War Powers and Treaties

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Guthrie, for introducing this crucial debate today. I remind the House of my interest as a serving TA officer and that I served on Operation TELIC 1 in Iraq in 2003. When contemplating a change in the constitution, the law or conventions, one must ask: what is the mischief that is to be dealt with? How did it come about and will the proposed changes eliminate any possibility of a recurrence? Finally, are there any unintended or undesirable consequences of the proposed changes? The mischief is that we invaded Iraq when, according to most current informed analysis, that was not legal and it was not necessary. The post-conflict reconstruction plan was not properly executed or drafted, despite it being the legal responsibility of the occupying power to do so. How did this come to pass? The noble Lord, Lord Butler, in his excellent report tells us that the answer involved sofa government rather than Cabinet government and a dodgy dossier that could be torn to shreds in classified briefings with officials. Will the proposed changes prevent a recurrence? I suggest not, because they would not change the deeply flawed government decision-making process of the sofa government of the time. Also, it is not possible for 650 MPs to forensically examine a dodgy dossier or other classified documents. The fact is we have to rely upon the collective judgment of the Cabinet and the rest of the Government. I am afraid the Cabinet has been a miserable failure. The rest of the Government did not do very well, with the notable exception of the noble Lord the Minister on the Front Bench, who took a very honourable position at the time. The final question to answer is about the unintended and undesirable consequences of an operation. Unless parliamentarians have seen the grand strategic plan for the operations, which I suspect would be a little bit classified, they cannot possibly know the answer to the question of whether the unintended consequences have been properly dealt with. I recall during the debates in February 2003 that your Lordships, while confident of the military outcome, were asking about post-conflict reconstruction. We asked the right questions. Apparently all had been considered, but of course we now find out that it had not. I do not believe that the proposed changes will deal with the mischief and I intend to examine some of the other issues in a little more detail. There is an argument that the changes will bring us into line with similar democratic states. That may be true, but many of those states do not engage in military operations to the extent that the UK does and, because of their procedures, do not have the utility that the UK forces have; many noble Lords focused on that. In addition, they normally have secrecy and urgency provisions in their arrangements, which means that a malign or incompetent Government can easily circumvent the requirements. I do not want to tie the hands of a future Government so that their grand strategic plan is skewed around the need for agreement in Parliament. Incidentally, I agree that these matters are for another place uniquely to make the final decision on; debates in your Lordships’ House must precede debates in another place. If a significant proportion of the Members of another place are against government policy in a crisis, a vote of confidence can be called. An adverse vote would stop any military operation in its tracks. In practice, such a situation would never arise because the government Chief Whip in another place would report the views of Members of the House in confidence to the Prime Minister long before any vote took place. Of course, the view of Her Majesty’s Opposition would be crucial. In 2003, the Government were confident of the support of the Opposition and could afford to have a vote in the House of Commons without any risk of it being lost. If there are to be formal parliamentary procedures, we need to determine when Parliament should decide. I suggest that any authorisation should be far earlier than many noble Lords would expect. When I arrived in HQ 1 (UK) Armoured Division in March 2003, I had the words of the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Bach, ringing in my ears that war was neither imminent nor inevitable. I confidently expected a month of intensive exercises before we started operations, so I was a little surprised when I got to headquarters and the question was, ““Will we be going this week or next week?””. When the vote took place in the House of Commons, it caused us a slight delay, which was, as it happens, quite useful. However, the timing could have been a significant hindrance. If the vote in the House of Commons had been lost, the operation would obviously have stopped and our forces would have adopted a purely defensive posture. However, we would also as a nation have experienced immediate, catastrophic and permanent failure in our strategic relations with the United States, which no UK Government could afford to allow to happen. The noble Lord, Lord Anderson, articulated similar concerns, but I thought that he was rather muted when he talked about a ““stabbing”” in the back. The Government would ensure that Members of the House were aware of the serious consequences of a no vote at a very late stage in the confrontation, so in practice Members of another place would have no choice; they would have to vote with the Government. So why do it? Why have a vote at a late stage? If there were to be a formal parliamentary procedure, perhaps it ought to occur before any of the following took place: outloading of the ammunition depot other than for training; loading of armoured vehicles on to ships other than for training and for roulements, because that makes us vulnerable to attack by the other state—we are preparing for war; and deployment of combat aircraft overseas other than for exercises. These actions cannot be done easily without our opponent becoming aware of them through other intelligence agencies, but they would be taken early enough in the process not to affect the negotiating position of Her Majesty’s Government and the diplomatic efforts. The difficulty with an early vote is that not all the diplomatic solutions will have been fully exhausted; therefore, it could not be the final decision. I have run out of time but, speaking for myself, I believe that we should maintain the status quo and return to effective Cabinet government, which has served us so well to the past.