Mike Gapes
Main Page: Mike Gapes (The Independent Group for Change - Ilford South)Department Debates - View all Mike Gapes's debates with the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office
(5 years, 9 months ago)
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Mr Speaker
I call the man brandishing a report of the Foreign Affairs Committee, which he once chaired and of which he remains a distinguished ornament: Mr Mike Gapes.
Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Lab/Co-op)
The Select Committee’s unanimously agreed report on “The Responsibility to Protect and Humanitarian Intervention”, published today, says:
“There has been a manifest failure to protect civilians and to prevent mass atrocity crimes in Syria.”
It calls for an independent inquiry to investigate the processes that lead to and the consequences of the Government’s decision not to intervene in Syria. We could have intervened in 2011, with humanitarian corridors and no-fly zones, and the Minister referred to the 2013 debate and others. However, why are we quite happy to hold inquiries when we do intervene, such as with Iraq, but not when we do not intervene? As the Committee points out, the consequences of non-intervention by the international community can be worse than those of intervention.
Alistair Burt
It is obviously too early to give an official response to the Committee’s report, but the hon. Gentleman and I know the circumstances well. There is absolutely nothing to stop a further inquiry by this House into the decisions that were made and why. Indeed, I can remember most of the arguments now. However, he is correct that Syria has demonstrated the consequences of non-intervention in a way that had not been made fully clear before. Many of the political arguments at the time were based on what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I remember the public—it was nine to one—telling Ministers and Members not to do anything.
We now know that there have been consequences of that non-intervention. I do not know what the right forum is to learn still more of that, and I am not sure about the process, but now that the potential damage from non-intervention is established fact, the hon. Gentleman is right that the House needs to consider the consequences of non-intervention as well as intervention. I should add of course that there has been intervention since 2013, just not by the United Kingdom and its allies.