I beg to move,

That leave be given to bring in a Bill to require football clubs to provide tickets to matches at a discount for persons under a specified age; to require local authorities to consider the needs of match going supporters when approving kick off times; to require football clubs to set aside a proportion of transfer fees paid for the development of football facilities for local clubs and young people; and for connected purposes.

Football is our national sport. We invented the modern game and we have the most popular league in the world, viewed by millions around the globe. I grew up playing and watching the game, and loved every minute of doing so. Although I still play and watch when I can, I have less time to do so now, and when I play I do not move quite so quickly around the pitch, but I still enjoy it and score the odd goal. As a supporter, however, I find that the difference between the game I grew up watching and the game now is incredible. I remember being able to turn up just before kick-off and pay on the gate. If I did not manage to see the match in person, that usually meant that I would not see it at all, because at that time televised games were the exception rather than the rule.

While there were plenty of good players then, nowadays we have many of the best players from all over the world. There are fantastic modem stadiums, there is huge media coverage of every millisecond of every Premier League game, and of course there is more cash in the sport than it has ever seen before. Despite all that glamour and cash, however, there are things we could be doing better. Our teams, by and large, still flatter to deceive on the international stage, and the proportion of young home-grown talent breaking through each year appears to be less and less.

Not only are there fewer youngsters out on the pitch, but there appear to be fewer in the stands as well. During the 1980s, a much higher proportion of match-going fans were younger. Surveys undertaken at the time suggested that about 20% of match-day fans were in the 16-to-20 age group. I suspect it is no coincidence that the average age of a match-going supporter now is in the 40s: those same fans have grown up with the match-day experience being a part of their life that they have retained. However, the proportion of young people going to games now is much lower, and some surveys even suggest that it is considerably less than 10%. Cost plays a huge part in that, with ticket prices far outstripping inflation at most clubs. If we do not make more provision for younger supporters, we shall risk empty stadiums in 20 or 30 years’ time, because the fans of the future will have been driven away by sky-high prices.

I believe that it is time to make provision for our younger fans. The first element of my Bill will require all football clubs to provide 10% of their tickets at discounted prices for young people under the age of 22. We have a lower minimum wage for people under 22, and many of them are in full-time education or apprenticeships. The price of a match-day ticket is beyond the reach of many young people, and when our prices are compared with others around Europe, we know that there is an awfully long way to go. That criticism is not levelled solely at Premier League clubs; far too many Football League prices are too high as well. The match-going ritual was part of growing up for my generation, and I do not want to see the next generation miss out on that.

A second measure in the Bill would require local authorities to consider the needs of match-going supporters when approving kick-off times. They are currently required to take account of safety and police advice, but I believe that the needs of the supporter should be considered as well. A number of high-profile games have been moved to times that make it impossible for travelling supporters to attend via public transport. There are countless examples of matches being moved at short notice, in particular to accommodate the demands of television companies. The money that television coverage has brought into the game is of course welcome, but that should not mean that the interests of the match-going fan are entirely subservient to the needs of the TV scheduler.

One high-profile example was the occasion on which Everton and Manchester United played in the FA Cup semi-final in April this year. A late 5.15 pm start meant that fans risked being left with no train back home to the north-west from Wembley after the match, particularly if there was extra time or penalties. However, that does not just apply to the big games. At the other end of the scale, at the start of the season in the non-league, Eastleigh football club’s game against Barrow was moved to a 12.30 pm kick-off to accommodate television broadcasting, which left fans with a 10-hour, 600-mile round trip. How could anyone seriously expect supporters to travel sensibly to and from that game on public transport?

The Bill requires councils to make an assessment of the availability of transport links before a final kick-off time can be approved, so that travelling fans have a realistic chance of being able to get to the game. That is particularly relevant as we approach the traditional Christmas fixture list, when public transport options are more limited. Games are currently scheduled to kick off at midday on Boxing Day and 5.30 pm on New Year’s Eve. How can either of those times be remotely sensible on those days?

There are also the fans who have gone to considerable trouble and expense to make travel arrangements well in advance of the game, only for the time and, on some occasions, the day of the game to be changed at the last minute. What about the shift worker who has made arrangements with his employer, possibly swapping shifts with a colleague for time off, only to find that the game has been moved at a few days’ notice? How many people have to make complicated arrangements to juggle their various commitments when the fixture list is released at the start of the season, only to find that the original fixture list becomes increasingly worthless as the season progresses?

The third part of the Bill would require football clubs to set aside a proportion of transfer fees for the development of football facilities for local clubs and young people. That would apply only to fees paid by Premier League clubs, which, during the last transfer window alone, spent £1.2 billion on players. A levy of just 0.1% could raise an extra £1.2 million for grassroots football. I know that money does go to support grassroots football, but it is not enough. Given the cash washing around the Premier League at the moment, I believe we could take further steps to ensure that a little of that unprecedented wealth helps to secure the future for our players and to improve facilities for all.

A study of the amount paid in agents’ fees by Premier League clubs showed that £46.5 million was paid in agents’ and intermediaries’ fees in the four months from October 2015 to January 2016. That is money leaving the game. Much as I would like to, I am not suggesting we outlaw agents’ fees all together; I am merely using these figures to demonstrate that huge sums are going through the game that are not benefiting players or clubs, and certainly not the fans.

We should be concerned about the declining number of home-grown players coming through the leagues. Last season, 35% of Premier League players were English—a huge decrease since the opening 1992-93 campaign of the Premier League, when 69% of the players were English. A survey last month showed that just four Premier League teams had given more than half their game time to home-country players, compared with 11 teams in Spain and 17 in France.

There are huge questions about how professional clubs operate and how our younger players can hope to get a chance against the imported superstars, but one thing we can do is improve the standard of facilities for younger players of all abilities, and indeed everyone involved in grassroots football. We know the pressure that local authorities are under to balance the books, and there is little left for discretionary spending on improving sporting facilities. Often pitches are in poor condition, with poor drainage—there are areas where there is more mud than grass—and many pitches have few or no changing facilities connected to them.

That really hit home with me recently, when I saw for myself a local pitch used for kids’ football, where the goal at one end of the pitch was smaller than the other because of vandalism. We cannot expect the superstars of tomorrow to emerge if we do not invest in them, and we should not tolerate second-rate facilities for our national sport. There are plenty of distractions and reasons why kids might find something to do other than play football. We should do what we can and make sure that at least a little of the wealth flowing through the game trickles down to support the grassroots.

Football is more than just a game. It is certainly more than just a business. It is an integral part of our culture and it needs to be nurtured and protected. The fruits of this golden age in the sport should be used to help secure its future for everyone. I believe that this Bill will achieve that aim.

Question put and agreed to.

Ordered,

That Justin Madders, Alan Brown, Carolyn Harris, Stephen Kinnock, Ian C. Lucas, Christian Matheson, Jason McCartney, Karl MᶜCartney, Ian Mearns, Paula Sherriff and Jo Stevens present the Bill.

Justin Madders accordingly presented the Bill.

Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time on Friday 24 February 2017, and to be printed (Bill 103).

Bill to be read a Second time on Friday 24 February—

Will it be televised?

We have no intelligence on the question whether it will be televised—well, actually we do, and it very likely will. [Laughter.]

I beg to move,

That this House recognises that the Chilcot Inquiry provided substantial evidence of misleading information being presented by the then Prime Minister and others on the development of the then Government's policy towards the invasion of Iraq as shown most clearly in the contrast between private correspondence to the United States government and public statements to Parliament and to the people and also in the presentation of intelligence information; and calls on the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, further to its current investigation into the lessons to be learned from the Chilcot Inquiry for the machinery of government, to conduct a further specific examination of this contrast in public and private policy and of the presentation of intelligence, and then to report to the House on what further action it considers necessary and appropriate to help prevent any repetition of this disastrous series of events.

I move the motion on behalf of myself, my hon. Friends and hon. Members representing seven political parties across this House—[Interruption.] I see Labour Members are already in an excitable state; I just said “Members of”.

It is a great pleasure to move this motion on St Andrew’s day—Scotland’s national day. The leaders of the political parties complimented Scotland in their remarks at Prime Minister’s questions. When the SNP parliamentary group discussed what motion should be tabled, there were many obvious candidates: Scotland in the world or the meaning of St Andrew’s day—a broad debate given that this is a St Andrew’s day motion. However, we thought it would be better to focus on issues of signal importance to the people. The second debate to be moved by my hon. Friends this afternoon will be on the injustice perpetrated on the WASPI women—Women Against State Pension Inequality—to see whether a debate can advance their cause. This debate is on the issue that has dominated the past two decades of politics, both here and internationally: the war in Iraq.

One hundred and seventy-nine Members are left in the House of Commons who were present when the debate on the war in Iraq took place in March 2003. I remember the figure exactly, because the same number of British soldiers died in the conflict. The deaths of thousands of American soldiers and 200,000 Iraqis, the birth of Daesh in the prison camps of Iraq and the conflagration in the middle east are all directly sourced to the disastrous decision of March 2003. The intention of today’s debate is not to rerun the Chilcot debate of July—we have had that debate—but to try to identify from that debate how we can take matters forward in terms of parliamentary accountability.

I mentioned a few seconds ago that Members from seven political parties in the House put their names to the motion. We do not want to rerun the Chilcot debate, because the generally accepted view of both the press and the public was best summed up in the headline in The Times the day after Chilcot:

“Britain fought an unnecessary, disastrous and potentially illegal war in Iraq because of Tony Blair’s misguided and personal commitment to George W Bush, the Chilcot report concluded yesterday.”

That is a reasonable summary of the general tenor of the reaction to the Chilcot report. What was unstated and unsaid in the Chilcot report was what to do with both the amassing evidence, and what to do in terms of parliamentary accountability if, as we believe, this House and the public were grievously misled into that disastrous conflict.

The hon. Members representing seven political parties in this House commissioned a report from Dr Glen Rangwala of Trinity College, Cambridge. I put the report in the House of Commons Library this morning. All Members would do well to give it a good reading. The report considers, in exact terms, the statements made over a period to this House—not just in the March 2003 debate—and takes into account Chilcot’s findings from the wider canvas of information now available, and contrasts and compares the two. It might help the House if I make a few remarks on Dr Rangwala’s general findings.

In summary, from late 2001 to March 2003, Tony Blair repeatedly made three interrelated statements to the House of Commons: no decision had been taken to use military force against Iraq; military action could be avoided by Iraq’s disarmament of its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons; and regime change was not the goal of Government policy. The report of the Iraq inquiry, published on 6 July, demonstrates conclusively and authoritatively that each of those three statements was untrue, and that their falsity was known to Mr Blair. Mr Blair backed up his claims about the need for Iraqi disarmament by asserting there was conclusive evidence of Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction and that these weapons were a threat to the UK’s national security. On both points, those statements contradicted the intelligence assessments put to Mr Blair.

Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that Hans Blix, the arms inspector carrying out an inquiry at the time of the vote in March 2003—I was present and voted against intervention—believed at that time that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction?

I am aware that Dr Hans Blix asked for more time to complete the process of inspection and was denied that by the then Prime Minister and President of the United States of America.

It was not just Hans Blix who thought that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Even countries that thought we should not go to war—Russia, France and Germany—thought Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, too. In fact, the only way Saddam Hussein was able to enslave the people of Iraq was by leading them to believe he had weapons of mass destruction.

And those countries the hon. Gentleman mentions voted against the war in Iraq for very good reasons.

Rather than speculate on that, thanks to the Chilcot report we now know what evidence the Prime Minister had at his disposal from the Joint Intelligence Committee, which on 15 March 2002 stated:

“Intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction…and ballistic missile programmes is sporadic and patchy… We continue to judge that Iraq has an offensive chemical warfare (CW) programme, although there is very little intelligence relating to it. From the evidence available to us, we believe Iraq retains some production equipment, and some small stocks of CW agent precursors, and may have hidden small quantities of agents and weapons… There is no intelligence on any BW agent production facilities.”

That highly qualified assessment from the Joint Intelligence Committee was presented to the House of Commons as a certainty that Iraq possessed weapons that were an immediate danger to the United Kingdom.

Does the right hon. Gentleman share my concern that if we do nothing following the seven-year, £10 million inquiry and take no steps towards accountability for the clear evidence that the former Prime Minister was fixing the evidence around the policy to go to war, it will be almost impossible to begin to restore the faith that has been lost in our political system?

Yes. The loss of faith in the political system is another dramatic consequence of the disastrous events in Iraq.

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

Let me finish this point, before I give way to the right hon. Gentleman.

This point was raised in the Liaison Committee, when Chilcot was asked about weapons of mass destruction. He was asked repeatedly whether a reasonable person could have come to the conclusion the Prime Minister had come to. The best exchanges were between the Chair of the Committee and Sir John Chilcot on the well understood test of a reasonable man. The Chair asked:

“Would a reasonable man—another human being—looking at the evidence come to that conclusion?”

Sir John Chilcot replied:

“If you are posing that question with regard to a statement of imminent threat to the United Kingdom”—

The Chair said: “I am.”

Sir John Chilcot went on:

“In that case, I have to say no, there was not sufficient evidence to sustain that belief objectively at the time.”

Given the length of time the Chilcot inquiry spent considering this exact point, it may be the opinion of many hon. Members that Sir John Chilcot’s expression of this carries rather more weight than that of hon. Members desperate to defend the indefensible.

Did not Sir John Chilcot, when asked this question in the Liaison Committee, say:

“I absolve him from…a decision to deceive Parliament or the public”.

We cannot have it both ways. We have had the Chilcot report and parliamentary accountability: Chilcot said that the former Prime Minister did not deceive this House or the public.

The trouble with that intervention is that the right hon. Gentleman does not go on to read the next sentence in that exchange, which I shall read for his erudition:

“However, he also exercised his very considerable powers of advocacy and persuasion, rather than laying the real issues, and the information to back the analysis of them, fairly and squarely in front of Parliament or the public. It was an exercise in advocacy, not an exercise in sharing a crucial judgment”.

As the right hon. Gentleman is aware, I agree with his description regarding the catastrophic nature of the invasion of Iraq. I agree with him that the former Prime Minister has a lot to answer for. He will no doubt continue to do so, although he was cleared by Chilcot of deliberate misbehaviour. Does the right hon. Gentleman not accept that if we turn post-Chilcot debates into an attempt to pursue and hound Tony Blair, the whole thing turns into a party political argument, with Labour Members trying to defend the position of their Government?

Will the right hon. Gentleman go on to address—he is entitled to go on for a bit—the most important matter: how do we ensure that the system of Cabinet government, handling intelligence, and taking on board and properly communicating defence advice to all members of the Cabinet and to Parliament, cannot be repeated, so we do not have another catastrophic foreign policy decision? By personalising the issue we will, if we are not careful, lose the point, which is whether we are satisfied that everything possible is being done to ensure that cannot happen again.

As the Chilcot report concluded, this was very much a personal campaign by the Prime Minister in doing things unbeknown to both Cabinet and certainly Parliament. I am going to address the point the right hon. and learned Gentleman makes, but the question of parliamentary accountability is in my estimation central to this case. Committees of this House have been examining the conduct of the processes of government. If he reads the minutes of the meeting that the Committee to which we intend to refer the question of parliamentary accountability held with the Cabinet Secretary, I do not think he will find much reassurance that there has been a tremendous advance in the process of government. The overwhelming impression is that a headstrong Prime Minister could still create a situation where sofa government drove a country into an illegal war. I suggest that parliamentary accountability and an examination of statements made to Parliament and public against the facts as we now know them would be a valuable additional sanction and tool in restraining future Prime Ministers from any such course of events.

I was here in 2003. I was a frequent visitor to Iraqi Kurdistan. The Kurds believed prior to 2003 that chemical weapons were going to be used against them again. The Iraqis were in the Gallery; it is a pity we are not having this debate in front of them, because they could point out their concern at the time, and their pressure for this country to help them in their action to overthrow Saddam Hussein. It was not simply an idea that Tony Blair had in his head; we had a full debate in this Parliament in 2003 and I, among others, voted for the action.

The right hon. Lady’s position on that issue has been consistent through the years, but that was not the case presented to this Parliament. The case presented to this Parliament was that there was a real and present danger to the United Kingdom that required the abandonment of diplomacy internationally and the immediate process to war.

I say this to Labour Members, and correct a point made by the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke): it is not all Labour Members. Many Labour Members, throughout this whole sad story, have been prepared to vote with their conscience in condemning their own Government. Indeed, we are all well aware that the leader of the Labour party would, if he was free to do so, be joining us in the Lobby this afternoon.

I say again to Labour Members that I am not really interested in the civil war in the Labour party; I am interested in the real war that took place and resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Therefore, it is reasonable and important to consider whether parliamentary accountability can be a major weapon of this House in making sure such events do not happen again.

I wish the right hon. Gentleman and Scots everywhere a very happy St Andrew’s day. He mentioned seven parties; none of my party’s MPs in this House has signed this motion. I do not for one minute doubt the sincerity of many Members who have signed the motion and their desire to get to the truth, but is he not, following on from the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), in real danger of turning a very important issue into a party political issue—the SNP trying to attack the Labour party—rather than making it an issue of real national concern, drawing the lessons that need to be learned? That is one of the reasons we did not sign up to his motion.

I would have been very pleased if the right hon. Gentleman had made it Members from eight political parties signing the motion, but the whole point of the cross-party group, which has been working on this issue for months, is to make it not a straight party political issue. As for attacking the Labour party, I think it is more that Labour Members wish to attack me in this debate, but I do not mind that because I am driving on to make the points of parliamentary accountability and the information we had from the Chilcot report that make it unsustainable to argue other than that this Parliament was grievously misled.

The report in the Library—

rose—

If the right hon. Lady will forgive me, I will make some progress.

The report in the Library from Dr Glen Rangwala analyses this in enormous detail and I hope Members read it, although even that report is not exhaustive. The right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) in the Chilcot debate in July listed five, as he put it, clear instances of misrepresentation in a single speech from the Prime Minister—in the war speech, the greatest speech of his life, in March 2003. I want to look at just three of the key things that have arisen and that we now know about from the Chilcot report.

The first of those things is the question of prior commitment. Through the long debates on Iraq, many of us suspected that the Prime Minister had given commitments to the American President which were unrevealed to this House and to the public. The Chilcot report outlined these in spades. The famous phrase

“I will be with you, whatever”

will go down in infamy in terms of giving a commitment. Chilcot says that after giving such a commitment it would be virtually impossible for the Prime Minister to withdraw from it.

My constituent Mr Matt Walton, an ex-serviceman, contacted my office several months ago regarding the Chilcot report. Matt is clear that Mr Blair’s actions ensured that many of his colleagues’ tragic fates were already decided before they left the UK. Does my right hon. Friend agree that it is an outright scandal that ex-members of the armed forces are even thinking this way, and that the then Prime Minister has utterly let down those who were allegedly sent out to protect us?

I very much support the view of my hon. Friend.

The right hon. Gentleman is making a fascinating case, but I do not think he does himself a favour when he refers to this communication with President Bush and says that it was a commitment to military action come what may. There were in fact specific areas where the Prime Minister said that progress would need to be made before he could commit to military action, and he also said that there was a need to commit to Iraq for the long term. I simply say that because, if we are going draw appropriate lessons from history, yes, absolutely, draw critical lessons, but please put them in context.

The right hon. Gentleman will understand that my point was that no evidence or information about these commitments was ever presented to this House or to the general public. Indeed, it was not, as we know from Chilcot, presented to the Cabinet. Only Downing Street officials saw that letter and advised the Prime Minister, apparently, not to send it, which he did anyway. The Foreign Secretary, Mr Straw, saw it after the event. It has been said by some that that phrase did not mean what it clearly seems to mean. I just point out that after the Foreign Secretary did see the letter to President Bush, he himself wrote in a memo to the Prime Minister on 11 March 2003, when things at the United Nations were not going well:

“We will obviously need to discuss all this, but I thought it best to put it in your mind as event[s] could move fast. And what I propose is a great deal better than the alternatives. When Bush graciously accepted your offer to be with him all the way, he wanted you alive not dead!”

The Foreign Secretary was referring to being politically dead, not really dead like the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. That point shows with absolute seriousness and clarity that there was no doubt in the mind of the then Foreign Secretary of the extent of the commitment that had been made, and there was no doubt in the mind of the Chilcot inquiry when it commented on the range of letters and correspondence to the President of the United States, which it said would have made it very difficult for the UK to pursue any independent policy after the commitment had been made. That is what the inquiry says on the question of prior commitment.

It is a matter of regret that this is being turned into a party political debate. It is worth remembering that 139 Labour MPs voted, against a strong three-line Whip, against the war, including Members who are present now. The great majority of Conservative MPs did not, but with honourable exceptions—half a dozen of them. Three Select Committees of this House were gung-ho for the war, and what is on trial today is the reputation of Parliament. It is Parliament who voted for an unnecessary war that ended in the deaths of 179 British soldiers, as we have been reminded. The loved ones of the British soldiers need the truth and they need a debate, and a serious debate, not a party political row, which this is turning out to be.

I very much welcome the hon. Gentleman’s intervention. As I have been trying to point out, that is why Members from seven parties in this House have put their names to this motion.

There is a real argument, which has been put forward by the hon. Gentleman, me and others who voted against the conflict, that if we suspected there was something grievously wrong with the Prime Minister’s case, why did other people not come to the same conclusion as the late Robin Cook—that in his estimation weapons of mass destruction did not exist in respect of a clear imminent threat being commonly expressed? Why did other people not see that? The hon. Gentleman and I have to understand that when the Prime Minister went to the Dispatch Box in March 2003 and told the House conclusively that a real and present danger to the United Kingdom existed, it was reasonable even for those with misgivings to think that he must be seeing something that they were not seeing and that he must know something that they did not know. Those Members were thereby misled into the Lobby to vote for the conflict.

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

No, I am making progress.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North (Joan Ryan) has been trying to intervene for ages.

No doubt, but I think I have been more generous in giving way to Labour Members than they have ever been to me in any Committee or debate that I can remember. I say this reasonably gently: when I first came to this House, the Scottish National party had three Members here and the Labour party in Scotland had 50. I was used to taking constant interventions, and that was entirely legitimate. It did not faze me at all when I was a young Member, and it certainly does not faze me now. So let us make some progress.

On the question of the imminent threat, Chilcot said after assessing all the evidence that the then Prime Minister was engaged in advocacy, not in presenting the facts. On the question of a prior commitment, the Chilcot report is full of expressions from the Prime Minister to the President of the United States of America that were not known to Members of this House or to the general public. That information gives a totally different view of the reasons for conflict that the Prime Minister was then presenting to this House. For example, back in December 2001, the then Prime Minister said in a letter to President Bush that

“at present international opinion would be reluctant, outside the US/UK”—

I do not know how he read opinion in that way—

“to support immediate military action though, for sure, people want to be rid of Saddam. So we need a strategy for regime change that builds over time.”

The Prime Minister said repeatedly and consistently in this House that regime change was not the objective of Government policy. He stated that the Government’s objective was to stop a clear and present danger to the United Kingdom. I have yet to see a more clear example of misleading people.

Lastly, and I think most pertinently, Chilcot identified the damage done to the authority of the United Nations. These were among the clearest and most resounding points in his report. In this troubled world, we have never needed an effective United Nations more than we do at this moment. That undermining of the UN was clear in the actions of the Prime Minister and in his presentation of why the second resolution was not to pass. Such a resolution would apparently have gone down by 11 votes to four. The Prime Minister repeatedly told the public that the only circumstances in which there would be a war without a second resolution were if one country expressed an unreasonable veto or stood out against international opinion and was not prepared to sanction action in Iraq. We now know beyond question from Chilcot that that was not the case.

We know that the then Prime Minister was misrepresenting the views of the Government of France and of President Chirac, for example. Even on the day of the debate, he continued to misrepresent the French position. The damage to the authority of the United Nations Security Council and to the consistency of international relations is inestimable. In a radio programme last year, as I recall, Sir Stephen Wall was asked specifically whether the Government had lied about the intentions of the French and withheld information on that matter. His answer was yes. The damage to international relations and the question of the unreasonable veto, as the then Prime Minister put it, are at the heart of this misrepresentation.

In recent weeks we have heard a great deal about checks and balances in political systems, particularly as people across the world are crossing their fingers and hoping for the best in the White House. We have been hoping that the institutions of office have a restraining effect and that the mad tweeter will become a sensible President.

The right hon. Gentleman is right to talk about prime ministerial accountability to this House, and he is making a powerful case, but is not the real lesson from Chilcot the need for a policy response from the Government to ensure that this kind of thing does not happen again? For example, the creation of the National Security Council was a policy response from the Government to ensure that we have better information sharing and that decision making in Government is improved. Is that not the critical point in this debate?

It is certainly an important point, and it is one that is being pursued by the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee and other Committees of this House. When the Cabinet Secretary was repeatedly challenged on whether the changes to the flow of information to the Intelligence and Security Committee would make a decisive difference to a Prime Minister who was hellbent on pursuing a particular course of action, answer came there none. It is not enough to say that we are going to change the institutions of government or that we are going to learn the lessons of post-conflict analysis, although we have been promised a paper on that in the near future. There has to be an essence of parliamentary accountability.

I was the Chair of the Committee when the Cabinet Secretary was asked that very question, and I can assure the right hon. Gentleman that my Committee does not necessarily take the advice of the Cabinet Secretary on our recommendations. We will be making recommendations that we are confident will prevent such events from happening again. Should this motion be carried, we will respect the view of the House and extend our inquiry in order to respect that view. I do not know, however, whether we can satisfy the rather less reasonable terms in which the right hon. Gentleman has presented his reasonable motion. That will be for the House to judge.

The motion speaks for me and for the other Members who have signed it. I welcome that intervention from the Chairman of the Select Committee. I looked at his robust questioning of the Cabinet Secretary and I am now filled with more confidence that significant recommendations will come forward.

What Iraq demonstrates is that there are currently no effective checks and balances in our system, that the Prime Minister had the ability to create the circumstances in which this House followed him into an illegal conflict, and that all the memos from the higher echelons of the civil service will not mean a thing—rather like the Cabinet Secretary’s evidence to the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee. That should be of little surprise to us.

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. According to my reading of Chilcot, the report states that there was

“no falsification or improper use of intelligence”,

there was “no deception of Cabinet” and there was

“no secret commitment to war whether at Crawford Texas in April 2002 or elsewhere”.

As we have been told, Chilcot made it clear to the Liaison Committee that Tony Blair had not deceived Parliament. Sadly, I think the only deception is in today’s motion. Its opportunistic nature does not serve this issue or this Parliament well.

In relation to the right hon. Lady’s intervention, I have already corrected one of her hon. Friends and suggested that they carry on to the next sentence after the ones they have cited from Chilcot. Also, the Liaison Committee’s questioning of Sir John Chilcot found explicitly that a reasonable person could not have drawn the conclusions that the then Prime Minister did, and that he presented those conclusions to the House as an advocate rather than as a conveyor of information. I ask the right hon. Lady to go back and look at those points, because they concern every Member of this House regardless of their political party.

Chilcot shows that we have a system of non-accountability. We waited six years before establishing a proper inquiry and, as we found out in The Observer a week past Sunday, it was structured in such a way as to avoid blame. It was deprived of judicial expertise and could not even pronounce on the legality of the conflict. It was wrestled with over the release of the diplomatic correspondence with President Bush, which more than any other factor provides the Prime Minister’s motivations. It was seven years before it reported. After all this time, some people in the press and elsewhere say, “These things are in the past. Let the dead bury the dead.” Many dead people have been buried, the carnage continues, and the real issue, to quote the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin), is how to stop it happening again.

Memories will fade. A whole generation has grown up and reached adulthood since the war in Iraq. Soon, less than a quarter of Members—perhaps none—will have lived through the experience of the vote on Iraq and that fateful decision in March 2003. The motion presents an opportunity to introduce another check and balance into a system that is clearly deficient. It would start a process to create a precedent so that any future Prime Minister will know that he or she will have to account for their actions not only to history, but to this House of Commons. A long time ago, I made a speech in this House in which I suggested to Mr Blair that he might answer to a higher power than this House. I understand that he found it offensive, but I absolutely believe it to be the case none the less. In the meantime, in the here and now—here on earth—is it not important for us to find a parliamentary process by which a Prime Minister who grievously misled this House and the people into an illegal war can finally be held to parliamentary account?

Let me start by expressing my condolences and sympathy to those who lost loved ones in Iraq and to those who still bear the scars of the conflict. Whatever our views on the conflict, we can surely all agree on one thing: the bravery and courage of British servicemen and women in Iraq was exemplary. We owe it to all those who died or were wounded in Iraq—be they servicemen or civilians, British, Iraqi or any other nationality—to learn lessons from the conflict.

There can be little doubt that Sir John Chilcot’s report is detailed and forensic, and for that we should all be thankful to Sir John and the other members of the inquiry panel. At the inquiry’s outset, the Government of the day committed to provide the fullest range of information and to giving it unhindered access to Government documents. Sir John confirmed in his appearance before the Liaison Committee that the inquiry had total access to all UK Government material right from the start, including the most sensitive categories. The inquiry saw more than 150,000 Government documents and an unprecedented amount of previously classified Government information has been released. Some 7,000 documents were referenced in the inquiry’s report, and more than 1,500 documents were published alongside it. The papers include records of key Cabinet discussions, notes from Mr Blair to the US President, records of conversations between the then Prime Minister and other Heads of Government, records of meetings between senior UK and US officials, and Joint Intelligence Committee assessments.

The inquiry concluded that mistakes and failings were made that could have been avoided at the time and for which hindsight is no defence. The inquiry’s report is a salutary tale of what happens when not enough opportunity is given to challenge and debate a policy or approach. When asked by the Liaison Committee to sum up one key lesson of the report, Sir John Chilcot said:

“If you press me very hard, I will say it was a failure to exert and exercise sufficient collective responsibility for a very big decision, and then to scrutinise and supervise its conduct and implementation.”

As the then Prime Minister, the former Member for Witney—it is good to see the present hon. Member for Witney (Robert Courts) in his seat about to make his maiden speech—said in his statement to the House on 6 July:

“On the issue of misleading Parliament, there is nothing in the Chilcot report that I can see that points to deliberate deceit, but there were clearly occasions when more information, or better information, could have been presented.”—[Official Report, 6 July 2016; Vol. 612, c. 907.]

He also said:

“As for how people should account for themselves, it is for them to read the report and explain why they did what they did.”—[Official Report, 6 July 2016; Vol. 612, c. 902.]

At his appearance before the Liaison Committee on 2 November, when considering whether Mr Blair had misled Parliament and the public, Sir John said that he absolves Mr Blair

“from a personal and demonstrable decision to deceive Parliament or the public—to state falsehoods, knowing them to be false. That I think he should be absolved from.”

He also made the following point about the legal basis for military action, saying:

“The way in which the legal advice about—the basis for it was highly unsatisfactory, but that is not the same as saying it was illegal, and therefore that something should follow or some effect should be procured. One can’t say that.”

He also reminded the Committee that before the invasion of Iraq

“the whole intelligence community, and not only in the United Kingdom, were strongly of the belief—and had, they thought, sufficient intelligence to support it— that Saddam did have weapons of mass destruction available for use.”

The decision to go to war in Iraq has had a profound and lasting impact on politics in this country, on the families of those who lost loved ones in Iraq and on those who were injured. Clearly, it was a tragic and seismic episode in our nation’s history. Lessons should be learned and that process is ongoing. The Government are considering the lessons identified by the Iraq inquiry, many of which had already been recognised with changes made before Sir John published his report. The Prime Minister’s National Security Adviser is currently leading a process with our national security Departments to consider further improvements. We fully recognise that ensuring that lessons are properly learned and embedded will be a long-term process.

The Minister mentioned Sir John Chilcot’s evidence to the Liaison Committee. The passage in which Sir John concludes that a reasonable man could not have come to the conclusion that Mr Blair did about weapons of mass destruction was followed by the Chair saying:

“So he misled the House, or set aside evidence in order to lead the House down a line of thought and belief with his 18 March speech”.

Has the Minister read that passage in the evidence?

The important thing to recognise is that the Chilcot report—in paragraph 537 of the executive summary—explicitly does not question Mr Blair’s belief at the time that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. Paragraph 533 states:

“There is no evidence that intelligence was improperly included in the”

September 2002

“dossier or that No.10 improperly influenced the text.”

In paragraph 491, the report is explicit that

“Cabinet was not misled on 17 March”

2003.

One of the lessons we can learn is that there was no plan for reconstruction. If we are to learn that lesson, we should bear that in mind when considering reconstruction in Syria or Iraq.

The hon. Gentleman is right that there are lessons for modern-day conflicts. I hope that this debate will give Members the opportunity to put their views across on which lessons should be learned. We had three days of debate on the Chilcot report itself, and I hope that we can move forward by coming up with proactive, positive recommendations.

The Minister mentioned the establishment of the National Security Council as one thing that followed from the situation in Iraq. I draw to his attention the recent report of the Foreign Affairs Committee on events in Libya in which we were critical of Prime Minister David Cameron’s failure to use the NSC properly and of the lack of detailed input into the situation in Libya, that was considered by the Government at that time.

The hon. Gentleman has put his comments on the record. I understand that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office will formally respond to the Committee’s recommendations, so I will leave it at that.

The National Security Council is a dedicated, standing Cabinet Committee that meets regularly at both ministerial and senior official level and has the right range of information to take forward informed decisions and to hold collective responsibility at the highest level. It provides collective strategic leadership on national security and crisis situations, with a built-in challenge function, making clear recommendations to Cabinet on military interventions, and formally recording both decisions and operational actions. The Attorney General attended the NSC regularly until April 2016, when he became a full member, and formal written legal advice is now provided and discussed at relevant NSC meetings and presented to Cabinet before any decisions on military intervention are taken.

The Government have integrated their overarching strategic approach with pragmatic, costed delivery mechanisms, including for military equipment, in a national security strategy, and strategic defence and security review, which is refreshed and adjusted in the light of developments every parliamentary term. The SDSR and refreshment of the national security strategy in 2015 brought this work together in a single integrated document. Cross-Whitehall working continues to improve, with creative policy making designed and delivered collectively across national security Departments and agencies to ensure that we understand, as far as is possible in dynamic and evolving threatening situations, what we want to achieve, and the implications for and impacts on ourselves and others. In support of this work, we set up joint units and taskforces where issues cut across several departmental responsibilities.

The Government are committed to understanding and acting on the important lessons drawn by Sir John Chilcot and his colleagues, but we recognise the need to continue to improve, whether working across the national security community or the wider civil service, hence the importance being given by the collective senior leadership to civil service reform and learning.

I am grateful for the Minister’s remarks about the improvements being made, and the Cameron Government did make improvements by introducing the NSC, but—I say this with hindsight—we still invaded Libya after too cursory a discussion in Cabinet, and somehow we did not look properly at what the consequences would be. We talked only about the imminent threat of a massacre in Benghazi, which took everybody in to the intervention.

The Minister says the Government are considering further improvements, so will he invite my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister to consider setting out some principles: about the amount of notice the NSC has of such decisions, the length and fullness of discussions—that applies to Cabinet, too—and the right of individual members of the Cabinet to have access before a meeting to security advice and defence advice if they wish to prepare themselves for the discussion?

I thank my right hon. and learned Friend for his recommendations. I am sure the National Security Adviser will be listening closely to this debate, and the fact they have been put on the record means it will be important for him to have regard to them. I am sure my right hon. and learned Friend will understand that at the time he mentions we were facing a bloodbath in Benghazi, that intervention was vital and that we would not now row back on that intervention.

I do not wish to add to any difficulties in this respect, but one problem is insufficient military input to the NSC; it all comes in through the voice of one man, the Chief of the Defence Staff. The Defence Committee has suggested that one way to strengthen the NSC would be to constitute the Chiefs of Staff Committee as a sub-committee of the NSC. In that way, a Prime Minister with a bee in his bonnet would not be able so easily to sweep away military concerns.

I thank my right hon. Friend for his separate recommendation and note that the Minister for the Armed Forces is in his place and listening carefully. That is not a new recommendation, but we will consider closely all recommendations from this debate.

Although it is right to learn the lessons identified by the Chilcot report, we should ensure that we avoid learning the wrong lessons. As the then Prime Minister said on the day the report was published,

“it would be wrong to conclude that we should not stand with our American allies when our common…interests are threatened”

and that

“it would be wrong to conclude that we cannot rely on the judgments of our brilliant and hard-working intelligence agencies”.

He said that it is “wrong” to question the capability of our military, who

“remain the envy of the world”.

Perhaps most crucially, he said that it is wrong to

“conclude that intervention is always wrong.”—[Official Report, 6 July 2016; Vol. 612, c. 888.]

This has been a long and exhaustive inquiry. Sir John and his colleagues have had access to thousands of official documents and reached their conclusions—

Will my hon. Friend give way?

No, not now.

Lessons are being learned and will continue to be learned from what happened in Iraq, and so the Government can see no merit in undertaking any further inquiries into the Iraq war.

I am grateful for the contributions made so far, especially the Minister’s. When we reflect on the matters we are debating this afternoon, it is very important that we first pay tribute, as the Minister did, to the hundreds of British servicemen and women and civilian personnel who lost their lives during the conflict in Iraq and that we send our thoughts to all the thousands of others who are still living with the injuries they suffered when serving in our armed forces.

We must never forget the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians who died during the conflict, and subsequently as a result of the sectarian violence and terrorist outrages that have followed. They must all be uppermost in our minds when we talk about learning from the mistakes that were made in Iraq and ensuring that future Governments do not repeat those mistakes.

No matter whether we are one of those Members who voted against the war, as I did, or one of the many, on both sides of this House, who in good faith and good conscience voted in favour of the invasion, it is incumbent on us all to learn the lessons about what went wrong and, indeed, to apologise for what has been exposed by Sir John Chilcot as the collective failing of our institutions.

It is a little over four months since this House spent two full days debating the contents of the Chilcot report, and a week after that debate we spent several hours asking questions about it to the then Prime Minister, David Cameron. Much has changed since that debate, but in terms of the arguments we have heard about the evidence presented in the Chilcot report, I would say, with great respect, that we have, thus far, heard nothing new today.

The right hon. Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond) has a long-standing contention—we have heard him set it out again just now—that, first, Parliament was deliberately misled by Tony Blair and his Government in the run-up to war; secondly, that intelligence allegedly known by Ministers to be false was deliberately presented to this House and to the public; thirdly, that this was all designed to deliver on a private pact that Tony Blair had made with George W. Bush to go to war with Iraq; and that the evidence for those contentions lies mainly in the six words written in a memo from the then Prime Minister to the then President.

Although I have listened very carefully again to the argument made by the right hon. Member for Gordon, we all know that those were exactly the contentions that Sir John Chilcot spent several years looking into, alongside all the evidence from memos and records of conversations, and from his many interviews with hundreds of witnesses. So let me say once again that Sir John deserves our thanks and our praise for conducting that vast but vital task with great care, diligence and objectivity.

The Chilcot report was the fifth, and hopefully the final, inquiry into the Iraq war. The first was published on 3 July 2003, before the tragic death of Dr David Kelly, before the capture of Saddam and while the search for weapons of mass destruction was still going on. That inquiry was undertaken by the Foreign Affairs Committee, on which I served at the time. My right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Ms Stuart) is the only other member of that Committee still sitting in this House. On looking back at the conclusions of that report, I note that on chemical and biological weapons we said:

“we have no doubt that the threat posed to United Kingdom forces was genuinely perceived as a real and present danger and that the steps taken to protect them were justified by the information available at the time.”

We were critical of the prominence and emphasis given to the 45-minute claim in the September 2002 dossier, saying that greater uncertainty should have surrounded the presentation of that and other claims. However, we concluded that those claims were

“well founded on the basis of the intelligence then available”

and that

“allegations of politically inspired meddling cannot credibly be established”.

We were highly critical of the February 2003 dossier—the so-called dodgy dossier—and the fact that Tony Blair had inadvertently presented it as “further intelligence” on the Floor of the House without realising its true provenance. However, that was 13 years ago. Four inquiries later, with the benefit of millions of pages of documentary evidence and hundreds of key witnesses to which my colleagues and I did not have access at the time, the conclusions have remained fundamentally the same.

There are many serious lessons to learn from the Chilcot report, and I will address them in a moment. However, on learning those lessons, we will do ourselves and future Governments no favours if we spend even more time in this House and in the Committee Rooms examining contentions that the Chilcot report and four other inquiries—at exhaustive length—have already found to be incorrect; nor will any of us benefit if we continue to try to turn a collective institutional and international failure in Iraq into an attempt to pillory and scapegoat one individual. Let me be clear: I totally disagreed, as many other people did, with Tony Blair on the Iraq war. I voted against our Government because I thought that our then Prime Minister was simply wrong, but never for one second did I believe that he was acting in bad faith, and I do not do so now.

I rise to support my hon. Friend. Like him, I voted against the war at the time. Nothing has happened since then to make me think that I was wrong to do so, but I did not for one minute think that Tony Blair lied to this House, or attempted to mislead me. I just came to a different judgment. The problem is that in the minds of those who believe that we were misled, there is no report that will ever convince them otherwise, but it is time to learn the lessons for future generations and to move on.

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention, because he captures the mood that was prevalent at the time. Many of us wanted to vote against that war and we did so with a clear conscience because we felt that it was the wrong approach to resolving the problems in Iraq. I will go on to say a bit more about what should be done now.

I was a Member when that vote was taken. I suspect that, with hindsight, many people would look again at the way they voted. Does the hon. Gentleman accept that, whether the commitments to the House were made in good faith or bad faith, the central point of being able to hold the Executive to account for the basis on which they go to war, for their actions afterwards and for the way in which they prepare our troops for battle is important? It provides an important role for this House, which is to scope out ways in which it can avoid mistakes in the future.

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. The important words he used were “in the future”. We must be held to account by the people who elected us—by the public of this country—and we must hold our Government to account for the decisions that they bring to this House for approval. It is very clear, as Sir John Chilcot said, that this was a collective and institutional failure.

Does the hon. Gentleman recognise the results of the freedom of information requests a few weeks ago that demonstrated precisely that the Chilcot inquiry had been designed to “avoid blame”. Sir Gus O’Donnell has been quoted as saying that he recommended using the inquiry’s terms of reference to prevent it reaching

“any conclusion on questions of law or fact”

or to attributing any blame. If we look at the Glen Rangwala report, which simply puts the evidence in front of us—

Order. May I make a plea to those who are looking to catch my eye later on to keep their interventions to the minimum, as there are a very large number of people wishing to contribute to this debate?

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention, but no, I do not recognise those results, because I do not know the context in which those words were said. All too often speeches and phrases are taken out of context. I do not believe for one minute that Sir John Chilcot and his whole report and all the years and the time that he spent were there simply to mislead the public.

Let me try to make some progress. As I have said, I never for one second believed that the then Prime Minister was acting in bad faith, and I do not do so now. For those reasons, I will be urging my Labour colleagues to vote against today’s motion. I will urge them to do so to enable the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee to focus properly on the real job of its inquiry, which is to analyse the conclusions that Sir John has actually reached, based on the evidence that he gathered, and to look at the lessons that he says should be learned from his report.

One factor that has not been fully explored in this debate is the Attorney General’s role. Many of us who had doubts about this war were told that it was legal. Has my hon. Friend had a look at that, and is he satisfied that the Attorney General’s decision was right?

At the time, the Foreign Affairs Committee did look into that matter. I have not examined it since then—in the past 13 years—but I believe that Sir John Chilcot does make reference to it in his report.

If there is one serious risk that we now face, it is to assume that all the lessons from Iraq have been learned and that the mistakes made there could never happen again. That is particularly important now, while we have in place a relatively new Prime Minister, who may in due course face her own decisions over peace and war, and who may herself need to come and make a case before this House.

Listening to the former Prime Minister’s response to Chilcot back in July, I understood that, although he acknowledged that lessons needed to be learned, his clear implication was that that had already been done. He said that by establishing the National Security Council there could be more questions from Ministers about intelligence assessments and more questions from the military about shortcomings in planning, yet, as the right hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis), the Chair of the Defence Committee, has pointed out, there is insufficient input from military sources to make that credible.

The former Prime Minister said that creating the conflict and stability fund meant that we were better placed to prepare for the aftermath of conflicts and to prevent the kind of power vacuum that sectarian and terrorist groups exploited after the Iraq war. Although we welcome the theory behind innovations such as the National Security Council and the conflict and stability fund, the reality of what has happened in Libya and elsewhere over the past five years—this is what my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes) pointed out—does not give confidence that they are working in practice. It suggests even more clearly that the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee has an important job to do over the coming months in ensuring that the real lessons of Chilcot—for Whitehall, for Ministers and for Parliament—are truly being learned.

Let us consider for a moment what Chilcot discovered in relation to civilian casualties as a result of coalition action. The Chief of the Defence Staff predicted that casualties would be in the “low hundreds”. When the reality became clear, the then Foreign Secretary said:

“We need to find ways of countering the damaging perception that civilians are being killed needlessly, and in large numbers, by coalition forces.”

When the truth became overwhelming, a private secretary to Tony Blair told him that casualty data must be suppressed because

“any overall assessment of civilian casualties will show that”

the coalition is

“responsible for significantly more than insurgents.”

Chilcot concludes:

“The Government’s consideration of the issue of Iraqi civilian casualties was driven by its concern to rebut accusations that coalition forces were responsible for the deaths of large numbers of civilians, and to sustain domestic support for operations”.

When we hear Ministers say exactly the same from that Dispatch Box in relation to civilian casualties in Yemen, is it possible to argue that anything has changed or that any lessons have been learned? I do not believe that that is the case. The mistakes of Iraq are being made all over again. We need to ensure that the National Security Council and all the other measures adopted are working, because I do not believe that they are at the moment.

In conclusion, I believe that the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee needs to examine the Chilcot report, not for what it tells us about the past but for what we can learn from it for the present and the future. Whether in relation to Yemen, Libya, Syria or the ongoing battle to restore stability and end sectarian conflict in Iraq, we must look forward and learn the lessons that have practical consequences for us all today. With instability growing throughout the middle east, eastern Europe and beyond, we may face even bigger challenges tomorrow, and that is why I cannot support the motion. I understand why its proposers have tabled it, but they are fighting an old war and raising once again contentions that have already been dismissed by five—five—separate inquiries. How many more do we need? In doing so, they risk distracting the attention of this House and the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee from what should be their true objective, which is to learn the real lessons from Chilcot and ensure that we never need such an inquiry again.

From time to time, Members of this House of Commons have the burden of debating whether to send our finest young men and women into harm’s way, and sometimes to their deaths. I do not believe that any Member of this House, on either side, ever takes that decision lightly, and we need always to take that decision based on the best possible information.

At the start of the second Iraq war, my young constituent Lieutenant Marc Lawrence, serving on a Sea King helicopter, was killed. That in itself is possibly a matter for a further inquiry, but I know that that loss was devastating to Marc’s parents and I believe that they have a right to know that their only son lost his life in a just cause and that his sacrifice was worth while.

Madam Deputy Speaker, I voted to send that young man to his death. On the eve of the vote, a significant number of Members then on the Opposition Benches, including myself, had grave disquiet about the cause on which we were due to embark. I and about a dozen colleagues met the then Leader of the Opposition, my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith), and the shadow Foreign Minister, the then Member for Devizes, Michael Ancram. The Leader of the Opposition told us on Privy Council terms that he had been informed on Privy Council terms by Mr Blair that the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction and that there was a 40-minute threat to UK interests and that therefore our support for the motion before the House the following day was vital.

I am afraid that I cannot concur with the hon. Member for Leeds North East (Fabian Hamilton). I sat on those Benches and listened to the tone of the debate as well as to the words that were said. I have to say that I believe that the House was deliberately misled. There were no weapons of mass destruction, as we now know, and there was no 40-minute threat. I think that it is plain—I am convinced that it is plain, sadly—that Mr Blair had made a pledge to President Bush that the UK would be delivered and that he was determined to deliver the UK in support of that war.

We cannot let this matter rest. We owe it to our armed forces to see this through. I support the call to ask the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee to take further action. My hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin), the Chairman of the Committee, has indicated to me privately, as he has indicated on the Floor of the House today, that his inquiries are ongoing and that further recommendations will be made. I am grateful for that.

I resent the fact that this is described as an opportunist Scottish National party motion. Technically, yes, this is an Opposition day debate, but the motion has cross-party support and I am grateful that the Government have effectively recognised that this is a House of Commons matter and should never be a party political matter.

I am not interested in a witch hunt against a former and discredited Prime Minister. I concur entirely with my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) when he says that we must seek to take every measure to try to ensure that these circumstances do not arise again. We cannot bring back the dead, but we can help to prevent further and unwarranted sacrifice of the men and women of our armed forces. I am not interested in the outcome of this vote. Whatever the outcome, I hope that my hon. Friend the Chairman of the Select Committee will help to ensure that the right measures are taken so that we never, ever face such circumstances again.

I am delighted to follow the hon. Member for North Thanet (Sir Roger Gale), because we went through the same experience of this House at that time. Although we like to feel that we take our decisions on an intellectual basis, I know that my feelings on this are motivated by strong emotion and what happened to my father in the war. He volunteered as a 15-year-old—he lied about his age—to go to the continent and stop the Huns bayoneting Belgian babies. He returned broken and badly wounded in 1919, extremely grateful to the Germans for having saved his life when he was dying in a foxhole. He could have bled to death.

My motivation—this should be our highest motivation —is the interests of our armed forces. They need an absolute assurance that any decision to put their lives at risk is taken in the most serious way after the most searching inquiries are carried out. We owe them that. I believe that another inquiry is necessary, and that is one on the decision to go into Helmand province in 2006 at a time when only six members of the armed services had been killed in the war. We went in in the hope that not a shot would be fired and 450 of our servicemen died as a result. That is what we must do now—that is what we should be taking on, not a tribal party row in this place. It is not appropriate; it is not right. We must look to the reputation of Parliament.

As has been said, we were misled. Whether it was deliberate or not—the expression “sincere deceivers” has been used in the United States about what happened in that war—we know that after that debate 139 of my comrades on the Labour Benches voted against the war, which was a very courageous thing to do as we were under great pressure, but 50 others had grave doubts about the war. They were, in my view, bribed, bullied or bamboozled into voting the wrong way and many—

Bribed? You can’t say bribed; that’s outrageous.

They were induced—

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Is it in order for a Member of this House to allege that other Members of this House were bribed—paid—to vote a particular way? Should he not produce evidence for it? What a disgrace.

The hon. Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn) did not accuse a specific individual of taking a bribe. The hon. Member for Dudley North (Ian Austin) is perfectly entitled to ask him in an intervention whether he will withdraw what he has said, but this is not a matter for the Chair.