Syria — House of Commons, 2018-04-16
Topic: International Affairs
James Stephen Heappey (Conservative, Centre-right): I join colleagues from across the House in congratulating the hon. Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern) on securing today’s debate. There is limited time available, so I will discuss only briefly some key issues that have been raised On the timeliness of action and how the decision was taken, I am clear that we could not have waited. The power of the strikes last week was not really to do with the munitions that were launched or the targets that we set, but to do with the fact that we were acting in concert with the United States and France very soon after such an abhorrent attack in Syria. Although Parliament must now hold the Government to account for the decisions that they have taken, we should be clear on our limitations. We are all relying on open-source information and the things that we have seen on social media. We do not, and cannot, have the luxury of seeing the high resolution, real-time satellite imagery that will have been at the disposal of my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, or the other surveillance assets that we have in theatre, or the signals intelligence and human intelligence that she will undoubtedly have had access to in making her analysis of what happened two weekends ago and how we should respond In my view, the Prime Minister made entirely the right call. She chose a course of action that was limited in scope and proportionate and that was expertly delivered by our world-beating Royal Air Force. She chose to degrade Assad’s chemical weapons capability, to deter its use in future and to demonstrate to Assad and his Russian backers that such behaviour would not be tolerated. She did not seek to facilitate regime change; nor did she furnish either side with a tactical advantage on the ground. In my view, she made exactly the right call, because last week was not the time for more diplomacy, more humanitarian efforts, more inspections or more pressure of other types. Let us be clear that all have their value in the medium and long term, but we know that any of those activities last week would have been stopped by Russia, and we would therefore have been unable to launch any sort of response to the chemical attacks. Let us be clear: we are responding to war crimes. We are responding to a dictator who gassed children in his own country. We had the capacity to do the right thing, and we did it. I am not a warmonger in advocating such a course of action, nor is the Prime Minister. I was sent by Her Majesty’s Government into harm’s way in Iraq, Afghanistan and Northern Ireland four times. I know what it is to be sent into those situations and to put my own life on the line. I also know that the Prime Minister has in the past sat down with the families of soldiers who have made the ultimate sacrifice in the service of our country, so she, too, knows the gravity of the decisions that she is taking and the cost that it can have for those who serve in our nation’s armed forces Having been in a situation where I have gone away at the behest of Her Majesty’s Government to do what was deemed to be in the UK’s national interest and having heard those conflicts being debated in this place, I have found it outrageous today to hear the Prime Minister’s motives questioned in the way that they have been. The idea that she took the decisions that she did to give us a boost in the local elections or to suck up to Trump is just an outrageous accusation and it cannot at all be true. My right hon. Friend carries a responsibility that the rest of us do not. We all see the pictures on TV and in the press. We all share the outrage, but only she gets the full intelligence and only she has the power to direct a response. It was brave of her not to delegate that decision to Parliament last week. She did absolutely the right thing for our country and for the people of Syria.