Extract from House of Commons Hansard    Debates for 15th May 2007

Parliamentary Approval for Military Action

Mr. Neil Gerrard (Walthamstow):

Normally, when I attend debates and hear agreement between Ministers and Opposition Front Benchers I am immediately suspicious. Today, I shall make an exception, because an important development is taking place along lines for which I and some other Members have been arguing for some time. As I pointed out earlier, I introduced a private Member's Bill on the subject in January 2005. It had cross-party support and in the following year my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Clare Short) took the matter up again after the 2005 general election.

Over the past two or three years, there has been a change of opinion and in the degree of support for our views. In late 2004, I tabled an early-day motion that attracted 149 signatures; by 2005, a similar motion received 233 signatures. The shift is continuing. The right hon. Member for Richmond, Yorks (Mr. Hague) suggested that it had occurred among only Labour Members, but it has actually occurred on both sides of the House.

In 2004, seven Conservative Members signed my early-day motion; by 2005, 36 of the 233 signatures were Conservative. In the opening speeches and in the interventions made on the right hon. Member for Richmond, Yorks, I still detected unease among some Conservative Back Benchers about not only the Government's proposals but those of their Front-Bench team.

The general mood and general opinion have shifted. The right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) said that only the converts are in the Chamber, but there has been a significant change and the general view on both sides of the House is that Parliament should be involved in what is probably the most important decision that we can make—sending troops to military conflict.

The differences between the Opposition motion and the Government amendment seem to be of the order of angels dancing on pin heads. Whichever of them is accepted, we shall have reached agreement on an important point of principle—things need to change—although we shall still need discussion and consultation about the detail of how the changes are to happen and whether it is to be through legislation or convention.

There has been much mention of Iraq, but the war in Iraq was not the stimulus for my private Member's Bill, or for the inquiry carried out by the Public Administration Committee, which looked much more broadly at the use of the royal prerogative. The question we are debating was just a part of that. There were three votes on Iraq and I never had any doubt that each of them was about legitimising a forthcoming war. I cannot understand how people in the House at the time could see any of those three votes as anything else.

The first debate was in November 2002, some months before the war, and some Labour Members were not really sure whether they should vote. During the debate, I told them that it might be their only chance to vote before the war and that they should not assume that there would be another chance, although in fact there were subsequent votes. But a precedent was set. The Prime Minister said shortly afterwards that he thought that it was inconceivable now that any Government could try to go to war without a vote—but the fact that the Prime Minister said that is no guarantee for the future. We have to look at the mechanisms involved.

Mr. Gray: The hon. Gentleman used an interesting word. He correctly said that the three votes “legitimised” a war that would otherwise not have been legitimate. Does he therefore agree that if a procedure such as the one that we are discussing were put in place, there would be a risk that, in future, Prime Ministers would seek to use a vote in this place to legitimise something that, if it were done under the royal prerogative, would not be legitimate?

Mr. Gerrard: I think that we are getting into a slightly arcane legal point. Obviously I accept that if it were laid down in legislation what votes should be taken, how they should be taken and in what circumstances, that would open up the possibility of legal challenges—in a way that might not arise if we had a convention. But I was not using the term “legitimising” in its strictly legal sense; I was thinking about the Government's seeking justification for the action that they intended to take.

If we start to look at the detail, we can see that the argument between having legislation and relying on convention is quite difficult. My gut feeling and preference would be for legislation, having introduced a private Member's Bill on the subject a few years ago, but I recognise from that experience the difficulties of drafting and of getting the legislation exactly right. Safeguards are necessary to allow for urgent action and for troops to be able to defend themselves without any fear that that action will create difficulties for them. How do we distinguish between military action and peacekeeping? Is there really a distinction in some cases?

I recall the debate on the Bill introduced by my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Ladywood and that some of the difficulties that were suggested at that time were somewhat exaggerated. The most important difficulty is one that the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe spoke about in his contribution: the timing of the vote. If Parliament is asked to vote when troops have already been deployed—as it was in the final vote on Iraq—certainly for some people it becomes much more difficult to oppose the war.

Ms Abbott: Does my hon. Friend agree that timing is vital for two reasons? When the House is asked to vote on military action and the troops are massed at the border, two issues come into play in Members' minds. First, there is the fact that they will be letting down their troops, who have been heavily deployed. Secondly, there is the humiliation that the Prime Minister of the day will suffer if his own MPs do not vote for military action. Timing is key to having a proper and reasoned vote on the subject.

Mr. Gerrard: I accept both those arguments. The difficulty is how to get the timing right. If the timing of the vote is left entirely in the control of the Prime Minister, frankly it would be a pretty stupid Prime Minister who could not select when he would have a much better chance of getting the desired outcome. There is no question but that the timing of the vote can affect the outcome. Whether we go down the legislative route or the convention route, we should be looking for some mechanism that gives Parliament more control over the timing and more choice about when votes are called, as was suggested. If all the choices about timing are left to the Executive, it is almost certain that the vote will take place when it is most likely that the Executive will get the result that they are looking for.

Dr. Palmer: Does my hon. Friend agree that there is a genuine difficulty? We have discussed the problems with having a vote very late in the process, but if we have a vote very early in the process a lot of MPs will feel that it is rather premature and that it might inflame the situation. There could be a delicate diplomatic situation and the Prime Minister of the day could have to go to Parliament and say, “Give me a mandate to go to war,” when there might still be a chance of peace. Does he agree that there is a genuine objective difficulty that makes it difficult to lay down in statute exactly when the vote should take place?

Mr. Gerrard: I accept that point. There are genuine difficulties about the timing. If we look not just at the Iraq war, but at some of the other military actions over the past 10 years, we see that there have been quite long build-up periods. Choosing when there should be a vote is not simple. I would not pretend for one moment that it was. But we ought to give some thought to the mechanisms for determining the timing of the vote. That will be critical in getting a procedure that works properly—if we are going to have parliamentary involvement. I am not suggesting for one minute that I have a simple, easy answer, but it is a key point.

Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP): Should not the rights and responsibilities of Parliament extend not just to the resolution to deploy into an area of armed conflict? Should it not have the right to monitor what subsequently happens? Perhaps it could appoint a bespoke Select Committee to monitor what happens in the conflict and post conflict. In situations such as Iraq, when Parliament knows that it is potentially on a countdown to deployment to armed conflict, such a bespoke Select Committee could be formed and could help to determine when parliamentary votes were required and when debates were appropriate.

Mr. Gerrard: I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. That is obviously one possible mechanism. In terms of scrutiny, there seems to be no problem with Select Committees choosing to look at what is happening. The real problem is that debate is not taking place in the House as a whole. We have had relatively little debate in the past two or three years about what is going on within Iraq, when it is clearly of immense importance and when there are many, many Members who are seriously concerned about what is happening. But that is a slightly different issue: it is to do with what happens afterwards, rather than what happens at the point when we are about to take military action.

I was interested to read in the report from the House of Lords Constitution Committee some of its descriptions of what happens and what needs to happen. The Committee talked about wars “of necessity”, “of choice” and “of obligation”. A war of necessity is self-defence. If one is attacked, quite clearly one expects to defend oneself. As far as this country is concerned, it is difficult to think back to a time when that actually happened—when the trigger for war was a direct attack on this country. The Committee dismissed wars of obligation as not being a reality. It pointed out that none of the international treaties that we are signed up to forces us to take military action. Even perhaps the most obvious example, article 5 of the NATO treaty, which is the core commitment to collective self-defence in NATO, only commits each signatory to take

“such action as it deems necessary”

in the event of an attack on another. In the end, the sovereign country still decides whether to take military action.

In every case, the military action that we are involved in, and have been involved in over quite a long period of time, has been the result of choice. It was a political choice to be involved in military action in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Sierra Leone and Iraq—the major military actions over the past 10 years. It cannot be suggested, as some tried when we discussed parliamentary involvement a year or two ago, that if Parliament had been involved, it would have given the game away and alerted the enemy that we would be involved in military action, because every example involved a significant build-up period. In most, although not all, of those cases, military conflict did not involve the UK going it alone because either we were in a coalition, or the action took place under the auspices of UN resolutions.

I am glad that there is recognition that some of the objections that were raised in the past were rather spurious and that we have reached a position in which we will today agree the principle that we need to find a different mechanism. I understand the argument that a convention could be more flexible than legislation and that a workable convention might be easier to achieve. I remember from drafting my private Member’s Bill that it is really difficult to get all the detail right and to think of all situations that might arise so that they can be covered. The key issue is that there should be substantive votes. We need a mechanism that will ensure that substantive votes take place in the House and that the House can have a degree of control over the timing of votes. Those are the two things that we should be looking for from the consultation that will take place as a result of this debate.

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