Cook told to stop linking arms sale with "ethics"

LONDON, Oct 3: British Prime Minister Tony Blair has told his Foreign Secretary Robin Cook to moderate his policy of blocking arms sales to...

LONDON, Oct 3: British Prime Minister Tony Blair has told his Foreign Secretary Robin Cook to moderate his policy of blocking arms sales to countries with alleged poor human rights records, a press report said Friday.

The Financial Times said the Prime Minister’s aides had reacted angrily to last week’s announcement that export licenses had been refused for a Å“ 1 million pound shipment of armoured personnel carriers and sniper rifles to Indonesia last month.

The aides wrote to Cook expressing irritation at this handling of the announcement and asked to see all the documents relating to the decision, the paper said.

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It noted that trade union leaders, the companies affected, and the arms lobby had all complained to officials about “posturing” which they said damaged British weapons exports.

Cook, upon taking up office after Labour’s landslide election victory on May 1, promised that human rights would be at the heart of a new “ethical” foreign policy. On Thursday, he told the annual Labour Party conference that Britain was “cleaning up the arms trade” by refusing export licenses for arms that would “conspire with conflict or abet repression”.

He also announced that he had invited French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin to join Britain in proposing a European code of conduct to regulate the arms trade.

Meanwhile, the annual conference of Labour Party voted narrowly on Thursday not to scrap the nuclear Trident missiles carried by the British submarine fleet.

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A motion calling for the missiles to be destroyed and the corresponding savings to be invested in social programmes was defeated by 56 percent to 44 percent.

The vote, which is an annual event at the conference, was a sign of the anti-nuclear current which still runs through the Labour Party rank and file despite the leadership’s conversion to maintaining a nuclear deterrent.On his succession to the party leadership in 1994, Tony Blair set about creating a “credible” defence policy, forsaking Labour’s commitment of the 1980s to unilateral disarmament. In 1993, the conference voted against the leadership in favour of scrapping Trident, and the only vote which Blair has ever lost was on Defence spending.