Syria Crisis: UK Response

Heidi Allen Excerpts

Monday 8th February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

The right hon. Lady will be pleased to hear that the Foreign Secretary is part of the International Syria Support Group, which will meet in Munich this Thursday, hopefully with the Russians there. That is precisely the sort of message that we will be delivering to the Russians; they have a critical part to play in enabling the peace talks to move forward. At the moment, their actions are taking us further away from a peaceful settlement, because they are bombing the very moderate opposition around which it should be possible to form a transition Government.

[Heidi Allen (South Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

The Secretary of State has every right to be exceptionally proud of what was achieved at the conference, but I fear that we need to do more locally in Europe. She will know, I am sure, that I and my hon. Friends the Members for Bury St Edmunds (Jo Churchill) and for Eastbourne (Caroline Ansell) were in Lesbos last weekend, and I can tell her that the Greeks are not coping. Britain needs to lead in Europe, as we have done on the global stage. There are refugees, including children, in Europe who need our help, and Greece is on its knees. Will the Secretary of State meet us to hear our first-hand emotional and factual account of what we saw?

[Justine Greening]

I am very happy to meet my hon. Friend, and I have read reports of her visit. I reassure her that we are playing as much of a role as we can in working with Greece. The UK has worked with the UNHCR, which has registered many of the refugees who have arrived in Greece. In the end, we have to accept that Greece has sovereign control, and it will want to organise how it deals with refugees. Yes, it needs resourcing. The European community is discussing how it can effectively do that, and the UK has been part of that. In the meantime, our focus has rightly been on dealing with the root causes of why those people lost any hope that there was a future for them in the region where they lived and had grown up. That surely has to be the main focus.