Military Action Overseas: Parliamentary Approval

Clive Efford Excerpts

Tuesday 17th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I will come on to the specific issue of the vote that the hon. Gentleman would have preferred to see on the action that took place last week. He says that nobody is in any doubt of the Government’s need to be able to act by themselves and make their own decision on a matter of national security. Having heard the Leader of the Opposition’s speech, I am not sure that that statement flows for every Member of the House. As I understood it, the Leader of the Opposition was saying that it should always be the case that Parliament takes a decision in advance of the Government taking action.

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

Will the Prime Minister give way?

[The Prime Minister]

I will make some progress. I want to set out for the House today four fundamental reasons why this exception is right and why it applied in the case of our military action last weekend.

First, coming to Parliament before undertaking military action could compromise the effectiveness of our operations and the safety of British servicemen and women. In the case of our actions last weekend, the Syrian regime has one of the most sophisticated air defence systems in the world today. To counter such a system, it is vital to confuse the enemy as much as possible and to conceal the timing and targets of any planned attack. For example, if they had known even the category of target we had identified—in other words, our narrow focus on chemical weapons—that would have allowed them to concentrate rather than disperse their air defences. They could also have pre-empted our attack by dispersing their chemical weapons stocks, instead of leaving them at the target sites that we had identified.

Our ability to exploit uncertainty was a critical part of the operation, and that uncertainty was also a critical part of its success. We know that the Syrian regime was not aware in advance of our detailed plans. If I had come here to the House to make the case for action in advance, I could not have concealed our plans and retained that uncertainty. I would quite understandably have faced questions about the legality of our action. The only way I could have reassured the House would have been to set out in advance—as I did yesterday after the event—the limited, targeted and proportionate nature of our proposed action. I would have faced questions about what aircraft and weapons we were planning to use, when the operation was going to take place, how long it was going to last and what we were going to do.

All of that would have provided invaluable information that would have put our armed forces at greater risk and greatly increased the likelihood of the regime being able to shoot down our missiles and get their chemical weapons away from our targets. I was not prepared to compromise their safety and the efficacy of the mission. [Interruption.] To the shadow Foreign Secretary, who from a sedentary position is saying that it is nonsense to argue about the security of our armed forces, I say that that should be at the forefront of our thinking.

[Clive Efford]

I am grateful to the Prime Minister for giving way. Nine days have elapsed since the attack on Douma. The President of the United States tweeted about it, and there was a highly publicised Cabinet meeting on the morning of 12 April. On that day, comments of the Prime Minister in that Cabinet meeting were reported in the press. No one here would have asked for secret details of the attacks. We would have asked about the long-term strategy for getting people around the table to discuss the future. She set out yesterday her objective in this attack, but is that attack likely to increase the possibility of getting those people around the table to bring a solution to the problem in Syria? No, it is not.

[The Prime Minister]

The hon. Gentleman knows full well that the strikes were undertaken because of the concerns about the use of chemical weapons. They were not about the longer term issues of the resolution of the conflict and civil war in Syria, and they were not about the issue of regime change. They were about degrading a chemical weapons capability and deterring the use of those chemical weapons.