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Blair switches on Syria: We need to do a deal with Assad and accept he’ll remain president

23/04/2014, 10:47:36 AM

by Atul Hatwal

In a wide-ranging speech on the middle east, Tony Blair today made a significant intervention to recast the British debate on Syria.

Until now, the assumption has been that President Assad would have to go as part of any peace deal. The dividing lines of the conflict seemed to be clear: Assad was the oppressor, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of his own people, while the opposition represented Syria’s best hope for a more democratic and enlightened future.

The idea of President Assad remaining in power was unthinkable.

But as the tide of the conflict has turned in Assad’s favour, and Islamist factions in the opposition have gained prominence, Blair’s speech signals a fundamental reappraisal of the negotiating position.

At the time of the parliamentary vote on military action in Syria, within Labour it was the Blairite wing of the party which was most in favour of punitive measures against President Assad. There remains an abiding sense of grievance among many in the party at the manner in which Ed Miliband first backed intervention, and then opposed it.

Now, however as the facts on the ground have changed, so has the solution – at least in Tony Blair’s view. In the Bloomberg speech he states,

“But the truth is that there are so many fissures and problems around elements within the Opposition that people are rightly wary now of any solution that is an outright victory for either side. Repugnant though it may seem, the only way forward is to conclude the best agreement possible even if it means in the interim President Assad stays for a period. Should even this not be acceptable to him, we should consider active measures to help the Opposition and force him to the negotiating table, including no fly zones whilst making it clear that the extremist groups should receive no support from any of the surrounding nations.”

Contrast this with his view in June last year,

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Are Nick Clegg’s pants indeed on fire?

03/04/2014, 06:00:22 PM

In their television ding-dong last night, Nigel Farage accused Nick Clegg of “wilfully lying” about Europe when the Lib Dem Leader claimed just seven per cent of UK laws are in fact made in Brussels.

But he wasn’t the only one accusing Clegg of being economical with the facts yesterday.

He is also in hot water after berating his local council in Sheffield for not being willing to take in its share of Syrian refugees.

Clegg accused council chiefs of “tarnishing” the city’s reputation as a “city of sanctuary” after refusing to be part of the Home Office’s Vulnerable Persons Relocation (VPR) programme.

In a piece of chest-puffing hyperbole, he claimed the Labour Leader of Sheffield City Council, Julie Dore, had “decided to shut the door on some of the most vulnerable people in the world”.

Dore hit back, saying it was “outrageous” of Clegg to claim the council had refused to take in Syrian refugees and accused him of “not telling the truth”.

She in fact wrote to ministers last month “making it clear” the council would do so, providing the government would guarantee funding for longer than 12 months.

The refugees are expected to need to stay for up to five years, with many having complex health and social care needs.

Hull and Manchester are also said to have asked the government for further funding guarantees before taking any refugees.

Unfortunately, Clegg has form. Last year exasperated council chiefs had to formally write to him to ask him to stop misrepresenting the council’s budget, claiming the council was spending £2 million renovating council meeting rooms.

In fact, the council was spending £600,000 on essential maintenance to the Grade II listed Town Hall and making improvements to increase the number of income-generating civil ceremonies.

In accusing Farage of being an isolationist last night, Clegg mocked his Billy-No-Mates approach.

Still, better than being Billy Liar?

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Labour has a foreign policy vacuum. It needs to be filled.

10/01/2014, 12:39:13 PM

by Nathan Jones

Ed Miliband and shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander have given little away of their plan for Britain on the international stage. While it is not traditionally at the centre of election debate, foreign policy holds a special significance for Labour today because, despite Ed Miliband’s professed belief that it was ‘wrong to take Britain to war’ in 2003, public trust in Labour remains inextricably bound to Iraq. It is perhaps for this reason that Mr. Miliband has chosen to remain largely silent on what Labour’s foreign policy priorities would be in 2015.

Despite the many achievements of the last Labour government, Iraq still defines its legacy in many ways. Leaving the debate over legitimacy aside for now, it is clear that a lack of transparency on the road to war generated a huge deficit of trust. Blair’s popularity waned in the ensuing scandal, and was further eroded by a series of gradual, incremental revelations and inquiries which undermined New Labour’s new-found legitimacy.

Therefore it was not Sure Start, the minimum wage or a New Deal for Young People that became the party’s new epithet, but Iraq. If Labour is to win in 2015, a clear statement of international intent would go a long way to restoring public trust in a Miliband government’s ability to take the country forward.

Although policy remains patchy, there are some clues as to what Labour’s international intentions after 2015 will be. The vote on Syria stands out, when Labour forced an almost unprecedented change in government foreign policy from opposition. The decision to oppose what seemed like the inevitable move to intervention drew plaudits from the party’s leftist, anti-war support, but led others to question whether political concerns had taken precedence over the fate of the Syrian people.

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Labour’s 2013 report card: relying on the kindness of strangers is not enough

08/01/2014, 07:00:18 AM

by Rob Marchant

Recently there seems to have been an odd acceptance by some right-wing commentators that Britain is to “sleepwalk to a Labour win”, as the Telegraph’s Matthew D’Ancona put it. It may be a genuine belief, rather than a way of giving Cameron a sly wake-up call. But if only that outcome were so sure from Labour’s current position.

On the contrary, when we look back on the third year of the Miliband project, we might struggle to see it as the success-filled year of the winning team.

For a start, any midterm year which an opposition ends with both a party and a leader less popular than at its start – as pollster Anthony Wells has observed – can hardly be declared an unqualified success.

This was a year in which a party going on to win a general election needed to be increasing its lead in both those categories, or at least holding them firm. If the near-halving of Labour’s poll lead had been down to some kind of surge for the Tories, it could have been acceptable. But the fact that both Labour and their leader are polling worse is discouraging news.

Pollster Deborah Mattinson’s noting that no party has ever gone on to win a majority from here is important, if not conclusive. And the answer is not, self-evidently, to simply lower our expectations and carry on as before, hoping to grasp at a deal with the Lib Dems, should such a thing one day be on the table.

When you are in a hole, stop digging, seems more appropriate. Or, put more simply, you do not tend to go down in the polls because the public thinks you are doing the right thing.

A second point would be the Syria vote: although Miliband managed to klutz it up fairly comprehensively, it is also fair to say that Cameron foolishly underestimated the lack of support in his own party. As a result, neither is cutting much of a figure of world statesman, as the bodies pile up in Syria at a higher rate than ever. “We stopped the rush to war” has a rather hollow ring to it, now it looks like the flimsiness of Western resolve means the murderer of thousands of children will stay in power after all.

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Blunkett is right: one out of three ain’t good

18/09/2013, 08:47:03 AM

by Rob Marchant

It cannot have been the most welcome of interventions by a party elder, coming on the eve of TUC conference and a tricky moment for Miliband in his critical party reform agenda. Even less so to have chosen as his medium Labour’s favourite bête noire newspaper.

But although some things have moved on in the intervening ten days, David Blunkett’s recent Daily Mail piece certainly succeeded in one thing: he correctly identified the three areas where Labour has shown itself wanting, and in which its overall lack of success this year has surely not helped Miliband’s personal poll ratings, now standing at an historic low.

And they are these: its struggle with union leaders – as opposed to their members, who Uncut demonstrated last week think differently – over party reform; its recent foreign policy disaster over Syria; and its constant problem since the last election, the economy.

On party reform, Miliband certainly seems doing the right thing. It is a difficult path, but he stood his ground last week, we can only hope that that continues next week at party conference. He deserves the party’s praise and support, as even Times columnist and former Tory MP Matthew Parris acknowledged this weekend.

The problem he has is the other two areas.

First, it looks to be too late to recoup the losses on Labour’s Syria stance.

It is ironic that he same subject that gave rise to Obama’s now-legendary “red lines” also gave rise to the crossing of some red lines within our own party. There are some who will never forgive Miliband, although, to be fair, they are surely in the minority.

Whether you take is as an unintentional fumble or a cynical way to score party political points at a time when statesmanship was called for, it has been a watershed; one which has left Miliband consolidated in some sections of his party, yet diminished in the minds of opinion-formers who have spent the last three years treating him with polite respect, if not a warm embrace. The fickle country, despite not being keen on war, has surely yet to decide what it thinks about Labour’s handling of Syria, but sure-footed it has not been.

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The Russians are stalling on Syria, America must be ready to act

12/09/2013, 01:44:26 PM

by Dan McCurry

Sarin is invisible, odourless and deadly in tiny amounts. If it’s in your surroundings, you’ll soon know; typical symptoms include soiling yourself, and choking to death as your throat muscles contract.

The international convention to ban these chemicals came about following the killing of 5,000 Kurds in Iraq. Apart from a bizarre terrorist incident on the Tokyo subway, sarin hasn’t been used since, so the ban had been effective right up until Syria.

The fact that sarin has now been used, without consequence (so far), must have put ideas into the minds of other dictators. After all, it’s somewhat more effective than CS gas. This stuff can stop a riot in a minute and a revolution in a day. For dictators, possession of sarin ensures security of tenure is guaranteed.

No one disputes that this chemical was created by Assad’s regime.

We’ve now got Putin striding the global stage, negotiating to decommission the weapons. Prior to the negotiations Assad had lied for years claiming that he had no such weapons. Immediately prior to the negotiation Putin was claiming that the rebels had used the sarin on themselves.

Let’s be clear about the veracity of that previous claim. Putin now admits that Assad built the stock pile. Sarin doesn’t have any other use on Earth. It is a weapon. There is no dual purpose. It doesn’t come about by accident. It only exists in order to kill people. If Assad built this arsenal he must have been willing to use it.

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Syria: the hangover

04/09/2013, 12:48:08 PM

by Rob Marchant

If Westminster is often a bubble, on frenzied days like last Thursday it becomes even more so. Everyone is waiting for the latest news. What can easily happen, and what seems to have, is for Parliament to forget about the world outside entirely until it is over.

As the Telegraph reports, some Labour MPs, as they left the parliamentary lobby giddy with unexpected victory, were rudely jolted back to reality by pictures of Syrian victims of incendiary bombs, as a reminder of what had just collectively been achieved by voting down intervention, without necessarily meaning to. The hangover had begun.

It is particularly easy to miss the impact of such things in the wider party, the decent people who organise raffles and knock on doors. Over the weekend, I was in touch with two centre-left colleagues (and no, neither was Dan Hodges), one of whom was seriously considering leaving a party of which he had not only been a member for a generation, but had worked for during more than a decade.

The other would have resigned, but it was Saturday and she couldn’t get through to the membership department. Another typical story from one young member leaving is blogged here.

The consequence of Thursday, it seems, is now a leakage of the very centrist common sense the party so badly needs. Perhaps there would have been even more from the left, should Miliband have opted for intervention. We will never know.

When you make a tough decision on a touchstone issue, there is always the risk that you will lose people to the left or right. That’s politics. Miliband’s apparent instinct is firstly to stake out a position more or less in the political middle of his party and tack slightly from it this way and that, to try and keep the party together. We might argue that perhaps it would be better to stand still, but ok.

But it seems that – unless something happens which truly threatens the party and its leadership, like the battle with Unite – in that last moment when he is finally forced to jump one way or the other, one cannot help but feel the instinct is always to rabbit-run to the left.

And that in itself might be understandable to many, were it not for the way that the jump was made in this case. A last-minute change of mind, after Cameron’s meek acceptance of all Labour’s conditions, led to a breakdown of trust which seems to have torpedoed the idea of intervention altogether, quite probably permanently.

We might be on one side of this debate or the other, but what we cannot pretend is that something minor has just happened. That it is an inflection point in Miliband’s leadership, and in British politics, is undeniable (it is, after all, the first time a vote has been lost on a matter of national defence in over two centuries).

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There’s more to helping Syria than air strikes

02/09/2013, 12:37:09 PM

by Lee Butcher

Parliament has spoken. Cameron’s rushed attempt to convince the nation of the need for intervention in Syria has failed. The reason and culprits will be debated for a long time to come yet. Whether intended or not a signal has been sent out to our international partners that if they want our support they are going to have to provide compelling reasons for doing so; in failing to do so Barack Obama and David Cameron have damaged their cause, for that they only have themselves to blame.

While I will not dwell on the possible reasons for the failure of that vote, the issue of chemical weapons is worth briefly addressing if for no other reason but to question the consensus that something must be done because of their use. The talk of the near century old norm to stop their use rests on rather dubious historical ground. A recent and notable example is Britain’s support for Saddam Hussein during his war with Iran between 1980 and 1988, a period which saw him deploy large scale chemical attacks against the Iranians and against civilians in Halabja.

As cynical as that policy was there is little evidence that it was followed by a sudden outburst of chemical weapons use by other powers because we failed to oppose him. On the moral grounds of action, it is worth questioning a morality which regards being killed by a bullet or a bomb (a cause of death responsible for over 100,000 people) as being better than being gassed. This is something which the supporters of this action will have to address themselves. As far as helping potential chemical victims, an alternative suggestion worth considering can be seen in this opinion piece from the New Scientist magazine.

The Labour party ought to now consider where next for engagement with the Syrian crisis and what Plan B from the government we can support. In seeking a limited response to the use of chemical weapons the government have opened up heartfelt moral concerns about the on-going suffering in Syria. Those who have voiced such concerns must realise last week’s vote, even if won, would not have addressed them. Their concerns inevitably widen our view on the crisis.

The government, Ed Miliband and Douglas Alexander should embrace this new found interest in Syria. Now that military options are limited we should see this as an opportunity to focus our minds on what else can be done for the Syrian people. If that occurs last week’s vote may well have a positive outcome for Syria.

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Only Miliband can now lead Britain on Syria

30/08/2013, 12:00:35 PM

by Jonathan Todd

All changed, changed utterly. If politics is trench warfare, advancement by inch, especially now with our major parties seemingly so entrenched in their political and socio-economic citadels, with their safe seats and ideological comfort zones, then last night was a moment when the terrain dramatically shifted.

Ed Miliband led the Labour party out from behind the ghosts of Iraq. What emerges, however, is not a pacifist party. At the same time, the prime minister lost control of his most fundamental responsibility. “The people have spoken, the bastards,” he might lament.

The awful truth is that UKIP remain the party with a position closest to most of these people. Which is that we should stay completely out of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing. There may be some who mistakenly think that this is Labour’s position.

The party’s position was, however, clearly set out in the 5 points that Miliband emailed to party members last night:

1.) We must let the UN weapons inspectors do their work and report to the UN Secretary Council;

2.) There must be compelling and internationally-recognised evidence that the Syrian regime was responsible for the chemical weapons attacks;

3.) The UN Security Council should debate and vote on the weapons inspectors’ findings and other evidence. This is the highest forum of the world’s most important multilateral body and we must take it seriously;

4.) There must be a clear legal basis in international law for taking military action to protect the Syrian people;

5.) Any military action must be time limited, it must have precise and achievable objectives and it must have regard for the consequences of the future impact on the region.

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Ed gets it: the red line matters – but so does international legitimacy

29/08/2013, 08:34:51 AM

by Jonathan Todd

Daniel Finkelstein in the Times yesterday quoted Andrew Tabler, a Syrian expert, as saying: “What happens (in Syria) will not stay there.” Which makes it imperative that as large an international coalition as possible is built behind the evidence that the Assad regime used chemical weapons against its own people, constituting a violation of international law that must be punished.

This must not be Barack Obama “shooting an elephant” – the George Orwell analogy employed by Stephen Walt: the strong doing something only because it is expected. It must be the world coming together to protect the weak: those that have been gassed by Assad and those who may have WMD used against them by tyrants in future.

It is incontrovertible that an attack has occurred. It also seems highly likely that the Assad regime carried out this attack. Finkelstein is right that if this breach of the established red line passes without consequence, a green light is given to other evils. Iran and all world-be oppressors would note.

Enforcing that red line is vital. But so is enforcing it in the right way. Transparently drawing upon robust evidence, UN process and established precedent, to build both a watertight legal case against Assad and one that motivates wide support for the actions that follow. Failing to do this would degrade international law and weaken the capacity of the UK and our allies to positively influence the future of Syria and the wider region.

Under a scenario where the US and her supporters retaliate against Assad before UN processes have run their course, they would do so without the support of Russia, China and Middle Eastern states that might otherwise be brought on side. Whatever strikes are executed would be unlikely to remove Assad from power – and may do relatively little to undermine his capacities, while fortifying the resolve of his supporters and backers to resist The Great Satan. Hezbollah may well attack Israel. Western interests would crash under the force of the Electronic Syrian Army. Assad would launch further attacks against his own people – whether using WMD or not.

What would the US then do?

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