Why all the fuss about Hilary Benn's Syria speech?

Call me a terrorist sympathiser, but I think Hilary Benn’s supposedly “spectacular” speech in the Commons debate yesterday about whether to bomb Syria was mediocre, and the rapturous reaction to it demonstrates the catastrophic intellectual decline of the political leadership and the media of Britain.

For a start, everyone ought to know that good speeches are short. Benn’s was far too long, to the extent that, were it not for my strength of feeling on the matter, I should never have bothered to listen to the whole thing.

His colleagues proudly told the Spectator’s Isabel Hardman that he wrote much of it in the Commons, during the debate. That explains why he wasn’t able to consult a history book. At one point, he compared air strikes in Syria to the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, despite the fact that the two situations are utterly incomparable.

If ISIS is the equivalent of Franco’s Falangists, then who represents the Italians and Germans? Back then of course, the Russians were on the side of the International Brigades, whereas now they are with Bashar al-Assad and Iran. Who was playing the part of Iran in the Spanish Civil War? And aren’t the volunteers flocking to fight in Syria the bad guys?

Also, while the volunteers from 53 nations that made up the International Brigades were supporting the left wing Spanish Republicans, basically a load of socialists and communists, where is the secular left in Syria? The closest match is the Kurdish Peshmerga, sort of, but outside of their territory in northern Syria, the part will have to be played by some Islamists who are slightly more moderate than Daesh.

The speech started off boringly, as so many of the speeches in that 10 hour marathon must have, with the restatement of some tedious obviousnesses, none of which addressed any of the arguments put forward by opponents of the motion he was defending.

Benn refers early on to a UN Security Council resolution which “calls on member states to take all necessary measures to redouble and coordinate their efforts to prevent and suppress terrorist acts committed specifically by ISIL and to eradicate the safe haven they have established over significant parts of Iraq and Syria.”

According to Benn, that translates as an order to do something “now”. To which my immediate response is: “Well, what have you been waiting for? Why not yesterday, or last week?” But then it occurs to me that the UN probably would not begrudge its member states the time it takes to come up with a decent plan before stampeding towards Raqqa.

Furthermore, opponents of the air strike bill argued that the proposed action is either unnecessary or falls far short of what is necessary to achieve the stated aim of the UN resolution. Benn eventually gets around to tackling this by airing the tired comparison of the situation to that in Iraq, where some progress against ISIS appears to have been made.

This is despite him knowing full well that the situation in Iraq is (a bit like the situation in 1930s Spain) completely different. As has been pointed out many times, air strikes in Iraq are supported by ground troops supplied by the Iraqi government, a coalition member, while no such ground support can be counted on in Syria.

The Iraqi government asked the UK to intervene in Iraq (as Benn himself points out). In contrast, Bashar al-Assad, the president of Syria, is of the opinion that coalition air strikes make Daesh stronger.

Benn sort of acknowledges this when he says air strikes alone will not defeat Daesh, “But they make a difference,” he said. An expert on the conflict speaking on Radio 4 on Tuesday reckons they will make barely any difference. But whether that’s true or not, it’s a far cry from just minutes earlier, when Benn was raving about “all necessary measures.”

He adds that the government needs to better explain the mythical 70,000 allied troops on the ground we hear so much about, but presumably not before we’ve sent a few jets over to make random craters. Benn posed many, many rhetorical questions during that long speech, but not this one: “Why wait until we know what we’re doing?” UK warplanes took off for Syria shortly after the vote.

Benn also points to a coalition of over 60 countries standing together “shoulder to shoulder”, but according to another expert on Radio 4 on Tuesday (this is from memory as I need to go to bed and don’t have time to do the research), the only member of that coalition that has launched air strikes on Syria in recent months besides the United States is France, which had carried out about four. Benn was not including Russia, which is part of a somewhat different coalition.

The ‘high point’ of the speech, from what I gather from the Facebook posts of my Labour Party friends, came at around the 12 minute mark, when Benn directly addressed Labour MPs, appealing to their internationalism. There was an unintentional (I think) moment of comedy when he turned back round to face the Tory-occupied government benches at precisely the moment he roared: “We are here faced by fascists.”

He then launched into a tirade of things we’ve already heard about Daesh, perhaps taking his cue from the more original but equally unedifying Andrew Neil rant of a few weeks ago, before making his Spanish Civil War reference (see above) and throwing in Hitler and Mussolini for good measure.

As has already been pointed out elsewhere, he would automatically have lost the debate at that point if it had taken place in an online discussion forum, according to some interpretations of Godwin’s law.

Cries of “outstanding” and “brilliant” could be heard above the din of applause which erupted in the Commons at the end of the speech. Parliamentarians were moved to tears, and already inane ‘analysis’ pieces are hailing Benn as the next leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister. The Spectator, which I normally look to for journalistic and intellectual rigour, despite its right wing bias, has already published a blog post calling it “passionate, spellbinding – and historic.”

Can someone please tell me, am I missing something?

Hilary Benn
Photo: Her Britannic Majesty's Government