Britain’s stop-start march towards joining the air war in Syria now appears irreversible, after key Tory sceptics and a growing number of Labour MPs have signalled that they are ready to back an extension of airstrikes.



David Cameron will make his case for extending military action in a House of Commons statement on Thursday, Downing Street confirmed, following a UN security council resolution authorising powers to “take all necessary measures” to defeat Isis.

Michael Fallon, the defence secretary, will then provide a private briefing to Labour MPs on the military position less than a week later on 2 December, leaving the government’s chief whip, Mark Harper, to make the calculation over the following weekend as to whether Cameron has a Commons majority for war.

Labour remains divided – the party is unlikely to decide at this week’s shadow cabinet meeting even whether to give its MPs a free vote, a decision that would guarantee Cameron a Commons majority.

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Doubts about war – especially regarding identifying viable ground troops capable of taking territory captured from Isis in northern Syria – are still widespread in the Labour party, including amongst MPs deeply unimpressed by their leader Jeremy Corbyn’s response over the past week to the Paris terror attacks .

With parliament due to go on Christmas recess from 17 December until 5 January, ministers will want to keep up the momentum and stage the vote in early December.

At the same time Cameron cannot afford a repeat of the personal, political and diplomatic humiliation of 2013, when MPs rejected his call for airstrikes to punish Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons.

George Osborne, setting out a patriotic case for action in light of the Paris attacks, told the BBC’s Andrew Marr show: “Frankly Britain has never been a country that stands on the sidelines and relies on others to defend us.”

He added that another Commons defeat on airstrikes would be “a publicity coup” for Isis and would send “a terrible message about Britain’s role in the world”.

There are clear signs that Cameron is winning over sceptics as tentative progress is made on the diplomatic front to start a process geared towards a political transition in Syria, a ceasefire and a means of assembling ground troops from the region. There are also signs that Russia is willing to focus its bombing campaign on Isis. Russia has stepped up its airstrikes since a bomb brought down a Russian plane over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, killing all 224 people on board.

France has meanwhile dispatched an aircraft carrier to the eastern Mediterranean to enable French jets to multiply strikes on Isis targets.

Cameron is due to meet François Hollande in Paris on Monday to discuss the air campaign and identify the ground troops that might be needed to take and occupy ground in Syria currently held by Isis.

He will have been heartened by opinion shifting at Westminster. The Democratic Unionist party’s leadership at the weekend suggested it was likely to back war, boosting the Commons arithmetic in Cameron’s favour. Nigel Dodds, the DUP leader at Westminster, said in a speech: “We have always said we can back British military force, provided it is realistic and in the national interest. The scene is set for our action being just that.”

But the Conservative chair of the defence select committee Julian Lewis remains sceptical, saying on Saturday: “What we have here is a refusal by the government to recognise that this is a choice of the lesser of two evils. It is dangerous enough to intervene, to try to help one side in a civil war beat the other side in the civil war, but to try and intervene so that both sides will lose – that Assad will lose and that the Islamists will lose – that’s really asking for trouble.”

Inside Labour, the pressure to hold a free vote and avoid a damaging split on national security is intense. It is understood that key figures such as the shadow foreign secretary, Hilary Benn, are less likely to be swayed by the new UN resolution, but will instead be more influenced by whether Cameron comes up with a coherent plan to end the civil war and end Assad’s rule.

Thus far, airstrikes, particularly those executed by Russian aircraft, have merely served to embolden Assad and his troops. The Syrian president on Sunday claimed in an interview with Chinese television that his forces were advancing on almost all fronts thanks to Moscow’s aerial intervention. He also declared his readiness to engage in new dialogue with the opposition.

One Labour source said: “The issue for us is the responsibility to protect the Syrian people,” and added that key shadow cabinet figures remained sceptical that the Vienna peace process had made as much progress as suggested in creating a ceasefire, let alone how it would be enforced.

