Syria

Stewart Malcolm McDonald Excerpts

Monday 30th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[Penny Mordaunt]

Turkey is a key NATO ally—I hope my right hon. Friend would want me to describe it as such—and it is supporting an enormous number of refugees. I very much understand his concern on this issue. The way we distribute aid is based on need, and we obviously have protections to ensure it is distributed as it should be. The main obstacle to that happening is access to particular areas, but aid is not being given to terrorist groups and it is not being abused in that way.

Most of the armed opposition are now dead. Back when we had the vote on the Floor of the House in 2013, there were 12 groups that nobody could describe as extremists or terrorists, and they were the best hope for a peaceful and good outcome to this situation. We are now faced with a situation in which Assad will continue his campaign, despite no restrictions being put on negotiations by the opposition groups. The only peaceful outcome in Syria will be with the consent of all parties, which I am afraid does not point to Assad remaining there.

[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.