Parliament: Waging War (Constitution Committee Report)

My Lords, I am grateful for the report and for the energy and effort that have gone into it. I am also grateful for the opportunity to explore the relationship between Parliament and what is in any circumstances the horrific decision to wage war, committing us to the deaths of our own citizens and of the fellow human beings with whom we engage. War is barbarous, and that needs to be borne in mind in the whole debate. As such, it can be justified only within the tight constraints that Christian ethics have come to call the ““just war tradition””. Among the requirements for a just war are a just cause, proportionality and a realistic anticipation of a just peace. Alongside those is the requirement for a just or legitimate authority. Since the 17th century wars of the European princedoms, it has been rightly argued that the individual ruler cannot be that legitimate authority. War is too destructive to be undertaken by any individual, however eminent, and that is why the use of the royal prerogative to wage war is outdated and inappropriate. The just authority in our own country is Parliament, and that needs to be expressed in the legislation governing the waging of war. For that reason, I still need some convincing that the convention route is the right one along which to go.I look forward to learning in this debate and subsequently about the different arguments in favour of the convention route over that of legislation, which seems on the face of it to be the more appropriate way to establish the authority of Parliament. In addition to the question of who can legitimately declare war, we now have the problem of defining war. In 1939, it was clear when this country and Germany were at peace and when they were at war. That is far less clear in our own generation and the danger of creeping war seems to me also to require that we have a much firmer parliamentary watch on the deployment of our Armed Forces. I fear that we live at a difficult moment in history. In our generation, there is increasing respect for human life, expressed, for example, in Pope John Paul II’s simple cry before the 1991 Gulf hostilities, ““Never again war””. At the same time, there is the threat of ever scarcer resources of water and food. The dangers of climate change include greater violence overthose scarcities, and it is interesting that in the Comprehensive Spending Review analysis the pressures on human resources and on water and food are seen as being among the key threats to prosperity and to the peace of the world. It is likely that in coming years we shall find ourselves being highly critical of the waging of war by others. If we take that attitude, as we may find ourselves rightly doing, we need to be very clear that our use of our Armed Forces, our own waging of war, is on a secure and legitimate basis. In a week that has seen scathing criticism of the Israeli Prime Minister over the waging of war in Lebanon, it is crucial that we work for parliamentary safeguards over the waging of war and the deployment of troops with violent intent. There will certainly need to be much work on details about emergency situations, the safety of troops and cases where there is a genuine need for pre-emption in self-defence. Those details would need to be worked out as we continue to develop the right way forward in response to this report. All of that needs to be done in the context of a clear principle that war should be engaged in only with the overwhelming consent of the people of our country, and that consent needs to be expressed through debate and decision in Parliament.