War Powers and Treaties

My Lords, it is a very special privilege to follow the noble Lord. I have heard many maiden speeches but he brought a fundamental and important message to us all with passion, and we welcome him very much. He comes to the House with a distinguished medical career in saving lives. However, as his speech has shown today, he has much wider and more fundamental concerns about society and community. The fact that he is a trustee of Muslim-Jewish Relations at the Woolf Institute is a perfect illustration of that commitment. He is also a passionate supporter of the Commonwealth and is chairman of the Commonwealth Youth Exchange. He has already been recognised and honoured in many ways. I was particularly intrigued by the fact that he has been honoured by the Order of the Burning Spear. I hope, one of these days, that he will explain to us what that honour involves. I am sure that the House will want to hear him more during the coming months. As we grapple with this vital issue of parliamentary accountability in war, I briefly follow my noble friend Lord Morgan into a brief historical digression. I want to draw the attention of the House to the peculiar and particular contribution that war itself has played in the development of our parliamentary processes. If we go back to the 17th century, we see that if the king or the crown could avoid war, they also avoided calling Parliaments. It was war that eventually, and fatefully, forced Charles I to summon Parliament, with all the consequences that flowed from that. His son, Charles II, governed the last four years of his life without any Parliament at all; he stayed out of war and conflict. From five years after that—1690—to the present day, this House and the other place have sat every year. That is a unique record of representation. Why is there such a tradition of representation, meeting and scrutiny? The prolonged conflicts and war between 1690 and 1715 ensured a permanent place for Parliament as a central institution of the state—as opposed to an event, which it had been before. War has played a significant part in the way in which our parliamentary processes have evolved. It was involved in the birth of the demand for scrutiny of estimates, in the beginning of the Public Accounts Commission and, above all, in the introduction of annual Sessions, with which came debates and inquiries. There was no squeamishness in the 1690s about debating war—strategy, cost and conduct of war was debated with vehemence and passion. That was the legacy for us from that post-Revolution Parliament. Few would now suggest—this is the reason that we are debating an alternative parliamentary mechanism—that the old fashioned methods we adopted, of controlling the Executive by controlling supply, scrutinising estimates and delving into the details of government expenditure, are a relevant means of asserting parliamentary scrutiny in relation to war. I have noticed in my parliamentary lifetime in the other place an increasing lack of interest in or concern about the details of estimates. I am one of the last veterans of the old ““jumbo”” estimates committee of the Commons, which at least tried to tie its inquiry to a vote. The noble Lord opposite was also a member. All that has gone. We cannot use scrutiny and control of supply as a means of keeping a check on the Executive of the day. As a number of noble Lords have said, in recent times, the character of armed conflict, and our involvement in it, has changed. The catchphrase is ““wars of choice””. Our involvement in recent conflicts has been a matter of choice. Where there is a choice, it behoves the Government of the day to justify particularly and thoroughly that decision and seek prior parliamentary approval for it. That was most forcefully expressed by the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Bramall. The considerable practical issues have been rehearsed today, as was done in considerable detail in the report of the Constitution Committee, which I had the privilege to be a member of. I draw the attention of the House to evidence supplied by the Ministry of Defence. We could not publish it in full, but it is summarised in paragraph 27 of our report. Since 1990, there have been 60 military operations. It would have been absurd and dangerous to suggest that parliamentary approval could apply to each and every one of those operations. When members of the committee analysed those 60 operations, we saw that they flowed from a series of initial mission decisions: repelling the Iraq invasion of Kuwait; the enforcement of no-fly zones in Iraq; the coalition operations in Iraq from March 1993; our contributions to the Balkans in the UN Protection Force and the NATO-led Implementation Force; Sierra Leone; and, finally, Afghanistan. I was in the other place when a number of those decisions were made—not for the latter two but I was certainly there for the Sierra Leone decision. Neither I nor any member of the committee really believed that if Government had had to seek prior parliamentary approval, that would in any way have jeopardised the military operations that followed. It would have given an additional degree of authority, particularly with regard to international legal obligations, legal rights and so forth; I refer in particular to the need for understanding and appreciating the legal basis of any such decision. The principle of prior parliamentary approval is good and a good additional discipline for Government to have to go through. I disagree briefly with my noble friend Lord Morgan over his dismissal of the idea of a convention. A parliamentary convention can be created by the powerful all-party consensus that seems to be emerging as a result of discussions and debates. I believe that we will have the force of Parliament behind that. Governments will constantly err on the side of coming to Parliament for approval rather than trying to avoid it. If we established such a convention, that would involve not doing something radically new or dangerous, but restoring and renewing a degree of parliamentary accountability—our predecessors began that more than 300 years ago.