Military Action Overseas: Parliamentary Approval

Lord Swire Excerpts

Tuesday 17th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[Sir Edward Leigh]

I have considerable sympathy with the hon. Gentleman’s argument. I have just said that I agree with the Father of the House that in general Parliament should have its say before action is taken.

I believe that there is so much opposition to what we are doing in the middle east because from the beginning western Governments have not really been cognisant of the sheer complexity of the situation. The Americans are against Assad and the Russians, and for the Kurds, many of whom are against Assad, but the Americans are also allied to the Turks, who are against the American-backed Kurds, and the Turks will do anything to stop the Kurds, even though both are friends of the Americans. That shows the sheer complexity of the situation.

I must quote the patriarchs of the Syriac Orthodox Church, the Greek Orthodox Church and the Melkite Catholic Church. They are based in Syria and rely on the Assad regime for protection and their continual survival. This can perhaps be dismissed, as they are subject to pressure from the regime, but their beatitudes say:

“It causes us great pain that this assault comes from powerful countries to which Syria did not cause any harm in any way.”

They are Christian leaders speaking in Syria. We should be very careful.

[Sir Hugo Swire (East Devon) (Con)]

Did any of those Christian leaders in Syria comment on the atrocities visited on innocent children that we have seen in the past week?

[Sir Edward Leigh]

I have just said that these Christian leaders are under great pressure from the Assad regime to toe the party line, as it were, but the fact is that their responsibility is to protect their own communities, which are under unprecedented pressure. We have to take some account of the pressure on Christian communities.

Last week, when the Vatican all-party group was in Rome, we had a meeting on persecuted Christians in Syria. We met every single expert from the refugee services and from all around the world who look into this issue, and they all told us that bombing was a dangerous thing to do with regard to opinion in the middle east and pressure from Muslims on the remaining Christian communities. I was struck when the representative of the Catholic Church in Pakistan said that the Catholic communities there would get it in the neck even more because, unfairly, so many Muslims do not differentiate between Russian bombs, American bombs, French bombs and British bombs. They say that the misery in Syria has been caused by foreign Christian powers raining bombs on their communities. That might be an unfair point of view, but it is generally held in the middle east.

This point has not been made by anybody else in the debate so far: I accept that the Government were right to act, and that they have powers under the royal prerogative to act, but I do not believe that we should pursue any more our objective of trying to change the Assad regime. If we then do act for humanitarian reasons—if we intervene to deter a possible chemical attack—we will have much more credibility in the middle east, because we would not be seen to be taking sides. That is the way forward.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Norris]

The hon. Gentleman has not given me the chance to make my case. I am arguing for a formalised, codified role for this place so that we are not in the situation of last week when, for as many tweets as there were about whether we should be acting at all, there were tweets questioning whether Parliament should be recalled. We should not be in this fudge at a time when we are making such important decisions.

We are not asking to constrain operational flexibility—of course we are not. I do not believe that I and all other Members collectively should be setting a strategy for a campaign, but we should have the opportunity to make sure that there is a strategy for the campaign and to ask questions.

[Sir Hugo Swire]

This was not about a campaign. In this instance, it was effectively, about a surgical strike. Does not the hon. Gentleman recognise that he would constrain the flexibility of the Prime Minister if there was a question of timing? If she were obliged to come to this House first, that could seriously impede any operational activity.

[Alex Norris]

I am not arguing for that. We could weave into the statute circumstances in which there was a clear and immediate need to act in the national interest, and the right hon. Gentleman will be glad to hear that I am getting to that very point.

I want to draw on the work of the former Political and Constitutional Reform Committee. I know that you have a keen eye for detail and strong powers of recall, Mr Speaker, so you will remember that it was my predecessor, Graham Allen, who chaired that Committee. I am afraid that a keen interest in constitutional reform and all those sorts of matters does not pass down through the generations of Nottingham North parliamentarians—or if it does, it has skipped me. Nevertheless, I say to hon. Members that the Committee’s excellent documents are a manual for how we might have such a statute in our law. They offer comprehensive insight. They list the hurdles that we would face, including those regarding the courts, and outline the solutions that are there at our disposal. The solutions are there, so this can be done if there is a will to do it.

The previous Prime Minister said that consulting Parliament regarding military action was a “good convention”. Clearly that convention leaves too much room for debate, as I think this week has shown. As the Leader of the Opposition said, it is broken. Now is the time to settle this one way or another. We should put Parliament’s role in statute. Even if the position is for Parliament to play no role at all, that ought to be written down, and that is why we need a war powers Act. What happened last week was a fudge. It will not do that we are doing a hokey cokey over whether we are coming to London to discuss these matters when we are dealing with really significant incidents across the globe.

The Prime Minister says that the convention still stands, so she believes that Parliament ought to have a role in military action. Well, now is the time to make good on that. Through legislation, we can show once and for all what Parliament does and does not do, and how—in the popular words of the day—we have taken back control for this Parliament.