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Defence in the World

In a wide-ranging debate, the Front-Bench spokesmen concentrated, quite naturally and properly, on the issues that face us in Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition to those continuing hostilities, two issues of overriding importance affect our stance on security. First, there is the question of our response to the growing evidence that the United States or its proxy, Israel, may unleash a military strike and possibly a nuclear one against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Secondly, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne, East and Wallsend (Mr. Brown) mentioned, there is the decision on Trident. I shall comment briefly on both issues. I assume that if there was a US military attack on Iran there would not be any UK military involvement whatsoever, but I am not wholly convinced that our participation has been ruled out, so we must consider how a decision on the UK response would be made. As we learned from the Iraq war, it is astonishing that the decision to go to war—the gravest decision facing a nation—is still taken by one person alone in this country, namely, the Prime Minister of the day. There is no requirement to seek parliamentary approval and, even more astonishing, if the Prime Minister allows a parliamentary vote, and that vote is against war, he would still be within his rights to ignore it, as he has absolute power to commit the nation to war. That may be unlikely, but it is, none the less, an untenable position. Under the royal prerogative, which dates back centuries, the powers of the Crown exercised by the Prime Minister, without consultation in Cabinet or in Parliament, include the right to make war, to make peace and to sign and ratify treaties. The democratisation of prerogative rights is being actively sought by all political parties, and in opposition the Labour party stated that it would ensure"““that all actions of government are subject to political and parliamentary control, including those actions now governed by the arbitrary use of the Royal Prerogative””." It went on to emphasise the fact that the decision to go to war and the ratification of treaties were special areas of concern, and that is clearly the case. It is high time that those pledges were implemented. We urgently need a convention that requires the approval of Parliament to be sought before British armed forces are deployed and take part in military action. The Prime Minister should be required to lay before both Houses of Parliament a report setting out the proposed objectives of the action and its legality, including—and we remember the Iraq affair—the Attorney-General’s full advice about the legality of any such action. That would still allow the Prime Minister, if he deemed it urgently necessary, to deploy troops before the approval of the House is given. In such circumstances, which are likely to be rare, the Prime Minister should still have to lay the report before Parliament within seven days after troop deployment had begun. Such demands are not out of step with constitutional practice elsewhere. In the US, for example, the war powers resolution of 1973—more than 30 years ago—requires that if the approval of Congress for waging war is not secured within 60 days, the President must withdraw US forces within a further 30 days. For all these reasons, will my right hon. Friend make it clear in his winding-up speech what plans the Government have to abolish, as we promised to do before 1997, the royal prerogative to commit the country to war, and in its place—I believe that this has wide support across the House—to regularise a democratic procedure by requiring a parliamentary vote of approval on a substantive motion? The second issue is Trident. The Prime Minister has made it clear that he has already taken the decision to replace the system. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne, East and Wallsend said so eloquently, at present the biggest danger that we face is the threat of terrorism on our mainland. For that, of course, nuclear weapons are useless. The only argument to justify Trident replacement, to which the Government always resort, and I think this also applies to the Opposition— when one is opposing both Front Benches, one feels confident of the rightness of one’s cause—is that although nuclear weapons are irrelevant to our current security concerns, and even though we are now in an utterly different post-cold war environment, we may at some future point, inevitably unspecified, face either a rogue state, a re-emerging nuclear Russia or a nuclear-armed superpower like China. I want to examine that argument because, in the last analysis, it is the only serious bottom-line argument that is advanced. It is seriously flawed on at least three counts. First, as is or should be widely known, our nuclear deterrent is not an independent British nuclear deterrent—again, my right hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne, East and Wallsend, with whom I had not collaborated before the debate, made the point excellently. We depend on the Americans for the warheads, the fuse and firing systems, the nuclear explosives, the warhead casings and the guidance systems. We cannot fire the missiles without US-supplied data and satellite navigation. As my right hon. Friend went on to say, we do not even own the missiles. They are leased to us by the Americans from a repository on the east coast of the United States under a system which, I believe, is known as rent-a-rocket. If we ever needed to stand alone in a situation where we did not have US approval, we would not be able to do so.