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We’ve heard a lot about the Commons debate on the expansion of UK air strikes into Syria. There were also some very good speeches on the subject in the House of Lords, during a discussion held at the same time as the Commons’ one, plus good peers’ input elsewhere.
You can browse the Peers’ debate here both in video and text form.
Most people wouldn’t know that the large biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) just took place in Malta. The Telegraph made a quip about the ‘Dictators Club’, the Daily Mail twisted some policy announcements. The Independent had bits of coverage. The Guardian, surprisingly, stuck to rewording Government press releases.
Tim Farron also intervened on the subject of LGBT rights. Paraphrasing: he said that the Government should be raising LGBT rights as an issue using its position of strength in the Commonwealth. This statement got coverage – the point was well landed! But when you think for a moment, you realise the intervention was wrong.
LGBT rights were actually a major topic. The Commonwealth People’s Forum, the Civil Society part of CHOGM, made part of its post-Forum Declaration on LGBT rights. The Commonwealth Secretary General reprimand to leaders in his pre-CHOGM speech, and a quick check of Hansard, shows that Baroness Verma announced weeks ago she would chair a CHOGM discussion on LGBT rights.
On the night of the Syria debate I missed out on hearing Hilary Benn’s speech and instead paid a visit to my local mosque. Evening prayers had just finished and I sat in a room at the back with Dr Haytham Alhamwi, Director of Rethink Rebuild Society – “the voice of the Syrian Community of Manchester”.
Tempting as it was to discuss the rights and wrongs of the UK bombing campaign, we didn’t. It was clear that the vote would be won in Parliament. We were more interested in what happens next.
Whether you think that the UK joining the international bombing campaign in Syria is a good thing or a terrible mistake, we all want to get the best outcome. But what would that outcome look like?
We all know the situation in Syria is confusing, and I certainly didn’t leave the mosque with a perfect understanding – nothing like it. But over a coffee and a chocolate biscuit, I gained a much better grasp of what Dr Alhamwi’s organisation – and others like it who want to see a peaceful, democratic Syria – believe needs to happen.
We saw western attempts to bring about democratic states in Afganistan and Iraq falter. We saw the Arab Spring burn brightly then sputter out. But, Dr Alhamwi argues, Syria can be transformed into a democracy. It won’t happen on its own, but it can be done.
Interviews with Syrians of all faiths and sects have shown that, as with all of us, they wish to live in a pluralist society, as they used to. The want to return to the days when Christians and Druze were friends and all lived on the same street. The action we take must contribute to this aspiration
Lib Dem MPs voted to support the government based on five criteria, or principles. Any action taken must be legal, there must be a diplomatic framework, we must ensure pressure is placed on the Gulf States and Turkey to re-engage and support efforts to destabilise Daesh, there must be a post Daesh plan, and we must do more within our own borders to combat British extremist groups and ensure safety for refugees.
It has been a pretty stressful few weeks to be a Lib Dem, let’s be honest. It’s good, then, that there is something to cheer us up. Tim Farron went on Russell Howard’s Good News last night and came over really well – funny, decent and showing all signs of getting what actually matters to people.
I’m not going to spoil it for you, because you need to watch it yourself. I will just make an observation that he probably never expected to be asked, way back in the 90s when he was speaking at Conference (clip shown) to be on national television being asked if he’d ever had a sexual encounter with a pig. He repeated his answer made when that story came out – that he had never been so glad to be a vegetarian.
I wrote on Syria last week that I was “mystified by those who’ve already made their minds up with cast-iron certainty on either side”. That’s still the case despite, and probably because of, the eruption of passions leading up to and beyond Wednesday’s vote. The UK is, after all, already involved in military action against Isis in Iraq. Sure, extending those airstrikes to Syria represents an intensification and, like any bombing campaign, requires serious consideration. But that is a question not of basic morality (if it were there should have been an equally strenuous efforts to cease attacks in Iraq) but of likely effectiveness.
And that, of course, is the known unknown of this week’s debate. None of us truthfully knows what will be the consequences of extending the campaign to Syria; just as we don’t know what might have happened if MPs had voted against action. There is no possibility of a controlled experiment which allows us to pose the counterfactual. All we are left with is our own opinion: which of the options facing us is most likely to result in fewest deaths? Ultimately, it’s as utilitarian a decision as that.
Which is why I get fed up with simplistic shroud-wavers shouting “blood on your hands” at those who support intervention. Innocent people are dying every day in this conflict, and further deaths are plotted daily by Isis, so delaying further this supposed “rush to war” will also directly lead to fresh casualties. See, we can all indulge this moral blackmail arms-race — but it gets us nowhere. Decisions like these are shades-of-grey. I respect opinions on both sides of the divide on Syria, but most especially those honest enough to recognise they may be wrong.
We didn’t have much of our own to hold in Oldham, but we held it, which is not a bad thing. It compares with other by-elections in seats where we don’t have a presence. You just so need that Liberal Democrat local government record to build on.
Talking of local government, signs of a small #libdemfightback in Boleyn ward in Newham. We went from nowhere to second, albeit a fairly remote second. This is a place where they way the Labour vote, but Elaine Bagshaw has been leading some brilliant campaigning there since the General Election and mayoral by-election.
Candidate Sheree Miller did an amazing job to get second place and 9.1% of the future. The first chunk of the elephant has been devoured and there’s a motivated and energetic team ready to take on the rest.
Boleyn (Newham):
Labour HOLD. pic.twitter.com/xalRSkojMK
— Britain Elects (@britainelects) December 4, 2015
I am not going to sugar-coat it, the result in Oldham West and Royton is disappointing.
It was always going to be tough. Liberal Democrats have never won this seat and the highest we have ever finished is third.
But, nevertheless, I am hugely proud of Jane and the campaign the team has run. I cannot thank her, Claire, Nassar, Lisa and Chris enough. They went above and beyond.
Jane worked tirelessly and was a great candidate for the party whether it was in hustings on the television.
It is has been great to get back to pounding the streets and even better to see so many new activists getting involved.
The result has just been declared
Oldham West & Royton: the result. Labour HOLD. pic.twitter.com/h8gs97mHoa
— Britain Elects (@britainelects) December 4, 2015
Jane Brophy and her team ran an energetic campaign and the party owes them a huge debt of gratitude. It’s not easy facing a by-election in these circumstances and they did so with great spirit and energy.
Fresh from his success on Have I got news for you last week, Tim Farron will be on Russell Howard’s Good News on BBC2 at 10 pm tonight.
No doubt he’ll be talking about his reasons behind the Syria vote. It’ll be interesting to see how the generally young audience think of what he has to say.
In the meantime, if you are bored and looking for something to do, you might want to contact Oldham HQ and help Jane Brophy. She has been a fantastic by-election candidate and her team have put together a marvellous campaign which has helped train lots of new members. Get in touch here and I’m sure they’ll give you some knocking up to do by phone. Good numbers of people have travelled to Oldham in the last few weeks to get the feel of a by-election. I’m quite gutted that I didn’t get to go. Let’s hope that the result she gets today shows some progress.
I guess it’s good to see Labour MPs like Alan Johnson and Jess Phillips have been calling out the protesters who have been having a go at their MPs who voted for the action in Syria. Jess, particularly, knows what it feels like when a metaphorical angry mob descends on you by social media and waxes lyrical about all the horribly violent things they would like to see happen to you. Stella Creasy knows what it’s like to have an angry mob descend on your office. Can you just imagine how frightening it might be to be in there as a member of staff with all that going on?
On Friday 20 November the Liberal Democrats International Office organised a roundtable discussion on promoting women in politics at the 2015 Congress of the Alliance of Liberal and Democrats for Europe (ALDE), sharing success stories from across Europe.
International Research Officer Nick Thorne tells us more about the event here.
“The most important thing women have to do is to stir up the zeal of women themselves.” Kicking off the discussion with this inspiring quote from John Stuart Mill, Baroness Sal Brinton set the tone for what was to be a dynamic debate. Women are 51% of the population, but in the UK, they make up just 29% of MPs. Frighteningly, this is higher than the European average of 25.5% and it is not much better than the average of 23.2% in Sub-Saharan Africa.
After furious debate from all parties on both sides of the floor, the House of Commons has voted in favour of Britain expanding its current military operations to cover both Iraq and Syria. To the shock of many within the Liberal Democrat party this week, Tim Farron announced that the parliamentary party will be backing the government’s proposal, stating that:
It is in my judgement that, on balance, the five tests I set out have been met as best they can at this moment, and I will therefore be voting in favour of extending the operations to allow airstrikes on ISIL in Syria.
The implications of this for the party and for the country will be debated over the coming weeks, months, or potentially years, to come. However, this article is not about the legal, moral, political or philosophical reasons to support/condemn this decision. This article is about the nature of the decision itself.
Yesterday was a very strange day, full of mixed emotions for me. I had instinctively felt from the start of all of this that the case for extending air strikes into Syria had not been made and, although I came very close, I could never get to a place where I felt the risks to people on the ground outweighed the potential benefits. Had I been a Liberal Democrat MP, I would have voted against. I watched a huge chunk of the debate and it was, at times, difficult to see my feelings being expressed by members of other parties.
This wasn’t like the coalition years, though. On more than a handful of occasions, I sat through parliamentary debates with gritted teeth, often feeling apoplectic because I could not understand why on earth we had even entertained the idea of voting for, say, secret courts or some of the more brutal elements of welfare reform. Yesterday, though, I could totally understand and empathise with our leader’s stance, driven as it was by the best of liberal, humanitarian and internationalist motivations. He made an absolute cracker of a speech, delivered with passion and confidence. If you haven’t seen it, watch this extract:
Here is my response in the House of Commons earlier today, on the decision to take action on ISIL in Syria
Posted by Tim Farron on Wednesday, 2 December 2015
I marched against the invasion of Iraq and spoke against the illegality of that invasion. I believe that Chilcot will vindicate that view. The situation we now face is completely different.
With huge parliamentary backing we have already taken part in a lawful armed intervention against Daesh in Iraq, it is absurd to argue that we cannot lawfully do the same in Syria in accordance with UN Resolution 2249 (2015) on Daesh.
The resolution describes Daesh as a “global and unprecedented threat to international peace and security,” it says that the Security Council is determined to combat, by all means, this “unprecedented threat to international peace and security.” The resolution calls on member states to take all necessary measure on the territory under the control of Daesh in Syria and Iraq and to redouble and coordinate their efforts to prevent and suppress terrorist attacks committed by Daesh and other terrorist groups. Member states are called upon to “eradicate the safe haven they have established over significant party of Iraq and Syria.”
It appears that the Liberal Democrats may not have a full set of MPs going through the Aye lobby tonight. The BBC’s Norman Smith tweeted a while ago:
I'm told two @LibDems MPs "struggling" to support @timfarron in opposing airstrikes #syriavote
— norman smith (@BBCNormanS) December 2, 2015
Unfortunately, now that we can list our MPs in a single tweet, tracking down the two was not hard.
Even if John Barrett, former Lib Dem MP for Edinburgh West hadn’t left this comment:
Willie Rennie has written for The National, Scotland’s independence supporting newspaper about why Liberal Democrat MPs are supporting airstrikes in Syria. That view is not likely to find many supporters amongst the National’s readers.
We agree with those who say further diplomatic progress is needed. It is vital the UK Government uses all efforts to support the Vienna peace talks and any military action by the UK must be part of an international effort involving all those who have an interest in defeating Daesh.
What we have seen in recent months is the emergence of a more coherent international approach towards a diplomatic solution in Syria that involves countries such as Iran and Russia for the first time. The last time the House of Commons voted on intervention in Syria in 2013, this was not the case. There are no easy answers on any question relating to whether UK forces should take part in military action.
Here is Tim Farron’s speech in full from today’s debate on Syria from Hansard:
As has been mentioned already, the spectre of the 2003 Iraq war hangs over the debate in this House and in the whole country. In 2003, the late and very great Charles Kennedy led the opposition to the Iraq war and he did so proudly. That was a counterproductive and illegal war, and Daesh is a consequence of the foolish decision taken then. Charles Kennedy was also right, however, in calling, in the 1990s, for military intervention in Bosnia to end a genocide there. I am proud of Charles on both counts.
My instincts, like those of others, are always to be anti-war and anti-conflict. In many cases, the automatic instinct will be that we should react straightaway and go straight in. Others will say that under no terms, and not in my name, should there ever be intervention. It is right to look at this through the prism of what is humanitarian, what is internationalist, what is liberal, what is right and what will be effective. I set out five principles that I have put to the Prime Minister. I will not go into all of them here, with the time I have available, but they are available on the website and people can go and have a look at them. My very clear sense is that any reasonable person would judge them to have been broadly met.
Later today, Liberal Democrat MPs will vote to support the extension of airstrikes in Syria.
Many people will disagree with this decision, as some others, who I respect, agree. Others will be upset. Some may even be on the point of resigning their party membership.
I’m writing today to explain why I’m staying to fight for what I believe in, within the Liberal Democrats.
I resigned from the party once before, over a series of events and ultimately the decision by Nick Clegg on tuition fees. The betrayal of trust I felt, rather than the actual policy was my final straw, which caused me to leave. It’s a lonely place outside the party. You’re still a liberal, with a small l, knowing what you believe in. You acquire a different perspective, seeing all the liberals in all the parties, and wishing they would work all together more often. You quickly realise that by far the greatest number are in the Lib Dems.
Elections become difficult. You research the candidates, looking for the most liberal ones that will help your area. You vote Lib Dem, more often than not, because they still chime with your views. However, that sense of loneliness persists. You can join a pressure group, but by their nature, they focus on one particular issue. You search for that overarching view, but it’s missing.
Above all, you miss the real Lib Dems. People who respect your views when you disagree with them. People who want to create real change in our society, like changing our voting system. On that basis, I chose to rejoin. Warning – be careful if Liz Lynne is a social event if you’ve lapsed – she’s very persuasive.
If you kill people to stop them killing each other you haven’t curbed the sum total of killings, you’ve merely become one of the killers.
If I thought for a minute that we’d lesson the number of deaths as a result of firing Brimstone missiles into cities like Raqqa I might be persuaded, but the Air Wars Project, which is monitoring international airstrikes on Isis, estimates that there have been about 700 civilian deaths as a result – more than five times the number of people killed in Paris.
Civilians in this desperate part of the world will still be getting raped and tortured. Gay men will still be thrown off rooftops and to add insult to injury now their children will be getting blown limb from limb by British bombs.
We heard from Nick Clegg on Sky News last night and Tim Farron has written and talked about why he’s decided to support Syrian airstrkes.
Other MPs have been explaining their thinking. As we find them, we’ll put them up on this post.It’s going to be a bit of a marathon read, but worth having all the rationale in one place.
You will have seen it reported in the press and media this morning that Liberal Democrat MPs will support the motion in the House of Commons today to extend to areas of Syria our current military involvement against ISIL/Da’esh in Iraq. I want to explain why, after lengthy discussion and deliberation, we have reached this decision and why I will support it.
Decisions of this sort are never easy and this has been the most difficult one that I have ever known. I certainly do not share David Cameron’s reported view that those who oppose intervention are “terrorist sympathisers”. This is an issue on which we have all had to come to our own conclusions and for many of us it has been an enormously difficult process. I know no one, inside parliament or not, who has approached this from anything other than a position of good faith and I respect completely those who have reached a different conclusion from mine.
By comparison the decision to oppose war in Iraq was simple by comparison – it was clearly illegal and it was difficult to identify what the British interest in intervention was.
Recognising that some of the problems we are dealing with today have their roots in that disastrous misadventure, we should be quite clear about why this is a different conflict with different issues.
Tim Farron has made a video in which he explains how seeing the plight of the refugees this Summer has moved him to back the action against Daesh.
I’ve made a short video, explaining the rationale behind my decision to back the Prime Minister’s action on Syria, as part of a wider package of measures to bring stability and an end to the long running civil war in the country.
Posted by Tim Farron on Wednesday, 2 December 2015
Last week, I read a blog post by legal expert Andrew Tickell which horrified me. That post, and the judgment of the Appeal Court to which it refers had me feeling sick and shaking, so be aware that it contains some horrible details of rape of adults and children and the sexual abuse of a child before you click on it. The judgment was for an appeal by the prosecution in a case of rape and sexual abuse which ultimately had the rapist’s prison sentence raised from five to eight years.
The judgment drew attention to remarks made by the trial judge which belittled the rape and suggesting that the victims had acquiesced to or condoned the rapes and that they were minor.
Scottish Liberal Democrat Justice spokesperson Alison McInnes has taken this up with one of Scotland’s most senior judges as Scottish Legal News reports:
For me, the arguments for and against air strikes against Daesh in Syria are finely balanced, and there is no surprise that reasonable people have come to different views. I am stunned that with the SNP against, Labour split down the middle, and (the BBC predicts) 15 Conservative rebels, we might be the most hawkish party.
I am very glad that Erbil was saved in August 2014 with help from US air strikes when Daesh were rampaging across northern Iraq. Had the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, population 1.5 million, fallen, the death toll and consequences for the region would have been horrific.
Go to war or don’t go to war: it amounts to the same thing. Intervene, and the deaths will be collateral. Don’t intervene, and the deaths might have been preventable. So long as ISIS and Assad are intent on having a war civilians are going to die.
Conventional warfare normally looks like this: you cost the enemy so much that they have to come to the table, and accept terms they would otherwise reject because the threat of further losses is too great to risk.
This strategy is not viable.
The Caliphate seeks to create a state under a radical, neo-traditionalist interpretation of Islamic scripture without the corrupting influence of ‘modern’ philosophy. It does not matter if this influence is from the West or Muslim scholars. This state will then provoke the ‘armies of Rome’ into a battle at Dabiq, which is supposed to precede the apocalypse.
Anybody who opposes, disobeys, or resents the law of the self-appointed Caliphate is a potential victim. Gays, Christians, women, Jews, free thinkers, and any Muslims who doesn’t accept the Caliph as their sovereign, can all legally be killed under their law. There is no room for negotiation.
This has just come through from Tim Farron:
The decision every politician dreads is whether or not to send brave servicemen and women into military action in defence of our country.
When the Government asked MPs to support extending airstrikes into Syria in 2013 to target Assad, I refused to provide that support. I was not convinced at that time our intervention was properly effective, nor that it would be backed by a diplomatic effort to establish a lasting peace or prevent more suffering than it caused.
In response to that deep-rooted scepticism last time, I wrote to the Prime Minister last week together with Nick Clegg, Paddy Ashdown, Ming Campbell, Kirsty Williams and Willie Rennie setting out five principles against which the Liberal Democrats believe the case for extension of military action against ISIL in Syria should be based.
It is my judgement that, on balance, the five tests I set out have been met as best they can. I will therefore be asking my parliamentary colleagues to join me in the lobby to support this motion.
I have written in more length about how I have reached my decision. I hope you will take the time to read it here (note: and copied at the end of this post).
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Comments: Don’t write something that would lead the Queen to set her Corgis on you – from our archive
Liberal Democrat Voice has a fantastic archive of posts going back to our establishment in 2006. Here’s an interesting article from our Founding Editor, which was published in November 2006. You can read the post in its original form here:
As happens on all blogs, there’s been a collective bout of grumpiness in the past few days in the comments.
I’ve just gone through the blog and deleted the variously abusive, rude, and fundamentally pointless messages.