It is unfortunate for the reputation of British politicians that parliament is often at its best when hardly anyone is looking. So it was with Wednesday’s epic debate on airstrikes against Islamic State in Syria.
The opening scenes – the ones that made early news bulletins – were the least edifying. David Cameron came under sustained pressure to apologise for comments the previous evening that a vote against the government would be complicity with “terrorist sympathisers”.
The prime minister refused, conceding only that principled positions were found on all sides. But the recurrent fury of reasonable dissenters knocked him off his rhetorical stride. He repeated arguments made earlier in the week, but with decayed authority.
The Tory benches bristled with impatience for debate to progress beyond the gaffe. A low point came in Jeremy Corbyn’s speech. He cited correspondence from a constituent – a Syrian refugee, fearing for the safety of his family – and some Conservatives failed to suppress the irritation they routinely show at prime minister’s questions when the opposition leader uses this device.
This was not the appropriate case on which to hang their sneers. Yet Corbyn, like Cameron, missed a chance to command the house. He tetchily refused to take interventions, rattling through his well-established objections to the dropping of bombs.
The party leaders’ speeches turned out to be a false start. It was Margaret Beckett, the Labour grandee and former foreign secretary, who steered parliament into maturity of tone with a measured but steely case for striking Isis in Syria. Anyone who approached the matter without anxieties and reservations, she said, “hasn’t been paying attention”.
But the force of the UN security council resolution urging action, the nature of the threat, the precedents of Kosovo and Bosnia that show intervention is not always doomed to failure and the moral imperative of solidarity with France all combined to make inaction unthinkable. Pro-intervention Labour MPs were said to be emailing the speech to colleagues outside the chamber to stiffen their resolve.
From that point onward, the debate was fluent and balanced. Some of the strongest arguments against Cameron’s position came from his own MPs. Julian Lewis, the chair of the defence select committee, made a sturdy, pragmatic call for caution, accusing the prime minister of being “in denial” about the complexity of dynamics in the Middle East and rejecting as fanciful the idea that there was a “third way” between the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, and Isis.
Cameron’s reliance on the notion of 70,000 potential ground forces ready to follow up airstrikes was rubbished as a “bogus battalion” equivalent to the notorious “dodgy dossier” of intelligence that made the 2003 case for war in Iraq. David Davis and Andrew Tyrie, the chair of the Treasury committee, dismantled the technical side of Cameron’s position with similar rigour.
Other former ministers usually associated with Labour’s Blairite wing – Liam Byrne, Ivan Lewis – made equally cogent cases against action, prefacing their remarks with denunciations of Isis before querying the viability of a government plan that appeared long on moral purpose but short on strategic clarity.
A vital digression was introduced by the Liberal Democrat leader, Tim Farron, candid in exposition of the agonies of a personal dilemma but settling in the end for a pro-intervention view for the sake of refugees fleeing Isis tyranny. His account of a seven-year-old boy arriving on the island of Lesbos, and asking his father if Isis was waiting for them, was the most poignant moment of the day.
On one point there was consensus: that MPs of opposing opinion deserved respect and that the debate outside the chamber, especially online, had been polluted by vitriol. Alan Johnson, speaking for the motion, earned approving murmurs with the sardonic regret that he lacked “the certainty of finger-jabbing representatives of the ‘new politics’”.
As the hours passed, speeches coalesced into a pattern. Those in favour stressed the broad moral imperative of defeating Isis, often analogised as modern-day Nazis, and answering the call to aid from Britain’s allies. Two former soldiers from opposing parties – Labour’s Dan Jarvis and the Conservative Tom Tugendhat – were effective on that front.
Those against accepted their opponents’ premise but challenged the likelihood of a happy outcome in pursuit of the specific plan set out by the prime minister. Many raised reasonable fear of civilian casualties and their consequences in terms of further radicalisation.
Labour’s Kate Hoey and Shabana Mahmood both stood out as nuanced doubters, unequivocal in their horror at everything Isis represents but unconvinced that Syrian airstrikes were the solution. Around this there swirled an auxiliary debate about the technical difference between operations already under way in Iraq and their escalation across the border.
On that point, the strongest argument was advanced by Hilary Benn, closing for Labour. Isis was at the gates of Baghdad just 14 months ago and has since been hemmed back. Airstrikes are working and the advantage must be pressed. But Benn’s summation ranged much wider.
He paid tribute to his own leader’s conscientious objections before embarking on a sweeping account of Labour’s history of international solidarity and the left’s record of standing up to fascism, reaching back to the voluntary brigades that fought in Spain against Franco. It was a performance that earned unusual applause in the chamber and was credited by the foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, as “one of the truly outstanding speeches” in recent parliamentary history. It will surely have shifted a fair few Labour MPs into the aye lobby. Hammond’s own follow-up speech was rambling and pedestrian by comparison.
When the votes were counted, the result in favour was not a surprise, nor was the scale of division within the Labour ranks. But no one who watched the debate could credibly question the rigour with which the case was interrogated, nor the sincerity and gravity with which MPs on all sides made their decisions. It will, no doubt, be said this was a precipitate rush to war, but military action is by definition a matter of urgency.
Whether the right choice was made or not, history will have to judge. But when that verdict is given, it should be recalled that, after a shaky start, parliament gave the matter due and dutiful consideration; that it fulfilled its constitutional function properly and, for the most part, with civil propriety. The outcome may be bitterly regretted by some, but the institution deserves more credit than contempt for the way the choice was made.
