Political sketch

Perhaps the time has come for us all to pack our bags, book our one-way plane tickets and leave our scheming Prime Minister to his bomb games; that’s how he seems to be treating them. As PM David Cameron enters the house of Commons to open a vote for airstrikes in Syria, the blatant stench of irony seems to go unnoticed.

Mr Cameron makes his second plea to carry out airstrikes against a Syrian group, except this time he seems to have changed his stance. Two years ago the House of Commons blocked the vote to carry out attacks against President Assad, and now our Prime Minister is going after Assad’s opponent ISIS. Did no one noticed this U-turn? Because this time he seems to have been met with ayes.

Quite possibly the scariest part of these attacks is Mr Cameron’s less than perfect argument of: “Why not?” Perhaps someone ought to politely let our country’s leader know that these aren’t toys, and a YOLO attitude doesn’t quite cut it for this job.

The Americans were already on hand to help France, a nation that was reaching out to us as well. So to Mr Cameron every day we didn’t do something was a day wasted. Unfortunately, there seemed to be very little time put in to asking the right questions, to our Conservative leader doing ‘something’ meant launching airstrikes, problem solved.

There would be no British ground forces involved because he, Dave the Great and Powerful , had discovered a standing army of 70,000 free Syrian moderates who were simply itching to form a democratic government. Quite possibly the best of all, Britain had joined forces with the US and as per, had: “God on its side.” Britain always seems to have God on its side when it goes to war according to David Cameron.

Leader of the opposition Jeremy Corbyn, otherwise known as a ‘terrorist sympathiser’, was red faced and squirming in his seat while the Prime Minister was sabre-rattling, but when the time came for him to speak his response was measured, calm and short. Is it too soon to say whether this might have been the highlight of his time as Labour party leader? While Mr Corbyn didn’t say he was ruling out airstrikes for good, he just wanted to take the time to get a few more answers to a few more questions.

Mr Hilary Benn, Shadow Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, took to the floor, directly facing our Prime Minister, challenging not only his approach to terrorism but his lack of respect for his fellow members of the house.

A wave of: “Here here” swept across the House as the preaching Shadow Secretary bellowed: “Now Mr Speaker all of us understand the importance of bringing the civil war in Syria to an end, no one doubts the deadly threat we face, I say the threat is now, and there are rarely, if ever, perfect circumstances to deploy military services.”

Could the house really be sure they weren’t making a bad situation worse? Are there perfect conditions to deploy military services? As it was put so eloquently by the leader of the Labour party, what could we add that the US, Russia and the French weren’t already doing?

The all important question that wise-old Jeremy has not ignored is: why had Canada and Australia stopped bombing Syria?

In a vague and rather pompous attempt to answer this Mr Cameron announces that: “There is deconfliction.” This half-hearted manner of avoiding a real answer was evidently more than good enough for Crispin Blunt, the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, who had previously voted against bombing, plenty of U-turns taking place in politics these days. He was happy to confirm that this time round he was up for a bit of de-conflicting.

After ten and a half hours of debate the results came back in favour of Dave the Great and Powerful’s airstrikes. The vote of 397 ayes, including 66 Labour MPs, took 174 vote majority. It seems Dave the Great and Powerful is awfully persuasive.