August 19, 2021 - 7:15am
Our MPs spent yesterday debating the Afghanistan disaster as if Britain could have prevented it.
Keir Starmer got the ball rolling with a misjudged — and, at some points, unintelligible — speech, blaming it all on Boris Johnson. Accusing the Prime Minister of complacency, he reeled off a list of supposed policy failures, all of which had this in common: their complete irrelevance to the course of this week’s events.
But it wasn’t just Starmer. One MP after another held forth as if Britain could have stopped the advance of the Taliban — or, at least, changed Joe Biden’s mind about the American pullout.
But neither of these things are true. This may have been a NATO mission, but it’s one in which America made by far the greatest contribution. What America wanted, under both Trump and Biden, was to withdraw — and having already done the same ourselves we could hardly object.
Several MPs, including Starmer, taunted the PM with his July prediction that “there is no military path to victory for the Taliban”. But the prediction was correct. The 300,000 strong Afghan army was not defeated on the battlefield, rather the country was handed over to the insurgents by its own political leadership.
This is the single most important fact about the fall of Kabul, but our MPs ignored it. Instead, they queued up to condemn President Biden for his statement that the Afghan military had collapsed, “sometimes without trying to fight.” Biden could have chosen his words more carefully — placing the blame on the leaders not the soldiers — but he was basically right.
On this and every other issue, the preference of our MPs is to emote rather than confront harsh realities.
The issue of refugees is a case in point. Clearly we owe a duty of care to those Afghans who helped us. But over-and-over again, MPs confused this specific moral obligation with a responsibility for the Afghan people as a whole. Starmer claimed that while the situation required an international response, Britain “must take the lead.” He never explained why.
Layla Moran, for the Lib Dems, called for a humanitarian corridor to be opened up to an international border — but failed to say how it might be secured or indeed which of Afghanistan’s neighbours should be at the other end.
Some MPs, like Yvette Cooper, did have constructive suggestions for how the immigration paperwork could be expedited for priority cases, but let’s not forget that the evacuation process at Kabul airport is only taking place with the agreement of the Taliban, which we can hardly rely upon. Needless to say, that didn’t stop other contributors to the debate from engaging in what Tom Tugendhat called a “political auction of numbers”.
The Prime Minister announced a resettlement programme for 20,000 Afghans. This was instantly pronounced inadequate. The Labour leader complained it was “number without rationale”, which should instead be based on a “risk assessment.” The SNP’s Ian Blackford also got into the numbers game; but when challenged on the Scottish Government’s contribution, he was reduced to spluttering indignation.
The Green MP, Caroline Lucas, took the opportunity to attack government efforts to stop illegal immigration. She claimed that “a woman fleeing the Taliban with her children on a boat across the Channel would be criminalised.” Unless the Taliban advance all the way to the French coast, that’s unlikely. Furthermore, those currently making the crossing are almost exclusively male. However, it didn’t seem to cross Lucas’s mind that illegal immigration not only compromises our security, but takes places from those with much greater need of our help.
Her attitude is typical of a political culture that refuses to accept that tough choices have to be made — if indeed there’s anything we can do at all.
Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.
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SubscribeI watched Tom Tugendhat’s speech live. And it was hard not to laugh.
It was like a hammy second-rate actor delivering a Shakespeare soliloquy. He obviously had visions that morning of his speech going viral.. “the ONE MP who cares!!”
It’s all just pantomime in that chamber with these utter spanners
You have summed him up perfectly.
To be fair, at least Tugendhat has ‘walked the walk’, unlike the other dismal contributions, Teresa May, of course she never had power to build up British military capacity, oh, if only she had…..
Then the utter hypocrisy of ‘woke’ Labour and the SNP, the majority of them usually wittering on about imperialism and our foreign policy being the reason for extreme Islamism, makes me want to vomit. But,…. The only point is to show everyone how caring and virtuous they are, not to ever do anything practical.
This entire debate took place without a single MP consulting their constituents about how many asylum seekers could reasonably be accommodated locally. We already have about 5 thousand people arriving illegally every week.
There doesn’t seem to be a single MP for whom stopping illegal immigration (let alone reducing overall immigration) is the top priority despite it being so for Tory voters and a top 3 priority for the entire country.
The migration acceptance, and encouraging, is deliberate to destroy UK, the Liberals so hate ‘Britain’ they seek to end it. It is a death wish pathology much like Anorexia Nervosa.
You are probably crediting liberals with vastly more intelligence and self-awareness than they actually possess.
They mainly come from social groups who’ve never really had to think.
Another example of British fake democracy as if the response to the referendum wasn’t sufficiently revealing. Time for new parties to collaborate and offer disillusioned people a choice
Thanks for this piece, Peter, it’s easily the most sensible article I’ve read on the whole sorry spectacle.
What might usefully be said about our MPs performance?
Tired & emotional?
Drunk on their own self-impotence?
Fire (and don’t rehire) the lot of them and start again?
If we were to start again, I hear Ashraf Ghani is free.
Caroline Lucas is an MP in a city (Brighton) with a chronic housing shortage. So severe that the homeless are dumped in places such as Newhaven. A housing shortage that she never addresses.
Thanks for a sensible article, one of only two or three I’ve read that seem to attempt an even halfway reasonable and considered view of the realities of this sad situation. Most of the political and cultural establishment appear to having a collective nervous breakdown, and the parliamentary debate was an absurd waste of time, full of impotent preening, virtue signalling and breast beating. The fact that the UK had already largely withdrawn from Afghanistan,a process that began several years ago and was largely uncontested until last week, and that there is at this point very little the UK government can actually realistically do beyond get our citizens and friends out, appears to have been studiously and furiously ignored.
Instead MPs of all stripes parade their unshakable prejudices and agendas – and what do most of their constituents actually think, and how much have they bothered to find out or even care?
And most of the MSM breathlessly reports all this grandstanding like it even matters. Even the Spectator seems to have lost the plot on this, full of earnest, admiring puff pieces about the various speeches that didn’t matter, made by people who few seriously believe would be have been able to do anything very differently if they had been in charge. In fact the Spectator website has gone downhill so precipitously recently, obsessed with Westminster tittle-tattle, that I invariable find that when I do actually see a decent, thoughtful article it’s actually from the printed edition – which I am likely to stick to from now on.
BTW – if you look online at the Spectator, you can see whether an article is destined to be in the printed edition – a very useful feature.
This was a fantastic article and it is so extraordinary that it seems to be a minority view
The debate (if that is what it was, there being no meaningful proposition on the table) was an utterly pointless exercise. A great deal of hot air to no purpose. Shameful.
Really excellent piece, thank you. Nail on head.
“Layla Moran, for the Lib Dems, called for a humanitarian corridor to be opened up to an international border”
Looks like Layla wants a million lone males with no applicable skills and a very different culture (to say the least) to be wandering the streets of London.
Germany has the best economy in the world, and has vast manufacturing and construction work and still struggles. London is coffee baristas and taxi drivers and no more needed.
I’m just waiting for Keir Starmer to blame the tories for preventing the Chinese from walking into Taiwan. Well, either KS or the next Laybaa Leader but three – so within the next year or two I expect.
What’s more, MP’s kept saying we have to save the Afghan people from the Taliban, as if the Taliban are from Mars. And that we had promised to protect them. Who? When?
There has been a Contest in Unreality over Afghanistan.
Our MP’s, lost in an SF universe where Britain is still a Great Power (or indeed, a Power at all) are beyond hilarious.
But the tragic victors of the Contest are the Afghan middle-class.
How could intelligent, educated people possibly not have realised that on Leap Year Day 2020, Donald Trump handed them over to the Taliban in the Doha Agreement, with the full backing of his political opponents in the US.
Only the exact nature and timing of the catastrophe were left in any doubt.
Absolutely right, despite the frequent ludicrous suggestions on here that Trump would have provided the answer – no doubt by ‘nuking’ somebody.
It’s difficult to see how a marginal military power like Britain, already defeated in Afghanistan, can conceivably return there to sort things out, as if we’re Yul Brynner and the Magnificent Seven sorting out a small clique of bad hombres.