Iraq Inquiry Report

Martin Docherty-Hughes Excerpts

Thursday 14th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Martin Docherty-Hughes (West Dunbartonshire) (SNP)]

I am delighted to sum up on behalf of the Scottish National party. Before I do so, I commend those who secured the debate—crucially, the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), my hon. Friend the Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr MacNeil), and the hon. Members for Newport West (Paul Flynn) and for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas).

Many of the Members on the SNP Benches, as the numbers indicate, see this as important issue. If not in all constituencies in the United Kingdom, it is so in Scotland, and for a specific reason. It was a real issue on the doorstep at the last election. I am mindful of my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North West (Carol Monaghan) who, in a hustings with her predecessor last year, asked the question, “Why did you vote for the Iraq war?” The answer was, “I didnae.” My hon. Friend took out an iPad and looked up Hansard. The rest is on YouTube to watch. It is embarrassing that that situation arose, when a Member of this House could not even remember whether they voted to go to war or not. It was a disgrace. Needless to say, that Member no longer sits in this House. Iraq has been a critical issue in Scottish politics over the past decade.

I declare an interest. My brother is a reservist and had a tour of duty in Iraq and two tours of duty in Afghanistan. When I used to write to him on the frontline, I knew day in, day out that I might never get a reply, so I share the concerns of many Members and those who represent military families of both officers and personnel. The report needs to be published, as promised. Families such as Rose Gentle and her family need answers.

Who, in any western democracy, would have believed that a four-letter word would have such a far-reaching and profound effect on domestic affairs and be so detrimental to our relations with other countries, as well as paralysing any hope of moving on and learning from past mistakes? It is a word deeply embedded in our psyche and conscience and it continues to overshadow our work in an increasingly unstable and fractured world. That word, of course, is “Iraq”.

In February 2003, together with more than 100,000 others, I marched through the great city of Glasgow, joined by another 1 million across the communities of these islands, to protest against an invasion of the sovereign nation of Iraq. I would never have imagined that I would be standing here to reiterate the same belief that led me to march then—a belief shared by Scottish National party members, predominantly those who elected us, that that invasion was the wrong choice and an immoral one.

Now, 13 years after our armed forces were led into that illegal invasion, and seven years after the establishment of the inquiry into the UK’s role, this Parliament and the communities of these islands are still waiting to learn of the true events of that catastrophic war which, as I said, has had profound consequences on our international relations and, critically, on the lives of our armed forces and on millions of lives across the globe.

During the debate I was looking up at the Public Gallery and I could see young and old, people of every generation and of every race and creed, and I thought to myself, “The consequences of that decision to go to war, on what I perceive as an illegal basis and a lie, will have profound consequences not just on those in the Public Gallery, but on the children being born now and the lives that they will lead in the future.”

Much has been made of using the Chilcot report, as stated in previous debates, as a mirror to reflect on the events leading up to the invasion and on the war itself. More importantly, the real opportunity is for the British Government to change what they are doing. In a speech on the Floor of the House last year, as has been mentioned, the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) stated that this is our Vietnam. I would go even further back, because this is another knot in the history of failed diplomatic choices by this political state. I consider Iraq to be a modern-day Khartoum, so we could go back even further and look at the situation we have faced in Sudan and Egypt over the many decades since. Iraq laid the ground for considerable misadventure in the years that lay ahead. I believe that we would be misguided to look at this report from the classic imperialistic viewpoint; the one that led us into Iraq in the first place.

Since being established, the Chilcot inquiry has had a stranglehold on British diplomatic and military policy, with everything being placed in limbo until the report is released. The longer we wait, the more unstable our position becomes. That has led successive British Governments to continue with the same failed philosophy without ever learning from their mistakes or looking at a different set of responses to the situation in which we now find ourselves. It would also be inexcusable for the British Government, led by the Conservative and Unionist party, to use its internal European war to delay publication. Frankly, it would be immoral.

Sadly, there does not seem to have been any willingness or vision from successive British Governments to change their knee-jerk and reactive diplomacy, according to which a situation requiring attention almost always ends up with a bombing campaign, which only adds fuel to an already inflammatory setting. In reality, we now have an inability to confront threats in a progressive manner due to the fear oozing from Chilcot. The Government are unable to learn their military and diplomatic limits, and that is undermining the UK’s diplomatic capabilities and reducing its ability to defend its economic and social interests.

The UK’s senior diplomats, as the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border mentioned last year, are reduced to a rump, often moved on very quickly in their tenure and often unable to communicate in local languages. Time and again in debates about Chilcot on the Floor of the House, the point is made that the policy of having a mass diplomatic service with ever dwindling expertise and reliance on local information undermines the idea that this place knows what is going on, and not only in Bagdad, but in Washington, as we clearly saw when a British Labour Prime Minister, and his Government, walked hand-in-hand with a Republican President of the United States and led our armed forces into war.

I am not often for quoting things, but I thought I would go back a wee bit and see if there was any expertise on how to use information in “The Art of War”, an ancient Chinese publication. The General notes that there are two goals for intelligence activities—I will quote only the first, Members will be glad to hear. He states:

“The first goal is to obtain accurate, timely information about the objectives, resources and activities of competitors.”

We failed in that basic military process because we relied on the services of others, while our other closest NATO allies in Europe looked to their own services and came to the discerned opinion that an invasion of Iraq would be wrong, with regard both to ability and to inability to extract ourselves from it. From that perspective, it looks like our diplomatic policy is based on Google Translate, due to the limited numbers of senior diplomats with second languages relevant to their placement and over-reliance on local translators and locally based staff.

From the Scottish National party Benches at least, the idea of “mission accomplished”, as mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Dunfermline and West Fife (Douglas Chapman), is both a fallacy and a myth perpetuated by successive British Governments hell bent on rewriting history. The maxim that victors write history cannot be applied here, because the war is not over.

Further to the point about the UK’s diplomatic efforts, failure to publish the Chilcot report would reduce the UK’s military leadership. With this House’s decision on Syria, for instance, it abdicates responsibility for bombing a country into submission, rather than dealing with the reality we now face: Assad, still ensconced. We knew that would happen, yet the Government have pursued a military programme that places in a perilous position not only the armed forces, but civilians. This policy failure is the price that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is paying for Iraq, and it is one for which the communities of these islands will pay for years to come. It is unforgivable.

Yet even when published, as surely it must be in the timeframe set out by the Prime Minister, the Chilcot report will not reflect the entire story. I am grateful that the hon. and gallant Members for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) and for Gravesham (Mr Holloway) rose to address the House today, because they reflected some element of the lived experience of the military service personnel on the frontline. But Chilcot is more than just an examination of Government policy and the impact on international relations; it is a very real and personal goal for the families of those service personnel who lost their lives during the war. Those families have lived the Iraq war every day since the bombs were dropped, and every day that the evidence of the inquiry was gathered. We want closure.

I will bring my comments to an end, because I am conscious of the time. We, as parliamentarians and representatives of the communities that have sent us to this place, have a duty and a responsibility to ensure that decisions made about war and peace are open and transparent. We recognise that armed services personnel know that they might not come back, because that is the danger of being in the armed services—that is not the point. The point is that we do not wish them to go to a war that is illegal or a bad diplomatic choice for the country. How can we carry out this process if we are being denied the opportunity to read a report on a war that continues to impact on the security of this political state?

The Prime Minister must stay true to his word on a two-week clearance period so that the report can be published in the week beginning 2 May 2016. Any further delay will not be acceptable to those on the Scottish National party Benches or our constituents, and I am sure, as we have heard from hon. Members across the House today, that it will not be acceptable to them and to Parliament itself. Critically, it will not be acceptable to those who served the Crown abroad and to the families of those who lost their lives.