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House of Commons Reform

The hon. Gentleman, who has been persistent on this issue—quite sensibly, he has tabled items on the Order Paper and campaigned elsewhere—makes some extremely good points. The Iraq conflict demonstrated that the House cannot entirely trust the Executive, who often have their own imperatives, desires and objectives. If a Government command a large majority in the House, irrespective of which party they represent, there is always a temptation to use the majority to get their business through. [Mr. Jim Hood in the Chair] I conclude with a quotation from Ken Macdonald, who was the Director of Public Prosecutions for five years from 2003 to 2008. It is a damning indictment not just of Tony Blair, but of Parliament as an institution:""The degree of deceit involved in our decision to go to war on Iraq becomes steadily clearer. This was a foreign policy disgrace of epic proportions and playing footsie on Sunday morning television does nothing to repair the damage. It is now very difficult to avoid the conclusion that Tony Blair engaged in an alarming subterfuge with his partner George Bush and went on to mislead and cajole the British people into a deadly war they had made perfectly clear they didn't want, and on a basis that it's increasingly hard to believe even he found truly credible."" We have to accept that that subterfuge and deceit was perpetrated on Parliament and that we did not have the effective means, tools or mechanisms to discover what was truly happening. We did not even have the basic legal advice that was given to the Government as providing legitimacy for the war. From my 26 years in the House, what happened with Iraq causes me the greatest concern, because as an institution we were sucked into something that many of us will regret for the rest of our lives. Any reforms of the institution must ensure that such a thing never happens again.