Parliament: Waging War (Constitution Committee Report)

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Holme of Cheltenham and the members of the Constitution Committee on their report. It is a pleasure to read an analysis of such clarity which distils the weighty, comprehensive and complex evidence in such an easily understood manner. However, as some other noble Lords have said, when I got to the end I was somewhat disappointed that we ended up with a convention rather than a statutory basis. I was one of the committee’s many witnesses giving my thoughts from the perspective of a former military officer and from having spent the past 11 years as a defence academic. Having read the report and other witnesses’ evidence, and in the light of subsequent events during the past 18 months in Iraq and Afghanistan, my view has not changed. I shall not go through all the evidence that I gave to the committee as it is in the report. However, my views can be summarised as a belief that the use of military force is a unique kind of authority. The state authorises some of its citizens, members of the armed forces, to use lethal force. It also expects these soldiers, sailors and airmen to be prepared to be killed in the service of the state. Before such authority is given, it seems to me self-evident that there must be democratic legitimacy and accountability and that Parliament must be the source of that democratic approval. I say as an aside to the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, that until your Lordships' House is an elected Chamber, our appropriate role is to inform the other place, which makes the decision. However, that will change when we are an elected Chamber. This need for parliamentary approval was true in the past when, once upon a time, we fought wars of necessity which concerned the protection of our people and the defence of our sovereignty. Today the need is even greater. We have entered an era that is characterised by wars of choice. There is no urgent, direct, state-based threat to the United Kingdom that motivates our decision to send troops to the Balkans, to Sierra Leone, to East Timor, to Iraq or to Afghanistan. Also, we have a responsibility to weigh up the importance of playing an appropriate and proportionate international role as a force for good, against the very real limitations of our military to conduct a number of simultaneous operations. We say ““yes”” to Afghanistan but ““no”” to Lebanon; we say ““yes”” to Sierra Leone but ““no”” to Rwanda. These are wars of choice. Having made the choice, young people aged 18 and upwards are put in harm’s way and are authorised to kill other young people if necessary. I do not argue, nor would we from these Benches, that such operations are not needed. They will continue to be needed and, as the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Bramall, said, in this chaotic and unjust world they are likely to be needed more than ever. The question is whether the decision should be taken, as now, under the royal prerogative—which in effect is by a single person, the Prime Minister—or whether, in a democracy, it should be taken by the elected representatives of the nation. I am delighted that the report moves us firmly towards the latter. As I said in my evidence to the committee, that must be the default position in any democracy. From that position, one then looks at the problems and limitations that may be necessary to make it work. That is not an impossible problem. I must admit that, like the noble Lord, Lord Judd, I was worried on reading some of the evidence from those who opposed such a change. In particular, I was struck by the remarks made by my former colleague, the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Boyce, who said that he believed, "““that going through Parliament for approval for deployment will compromise military success in every circumstance””." I fundamentally disagree with that assessment. Recent events have suggested to me that those who make the grand strategic decisions, which are what we are talking about, might make better informed ones if they were to be exposed to proper scrutiny by Parliament. The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, was right to draw us away from the Iraq 2003 event on which many have focused. He looked at the Falklands and the first Gulf War. At the time of the evidence-taking session, I used the then-prospective increase in deployments to Afghanistan as an example of where we ought to apply that principle. In the light of subsequent events over the past year, I strongly believe that a proper debate over the move into the south and the east of the country, the strategic aims, the resources—both our own and those of our allies—the expected timelines, the co-ordination between nations and the co-ordination between departments would have been very helpful. We might all have gone in with the same plans instead of different plans. It perhaps would have prevented a somewhat hesitant and uncertain start. It might have taken longer, which is one of the worries that noble Lords have talked about. The Dutch had a difficult time taking their decision, but they came to it, they are there and they are doing the operation. It is not always a question of whether it is just a ““go”” or ““no go”” decision. The process itself means that you have a better chance of ending up with a coherent strategy where everyone knows what the country is trying to achieve and how it is going to do it. In summary, I am broadly content with the report, because it moves us forward towards democratic control. I would have preferred a stronger approach than a convention, but it is a start. I was also absolutely astonished by the cursory response from the Government to what is a very serious report about a very serious subject. Among the areas that still need to be addressed is the question of thresholds for further parliamentary authorisation. Parliament must not micromanage troops at the tactical level, but it must have input to significant force level changes, up or down. In the sorts of operations that we are talking about, it needs to have a regular review of sustained operations, perhaps annually, where parliamentary authority has to be renewed and progress is looked at to see whether the strategy has changed. That is particularly apposite, four years to the day after President Bush declared, ““Mission accomplished”” in Iraq. To pick up the point made by the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, that would be the occasion to look at possible draw-downs if they were necessary, which are as important as force increases. However, despite those caveats, I wish the report well. I hope that it will be one of the new Prime Minister’s surprises on taking office to remove the royal prerogative. The country needs it, but so do the Armed Forces, who are sent to do the nation’s difficult and dangerous work.