A reason for working to defeat Labour
It isn't all that often that I record my agreement with him, but today is one of the days on which I do. George Monbiot thinks that there's an overwhelming reason to look forward to the end of this Labour government: the latter consists of 'a cabinet of war criminals'; it 'launched and sustained an unprovoked war' in Iraq.
Monbiot is right. I don't mean that he's right to say they're war criminals. Regular readers of this blog will know what I think about the much-canvassed claim that the Iraq war was illegal. (For my most recent posts on this issue, see here and here.)
No, what I mean is that anyone who thinks that the war was illegal and that this government is a government of war criminals should want to see it defeated, removed. One could go further and say that, within the limits of what they can manage consistently with other important commitments of theirs, they have a duty to do what they can to further the cause of seeing the back of it - by not voting for it, not urging anyone else to, indeed urging others not to. This is so, I would say, even if such behaviour means the return of the Conservative Party to government. Here it might be suggested that, had the Conservatives been in office in early 2003, they too would have backed the war and so become the war criminals Monbiot and others who think the same way see the Labour government as being. But that someone may have been likely to become a war criminal in certain circumstances, while it may not endear him to you, doesn't impose the same obligations as arise with regard to someone who actually is a war criminal. Just as: there are many who will become murderers in certain circumstances, but we only punish actual murderers for murder. As a conscientious democratic citizen, you should certainly not be acting to keep in power a government of those you think to be war criminals - even, I would say, if the consequence of what you do to see to it that they're defeated is another Conservative government.
Which just goes to show you, in case you needed showing, that doing what you think is right morally and politically can sometimes have consequences that are very unwelcome to you.
