As you may well have seen, Syria has quite rightly dominated the agenda in Parliament recently. There are some key points to take away from what the PM has said:

- This was not an invasion, we are not at war, we are not getting invloved in the internal Syrian conflict. This was a targeted attack on strategic sites known to have been used to make or store chemical weapons, intended to prevent Assad being able to carry out similar attacks on his own people in future.

- This has not escalated the conflict and up to now there are no reports at all of civilian casualites. Contrary to one or two constituents who have compared this to Iraq (which I asked the PM to clarify directly below) we are not now stuck in Syria for the long term, we have literally fired 8 missiles from RAF jets. That is the sum total of our involvement.

- The international community is convinced beyond reasonable doubt that Assad, supported by Russia, is the only actor in this with the means and the reason to launch this chemical attack. She's laid out much of the evidence for this publicly, but some has to remain private to protect our intelligence people on the ground there.

- Whilst we all would prefer a diplomatic solution, the kind of approach that Jeremy Corbyn wants to take - getting UN approval - would require Russia's approval too and they have consistently vetoed any such decision. We cannot give Russia a veto over our foreign policy, and in the absence of a diplomatic answer we had to take decisive action.

I fully support the decision the PM and Cabinet took to protect innocent people, amongst them many children, from further attacks by chemical weapons.

As I said I raised the main concern that I have heard from constituents this weekend directly with the PM during the debate, about the comparison between this action and historical military action in Iraq and Afghanistan. Whilst I have been very clear in my own responses that this comparison is not correct, I wanted to give those constituents the chance to hear it direct from the PM. This was her response:

16-4-18

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