Syria - Official Labour Party Policy

You won't find this anywhere in the mainstream news.  Here is the full text of the official Labour Party position on bombing (or not) Syria, as passed at the Party Conference in September 2015:

Conference notes the evidence of an increased Russian military build-up in Syria; the announcement of talks between US and Russian military leaders aimed at avoiding the risk of clashes in Syria on Friday, 18th September; the meeting between the Israeli and Russian presidents in Moscow on Monday, 21st September, focused on preventing accidental conflict between their forces in Syria; and the growing international diplomatic effort to achieve a negotiated settlement to the conflict in Syria.

Conference also notes the likelihood that David Cameron will seek House of Commons support to extend UK participation in the bombing of Iraq to Syria in the near future.  

Conference believes the Parliamentary Labour Party should oppose any such extension unless the following conditions are met:

1. Clear and unambiguous authorisation for such a bombing campaign from the United Nations;
2. A comprehensive European Union-wide plan is in place to provide humanitarian assistance to the increased number of refugees that even more widespread bombing can be expected to lead to;
3. Such bombing is exclusively directed at military targets directly associated with ‘Islamic State’ and is not aimed at securing regime change in Syria, noting that if the bombing campaign advocated by the British government in 2013 had not been blocked by the PLP under Ed Miliband’s leadership,  ‘Islamic State’ forces might now be in control of far more Syrian territory, including Damascus.
4. Any military action is subordinated to international diplomatic efforts, including the main regional powers, to bring the Syrian civil war to an end, since only a broadly-based and sovereign Syrian government can ultimately retake territory currently controlled by ‘Islamic State’.

Conference believes that only military action which meets all these objectives, and thus avoids the risk of repeating the disastrous consequences of the 2003 regime-change war in Iraq and the 2011 air campaign intervention in Libya, can secure the assent of the British people.

http://act.stopwar.org.uk/lobby/stopbombingsyria

So is Labour Party policy to bomb Syria?  Obviously not.  Just for one, the latest UN resolution is certainly not clear and unambiguous. It does not invoke UN Chapter VII article 42 which is the one necessary to authorise war or military action. New!: Further reading.

The resolution actually says action should stay within the UN charter, i.e. 42 needs to be invoked before military action:

"Calls upon Member States that have the capacity to do so to take all necessary measures, in compliance with international law, in particular with the United Nations Charter"

Meanwhile 2, 3 and 4 of Labour Party policy are clearly not met.

Despite what many of the over paid, rarely accountable,  unrepresentative Parliamentary Labour Party think.