TONIGHT Stop the War Coalition convener Lindsey German and former chair Andrew Murray launch their new pamphlet, No Return to Blair Wars.

A riposte to the Open Labour publication A Progressive Foreign Policy for New Times, which was launched by shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy in December, the pamphlet gives a lucid and concise outline of the case for anti-imperialism and counters many of the common attack lines deployed against the Stop the War Coalition and the peace movement.

It could hardly be more timely, with the Labour front bench egging the government on in a dangerous new cold war against China and backing provocations such as the dispatch of British warships to the China seas.

German and Murray point to the catastrophic record of British and Western military interventions abroad since the beginning of this century.

While Open Labour’s pamphlet by Dr Harry Pitts and Professor Paul Thompson admits – as does almost every commentator nowadays – that the Iraq war would have been better avoided, it presents former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and the anti-imperialist foreign policy it identifies with him as having almost accidentally ended up “on the right side of events like Iraq” because of an inflexible opposition to military intervention that is just as often proved wrong.

But the Stop the War veterans point to the uniformly disastrous impact of wars from Afghanistan to Libya and the way that advocates of “humanitarian intervention” do not address the ongoing legacy of these wars in failed states, the growth of terrorist organisations and the refugee crisis.

They effectively refute the “campist” theory deployed by apologists for military action, which accuses peace campaigners of selectively condemning the Western “camp” while ignoring the crimes of other countries. 

Indeed, one brilliant passage exposes how true this is of Open Labour’s own blind spot regarding the crimes of Britain’s allies – noting that it “follows conventional wisdom” in accusing Iran of being the main source of instability in the Middle East when it is Saudi Arabia that has in the last few years “attacked another [country] (Yemen), invaded a second to suppress a democracy movement (Bahrain), blockaded a third (Qatar), kidnapped the prime minister of a fourth (Lebanon), funded a jihadist insurgency in a fifth (Syria), underwritten a military coup in a sixth (Egypt) and dismembered a journalist in its consulate in a seventh (Turkey).”

The authors explain the importance of anti-imperialism and the enduring value of Corbyn’s approach to international affairs, as well as the evidence that support for a peaceful foreign policy is much stronger both among the public and the Labour membership than you would guess from most media coverage. They also draw out the links between Britain’s imperialist foreign policy and the domination of our economy by the City of London.

A must-read pamphlet that equips activists for arguments that will be familiar to some but need restating as people across our movement face a Labour right determined to restore cross-party support for war.

It can be downloaded free of charge from the Stop the War Coalition website or ordered for delivery from the coalition’s shop (https://stopthewarcoalition.bigcartel.com/) for a fiver.