Oral Answers to Questions

Keith Simpson Excerpts

Monday 23rd October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Sir Michael Fallon]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his welcome for an Operation Shader medal, which we hope to start issuing next year. It will rightly recognise the contribution made, over three years now, by our servicemen and women in this very important campaign against the evil of our time. I have already commented publicly about the current criteria, which require both “risk and rigour” to have been undergone before service personnel are eligible for a medal. The nature of warfare is changing, so we are having another look at those criteria.

[Mr Keith Simpson (Broadland) (Con)]

One consequence of the success of the operations against Daesh has been the dispersal of many of its volunteers, including United Kingdom citizens. Yesterday, my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart), who is a Minister of State at the Foreign Office and the Department for International Development, said that, as far as UK citizens who had served in ISIS were concerned, the only thing to do, with one or two exceptions, was to kill them. Is that now Government policy?

[Sir Michael Fallon]

My hon. Friend and I have made it clear that those who travel to fight with Daesh in Iraq or Syria will have been committing a criminal offence. Daesh is a proscribed organisation, and we have to make sure that if these people ever do return from Iraq and Syria, they do not pose a future threat to our national security. However, they have made their choice: they have chosen to fight for an organisation that uses terror and the murder of civilians as a modus operandi.