Middle East

Paul Maynard Excerpts

Monday 30th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)]

I have been sitting here racking my brains trying to remember which of Philip Larkin’s poems contained the following lines:

“We are not suited to the long perspectives

Open at each instant of our lives.”

That applies so very well to what occurs in this Chamber so often: we are so blinded by day-to-day events—by the proximity of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya—that we find it far harder to take a step back and look at the long duration of our involvement in the region. That is why I congratulate the Backbench Business Committee on granting this debate and my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell (Dr Lee), who is no longer in his place, on framing such a wide motion, which allows us to engage in a wider sense on the longer-term issues.

If we were to look back over the past century of our engagement with the middle east, we would see that every time there has been a major issue there have probably been those arguing for greater intervention, those arguing for less intervention and those arguing for no intervention at all, but the common point of all those debates has been one of diminishing engagement on the part of the United Kingdom. It is right to take a step back and ask why that might be and whether it is the right thing for the future. We should not blind ourselves by the decisions we will certainly have to take in the next day or two, but instead look at why we are there in the long term and how it has an impact on our national interest.

The hon. Members for Glasgow South (Stewart Malcolm McDonald) and for Edinburgh East (Tommy Sheppard) were urging us to learn the lessons of history, look at individual events and draw a conclusion from them. I always find that the most frustrating aspect of debate in this Chamber, because history can be a fickle lover. Whatever our argument, we can find that event that will buttress our argument and somehow disprove our opponent’s, and it is very dangerous indeed because history can mislead. It is far better not to focus on individual events but to try to look at some of the more thematic issues that underpin our engagement with this region. Of course foreign policy will be affected on a day-to-day basis by what occurs in the news. When Turkey shoots down a Russian jet it will, of course, have geopolitical consequences to which Ministers must respond, but what really affects the region is not the day-to-day power struggles of those in authority, but what is occurring to ordinary people on the ground.

Across the middle east, we see a number of themes. We see great demographic change. We see a growing population of young people, without the economic growth to give them the jobs they need. That means they become discontented, and that social grievance can lead to changes in Government. Probably, with the benefit of hindsight, we would say that it is what underpinned the Arab spring, which, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell said, nobody really predicted. In addition, we are seeing changes to the economic structure of these countries: agriculture is changing, food security is diminishing, food prices are rising in the cities and desertification is taking place, possibly as a result of climate change—who is to say? I am not expert enough to call it. That is certainly leading to greater urbanisation, which is accelerating some of those changes to the employment of young people and the social structures that lie within it.

All those things together are a common element in many of the countries we are focusing on, yet we often sit in this Chamber thinking that we in the UK have the sole answer to all these international problems and that only the UK can solve them. That of course is not the case, as the Minister will well know. These problems will be solved only by international coalitions, and the importance of our role will be diminished within these coalitions. What we tend to fall back on in any debate on foreign affairs are some of the more simple clichés, and they can be very dangerous. It is as though there is a binary alternative between intervention and no intervention, and there is no middle ground where we can start to say, “What sort of intervention is most helpful? What do we need to do to build a wider coalition of support in the UK?” The Prime Minister has been admirable in how he has tried to engage courteously with all Members from all parts of the House, whatever their views, to explain why this is not just a simple matter where the whole situation will be transformed if we bomb ISIS in Raqqa. It is far from that, and he has been candid in setting that out.

The other dangerous cliché beginning to circulate is a slightly isolationist one. It is that in some ways this is a religious war that we have no real part of, that we cannot decide between Shi’a or Sunni, and that it is not for Britain or any other western nation to get involved. It is an interesting and seductive argument, but it is also a dangerous one. Let me draw on a lesson from history with which others may disagree. If we go back to the Reformation in the late 16th and early 17th century, the destruction of Christendom and the wars of religion, we may think that that was all about religious differences and divisions, yet, it was not. It was the use of religion as a cloak to reinforce existing divisions of power structures, existing contests between states and between those who were governed and those who did not want to be governed in the way that they were being governed, all of which came to be sheltered under the identity of the person to whom the people owed their allegiance—whether it was a Calvinist, a Lutheran or a Pope.

When we look at the middle east, we need to be very careful that we do not repeat the same mistake of thinking that the various tensions that are there on the ground are all about religion. Often it is the control of religious observance that is the best way of exerting political control in a society where religious observance is one of the few communal activities that occur on a day-to-day basis, so I would very cautious about saying that this is a religious conflict in which we have no part.

The other point I wish to make in the 26 seconds that I have left is that, I hope in his protection of the Foreign Office Library, the Minister can find some scholarly works on the French mandate of Syria between 1922 and 1945, because it has an awful lot to teach us about the potential solution in Syria, particularly in the establishment of a cantonal system that included a homeland for the Alawites, which the French set up after 1922.