As we have a 13-years-too-late mea culpa (but a big boy made him do it) from John Prescott, Alistair Carmichael writes for the Times about Parliament’s role in supporting the Iraq War.
He makes the very valid point that Parliament could have given Blair a much harder time, asking for more evidence, scrutinising every claim made, but they ducked it.
Too many of those who now say, “Of course, if I had known then what I know now …” must be challenged. For the most part they could not have known then what they know now because they were not prepared to ask the questions or to demand the evidence.
Attention focuses on the actions of the prime minister and government of the day and rightly so — they failed to do what they should have done. That is, however, equally true of the Conservative opposition. Where they should have questioned, they acquiesced. Where they should have demanded evidence, they accepted assertions. As a party of the establishment, they could not allow themselves to believe that the various arms of government would be embarking on a war without a sound basis in law.
Our parliament failed us and as a result we embarked on a war that was a catastrophic error of judgment, the consequences of which shall be with us for decades to come.
He also points out the vilification meted out in the Chamber to those who did stand up against the war – notably Charles Kennedy:
Reading again the Hansard record of Charles Kennedy’s speech in the final debate on March 18, 2003, you see the repeated interventions, not least from the Speaker demanding that he be allowed to have his say. Hansard does not record the wall of sound that I remember greeting Charles when he got to his feet in these debates or, for that matter, every week at prime minister’s questions.
And he reminds of us his own prescient intervention.
I said this: “The government cannot be allowed to ignore the fact that they have not persuaded the public of the case for war. They must understand that the consequence of entering a war supported by the British government but not by the British people will be to see an acceleration of that process of disengagement between people and politics. It would be a grotesque irony if we went to war in order to bring democracy to Iraq and in so doing dealt a fatal blow to the democratic institutions of our own country.”
You can read the whole article here (£).
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