(from Comment is Free)

It is astonishing that the decision to go to war, the gravest decision ever facing a nation, is still taken in this country by one person alone, the prime minister, and there is no requirement to seek parliamentary approval. What is even more astonishing is that even where the prime minister of the day does allow a parliamentary vote, and that vote is opposed to war, the prime minister still has the absolute power to ignore the result of the vote and to commit the nation to war.
This applies both where the vote is taken after the declaration of war, as in the case of the Attlee government over the Korean war and the Major government over the 1991 Gulf War, and where the vote is taken shortly before the start of a war, as was the case of the Blair government with Iraq. In any case, the prime minister would be within his or her constitutional rights to override a parliamentary vote.
It is equally true that there is, at present, no requirement at all to have a parliamentary vote on a substantive motion to take the country to war. That was the case when Britain went to war in the Balkans in the 1990s and there was lengthy fighting in Bosnia and Kosovo. It is also true that even where a vote is called, it can be arranged at such a time – for example, at the last minute when British troops are fully deployed just before the outbreak of hostilities – that parliament is in a very difficult position to abort the build-up to war. This happened over the Iraq war on March 18 2003.
This is not an argument that it was wrong to take Britain to war in Iraq and therefore the decision-making procedures should be changed to prevent such a result in future. The issue is a much wider one – that irrespective of the rights or wrongs of particular wars, the decision to go to war is so paramount to the life of the nation that it should be taken, and only taken, by an elected parliament on a substantive vote, and well before events had moved to such a point that parliament had little or no alternative but to ratify a decision already reached.
This issue, perhaps more than any other single issue, raises the question of democratic accountability in Britain, which has withered away in the face of a marked centralisation of power over the last 30 years. Many of the previous checks and balances have been eroded, and some of the pre-existing autocratic prerogatives in the hands of successive prime ministers have been consolidated further. The right to take the country to war irrespective of parliamentary or public opinion is the clearest example of the latter.
Under the royal prerogative which dates back centuries, the powers of the Crown exercised by the prime minister, without consultation of cabinet or parliament, include the rights to declare war or make peace, sign or ratify treaties, confer honours, make appointments, establish commissions, and grant pardons. The democratisation of these prerogative rights is now being increasingly challenged by all the political parties. In opposition, Labour stated that it would ensure “all actions of government are subject to political and parliamentary control, including those actions now governed by the arbitrary use of the royal prerogative”, and emphasised in particular going to war and the ratification of treaties as central areas of concern.
But in addition to the democratic dimension, there is also the strong constitutional argument that the evidence cited to justify such a momentous decision as going to war should be full and transparent, subject to the strict dictates of national security. In the case of the Iraq war, that would mean that the full advice of the attorney general on the legality of the war, the evidence on the existence and threat of weapons of mass destruction, and the proper reporting of the key French position on possible use of the veto in the security council would be laid before parliament. All of these matters would then be much more thoroughly scrutinised, and any manipulation of the evidence would become much more problematic.
For all these reasons, therefore, I am introducing a bill into the Commons tomorrow (2 February) which requires that the approval of parliament must be sought before British armed forces can be deployed in military action. For this purpose it also requires the prime minister to lay before both Houses of Parliament a report setting out the objectives, legal basis and likely duration of the military action proposed. The bill does allow for situations where the prime minister determines that deployment is urgently necessary before approval of the House of Commons can be achieved. But in such circumstances, which would be rare, it requires that the prime minister must still lay the report before parliament within seven days after troop deployment has begun.
Nor are the demands of this bill out of step with constitutional practice elsewhere. In the US for example the War Powers Resolution of 1973 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. But in the UK the bill is a crucial change whose implementation is long overdue.

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