Alex Chalk
Main Page: Alex Chalk (Conservative - Cheltenham)Department Debates - View all Alex Chalk's debates with the Cabinet Office
(6 years ago)
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Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)
Committing British forces is a grave responsibility; no right-thinking Prime Minister takes any pleasure in doing so, but no responsible Prime Minister should shrink from taking action where basic humanity and the national interest demand that.
On basic humanity, I fear we might as a world collectively have forgotten the peculiar horror of chemical weapons. They are particularly appalling, and my right hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois) did us a service by invoking the poetry of 100 years ago. No one who heard it can fail to have been struck by some of what he quoted, and I remember as a child being appalled by the description of “white eyes writhing” in the face of a British soldier who had been affected and blood coming “gargling” from “froth-corrupted lungs”. There can be no doubt that President Assad would, if left unchecked, use this means as an easy, cheap and ruthless weapon to mop up any lingering resistance, so this must never be normalised.
The second point is that the credibility of the rules-based order is at stake. Over 190 nations are signatories to the chemical weapons convention, including Russia and Syria. To turn a blind eye is in effect to give a green light.
It is important that the rules-based order is not purely focused on chemical weapons; there are so many other aspects to this. The 1951 refugee convention sets out the rights and responsibilities of nations to grant asylum, and there is the Paris climate accord and the Geneva conventions with the restrictions on the use of mines and cluster munitions. If one pillar of the rules-based order is corroded, the whole structure is weakened, and rogue nations could become a rogue world.
It is also important to make clear the limits of this action that are in place. The UK is not in the business of regime-change. We know from history that large-scale intervention of that nature is very difficult and the middle east presents boundless opportunities to make a bad situation worse. That is not what this was about; it was targeted, limited and proportionate, and focused on protecting civilians and upholding international law. It was manifestly the right thing to do.