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What now for Brown?

JEREMY CORBYN argues that if the PM is to break with Blair, here's where he should start.
GORDON Brown looked rather uncomfortable sitting less than a golf-buggy seat's width away from George Bush in all the papers on Monday.
This was after the rather pained in-flight briefing that he'd given to accompanying journalists on his admiration for all things US, the importance of the special relationship and his apparently open agenda for the meeting with Bush.
Quite why successive British prime ministers always get manoeuvred into the phoney informality of Camp David on their first meeting with US presidents is a mystery. Perhaps the location of the first meeting is the beginning and end of the special relationship that Britain allegedly has with the US.
Lord Malloch-Brown gleefully assured us all a week ago that Britain was not joined at the hip with the US and that there would be a normal relationship. We wait with bated breath to see whether Brown will achieve anything different.
If anything is to change, it is the most obvious product of Tony Blair's obsession with the US, namely the appalling situation in Iraq. Of a total population of 24 million, the internal exile now amounts to two million people who are leading marginal lives in makeshift camps without continuous water, electricity or provisions of sanitation, housing or education.
The neighbouring countries have born the brunt of the Iraqi flight. Turkey has taken in 10,000 Iraqi refugees, Lebanon 40,000, Iran 54,000, Egypt 100,000, the various Gulf states 200,000 and Jordan and Syria a staggering 750,000 and 1.2 million respectively.
These countries are struggling hard to cope with this enormous influx. The population of Syria, excluding Iraqi refugees, is only 17 million. Those that remain in Iraq are in a terrible state and those who flee are in an equally desperate situation, as none of the neighbouring countries have the resources to meet the refugees' basic needs.
'Brown must recognise that the burden placed on Iraq's neighbours by refugees should be helpedby cash fromthe occupying forces.'
Refugee Council chief executive Donna Covey quite correctly pointed out that Britain has a responsibility to refugees displaced by the conflict in Iraq and we are not living up to that responsibility. Covey also criticised the British government for operating an incredibly tough border policy which makes it very difficult for Iraqi asylum-seekers to reach our shores.
Migration to Europe or neighbouring countries is, of course, not a long-term solution to the misery of the Iraqi people.
It has to be the end of the conflict in Iraq, which can only come about by the withdrawal of the occupying forces and recognition of the changed political landscape in Iraq, where the insurgent forces and many of the Iraqi political parties are saying much the same thing while specifically excluding al-Qaida from this new, rather loose coalition.
In the short term, one would hope that Bush and Brown would recognise that the impossible burden placed on neighbouring countries should be helped by finances from the occupying forces.
There is a seemingly inexhaustible pot for the maintenance of occupying troops but not for the victims of this war. The British media are always keen to play up the issue of asylum and its effects in Europe.
Next time, they should spare a thought for Syria, whose population has just increased by 7.5 per cent as a result of the Iraq war. The overall strategy of the US may well be to bow to congressional pressure and ultimately withdraw troops from Iraq, but it's unclear whether the Democrats have a similar policy in relation to Afghanistan, where the death toll of NATO forces is creeping ominously up towards that of Iraq's occupiers.
While President Pervez Musharraf looks weaker and weaker in Pakistan, the dangers of the war in Afghanistan spilling over the border grow ever stronger. The West has always been slightly obsessed with Afghanistan.
After the loss of tens of thousands of British soldiers in the 19th century, the Soviet Union also suffered terrible losses in Afghanistan and, now, it is a sad combination of Afghan civilians and NATO forces who are dying in a war that looks increasingly unwinnable.
One of the major consequences of the "war on terror" has been the attack on civil liberties in the US and around the world. In the US, the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security and the legal vacuum of Guantanamo Bay has meant that many people have been held without charge or trial in US custody and only after years of battling have some cases managed to get anywhere near a court in the US itself.
 
Across Europe, there has been a parallel increase in security measures by most countries, not least in Britain itself. Last week, Brown proposed still tougher anti-terror laws, which included doubling the 28-day limit on detention without charge for terror suspects and the removal of foreign suspects.
Blair reached a prime ministerial agreement with Jordan, Lebanon, Libya and Algeria that Britain could deport nationals of those countries detained on terror charges on the understanding that they would not be tortured on returning to their home country.
This is a very dangerous precedent which undermines the basic principle of the UN convention on human rights and specific conventions such as that on torture.
If further agreements are made, it would take away any political or moral imperative for any country which has not signed the convention to agree to these basic protective provisions for its citizens.
The last time the government tried to increase the period for which the police can detain suspects without trial, it was heavily defeated and the Commons ended up voting by default for an increase to 28 days from 14.
The Home Office's proposal to double this period again has been strongly criticised by a number of bodies, not least the highly influential joint committee on human rights, which is made up of members from both houses of Parliament.
Detention without trial for long periods is obviously an attack on individual liberty, but it also risks fuelling the sense of grievance, particularly among Britain's Muslim community, over unwarranted arrests.
The argument for defending civil rights is very strong and I hope that my colleagues in Parliament remember that we were elected to a sovereign House of Commons to defend liberties, not to remove them.
Jeremy Corbyn is Labour MP for Islington North. He can be contacted at corbynj@parliament.uk