What I cannot do is legislate for which causes activists within the Party spend their time and energies,
or require that people only highlight issues relating to one country or government if they spend equal
time on infractions or injustices elsewhere. No doubt my many years as a domestic human rights
campaigner may have led some people (not least in past Labour Governments) to question my
preoccupation with abuses by the British State when there was so much worse in North Korea, Saudi
Arabia, Syria, Russia and elsewhere. No doubt some people suspected my motives or my loyalty to
Britain. In truth it was my background, experience and a view that Britain should lead the world that
informed my choice of activism. However, I understand that some apparently obsessive
preoccupations will seem suspicious in motivation to those with a particular affinity or identification.
Similarly, defensiveness, however understandable and explicable, also undermines mutual trust. I can
only hope that courtesy and dialogue will help, and that people learn to behave on new media as they
would in traditional media or even face to face with their opponents in debate.
There is perhaps sometimes a danger in progressive movements of confusing tactics and principles. I
have rarely seen this so well demonstrated as in discussions around "no-platforming" or in building
cases of criticism against people on the basis of those with whom they have "shared a platform" or
even attended a large conference, even years into the past.
We can all remember or imagine times when it would make no practical sense for a national or local
politician or community leader to attend an event or conduct a debate with "the only fascist in the
village". The argument that people in public life should avoid giving the "oxygen of publicity" to hateful
minority opinion is a good one where it can actually work. However, the advent of the Internet makes
the efficacy of such an approach more and more dubious at this point in the twenty-first century,
where everyone has a platform and a greater danger comes from narrower platforms where hate goes
unchallenged and dialogue is replaced by diatribe.
I think it dangerous to argue guilt by association and in so doing to undermine the kind of dialogue and
debate that is the basis of peace, progress and greater understanding in the world. It is especially
pernicious, in my view, to blame those who share platforms with people who went on (often some
considerable time later) to say and do things with which we profoundly disagree and even abhor.
I myself was subject to this kind of attempt at undermining someone's good character and good will
earlier in the Inquiry process when a Sunday newspaper ran a story about my having shared a platform
with a Guantanamo detainee on his release from that legal black hole many years ago. I clearly
welcomed his release (for which I had long campaigned) and the speech he gave on that occasion. My
suitability to lead the Inquiry was called into question because of incendiary comments that he was
reported to have made "recently" (i.e. years after the event I attended). The irony of the story is that
the newspaper that criticised me was itself one of the most long-term and consistent campaigners
against the injustice that is Guantanamo Bay. But a story is a story and there seems nearly always to be
more mileage in undermining debate than encouraging it.
But I am not here to criticise the press. I will, however, ask Labour members and supporters to reflect
on what their representatives and leaders must strive to do in order to pursue the cause of peace,
justice and reconciliation in the world. When I was young I never thought that I would live to see the
fall of the Berlin Wall, liberation of apartheid South Africa and relative peace in Northern Ireland. None
of these wonderful and important developments would have been possible without debate and
discussion in public and in private by politicians of all persuasions and even diplomats and spooks.
Sharing a platform or having a meeting around some kind of problem or injustice never has meant,
does not and never will mean, sharing any or all of the views (past, present or future) of everyone in
the room. It is instead the business of peace-building and of the promotion of fundamental human
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