The Development Secretary, Hilary Benn, will cast his lot with critics of the Bush Administration tonight when he questions the validity of the phrase "War on Terror" during a speech in New York tonight.

His address will place the Government firmly on the side of the Democrats in what is presently a fraught debate in Washington over the use of the expression, which was coined by the Bush Administration in the days after the September 11 attacks and taken up by Tony Blair as Britain joined the wars that followed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mr Benn will argue that the term — which takes the form of "the global war on terror" or "GWOT" in US policy documents — gives an unwarranted legitimacy to the struggles of small fringe groups which really do not have much in common.

He will also say that war is only part of the solution to combating terrorism and Britain and America should do more to use the "soft power" of values, ideas and reform to bring about lasting change in the failed and angry states where terrorist groups prosper.

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“In the UK, we do not use the phrase ‘War on Terror’ because we can’t win by military means alone, and because this isn’t us against one organised enemy with a clear identity and a coherent set of objectives,” Mr Benn will say, according to excerpts of his speech released in advance.

“It is the vast majority of the people in the world — of all nationalities and faiths — against a small number of loose, shifting and disparate groups who have relatively little in common apart from their identification with others who share their distorted view of the world and their idea of being part of something bigger.

“What these groups want is to force their individual and narrow values on others without dialogue, without debate, through violence. And by letting them feel part of something bigger, we give them strength,” he will add.

The Prime Minister's spokesman denied today that Mr Benn's speech marked a change in policy, saying: “We all use our own phraseology, and we talk about terrorism, we talk about the fight against terrorism, but we also talk about trying to find political solutions to political problems."

But Mr Blair has also shown a wariness around using the American terminology, rarely using the phrase in the last two years. In his most recent major address to the House of Commons about Iraq, the Prime Minister preferred to speak of "an epochal struggle between the forces of progress and the forces of reaction".

Mr Benn's speech, which will be given at New York University’s Center on International Co-operation, is also considered an attempt to increase his standing among Labour MPs, whose support he is seeking in his bid to become the party's deputy leader. Putting some daylight between Britain and the Bush Administration's foreign policy is thought be a key priority after Mr Blair steps down this summer.

The usefulness of the phrase "War on Terror" has been the subject of debate ever since it was used to describe America's reaction to the attacks of September 11. In August 2004, President Bush even admitted that the phrase had its limits, telling journalists:

"We actually misnamed the War on Terror. It ought to be the Struggle Against Ideological Extremists Who Do Not Believe in Free Societies Who Happen to Use Terror as a Weapon to Try to Shake the Conscience of the Free World."

The following year, two years after the invasion of Iraq and three-and-a-half years after the toppling of the Taleban in Afghanistan, the term was tussled over by the Pentagon and the White House. The then US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, started speaking of "a global struggle against violent extremism" rather than a war, but he was swiftly put down by Mr Bush.

''Make no mistake about it, we are at war," said the President on August 3, 2005, after both Mr Rumsfeld and Stephen Hadley, his national security adviser, temporarily dropped the expression.

The debate re-opened earlier this month when the Democrats sought to use their control of Congress to delete "the global war on terror" from the 2008 defence budget. A 15-page memo from the House Armed Services Committee ordered members to “avoid using colloquialisms" and refer to specific military operations.

The memo drew fierce criticism from Republican congressmen and the scorn of Vice President Dick Cheney, a regular user of the expression. In a speech to the right-leaning Heritage Foundation in Washington last Friday, Mr Cheney said of the "Global War on Terrorism":

"I'm left to wonder — which part of that phrase is the problem? Do they deny the struggle is global, after the enemy has declared the ambition of building a totalitarian empire that stretches from Europe around to Indonesia? Do they deny this is a war, in which one side will win and the other will lose? Do they deny that it's terror that we're fighting, with unlawful combatants who wear no uniform, who reject the rules of warfare, and who target the innocent for indiscriminate slaughter?"

"That's the nature of the fight we're in. We can't wish it away, or define it away."

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