Arms to Syria

Phillip Lee Excerpts

Thursday 11th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Dr Phillip Lee (Bracknell) (Con)]

My speech has changed about four times in the course of the debate as I was trying to find a way, without fear of repetition, of saying things that have not been said already. I note the motion, and I note that essentially this is a legal and constitutional debate. With all due respect to those on the Front Bench and the Minister, I wonder why there is no legal representation here.

The debate is necessary because of the complexity of Syria and the wider region, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron) on securing it. I look up at the Annunciator screen, which shows the title of the debate as “Arms to Syria”, and wonder whether it should say “Arms to the Middle East”. We are considering arming the Free Syrian Army, but we also have arms contracts going back many years with Saudi Arabia and other countries in the region. We have never come to this Chamber to authorise the Government to make those arms deals. I am therefore not in favour of the motion.

If the motion concerned committing British forces on the ground in Syria, I would suggest it appropriate, for reasons that pre-date my time in the House, to have a debate and a vote. On Iraq and on other conflicts we have been involved in, the public have lost faith in the democratic process in relation to how Britain engages in military conflicts around the world. All I see in the world at the moment is increasing chaos, so I suspect that we will find ourselves involved in other conflicts in the middle east in the near future. We need to take the British public with us, and that involves our being able to go back to our constituencies and make a case for intervention.

Syria is a country created by the colonial pen strokes of Sykes-Picot, and other countries across the middle east were created by former colonial masters. On top of that, one lays the Sunni/Shi’a split, a sense of an Islamic reformation taking place, and the unresolved issues concerning democracy and Islam. I am no historian, but it feels like the Catholic Church in the 16th century wrestling with how to give power back to Governments of free and increasingly democratic nations. Because of the complexity of the situation and the fact that we are trying to look at these issues through the prism of countries that will probably not exist in 10 years’ time—there will be fragmentation—it is extremely difficult to come here and talk about sending arms to a particular country that would not have existed had it been created on tribal lines and by taking ethnic loyalties into account.

I have a lot of sympathy with my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Front Bench, but UK foreign policy should be about what is in Britain’s best interests. I think it is in Britain’s best interests to have as coherent and consistent a policy as can be applied across the middle east. After Syria, this situation could fall into Lebanon, Jordan and, dare I say it, Saudi Arabia, with the consequent impact on energy prices and so on. It is in Britain’s interests to garner the trust and support of the wider Arab public, and not just intervene and fiddle around the edges. I could come here and vote for a commitment on the ground in the middle east. I struggle to come here to vote for a commitment to arm just one particular force.