Chilcot Inquiry and Parliamentary Accountability

Debate between Alex Salmond and Lord Austin of Dudley

Wednesday 30th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Alex Salmond]

I am aware that Dr Hans Blix asked for more time to complete the process of inspection and was denied that by the then Prime Minister and President of the United States of America.

[Ian Austin (Dudley North) (Lab)]

It was not just Hans Blix who thought that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Even countries that thought we should not go to war—Russia, France and Germany—thought Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, too. In fact, the only way Saddam Hussein was able to enslave the people of Iraq was by leading them to believe he had weapons of mass destruction.

[Alex Salmond]

And those countries the hon. Gentleman mentions voted against the war in Iraq for very good reasons.

Rather than speculate on that, thanks to the Chilcot report we now know what evidence the Prime Minister had at his disposal from the Joint Intelligence Committee, which on 15 March 2002 stated:

“Intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction…and ballistic missile programmes is sporadic and patchy… We continue to judge that Iraq has an offensive chemical warfare (CW) programme, although there is very little intelligence relating to it. From the evidence available to us, we believe Iraq retains some production equipment, and some small stocks of CW agent precursors, and may have hidden small quantities of agents and weapons… There is no intelligence on any BW agent production facilities.”

That highly qualified assessment from the Joint Intelligence Committee was presented to the House of Commons as a certainty that Iraq possessed weapons that were an immediate danger to the United Kingdom.

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[Ian Austin (Dudley North) (Lab)]

I start by paying tribute to everybody who served their country during the war in Iraq, and to those who tragically lost their lives. It was a pleasure to listen to the maiden speech by the hon. Member for Witney (Robert Courts) and to the speech by my right hon. Friend the Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw). I am afraid I cannot say the same about the speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn)—oh, he has gone—or the speech by the right hon. Member for Moray, neither of whom could find a word to say about Saddam Hussein; there was not a word about his use of chemical weapons against the Kurds, not a word about his brutal repression of his opponents and not a single word about his brutality. What a disgrace!

The right hon. Member for Moray was completely wrong when he blamed the conflagration in the middle east on the war in Iraq. The truth is that Libya was already in a brutal civil war before western air forces prevented Gaddafi from killing innocent people in Benghazi. Toppling Saddam did not fuel the rise of Isis or cause the conflict in Syria. As Martin Chulov, The Guardian’s middle east correspondent and expert author of a definitive study of ISIS, says:

“The Syrian civil war was not driven by Isis. It fed directly out of the Arab awakenings and was a bid to oust a ruthless regime from power.”

That is what started the conflagration in Syria, and for the right hon. Gentleman to blame it on Britain is completely wrong.

[Alex Salmond]

First, I am not the hon. Member for Moray. Secondly, I did not mention Libya in my speech; I think that the hon. Gentleman is confusing me with other people. Will he address the point about Sir John Chilcot’s clear statement that Tony Blair acted as an advocate in terms of the evidence for weapons of mass destruction, as opposed to giving the House the facts?

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[Ian Austin]

I apologise for getting the name of the right hon. Gentleman’s seat wrong. I have obviously not paid him the huge respect that his sense of self-satisfaction, to which we are all so frequently treated, deserves. I want to say—he has asked his question about three times—that it is perfectly in order for a Prime Minister to set out his case and to try to persuade people in this House and elsewhere that the course of action he is advocating is the right one.

I want to put this debate into context. Last week, we had the autumn statement, which is a disaster for working people in Scotland, and yesterday we learned that Scottish councils face a £553 million black hole. SNP Members do not want to debate any of that. They do not want to debate the educational attainment gap between the richest and the poorest that is growing in Scotland. They do not want to debate the fact that Scotland has the lowest percentage of university entrants from the poorest families. They do not want to debate any of that. They do not want to be held to account on their record. They do not want to discuss any of that. Despite all of that—all the problems faced by the people of Scotland, whom they are sent to this House to represent—they do not have a word to say about it. If we look at their recent Opposition day debates, we can see that they chose to debate this today, House of Lords reform in October and Trident last year, instead of the issues that people in Scotland worry about day in, day out—education, the health service, housing. They come here to score party political points, choosing motion after motion to divide the Labour party. That is what this is about—[Interruption.] That is what this is about, and they should be treated with the contempt—[Interruption.] Look at him laughing, as if Iraq was a subject for humour, as if it was a joke.

[Alex Salmond]

rose—

[Ian Austin]

Sit down! We’ve heard enough from you. Sit down! I want to say this: the Chilcot report—

Report of the Iraq Inquiry

Debate between Alex Salmond and Lord Austin of Dudley

Wednesday 13th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[Alex Salmond]

If the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe) had been able to give evidence to Chilcot, no doubt the report would have concluded otherwise. However, we now have the report as it has been concluded. I am not talking about individual pieces of evidence; I am talking about the conclusion of the Chilcot inquiry itself. This is why The Times was undoubtedly right to describe the events as “Blair’s private war”.

On the question of collective responsibility in this place, I fundamentally disagree with the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe on one point. If Parliament is to hold future Executives to account, it will not just be a question of changing the process of decision making, although I accept that some changes have been made. I do not accept the Foreign Secretary’s confidence that the mistakes could never be repeated, and I do not believe that his distinction between a land campaign in Iraq and an aerial bombardment in Libya fully explains why this country—never mind its allies—spent 13 times as much on bombing Libya as we spent on the budget for reconstruction in Libya. That might be a lesson that has not been carried forward. The changes that must be made relate not only to the process of government but to parliamentary accountability, the most fundamental aspect of which is Parliament deciding whether it has been misled.

[Ian Austin]

The fact is that Libya was already in a brutal civil war before western air forces prevented Gaddafi from slaughtering innocent people—women and children—in Benghazi. That was what was happening. The question that the right hon. Gentleman has to answer is what he would have done to help those women and children in Benghazi. [Interruption.]

[Alex Salmond]

As the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen) says from a sedentary position, I probably would not have supplied arms to people like that over a period of time. Not doing oil deals in a tent with Colonel Gaddafi might have been another thing.

[Ian Austin]

rose—

[Alex Salmond]

If the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I want to make my speech.

My point was about the lesson of reconstruction, not the argument for the conflict. It is fair to point out that this country spent 13 times as much bombing Libya as we did on the budget for the reconstruction of Libya. That might provide a lesson about the priority given to the aftermath of conflict, and I am unsure whether the Foreign Secretary has taken it fully on board.

This is about not just the process of government but parliamentary accountability—that is the most fundamental point of all. Parliament has held people to account in the relatively recent past—there was Profumo and the sex scandal, and if I remember correctly, Stephen Byers was accused of misleading Parliament because he nationalised a railway company. Those things were no doubt important, and that line of accountability is crucial, but how much more important is the line of accountability on peace or war, when hundreds of thousands of people lose their lives as a result of decisions made by the Executive?

My contention is that Chilcot provides a huge array of evidence for a lack of parliamentary truthfulness, in that one thing was being said to the President of the United States and quite a different thing was being said to Parliament and the people. That did not happen in just a single speech or parliamentary statement, although the immediate run-up to the war provides ample and detailed examples. For example, the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) referred to the total misrepresentation of the situation in the United Nations. How do we know that it was a misrepresentation? Because Chilcot has published what was being said within Government, and we can compare that directly with the explanation that Parliament was being offered. The process of Parliament being told one thing while George W. Bush was being assured of something else took place not over a few weeks but over 15 months—that is amply demonstrated in the evidence presented to Chilcot. We know now why Chilcot fought so strongly to have the private memos as part of the report.

The right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe rightly pointed to the motivation of regime change and the difficulty that regime change could not make the war legal in generally understood international terms. That is amply demonstrated in a private memo from Tony Blair to George Bush in December 2001, which states that

“any link to 11 September and AQ”—

al-Qaeda—

“is at best very tenuous; and at present international opinion would be reluctant, outside the US/UK, to support immediate military action though, for sure, people want to be rid of Saddam.

So we need a strategy for regime change that builds over time.”

At the same time, however, when pursuing the Prime Minister in the House, Charles Kennedy was being told that the “two phases” of war included the war in Afghanistan and the pursuit of

“international terrorism in all its different forms. That is a matter of investigating its financing, how terrorists move across frontiers”.—[Official Report, 14 November 2001; Vol. 374, c. 867-868.]

The House was being told that stage 2 of the war on terror was not an assault on Iraq—far less regime change in Iraq—but the pursuit of international terrorism. The two things are totally incompatible. One thing was being said to George Bush in private and another thing was being said to this Parliament and the people of the country.

Moving into 2002, there was something that was amply picked up by the press after Chilcot reported—the memo of 28 July to George Bush, stating:

“I will be with you, whatever.”

I heard the former Prime Minister explain that to John Humphrys on the “Today” programme by saying that of “whatever” meant somehow “wherever”, and that the memo did not give an unconditional commitment to stand with the United States in a war. I am not sure I fully understood that explanation, and crucially, nor did John Chilcot or Jack Straw, a crucial member of the Administration.

Jack Straw’s memos to Tony Blair have also been published. The report shows that on 11 March 2003 Straw wrote to Blair:

“When Bush graciously accepted your offer to be with him all the way, he wanted you alive, not dead!”

That referred not to the mortal danger to troops or civilians that would ensue from a war, but to whether the then Prime Minister would be alive or dead politically. Jack Straw was under no illusions whatever about the commitment that had been given to George Bush. Nor were Tony Blair’s own advisers, who advised him to take it out of the memo, or George Bush and his advisers, or Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Sir John Chilcot concludes, on the meaning of the memo:

“Mr Blair’s Note, which had not been discussed or agreed with his colleagues, set the UK on a path leading to diplomatic activity in the UN and the possibility of participation in military action in a way that would make it very difficult for the UK subsequently to withdraw its support for the US.”

But that was not what Parliament was being told at the same time. Parliament was not told of assurances to George W. Bush on military action. Parliament was told that the Prime Minister was striving for peace and trying to find any way to avoid a conflict, and that it was all up to Saddam to choose peace or conflict. That deliberate misrepresentation, in what was said to Parliament, of what was being said to the Americans continued into the very onset of war itself.

I want to refer to the memo that my hon. Friend the Member for Ochil and South Perthshire (Ms Ahmed-Sheikh) quoted earlier. When Blair was telling Parliament, even in his speech in the war-or-peace debate, that

“I have never put the justification for action as regime change”,—[Official Report, 18 March 2003; Vol. 401, c. 772.]

he was telling George Bush only a few days later:

“That’s why, though Iraq’s WMD is the immediate justification for action, ridding Iraq of Saddam is the real prize.”

We heard earlier that this was not a matter of one man. But that one man was the Prime Minister. We were told earlier that it was really about process of government, but it was the Prime Minister who dictated the process of government and indeed prevented government processes, meaning that checks and balances did not work. Above all, it was the Prime Minister who prevented this House from having the information it required to make a reasonable judgment.

Last week, I heard that one of the defences of intervention in Iraq was a counterfactual argument: what if Saddam Hussein had stayed in power? What would he have done? For example, what damage would he have done during the Arab spring? I have had another counterfactual argument in mind: what if the massive international coalition that was built to deal with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan had been held together? What if the hundreds of billions of dollars that were then to be wasted in the Iraqi desert had been applied to making a real success of the rebuilding of Afghanistan? What if the justification for a totally legal international intervention, which this country took part in, had resulted in a genuine benefit? What if that massive coalition, which extended even to approval from the Palestine Liberation Organisation, had been able to demonstrate that a legal war, correctly applied, could result in construction, reconstruction and allowing a country the investment required to be a shining light of a genuine international intervention?

The United States of America was, in a way, never stronger than in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. It was never more respected, because it had suffered a terrorist atrocity. What would have happened if an ever broader coalition had brought to fruition the situation that I have described, instead of this meandering into Iraq on a private vendetta of the President of the United States with his closet of neo-con advisers, aided and abetted by a British Prime Minister who subverted collective responsibility and prevented this Parliament from having the information that it required to hold the Government to account?

I once told the former Prime Minister that he would answer to a higher law than this Parliament, and I believe that to be absolutely true. In the meantime, this Parliament should hold him accountable at this stage, not because it is a matter of pursuing him but because it will demonstrate and illustrate that, even retrospectively, if a Parliament is systematically misled, it will say that up with it we shall not put. That is part of the changes that we should make not just in the processes of government, to impose collective responsibility, and not just in, I hope, learning the lessons of how to reconstruct a country, but, essentially, in parliamentary accountability. If we make those changes, we will be able to say legitimately that an Iraq could never happen again.

European Union Referendum Bill

Debate between Alex Salmond and Lord Austin of Dudley

Tuesday 9th June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Alex Salmond]

One wonders how long it took the hon. Gentleman, when he was lying in bed this morning, like the Prime Minister, working out how he would deploy that bon mot in the debate, to come up with that.

The hon. Gentleman mistakes me, incidentally. He should reflect on the speech that I made in this Chamber only last week. I am not one of those people who argues that the UK could not possibly be out of the European Union. In my speech last week, I warned against a parade of establishment figures talking down to people and saying, “You can’t do this. You can’t do that.” I am not one of the people who argues that case. The essence of my case for being in the European Union is a positive case about what Europe should be doing, not about what it should not be doing. I hope that at some point in this debate, we will get to the stage where what is said to be wrong with the European Union is not things like hard-working Polish people being able to repatriate their child benefit to Poland. There must be more to this country’s relationship with the rest of Europe than matters of such smallness.

I will move on to the essential nonsense of this referendum and why my party will oppose it in the Lobbies this evening. When someone proposes a referendum, it should be because they are proposing a significant constitutional change, whether it be the alternative vote, Scottish independence, Scottish devolution or Welsh devolution, and they are looking for democratic sanction—the sovereignty of the people—to back that change. That is not the position of the Prime Minister. Nobody seriously believes that he wants to take this country out of the European Union. The referendum is a tactic that is being deployed as a means of deflecting support from UKIP and as a sop to Back Benchers. Nobody believes that the Prime Minister wants to take the country out of the European Union.

The suspicion, which is already developing in this debate, is a result of that essential contradiction in the Government’s proposition. The suspicion is coming, incidentally, not just from the hardened Eurosceptics—or Europhobes, perhaps—from whom we have heard on the Government Benches, but even from the hon. Member for Reigate (Crispin Blunt) and the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve), who questioned why it looks as though the Government are trying to stack the deck in the referendum before the campaign has even begun. The questions about the campaign limits and the purdah period are coming not just from people who are opposed to the European Union, but from Members of great experience who are concerned that the Government are already moving to imbalance the referendum campaign.

Let me tell right hon. and hon. Members who do not share my view on Europe what exactly will happen if we go into the campaign and the polls start to close or perhaps the no side even moves ahead. We will find Sir Nicholas Macpherson parading things in front of Select Committees of this House; we will find civil servants compromising their impartiality; and we will find the Prime Minister suddenly making a promise, a commitment, a pledge or a vow, and saying that he has found some new policy initiative to turn the argument, in total defiance of any idea of a purdah period.

My advice—and it is free advice, honestly given—is that Members should lock things down in the Bill, otherwise all their worst fears will come into being. With great respect to the Foreign Secretary, they should not trust his bona fides in saying that he just wants a fair game and fair play. If we want to secure a proper and decent referendum and avoid the deck being stacked, we should lock it into the Bill through amendments.

We have detailed reasons for opposing the referendum in its current form. I say to the Labour party that I am surprised by its argument, “We lost an election, and we therefore have to change our policy”, as the acting Leader of the Opposition said just the other day. Does that apply to all the policies that Labour fought the election on, or just to the policy on the referendum?

[Ian Austin]

I have to say, the right hon. Gentleman is doing absolutely nothing to reduce the reputation for self-satisfied smugness that preceded him before he was re-elected.

I speak as someone who has believed for well over a decade that we should have a referendum on our membership of the EU. If it was right for the Scottish people to have the referendums they wanted on establishing the Scottish Parliament and on Scottish independence, why is it not right for the vast majority of people elsewhere in the UK to have the referendum that they definitely want on Britain’s membership of the EU? Why should the right hon. Gentleman’s party troop through the Lobby to try to prevent that? Why should he deny people in Dudley their say on this issue?

[Alex Salmond]

If it was two or three weeks ago that the hon. Gentleman was campaigning against the referendum, why is he suddenly in favour?

[Ian Austin]

I wasn’t.

[Alex Salmond]

On a manifesto of—

[Ian Austin]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker.