Miliband: Stop ‘punishing us’ for Iraq

By politics.co.uk staff
 
Foreign secretary David Miliband has appealed to former Labour voters to stop “punishing” his party over the Iraq war.
 
Speaking to the Guardian, Mr Miliband said not voting for Labour because it took the country to war in Iraq would lead to a victory for the Conservatives, who also supported the war.
 
He said: “I met some guy in Soho when we were launching the Labour lesbian and gay manifesto. And I said to him, ‘Look, you’ve punished us enough about Iraq, all right? So don’t start punishing yourself.’
 
“Some people feel very, very strongly about it, and I respect that. There are people who resigned from the government because of Iraq. But what on earth is the point of punishing yourself or punishing the country for Iraq given that the alternative government, the Tories, also voted for it?”
 
He also used the interview to attack the Liberal Democrat stance on a replacement for Trident.
 
The party’s manifesto said that a Lib Dem government would not commit, as Labour and the Conservatives have done, to replacing the ageing missile system on a like-for-like basis.
 
Mr Miliband said any alternative system adopted by the Lib Dems would not be cheaper. He added: “It requires rearmament. It requires you to have more warheads, a greater payload. The Lib Dems say they’re multilateralists. Well, if you’re a multilateralist, why behave like a unilateralist?”
 
On Conservative policies on the EU, Mr Miliband said: “The real danger to Britain is a foreign policy that is isolationist in Europe and therefore weak in the rest of the world.”