British MPs are deceiving themselves if they believe they do not bear some of the responsibility for the “terrible tragedy” unfolding in Syria, the former chancellor, George Osborne, said on Tuesday during an often anguished emergency debate in the House of Commons on the carnage being inflicted in eastern Aleppo. In one of his first speeches in the Commons since losing office, Osborne said there had been “multiple opportunities to intervene” in Syria as he cited parliament’s decision in 2013 not to take military action after the use of chemical weapons by Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

“Let’s be clear now: if you do not shape the world, you will be shaped by it. We are beginning to see the price of not intervening,” Osborne said.

The Commons voted by a majority of 13 in 2013 to reject military action after Labour combined with Tory rebels to deliver David Cameron his single biggest Commons rebuff.

The Speaker had granted Tuesday’s emergency debate to the former Conservative cabinet minister Andrew Mitchell, who said that, even at this late stage, a humanitarian corridor should be established in east Aleppo to allow innocent civilians to leave the city for safety.

The foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, ruled out air drops of aid, saying it was too dangerous to fly into airspace controlled by Russia and Syria and that UK planes would be sitting ducks. Johnson said the slaughter in eastern Aleppo “shames us all” and promised that the government was pulling every diplomatic lever at its disposal.

Like Osborne, Johnson attributed some blame to the 2013 Commons vote to reject military action. “Our ability to influence events in Syria or to protect civilians or compel the delivery of aid has been severely limited,” he said. “The dictator was left to do his worst, along with his allies, Russia and Iran, and the bloodiest tragedy of the 21st century has since unfolded.”

The inescapable reality, Johnson said, was that “we as a House of Commons, we as a country, we vacated that space into which Russia stepped, beginning its own bombing campaign on behalf of Assad”.

But in a speech that overshadowed contributions by the Labour front bench and Johnson, Osborne largely ignored the short-term calls for aid drops, but slammed MPs for giving Assad and his Russian sponsors the green light to destroy the democratic Syrian opposition using sarin gas.

In an attack in effect aimed at the former Labour leader Ed Miliband, who ordered Labour MPs to vote against military action in 2013, Osborne said: “I have to say the whole concept of an emergency debate suggests that somehow this tragedy has come upon us out of the blue and indeed it has an almost natural element to it. That is not the case. The Syrian civil war has been waging since 2011, and therefore it is something that we could have foreseen and done something about.

“I think we are deceiving ourselves in this parliament if we believe that we have no responsibility for what has happened in Syria. The tragedy in Aleppo did not come out of a vacuum; it was created by a vacuum, a vacuum of western leadership, of American leadership, British leadership.”

In an assessment that is known to represent David Cameron’s views, Osborne said the UK’s involvement in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan meant politicians in the UK knew the “price of intervention”. “I think we have come to a point where it’s impossible to intervene anywhere, that we lack the political will as the west to intervene,” he said. “But I have some hope out of this terrible tragedy in Syria which is we are beginning to learn the price of not intervening.”

Mitchell read out the words of an Aleppo resident, who said a “human corridor” needed to be established to evacuate civilians from the bombarded city and that “nobody will ever believe” Britain again over fighting terror if it ignored “state terror”.

The shadow foreign secretary, Emily Thornberry, who is under pressure over the reluctance of Jeremy Corbyn to criticise Russia, insisted that Labour had condemned the Kremlin and Assad for their actions in eastern Aleppo. “We must ensure they are one day held to account, while we equally condemn Iran and Hezbollah for the role they have played in this massacre. It was a global collective failure, every bit as great as … Srebrenica,” she said.



The Labour MP John Woodcock, a long-term advocate of intervention, said: “We’ve said ‘Never again’ so many times, and we mean it when we say it, but then, a few months, a few years later, it comes to nothing.”

Commenting on Osborne’s speech, Woodcock said: “He gave the speech that should have been made from our despatch box and he showed a level of understanding about these issues which shows that, which makes me hope very much that he has a future in his party.”



He attacked his party’s stance in 2013, saying: “I still feel sick at the idea of the then leader of the opposition going from that vote into the whips’ office and congratulating himself and them on stopping a war, when look what is happening today and look what’s happened over the last three years.”