote the “national interest” ending in the Pergau Dam or Matrix-Churchill scandals.

This time last summer, Cameron was leading the charge against the Russian invasion of Georgia. Now, Hague is calling for better relations with Russia. It is a clear political choice, as David Miliband is the Kremlin’s least favoured European foreign minister. But is Hague seriously going to stop protesting Moscow’s harrassment of the British Council, British diplomats or give up trying to secure justice after the Polonium 210 murder of Alexander Litvinenko?

And as US vice-president Joe Biden goes to Georgia to warn the Russians not to repeat last summer’s invasion (as well as telling Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili to cool the anti-Russian rhetoric), why have the Tories chosen now to send billets doux to Moscow? The Kremlin’s foreign policy goal is simple: “Russia up. America down. Europe out!” Hague and Cameron agree with the latter, but supporting Russia at the expense of America will not be seen as helpful in the White House or among the new EU member states to Russia’s west.

The revelations that British Tory MEPs are serving under a Polish politician, Michal Kaminski, who has sought to explain away Jewish massacres in wartime Poland and who has been called homophobic, as well as being an admirer of General Pinochet, reveals the deep confusion in the Cameron-Hague worldview.

The US, where both Democratic and Republican politicians are deeply sensitive to Jewish and gay issues, could wake up to find a putative British prime minister in bed with antisemitic and gay-bashing European politicians. Newsweek’s Stryker McGuire has recently argued that rightwing Republican commentators are portraying Cameron’s makeover of the Tory party as a model the US right should follow as it struggles to find bearings after Obama’s victory. Not any more.

If Cameron does not take the Tories swiftly out of their alliance with Kaminski, American politicians will look aghast at how frivolous the Conservatives have become, as Cameron allows the anti-European obsessions of William Hague and Liam Fox (and if truth be told, most Tory MPs) to lead to disasters like the Kaminski alliance.

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