Syria and the Use of Chemical Weapons

Baroness Murphy Excerpts

Thursday 29th August 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Murphy]

My Lords, I have never before spoken about foreign policy in this House. I have been here nine years, and whenever I felt the urge to do so, I looked around at the experts in this House and thought better of it. But when I was listening to the messages coming from the Government a couple of days ago, I thought I should come in, stand up and at least be counted and express a view.

The noble Lord, Lord Griffiths of Burry Port, said that he was talking for the man on the Clapham omnibus. Today, I am the woman on the Clapham omnibus. I am not convinced that any military intervention would be to the benefit of the people of Syria, the ordinary people who are suffering in Syria, and I believe that most people in this country feel the same way. I have listened with enormous care to the debate today, and I found it enormously heartening because there were so many moving speeches. I want to mention particularly the noble Lords, Lord Wright of Richmond, Lord Jay of Ewelme, Lord Hurd, Lord Tebbit—I never thought I would say that—and so many others.

I particularly want to pick up on something the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, said about the mood music—he used another phrase. It has been getting worse in the past two or three years. Every time Syria has been mentioned by the Government there has been a sort of worsening approach to talking about it, which has made me feel deeply uneasy. I do not know what the outcome of the Syrian civil war will be, but I do know that at this point a blow against that regime is going to be a blow for the opposition. The House of Lords notes give me a list of 15 organisations in that opposition, and half of them I would not want to support. It therefore seems to me that the international community has got to think very carefully about what it does. We say that we cannot allow people to use chemical weapons with impunity and that it is illegal to use them, but in fact we have let other regimes use other weapons with impunity without too much difficulty.

The other words that people use about what the meaning of the strike would be—“retaliation”, “showing them they can’t get away with it”, “punishment” and “vengeance”—form no moral basis for escalating the conflict. It is fanciful to think that the regime will not continue to attack rebel civilians through other means. It would contribute to less safety and less security in that region. We know very well that we cannot change this regime; only the Syrians can do that for themselves. Civil wars have to be sorted out by the community in which they occur. The regime cannot be changed by us—we have demonstrated very clearly that we do not know how to do it in this very difficult region, and we should not be trying to do so in any way, or making any move to support action in that direction. Therefore, I say no to any form of military intervention. Sometimes not to take a legal, offensive way to express our views is the moral thing to do. Sometimes it is more difficult to sit on our hands and say, “No, we must not act”, but that is what we should do.