Jeremy Corbyn 'cannot support UK air strikes in Syria'
 

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has written to his MPs saying he cannot back UK air strikes in Syria - prompting a warning of shadow cabinet resignations.

Mr Corbyn rejected David Cameron's claim that targeting so-called Islamic State there would make Britain safer.

His intervention - which puts him at odds with a number of his MPs - was criticised by a shadow cabinet member.

The frontbencher said there would be resignations if Mr Corbyn ordered the shadow cabinet to back his stance.

Labour is divided on whether to support Mr Cameron's call for air strikes, with about half of the shadow cabinet believed to back intervention.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-34939109

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This could finish him off.

How many Corbyn based threads are there now?...

its news innit

Yes Of Course he is Against it


Everyone knows it

Yes it's a bit yesterdays news, it's stated on the other 100 Corbyn threads.

I wasn't aware I needed your permission to post. This is brand new news 1 hour ago from the BBC news site

The best way forward is for a free vote, let them all vote with their conscience.

There is one other thread on Jeremy Corbyn on this page of SD and that is a general thread about his leadership. This is a very recent news story with implications for the Labour party and UK politics in general, nothing wrong with having a thread about it.

Well I've thought about it and I'll allow it this once ok?....

ok :joker:

I honestly thought this was what happened anyway?

If they don't make their own choices, wtf is the point in having a vote to start with? This is confusing me :laugh:

If Corbyn enforces the whip, the party must vote as instructed or lose the whip which means they no longer represent labour in the house.

If he allows a free vote, they can vote as per their consciences.

These are testing times for Corbyn as he went against the labour party many times when he was a back bencher .... how will he behave now.....

David Cameron’s case for UK military action in Syria has several highly contentious key points.

‘There is a credible military strategy to defeat Isil in Syria as well as Iraq’
If there is, no one has told the US. In private briefings and in public testimony to Congress, a long line of senior American officers have acknowledged frustration with the battle against Islamic State. General John Allen, who was in overall charge of the US campaign in Syria and Iraq, has quit after a year.

‘Airstrikes can degrade Isil and arrest its advance’
It is debatable whether this is true. The coalition repeatedly says it has shrunk the geographical area controlled by Isis by 30% in the past year, but in that same period Isis has advanced on and taken Ramadi in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria. In any event, Cameron goes on to concede that air strikes alone cannot defeat Isil.

‘We need partners on the ground’
Who is going to provide these troops on the ground? The Obama administration is opposed to deploying more ground troops. British military chiefs laugh off suggestions of committing tens of thousands of UK troops to take Raqqa.

So who is going to do it? The Kurds are too small a force, with little interest in fighting beyond neighbouring territory. The Iraqi army is riven by religious and ethnic divisions. The Free Syrian Army and similar groups have so far been largely ineffective – although Cameron says there are 70,000 anti-Assad non-Isis fighters available for the task.

How easy will it be to take the IS stronghold Raqqa?
The US had 170,000 troops in Iraq at the peak of the fighting in Iraq in 2007 and struggled to suppress the insurgent force, even though it was much smaller than IS. Quelling towns and cities often required house-by-housing fighting, with high casualties on both sides.

'Our intelligence is that there are 70,000 moderate Sunni forces’
Retired British brigadier Ben Barry, a specialist in land warfare at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, estimated a joint US-UK-French coalition would require 20,000 troops to retake Raqqa. He described the prospect as “challenging”, given that IS had been preparing its defences for the last year.

Rebel leaders claim to have 70,000 fighters but Cameron should have added that at present they are not much of a fighting force. The rebel forces are deeply divided among lots of competing factions. For many of them, the focus is fighting Assad’s forces around Damascus, not Isis.

Cameron said the intelligence about the 70,000 moderate Syrian rebels comes from ‘the highest level’
The one thing it might have been assumed that Cameron would avoid is an echo of the dodgy intelligence in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. And yet he did just that, saying the intelligence about the 70,000 figure had come from the “highest level”. Who is this? The UK’s joint intelligence committee, which coordinates information from all the agencies and was responsible for the bogus claim in the run-up to the Iraq war that Saddam Hussein could hit a UK base with missiles within 45 minutes.

'Decisions to use force are not to be taken lightly’
Politicians nearly always say that. The British military, like their counterparts around the world, like to fight, to put into practice all those hours of training, but only if there is a clear strategy, a fixed objective, an endgame. And there is none at present.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/...ly-contentious

I think on balance and reluctantly,I would support the PM on this.

We were told we were helping 'decent' as far as was possible,opposition forces in Libya when we got involved there.
The opposite was the case and now Libya is near ungovernable at present.

This may be the case here too, however I think the PM is right that we must do something more than just watch now.
Hopefully he makes a better and clearer case when he asks for the vote on same however.

It should however be for all MPs and all parties a free vote.

Yeah realistically we cannot just sit and wait for them to hit more people :/

Maybe the air strikes don't help, but its better than nothing. I don't relish the idea of our strikes possibly killing innocents mind, but without intervention thousands more innocents will die. I don't see any other way past this :shrug:

I think that we should clean up our mess tbh, and once we've destroyed ISIS we leave that side of the world alone is my stance.

I would leave well alone tbh

We got the same bs before afghanistan/iraq/libya

lets face facts they killed 130 people in france out of what 66,000,000

its hardly an invasion

let them destroy themselves

What his son is doing I don't know :(

Yes a Classic Clip.


I assume his Son
is more right wing Labour

We find out on Monday
from Labour.

The 30mins Daily Politics
today , said the only way to do it
is a Free Vote.


Once again JC sent letters out to all his cabinet
far to early

Blair and Bush should have left Iraq alone,yes Saddam was a bastard but the country sorted itself in it's own way,those two interfered and caused all this unrest in the middle East now,I cant see how Cameron can just sit back and wait for something terrible to happen here ,and it will.I back him on at least helping our allies.

Leeds central scene of the infamous plant in the televised debates prior to the election so...yeah.

Although I would just support it, I do feel it is very likely more than not, that we are making almost the same error as in Iraq.
Perhaps had we supported,well that's not the word,but tolerated the Assad rule,rather than initially get obsessed with regime change as Cameron was, then that may have been the better route.

Then again, hindsight is a wonderful thing that few can possess.
The PM has to get his way on this now,I add however 'unfortunately so',because I just about trust him as much as I would Blair,and that isn't saying anything positive at all..

I have no problem with forcing the government to think through and justify its strategy before giving them the OK, but it should be a process of refinement with agreement in principle.