Syria

John Bercow Excerpts

Monday 30th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[Stewart Malcolm McDonald (Glasgow South) (SNP)]

I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of her statement. I wish her well with her new ministerial responsibilities, and I associate the Scottish National party with her words on the aid workers in South Sudan.

The Syrian conflict is making the Schleswig-Holstein question look positively simple by comparison, but there are a number of questions that I hope the Secretary of State will be able to help me with this evening. Can she tell us a bit more about the new sanctions she has announced? Will they target the Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Centre and the network of shady bank accounts connected to it? Will she seek to address the large imbalance between the number of UK and EU sanctions and the number of sanctions brought in by the US Treasury? The US Treasury has almost 300 sanctions, but I understand there are fewer than 30 from the United Kingdom.

Can the Secretary of State tell us how she plans to strengthen the chemical weapons convention and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons? Isopropyl alcohol and hexamine are required to make sarin gas, but neither of those two components is covered by the chemical weapons convention. Are there plans to address that? Can she tell us a bit more about the US aid imitative she mentioned in her statement and how much new money will go to it?

The UN Security Council is tasked with underpinning global security, and it worries us all that it is now effectively an entirely broken instrument. Although, like the Secretary of State, I hold no candle for the Russian veto, if the veto is dead for Moscow, it is dead for every permanent member of the Security Council. Given that with the airstrikes the UK Government have essentially acted, whether we like it or not, outwith the norms she says the Government have acted to defend, what is the long-term plan to bring back some decorum, some decency and some order to the UN Security Council?

[Mr Speaker]

It is always in the interest of our proceedings that they should be entirely intelligible to those who attend or who watch on television. If memory serves me correctly, only three people knew the answer to the Schleswig-Holstein question: one died, a second went mad and the third forgot the answer.

[Penny Mordaunt]

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I hope to do rather better in my reply to the hon. Member for Glasgow South (Stewart Malcolm McDonald).

Whether through financial levers or through having other options in our humanitarian toolbox, we need to be able to do more in future. When I was a Defence Minister, I was fed up of coming to the House to say why we could not do airdrops; as Secretary of State for International Development, I am fed up of coming to the House to say why we cannot protect people better. We are a smart nation. We have great brains in our armed forces and in our civil contingencies, and we work very closely with our US allies. We have to come up with some better capabilities, and I am determined that we will do so.

We also want to focus on financial levers, and we are working with the EU and other international partners to develop them. I cannot give details on that today, but it is in train. I will update the House at a later date.

The US aid initiative is a joint partnership with the UK. Initially, we are each putting in £5 million to invite competition. We are asking people to come in with ideas, and we will then look at and develop those ideas, which could be about protecting civilians, getting power or water supplies back up or getting aid to individual people.

Additionally, we will set up a humanitarian innovation hub in the UK. My right hon. Friend the Minister for the Middle East will lead on that, and it will use the best brains from across many sectors to come up with solutions that we can use and that may help our defence and civil contingency capabilities.

On the UN, huge efforts are being made by our dedicated team in New York. I have spent time with them and I have visited them, and they are making a sterling effort. We need to keep pressure on Russia and Iran, which is the only way we will get things back to how we want them to work. In the meantime, we have to find other ways of making sure that we adhere to international norms. We will all be safer if that is the case.

--- Later in debate ---

[Penny Mordaunt]

I could not agree more. There is a very good reason why these weapons have been outlawed: they cause immense suffering. This regime is choosing not only to bomb its own people, but to exterminate them in the most cruel ways imaginable. Any nation that facilitates that should be ashamed of itself. I do not think the Russian people would approve of that kind of behaviour, and the Russian Government should look to their conscience and to the security of their own people, because by breaking these international norms they are putting their own people in danger, too.

[Mr Speaker]

I cannot say I have heard of this Slutsky fellow, but I am sure that the hon. Member for North Thanet (Sir Roger Gale) can take it upon himself to educate the gentleman—very useful.

[John Woodcock (Barrow and Furness) (Lab/Co-op)]

The statement is welcome, and I hope it will be followed by further regular and frequent updates. The Secretary of State knows that many of us are pushing for far stronger actions than sanctions to deal with the full spectrum of Assad’s atrocities, but when she talks about “A new sanctions regime against those responsible for chemical weapons use”, do we firmly put Iran and Syria among those “responsible”? Will she consider a wider sanctions regime, covering siege, starvation and deliberate targeting of civilians, as well as chemical weapons use?