Middle East and North Africa

Lord Davies of Stamford Excerpts

Wednesday 16th September 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Davies of Stamford (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, who always comes to this House well prepared with facts and figures. She usually goes out of her way to try to defend the Government, but she said this evening that our present policy in Syria is not working. That undoubtedly qualifies as the understatement of the evening. Our policy in Syria has been extraordinarily inept and extraordinarily unedifying.

As soon as the insurgency against the regime of Bashar al-Assad started, for some extraordinary reason the Government were determined to get involved with it, and the Prime Minister personally so, it appears. We sort of more or less declared war on Bashar at that point, and we have been in a state of war with him ever since. At the time I thought—and I continue to think—that it was a very bizarre decision. There does not seem to have been any particular national interest of ours in doing that; we should not deploy our forces frivolously. Of course, Bashar is an unpleasant dictator with blood on his hands, and much more blood now as a result of the insurgency against him, of course. But if that was a criterion for taking military action against a regime, we would be involved in at least a dozen wars overnight—all the way from Equatorial Guinea to North Korea—so that cannot be the explanation. We cannot say that we got involved because we wanted to avoid a refugee crisis, because it was the fighting that produced that crisis.

Most peculiarly of all, the decision flew in the face of all the lessons that I thought any sensible person would have learnt from Iraq and Libya—that trying to change regimes in other countries is always a problematic exercise and should never be embarked on unless one has available a viable and credible alternative regime to impose. That was clearly not the case in this situation, so I remain mystified as to why we did it. What is clear is that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Helic, has just said—in words softer than mine, but the meaning is exactly the same—it has been a complete failure. The Government also made series of mistakes in political analysis and seriously underestimated the resilience of the Bashar al-Assad regime. We now find ourselves continuing to fight a war on two fronts in Syria, one a voluntary war started quite gratuitously by ourselves and the other an involuntary war, declared on us and the rest of the western world by Daesh. That is a very serious matter, but it cannot be very clever to engage in two wars at the same time, when one was inevitable.

That is the inept part of the story; the unedifying part of the story is the way in which we have handled the refugee crisis over the past few weeks and months. Until the PR agenda changed—because that is what changed everything, when the picture of the dead child on the beach was all over the newspapers—the Government were taking a very tough line, saying that they were not going to have any significant numbers of Syrian or other refugees here at all. The Government were completely obsessed by maintaining their arbitrary 100,000 person a year immigration total. Then suddenly, because the PR equation changed, they started making all sorts of declarations about receiving refugees and doing something for them. We have actually discovered that what they are doing, which the Prime Minister described as extraordinarily generous, was extraordinarily ungenerous, taking 10,000 or at most 20,000 over five years when other countries, as has already been said in this debate, are taking far more. What is more, as the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, pointed out very well, we are not actually taking the refugees who are most vulnerable, those who are on the road and have no accommodation or food and are in serious danger of dying on their travels. The refugees in camps are obviously not very comfortable in them, but at least they do not face those threats quite so immediately.

One has to wonder why we have not taken up our quota under the EU system. The noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, said that he thought it was because the Government could not bear to do anything that looked like co-operation with our EU partners, because it would be unpopular with the Eurosceptics. I have to tell him that that is an appalling suspicion to have—that in a matter of life and death a Government would be influenced by party-political considerations of that kind—and I am very sorry to have to say this, but in my heart I cannot think of any other explanation for their conduct.

It is a very unedifying situation, and one in which we have no influence with anybody. We lost a lot of influence with the Americans because the Prime Minister was foolish enough to say to Barack Obama that we would get involved in Syrian operations without mentioning that he needed a House of Commons vote that he was not likely to get. We clearly do not have any influence with the EU now, with the way we have behaved, and we do not have any influence with third parties. That is very important as it is very important in this crisis that we encourage the Gulf states to take refugees from Syria. That is the most obvious solution because those economies are systematically dependent on immigrant labour and they are common cultural and linguistic areas, so it would be an obvious thing to do. But they are not taking any refugees; they are just paying cheques to keep people in camps, just like we are doing. Since we are doing that, we have no influence with them whatever. That is the situation we now find ourselves in.

I do not want to come before the House and just criticise. I want to say a couple of words about what I think we should be doing instead. First, we should regard the Daesh problem as a completely unique situation, which it is. People are fleeing a murderous horde of fanatics who will kill them if they can. We must open our doors and prevent that happening. Secondly, we should under no circumstances allow this to be a precedent, so that anybody who comes from a civil war or an area where there is a lot of violence can immediately claim asylum in the European Union or this country. It is not a realistic possibility. Thirdly, we must look again at the need to co-operate with our European partners. I think Mrs May has learnt the lesson that we cannot just say, “That’s all right—we aren’t in Schengen. We’ve got the Channel, so we don’t have to worry about people in Sangatte”. She has now belatedly realised that Sangatte is a problem for us.

Actually, it is a problem for us if these refugees come into southern Europe or the Balkans. We need to make sure that there are proper controls on the common external frontier. We have every interest in making sure that there is a robust common external frontier. I believe we, together with our EU counter- parts, should invest considerable naval resources in patrolling the Mediterranean to make sure that these poor people coming through on boats run by criminal organisations—criminal gangs in many cases—do not get through to the mainland of the European Union. They are of course rescued and given food and water when necessary, but they are towed back or taken back to Libya, where they mostly come from. We should negotiate, which I am sure is feasible, with the various warlords who now govern the Libyan coastline to enable us to do that. We need to have robust measures where they are required. We need to have a humanitarian response to this completely unique and horrifying Daesh phenomenon, and we need to make sure that in future we have well-thought through and coherent policies in these areas, which we certainly have not had up until the present time.