Tories divided

Today’s Metro reported that “Mrs May’s decision not to call a vote was criticised by Tory Sir Ken Clarke, who pointed out that Mr Trump had tweeted a warning about air strikes.
He said: ‘Once the president had announced to the world what he was proposing, a debate was taking place everywhere, including many MPs in the media, but no debate in Parliament.”

And now the consequences….

The Metro also reported the following: “Russian hackers ‘already targeting UK for revenge’
Britain is braced for cyber warfare attacks by Russia that could send services such as healthcare, transport and utilities into meltdown….Intelligence experts warned that the UK’s ‘critical infrastructure’ could be endangered in the same way that hackers previously brought down hospital systems across Britain….The Pentagon reported a 2,000 per cent surge in activity by Russian ‘troll’ accounts.”

Dubious morality

The Prime Minister has taken the moral high ground over this issue, saying “We’ve done it because we believe it was the right thing to do”. So its ok for Assad to knock seven bells out of his own people for years, providing he doesn’t use chemical weapons? What kind of morality is that? Whether we should have got involved in this conflict earlier is another issue, but the action taken at the weekend has shown that we potentially could have weakened Assad’s military capabilities if we had done.

The message has been sent out loud and clear that might is right, and that we in the west can be judge, jury and executioner before the evidence has been examined. Is that the right message to be sending out? I don’t trust Putin, but we need to understand him – he wants to look like a hard man to his own people, and the action taken on Saturday has made him look weak, which is why we should take reports of Russian revenge very seriously! I still consider we should have met with Putin, taken to him all the evidence of chemical weapons that we’d got, and come to an agreement regarding the future of Syria.

No endgame has been calculated for what we have started, and the future for Syria remains bleak. The future for east/west relations remains very uncertain.

Content published and promoted by Dan Barker (Liberal Democrats) all at 13 Greaves Close, Walsall, WS5 3QT