Chris Bain: Don’t make Blair’s mistake: match rhetoric with reality for international development

Chris Bain is the Director of CAFOD (Catholic Overseas Development Agency)

Ten years ago today, Tony Blair made his famous ‘Kaleidoscope’ speech to Labour’s party conference in Brighton, three weeks after the 9/11 attacks.

As David Cameron prepares for his own conference speech on Wednesday at a time of similar international upheaval, I hope he will reflect on the lessons – good and bad – he can learn from his predecessor.

Aside from brilliantly capturing the empathy the British people felt for the victims of 9/11 and their families, Tony Blair’s speech is primarily remembered as laying the ground for the aggressively interventionist foreign policy of his second term in office.

The genocide of Rwanda, he said, would not be allowed to happen today. The Taliban could give up Al-Qaeda or give up power. Iraq and Saddam were not mentioned in his speech, but the philosophical foundations for intervention there were clear.