Article in Morning Star, 21 December 2016, with Mike Phipps

WHAT is happening in Aleppo is a human rights calamity.

It’s impossible to watch the footage without wanting to do something, immediately. That leads some on the left to surprising positions.

Disrupting Jeremy Corbyn’s speech on December 10 did nothing to help civilians in Aleppo; it diverted attention from the important pledges he made on women and human rights. Equally, this newspaper was wrong to characterise President Bashar al-Assad/Vladimir Putin’s military assault as a “liberation.” Faced with brutal horrors, the West — both the left and the right — reaches too quickly for military solutions.

Jeremy Corbyn is right to continue to reject military intervention, and to call for “humanitarian assistance to Aleppo and other besieged areas and serious pressure to negotiate ceasefires across the conflict…