ISIL in Syria

Paul Flynn Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Keith Simpson (Broadland) (Con)]

This may be the kiss of death for them, but I congratulate the right hon. Members for Derby South (Margaret Beckett), for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Alan Johnson) and for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) on three formidable speeches. It always takes incredible courage to stand against one’s party and they should not be denigrated for doing so.

I support the Government’s motion. I fully understand all the caveats of one kind or another that colleagues have put forward, but the most important immediate issue is making the strikes against Daesh in Syria that our intelligence and security agencies have identified and wish to carry out, because it offers a present threat to us, our constituents and our allies in Europe. This is a present threat. They may not get it entirely right. I can see my right hon. Friend for—what is his constituency? [Interruption.] I have so many friends! It would be wrong to name them all, but they think that there is no direct threat as far as intelligence is concerned. Those colleagues who have received briefings of one kind or another understand that. The intelligence and security services cannot guarantee to prevent every threat. We should support the motion primarily because we wish to extend our air campaign into Syria to help prevent the threats to this country.

Secondly, I am mindful that the elephant in the room is the Iraq war. We tend to look back to previous wars to draw lessons of one kind or another. The Prime Minister is absolutely right that we have to look at the present situation and the future. Hopefully, we have learned lessons, both political and military, from that war, but we can end up having our current operations and politics determined by past experiences.

Our predecessors sat in the Commons in the 1930s, determined never to have a great war again. The Labour party was divided—there were pacifists and those who wanted collective security. My party supported appeasement, as did the overwhelming majority of the British public, because they genuinely—these were not evil men and women—wanted to prevent another war. They failed, of course, because they were dealing with people in other countries who were not prepared to negotiate. The lessons learned from that war were used in 1956. Anthony Eden believed that Nasser was another Mussolini. He was therefore prepared to take action, but it was the wrong action at the time. I believe that we should put aside where we stood on other campaigns and look at what the situation is today.

My final point is that there has been a great debate about the 70,000 moderate or immoderate people who might or might not provide ground forces. I am sure that the leader of the SNP is, even as we speak, getting YouGov to go out and ask them whether they consider themselves to be moderates or immoderates.

[Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Simpson]

I am sorry but I have almost run out of time.

During the second world war, when Churchill and Roosevelt were looking at resistance in Europe, it was dreadfully difficult to find out whether people were communists, non-communists, or Gaullists of one kind or another. At the end of the day, their criterion was, “Are they fighting the Nazis?” There is no easy solution, but the Prime Minister has laid out a set of proposals as far as he can, and I urge the House to vote with him on this occasion.

--- Later in debate ---

[Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)]

We are fighting and losing the wrong war. This is a war of hearts and minds that can never be won with bombs and bullets. The situation is truly terrifying, and we underestimate it if we imagine that it is confined to a couple of countries. People who have been brought up in this country, gone to our schools and absorbed our culture and values find themselves seduced by the message of Daesh. Two such people went to Syria from Cardiff and are now dead. They gave their lives to this mad, murderous cult. We must examine why they did that.

The reason is that Daesh’s narrative is very cleverly conceived to appeal to adolescents. It offers danger, adventure in foreign parts and martyrdom. It also deepens the sense of victimhood by churning up all the stories from the middle ages about how the wicked Christian crusaders slaughtered without mercy the Muslims. We must challenge that dialogue of hate. We must have a different narrative. There is a good narrative for us to take up, because in the past 200 years we have had great success in places like Cardiff and Newport in building up mixed communities of races and religions.

We must not imagine that anything will be over as a result of what happens in Syria or Iraq. This has spread throughout the world—throughout Asia and throughout South America. There is hardly a country in the world where Daesh does not want to spread its hatred. It has a worldwide plan to divide the world into Muslim communities and Christian communities that are at war. In other countries there is great suffering in many of the Christian communities that are being persecuted. We are falling into the trap it designed in Sharm el-Sheikh, Tunisia and Paris to pull us on to the punch. It is saying, “This is the way to get a world war going. This is the way to incite the west to send in military people and have a world war.” This is precisely what it wants—it has said so. It wants a world war and we must not fall into the trap.

We have heard today throughout this House some very good, sincere speeches, but I believe that the combination of two dangerous views, “Something must be done” and “Give war a chance”, leads us to the position that we are now in. Those of us who were in the House when we went to war in Iraq were told, by the same people who are telling us now that there are 70,000 friendly troops, that there were definitely weapons of mass destruction there. There were not. In 2006, we were told that we could go into Helmand with no chance of a shot being fired. We lost 454 of our soldiers there. Little has been achieved. Because of decisions taken in this House in the past 20 years, we have lost the lives of 633 of our soldiers. I believe that if we go in now, nothing much will happen. There will be no improvement—we will rearrange the rubble, perhaps—but we will strengthen the antagonism and deepen the sense of victimhood among Muslims worldwide; they will have another excuse. We must not fall into that trap. We need to have a counter-dialogue, and get it into the media and on to the world wide web, to say that there is a great story to be told of harmony in our country. We must put that forward as a genuine alternative.