William Hague
Corbyn will never defend our liberty
Ihave been reminded by Nick Robinson of the BBC that, like Jeremy Corbyn now, I called as foreign secretary for legislation to require governments to consult Parliament before launching military action. That was when, in the Coalition Government, we asked for and obtained the overwhelming support of the Commons for our actions in Libya.
Yet over the following two or three years, looking at it with the then defence secretary and attorney general, I came to the reluctant conclusion that enshrining in law all the circumstances when ministers need to use armed force overseas was not practical. It is easy to decide that a full-scale assault on another country, like the invasion of Iraq, requires a parliamentary vote, and equally easy to know that something like using special forces to rescue a hostage does not. The trouble is the many and unpredictable grey areas in between.
What about the moments when acting with our allies requires an immediate decision? Or the best way to defend ourselves is to launch a pre-emptive attack? Or complete secrecy is essential for the safety of our forces? Or serious force is to be used but stopping far short of becoming engaged in a war? Is cyber warfare included in the legislation? There are endless questions of this kind, particularly given the rapidly changing nature of warfare, which are extremely difficult to allow for in a law and which would then be open to judicial interpretation.
In any event, even I never believed that the use of British forces on the scale we saw on Saturday morning should be inhibited by legislation. This was a limited operation, with minimal risk to our own personnel, in conjunction with our closest allies and where speed was essential for it to be effective, and in defence of humanitarian principles to which this country is committed. It is wholly reasonable for the elected government to make a decision on such an operation and be accountable to Parliament for its success or failure.
What would be desirable in the long term is a general understanding among political parties that our deliberate entry into a sustained conflict or large-scale operation requires parliamentary approval but that many other circumstances can necessitate an executive decision. Such an understanding, however, will never be achieved as long as Corbyn is Labour leader. For his objective is not to codify the rules for taking military action but to come close to preventing it ever happening at all; not a vigorous parliament but an impotent Western world.
If anyone doubts that, they should take a close look at his interview on Sunday with Andrew Marr. His first instinct is to demand a level of proof of culpability that is almost impossible to satisfy. On the attempted murder of Sergei and Yulia Skripal with a nerve agent that all our own experts and the international inspectors agree was produced in Russia, he is still asking for “incontrovertible evidence”. Similarly, on the use of chemical weapons in Syria, he wants to see the result of more investigations by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, even though the Russians and Syrians will already have destroyed much evidence, and the same organisation ruled last year that Assad was responsible for chemical attacks.
Whatever the evidence, he then went on to show that he would never be prepared to take any action about it. Asked what he would do if furnished with sufficient proof, he said he “would confront Assad with that evidence”. Then he would say someone “must come in and remove those weapons”. It is impossible to hear these sentences without thinking that the problem might be naïveté, stupidity, lack of information or an absence of familiarity with the world at large. But Corbyn is not a stupid or uninformed man. He must know that, were he prime minister, securing a meeting with Assad to “confront” him would be an unlikely scenario, and not very advisable given the mass murders authorised by that very man. And he also knows full well that there has already been a long process of Syria agreeing to the removal of its stock of chemical weapons and that the regime has deliberately failed to keep its word and has hung on to sufficient supplies to kill a lot of people.
In case these ludicrous objections to trying to uphold the international ban on chemical attacks could be overcome, Corbyn then voiced a final all-embracing obstacle to taking any action, ever, in the Syrian conflict. He said he would only countenance our involvement “if there’s UN authority behind it”. Again, one wonders at first blush if he is at all acquainted with the events of recent years. Russia has proved many times that it will veto any use of force by the West while feeling free to intervene itself without regard for humanitarian concerns. Corbyn’s statement is therefore the same as saying that there is no atrocity that Assad or anyone else can commit that will provoke us to make any intervention other than a strong set of remarks at the Security Council.
It would be comforting to think that the Leader of the Opposition is just a dear old idealist who can’t bring himself to think the worst of various authoritarian regimes, and hates using force on principle. If he is, that is dangerous enough – he even voted against joining the successful action against the emergence of an Isil state in Iraq and Syria, and would have left the world, including British citizens, more open to their attacks.
He does not, however, have the excuse of ignorance, and the more likely explanation is more chilling. He is consciously unwilling to defend the Western world and its norms of behaviour, even though it is our own world of freedoms, prosperity and accountability. Far from being a throwback to the Seventies, he has not intellectually accepted the lessons of the Thirties – that anti-semitism must be stamped out without hesitation and that dictators cannot be allowed to push the boundaries of acceptable conduct.
Corbyn is not just a more Left-wing version of previous Labour leaders. We know for sure after the last few weeks that he is someone completely different, who would not lift a finger, under almost any circumstances, to defend the society whose liberties he has for so long enjoyed.