Parliament is always in a way a comedy of vanity. Yesterday it was a narcissistic farce. Our elected representatives spent ten hours making the same unconvincing points over and over again. The standard of speaking was poor because nobody had much worth saying. The pro-bombers kept arguing that we had to stand with our allies, and that Isis was horrid. The anti-bombers urged us not to make another tragic mistake in the Middle East. And everybody had to say how they felt personally — as if personal feelings are more important than right or wrong.
Yet all the MPs knew deep down that Britain’s intervention in the Syrian conflict would be so small-scale as to be pointless. For all the posturing about solidarity and keeping our citizens safe, the winning argument was that since we are already bombing Isis a little in Iraq, we may as well bomb them a little in Syria, too.
The whole debate wasn’t really about the Syria war, though, was it? It was about Labour’s war.
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