Hi, I'm Anouche. I'm Stephen. Alva's out reporting. On today's New Statesman podcast,

we discuss the House of Commons debate about Afghanistan and you ask us more questions

about the crisis.

So the House of Commons was recalled today to discuss the situation in Afghanistan, which

was literally the name of the motion, wasn't it?

Yeah, it was the House has considered the situation in Afghanistan, which is, you know,

for those of our listeners who aren't Commons procedure experts, or hello, and for those

of you who are, I apologise in advance for all the mistakes I'm about to make. The

government sets the wording of the motion, and a neutral motion can't be amended, which

means that you don't have to have, you know, a vote on it at the end. You avoid any kind

of difficulties within your own party. In any case, there are lots of things which you

can imagine an amended motion could have, obviously, the government would have won the

vote because they have a huge majority, but there were lots of things which would have

exposed the various saws within the conservatives over this issue. And then yeah, basically

that means MPs discuss it, it kind of ranges across the House. Now, some people have said

I will actually, as it was pointless, actually, while the level of openness to refugees

with saying is actually, you know, not as large as I would like, fairly derisory, and

I think also involves a bunch of quite a lot of magical thinking, both about our capacity

to rescue people, but also about the Home Office's willingness to actually in practice.

You know, it's one thing saying, yeah, we're going to prioritise women and girls' religious

minorities and sexual minorities, except, of course, we know that the Home Office has

a long history of being like, don't seem that campmate. Yeah. Yeah. Probably not LGBT.

...