Iraq Inquiry Report

Steven Paterson Excerpts

Thursday 14th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Steven Paterson (Stirling) (SNP)]

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) on securing the debate, as well as those who signed the motion.

I signal my wholehearted support for the aspirations of the motion; namely that security checking of the Iraq inquiry report should be completed as soon as possible and that no later than two weeks after the report is submitted to the Government next Monday, 18 April, it should be published. We want to see that. This week, I attempted to table a question for Defence questions next Monday on the timing of the Chilcot inquiry. I was told by the Table Office that it was not appropriate—as the inquiry was independent of Government, that was not an acceptable question to ask the Government. Yet here we are debating the issue today, because of the Government’s apparent intention to delay publication of the report until 24 June, the day after the referendum.

I would respectfully submit that the Government cannot have it both ways: the publication of this report is clearly to be delayed beyond the time necessary for appropriate security checking, if it is going to be delayed, for entirely political reasons. That is wholly unacceptable, and the Government need fundamentally to rethink it, if that is their intention, for several reasons that I will cover in my contribution today.

When making a statement announcing the establishment of the Iraq inquiry on 15 June 2009, the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown said:

“The inquiry is essential because it will ensure that, by learning lessons, we strengthen the health of our democracy, our diplomacy and our military.

The inquiry will, I stress, be fully independent of Government.”—[Official Report, 15 June 2009; Vol. 494, c. 23.]

If the inquiry was essential in June 2009 for those reasons, then the logical conclusion we must draw is that the as the report has still not been published, these lessons have still not been learned and our democracy, diplomacy and military are still not strengthened in the way envisaged by Gordon Brown. The inquiry is plainly not “fully independent of Government” if the timing of its release is controlled by the Government, and is intended to be used—if it is the case that that release will be delayed until after the European referendum—in such a plainly and blatantly political way.

No one has mentioned purdah today, although I know that it was mentioned in last year’s debate. The purdah period before an election might be an argument used to say that the report should not be published, but that is not an argument I would accept. Indeed, last year the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden made the point extremely well, saying:

“Purdah periods exist for a…reason: to prevent Governments from using their power to publish information that would give them electoral advantage. They are not to prevent impartial information from being put in the public domain”.—[Official Report, 29 January 2015; Vol. 591, c. 1038-1039.]

I could not have put that better myself, and I entirely agree.

That brings me to security checks. I accept that there is a need to ensure the report does not disclose information that is detrimental to our national security, and that there are other Committees of this House that can scrutinise sensitive matters and provide political oversight without national security-sensitive information being released publicly. That is the way it should be. However, as the motion quite correctly states, none other than the Prime Minister wrote to the inquiry chairman Sir John Chilcot last October about national security checking, expressing his wish to see the process completed faster than the two weeks required to complete the process for the Saville inquiry into Bloody Sunday. I hope that nobody intends today to suggest that all of a sudden the national security checking will require precisely nine weeks and one day to complete rather than the two weeks imagined in October.

The second Iraq war caused the deaths of at least 134,000 Iraqi civilians and claimed the lives of 179 British soldiers. More broadly, according to Casualty Monitor, there were 5,970 UK military injuries throughout the period of the war in Iraq. This is a war which destabilised Iraq, precipitated an ongoing civil war and has left a fertile breeding ground for vicious terrorist fanatics. It is a war which has shattered the credibility of western countries in the region and invites seemingly endless military interventions.

The continuing delays in publishing this report are an insult to the families of those service personnel killed in the Iraq conflict, who have been made to wait almost seven years for a report anticipated to take one year. Those responsible for leading us into that illegal war have never been held accountable, and the essential lessons have not been learned. It is high time they were learned, because this episode is indeed an “international embarrassment”. I commend the motion, and call on the Government to publish the report at the earliest opportunity.