A group of the above NGO’s has prepared a considered response to the above document to present a different point of view which we hope will stimulate debate in the Labour constituencies and at the alternative forum in Birmingham. We hope this will help Party members in formulating their own response in preparation for the Annual Conference later this year.

The 'Britain in Europe' Campaign concluded recently that even if the UK withdrew from the European Union it would only cost about one year's worth of officially defined 'growth'. The extent that the EU has come to dominate the debate about Britain's place in the world has clearly been out of proportion. We are sceptical about how far any leading role is available to the UK in the EU as it is currently developing.

One of the most likely threats to any UK government's standing is the sustainability of the G8 as the leading body in global governance. Leading figures in European politics separately argued for either a new G3 or a wider bigger future grouping.

This would need to begin soon, if a consensus is to emerge so that Britain does not miss the opportunity in 2005 to use its next G8 presidency to found this new regime.

This would seem to be a promising way for the UK to become a more valued partner to Europe than merely seeking to further develop a military role in Europe.

When the UK was given the Rapid Reaction role in Europe (for NATO) in 1991, the UK was still the only ‘ally’ with professional rather than conscript armed forces. By 2003 this will be far from the case. France had more aircraft deployed in the 1999 Kosovo War. These developments call for a European Strategic Defence Review, during which the UK should develop a role of providing 'strategic transport' to alliances in which we are involved rather than 'Rapid Reaction'. Resources re-deployed in this way would allow us to assist decisively in the diminishing number of occasions in which traditional military action with allies would make a positive difference. But also allow us to decisively contribute to resolving the growing number of crises such as those in Mozambique and Ethiopia (2000) and even East Timor (1999) and Rwanda (1995).

These are some of the ways in which we can develop our partnerships, so that the UK decisively assists Europe to become a source of global stability and global social justice as the aspiration set out in the New Labour documents.

While there are some benefits of globalisation the other side of the coin of 'globalisation' is localisation. In the nineteenth century, every locomotive running on rails in India was made in the UK. By the last quarter of the twentieth century, India made all its own trains. Much the same can be said for ever more emerging nations over the post 1948 period.

With good reason it has long been assumed that it was the business and professional classes in developing countries which were most receptive to western values of human rights and co-operation with western interests.

In 1997, Clare Short's White Paper 'Eliminating World Poverty' correctly gave priority to the needs of the poor in our aid and international development activity. However, when we assume that Sustainable Development will be led by indigenous business activity in emerging market economies, we must also give some priority to giving the business and professional classes in emerging markets more certainty in international development horizons.

However, during Labour's current term in office the West and its institutions have disastrously alienated those interests in many countries, and in the summer of 1998 did so in the least stable nuclear-armed states - Russia and Pakistan.

The IMF badly mishandled them both in the period since with consequences for global security that cannot be overlooked. The abuse of IMF programmes for geo-political objectives is a discredited and indeed counter-productive approach.

In Birmingham in 1998, under British presidency, the G8 decided to enforce a code of transparency upon the banking systems of emerging nations supposedly to avoid a recurrence of the collapse of 1997 in East Asia. However within weeks, for reasons more to do with international politics than 'economics', those whose wealth was stored in bank accounts in Moscow and Karachi rather than property were in limbo.

It is only in such a transparent world order that stability will develop, the benefits of economic interdependency will spread and genuine free and fair trade will grow.

The Labour conference really does need to commission work on the relationship between the global economy and sustainable development, which is not clear in the current document.

The first term of Labour government has witnessed the stalling of the forward march of democracy promised by the end of the Cold War.

Russian democracy has disappointed all round. Pakistan has turned back to military rule. Only ten years after 1989, elections in Poland and Hungary barely inspire half the voters to vote. (The Czech Republic is heading the same way.) It may be that the former Yugoslavia has seen more sustained voter participation! Governments now fall through disappointment rather than hope in any alternative. Had democracy really flourished in eastern Europe, the most affected emerging democracies might have addressed what was happening with their Balkan neighbours earlier in the 1990s.

Who holds office needs to be made to matter to voters. In too many emerging democracies, politicians of all labels are in the grip of the IMF. Only when this is relaxed will democracy be renewed where it currently struggles to bloom. The exclusion of the IMF from a role in the committee assembled for the reconstruction of the Balkans needs to be developed as a precedent.

Gordon Brown and Clare Short both expressed frustration in late 1999 about the failure of the IMF to follow the lead given on debt-relief by the G8 Cologne summit. Already in January 1999, 16 Latin American countries met in Tegucigalpa in Honduras, and proposed arbitration panels, empowered to make binding settlements concerning the re-organisation and writing-off of specific countries’ debt. Such panels, making publicly conducted decisions about how the international authorities will assist troubled countries conduct their international financial relations, must become the norm over this first decade of this millennium.

The IMF can no longer be the gate-keeper to debt-relief.

Most of the heavily indebted poor countries have become the way they are because war, often civil war, have crippled their export earnings. Debt relief will work to rebuild these countries only if arms sales to Africa especially are diminished, above all in the current context of armed conflict raging from Angola through the Congo to the Horn of Africa.

Labour's current term in office has yet to see much development of new approaches to conflict prevention and resolution. Indeed from the early nineties, peace processes have increasingly stalled. Our armed forces are already pleading over-stretch.

The Department for International Development (DFID) has made efforts to involve new voices in official dialogue about the central problems in international development. The DFID Regional Policy Forum for the West Midlands has been one of the most lively, reflecting the West Midlands being the launching pad of Jubilee 2000.

This is the only way that conflict prevention and resolution will be seen to mean something. The same must be said for Sustainable Development. DFID should then play a greater role in the cabinet committees that determine the UK's international policies.

Later this year, US President Clinton will decide whether or not to go ahead with plans for a National Missile Defence system at a projected cost of $35 billion.

This decision has serious international implications. It contravenes the 1972 Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty set up between US and Russia. The US threat to withdraw from the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty forces Russia to agree to a very substantial revision of the treaty.

Britain in particular is deeply involved. Not only will the US expect our political support, but listening posts and radars which are part of the projected system will actually be sited on our soil at, respectively, Menwith Hill and Fylingdales, both in Yorkshire. This makes Britain an accomplice in breaking the ABM treaty, and these sites become legitimate targets for any military offensive against the US.

The fundamental objection to this system is that any state with both nuclear weapons and an effective Anti Ballistic Missile(ABM) shield would be free to use its own weapons, knowing that it could not be hit in return. In addition, the most obvious riposte to an ABM system is for the ‘enemy’ state to increase its offensive nuclear capacity in order to swamp the system. Thus any ABM deployment is likely to provoke a nuclear arms build up, and increase rather than decrease international tension.

As one of the five Nuclear Weapons States, the United Kingdom has accepted specific responsibilities to comply with the Articles of the Non Proliferation Treaty and the set of principles and objectives agreed at the 1995 Review and Extension conference.

Britain is well placed to take the lead on the path to global nuclear disarmament, and would be supported by most other states including many of its allies. The end of the Cold War raised expectations that the nuclear weapons states would at last begin to discuss the elimination of nuclear weapons. Unless the nuclear weapons states show that they have taken action to fulfil their obligations under the Non Proliferation Treaty then nuclear weapons will spread to other states.

Now that the Russian Duma has ratified Start II Britain taking a first step in decommissioning Trident would give a boost to the negotiations on Start III and would enable the UK to be more independent of the US.

Great concern is expressed internationally about the sheer volume of weapons which are in circulation yet countries which wish to join NATO are expected to increase and upgrade their military capability in spite of any adverse effect this may have on their internal economy.

Partnership for Peace countries are encouraged to do likewise to whatever extent they can.

Britain is the world’s 2^nd largest arms exporter with 25% of the world market. The government’s continued promotion of, and support for, the defence industry make it impossible to have an ethical foreign policy and, far from contributing to global security, help to undermine it.

Licensing: The EU Code of Conduct aims to prevent undercutting, i.e. one European country selling arms to a buyer who has been refused by another. It works through licensing and the two vital factors in this are the criteria under which licenses are granted and who makes the decisions.

Britain’s criteria are less stringent than the EU Code, particularly in the insertion of a clause making national self-interest paramount. Although in difficult cases there is inter-departmental consultation at a fairly high level, day to day "responsibility within the MOD for vetting firms’ license applications" is undertaken by the Defence Export Services Organisation, known as DESO. (Second Report of Defence Select Committee 1998/9) Since this is the body which exists solely to support the defence industry and promote its sales in every possible way, its decisions are hardly likely to be impartial.

Large quantities of arms can be and are sold from London (over 300 dealers) without ever entering this country, including items such as torture equipment whose sale is prohibited here by law.

The measures proposed in the White Paper on Strategic Export Controls are not strong enough.

Depleted Uranium Weapons are classed by the United Nations as ‘Weapons of Indiscriminate Effect’ and are therefore illegal. Britain continues to manufacture these weapons in the West Midlands and continues to deploy them.

Britain has taken a leading role in banning landmines but has used cluster bombs freely in Kosova. These are very similar to landmines in that they frequently fail to explode on impact and are easily set off later by innocent non-combatants. Each cluster releases 2000 pieces of shrapnel.

There have been calls from international figures such as Michael Camdessus of the IMF to end financial support for arms exports.

The Export Credit Guarantee Department: In Britain, 25% of the ECGD cover goes to arms exports. For manufacturers this is a type of cheap insurance cover for deals which would be considered too risky for normal insurance. In the case of bank loans to overseas buyers the bank is reimbursed in full by the ECGD should the loan not be repaid. It is worth noting that Indonesia owes the ECGD £131 million (Hansard 16:2:2000)

Money-laundering and conflict: In February the International Development Committee called for sanctions to be enforced to end the scandal of both sides in the Angolan war laundering illegal diamond profits through British banks. This money is being used to buy arms and prolong the conflict. Similar deals in diamonds, oil and copper have also played a part in prolonging conflict in Sierra Leone and other countries.

The UN is the international institution with the widest remit for promoting a peaceful world, with responsibilities ranging from conflict prevention to sustaining the planet’s ecosystems.

The UN itself is however in dire need of reform and of democratisation to prevent one or two powerful states from using its name to cover actions that promote their own self interest.

The UN’s finances are in urgent need of restructuring to prevent lack of funds crippling its efforts to carry out its legitimate tasks such as confidence building and early warning monitors to highlight potential conflict.

A quarter percentage tax on all air fares would produce a significant income for the UN. Removing voting rights from states in serious arrears with UN dues would be another possible step.

The UN recognises the validity of regional organisations taking action, under UN authorisation, to deal with regional problems. The OSCE is an under used organisation whose original function was to achieve cohesion and peace across Europe including Russia.

This is becoming increasingly important in world affairs and disputes. It is a defence against illegal actions between states and within states.

We applaud the government for its support for an International Criminal court to convict individual war criminals.

The EU is increasingly moving towards a Common Foreign Policy. Our government should press for a policy that is globally just and enhances peace.