'MAKING THE WORLD A SAFER PLACE'

24 NOVEMBER 2001

When Margaret in the dry cleaners says it then you have to listen. "Tell Tony to take it easy - he looks ten years older" she told me. And it must have been a hellish ten weeks for the Prime Minister - troops in combat, civilians nervous about bombs or anthrax or both, all combined with 50 000 miles of travel. As the old saying goes, jet lag makes you feel like your passport photo.

I always give the same answer when people worry about the PM. Imagine the outcry if he looked like he had just been on holiday, tanned and relaxed while the nation is in peril. And I always repeat what he says: it is tough being Prime Minister, but it is much tougher for the troops on the front line.

They say a week is a long time in politics, but this week a day seems like a long time. I read last Tuesday's Guardian in the evening. An article confidently predicted a bloodbath if the Northern Alliance tried to take Kabul. Yet by the time I read the piece Kabul had already fallen.

After this momentous week of military progress, there is still a huge job to be done finally to bring Osama Bin Laden to justice, and the Al Qaeda network to an end. But the longer term questions are also closer. Even the most blinkered nationalist must have learnt that we live in one world, where injustice and neglect of one are a threat to all.

In Afghanistan itself the challenge is immense. The Afghani population clearly felt liberation from turning on the radio. But it will take more than radios to turn round a country where six in ten boys and more than nine in ten girls do not go to primary school, where removal of landmines will cost £300 million, and where more than three quarters of the country have no safe water or sanitation. These conditions do not on their own create terrorists - the mullahs dedicated to teaching hate do that - but they do create the conditions in which terrorism can develop.

Across the developing world, over 2 billion people live in abject poverty, defined as less than one dollar a day. The moves in this country to increase the aid budget and increase debt relief are a start, but we have to work with others to open trade, increase investment and support good government. (Isn't it ironic that while many in the developed world complain about government, in the developing world it is the weakness of the government that is the problem).

These problems can seem far away, the list of trouble spots lengthy, the nature of the problems complex. But September 11th taught us that it could be any of us caught up in the crossfire. The moral case for internationalism has always been strong; today the self interest is clear as well. Of course we have to focus on our own problems, but if we take our eye off the problems of others, we will pay the price.

When I laid a wreath at the Westoe cenotaph two Sundays ago on behalf of the people of South Shields, I couldn't help thinking that if we were better at learning the lessons of wars, then there would be fewer of them. There's a lot to do, and if that is what is keeping the PM up at night, then he is making the world safer for the rest of us, and good luck to him.