He said that by doing so, they would only hurt the poorest, who were dependent on a Labour victory.

The leader had 'got the message' about their displeasure, Hain said, arguing that those who still disagreed over Iraq or civil liberties should reopen the arguments after the election

'There's now a kind of dinner party critics who quaff shiraz or chardonnay and just sneeringly say, "You are no different from the Tories",' he said. 'Most of the people in this category are pretty comfortably off: it's not going to be the end of the world if they get a Tory government. In a working-class constituency like mine, this is a lifeline. It's not a luxury.' "

Hain appears to see the issue of Iraq as something we should put to one side in order to concentrate on poverty and deprivation. The proposition is made problematic in part by his own actions in a previous role as Foreign Office Minister. There he helped maintain a sanctions regime upon Iraq which killed over a million civilians. In his report for the Guardian, published in March 2000, John Pilger detailed the scale of the devastation.

"According to Unicef, the United Nations Children's Fund, the death rate of children under five is more than 4,000 a month - that is 4,000 more than would have died before sanctions. That is half a million children dead in eight years. If this statistic is difficult to grasp, consider, on the day you read this, up to 200 Iraqi children may die needlessly. "Even if not all the suffering in Iraq can be imputed to external factors," says Unicef, "the Iraqi people would not be undergoing such deprivation in the absence of the prolonged measures imposed by the Security Council and the effects of war."

Anupama Rao Singh, Unicef's senior representative in Iraq, told me [that]. "In 10 years, child mortality has gone from one of the lowest in the world, to the highest."

Denis Halliday resigned as co-ordinator of humanitarian relief to Iraq in 1998, after 34 years with the UN. His was the first public expression of an unprecedented rebellion within the UN bureaucracy. "We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that."

"I had been instructed," he said, "to implement a policy that satisfies the definition of genocide: a deliberate policy that has effectively killed well over a million individuals, children and adults. We all know that Saddam Hussein is not paying the price for economic sanctions; on the contrary, he has been strengthened by them. It is the little people who are losing their children or their parents for lack of untreated water. History will slaughter those responsible."

Then on February 13 this year [2000], Hans von Sponeck, who had succeeded him as humanitarian co-ordinator in Iraq, resigned. "How long," he asked, "should the civilian population of Iraq be exposed to such punishment for something they have never done?" Two days later, Jutta Burghardt, head of the World Food Programme in Iraq, resigned, saying privately she, too, could not tolerate what was being done to the Iraqi people. "

Hain defended his involvement, saying that he was "convinced Britain's policy is right. Saddam Hussein's regime is a danger to its neighbours and to its people. That danger must be contained. Sanctions were imposed to force Iraq to eliminate its weapons of mass destruction". But as Pilger had noted in his report "Scott Ritter, a chief UN weapons inspector in Iraq for five years, told me: "By 1998, the chemical weapons infrastructure had been completely dismantled or destroyed. The biological weapons programme was gone. The nuclear weapons programme was completely eliminated. The long range ballistic missile programme was completely eliminated. If I had to quantify Iraq's threat, I would say [it is] zero."

Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 infant mortality has increased yet again, and acute malnourishment among children under five has nearly doubled. The south is littered with large amounts of the depleted uranium, used in US and UK ammunitions and known to cause respitory problems, kidney problems and cancer. Iraq holds the world's second largest oil reserves yet its economy is a train-wreck, with unemployment sent soaring up to 67% as a result of US "shock-therapy".

So it was not without some provocation that an estimated 300,000 Iraqis demonstrated against the occupation of their country at the weekend. The peaceful demonstration was called by hardline Shiite cleric Muqtada al Sadr, who draws his support largely from the urban slums of Baghdad and the south. The New York Times reported that the Association of Muslim Scholars, a leading group of Sunni clerics, had said its followers also took part in the demonstration. Mimicking the famous images of US soldiers and Iraqis pulling down a statue of Saddam Hussein as Baghdad fell, protesters toppled effigies of President George Bush, Tony Blair and Saddam.

Apparently critics of the UK government's record on Iraq are not restricted to the sneering, dinner party set of Peter Hain's imagination. To many of those critics, both in Iraq and elsewhere, that record is more than a mere abstraction that diverts us from the real issues. In a "working-class constituency" like Sadr City in Baghdad, and for millions of Iraqis, New Labour has been neither a lifeline nor a luxury. It has been one of the parties responsible for "a policy that satisfies the definition of genocide" according to a former Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations. Despite this Peter Hain remained "convinced [that] Britain's policy is right", publicly defended that policy and facilitated its implementation. Voters, especially those in his constituency, should certainly consider the fate of the poorest when they make their choice on May 5.