Conflict Decisions and Constitutional Reform

Mike Weir Excerpts

Thursday 19th June 2014 Westminster Hall

[Dr Coffey]

On a point of order, Mr Weir. I am surprised that it is parliamentary to suggest that Parliament has been bribed, because that implies corruption. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman does not want to make that suggestion—that people took bribes to vote a particular way.

[Mr Mike Weir (in the Chair)]

I think that the hon. Gentleman was making a debating point. I do not think that he was suggesting that Parliament as a whole was bribed in any way, and I do not think that that is a point of order.

[Paul Flynn]

I mean bribed by political favours. The full story of this is available. Is it not astonishing that on this matter—these are the most important decisions that Parliament takes—we are still to be denied the full truth of what happened? The Chilcot report will be published in expurgated form, and many of the reasons why we went to war, many of the influences, will not be included. Will not the impression left behind, if that happens, be that the Chilcot report is a cover-up by civil servants and politicians to protect their own reputations?

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[Mr Gray]

You are supposed to be giving way.

[Mr Mike Weir (in the Chair)]

Order.

[Mr Allen]

This is a rather important issue, Mr Weir, and I know that the hon. Gentleman is agitated about it. If he wishes, I can make a case even on the back of what has happened in Iraq this week, with thousands of people dying and with individuals being executed on television for the benefit of people with particular views. These are really serious issues, so I would like to explain how this Parliament and this Government can work together to ensure that on similar, very serious occasions, we get this right in a way that perhaps we have not before. Again, we have made no outrageous demand that not a soldier should be deployed anywhere at all without the wise words of this House—of course not. We have made five reports to Government and the House, trying to get a clear resolution of this issue.

We have had three or four wars during the time we have been trying to get Government to come to the table and make an agreement that will take us all forward together, united as a nation in the most difficult circumstances we are ever likely to face. Have we been tolerant? One could argue that we have been far too tolerant.

In our first report, we suggested—this is not outrageous language—that the Government should

“bring forward a draft parliamentary resolution for consultation with us among others, and for debate and decision by the end of 2011.”

Similarly, the Government responded to our second report by saying:

“we hope to make progress on this matter in a timely and appropriate manner.”

That was in September 2011.

Our third report concluded:

“The Government needs to honour the Foreign Secretary’s undertaking to the House to ‘enshrine in law for the future the necessity of consulting Parliament on military action’”.

That was not me or my Committee, but the Foreign Secretary. He still is the Foreign Secretary, and one hopes that his words will come to pass. Our report continued by saying that the Government should

“do so before the end of the current Parliament. In the absence of any other timetable, this is the one to which we will hold them.”

Let us move on to the fourth report on this issue by a Select Committee of this House—my Political and Constitutional Reform Committee. In September 2013, after the House had debated the Iraq question, we called for the Government to

“provide a comprehensive, updated statement of its position on the role of Parliament in conflict decisions.”

Again, the language was hardly inflammatory. The report went on:

“We also recommend that it precisely details the specific steps which will now be taken to fulfil the strong public commitment to enshrine in law the necessity of consulting Parliament on military action.”

That shows a Committee trying to make the system work for everyone’s benefit.

Finally, in March this year we published the fifth report, on which the Minister may like to comment in his speech. We drafted a resolution—a draft resolution means that the House and the Government can discuss it, change it and make it more workable if we have failed to make it as workable as possible. We produced a resolution that set out the process we could follow in order to get approval from the House of Commons on future conflict decisions. We called on the Government to consider the resolution and come forward with a revised draft by—we were getting a little frustrated, so specified the time—June 2014, with a view to having the House agree a resolution by November 2014.

We are now in June 2014. So far, we have received no Government response, but I hope that we get one this month. Knowing the Minister as I do, I hope very much that it will be a positive, creative and constructive response. I hope it will be in a form of words that can take us forward for perhaps 50 or 100 years, and will agree with us on a sensible way in which the House, its Members having been duly elected by the public, can be involved with the Executive, who have a vital and necessary interest in sometimes being able to move swiftly and expeditiously on conflicts that we would hope to avoid in other circumstances. I hope that the Minister has had the chance to prepare, and will give us some good news today on how we can go forward together on such a vital issue.

Just to show how forgiving I can be, I am going to let my friend the hon. Member for North Wiltshire (Mr Gray) intervene.

[Mr Allen]

You talk too much, James, that is your problem.

[Mr Mike Weir (in the Chair)]

Order.

[Mr Gray]

All I did was to seek to intervene at a crucial point in his speech. The hon. Gentleman’s entire thesis seems to be based on the fact that he did not approve of or agree with the Iraq war. My question to him is simple: if indeed he is basing his entire report and thesis on that fact, how could it be that, of all wars in the past 250 years, the Iraq war was the only one in which there was not one but three substantive votes in this place before the deployment of troops? If his answer is that he does not like the way in which his party whipped its Members, and all the cajolery, bribery and other things he mentioned, I am afraid to say that that has absolutely nothing to do with going to war; it is to do with processes in this place.

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[Paul Flynn]

As the hon. Member for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey) said, the vote on 29 August was one of immense significance. It was the first time for centuries that, a Prime Minister having come to the House of Commons to suggest that we go to war, Parliament rejected that suggestion. It is extraordinary; had that decision gone the other way, and had we found ourselves opposing Assad in Syria—although there are three sides there—we would now be on almost the same side as the ISIS rebels. Is it not crucial that we learn that if we are to go to war, we should rely not on a Prime Minister writing his page in history, full of hubris and vanity as he takes the decision, but on the good sense of 650 Members of Parliament?

[Mr Mike Weir (in the Chair)]

Order. Before we proceed, I must say that interventions are becoming very long. I appreciate that these are complex matters, but will Members please keep their interventions short? There will be chances for you to make speeches later on.

[Mr Gray]

On a point of order, Mr Weir. As you will have guessed from my interventions, I had intended to contribute to this debate, but I have just had a message from outside that my stepdaughter has collapsed and is in difficulty. I had intended to express my view, but if the House will forgive me, I will push off and sort her out.

[Mr Mike Weir (in the Chair)]

That is perfectly understandable.

[Mr Allen]

Our debate is lesser for the absence of the hon. Member for North Wiltshire. I am sorry that we will not have more chance to debate these issues today, but as we are in the middle of an exchange that will appear in The House magazine, I am sure that Members will be able to read his views. Best wishes for his stepdaughter’s speedy recovery, too.

I will avoid the lure of the clear views of my hon. Friend the Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn) on Syria other than to say that, in a democracy, decision making always benefits if we allow the voices of elected representatives to be heard. Whether we wish to take advantage of that advice, which comes in many different forms and from many different directions—a synthesis takes place—is a matter for the Executive and for the Government. Let us hear those views, and let us define a process that allows that to happen sensibly and appropriately. I look to my party colleagues, who may or may not soon be in government, to ensure that the issue will not go away. Sadly, armed conflicts will not go away, and it is much better to be prepared and to have a position ahead of time so that we can try to resolve what might be a problem in the future, rather than wait until a calamity happens and have to react in a crisis. Although it is hard to say so when we see awful pictures, particularly from Iraq and Syria at the moment, believe it or not this is a moment of relative quietude for the involvement of our country in which we can make sensible, sober and careful judgments about how to involve Parliament and Government in this most horrendous and responsible of decisions.

I will now move on to my Select Committee’s other report before the Chamber today. The report is on the need for a constitutional convention. The report was timely when it was agreed by the members of the Committee who are present, and it has become even more pertinent as time has gone by. With every moment that passes, as we come closer to the referendum in Scotland, and as other issues related to the whole concept of the Union and devolution start to appear on our agenda, the need to work that out becomes ever more pressing. How difficult it must be for Ministers living the day to day, the red boxes and everything else, to take a pace back and try to anticipate problems, but we need to do that in government and in Parliament. At the moment, there is a sense of, “Well, let’s just wait and see what happens in the Scottish referendum, and then we’ll react and respond.” That diminishes our position because it will be seen as a reaction to events, rather than a decision based on a principle on which we can all agree.

I believe that we can all agree on certain key principles. I take great strength from the fact that all the Union parties in Scotland—the Labour party, the Conservative party and the Lib Dems—have signed up, not to every dot and comma of a common position but to a sense that there should be greater devolution. They all have their different views. My party is lagging behind a little at the moment. Believe it or not, zooming by on the right-hand side of the debate has been the Conservative party, which is putting many of us to shame with its proposals on devolution for Scotland. The Lib Dems are there with their strong traditional views on serious devolution, too. A debate is going on, but all three parties are pointing in the right direction and share a common platform of greater devolution, which gives them great strength ahead of the referendum. Had they adopted such a platform after the referendum, people would have laughed, depending on whether the vote was yes or no.

Such a demonstration needs to be echoed in the United Kingdom. I believe that the leader of the Conservative party, the leader of the Labour party and the leader of the Lib Dems should similarly get together and make a simple one-line statement to the effect that, as principles governing our United Kingdom, we believe in Union and in devolution. That should not be after the event but now, and I think it would underpin much of the debate between now and the referendum. It would make the position believable for all of us. Rather than being an expedient because someone is shouting or has won a vote, we would be talking about devolution because we believe in it as a principle.

The Union and devolution are two key principles for our governance, and I would love to see that position put into the public domain. If the parties agree on nothing else, even if they do not agree on the detail, agreeing on those two principles would be immensely strengthening. Why? Because we would then separate the visceral separatists—those who are driven by hatred and dislike—from the rational devolvers, such as me and perhaps most people in this room. I am glad you cannot participate from the Chair, Mr Weir.

[Mr Mike Weir (in the Chair)]

I am strictly neutral.

[Mr Allen]

I know these things may come back to haunt me later.

To be serious, though, many of us—even people sitting in Nottingham, as I do—feel that Whitehall telling us what to do and when to empty our bins, and not allowing us to get on and run our affairs, is an unacceptable imposition in a democracy. Many of us work away in our own way to make the case for rational devolution, wherever we are. If we do not have rational devolution, where do the rational devolvers go? Some of them become attracted to nationalism and see it as the way forward. It is ludicrous that we do not say to such people, and to people such as me in the east midlands, or whatever nation or English region we may live in, that we can run our own affairs.

How do we do that? I have some views of my own, but why do we not have a constitutional convention? Why do we not say that there has been a very serious schism? I hope that that schism starts to heal, but it will heal only if we take serious heed of how we can devolve power not just to Scotland, not because it is a reflex and not because it is a response but because we believe in it. The way to demonstrate that belief is seriously to consider devolution in England. That is one of the things that could come through in a constitutional convention.

There is no one in the House of Commons to whom the Minister takes second place on devolution. If there is one person in the House who has done more for devolution than any other, it is him. Long may he continue. Those Trojan, individual efforts of will and drive need a process. I hope he will be with us for many years, but just in case he is not, we need a structure that allows devolution to take place because, regardless of party, there is a means for it to do so.

Fundamentally, if the English get devolution, it then becomes believable not as an expedient for every other nation but because it is seen to be a principle and something that cannot be taken away. I wish that were not the case, but to prove that devolution is a principle we need to be clear and honest about English devolution. Creating a convention does not have to be a formal thing after an election; it could be an informal thing before an election and it could start to outline where we can go and how we take this process forward.

My Select Committee has been looking seriously at what that means for England and how it might shape things. We have not always come to complete unanimity on it; there are many different views and many different parties. However, we managed to get a sense of direction, if nothing else, and recently we produced our report on the codification of the relationship between local government and central Government. I hope that, as an individual Back Bencher, I can produce a Bill on that matter shortly, which will go a bit further and define independent local government of the sort that is commonplace in every other democracy. People are not like us. We are the weird one in the democratic family, in not having independent local government; in being unable to raise revenues locally to meet our budgets; and in being told what to do by a massively over-centralised Whitehall, in this case. That does not happen in many of our neighbours in north America, Europe and elsewhere in the democratic family.

We can get up to standard—up to modern democratic standards—by doing those things. If we do that; if it is written down and cannot just be thrown away on a whim by the next Government, or the one after that, or the one after that; and if it is part of what we are and what we believe in, which is union and devolution, it will be something that will see us through for a long, long time. That was the heart of what we were trying to say as a Select Committee—working together—when we put forward the paper on our proposal for a constitutional convention for the United Kingdom.

One of the key things that we opened up in our other report on codification of local government was how we finance things. We can have all the nice codes written in Brussels, which get shipped over here every so often and go straight into the waste bin in Whitehall, but if we are really to do this thing we need, of course, to have powers—they are relatively easy to define—but we also need to have finance.

At the moment, local government is financed. Where does that money come from? It comes largely from the income tax payments of every individual in this country. Maybe it is not possible to devise a system whereby we can link income tax to local government. Oh, yes—let us look up the road, and we see that they are doing it. Again, Scotland has led the way, winning over even the Treasury to the concept of assigned local income tax. Right now, it is only 10p of the income tax, but the foot is in the door; it is possible to go further and indeed the Scottish Conservatives have demonstrated how that can be done.

Such an offer—the current offer—has been made to our good friends in the Welsh Assembly. I hope that they will bank that, I hope that they will pick it up and I hope that they will be greedy and come back for more, because all they would be asking for would be to retain some of the income tax in their own nation and put it to work. It would not be income tax on a different rate; it would not be without equalisation; it would not be collected in a different way; and it would not involve setting up a local income tax bureaucracy. It would just be income tax the way that we do it now, but using the equalisation mechanism. If we wanted to use one in England, it would be the Department for Communities and Local Government, which would take that allocation—the amount of money currently spent on local government, paid for by income tax—and equalise it there, before distributing it to the local authorities.

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[Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)]

It is a fine example of the trials and tribulations of the job of chairing these sittings that you, Mr Weir, had to endure in silence some parts of the speech by the hon. Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope). You would have been entirely justified in breaking new ground by asking to intervene on his speech at certain points.

[Mr Mike Weir (in the Chair)]

The Chair remains neutral.

[Paul Flynn]

It must be painful for you to do that, Mr Weir. The Committee that my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen) chairs, brilliantly and with great wisdom, contains the entire political spectrum, from the deepest red to the densest blue. Somehow or other, the reports, with compromise and good sense from the Chairman—he acts as a peacemaker and compromise seeker—turn out to be unanimous. The Committee’s work is not on the immediate, the current or the things that are in the headlines of the day, but on issues that are of deeper importance when we take a broad look at the way things are going.

Going to war is one of our gravest responsibilities, and there have been few times in our history when Parliament has been divided on such decisions; it is normally well united, with the possible exception of the Boer war, which was rightly opposed at the time by Lloyd George and others. I believe, however, that there has never been a division in opinion in the country as there was in 2003, when at least 1 million people—some say 2 million—marched in the streets. Some 139 Labour Members, six Conservatives and virtually all the Liberal Democrats voted against that war. The nationalist parties were passionately opposed, as was public opinion, and public opinion was right. It was in advance of opinion at the top of the political tree at the time.

The decision to go to war was reported with equal enthusiasm by the leaders of both the major parties, and that is the great difficulty. There is a splendid book by David Owen that I commend to people, if they have not read it, about hubris in politics. He writes about what happens to Prime Ministers when they hear the drumbeats of war. It is their opportunity to escape from the dreary minor matters of the day and write their page in history, which is usually, sadly, a bloody page. They become different people, and we can see it. They walk in a different way. They strut and stand with a Napoleonic stance. They talk in a different way, dredging up all the Churchillian rhetoric and speaking in these great rounded phrases. It is the most exciting time of their lives. In David Owen’s view, they become at least a little mad, and their judgment is in question. That thesis is absolutely right.

By example, by convention and by the fact that MPs were allowed to vote in 2003 because the then Government were convinced as to how we would vote—we would not have been allowed otherwise—a principle has been established and cannot now be reversed. Power has moved from the exercise of the royal prerogative by the Prime Minister to a decision by the House of Commons. Thank goodness for that. As I said in an earlier intervention, it is far better to trust the wisdom of 650 Members of Parliament with differing views than the overexcited hubris of a Prime Minister, who might be motivated by vanity or seeking a place in history for himself or herself. It is a major advance.

Returning to the heroic work done at the time by my hon. Friend, it is good that we are reminded of what happened during that period. Many of us regard it as the most important vote—or votes as it turned out—that we will take part in during our political careers, even if we are here for many more years. There was huge pressure at the time to vote a certain way. The political establishment was united in going one way. The Intelligence and Security Committee, the Foreign Affairs Committee, the Defence Committee, the Government and the main Opposition were absolutely united that we had to go to war to defend ourselves against what turned out to be non-existent weapons of mass destruction that threatened to attack us within 45 minutes. We were not deciding whether there would be an Iraq war, which was going to happen anyway. Saddam was going to be deposed. We were deciding whether to collaborate with George Bush in that war. George Bush said that he did not want us and made it clear, publicly, that we were not needed, but somebody wanted to take us into war and we deserve to know the truth about what happened between the then Prime Minister and President Bush.

The reasons why we need to know are crucial. The first is for the loved ones of the 179 brave British soldiers who died in that war. They died because we in the House of Commons made a decision in March 2003. They would not have died otherwise. Many of their relatives have expressed, some of them publicly, the torment of not knowing whether those soldiers died in vain. They deserve some closure for their grief. That is why every word and syllable of the letters should be published.

The second reason is our soldiers. They are entitled to know that when Parliament decides to order them into battle and to put their lives at risk that that decision has been made on the basis of the most rigorous examination of the evidence and not on untruths or politicians’ vanity. The other people who need to know are the hon. Members of this House. Unless we can discover what happened in 2003, are we in a position to judge new wars now?

However, there was a worse decision than the one in 2003 and it was made without a vote in the House. In 2006, we moved into Helmand province on the basis of a claim that we were going to clear up the opium trade and to perform a bit of reconstruction and with the hope that not a shot would be fired and that we would be out in three years. There was a debate about that in this room, during which one Member said that it would be like the charge of the Light Brigade and would stir up a hornets’ nest. This time it was:

Bush to the right of them,

Blair to the left of them,

Holler’d and thunder’d,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die,

Into the valley of Death,

Into the mouth of Helmand,

Drove the five thousand.

The number of soldiers killed in combat in 2006 before we went into Helmand was two. The number now is 463, which is three times the number who died in the charge of the Light Brigade. We should look not only at declarations of war, but at what happens when we escalate wars. If we had had a vote on going into Afghanistan, it would have been supported by perhaps 95% of Members, but it was the escalation that did the great harm. We must take that into account when we look to war.

The extraordinary events of 29 August 2013 have changed Parliament for the better and represent a change of view in that no longer do we have absolute trust in the claims of Prime Ministers in such situations. History will tell us the real tale of what happened during that week, but there was unanimity among the leaders of the three main political parties at the beginning of the week that we needed to go into Syria. Soundings were taken, meetings were held by the political parties and different views were expressed, all of which meant that a majority could not be obtained in the House. Part of the reason was the collapse of faith in the decisions taken on Iraq and possibly on Helmand. The House made terrible blunders. MPs made those blunders and 620 soldiers died as a result.

We must have the courage to face the truth and to decide our future. We are still obsessed—it happens at the top of all parties—with punching above our weight as a nation, but doing so militarily means that we spend outside of our interests and we die beyond our responsibilities. We would be greatly helped as a nation and our soldiers would be well served were we to accept our position in the world. We are not the masters of the universe or the leaders of empires, as we were in the past. We should escape from the idea that every crisis in the world is Britain’s crisis when it often is not. Our involvement in such crises leads to intense problems and enormous costs and, in future, we must look to the decision on Helmand.

The report, “Parliament’s role in conflict decisions: a way forward”, cannot be expurgated in the same way as the Chilcot report. John Major, the former Prime Minister, has said that if the full truth is denied, the whole issue will continue to fester and doubts will persist. A Minister recently told the Public Administration Committee that Chilcot did not report to Ministers, but he reports to the Prime Minister. Changes can be made. The Political and Constitutional Reform Committee offers this report to confirm the improvements that have taken place and to ensure that decisions on warfare are not made by a tiny clique at the top of the tree. Looking at the first world war, errors were made and the reasons for getting involved were extraordinarily trivial, resulting in a tremendous number of casualties. The Committee has served us well and we will serve our nation well if we look at Parliament’s role in warfare and strengthen it to the benefit of all.