It’s impossible for foreign policy to reflect our diversity

There was so much that was unsatisfactory about yesterday’s debate. For all that it was billed a classic Commons occasion – Prime Minister’s Questions cancelled, a straight 10 hours cleared for speeches, unusual indulgence shown to placard-bearers on Parliament Square – the political prelude to UK air strikes on Syria fell short by a very long way of the calibre we saw and heard when MPs debated the Iraq War or, to go back much further, the Falklands.

There was a pedestrian quality about many of the contributions. The Prime Minister ventured some quite unnecessary hair-splitting in his call for Isis to be henceforth called by its (pejorative) Arabic acronym, Daesh – to which he appended a still more gratuitous sideswipe at the BBC. The whole was suffused with an unseemly sense of haste and opportunism. With opinion polls showing the effect of the Paris attacks fast wearing off, it was hard not to agree with the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, that David Cameron was concerned to hold the vote “before it slips from his hands”.

Yes, the Government had prepared impeccably, covering all the bases it had failed to do before it lost the vote on air strikes against a different scourge in Syria two years ago. MP after MP referred, with due appreciation, to intelligence and other briefings that had been provided for them. Judicial backing had been secured, that found the proposed extension of air strikes over Iraq to Syria to be legal, and there was a UN Security Resolution to fall back on (though not one, it should be noted, that explicitly mandates military action).

The Iraq air strikes of the past year were cited as an example of how civilian casualties had been expertly avoided, and much play was made of requests for help from allies, including France. Enormous efforts were made to distinguish the ill-fated Iraq War from what was now envisaged for Syria. A number of speeches, however, evinced a note of particular unease and defensiveness – less about the risks attending the military tasks that lay ahead than about possible implications for the home front. And those speeches included the opener delivered by Cameron.

Announcing a review into “any remaining funding of extremism within the UK” – a nod, it appears, to demands both from Labour and the Liberal Democrats – the Prime Minister said this: “I know there are some who suggest that military action could in some way undermine our counter-extremism strategy by radicalising British Muslims, so let me take this head on: British Muslims are appalled by Daesh. These women-raping, Muslim-murdering, medieval murderers are hijacking the peaceful religion of Islam for their warped ends.”

Quoting from a newspaper article by the King of Jordan, he went on: “These people are... outlaws from Islam and we must stand with our Muslim friends here and around the world as they reclaim their religion from these terrorists.”

Corbyn, for his part, read out a message from a Syrian constituent with relatives living in an area now under the control of Isis. “My question to David Cameron is: Can you guarantee the safety of my family when your air forces bomb my city?” Any action, the Labour leader continued, “could have an impact on ethnic minority communities”, including in Britain. Since the Paris attacks, he said, there had been a sharp increase in Islamophobic incidents and physical attacks. “The message must go out from all of us in the House: we will not tolerate any form of anti-Semitism, Islamophobia or racism in our country.”

As the debate ground on, the potential repercussions for Muslims in Britain and community relations became a secondary theme of other speeches, mainly – but not always – from MPs who are themselves from a Muslim background or represent constituencies with many Muslim voters. A recurring question was whether radicalisation of especially young ethnic-minority Britons, albeit a tiny minority, might be a response to Western policy, now and in the past, rather than a phenomenon originating within that culture.

There is no doubt that a large number of British Muslims joined opposition to the Iraq war. But disaffection set in before that, with the impression, gained largely from television news at the time, that Western countries, including the UK, failed to protect Bosnia’s Muslims after Yugoslavia collapsed. It is fair to point out that Nato air strikes on Serbia and the intervention in Kosovo were in defence of largely Muslim populations. But this argument has done little to banish the view that the outside world was slow to act and, in particular, failed to prevent the massacre of Muslim men at Srebrenica. And always in the background stands collective concern for the plight of Palestinians, still languishing in camps more than half a century after the establishment of the state of Israel.

Foreign policy, of course, is not the only source of discontent among young Muslims, whether here in Britain or elsewhere in Europe. A sense of being caught between two cultures, of not really belonging anywhere, of suffering inferior life chances compared with the majority population – all of these considerations come into play. But foreign policy, and the UK’s waging of wars in mainly Muslim lands, is a component, and a prominent one at that.

So far, the misgivings of British Muslim voters have not reached the point where they overtly influence UK foreign policy. But there have been hints of what may be to come. Two years ago, both the government and the opposition front benches lost Muslim spokeswomen. The Tory peer Baroness Warsi resigned as a Foreign Office minister over what she saw as the government’s indulgence of Israel over Gaza. Rushinara Ali, the Labour MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, resigned as a shadow Education minister before abstaining in the vote on air strikes against Isis in Iraq.

It is easy to celebrate ethnic and religious diversity and regard much of Britain as a success in this respect. But it will be hard, if not impossible, for any government to pursue a foreign policy that truly reflects that diversity. How hard, we may start to learn in the years to come.