Military Action Overseas: Parliamentary Approval

Heidi Alexander Excerpts

Tuesday 17th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[Heidi Alexander (Lewisham East) (Lab)]

This debate today, about how we take decisions on UK military action, is an important one. The Prime Minister’s decision to commit British service personnel to involvement in limited airstrikes against Syrian targets last week has generated strong feelings on both sides.

I have mixed views on the rights and wrongs of that action, and I do not know how I would have voted had the decision been presented to Parliament, but this debate is not about that. It is about the process by which decisions of this nature are taken and the right of the Government, the Executive, to retain flexibility to act without recourse to Parliament. I think the Executive should have that right, and had I been in the Prime Minister’s shoes last week, it is likely that I would have chosen a similar course.

There is an erratic President in the White House upon whom we wish to exercise influence, a UN Security Council rendered powerless by the Russian veto, a hung Parliament and the reuse of chemical weapons in a country that was supposed to have eradicated its stockpile five years ago. I do not have access to the intelligence that the Prime Minister does, but I recognise that the context in which she was acting could not have been more complex.

This debate, though, is not about the specifics of the past week; it is about the nature of the decision-making processes in future and whether we should constrain the hand of government.

[Stephen Doughty (Cardiff South and Penarth) (Lab/Co-op)]

My hon. Friend is making some strong points. I believe the Prime Minister should have come here last week and we should have had that debate on whatever the rights and wrongs of this were. Does my hon. Friend share my concern that not only would a very fixed war powers Act be difficult to achieve in debate, because of the wide range of views, as we have seen in this debate, but that in the one example where such an Act does exist, the United States, it has never, as far as I know, been used to prosecute a President and many actions have been taken beyond the 60-day limit? Even in practice these things do not operate in the way it is claimed.

[Heidi Alexander]

I have great sympathy with what my hon. Friend has said.

Much has been said in recent years about the Syria votes that happened in this place in 2013. Something that is often forgotten is that the two votes that took place on that night five years ago were about two different decision-making processes. One, the Labour motion, was a more rigorous process; the Government motion was less defined. Had either of those motions passed, there would have been another vote—a substantive vote on the question of military involvement—the following week. That vote never happened because the then Prime Minister decided he could not risk it.

I remember the build-up to that vote—I felt sick. I knew I was elected to this place to be part of these decisions, but the responsibility, even as a junior member of the Opposition Whips Office, weighed heavy upon me. The truth is that I spent 48 hours on Google, trying to locate reliable sources in order to educate myself, when I felt I should have been studying it for two years and not two days. What factions were fighting whom and where? What was the objective? What did the responsibility to protect in international humanitarian law mean, and how could one judge the legitimacy of any action? I envied the moral certitude with which some colleagues spoke. It felt enormous and it was.

I do not regret the decisions I took that night; had the outcome of the vote been different it is likely that many thousands of people would still have died as they have done in Syria since—different weapons, different culpability. Nor do I regret the decision to vote for airstrikes against ISIS targets in December 2015. In fact, I am proud of that—different proposals, different decisions. I believe that different circumstances will sometimes require different decision-making processes.

If we are to change the way in which we make decisions about military action in this country, let us do it with cool heads. Let us not start the debate when it will only be seen through the prism of last week’s action. Our attention this week should be on the children of Douma, not the consciences of Westminster MPs. We owe it to those children to come up with real solutions for their country, which has been torn to shreds. Internal retrospection on our part, however well-meaning, will not help them.