Chilcot Inquiry and Parliamentary Accountability

Joan Ryan Excerpts

Wednesday 30th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Alex Salmond]

I would have been very pleased if the right hon. Gentleman had made it Members from eight political parties signing the motion, but the whole point of the cross-party group, which has been working on this issue for months, is to make it not a straight party political issue. As for attacking the Labour party, I think it is more that Labour Members wish to attack me in this debate, but I do not mind that because I am driving on to make the points of parliamentary accountability and the information we had from the Chilcot report that make it unsustainable to argue other than that this Parliament was grievously misled.

The report in the Library—

[Joan Ryan (Enfield North) (Lab)]

rose—

[Alex Salmond]

If the right hon. Lady will forgive me, I will make some progress.

The report in the Library from Dr Glen Rangwala analyses this in enormous detail and I hope Members read it, although even that report is not exhaustive. The right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) in the Chilcot debate in July listed five, as he put it, clear instances of misrepresentation in a single speech from the Prime Minister—in the war speech, the greatest speech of his life, in March 2003. I want to look at just three of the key things that have arisen and that we now know about from the Chilcot report.

The first of those things is the question of prior commitment. Through the long debates on Iraq, many of us suspected that the Prime Minister had given commitments to the American President which were unrevealed to this House and to the public. The Chilcot report outlined these in spades. The famous phrase

“I will be with you, whatever”

will go down in infamy in terms of giving a commitment. Chilcot says that after giving such a commitment it would be virtually impossible for the Prime Minister to withdraw from it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Salmond]

I very much welcome the hon. Gentleman’s intervention. As I have been trying to point out, that is why Members from seven parties in this House have put their names to this motion.

There is a real argument, which has been put forward by the hon. Gentleman, me and others who voted against the conflict, that if we suspected there was something grievously wrong with the Prime Minister’s case, why did other people not come to the same conclusion as the late Robin Cook—that in his estimation weapons of mass destruction did not exist in respect of a clear imminent threat being commonly expressed? Why did other people not see that? The hon. Gentleman and I have to understand that when the Prime Minister went to the Dispatch Box in March 2003 and told the House conclusively that a real and present danger to the United Kingdom existed, it was reasonable even for those with misgivings to think that he must be seeing something that they were not seeing and that he must know something that they did not know. Those Members were thereby misled into the Lobby to vote for the conflict.

[Joan Ryan]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Alex Salmond]

No, I am making progress.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Salmond]

The motion speaks for me and for the other Members who have signed it. I welcome that intervention from the Chairman of the Select Committee. I looked at his robust questioning of the Cabinet Secretary and I am now filled with more confidence that significant recommendations will come forward.

What Iraq demonstrates is that there are currently no effective checks and balances in our system, that the Prime Minister had the ability to create the circumstances in which this House followed him into an illegal conflict, and that all the memos from the higher echelons of the civil service will not mean a thing—rather like the Cabinet Secretary’s evidence to the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee. That should be of little surprise to us.

[Joan Ryan]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. According to my reading of Chilcot, the report states that there was

“no falsification or improper use of intelligence”,

there was “no deception of Cabinet” and there was

“no secret commitment to war whether at Crawford Texas in April 2002 or elsewhere”.

As we have been told, Chilcot made it clear to the Liaison Committee that Tony Blair had not deceived Parliament. Sadly, I think the only deception is in today’s motion. Its opportunistic nature does not serve this issue or this Parliament well.

[Alex Salmond]

In relation to the right hon. Lady’s intervention, I have already corrected one of her hon. Friends and suggested that they carry on to the next sentence after the ones they have cited from Chilcot. Also, the Liaison Committee’s questioning of Sir John Chilcot found explicitly that a reasonable person could not have drawn the conclusions that the then Prime Minister did, and that he presented those conclusions to the House as an advocate rather than as a conveyor of information. I ask the right hon. Lady to go back and look at those points, because they concern every Member of this House regardless of their political party.

Chilcot shows that we have a system of non-accountability. We waited six years before establishing a proper inquiry and, as we found out in The Observer a week past Sunday, it was structured in such a way as to avoid blame. It was deprived of judicial expertise and could not even pronounce on the legality of the conflict. It was wrestled with over the release of the diplomatic correspondence with President Bush, which more than any other factor provides the Prime Minister’s motivations. It was seven years before it reported. After all this time, some people in the press and elsewhere say, “These things are in the past. Let the dead bury the dead.” Many dead people have been buried, the carnage continues, and the real issue, to quote the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin), is how to stop it happening again.

Memories will fade. A whole generation has grown up and reached adulthood since the war in Iraq. Soon, less than a quarter of Members—perhaps none—will have lived through the experience of the vote on Iraq and that fateful decision in March 2003. The motion presents an opportunity to introduce another check and balance into a system that is clearly deficient. It would start a process to create a precedent so that any future Prime Minister will know that he or she will have to account for their actions not only to history, but to this House of Commons. A long time ago, I made a speech in this House in which I suggested to Mr Blair that he might answer to a higher power than this House. I understand that he found it offensive, but I absolutely believe it to be the case none the less. In the meantime, in the here and now—here on earth—is it not important for us to find a parliamentary process by which a Prime Minister who grievously misled this House and the people into an illegal war can finally be held to parliamentary account?