Parliamentary sketch: MPs debate airstrikes in Syria

With the public divided over airstrikes in Syria, the House of Commons debate on the subject was a time for cool heads.

Unfortunately things got off to an inauspicious start, with reports last night alleging that David Cameron had urged Tory MPs not to “walk through the lobbies with Jeremy Corbyn and a bunch of terrorist sympathisers”.

The remarks attracted criticism, presumably because they sounded like something that Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney would have come out with at the height of the War on Terror.

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To be fair though, Cameron has previously claimed Corbyn is “a threat to our national security”, which would actually suggest an improvement. Better a sympathiser than a direct threat, after all.

But Cameron took a slightly different line today, saying: “I respect people who come to a different view. I respect people who disagree”.

Still, Labour were furious, and they wanted an apology. Jeremy Corbyn had pushed for a two day debate, because of the complexity of the issue involved and its effect on the UK’s national security.

But their efforts were in vain and, presented with just one day to discuss air strikes, they then seemed to spend the entire start of the debate demanding an apology from the Prime Minister.

It went on and on. Jeremy Corbyn asked for an apology. Caroline Flint asked for an apology. Margaret Hodge asked for an apology. Alex Salmond asked for an apology. Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh asked for an apology. Angus Robertson asked for an apology.

Between them, opposition parties demanded an apology at least 14 times. Eventually it became clear: we should only launch airstrikes on one of the most volatile parts of the Middle East if David Cameron apologises for a petty insult on Jeremy Corbyn. Get the apology and, somehow, we would have all the facts behind this complicated issue.

If that wasn’t the case there would be no reason, beyond party politics, for them to keep asking – and surely this was too important for party politics?

Conservatives meanwhile used their interventions in a debate on Syria to ask why the House was not debating Syria, rather than demanding apologies for petty name calling. It was petty of Labour and SNP MPs to become obsessed with petty name calling, they suggested.

Then, apparently keen to keep the debate focused on Syria, they asked Corbyn whether he supported bombing Iraq.

And Corbyn had little chance to present his views. Tory MPs, fresh from criticising the pettiness of demands for an apology, heckled him constantly.

“The logic of an extended air campaign is in fact mission creep and western boots on the ground, whatever the Prime Minister may say now about keeping British combat troops out of the way, are a real possibility,” he tried to say.

But heckles grew. The speaker intervened. Corbyn stood up and they just heckled him again.

The Prime Minister defended his position, though he did admit that some of the 70,000 Syrian fighters he had claimed would help the UK were not ‘ideal allies’.

How un-ideal they are as allies was not specified. Are they un-ideal in the way Bashar al-Assad – a former enemy of the UK – is un-ideal as an ally?

Are they un-ideal in the way that training and arming Osama Bin-Laden before 9/11 was un-ideal? Or in the way that releasing the leader of ISIS, Bakr al-Bagdadhi, from jail, as the US allegedly did in 2004, was un-ideal?

The key question, it seemed, was whether these fighters are un-ideal in a way that would cause further problems after the UK arms them then leaves.

Iraq clearly still echoed through the debate. As Julian Lewis put it, “Instead of having dodgy dossiers, we now have bogus battalions of moderate fighters”.

SNP leader in Westminster Angus Robertson demanded more information on these fighters.

Richard Benyon said Robertson’s was a “nitpicking, quibbling point”. He promised the House that the fighters named, “Are not on Assad’s side, and not on ISIS’s side”.

But he didn’t say they were on our side.