Iraq Inquiry

Debate between Jack Straw and Paul Flynn

Thursday 29th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Straw]

With great respect, it was not. I have looked at the precedents. There can be inquiries in the middle of wars. I have looked, as it happens, at the precedents of the Dardanelles and the Crimea. A contemporaneous report of the conclusions of the report on the Crimea, which were read out to the House by the Clerk for one hour and 25 minutes, spells out that the difficulty of the task

“has been materially enhanced by the impossibility of summoning some persons by considerations…of State policy”,

and the committee admits that

“they have been unable satisfactorily to complete”

the inquiry.

The Franks inquiry was the subject of huge controversy at the time. I was in the House. Yes, it did report in six months, but it was a committee of Privy Counsellors, four of the six were former Labour and Conservative Cabinet Ministers, and one had been the former permanent secretary at the Ministry of Defence. Some said that they were parti pris. They took all their evidence in secret and, as far as I know, they published no documents to be declassified. It can be done in that way, but it is not acceptable these days.

There were many debates about a meaningful inquiry, for example the one in October 2006. At the time it was said,

“important operations are under way in Iraq. Major political decisions…and efforts to contain the insurgency appear to be in the balance…Any inquiry should be able to examine what happens in the coming months…as well as the events of recent years. To begin an inquiry now would therefore be premature.”—[Official Report, 31 October 2006; Vol. 451, c. 183.]

Those powerful words were the argument that we were advancing. What is interesting is that they were not offered by a Minister, but from the Opposition Front Bench by the right hon. Member for Richmond (Yorks) (Mr Hague).

I do not envy members of the inquiry the burden they have had to face. The unanticipated delays in the inquiry’s progress now make for additional pressures on the inquiry members themselves. In particular, as the months go past, wholly unfounded suspicions fall on the inquiry about a whitewash, and there is an equal and opposite concern that they may feel obliged to respond to these pressures by conclusions more starkly drawn than the evidence would allow.

[Paul Flynn]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Mr Straw]

I am just coming to the end.

Everyone bears a heavy responsibility for ensuring that the inquiry is not put in a position where it becomes impossible to conduct a fair process and reach a fair and independent conclusion. As the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden importantly noted outside the House on 14 January:

“The purpose of the inquiry is not vilification or vindication—it is to learn lessons.”

That is the path all of us wish the inquiry to follow, and I hope, as we all do, that it can be published as quickly as possible.

--- Later in debate ---

[Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)]

It is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Broadland (Mr Simpson), but I disagree with him on the idea that we see the events of 2003 as history. We see them under the cold light of eternity. They are not a matter of history for the loved ones of the 179 of our brave soldiers who fell. They still suffer a living wound that will never heal. I would like to repeat a speech I made in 2009 when I was sitting where the hon. Gentleman is sitting now. I am not allowed to repeat that speech, but not a word of it would change. The speech consisted of 10 minutes of reading out the names of all the British soldiers who died. I believe that that is a far more effective way of making the point that, as the result of a decision taken here in this House by many of us, those young people lost their lives.

An American-British enterprise was not inevitable. We need not have been involved. The Americans were going in anyway and we had the choice to stay out, as Harold Wilson did many years ago. The main reason I am offering myself to my electorate in a few months’ time is because of this. I want to see the end of this and I want to see us get to the nub of the terrible mistake we made. It is to do with the role of Prime Ministers and their relationship with Back Benchers in this House.

Something happens to Prime Ministers when the war drums start to beat. They talk in a different way. They drag out the old Churchillian rhetoric. The rolling phrases come out. They walk in a different way—they strut like Napoleon—and they are overwhelmed by hubris. No longer are they dealing with the boring detail of day-to-day operations; they are writing their own page in history. Usually, it is a bloody page in history.

We do not need an inquiry into the whole Afghanistan enterprise, on which there was general agreement, but we certainly need one into why we went into Helmand when only half a dozen British soldiers had been killed in combat. We went in with a belief that not a shot would be fired and we would be out in three years, but 453 deaths followed. That is what we need an inquiry into.

There has been a profound change in this House. It happened on 29 August 2013, when the Prime Minister came here to encourage us—I believe, with a certain complicity with other party leaders—to go into Syria to attack Assad, who was the deadly enemy of ISIS. Now we are attacking ISIS, which is the deadly enemy of Assad. How on earth could we have been persuaded to be dragged into the middle of that conflict, which is ancient, deep and incomprehensible to us? Thank goodness the good sense and pooled wisdom of 650 MPs, informed by the terrible tragedies of Iraq and Afghanistan, persuaded this House not to follow the prime ministerial instinct for war. That will change this House for a long time.

Along with others, I believe there is nothing political about this in any way. Those of us who remember the vote, which was the most serious vote we ever took, remember the imprecations of the Front Benchers. One hundred and thirty-nine Labour MPs voted not to go to war, against the strongest three-line Whip of my time here, but 50 others, who were very doubtful, were bamboozled, bribed and bullied into the wrong Lobby or into abstaining—and nearly all of them bitterly regret it now. It was a misuse of the organs of this House. Virtually every Committee that looked into it—those that are supposed to know better, such as the Intelligence and Security Committee, the Defence Committee, the Foreign Affairs Committee—were all cheerleaders for the war. And where were the Opposition? There is nothing political here. The then Leader of the Opposition was more gung-ho for war than Tony Blair. Only half a dozen hon. Members on the Conservative side voted against the war, and to their great credit, of course, the Liberal Democrats and Plaid Cymru voted the same way.

We are being denied the truth. I find it astonishing that the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) does not agree there were no weapons of mass destruction. It is amazing if he still believes there was an imminent threat to British territory. I have a document—I have no time to go into its detail—referenced by Tony Blair as evidence of the existence of weapons of mass destruction and the threat posed. It concerns a meeting on 22 August 1995 at which the principal person giving evidence was a General Hussein Kamal. For goodness’ sake, read the document!

[Mr Straw]

I dealt only briefly with the intervention from the hon. Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron) because this debate is about the Iraq inquiry and its timing, not about the substance, and I would have been slapped down very quickly. For the avoidance of doubt, however, the whole Security Council judged in November 2002 that there was a threat to international peace and security from Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.

Syria and the Use of Chemical Weapons

Debate between Jack Straw and Paul Flynn

Thursday 29th August 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Straw]

We can debate the Iraq inquiries at another date, and I am sure that we shall do so. I accept my responsibilities fully for what happened in respect of Iraq. I have sought, both before the Iraq inquiry and elsewhere, to explain why I came to my conclusion. I simply make the point, which is widely shared across the House, that one of the consequences of the intelligence failure on Iraq has been to raise the bar that we have to get over when the question of military action arises.

[Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)]

The House was told that there were weapons of mass destruction that posed a threat to the United Kingdom, and we were also told, in 2006, that we were going into Helmand province in the hope that not a shot would be fired. Does my right hon. Friend acknowledge that the result of accepting those decisions has been the deaths of 623 of our brave soldiers? Does he not realise that those are the reasons that the public no longer trust Government assurances about going to war?

[Mr Straw]

With respect to my hon. Friend, the arguments about Afghanistan, then and now, are very different. There will be other occasions to debate that matter.

Even if there is compelling evidence on culpability, the bigger question arises of the strategic objective of any military action and its likely consequences. The Prime Minister has accepted that such strikes would not significantly degrade the chemical weapons capability of the Assad regime. We need to be clear about that. The right hon. and learned Member for Kensington (Sir Malcolm Rifkind) spoke about trying to take that capability down. However, if the first set of strikes failed to do that—the Prime Minister seemed to accept that they would be more by way of punishment and deterrence, rather than a degrading of the capability—what would happen after that? We all know—I bear the scars of this—how easy it is to get into military action, but how difficult it is to get out of it.

There is also the issue of precisely what the objective of the action is. The case seems to veer between the alleviation of human suffering and some sort of warning for or punishment of the Assad regime. If the Prime Minister comes back to the House to recommend military action, he must be clear about precisely what the purposes are.

This morning, we woke up to hear the President of the United States, Barack Obama, saying that by acting in

“a clear and decisive but very limited way, we send a shot across”

Assad’s bow. Let us pause and consider the metaphor that was chosen by the President, because it is revealing. A shot across the bow is a warning that causes no damage and no casualties—shells fired over the bridge of a naval vessel. In this case, it might be a Tomahawk missile that is targeted to fly over Damascus and land in the unoccupied deserts beyond. That cannot be what the President has in mind. We need to know what he really has in mind and what the consequences of that will be. There will be casualties from any military action—some military and almost certainly many civilian.

I have one last point to put to the Prime Minister. He sought to draw a distinction in his speech between our response to war crimes and taking sides in the conflict. However much he struggles to make that distinction, let us be clear that if we take an active part in military action, which I do not rule out, we shall be taking sides. There is no escape from that. We shall be joining with the rebels, with all the consequences that arise from that, and not maintaining a position of neutrality.

Iran

Debate between Jack Straw and Paul Flynn

Monday 20th February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Straw]

I have had a serious problem in my right ear since 1981, and I can tell the hon. Gentleman that there is a very good consultant just across the river at St Thomas’s, on the NHS. I have been treated there for 30 years. I think it was within the hearing of the House and Hansard when, within about my first two sentences, I spelled out that I would support the amendment moved by the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington. I apologise if it did not quite get as far as the bubble in which the hon. Gentleman sits.

[Paul Flynn]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that the current situation is very similar to the prelude to the war in Iraq? Does he really think that going to war on the basis of what proved to be non-existent weapons of mass destruction was worth the loss of 179 British lives?

[Mr Straw]

The two are very different, and in any case I have already said that I do not regard us as being remotely close to the bar for military action at present. It is important that Members, particularly those who support the amendment, are cautious and do not get themselves into a lather, as some but not all did in respect of Iraq and other issues. It is very important to acknowledge the evidence.

If the House refers to paragraph 53 of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s report of November, it will see that it states:

“The Agency has serious concerns regarding possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear programme.”

However, it continues that information

“indicates that prior to the end of 2003, these activities took place under a structured programme, and that some activities may still be ongoing.”

The truth is that—until recently, we think—the major part of the programme stopped in 2003. It is my judgment, but no more than conjecture, that Iran’s aim has been to build up a nuclear weapons capability on paper, but not to turn it into a nuclear weapons programme. With respect to the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington, there is a big difference between the two.

Finally, I urge caution. I hope that we hear less of the suggestion that were Iran to get a nuclear weapons capability, there would automatically be an arms race in the middle east. I do not believe that. A senior Saudi diplomat said to me, “I know what we’re saying publicly, but do you really think that having told people that there is no need for us to make any direct response to Israel holding nuclear weapons, we could seriously make a case for developing a nuclear weapons capability to deal with another Muslim country?”

This is a complicated issue, and we need a resolution to it. We need to ensure that the Foreign Secretary does not go into negotiations without options open to him, but I also believe that with sensible negotiations, and working with the United States, Europe and other allies, we can ensure that there is a peaceful solution.

United Kingdom Statistics Authority

Debate between Jack Straw and Paul Flynn

Tuesday 13th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)]

This appointment is a major development in our parliamentary procedures. This is the first time that the pre-appointment hearings made a significant difference and had an influence in changing the candidate. The pre-appointment hearings came out of an investigation in the previous Parliament by the Public Administration Committee, which went to America and recommended that certain senior appointments should be subject to the procedure. We have heard the explanation given by the Chair of how the decision arising from the interview with the first candidate resulted in a second candidate coming along and how a member of the Committee was appointed to the panel that took part in the process. These are important changes that reinforce the view that this is a useful way of proceeding. The House has behaved in a responsible manner in this process.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) referred to the forces of darkness and the queen bee jelly that takes over Governments. Some of us can rejoice in being the forces of light who were against the previous scheme and against our own Government, and are still against it and against the new Government. So often when Governments change, it is not a change of philosophy, but an exchange of scripts. Of course Governments neurotically want to hoard their secrets for as long as possible. It seems extraordinary that it was only in 2007 that the arguments were exactly reversed—when I was sitting on the Government Benches arguing with my own Government, the Tory Opposition were saying that this was the big weakness in the Bill that went through. Now they flip over without a blush.

There was a time when I recall accusing Mr Alan Clark of supervising the largest and most shameless massage parlour in London, which was the Department of Employment, in his use of employment statistics. There was some truth in that. I had an exchange of letters with Margaret Thatcher in 1989, when a group of statisticians came to see me. They were distressed because the responsibility for statistics was being moved from the Cabinet Office to the Treasury, and they rightly said, “This is our life’s work. That will reduce these pristine, glorious statistics, wonderful graphs and histograms to garbage by politicians on the make.” They suggested that the Treasury was the Department with the greatest vested interest in fiddling the statistics and damaging the result of their work. Their whole professional raison d’être was diminished by that.

Mrs Thatcher sent me a letter in which she expressed her deep shock that anyone should express the unworthy idea that her Department would want to fiddle statistics in any way. We do not feel quite that way now. There has been a move forward. I mentioned the distressing episode involving the Mayor of London. It goes to show that the advance has not been complete—not all Departments have changed their mind.

The Mayor of London was rightly criticised by Sir Michael Scholar, and we have all praised him for the way in which he did that. Sir Michael has done very well. He challenged the Home Department with great courage. He challenged the previous Government and he has challenged Departments now. He did the job that he was set to do, but when he attacked the Mayor of London, the Mayor’s reaction was not to say, “All right, I got it wrong. I’ll change the statistics”.—no humility from Boris, of course. Instead, he called him a Labour stooge. It was an outrageous thing to say, given his lifetime of independence. Michael Scholar, as all today’s contributors have said, has done a splendid job of establishing that independence, and it is what we see in Dilnot.

There are still a few old lags in the House from the passage in 2007 of the Statistics and Registration Service Bill, which went through with hardly a flicker of interest; this is a crowded House compared with the number of people who attended back then. There was only one tiny piece of interest in the press, too, but it was an article that I repeated ad nauseum to the House at the time, because it stated that it was the most important Bill of the Labour Government—we had been in power for 10 years—and would have a bigger effect than anything we had done, including handing over power and independence to the Bank of England. The article was written by a certain Andrew Dilnot, and his entire career has rightly been in that area—suggesting that statistics need to be independent.

In the Public Administration Committee, we all saw Dilnot’s boyish enthusiasm for statistics. He talks about them as “Statistics”—these wonderful things, which are the key to all happiness and the path to knowledge and wisdom—

[Mr Straw]

And employment in your constituency!

[Paul Flynn]

Indeed. I will turn to that point now.

I do have a slight vested interest in the matter, because the largest employer in my constituency happens to be the Office for National Statistics, and that is why I like to deal with the cynicism that occasionally crops up about the well-being statistics. They might have cost £2 million, but they have certainly added to my sense of well-being, because they provide work in my constituency, and we should not be cynical about them. In the past we measured happiness, success and politics on the basis of gross domestic product, but that is not a sensible thing to do, because, when the nation’s prosperity increased, unhappiness increased as well.

There was a splendid T-shirt in Hungary in 2000. On the front it said, “What has 10 years of right-wing government done that 50 years of communism could never do?” and the answer on the back was, “Made the people love socialism”. They had put up with the equality of misery, because everyone was treated badly, but when they moved to the inequality of choice they were unhappy, because young men were becoming millionaires on the stock exchange while pensions were increasing slower than inflation.

There is a crucial difference between the two, and one of the myths of politics is that choice is an example to be pursued, and that everyone will be happy if they have choice. No, they will not. I am a child of the war, when there was no choice and we wore utility clothes, but everyone was on the same level, and that was much better than what we have now, with our children wanting to wear quality, fashion clothes. All the great myths of politics are there, so it is crucial that we measure scientifically our sense of well-being.

Many points that I wished to make have been made, but it was telling of Andrew Dilnot to give us one striking example of the need for truth and honesty in statistics. He did not mention the newspaper, but most people will recognise that he was citing The Daily Telegraph, which put out a big, 36-point, front-page headline, stating, “Public pensions to cost you £4,000 a year”. It had divided £9.4 billion by 26 million and got an answer of almost £4,000. The answer is actually £400, but that particular piece of fiction was repeated on the “Today” programme and in the day’s headlines, and it became part of common knowledge which is actually common ignorance, so it is right that someone such as Andrew Dilnot should be there to take on the powerful forces that put fiction into the public domain because they are innumerate.

Mr Dilnot made a number of other points, which were entertaining, about how we should move forward. He talked about an idea called “Tell me a story”. He would suggest to schoolchildren that they go to the website of the Office for National Statistics or the Government statistical service and tell him a story about aspects of the country, but expressed in statistics.

It is a matter of great satisfaction and pleasure for my constituents that this Swansea boy should have been upgraded to Newport—a matter of some congratulations. He can work in Newport under the benign observance of a quality MP, and I am sure that he will be extremely content. The hugely successful relocation of the ONS to Newport can continue and prosper. Gales of applause will be coming up the M4 today as a result of the House’s decision, which I am sure will be to reinforce the decision of the Public Administration Committee to appoint Andrew Dilnot as the best possible candidate.