CND has condemned Ed Miliband for writing a ‘blank cheque’ to Prime Minister David Cameron over airstrikes on Syria. In a speech today at Labour Party Conference, the Labour leader said he supported the US airstrikes which took place last night – although he added that the UN now needed to ‘play its part’.
CND General Secretary Kate Hudson said:
‘When David Cameron beat the war drum over Syria a year ago, Ed Miliband urged caution and the Tories suffered an historic anti-war defeat in Parliament. He seemed to understand that a bombing campaign by the West would do little to resolve the crisis there. And he was vindicated.
‘But in his speech to Labour Party Conference today Ed Miliband has all but written a blank cheque to David Cameron, as President Barack Obama leads the charge with airstrikes against Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq.
‘No one should be under any illusions about the atrocities committed by IS. The question is: what will airstrikes actually achieve? We will be told they will be ‘surgical strikes’, that they are necessary to halt the spread of IS. But we know all too well how this ends: once again, innocent civilians will end up paying the price of western military intervention.
‘From Iraq to Afghanistan to Libya, the military crusades of the West have always been cloaked in the language of humanitarianism: but the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in these bloody conflicts are a grim reminder of the lives our leaders deem too cheap to consider.’