Iraq Inquiry Report

Mark Durkan Excerpts

Thursday 14th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr MacNeil]

The hon. Gentleman is very right. We expect the military to do its job when we commit it to war. I use the word “we”, but I was not an MP at the time and, like most of the rest of the citizens of the UK and Scotland, I did not support the action in Iraq. When we ask the military as a collective to do a job, we should be prepared to do our job and deliver change if necessary. We should not run away or be scared of such decisions. We must remember that there was a Butler inquiry in 2004, which the Evening Standard branded a whitewash on its front page. When the Government thought that they could get inquiries of a certain type, they were quite willing to have them.

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

The hon. Gentleman and other Members have made very important points. Is it not hugely important that we remove this false parliamentary rubric of having no inquiry while troops are in the field? Otherwise, Governments will have a perverse incentive to keep troops in the field in a possibly disintegrating and changing conflict situation, and will be suspected of doing so, in order to avoid an inquiry?

[Mr MacNeil]

I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for making that point. He probably knows that I am a great admirer of his thoughts and ideas. He makes a very good point about this perverse incentive that a Government can have to keep a war going to avoid an inquiry. Hopefully, that is not a reality, but given the machinations of politics, we can never know. There may be a desire to get over another couple of weeks or another month, or to kick the can down the road that little bit further. The can was certainly kicked down the road a decade ago. A pivotal thing changed between 2006 and 2009—the Prime Minister of the day changed, from Tony Blair to Gordon Brown. People can draw their own conclusions from that, but I do think that was significant. I will wait for the inquiry to see just how significant it was.

As hon. Members have said, we cannot have this Parliament running away from the reality of what it committed other people to doing. Ultimately, the Iraq war cost 179 UK lives. As the hon. Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn) said, that does not take into account those who were wounded in body or mind, or the knock-on effects on families, loved ones, and those dealing with people wounded in body or mind. The war has taken quite a toll on people in the UK, and it has cost the lives of 4,800 allied soldiers. Sadly, those figures, terrible as they are, are dwarfed by those for civilian casualties in Iraq. The lowest estimate is 134,000, but the number is possibly four times higher than that. The war also created 3.5 million refugees. For goodness’ sake, there are lessons that we must learn about what we got ourselves involved in, and what we might do again if we do not have the courage to face up to what was done.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr MacNeil]

I am grateful for that intervention. As was said earlier, the UK risks becoming an international laughing-stock because of this infinite, eternal delay with this report. My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and the delay is annoying many people. It is certainly not to the satisfaction of the families, many of whom would concur with what he said about the EU referendum. Roger Bacon, whose son Matthew Bacon was killed in Basra in 2005, said:

“To allow the referendum to get in the way of it seems to me to be completely wrong and smacks of political manoeuvrings that should not be taking place really.”

Interestingly, the former member of the Foreign Affairs Committee and former Labour Member representing Thurrock, Andrew Mackinlay, called for the publication of Chilcot not to get lost in the case of the European referendum. He said:

“It would suit the security and intelligence services and some people in high places for it to be ‘lost’ in the flurry…of final days of the referendum campaign”,

so let us have it soon at the beginning of May. That is when this report should be out, on the Government’s word. We are looking for the Government to keep their promise and for John Chilcot to keep his. The families certainly deserve that.

[Mark Durkan]

Some of us know John Chilcot and have worked with him, because of our backgrounds and roles. When he was appointed to carry out this inquiry, I was accused of being uncharitable in saying that although he had many attributes, I did not think he would be found in the “Yellow Pages” under I for independent or C for challenging. Perhaps he will prove otherwise. He conducted the review after the Castlereagh raid, and what he did then was what my party and I predicted he would do—come up with an outcome that would entirely suit the security services and be more about their interests. That shows that this man is well attuned and sensitive to the interests, demands and requirements of the security services. The idea that he has written a report that will need serious national security checking is somewhat preposterous.

[Mr MacNeil]

Those are interesting words from the hon. Gentleman. That brings us back to the Prime Minister’s statement that the national security checking for the Saville inquiry took two weeks, and that the expectation was for the Chilcot inquiry to take no longer than that. I expect—and it is the expectation of this Chamber—that the report will be published in the week commencing 2 May. We cannot have anything other than that.

The failure to publish this report has, I think, left us uninformed about other engagements that took place subsequently to Iraq. The UK’s military action since Iraq has, it can be argued, been a chaotic mess. That certainly seems to have been the case in Libya, where we led a bombing campaign costing 13 times more than the amount spent on the rebuilding of Iraq. Had Chilcot been published, we might have had some hard lessons set out in black and white to guide any Government planning any military adventures or interventions in the future to plan for the peace afterwards, not to leave a vacuum and not to leave an opportunity for terrorists to move in and destabilise a state. We were selling ourselves short and other countries particularly short when the launch of the report was delayed, and we are doing so now through the interminable delay to its publication.

Let me conclude with the words of a woman I greatly admire—Rose Gentle from Glasgow, the mother of the Royal Highland Fusilier Gordon Gentle, who was killed 12 years ago in Basra at the age of 19. She said that she was “disappointed” by the latest news from the inquiry, and added:

“We thought it should be out a lot sooner than this. I thought it would be out by the end of the year, because they have everything there. It’s another let-down. It’s another few months to wait and suffer again.”

That was said on 29 October 2015, nine years after the initial debate on Iraq in this place. Bereaved parents such as Rose Gentle should not wait a day beyond the first week of May 2016 for the publication of the Chilcot report.