Syria

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Monday 30th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[Penny Mordaunt]

I thank the hon. Lady for her warm words at the start of her response. We are doing many things to ensure that we and the international community have the funding we need to alleviate the immense suffering being endured by the Syrian people. The first part of our contribution is obviously asking others to lean in, so my right hon. Friend the Minister for the Middle East and I have been asking other nations to do that. We obviously heavily co-ordinate our efforts with UN agencies and with their asks. We are also leading the charge on reforming the humanitarian system. We lose about $1 billion a year globally because the system does not work efficiently, so if we can get it to work better, we will have more money to deploy where we need it.

We are also helping in other areas. To give one example, I was recently in Jordan looking at the costs of healthcare; particular prices must be paid for vaccines for refugees. We are looking at the specific cost issues for the countries that are shouldering an immense burden and at what we can do to try to alleviate those costs or to get more sensible pricing systems in place.

We are also working with the multilateral system; as the hon. Lady will know, the capital replenishment of the World Bank was a huge success for the UK’s development goals. That formed part of our desire to ensure that the countries that are shouldering burdens, specifically Jordan and Lebanon, have their contributions taken into account when decisions are being made. I am pleased to be working with the president of the World Bank and Bill Gates on being human capital champions and on ensuring that all multilaterals are making decisions about which nations are stepping up and not only funding their own people, but supporting refugees from other nations.

The hon. Lady mentioned the UN, and we all know about the problems we have with the Security Council and Russia’s veto. We must find other ways of working and to encourage people to come to the table, and we have to put pressure on Russia and Iran to play their parts in getting the situation resolved.

As for the air strikes, their purpose was to degrade and deter the use of chemical weapons, as the hon. Lady knows. The vast majority of Members across the House recognise why they were a good thing for the people of Syria, for our own safety and for trying to ensure international norms. One reason why we are not able to share information with the House in advance of such strikes is that we can only make the judgment to which she referred when we know what the targets are. We can only make a judgment about whether a strike will be legal, effective in its objective and compliant with our targeting policies if we know what the targets are, and we cannot share that information with the House for understandable reasons.

We have chosen to support millions in the region. We are taking a number of refugees into the UK, but we are supporting millions of individuals not just with the basics of life, but by trying to ensure that they have some kind of future, particularly with our investment in education. Since I became Secretary of State, I have set up several new groups with the Home Office, both recently and last year, to consider issues in which there is Home Office interest, including the administration of the situation of refugees. For example, if people caught up in the Rohingya crisis have relatives here, we are trying to be proactive and to ensure that we are doing everything we can to get sensible things to happen.

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

I must express disappointment that, while rightly damning the monsters in the Syrian Government, my right hon. Friend still has nothing to say about the maniacs—the jihadists—who lead most of the armed opposition. Can she tell us whether this aid will be supplied only to displaced Syrians outside Syria or, if it will be supplied to Syrians within Syrian territory, whether it will be supplied to Assad-controlled territory, to territory controlled by the armed jihadist opposition or to territory controlled by the only people we have ever been able to support militarily—the Kurdish-led Syrian democratic forces? Those forces are currently under attack from Turkey, which she has just described as one of our friends in the region.

[Penny Mordaunt]

Turkey is a key NATO ally—I hope my right hon. Friend would want me to describe it as such—and it is supporting an enormous number of refugees. I very much understand his concern on this issue. The way we distribute aid is based on need, and we obviously have protections to ensure it is distributed as it should be. The main obstacle to that happening is access to particular areas, but aid is not being given to terrorist groups and it is not being abused in that way.

Most of the armed opposition are now dead. Back when we had the vote on the Floor of the House in 2013, there were 12 groups that nobody could describe as extremists or terrorists, and they were the best hope for a peaceful and good outcome to this situation. We are now faced with a situation in which Assad will continue his campaign, despite no restrictions being put on negotiations by the opposition groups. The only peaceful outcome in Syria will be with the consent of all parties, which I am afraid does not point to Assad remaining there.