Recently, Tom Brake of the Liberal Democrats consulted with Lib Dems about the prospect of intervention in Libya:

There were many thoughtful and valuable comments. Here is mine:

Yet another intervention would be extremely unwise. War is not self-sustaining; it is sustained by a series of decisions. Further interference in the internal affairs of sovereign nations would merely be imperialism by another name; no unity government can represent all the citizens of its nation.

The history of humanitarian interventionism is a history of self-interest, dishonesty and badly cloaked partisanship. Daesh would not even exist if it were not for such corrupt and self-serving ideologies.

The chain of disastrous and self-serving interventions has to be cut off, and sooner rather than later. Humanitarian interventionism is a tool of the mighty to oppress the weak; it can bring nothing but disaster, except to the powerful, who know well how to benefit from it.

The White Man's Burden belongs back in the 19th century with anti-'sodomy' laws, blasphemy laws and the right of men to treat women as their own property. It is a barbarous relic of our neanderthal ancestors, and everyone in this world, save a privileged few, would be immensely better off without it.

The Washington government wants us to participate in their headlong plunge into this white-supremacist imperialist morass; let's be smart, and have the attitude of Harold Wilson, not Tony Blair and Anthony Eden.