Chilcot Inquiry and Parliamentary Accountability

Natascha Engel Excerpts

Wednesday 30th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Lucas]

Does the hon. Gentleman recognise the results of the freedom of information requests a few weeks ago that demonstrated precisely that the Chilcot inquiry had been designed to “avoid blame”. Sir Gus O’Donnell has been quoted as saying that he recommended using the inquiry’s terms of reference to prevent it reaching

“any conclusion on questions of law or fact”

or to attributing any blame. If we look at the Glen Rangwala report, which simply puts the evidence in front of us—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Natascha Engel)]

Order. May I make a plea to those who are looking to catch my eye later on to keep their interventions to the minimum, as there are a very large number of people wishing to contribute to this debate?

[Fabian Hamilton]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention, but no, I do not recognise those results, because I do not know the context in which those words were said. All too often speeches and phrases are taken out of context. I do not believe for one minute that Sir John Chilcot and his whole report and all the years and the time that he spent were there simply to mislead the public.

Let me try to make some progress. As I have said, I never for one second believed that the then Prime Minister was acting in bad faith, and I do not do so now. For those reasons, I will be urging my Labour colleagues to vote against today’s motion. I will urge them to do so to enable the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee to focus properly on the real job of its inquiry, which is to analyse the conclusions that Sir John has actually reached, based on the evidence that he gathered, and to look at the lessons that he says should be learned from his report.

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[Ian Austin]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Is it in order for a Member of this House to allege that other Members of this House were bribed—paid—to vote a particular way? Should he not produce evidence for it? What a disgrace.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Natascha Engel)]

The hon. Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn) did not accuse a specific individual of taking a bribe. The hon. Member for Dudley North (Ian Austin) is perfectly entitled to ask him in an intervention whether he will withdraw what he has said, but this is not a matter for the Chair.

[Paul Flynn]

I am not suggesting that anyone took any money. There are such things as political bribes, with inducements and offers, of which we are well aware in this place. There was a very heavy operation here to convince Members to vote for war. We must look at the situation then.

One Back Bencher wrote to Tony Blair—I speak of Tony Blair with no animus against him. I campaigned for him to be Leader of the House. I have congratulated him again and again on the work that he has done for the Labour party, but it is not the case that there was one failure. It was a failure of the three most important Select Committees in this House, who were all cheerleaders for the war. There were all those who went around saying, “If you knew what we know—we’ve got this secret information—you would certainly vote for war to go ahead.” I believe it was in that circumstance that the decision was taken.

One letter to Tony Blair warned in March:

“Our involvement in Bush’s war will increase the likelihood of terrorist attacks.”

It said that attacking a Muslim state without achieving a fair settlement in other conflicts in the world would be seen by Muslims from our local mosques to the far corners of the world as an act of injustice. I believe we paid a very heavy price for seeming to divide the world between a powerful, western, Christian world which was taking advantage of its other side, who were Muslims.

I am certain that in his mind Tony Blair was sincere. He was proved to be right on Kosovo when many people criticised him, and on Sierra Leone he was right. He was convinced on that that the others were wrong and he was going to prove it. One of the pieces of information that he quoted was an interview with Hussein Kamel, who was the son-in-law of Saddam Hussein. It was quoted in the document as evidence of weapons of mass destruction. According to the interview, Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons, biological weapons, nuclear weapons, which he did say in the evidence. But in the same interview, which was conducted in 1995 and was already old news, Hussein Kamel said, “Of course, we got rid of them after the Gulf war.” What was in that dodgy dossier was half the story—evidence, yes, that Saddam had had such weapons, but also evidence that he no longer had them, and that was never published.

What Chilcot said in his report was not the absolution that people believe it to be. He said that the decision to invade was taken

“before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted”

and that military action was

“not a last resort”.

According to the strictures of modern philosophy, that means it is not a just war. Chilcot said that Saddam posed no “imminent threat”. In effect, he declared the war needless.

Colin Powell has confessed that he was fooled and lied to, and that he regrets bitterly that he did not follow his natural instinct and avoid the war. Strangely enough, most of the people who were advising him at the time have said that they were wrong and the war was a terrible mistake.

I believe that this House must accept what Chilcot is saying and not take an aversion to it that pleases our political point of view. The issue is one that the loved ones of the 179 have been following. They have gone through years of torment asking themselves, “Did our loved ones die in vain?” Chilcot has reported, and his report was that the decision was taken not just by a Prime Minister but by all those who were gullible enough to believe that case. There were a million people who walked the streets of this country and demonstrated. It was not a clear decision.

We fall into the trap time and again of believing that our role in Britain is to punch above our weight militarily. Why should we do that? Every time we do, we die beyond our responsibilities.

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[Mr Bradshaw]

No, the right hon. Gentleman had half an hour and a lot of Members want to speak.

Some people cannot accept that however much one disagrees with a decision taken, it can still have been taken in good faith. So here we are debating a motion that seeks to distort and rewrite Chilcot and, in effect, put Tony Blair back in the dock. I am delighted that my own party is having none of this nonsense and that we will be voting against this mendacious opportunism in an hour and a half’s time.

I think there may be another reason why some people persist in trying to claim falsely that there was deliberate deceit in all this. They are more than a little nervous that as we look at what has happened in Syria, and is still happening in Syria today, where there was no intervention and we left a brutal dictator to continue to slaughter his own people, history will prove our former Prime Minister right.

Several hon. Members rose—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Natascha Engel)]

Order. I am going to suggest an informal limit of six minutes and see how we get on. It may be necessary to put a formal limit on, but we will start with six minutes.

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[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Natascha Engel)]

Order. I am afraid that my informal speech limit was an abysmal failure, so I will have to impose a six-minute limit to start with. It will have to go down, unfortunately.

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[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Is the hon. Gentleman in order to pursue these particular matters when we are in fact having a very serious debate on Iraq? [Interruption.]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Natascha Engel)]

Order. This debate is about the Chilcot inquiry and parliamentary scrutiny. I have given the hon. Member for Dudley North (Ian Austin) quite a lot of leeway, but I would be very grateful to him if he got back to the subject we are debating.

[Ian Austin]

This debate is also about judgment, and the right hon. Gentleman’s judgment has been found completely wanting at every stage. It is also about intervention—whether Britain intervened rightly or wrongly—and about the consequences of that intervention. For example, when Britain was intervening to save lives in Kosovo, he said it was an action of “dubious legality” and condemned it as “unpardonable folly”. He demanded a ceasefire and urged the urgent start of talks with Milosevic. When challenged, he said that

“we shall see if I am right”.

History has proved him completely wrong—

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

Order. This is not a debate about the right hon. Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond); it is about the Chilcot inquiry. I would be grateful to the hon. Gentleman if he moved back to that subject.

[Ian Austin]

This is the final point I want to make: of course we should learn lessons from the invasion of Iraq, but we must also learn lessons from successful interventions, such as those in Kosovo, but the right hon. Gentleman ought to show some humility and apologise for his mistakes and lack of judgment over the decades.

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[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Natascha Engel)]

Order. I am going to drop the time limit down to five minutes.

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[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Natascha Engel)]

We will have to drop the time limit to four minutes.