ISIL in Syria

Debate between Angus Brendan MacNeil and Dominic Grieve

Wednesday 2nd December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)]

In essence, this debate boils down to UK RAF jets going into Syria, into a war that is already in existence—a multi-cornered and multifaceted war. It is not the great squadrons imagined in the press, or in the minds of the public as a result of what has been put into their minds by the press. It is, as we have heard, eight jets, and as the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee told me, probably only two would be active at any one time on any day in Syria.

For context—I am grateful to the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) for this—there have been 57,000 sorties in Syria, in 8,000 of which bombs have been dropped, in 17 months. That is 113 sorties a day, with 16 of them dropping bombs. We will deflect from what we are doing in Iraq, where 10% of sorties are by the UK. I asked the Prime Minister last week whether bombing Syria would mean bombing ISIL less in Iraq. He has made the choice to bomb ISIL in Iraq. He could not answer my question, though he should have been able to. He then claimed that he would have 75,000 Free Syrian Army troops. I have to tell the House that the Americans tried to raise a force of moderates and mobilise them, but it failed. David Wearing, who lectures on middle east politics in the University of London, explained on CNN:

“A US initiative to stand up even a 15,000 strong ‘moderate’ force to confront ISIS recently collapsed in failure, having put less than a half a dozen troops onto the battlefield.”

[Mr Grieve]

The one issue that does not seem to feature in the hon. Gentleman’s discourse, or that of any members of his party, is what would have happened if there had been no intervention in Iraq at all. Surely the consequences might well have been that Daesh spread very quickly and caused a generalised conflict. Ignoring that point seems remarkably selective on the part of those who argue that we should not take further steps now. I would be grateful if the hon. Gentleman cared to address that point.

[Mr MacNeil]

The right hon. and learned Gentleman might like to know something about the interventions in Iraq. Martin Chulov, an Australian who works for The Guardian, and who just got an award from the Foreign Press Association, noted, after speaking to ISIS commanders, that they were incubated in the American camps in Iraq. That is what intervention has done. The right hon. and learned Gentleman knows full well that that is the result of intervention.

Only two months ago, one of the central views of the United States and its allied was that Russian involvement in Syria would only fuel more radicalism and extremism. Mehdi Hasan in The Guardian noted that the United States Defence Secretary, Ashton Carter, had warned of the “consequences for Russia itself”, which would become “rightly fearful” of terrorism. A point that is almost central to the public debate and discourse here in the United Kingdom in general, and in the House in particular, is that involvement in disastrous wars increases rather than decreases the threats to us in the west. I am also grateful to Mehdi Hasan for reporting the words of retired US general Mike Flynn, who used to run the US Defence Intelligence Agency, and who said

“the more bombs we drop, that just…fuels the conflict”.

That is a very hard truth for some to hear, but it is indeed the truth.

The “war on terror” started by George W. Bush was straight from the “must do something” school of thought, a school of thought that is all too prevalent in the House today. It turned a few hundred terrorists in the Hindu Kush into a force of 100,000, almost globally—they were certainly active in 20 countries—and employed the classic recruiting tactics of the unjust war in Iraq, based on lies. Twelve years ago, the “must do something” rhetoric in the UK involved talk of “appeasement” and attempts were made to conjure up images of Neville Chamberlain, but all the while the unseen appeasement was that of George Bush by the poodle that we had as the UK leader, Tony Blair.

As the writer Jürgen Todenhöfer said in a recent article in The Guardian,

“War is a boomerang, and it will come to hit us back in the form of terrorism.”

We must be honest with the people about that very real possibility. The Daily Telegraph said as much recently when reporting the crash of the Russian Metrojet aircraft in Egypt, which it described as a direct consequence of Russia’s involvement in Syria. It went further, suggesting that Putin might have incited that attack on the Russians. We have to be very sure that we see in our own eyes what we see in the eyes of others.

What do we have in Syria? We have 10 countries bombing, we have Kurds fighting, and we have the Free Syrian Army, which, as we were told earlier by the Chairman of the Defence Committee, is a ragbag of 58 separate factions. We have Assad, and we have Daesh/ISIL. Meanwhile, significantly, Russia bombs our allies but it seems that we will not, or cannot, bomb theirs. We have Turkey bombing a Russian plane, and bombing the Kurds as well. When the Turks bombed the Russian plane, they were taunted by the Greeks; both are members of NATO. Throw in America, France, the United Kingdom and the regional powers, and we have the powder keg of 1914, of which we seem blissfully unaware. All in all, we have a debate about two jets that has led us into something that we should not be going into.

As will be clear to the House, I am against this action for many reasons, but I am also against the way in which the Government are handling the issue. They should have provided more time. They should not have bumped the House into this yesterday, and they know that full well. The United Kingdom is caught between its time of empire and Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex. For that reason, we are being urged that something must be done, even if it is the wrong thing.

Scotland Bill

Debate between Angus Brendan MacNeil and Dominic Grieve

Monday 6th July 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Grieve]

I had not intended to speak in the debate, but the rather pejorative comments of the hon. Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey) in which he described my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg) as representing Downton Abbey prompted me to do so. My hon. Friend might at times appear to have a rather archaic way of approaching some of these issues, but in practice his analysis of the devolution of the Crown Estate that is proposed in the Bill is correct.

The Crown Estate is indivisible, because it is the Crown Estate of the United Kingdom. There is absolutely no reason why the revenue from it should not be allocated in different ways, including to the Scottish Government—I have no difficulty whatever with that proposal—but an issue arises in relation to the duty of this House to fulfil what is both a statutory and, in a sense, a fiduciary duty to ensure that the estate is properly managed and to hold to account the Ministers and, ultimately, the Commissioners who are responsible for that. The point has been made that the provisions in the Bill do not allow for the estate’s alienation, but that does not mean that it could not be so mishandled in the course of its management that its value did not diminish substantially. I assume that, as a result of the Bill and of Sewel motions, this House would no longer be in a position to scrutinise how that management was taking place if that were to happen.

The Crown is a reserved matter, and the running of the Crown Estate is intimately concerned with the affairs of the Crown, so this proposal is a constitutional novelty that my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset was quite right to highlight. I hope that the Secretary of State will tell us more about the issues relating to alienation, about the management of the Crown Estate and about the extent to which this House—which is ultimately supposed to maintain the dignity of the Crown—will have a role hereafter in respect of those parts of the Crown Estate that are being managed elsewhere.

[Mr MacNeil]

The right hon. and learned Gentleman referred to the proposal as a “novelty”. He might have missed the earlier intervention by my right hon. Friend the Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond), who said that the administration of the Crown was given to the Irish Free State in 1923. What view does he take of that novel innovation?

[Mr Grieve]

I disagree with the right hon. Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond), because the creation of the Irish Free State in 1923 involved the creation of a separate sovereign state. In the light of last year’s referendum result, that is not what we are doing here. We are trying to create a quasi-federal state that will recommend itself to the citizens of all parts of the United Kingdom while preserving this basic unity. One of the bases of that unity is the Crown, and the Crown Estate is intimately linked to the Crown. That is why matters relating to the Crown have always been reserved here. To that extent, the proposed change should not pass without comment, and I will be interested to hear from the Secretary of State how the safeguards will be introduced.

There are other oddities relating to the way in which the clause is drafted. Indeed, I have spent quite a lot of time trying to fathom out why it has been drafted in this way. I think it is understood that parts of the Crown Estate could end up not being devolved, because certain aspects of partnership operations would not allow for that to happen. I would be grateful for the Secretary of State’s comment on the fact that the option appears to have been preserved for the creation of a completely new and separate Crown Estate in Scotland, based on purchases made in Scotland by the Crown Estate Commissioners of the United Kingdom, who are still based in London. Without that option, the wording of some of the provisions in clause 31—particularly of proposed new subsection 90B(5)—would otherwise be incomprehensible. I would be interested to hear what the Secretary of State has to say about that. I must assume that it has been done deliberately in order to allow for the possibility of the Crown Estate’s Commissioners of the United Kingdom to continue to make investments north of the border if they so wish. There is nothing wrong with that, but it raises further questions.

Perhaps I am approaching this from too much of a lawyer’s point of view, but the nature of this debate does not seem to lend itself to simplicity. The lack of simplicity has the potential to undermine the aim that I have, as a Unionist, to find a long-term or permanent settlement—albeit not the one under which I lived 20 years ago—that will last for the United Kingdom and for all its parts. I hope that the Secretary of State will forgive me for saying that this aspect of the legislation highlights an underlying concern that we are gently salami-slicing our constitution.

The right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) raised the question of changing the Standing Orders of this House by means of only one afternoon’s debate. I have considerable sympathy with that point, and I hope that I will be in a position to add to it tomorrow. There might be good reasons why that is the only way we can proceed, but I believe that we shall have insufficient time in which to debate the matter properly.

For all those reasons, I hope that my right hon. Friend will provide the answers to all my specific questions on the details of the Bill in due course. It strikes me that the end product could be two Crown Estates north of the border, one of which has been devolved—although it is unclear how this Parliament would retain its fiduciary duty to ensure the estate’s good management—and another completely new one that could be created some time in the future.

[Mr MacNeil]

The right hon. and learned Gentleman talks about the possibility of two Crown Estates, but there could be more, such is the potential for innovation in Scotland. The move to give control of the Crown Estate to Edinburgh is not the end of the story. We could see separate Crown Estates for the island of Eriskay, the islands of South Uist and North Uist and the island of Benbecula, for example. Things could change quite a lot. He is very much mistaken to suggest that the Crown Estate is the glue that holds the United Kingdom together. We are looking at what will work practically and for the benefit of the people who live in island and coastal communities.

[Mr Grieve]

I certainly do not think that the Crown Estate is the glue that holds the United Kingdom together. I can reassure the hon. Gentleman on that. There are all sorts of other things that provide that glue.

I said that I was perhaps looking at this too much from a lawyer’s point of view, but I like to look at structures that have some coherence. This particular structure is showing signs of not being coherent. One of the problems with these debates in which we try to reach a sensible and lasting constitutional settlement is that although I would love to accept the arguments put forward by the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr MacNeil), I am conscious of the fact that he does not really want a solution to the problem. Just as the Irish question is said to have changed every time Mr Gladstone asked it, so the hon. Gentleman changes the question each time an answer comes up. He has a desire for certain structures, and although I will do my best at all times to deliver what the Scottish people want, I do not always find it easy to accept the songs that he sings, which are generally designed to lure the Union of the United Kingdom on to the rocks.