Today the Constitution Unit publishes a wide-ranging new report. The Constitutional Landscape: Options for Reform briefly summarises 31 areas of constitutional policy, describing the current state of affairs and the options for reform. In this post Lisa James, one of the report’s authors, explores its contents.
Continue readingTag Archives: Iraq
Should military action require parliamentary approval?
The role of parliament in authorising the use of military force has been much debated in recent years, most recently following airstrikes against targets in Yemen. The Constitution Unit hosted an event with three distinguished experts to discuss what role, if any, parliament should have in approving military action. Rowan Hall offers a summary of the key contributions.
Recent airstrikes in Yemen have revived the debate around parliament’s role in military action. In March, the Constitution Unit held an event on this very topic, with a panel consisting of academic experts Dr Veronika Fikfak and Dr James Strong, and former Cabinet minister and current chair of the Royal United Services Institute, David Lidington. This blog post summarises some of the points made at the event, a recording of which is available on YouTube and in podcast form.
Dr Veronika Fikfak
Veronika Fikfak began by outlining the current constitutional convention governing parliament’s role in military action and made three key points.
First, citing the Cabinet Manual, Fikfak said that the role of MPs currently only extends to debating military action, not necessarily to voting on it. Although MPs have voted on military action in the past, this is not always guaranteed under the convention as it currently stands.
Second, Fikfak said that the convention as it currently stands is explicitly linked to the period before military action takes place, not during or after it happens. She welcomed this, arguing that if parliament is to have a real say, it needs to do so in advance of military action. However, she did also note that this aspect of the convention has not always been observed.
Continue readingHow might Keir Starmer codify his Prevention of Military Intervention Act?
Recent events have led to renewed discussion about the convention that parliament should have a formal role in authorising military action, which Keir Starmer at one point proposed to codify in legislation. Robert Hazell argues that placing the existing convention on a statutory footing is unwise, and calls on parliament and the government to work together in creating a ‘shared vision’ of how the convention should operate.
Tony Blair’s decision to support the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 has cast a long shadow over every subsequent leader of the Labour party. Keir Starmer opposed the Iraq war, and one of ten pledges he promised as part of his 2020 leadership campaign was to introduce a Prevention of Military Intervention Act. He subsequently specified on The Andrew Marr Show: ‘I would pass legislation that said military action could be taken if first the lawful case for it was made, secondly there was a viable objective and thirdly you got the consent of the Commons’.
Starmer was reminded of this pledge when he was interviewed about the UK airstrikes against the Houthi rebels in Yemen. He told Laura Kuenssberg on 14 January that his proposal for military action to require the support of the Commons only meant sustained military action involving troops on the ground, rather than targeted airstrikes like those in the Red Sea:
If we are going to deploy our troops on the ground, then parliament should be informed: there should be a debate, the case should be made, and there should be a vote… What I wanted to do was to codify the convention: the Cabinet Manual has a convention… it could be in a law or it could be by some other means.
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FOI and weapons of mass destruction
The controversy over the War in Iraq continued yesterday when Alastair Campbell’s claims about the case for war appeared to be undermined. The debate over the War in Iraq in the UK has centered on the so-called ‘dodgy dossier’ and the extent to which this document was subject to political interference or was a set of objective facts about Saddam’s Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Alongside the succession of inquiries, journalist Chris Ames has used a series of FOI requests to try to shed some new light on the process around the writing of the dossier.
Ames did a number of interesting things. First, he obtained one very interesting early draft of the dossier, which had been annotated by an official with a good knowledge of 20th century history and, perhaps, a gift for dry and succinct statements of fact, as this extract shows:
‘There is evidence of some of [the document’s] claims are being questioned. The draft [begins] with the words: “Iraq presents a uniquely dangerous threat to the world. No other country has twice launched wars of aggression against neighbours.” In a margin someone has written: “Germany? US: Cuba, Guatemala, Mexico.” The next sentence reads: “In the 77 years since the Geneva Convention against chemical weapons was signed, Iraq is the only country to have broken it.” Here, the fastidious official has added: “Japan in China?”‘
He has also used FOI to get hold of some very interesting emails, notably between Tony Blair and his chief of staff. He also obtained emails between officials involved that appeared to show them trying to ‘tone down’ the dossier, describing claims about Saddam’s nuclear capability as ‘Frankenstein’ science and showing their failed attempts to moderate the document ‘We have suggested moderating the same language in much the same way on drafts from the dim and distant past without success’.
Whether this ‘proves’ that the case for war was manipulated is something the current (and fourth) inquiry into Iraq is looking into but the data serves to severely undermine some of the central official claims made about the path to war. Ames’ work is a clear example of the ‘jigsaw effect’, a patient piecing together of parts of the process behind the controversial decision to go to war. But it also exposes the limitations of FOI in complex decision-making cases such as these. Four years is really too long to keep up with the details and it becomes yesterday’s news.
This won’t stop the revelations, however, and here’s an excellent example of a badly timed attempt to cheer up Donald Rumsfeld recently revealed by FOI.