15:26 - The House divided: - Ayes: 114 / Noes: 1 - Question accordingly agreed to.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Alistair Burt)
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron) for raising the issue. I agree that it is more than useful to have this debate. I have no intention of opposing the motion before the House today. I would like to set out briefly the situation in relation to Syria, to comment on the substance of the motion and then to deal with some of the questions that have been raised on the motion and wider issues. Clearly, however, so much was covered that we will not be able to get through it all.
The situation in Syria is genuinely appalling and is getting worse at an ever-more rapid pace. As the Foreign Secretary said yesterday, the number of deaths will soon exceed 100,000 people. Since last July, on average, 170 people have been killed every 24 hours. By the end of the year, 10 million people—half of Syria’s pre-conflict population —will be likely to be in need of humanitarian assistance. Neighbouring countries are struggling with the refugee crisis.
The brutal Assad regime has used chemical weapons on his own people. We are concerned to see new, unconfirmed reports over the weekend of further chemical attacks in Homs. We judge that Iran is providing personnel, equipment, weapons and financial assistance to the Assad regime, which is also being supported by thousands of Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon.
The Syrian people and the legitimate opposition are caught between this brutal regime and its backers on one side, and extremists on the other. We must not accept what Assad wants us to believe—that the only alternative to his brutal regime is extremists and terrorists. I am keen to disabuse any colleagues who have strayed into that area during their remarks. There are millions of Syrians who want a peaceful and democratic future, and legitimate forces are fighting for their interests. We should be on their side. However, the extremist groups operating inside—affiliated to or aligned with al-Qaeda—are taking advantage of ungoverned spaces created by the conflict. They pose risks to UK national security. We judge that more than 100 UK-linked individuals of concern have travelled to Syria. Some individuals returning to the UK could pose a long-term terrorist threat.
As the Foreign Secretary said yesterday in his statement to the House, faced with this growing and protracted crisis to which there is no end in sight, we have three objectives: to promote a political solution in Syria, which I again make very clear is the Government’s overriding imperative; to help to save lives; and to protect the national security of the United Kingdom.
To this end, we have doubled our humanitarian assistance for Syria to £348 million. I commend to colleagues a very good document—this is straying into the interests of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for International Development—on UK aid in response to the Syria crisis, dated 4 July. It deals with some key facts on what we are doing. I will ask my right hon. Friend to make sure that it is e-mailed to every colleague, because, as more than one Member has mentioned, the humanitarian assistance is not a by-product of the UK’s involvement. We are entitled to be very proud of what this country is doing in that regard, and I would like colleagues to be well aware of what we are doing and to talk about it. We must not consider it to be some sort of backwater.
Alistair Burt
No, not yet.
We are also providing technical assistance for the protection of civilians. That includes advice and training on how to maintain security in areas no longer controlled by the regime, on how to protect civilians and minimise the risks to them—including in respect of helping the opposition counter regime forces as they attack towns under opposition control—and on co-ordination between civilian and military councils, and on how to maintain security during a transition.
Amending the arms embargo on Syria in May also supported these aims. As the Prime Minister has said, lifting the arms embargo on the Syrian National Coalition sent a powerful signal that there is no moral equivalence between Assad on the one hand and the legitimate representatives of the Syrian people, recognised by over 130 countries, states and other entities, on the other. It also increases pressure on the regime to negotiate seriously. We now have the flexibility to respond in future if the situation continues to deteriorate and if the Assad regime refuses to negotiate.
Let me come to the nub of the motion, just to be clear once again to the House. As my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary said yesterday in his statement to the House:
“On the question of any future lethal support—arming the opposition or intervening militarily ourselves—the Government’s position has not changed. No decision has been made, and any decision would be put to the House on a substantive motion.”—[Official Report, 10 July 2013; Vol. 566, c. 379.]
And as he said in the House on 18 June:
“We certainly would not want to pursue any aspect of our policy on this issue against the will of the House of Commons. That is neither feasible nor desirable, so of course we have made clear that there would be a vote. I have also made it clear that we would expect it to be before any such decision was put into action.”—[Official Report, 18 June 2013; Vol. 564, c. 746.]
Mr Baron
I absolutely applaud the Minister and I have great respect for his being absolutely clear. I agree that there has never been any change to the policy or the wording of the view that no decision has been taken, but I suggest with great respect that there has been movement by the Government on the assurances in the wording of the motion since it first travelled this journey. I urge the Minister to look back at what was said initially when many of us in this place urged the Government to put such a motion to a substantive vote.
Alistair Burt
Well, I do not believe so. Let me comment on something that is at the nub of this: the long shadow of Iraq. I am convinced that when this Government took office we were very well aware of the deficiency in trust felt in the nation on account of that. My sense is that, particularly in respect of the area my portfolio covers, in the last two or three years both the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary have repeatedly updated the House on circumstances as they have arisen. They have been very conscientious in doing that. The National Security Council was created precisely to try to find a structure that could address the concerns about foreign policy decisions that people had felt in the past. I believe that right from the beginning as the UK considered all its options—and I repeat, despite whatever I have said, that all options remain on the table—both the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister have been very keen to ensure that the House has been engaged, because ultimately this is an issue of trust.
That leads me on to the point made by the right hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Sir Andrew Stunell) and my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South (Richard Ottaway) about the possibility of something being sneaked through in the recess. The hon. Member for Walsall North (Mr Winnick) also talked about that. The whole point of what the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary have been doing has been to generate trust in the House. If the Government were to do something and then seek retrospective support in respect of an issue where Members felt we should have come before the House in advance, that trust would be broken, which would run contrary to what the Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister wish to convey. It may still be the case, of course, that emergencies arise that require the Head of Government to have the flexibility to make decisions in the national interest, as the House would expect, and the debate on Iran some time ago indicated that no hands should be bound. The clear intention of what I am saying and what the Foreign Secretary has sought to do, however, is that the Government want to keep the confidence of the House by going this extra step. So there is no question of our trying to use the recess or another opportunity to do something, because we would then have to come back to the House—and what would be the House’s reaction? I have tried to make clear the intention on which the Government are determined to act.
In the brief time available, I wish to cover one or two more of the questions raised, including those about Geneva and President Assad put by the hon. Member for Wrexham (Ian Lucas), who spoke for the Opposition. I know that you are very generous to us, Mr Speaker, so if I stray for one minute, having taken an intervention, I hope you will kindly let me do so.
My hon. Friend the Member for High Peak (Andrew Bingham) said that many people were asking what is in our national interest. Importantly, whether a decision is made to arm or not, there is a UK interest that needs to be considered. Let us make no mistake: whether we continue on our current course or do something different, we are involved. As a permanent member of the Security Council, we have an interest in promoting peace in the most conflict-ridden areas. It is to the discredit of the international community that that has not been possible, but that has not been due to any sparing of effort on our part at the United Nations. The conflict has been spilling over into neighbouring areas, as we have seen with Hezbollah and Lebanon. As my hon. Friend the Member for Braintree (Mr Newmark) said, if empty space is used, that is where a threat to and an attack on the United Kingdom can come from. We know that people are going out there to be radicalised, and that will come back to bite us as well. Whatever is done—whatever decision is taken—nobody in this House can escape the fact that there is British interest in Syria. Accordingly, our main interest is in closing this down and ending the conflict. This is not a plea from me to arm; I am saying that unless the conflict is ended, British interests will continue to be further damaged.
Iran clearly has an interest in this. It did not accept Geneva I. Who knows what is possible, but Iran’s interest is noted and is there. The removal of Assad is not so much a precondition from the United Kingdom; this is not the UK’s involvement in negotiations. It was clear from the beginning that this issue is difficult for an opposition that is being killed daily by Assad’s regime, but the practicalities now are that there are no preconditions if people can get to a position to negotiate that we want.
Richard Ottaway
Will the Minister clarify that? If a negotiated settlement comes out of Geneva, does he accept that it may result in President Assad staying in office?
Alistair Burt
The point I want to make is that if a negotiated solution emerges, it will have been negotiated by representatives of the Syrian National Coalition. I think that, in a way, it is their call; it is not for us to say. The reason we take the view that Assad’s legitimacy is gone is plain from the facts, but the United Kingdom is not involved in setting preconditions for the negotiations; that is for the parties involved.
I want to correct one misconception that has been abroad: that all the opposition is the same and we are allied with people we have seen performing extremist acts and acts of the greatest brutality. That is not the case. On 20 April, the Syrian National Coalition declared its commitment to democracy, ethnic and religious pluralism, and the rule of law, and it rejected discrimination and extremism. It also declared that it would guard against the proliferation of any supplied lethal equipment and would return such equipment at the end of the conflict, and confirmed that the supreme military council operates under the civilian authority of the coalition.
As for whether each side is as bad as the other, we condemn human rights abuses perpetrated by anyone involved in the violence in Syria, but we note that the last report by the UN commission of inquiry on Syria, published on 4 June, said that although there was evidence of human rights abuses committed by the opposition, those
“did not…reach the intensity and scale of those committed by Government forces and affiliated militia.”
There is no equivalence.
My final point is that if colleagues here are to get us to the position we all want to get to—a negotiated peace—they would do well to consider the graphic description by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kensington (Sir Malcolm Rifkind) of why that might not happening at the moment. No matter what we decide to do in the future, I suspect that his remarks, and those of my hon. Friend the Member for Braintree, should be taken in by everybody here as we go forward and take the difficult decisions we have to take. This is not easy—there is more than one side to the question—but the arguments raised by my two colleagues will take some consideration by all of us.