ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: As world leaders gather in Turkey for the G20 summit events of Friday night in Paris are going to dominate the agenda of course.  Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attacks, describing them as an act of revenge for the French involvement in Syrian air strikes as I’ve just been discussing with the Ambassador.  I am joined now by the Conservative MP, Crispin Blunt, who is chair of the influential Foreign Affairs Select Committee and he’s warned that UK military action in Syria would be a bad move.  Has this changed anything?  We discussed that a few weeks ago, and a very good morning to you Mr Blunt, let me put it through the prism of what Madame Ambassador has just told us, it would be appreciated if as a major ally of the French we stood side by side with them and got involved in this action in Syria

CRISPIN BLUNT: Well we didn’t say it would be a bad move, we said it would be an ineffective move and it wouldn’t be part of a coherent international plan to achieve our mission which is the defeat of ISIS.  What we’ve said is that British military action ought to be part of that coherent plan.  Now we are beginning to see the start of that with what is happening in Vienna, very important developments yesterday …

DM: The Syrian talks taking place.

CRISPIN BLUNT: The Syrian talks. Now out of that is coming a path to the transition of Syria politically with an agreement therefore of all the international players who have got dogs in this fight, so that’s us and the Americans with the Syrian National Coalition, there’s the Russians and Iranians with the regime, it’s Saudi Arabia and Turkey who are supporting various Islamist fighters.  We’ve all agreed that we are going to put pressure on our clients as it were, to sit down and come to an agreement, that’s extremely important and those talks have a target aim of starting on 1st January.  We can only get to a coherent military plan to defeat ISIS if we have a transition out of the Syrian civil war.

DM: You saying the clouds are beginning to clear then on the emergence of a coherent plan but we’ve got to feed Paris into this and something needs urgently to be done.  This surely must never happen again and surely part of the solution is dealing with ISIS where it’s developing, where it’s growing.  

CRISPIN BLUNT: Well there should be a real concentration of minds now.  ISIS have managed to spill blood of a large number of Russians in Egypt, they have now spilled the blood of an awful lot of French people and one or two other nations yesterday.  This follows a bomb outside Ankara station during the election campaign that killed over 100 people, it followed an ISIS bomb on a Kurdish demonstration a few months ago that began the destabilisation in Turkey and a number of other incidents.  The whole international community has a common interest in the defeat of ISIS and the United Kingdom …

DM:  Not to ignore those but the geography is important here, this is in the European heartland, this a major world capital which is only two and a half hours away from our very own, which is of course as we know, as ISIL have told us many times, is close to the top if not at the top of their target list as well.  It’s getting closer.  

CRISPIN BLUNT: Absolutely and the solidarity we owe everyone in this is making sure there is a coherent plan to defeat our common enemy ISIS and that’s where our focus should be.  Whether or not eight British aeroplanes should fly slightly wider air operations is not going to change anything militarily, the French are already flying there, the Americans are already flying the vast number of the missions there alongside now the Russians as well.  Making that picture slightly more complex is not actually going to change the outcome and what we’ve got to do here is to focus on the outcome.  What’s the mission?  The mission is to defeat ISIS, we’re not going to defeat the ideology immediately, that’s going to take a much longer time but it’s much easier to make sure that we can’t have attacks projected on us such as the ones we’ve had in Paris if ISIS does not control territory and there is nowhere for people to go, of whatever type, to go and fight for them. That territory has got to be taken off them, we’ve got to have an agreement about how to do that.

DM: Okay, turning to the intelligence side of the equation, is that almost more important than the military action?  

CRISPIN BLUNT: It is at the moment and it is obviously all part of a multi-layered operation.  One person who should get a huge amount of credit is the guy doing the body searches going into the Stade de France yesterday, he detected a suicide bomber and that stopped goodness knows how many casualties of someone detonating themselves in the crowd there and that’s one level of the protective defence that everyone has at their major public stadia, major public fora and it’s all part of the process we have here of intelligence on people who are of interest as it’s put by the security service, 3000 people that the French security services are apparently trying to follow, the last estimate I think I heard here was 2000.  These are a lot of numbers, they need a lot of resources to make sure we hold the intelligence picture here but at the same time, on top of all of this, there is a war going on in Syria and Iraq and there is a conventional military objective to be achieved which is to take this territory back under the control of a state and in Syria we don’t have a functioning state so we need the political transition process to get that going.

DM: Well the only apparatus of a functioning state, the remains of it, are controlled by President Assad and his cronies.   

CRISPIN BLUNT: And that’s why within the Vienna Agreement is a commitment to keeping what is left of the Syrian public administration intact.  Who directs that public administration is therefore an electoral process and …

DM: So you don’t think removing Assad should be a deal breaker?    

CRISPIN BLUNT: I think the language in Vienna is beginning to make clear the route out of it.  It is a question for the Syrian people but you then need a proper election process with the Syrian diaspora, those people who have fled, they have a stake in that process as well, their stake in it is set.  It is to be a secular government so it is not to be taken over by the Islamists for example and Jordan has been given the task of identifying who of the Islamist groups should be identified as terrorist groups in addition to ISIS and Al-Nusra.  So there is a process happening and it is that process we should be supporting.     

DM: Just a last point on that diaspora you mentioned, the flood of refugees escaping that conflict.  I spoke to Lord Carlile, the former reviewer of anti-terror legislation and he said Schengen, the free movement of peoples within the European Union really is over now, if it wasn’t over because of just the pressure of numbers that information that amongst that huge swathe of humanity were some terrorists, that means it really has got to stop.  

CRISPIN BLUNT: Well there has been a double failure.  The first failure is of the international community to properly support Turkey and Lebanon and Jordan in dealing with the people immediately displaced out of Syria and if you have the World Food Programme running out of money because other countries aren’t putting enough resources in, then are you surprised that people are then seeking a way out of the immediate camps.  There has then been a second failure within the Schengen countries, they haven’t properly supported Greece and Italy to help them with dealing with the tidal flow of people coming first from Libya last year and now from Turkey this year and if you don’t have that mutual solidarity between countries within a collective area such as Schengen, then don’t be surprised if it then falls over.  

DM: Mr Chairman, thank you very much indeed.  Crispin Blunt there, Chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee.