Shailesh Vara MP: How can we justify helping the Libyans but not the Syrians?

Shailesh Vara is the Member of Parliament for North West Cambridgeshire.

After Iraq and the continuing struggle in Afghanistan, scepticism about intervention in foreign crises may appear on the surface to be the wise approach. It is obvious that there are no easy answers, and no easy options, for Britain in its efforts to help bring the Syrian nightmare engulfing the Syrian people to an end.

Helping the moderate rebels to defend themselves would be fraught with difficulty, but that doesn’t mean Britain should simply turn away and be prepared to leave the Syrian rebels and their supporters to be slaughtered by the Assad regime forces, Hezbollah and their backers. 

The Prime Minister has arguably not received the credit he deserves for his leadership on the world stage in preventing a massacre of the Libyan opposition in Benghazi, eventually leading to the overthrow of the odious Gadaffi regime.

As Conservatives, we should be proud of this Government’s achievements in helping the Libyan people gain a chance at freedom. Although the Syrian case is far more complex and difficult, it would be hard to justify our intervention and support for the Libyan people, while doing absolutely nothing meaningful to help ordinary Syrians. 

The public certainly has its concerns, but allowing tyrants who use chemical weapons on their countrymen to prosper is not the British way, and we should be proud of that. Nor is it in our national interest either to allow Assad and his backers to regain their grip (with so far 93,00 dead), or allow the appalling civil war to spiral further downwards into destruction and barbarism.  

Lord Popat and Shailesh Vara: Britain found a home for Ugandan Asians

By Lord Popat of Harrow and Shailesh Vara Member of Parliament for Northwest Cambridgeshire.

On 4th August 1972 Idi Amin, the Ugandan President who had seized power in a coup just over a year earlier, announced that he had had a dream, in which God had told him to expel the Asian. Amin issued a decree ordering almost all Asians in Uganda - some 60,000 of them - to leave.

This brutal eviction saw people forced to leave behind their homes, businesses, land, bank accounts, temples; everything but the clothes on their back, their family and the spirit that had allowed them to flourish in Uganda and elsewhere.

The expulsion led to a global game of political football. Kenya closed its borders to these people. During Independence Ugandan Asians had been given British protected passports and now India made clear the 60,000 were Britain's responsibility.

Conservative Prime Minister, Edward Heath and his Government rose to the occasion and demonstrated the compassion that we have come to associate with Britain. He ruled that Britain had a legal and moral responsibility to take in those with British passports. In many homes of Ugandan Asians across Britain today, pictures of Ted Heath still hang proudly.

Shailesh Vara MP: Only a Conservative Government will give each Englishman the right to defend the castle that is his home

Shailesh Vara MP is Shadow Deputy Leader of the House of Commons.

David Cameron is right again to have raised the issue of householders’ rights to defend themselves when confronted by intruders.  It is a debate that has been going on for many years.  In 2007 I tried to introduce a Private Member’s Bill, with cross-party support, to clarify the law and provide greater protection for decent and ordinary citizens against intruders. 

The Government did not allow the Bill to progress.  The Government also blocked similar Bills in previous years from my Parliamentary colleagues Roger Gale, Patrick Mercer and Ann McIntosh.  And the Government hasn’t changed its mind since.

This is unfinished business and it will take a Conservative government to deliver on it.

The present test of a householder using “reasonable” force is difficult to define and not easy to enforce. That is why a higher test is required, one of being allowed to use force as long as it is not “grossly disproportionate”. Such a change in the law will not only benefit the general public but also the police and the Crown Prosecution Service, as it will provide them with much clearer guidelines with which to operate.  The only people the law will not benefit are the criminals who break it in the first place.

Shailesh Vara MP: The modern slave trade – human trafficking

Shailesh Vara MP is Shadow Deputy Leader of the House and Joint Vice-Chairman of the All Party Group on Trafficking of Women and Children.

Two-hundred years have passed since Parliament formally outlawed slavery, but for the thousands of victims of modern-day human trafficking, many of whom come to this country every year, slavery is anything but a thing of the past.

Today’s various forms of slavery are increasingly covert and deceptive than the Transatlantic Slave Trade ever was, and their effects are equally horrendous. Men, women and children are smuggled across borders for exploitation of all types – sexual servitude, crime, forced labour and even the removal of organs for illegal sale. Once detained, victims have few options and are often held through practices such as debt bondage, violence, kidnapping, and false promises of paid labour. Victims are kept silent with threats against them as well as to their families back home. With nowhere else to turn, they painfully endure the tragic consequences of a trade that, until recently, has often been overlooked by the authorities in this and other countries.

Of the thousands who fall victim to the horrors of modern day slavery, children are the most defenceless. Children as young as six are brought into Britain in their hundreds every year to be used as slave labour or as victims of paedophile rings. Sometimes they have been sold by their own parents and at other times they have been kidnapped. When they outlive their usefulness, they are discarded and left to fend for themselves. Currently there is no national mechanism for the identification and protection of these children. Instead, most are dealt with under the immigration system after being considered as children seeking asylum.