Chilcot Inquiry and Parliamentary Accountability

Tommy Sheppard Excerpts

Wednesday 30th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Paul Flynn]

I will stick to the word “gullible”. Three Committees of people who are great experts—the Intelligence and Security Committee, the Foreign Affairs Committee and the Defence Committee—all took the same view. They were all told stories about the weapons of mass destruction. The evidence was, and the evidence is there now, that those did not exist, and there was a very selective choice of evidence—as in the quotations of the son-in-law of Saddam Hussein—that the Committee members believed and chose to believe.

If we do not recognise that as a problem for this House, we will make the same mistakes again. We are going to face such decisions in future. The House will have to decide whether we are going to order—that is our power—young men and women to put their lives on the line, on the basis of what? Faulty evidence, ineffective evidence. That was the conclusion of Chilcot.

I am on the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee and I look forward to taking part in the inquiry, but I do not welcome the kind of debate that we have got.

[Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)]

The hon. Gentleman makes a compelling case, to which I am very sympathetic, but I wonder, given the case that he is making, if he agrees that it is a matter of some disappointment that a majority of his colleagues in the parliamentary Labour party have decided to set themselves against the motion before the House today, and that this will look like they are closing ranks to protect their former leader?

[Paul Flynn]

There is a great deal that I regret about things that are happening within the Labour party at this moment. In the brief cameo appearance that I had on the Front Bench, I called for this debate. I called for a debate to take place on these lines. Of course I want to see the debate. We cannot pretend that after all these years of investigation, the Chilcot inquiry is a trial without a verdict at the end. We must take that responsibility ourselves and we must reform this House to make sure that we can never again take such a calamitous decision, which led to the loss of 179 British lives and uncounted numbers of Iraqi lives. That was a terrible, terrible mistake and we must not repeat it.