ISIL in Syria

Alberto Costa Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Alex Salmond (Gordon) (SNP)]

“We cannot do nothing”, said the hon. Member for South West Devon (Mr Streeter), but that is not an argument for doing anything; it is an argument for doing something that works, as part of an overall strategy that has some chance of success.

I find myself in the unusual position of complimenting some Conservative speakers. We have heard some fine speeches thus far, but some of the best have come from Conservative Members dissenting from the Government line. The right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) did the House a service by reminding us of the proportionality of what we are discussing. We are discussing adding perhaps an extra two Tornadoes and a segment of Typhoons to the bombing campaign in Syria. We make up 10% of the current flights in Iraq. As the right hon. Gentleman said, we will not make any conceivable difference to the air campaign in Syria, where there are too many planes already, chasing too many targets.

[Alberto Costa (South Leicestershire) (Con)]

rose—

[Alex Salmond]

I give way to my compatriot.

[Alberto Costa]

Does the right hon. Gentleman not agree that the RAF has the capability to destroy Daesh’s supply and funding lines without causing any civilian casualties of note? If the RAF is capable of doing that, why is he opposing this?

[Alex Salmond]

I cannot tell the hon. Gentleman the number of times I have heard the argument about minimising the civilian casualties from a bombing campaign. I bow to no one on the skill of our pilots and the sophistication of weapons, but if he actually believes we are going to engage in a bombing campaign in a concentrated urban area such as Raqqa without there being civilian casualties, he is living on a different planet. As the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden said, there is no conceivable balance of difference that we are going to make to the campaign in Syria.

The Prime Minister said that we must not be haunted or hamstrung by past mistakes, by which he meant the war in Iraq. I am more interested in far more recent mistakes in terms of this House and its decision making and this Government and their decision making. First, we had last night’s mistake of describing opponents of the Government’s action as “terrorist sympathisers”. A hugely demeaning thing for a Prime Minister to do when he should be engaged in attempting to unite the country is to concentrate on accentuating divisions within the Labour party. Goodness knows, I have spent a lifetime in politics attacking the Labour party and replacing it, but I have not attacked its divisions on this issue because this is a matter of war and peace—it is about sending people into conflict. For a Prime Minister to demean himself in that way indicates that although he might be successful in dividing the Labour party, he will fail in uniting the country, and he should have apologised when given ample opportunity to do so.

The right hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis), the Chair of the Defence Committee, reminded us in his speech that only two years ago the same Prime Minister came to this House asking to bomb the other side in the Syrian civil war. That can be called many things by right hon. and hon. Members but it is not the sign of a coherent military or political strategy. Another mistake, which is less thought of, was spending 13 times as much on bombing Libya as we did on reconstructing that country after the carnage, and the total disarray and dysfunction of society that resulted.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Nicolson (East Dunbartonshire) (SNP)]

Let me begin with where, surely, we all agree. None of us in this House supports Daesh. All of us want to see it defeated. As an atheist, I shiver with horror when I see and read about Christians being beheaded. As a gay man I weep to see homosexuals being thrown from buildings in Syria. So let no one, on either side of the House, impugn the motives of those who speak in this debate. However, let us remember recent debates. It is not unkind to remind those who claimed that bombing would bring order to Iraq 12 years ago, and to Syria two years ago, of how wrong they were.

In the debate on the Iraq war, the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith) said:

“The idea that this action would become a recruiting sergeant for…those who are anti any nation in the west is, I am afraid, nonsense.”—[Official Report, 18 March 2003; Vol. 401, c. 774.]

He now sits in the Cabinet and advocates a new bombing campaign against another foe in the middle east, but uses much the same line. This debate puts mostly the same arguments, with the same proponents, as the debate on the Iraq war. I was a journalist at the time, and interviewed all the main political players and the country’s leading experts in chemical warfare, missile accuracy and Sunni-Shi’ite politics. I concluded that, while Saddam was a monster, he was a monster who controlled the monsters. The then Labour Government and Tory Front-Bench team disagreed and removed Saddam, thereby unleashing the forces of medieval hell on Iraq and its neighbours. Eliza Manningham-Buller, director general of MI5 during the invasion, said:

“The bombing increased the terrorist threat by convincing more people in the region that Islam was under attack. It provided an arena for jihad.”

The armchair generals would be chastened, one might think, but two years ago, by then in government, the Conservatives asked the House to bomb the region again. This time, they wanted to bomb another secular despot—President Assad—but wisely, the House refused.

[Alberto Costa]

The hon. Gentleman said that we all want to see the end of Daesh. I invite him to join us in the Lobby to agree the motion. Our position is that airstrikes can destroy Daesh supply lines and, more importantly, the terror training facilities, which are a danger to his constituents in East Dunbartonshire, as they are to South Leicestershire and the whole United Kingdom. Why does he not support that?

[Mr Speaker]

Order. Interventions must be brief, not mini-speeches, however eloquent.