Iraq Inquiry

Baroness Morgan of Huyton Excerpts

Tuesday 12th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morgan of Huyton (Lab)]

My Lords, like others I have still not had the opportunity to read the whole report and have relied to a large extent on the executive summary. I suspect that over the coming weeks and months new insights will emerge that will be useful to us all. However, let us try today to draw the right conclusions and lessons from the Chilcot inquiry. That means we should not regurgitate the oft-repeated theories that some will never drop, no matter how many inquiries are held. I have been particularly distressed by some of the media coverage that we saw in the past week, which was deeply inappropriate and irresponsible.

The inquiry was set up to examine what happened in the run-up to, during and after the conflict, and to learn lessons. The report finds, first, that there was no falsification of intelligence. I quote, so that it is clear:

“There is no evidence that intelligence was improperly included in the dossier or that No. 10 improperly influenced the text”.

That comes from paragraphs 533 and 807. It also says:

“The inquiry is not questioning Mr Blair’s belief, which he consistently reiterated in his evidence to the inquiry, or his legitimate role in advocating government policy”.

The reality is:

“The JIC accepted ownership of the dossier and agreed its content”.

Further, members of the then Cabinet and senior parliamentarians across the House of Commons—including the then leader of the Opposition and shadow Ministers—had regular briefings on the intelligence available at that time. That the intelligence was wrong is not in doubt. What do not stand up are the stories about political misuse of the intelligence.

Secondly, there was no deception of the Cabinet. The advice of the then Attorney-General to the Cabinet is well known. The majority of the Cabinet took the position that the role of the Attorney-General on 17 March was simply to tell the Cabinet whether there was a legal basis for military action, as it says in paragraph 950. That is what he did, and he was open to questioning on his advice. The report makes it clear that there was no so-called side deal. We should also be clear that the then Attorney-General, my noble and learned friend Lord Goldsmith, made it clear again last week that he believed at the time, and still does, that his legal advice was right.

I am not suggesting for a moment that the processes involved up to and after the military action could not have been much better—that would be foolish. I am simply stating for the record what the report finds in two key areas where mistruths continue to be repeated. Sir John of course makes strong, valid and important criticisms of the process of decision-making. The report understood that the nature of foreign policy requires the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary and officials to be negotiating policy almost hour by hour, and that the nature of the so-called sofa government in this period involved what the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, described as “a professional forum” with, broadly,

“the right people in the room”—

that is, Secretaries of State, the Chief of the Defence Staff and, as appropriate, intelligence chiefs, not a cosy cabal. The full Cabinet discussed Iraq many times too, of course.

That said, the report’s view that there should have been a Cabinet committee and should be in future, receiving all appropriate papers and having all decisions properly minuted, is obviously right. Similarly, the view that the Attorney-General’s advice should have been tabled in full is also sensible. My only pushback is this: we must not delude ourselves collectively that better processes, while right, will ever make such decisions easy, or even that different decisions would necessarily get taken. The Prime Minister, in a considered and thoughtful Statement in the other place last week, described the sensible changes that have been introduced, including the introduction of the National Security Council. He was, however, also honest enough to recognise that the changes had not made either decision-making or outcomes in Libya and Syria either easy or necessarily successful. There is not some magic box that can be pulled down from the shelf. In the end, decisions about military interventions made by military leaders are tough. There is no more difficult decision for a Prime Minister to take than the one that commits troops.

The other lesson that I sincerely hope we do not learn collectively is that intervention is too difficult and should just be avoided if at all possible—that we should step back from international involvements and look the other way. We know that there are serious consequences when we do not intervene. Think of the ethnic massacres in Rwanda, where over 1 million people died. Failure to act quickly enough in Bosnia led to more than 100,000 dead and the catastrophes that we know about too well. The humanitarian disaster in Syria has led to many millions of refugees and displaced persons, starvation, deaths and panic throughout Europe about migration. Think too about the positive effects of intervention in Kosovo, without UN authorisation as it would have been vetoed, and in Sierra Leone. Both actions are widely supported, but of course may not have been if the outcomes had been less successful.

It is important to move on from recriminations and learn the right lessons about process and decision- making in government, proper preparations and detailed planning. Do not let us decide that the only way through in future is to avoid our responsibility when we see humanitarian disasters or dictators terrorising their peoples. Intervention is not always wrong, but we have to try to do better.