Debate on the Address — House of Commons, 2015-05-27
Topic: International Affairs
Geoffrey Robert Clifton-Brown (Conservative, Centre-right): I have very little time left and an awful lot to get through I want to move on to Iraq, and talk about ISIS. ISIS is one of the most vile terrorist organisations humanity has ever seen, yet, again, we do not have a concerted strategy to deal with it. We started with the Cyprus talks involving the Americans, the Germans, the French, ourselves, and the Russians. Wrongly, in my view, we did not include the Iranians, but that is another point. Unless we have a concerted strategy to deal with ISIS, it will undoubtedly take over more parts of the world than just Iraq. What worries me most about Iraq is that Iran, with its Shi’a militias, is doing our bidding against ISIS. If we are not careful we will come to a point where Iran—with its emerging nuclear ambitions, despite the agreement with the Americans—will simply take over Iraq. When I close my speech with the figures on oil production, the House will see how dangerous that is On Syria, I did a social action project in Gaziantep in south-east Turkey and was able to meet many Syrians in one of the refugee towns. They all—to a man, woman and child—told me they wanted to go back to a country that was at peace with itself. They wanted the international community to intervene and sort out the problems and restore their country to what it had been. It appears to me that the world does not have a concerted policy on Syria. It looks increasingly unlikely that the Free Syrian Army will be able to defeat the President’s regime, and it looks ever more likely that ISIS will play an ever bigger part—again, ISIS is only likely to be defeated by Iran in some form or another, probably backed by the Russians. The Syrian situation is extremely dangerous, and it is extremely bad for the poor people of Syria; 300,000 people have been killed in Syria, and over 2 million people have been displaced. What a human tragedy Finally, I want to talk about the Maghreb and the Sahel—north Africa. We are dealing with an unprecedented situation of migrants trying to leave Africa, mostly via Libya—the migrants are mostly not Libyans, but come from other countries—and to cross the Mediterranean to come to Europe. Ultimately this is unsustainable. However Europe decides to deal with the problem, we have to try to keep these people in their own countries, and in doing so we have to redirect our foreign aid. I was delighted to be able to argue during the election that we had kept to our 0.7% of GNI pledge, as that is absolutely right, and I am delighted to be saying this with the Minister of State, Department for International Development, my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest West (Mr Swayne), on the Front Bench. We need to redirect that aid now to north Africa, to try and stabilise some of those countries: give them the help they need; stabilise their Governments and civil service; stabilise, and make sure we have, the infrastructure so that companies want to go into those countries and invest and provide jobs, so that the people are content to remain in those countries and do not have a desperate desire to leave them and come to better climes. These are very important matters that my right hon. Friend needs to deal with The trouble with the world today is that where we have very weak Governments, the forces of evil tend to move in. We are seeing it in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we are certainly seeing it in some of the north African countries, in Libya, in Chad and in the Central African Republic. We are seeing it in those very weakly governed countries. We are seeing it in Nigeria, too, for goodness’ sake, with the activities of Boko Haram. I believe our aid must go towards trying to strengthen those countries, so that we can defeat and deter some of the dreadful human rights abuses I promised the House that I would give the world oil production figures: Iraq has 12% of the world’s oil reserves and Iran has 13%. If we allow Iran to take over Iraq, who would be happy with an emerging superpower, and a nuclear superpower at that, controlling a quarter—that is more than Saudi Arabia and more than Venezuela—of all the world’s oil reserves? I think that could lead to a very big danger for the world.