Syria and the Use of Chemical Weapons

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Thursday 29th August 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, it might be better if some leading politicians went on much longer holidays and never came back.

I do not support military action against Syria, and I hope the Government will listen to the overwhelming balance of views in your Lordships’ House today, which range from people who are cautious, do not want to go ahead very quickly and think that the Government have not quite got it right, to people who take the view that I do: it is likely to be a disaster at any time.

I am sorry to be speaking against the policy of my leader, the Deputy Prime Minister and other of the leading members of my party, including my noble friend Lord Ashdown, for whom I have great admiration, but when my noble friend says that the choice is between action or no action, to act or not to act, the problem is that his view of action is military action and nothing else. As various noble Lords have said, military action ought to come after everything else has been tried. The other point about action or no action is that if you take no action for the time being, you can always go back to act in future; once you have taken military action, there is no going back whatever. If it turns out to be disastrous, you are lumbered with the consequences for ever.

The pulling back by the Government in the past few days has been a good thing. It has clearly been in response to public opinion; I think that it has been a response to an opinion in the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats as well. It has also been a response to what has been happening in the House of Commons among the politicians. Of course, the press will always try to personalise it and say that it is a big victory for one side or the other. I think that it is a victory for the House of Commons which, as a body, has been responsible for this being pulled back. In recent times, people have said, “Parliament is a waste of time, the House of Commons is toothless and not like it used to be”, and so on, but from time to time we get events and crises when the House of Commons, in particular, can rise to say, “Thus far and no further; we want a change”. I think that this is a victory for democracy as much as anything else.

As for public opinion, we should be concerned about it not just in this country but in the world—in the Middle East and the Arab world. The Minister, in introducing the debate, said that the Arab League was all on board. Yes, the Arab League stands for the Sunni establishment, by and large, in the Middle East; it certainly does not speak for some other countries and, in particular, I am not sure that the leaders of the Arab League speak for the Arab street.

One problem is that while Sunni opinion throughout the world may be watching and may be not too concerned about things at the moment because there is an evident dictator, a brutal sectarian dictator who is a version of Shia, once it goes wrong, if only 1% of the hundreds of cruise missiles that may be launched lose their way and hit a hospital or a residential area, the television pictures will be around the world within 24 hours and opinion can change very quickly indeed.

As far as Muslims in Britain are concerned, I have no doubt that British action in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Pakistan have played a central role in radicalising people. There are two aspects to this. Most of the ordinary Muslims in Britain come from the south Asian subcontinent. They are mainly Sunnis and mainly attend the mosques of a moderate variety of Islam. People I have spoken to recently in my own area in Lancashire have commented that what is going on in Syria is dreadful, the chemical attack was appalling and Assad is a bad man, but that when western countries go in to try to sort things out, they almost always seem to make things worse. I do not think that there will be lots of people out on the streets in demonstrations, like there were 10 years ago when a lot of us went on the big march. I do not think a lot of Asian people will do that at the moment, but the problem is the small number of individuals who for various reasons—their contacts, their psychological disposition or whatever—are subject to radicalisation. I have no doubt that if the missile attack on Syria takes place, it will almost certainly contribute to serious radicalisation and possible future serious incidents in this country.