UK holds Cobra meeting on Paris attacks
Britain will hold a government crisis meeting on Sunday chaired by Home Secretary Theresa May to assess the response after attacks in Paris killed above 120 people, a government source said.
"The Home Secretary [Theresa May] will chair a Cobra Sunday on the Paris attacks and the government's response," Reuters has quoted the unnamed source as saying.
Prime Minister David Cameron had chaired an initial Cobra meeting on the attacks earlier on Saturday, saying afterwards Britain would stick with its existing threat level of 'severe'.
Meanwhile, Secretary May has been quoted by the media as having played down the prospect of an early parliamentary vote on military action against the ISIL terrorists in Syria, saying the government would only seek a House of Commons vote “if there is a consensus to move forward,” the Financial Times reported.
This effectively places the decision in the hands of the Labour party, whose leader Jeremy Corbyn has long been opposed to British military interventions in the Middle East, the FT report added.
Shadow justice secretary Lord Falconer — who was in Tony Blair’s cabinet when the 7/7 bombings hit London in 2005 — said the British government needed to seek “a plan that covers the whole of the Middle East and addresses Syria” but this “cannot be done without a major international effort that needs to be thought-out in a way that convinces the people of Britain”.
“It is really important we seek some degree of unity on this,” he said. “We have got to work together as a nation.”
Labour will consider a new Syria vote if the government has a comprehensive plan, shadow foreign secretary Hilary Benn said.
Benn told Sky News that it was not possible “to defeat ISIL in Syria just by dropping bombs”.
The international community needed to first seek a peaceful solution to the civil war in Syria, which was creating a “vacuum” in which ISIL was “thriving”, he argued.
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