Hutton Report

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Wednesday, 04 February 2004 00:00

Mr. Gordon Prentice (Pendle) (Lab): I do not want to take my full time because so many colleagues want to speak in the debate. I voted against the war in Iraq because I did not believe, as the Prime Minister invited us all to believe, that there was a serious and current threat. I wanted Hans Blix to get back in there and finish the inspections. Let us remember that he said that the inspections would take months, not years.

Going to war is the most serious decision that a Government can take, and it must be taken in full knowledge of all the facts. It is as plain as a pikestaff that we did not have all the relevant facts before us when we voted on 18 March.

The key thing for those Labour Members who reluctantly voted with the Government was not resolution 1441, but the supposed existence of weapons of mass destruction that could be fired within 45 minutes. My right hon. Friend the Member for Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley (Mr. Foulkes) told me earlier that he did not know those colleagues. I can tell him and others that there were colleagues who voted with the Government reluctantly, because they believed that those weapons of mass destruction were primed and ready to be fired in 45 minutes.

Peter Bradley: Will my hon. Friend give way?

Mr. Prentice: I would rather not.
The September document showed concentric circles taking in not just the middle east but Europe, including the British base in Akrotiri in Cyprus. Any reasonable person reading it would say that there was a threat, if not to us in Britain but to our troops in Cyprus.

I believe that the policy of containment worked. What has been the result of military action? Yes, we are in Iraq, but 10,000 Iraqis have been killed, 500 American servicemen have been killed, and British soldiers have been killed. I do not believe that Saddam was a threat. We heard today, as several Members have noted, that the Prime Minister did not know on 18 March whether the weapons of mass destruction were strategic or battlefield. That is an astonishing admission. I hope that the Butler inquiry will shed light on that.

A number of positive things came out of Hutton. It showed for the first time the internal wiring of the Government—who was in the loop, and who was not. I find it astonishing that when so many of the key decisions were taken, the Secretary of State for Defence was not copied in to critical correspondence. It is astonishing that the head of the civil service, the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Andrew Turnbull, became involved only on the day after Dr. Kelly's body was found. The top civil servant, who is supposed to advise the Prime Minister, did not know about it—he was out playing golf or something—until after Dr. Kelly died.

It is unprecedented that all this information is posted on the internet, and yet we heard from my right hon. Friend the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee and my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay) that the Committee was denied access to information and told that it could not see John Scarlett even in camera. Lord Hutton comes along, however, gets that information and posts it on the world wide web. What conclusion do we draw from that? A fundamental review of the Osmotherly rules is needed to give Select Committees access to information that inquiries can ask for and get as a matter of routine.

The other thing that needs to be looked at is No. 10 and how it works. It is the classic paperless office—no notes of meetings were taken. It is astonishing that, over a two-week period, three written records were taken for up to 17 meetings a day. Phone calls and key decisions made over the phone were not recorded. Permanent secretaries, the top civil servants—belatedly doing now what they should have done then—are apparently insisting that key meetings, at which key decisions are taken, are properly minuted. Lord Hutton could follow the paper trail as far as the BBC was concerned, but there was no paper trail to follow in respect of what happened in No. 10—it all emerged from the evidence that was given during the Hutton inquiry.

Hutton also brought out other facts that would have been buried. I refer my colleagues to an article by Lord Alexander, the chairman of Justice—the British section of the International Commission of Jurists—that appeared in Monday's Financial Times, which chronologises and charts dossier changes, including key phrases that were taken out of the dossier in order to influence public opinion.

I am pleased that the Prime Minister, I think, told the House today that the new committee of inquiry will have sight of the whole, unexpurgated version of the legal advice that gave the legal basis for the Government to go to war. That is marvellous.

There are less satisfactory aspects of Hutton, of course, although I do not have time to go into them. Primarily, the focus was too narrow. When people give evidence to an inquiry that takes the judge outside his terms of reference, surely, in the interests of truth and justice, he should add a little footnote saying, "This is something that should be followed up." Yet Lord Hutton said that it was unnecessary for him to resolve the differences between the evidence that was given by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Defence and Alastair Campbell, without inviting anyone else to pursue such matters.

I want to finish on the question of the BBC. I sit, sometimes biting my lip, behind my right hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton (Mr. Kaufman), who is always dripping venom about the BBC, and cannot consider it objectively. He did so again today. The BBC has a programme complaints unit, and it is a great mystery to me why Alastair Campbell did not take that route. His complaint would have gone to Greg Dyke and the BBC governors. [Interruption.]

I invite my right hon. Friend the Member for Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley not to heckle me, because this is an important issue that goes to the heart of what we do—it is about truth and how people outside this place perceive us. If we take on the BBC, we will be the losers, because those people believe the BBC much more than they would ever believe the Government or Parliament.

5.16 pm

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