Afghanistan

Ed Davey Excerpts

Monday 6th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend knows whereof he speaks. I have met people who have come from Afghanistan only recently who have helped us greatly in the past 20 years. As the House will understand, the key issues for them are where they are going to send their children to school and whether they can access the housing they need. I thank my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government for what he is doing. My hon. Friend is quite right that the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle, is the single point of contact on which people should focus.

[Ed Davey (Kingston and Surbiton) (LD)]

We all saw the horrific carnage outside Kabul airport, where more than 180 people were killed. I join the Prime Minister in remembering all those victims, not least the two British nationals and the child of a British national. That airport atrocity was the work of the terrorist organisation ISIS-K. Everyone agrees that we must now work to prevent ISIS-K from becoming a threat to the British people, yet under this Prime Minister’s watch he has not only failed to agree a co-ordinated international strategy to take on ISIS-K but failed even to proscribe ISIS-K as a terrorist organisation, unlike other Five Eyes countries. Will the Prime Minister explain these failures on national security?

[The Prime Minister]

I am afraid the right hon. Gentleman is in error. ISIS-K—ISIS Khorasan Province—is a subset of Daesh. It is part of Daesh. As he knows very well, one of the bitter ironies of the situation is that the Taliban themselves are no friends to ISIS-K, and whatever Government there is in Kabul will need help to fight them.