---

Armed Forces (Parliamentary Approval for Participation in Armed Conflict) Bill

I am pleased to take part in the debate and to support my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Clare Short). As she said, I introduced an almost identical Bill during the previous Session. Unfortunately, I was not drawn anywhere near as high in the ballot as my right hon. Friend. Then, of course, the general election intervened. As a result, there was no real debate of my Bill. I recall that when I introduced my Bill in January it was assumed by many Members who spoke to me and by many outside the House that the only reason for it was opposition to the war in Iraq, and that no one could possibly support the Bill who had not been in opposition to that war. That is completely untrue. There was no reason why someone who thought that the war in Iraq was justified should not support the Bill. Its origins were not purely that war. My hon. Friend the Member for Pendle (Mr. Prentice), who was a member of the Public Administration Committee, conducted an inquiry into the royal prerogative. It was not an inquiry into the use of the royal prerogative in war, but went much wider than that. However, the use of the royal prerogative in that respect was one example that happened to coincide with others that some of us were concerned about and which we wished to take up. I make no secret of the fact that my opposition to the war was one of the reasons for my interest in taking forward the Bill, but it was not the only one by a long stretch of the imagination. I think that it was in March—I would have to check the date—that I raised questions arising from the Bill in Prime Minister’s Question Time. In responding to me, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister said that he could not foresee any future situation where a Prime Minister would go to war without a substantive vote in the House. He cited the vote on Iraq as an example. I have two comments about that. The fact that the Prime Minister said what he did does not give any guarantees for the future. There will be other Prime Ministers, and maybe Prime Ministers of parties other than Labour. The fact that the current Prime Minister has said that, in his view, it would not be possible to enter into a conflict such as Iraq in future without a substantive vote does not amount to a guarantee. My hon. Friend the Member for Pendle put his finger on the critical issue about the decision to go to war and the mechanisms used. If the Prime Minister believes that there should be a substantive vote in the future, it is worth noting that I have heard virtually no Members arguing that there should not be such a vote, whether before or after the event.