SOUTH AFRICAN ARMS
Raising the tone
By 'a Conservative'
The controversy surrounding the decision to sell arms to South Africa has produced much heat and little light. It has induced moral brittleness in quarters where South Africa is seen as a major feature in a darkening landscape of brutality and repression against which petitions can be presented, resolutions passed, and the English conscience made to feel that, at least where foreigners are con- cerned, it knows how best the nations should act in order to maximise moral good. It is the invincible moral virtue associated with these views which makes it desirable that the Russian threat, however real, should be treated as no more than an incidental excuse for a decision which should be taken for other reasons and with other objectives.
These objections include a desire to show that the foreign policies of responsible governments will not be hampered by moralistic repugnances forced on them by an objectionable minority of perverse pub- licists. In this sense the decision that it may be desirable to sell arms is a blow struck for a foreign policy which is not hampered by this sort of moralistic concern, which is primarily concerned with pursuing Britain's interests, and which does not have its decisions guided by a claim to know best what should be done in complicated, internal foreign situations for which its exponents have no governing responsibility. We take the view that it is as idle politically as it is offensive morally to pontificate about moral matters which, by their nature, de- mand situational sensitivity denied to those who are not involved in particular situations. We believe this very strongly, and we cannot too much deplore the easy tendency apparent in almost all public quarters to speak as though apartheid is the object of universal disapproval in this country, when in fact very few people here have the slightest knowledge or understanding of its nature and the situation from which it has arisen. If we need not go so far as to think of South Africa as a distant country of which most Englishmen know nothing, we may still think it best to avoid moral dogmatism about situations for which Englishmen will not have to take the consequences.
Within this frame of thinking, the de- cision about arms sales may be defused of its moral difficulty and seen to be as much a matter of calculation as any other foreign policy decision. Whether, in this framework, the Foreign Secretary's policy is sensible is a matter about which it is easy to see both sides. Which decision is eventually made is not of the greatest importance in itself, and it is by no means certain that the Foreign Secretary's first thoughts were the right ones. In any case, what matters much more than the content of the decision is a demon- stration that the Government is not going to be blackmailed by the self-appointed keepers of the public conscience, even when its practical conclusions are the same as theirs. To do this would be a useful exercise in public education and would raise dis. cussion of this aspect of foreign policy to the elevated level of interested calculation with which it ought now to be, and always should have been, concerned.
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