The Hemel Hempstead MP – who has said that Labour MPs who voted against proscribing Palestine Action should be chucked out of his party – is unapologetically combative in taking on the far-left.
“If we’d taken that decisive action when Corbyn and Abbott and McDonnell had voted against proscribing Al-Qaeda way back in 2001 then, 15 years later, they wouldn't be in a position to ruin our party. And ruin they did. Because of their blinkered views on foreign policy, we were not trusted on national security. That's not secret, obviously, and we've had to do so much work to restore our reputation.
“I've always been of the view that we should robustly take on these people because … they never gave any agency to the people affected by these countries,” he said, referencing an incident where Diane Abbott chaired a meeting of Stop the War coalition opposing any Western intervention in Syria, but which apparently did not feature any Syrian voices.
He is scathing of the seeming double standards some on the left, who refrain from criticising atrocities committed by dictatorial regimes but are perfectly happy to criticise the shortcomings of western nations.
“It's the stop some wars coalition, isn't it?
“They talk about other people having blood on their hands. Well, they, when Corbyn was opposition leader, did absolutely nothing to call for any kind of no-fly zone, any kind of intervention that would have stopped half a million people dying in Syria,” he said.
He referenced a 2012 Guardian column by Seumas Milne – who Corbyn would later appoint as his head of communications – which seemingly downplayed the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime in Syria.
“For me, that's just deeply, deeply hypocritical, and I've never forgiven them for that, and I never will”, Taylor added.
It wasn’t just governmental inaction against Assad in Syria back in the 2010s and the failure to adequately protect civilians subject to the Syrian dictator’s brutality that frustrated Taylor, it was the response of the aid and charity sector.
Inspired by the work of murdered Labour MP Jo Cox, LCID pushed for “RTP – the ‘responsibility to protect civilians’.
“I just felt frustrated that the sector as a whole was not speaking out and calling for action in Syria and calling for some sort of no-fly zone in the way that Jo had been doing,” he added.
“We were doing some great advocacy on Yemen and rightly calling for the UK to suspend its weapons ourselves to Saudi Arabia because of the way they were being used in that conflict. At that time, we were completely absent when it came to Syria and worse, we seem to be stopping others in the sector or limiting them speaking out.”
David Taylor MP displaying the new Syrian flag in Parliament, surrounded by Syrian activists (Image: X).[Missing Credit]
He is critical of a similar groupthink when it comes to the war in Gaza. Although he stresses that he agrees with how the government have approached the conflict and is critical of Israel’s government: “The aid does need to get in, and I think the Netanyahu government does need to do more to facilitate that”, he thinks there hasn’t been “enough condemnation of what Hamas has been doing” from aid organisations.
The JC has previously reported Hamas operating command centres inside schools and Emily Damari, the British-Israeli taken hostage by Hamas and held hostage for 471 days, has said that she was kept in facilities belonging to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa) and denied access to medical treatment.
Challenged about why so much parliamentary time is devoted to the conflict in Gaza – something the UK has no direct control over – Taylor countered that MPs were reflecting the concerns of those who voted for them. Including sizeable sections of the British Muslim community.
To his mind though, there was a distinction between his colleagues reflecting the concerns of their constituents to the more inflammatory language used by a handful of MPs.
However, he acknowledged that more needed to be done to raise awareness of the death and disaster facing civilians in other parts of the world that do not receive as much media coverage, or parliamentary time: “I think there's a wider debate to be had – and I honestly don't have the answer about this – about how we how we engage on this but also engage with the public around a whole range of other issues, many of which, of course, do affect Muslim people I mean, there's a lot of Muslim people in Sudan, a lot of Muslim people in Syria, lot Muslim people in Myanmar.”
For his part, during his time in LCID, the organisation helped facilitate speakers from Syria going to local constituency Labour parties and sharing their stories and speaking in opposition to the Assad regime.
“I remember thinking … I hope these people aren't going to get shouted at by some of the people that were in the Labour Party … but that never happened once. There were quite positive conversations. So you’ve got to engage. And that's what we haven't done, and that includes me, right? I think I can say the robust things on Twitter, but we've got to do more of a job, to bring people with us.”
To his mind, the fact that, despite the attention to the conflict in Gaza from Labour MPs, the government still proscribed Palestine Action was an illustration of their more balanced approach: “There are legitimate forms of protest. It's not that hard to start stay on the right side of the line on this, but we've got to kind of push people towards it.”
The interview with Taylor took place prior to the recent outbreak of violence in Southern Syria, but the 40-year-old former staffer to Gordon Brown – a staunch critic of the former government of President Assad – backed the government’s policy of critical engagement with the new government of Ahmed al-Sharaa, the former Al-Qaeda militant who is now president of Syria.
“Make clear the demands for an inclusive future and a new constitution and fresh elections. That's the thing that we've got to keep pushing them on,” Taylor said.
David Taylor MP with Syrian activists (Image: X)[Missing Credit]
“We've got to be careful. We know this guy's background. We've just got to keep pressing him.”
One optimistic note Taylor shared was that Raed al-Saleh, the former head of the White Helmets – a volunteer organisation that evacuated civilians from the aftermath of bombings – had been appointed as minister for emergency and disaster management in Sharaa’s government.
“There is an effort to make that government a bit more inclusive and not just be centred around him [Sharaa] and his relatives.”
