Labour can renew its fortunes with a mature response to refugee crisis

The new leader can unite a divided party by pressing for a more humanitarian approach towards Syria

The road to Damascus is the highway of conversions. Just as a Pharisee named Saul had his mind altered as he neared the city, Britain is prone to changes of heart on Syria. Forced to abandon air strikes in 2013 after losing a Commons vote, David Cameron is sabre-rattling again. Unlike St Paul, however, the Prime Minister has not seen the light.

While bombing Isil may seem bloodless in comparison to recent conflicts, the consequences are unlikely to be benign. George Osborne’s suggestion that the current refugee emergency will somehow be alleviated by air bombardment applies only in the realm of wishful thinking.

With military action in prospect and the biggest exodus of refugees since the Second World War moving across Europe, the Labour Party’s travails seem a sideshow. At 11am on Saturday, a new leader of the Opposition will be unveiled, and almost everyone supposes the victor will be the antiwar crusader Jeremy Corbyn. Despite fears from within his camp that their man has lost momentum, it looks likely that Labour will have the most Left-wing leader in its history before the week is out. In normal times, the party would begin instantly to splinter apart under a patina of faux-loyalty to an unwanted incumbent.

But these are not normal times, and any wise Opposition should ask itself how crass a political war would look to British voters preoccupied by real conflict. If Mr Corbyn wins on Saturday, Labour would be welladvised to promise unity and mean it. An early test is likely to be Syria, and the Osborne trap is already sprung.

By suggesting that the Government might launch air strikes even in the light of a Corbyn victory, the Chancellor signalled his hope that Labour centrists would vote with the Tories against their own newly ordained leader. Such a course would indeed be tempting for Mr Corbyn’s Labour adversaries. National security would be cited, legal justifications proffered and the brutishness of Isil stressed. Duty, if not conscience, might tempt many Labour MPs to back the PM over the peacenik foisted upon them.

Labour modernisers expect Mr Corbyn to blur many of his more controversial plans, such as leaving Nato, by invoking a consultation process. But Syria leaves little scope for compromise by a leader-in-waiting who almost missed his first hustings because he had promised to address a Stop The War rally. “There are no circumstances where we’ll give Cameron or Osborne a blank sheet of paper on Syria,” says one Corbyn supporter.

Rather than flattening Corbyn at the first hurdle, Labour should reflect on its shameful endorsement of the Iraq war, despite ample evidence that invasion would be unlawful and unjustified. A party so predisposed to misjudgment should think deeply before endorsing Mr Cameron’s misbegotten Syrian air strikes.

Back in 2013, the PM had some justification. Attacking the regime of Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, would have had the clear aim of forcing a retreat by a tyrant who had mounted chemical attacks against his own people. Ed Miliband, who touted as proof of moral valour his own shabby decision to remove future pressure on Assad, has much to regret.

In the absence of peace talks, Isil has moved into Syria’s ill-governed space, leaving an invading death cult in collision with a murderous president. While bombing may seem more justified this time, it is hard to see what RAF jets could usefully add to a US-led operation likely to poison relations with Arab Muslims, or conceivably create a vacuum in which Assad’s prime ally, Russia, might seize control.

Far better for Labour to exhort diplomacy involving Iran and Russia. A good Opposition should suggest too that Mr Cameron, rather than sniggering at Mr Corbyn’s “friends” in Hamas and Hizbollah, might apply pressure to his own dubious allies in Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern states where cash backers of Sunni extremists are in far greater supply than safe berths for refugees.

When Mr Corbyn expresses such opinions, as no doubt he will, opponents should ask themselves whether his sentiments constitute an appeaser’s ramblings or a way forward for a lost party. Labour has not won a major election anywhere in Britain for more than a decade.

As it weighs the lure of a resistance movement against the wiser course of rebuilding a vibrant party without recourse to civil strife, it has failed to notice that one conduit to renewal may be yawning open. If a proEuropean social democratic party has nothing useful to offer in the face of the gravest refugee crisis in almost a century and a poisonous Middle Eastern war, then it does not deserve to flourish or survive.

Yvette Cooper, who has not abandoned hope of winning the leadership, has been the boldest of the candidates, proposing that 10,000 Syrian refugees should be welcomed into Britain now, thus forcing Mr Cameron’s more miserly offer of taking up to 20,000 people directly from camps before 2020.

Britain must work with Europe to do much more, not only for the richer and better-qualified pioneers now on the road but also for those languishing in refugee camps. Many of these exiles will never beat at Europe’s portals or be offered bed and breakfast by Bob Geldof, but they too deserve safe enclaves where they can work and educate their children until war and terror have burnt out.

No British politician has shown a vestige of Angela Merkel’s decency and practicality. In the absence of such qualities, Mr Corbyn’s attempt to substitute “values-driven politics” for gamesmanship might appeal to voters, whose humanity exposes the icy hearts and overheated rhetoric of their elected representatives. That lesson should not be lost on whoever becomes the next Labour leader.

A first duty of the new incumbent will be to persuade his or her party to temper the PM’s military ambitions and press for a diplomatic and humanitarian response. Should the favourite win, Labour will undergo no Damascene conversion to Corbynism. But where Mr Corbyn is right, as he may well be on Syria, his party should back him to the hilt.