Iraq Inquiry

Lord Bew Excerpts

Tuesday 12th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bew (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to express my respect for the work of Sir John Chilcot and his colleagues in the production of this extremely serious and important report. The remarks I will make are different in tone from any of the other remarks that have been made in the House this afternoon because I intend to concentrate simply on the domestic context of the Chilcot report.

It seems only yesterday that we were widely assured by the media that Sir John was a man with no conscience, that he was another empty Whitehall suit, that we could be reasonably assured that the report would be yet another cover-up, and so on. It has most certainly not been so. Everyone now accepts that to be the case. There was no reason ever to think that it might be so. I shall make the obvious observation that at the time he was appointed Sir John Chilcot was the chair of the advisory committee of the Centre for Contemporary British History. The Centre for Contemporary British History has only two purposes: first, to assert the importance of what we can learn from contemporary history for policy-making, and, secondly, to assert the importance of the public accountability of government and officials. Nobody would devote their time to that job if they were the sort of person who believed that it is better to sweep things under the carpet. It is such an obvious fact in his curriculum vitae, yet it did not seem to occur to anybody over the past year or two in their discussion in the lead-up to this report.

The second obvious thing about Sir John’s career is that he was Permanent Under-Secretary in Northern Ireland between 1990 and 1997 and played a major role, working first for John Major and then for Tony Blair, in bringing about the success of the peace process based on historic compromise. In those seven years, Sir John was confronted by heart-rending, dreadful moments in the history of Northern Ireland. Those who heard him speak at funerals et cetera had no reason to believe anything other than that he was a man who had a serious heart and a serious moral centre. Quite why these perfectly obvious stand-out features of his career have somehow disappeared in the past three or four years from contemporary discussion in the media of this report and its evolution is quite beyond me. I am very happy that at this moment we can say that it is perfectly clear that Sir John Chilcot was determined to bring about a report characterised by honesty, clarity and serious research.

I am a little uneasy about one question with respect to the reputation of the former Prime Minister Mr Blair. More than 700 British soldiers died in Northern Ireland. He played a major role in bringing that conflict to an end. Some of those currently on the left of the Labour Party—now at the apex of the Labour Party—are the most bitter in their criticisms of him and of the errors clearly made that are located in the Chilcot report. Some of those people were bitter opponents of the work that he did and disagreed fundamentally with his attempt to bring about an historic compromise in Northern Ireland. It is worth mentioning it at this difficult moment to put that point into the balance.

This report is excellent but it will, in certain respects at least, be challenged over time in certain areas. This is inevitable. I was the historical adviser on the Bloody Sunday tribunal, which was the last great report of this kind. There are now articles written in books, serious commentaries and new documents coming to light, even now, after all the work and all the time, which raise reasonable doubts about certain arguments of the Bloody Sunday tribunal. There is nothing that comes close to breaking the fundamental structure of the argument of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Saville, but when it comes to significant parts about the role of x or y you would have to say that there may be another way of looking at it. This must inevitably be the case with parts of this report. More documents will come out in America and so on. I simply make the point that what is said this afternoon cannot be absolutely the last word. It is most unlikely that the fundamental arguments will change, but it cannot be absolutely the last word on all the issues addressed.

I took great comfort from what both Front Benches said at the beginning of the debate. We cannot give up on the idea that at some stage this country may again be called to make an international humanitarian intervention, and it would be disastrous if we interpreted the Chilcot report as saying that under no circumstances can we ever respond again because in this case things went so badly wrong. This problem has been with us for a long time. In 1859, in his A Few Words on Non-Intervention, John Stuart Mill wrote that it was time that,

“some rule or criterion whereby the justifiableness of intervening in the affairs of other countries, and (what is sometimes fully as questionable) the justifiableness of refraining from intervention, may be brought to a definite and rational test”.

We have been assured that with the national security and other new arrangements in place the context for that definite and rational test is probably wiser and better than it has ever been, but we cannot allow this report to send out the message that under no circumstances will the United Kingdom be available for humanitarian intervention, even though we have had a very sharp lesson in its risks.