Syria and the Use of Chemical Weapons

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

Thursday 29th August 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe]

My Lords, first, I am grateful to the Leader of the House for the statement at the beginning of the debate today, and I particularly welcome the indications from the Government that they have slowed down their approach and will take more time to deal with this issue. That has been welcomed by the House and the country generally. Secondly, I urge that we ensure that as we slow down and examine this issue carefully, we do it to our own timetable and are not responding to the timetable set down by others, such as the USA.

I come at the Government’s proposal with a degree of scepticism. I am sure that I am in line with many of the population. This is not because of a lack of sympathy or abhorrence about what has happened to the Syrian victims. There is concern for them and the Syrian population as a whole, and there is concern for the wider implications of the consequences that might arise from any military action on which we embark. I can be quite honest that my scepticism is based to a degree on the fact that, like others who have spoken today, I gave full support to the intervention in Iraq and subsequently going into Afghanistan. As time has gone by and I have seen what has happened, I have come to regret the decisions that I took at the time. I am very anxious to ensure that as I approach this issue, we do not repeat some of the errors of the past and what has happened in the recent past. I say this in a week especially when more than 50 people were killed in Baghdad and after a report from the United Nations that last month alone more than 1,000 civilians were killed in Iraq. This continues to escalate on a worrying scale.

The test that we ought to be exercising increasingly, even though people say that we should not be conditioned by what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan is: have we improved the quality and safety of life for the people in Iraq? A number of our ambassadors have posed the same question indirectly. We should also be asking whether our actions have improved the quality and safety of life for our citizens here in the UK. I read Mr Blair’s article in the Times and went through the barricades that now surround this building, which were not there 10 years ago. When I look at our public buildings around the country and our utilities and see the extent to which they are surrounded and guarded, which was not the case a decade ago, and I look at the cost and burden to the public, it is not difficult to understand why this time round the public are extraordinarily against what is being proposed by the Government. It behoves us to take account of that and to pick up the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Dannatt, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mayhew, that we cannot ignore the knock-on effect on our troops if we decide to move forward without the full support of the people. I hope that we will not rush headlong into further action.

It is 10 years since we went into Iraq and it is high time that the public and we ourselves saw the Chilcot report. When can we expect to see it so that we can start to learn some lessons that we might apply in the future? The public and Parliament are entitled to know all the evidence about the use of chemical weapons, which it is now indicated we will get. Who is responsible for ensuring that every effort at UN and diplomatic levels will be made and will continue to be made? The public will be looking for that more than perhaps Parliament has expressed they will.

I am not going to repeat some of the points that have been made about the UN, but more work needs to be done at that level and on an international basis. We have had quite a remarkable debate today, and I should like to suggest to the Minister—I put this in a positive way—that so many suggestions and proposals have emerged, which I sense have not been addressed by the Government in their full respect, that he should ask his officials to take the debate away and draw up a document in which we can see those suggestions and proposals. We will learn about where the Government have taken appropriate action, or think they have, or where no action on the lines that some people have suggested has been taken. This should be drawn to the attention of the Foreign Secretary and he should be required to report back to us on the actions to be taken, with a full report then placed in the Library of the House.