Robin Used Language
to Seek the Truth

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No need to grieve for Robin! To die in the company of friends striding on the Scottish mountains he loved is a fate that few sensible people would dread. However, we have particular reasons to feel thankful for his life and would like to share them with our readers.
So often Foreign Secretaries find good reason for using their power in favour of powerful interests rather than helpless and impoverished people in other countries - in favour of companies that produce arms rather than their likely victims. That is why he spoke with such force against the former Conservative Government's connivance with the supply of arms to Iraq after being given only three hours to digest the weighty Scott Report. The great risks that Robin Cook took were in the defence of those helpless people as when he effectively took action to prevent genocide in Sierre Leone.
The clarity of his vision and the power of his logic have been an inspiration for us. Robin shunned rhetoric and used language to seek the truth rather than to win others over to a cause he might have secretly distrusted. The best way of paying tribute to him now is to let his own words speak for him, particularly those that he used to announce that with a heavy heart he had resigned from the Government because he intended to vote against military action in Iraq. With beautiful economy of language he declared the benefits of being ruled by principle: "I must confess that I had forgotten how much better the view is from here."
After praising Britain's attempts to achieve an international coalition and a legitimate United Nations resolution to end the rule of Saddam Hussein, he argued with irresistible logic, "Now that those attempts have failed, we cannot pretend that getting a second resolution was of no importance," and described the fracture in European alliances and the stalemate in the Security Council as "heavy casualties of a war in which a shot has yet to be fired." Insisting that "Our interests are best protected not by unilateral action but by multilateral agreement and a world order governed by rules," he contrasted the incalculable consequences of going to war with the benefits of a policy of containment, a strategy which had "destroyed more weapons than in the Gulf war, dismantled Iraq's nuclear weapons programme and halted Saddam's medium and long-range missiles programmes." He put the war rhetoric of the British and US Government's into context by reminding the House of the time "when US companies sold Saddam anthrax agents and the then British Government approved chemical and munitions factories." He contrasted action against Iraq with action in Kosovo which was "supported by NATO, by the European Union and every single one of the seven neighbours in the region," and warned of "the strong sense of injustice throughout the Muslim world at what it sees as one rule for the allies of the US and another rule for the rest."
Yet no one could doubt that he did act "with a heavy heart" and that he "had no sympathy with, and would give no comfort to, those who want to use this crisis to displace Tony Blair." At the time of the General Election, we quoted his warning to those who planned to vote against the Government because of its actions in Iraq: "I suspect Tony Blair will do very nicely out of the openings that will come his way with such a punishment. My constituents will not." He reminded voters that Gordon Brown had done more "than any finance minister on the face of the globe to lighten the burden of debt on the poorest nations."
The loss of a man of such principle and intelligence is terrible, but his influence will remain with us.
(For family reasons Jamie Reed has not been able to send an article this time. He will take over this column again next month.)