From asset to liability: Blair, brown and the ‘special relationship’

Abstract

This chapter charts how the ‘special relationship’ with the US, an asset to the New Labour project in the mid to late 1990s turned, after 9/11, into a liability that led the government to participate in wars that divided the country, undermined the party’s electoral support, isolated Britain in Europe, acted as a spur to Islamist terrorism and played a significant role in eroding trust in British politicians. The chapter demonstrates, moreover, how British acquiescence in US practices of extraordinary rendition and torture - in an attempt to extract information from detainees swept up in the net of the global ‘war on terror’ - challenged human rights norms and led to Britain being criticized by both human rights organizations and the United Nations (UN). Such complicity between the two countries rather undermined Winston Churchill’s insistence in his March 1946 ‘Iron Curtain’ speech that the US and Britain: … must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence (Churchill 1946).