SNP motion on investigating Tony Blair over Iraq defeated

Houses of Parliament - PA

MPs have comprehensively voted against an SNP motion that claimed Tony Blair “misled” Parliament in the run-up to the Iraq War, following yet another acrimonious debate about the former prime minister’s legacy. 

The motion called for a committee of MPs to launch a “specific examination” of Mr Blair’s public statements and the private correspondence between him and George W Bush.

The attempt was defeated by 439 votes to 70 after the Government and Labour frontbench decided not to support it.

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The motion also claimed the Chilcot Inquiry had provided “substantial evidence of misleading information” from Mr Blair. 

The report, published this summer after a seven-year investigation, said Mr Blair had not deliberately set out to mislead Parliament or to falsify evidence - though it criticised him strongly for making the case with more certainty than the evidence supported. 

Opening proceedings, Alex Salmond said Labour MPs who still justified Mr Blair’s actions were “desperate to defend the indefensible”.

He pointed to a note written by Blair assuring the US that the UK would be “with you, whatever” as evidence that the former prime minister had already committed to supporting an invasion before the parliamentary vote in 2003.

Several Labour MPs spoke out in defence of their former leader, with many allies of Blair accusing the SNP of trying to score political points.

Ben Bradshaw said: “The lie that our former PM lied has finally been laid to rest and the SNP can’t stand it.” He and Blair’s constituency successor Phil Wilson described the motion as “mendacious”.

Ian Austin branded Salmond – and his Labour colleague Paul Flynn who signed the motion – “a disgrace” for failing to address the brutality of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

The motion was signed by MPs from seven parties, including the SNP, Labour, Tories, and Liberal Democrats.

The debate over Blair also led to a row on the Labour backbenches.

When Flynn, a longstanding critic of the decision to go to war, said some parliamentarians in 2003 had been “bribed, bullied, bamboozled into voting the wrong way”, Austin intervened to declare: “What a disgrace!” and asked the deputy speaker to admonish the Newport West MP.

Flynn later clarified that he was not talking about financial inducements.

There was a dispute within Labour about whipping arrangements for the vote. The PLP on Monday made clear it wanted the strongest three-line whip imposed to demand MPs vote against the motion, but the Shadow Cabinet instead selected the more lenient one-line whip.

Shadow FCO minister Fabian Hamilton spoke for the Labour leadership in the debate and he said he did not believe Blair had acted “in bad faith”, and that the motion amounted to an “attempt to pillory and scapegoat one individual” rather than look at the institutional and international failures that led to the war.

Salmond, though, said he believed Jeremy Corbyn would have wanted to vote in favour of the motion.

“The leader of the Labour party, we are all well aware, if he were free to do so, would be joining us in the lobbies this afternoon,” he said.  

“I’m not really interested in the civil war in the Labour party; I’m interested in the real war that took place and resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.”

Many on the Conservative benches also came to the defence of Blair, perhaps most notably former Cabinet minister Michael Gove.

He pointed to the chaos emanating from the Syrian civil war, where Parliament voted against intervention in 2013, to highlight the damage of failing to act.  

“Whenever we think about the consequences of action we very rarely think about the consequences of inaction," the former education and justice secretary said. 

"But we all have in front of us now a hugely powerful reminder of the consequences of inaction in what is happening in Aleppo at the moment."