Syria Strikes: Should Parliament Have Been Consulted? Yes.

We know the argument. Only the wise government knows what to do. Because it has access to the ‘intelligence’. So we are clueless, have no say and have to live with the consequences. That includes our elected representatives in the House of Commons. We have something called the Royal Prerogative. Ooh how clever. And how English.

Well this blog does not agree. Either we have a democracy or we don’t. We have elected a parliament, not a president. Wars are no longer fought on distant fields. The last one, in which I was a child, was fought over our heads and in our homes, which in countless incidents fell down on top of us. Friends and loved ones died around us, in our streets, not only on foreign fields. That war was declared without parliament being consulted, because that was the way we did things then. But now is a very different world.

If we ignore many insurgencies (IRA, Malaya, Cyprus, Kenya, Aden) we have since fought in Korea, Suez, the Falklands, Iraq twice, Afghanistan, Libya and on the fringes of Syria. Only the Falklands resolved the issue for the moment, but the quarrel with Argentina simmers on. Suez was a humiliation. Korea is still technically in a state of war after 60 years, and all the others are failures and still going on even after up to fifteen years. WWII lasted six. In the modern world force does not work. It kills and destroys but it cannot deliver peace. So its driver is bust.

Next time it might well be nerve agents and cyber attacks which seep into every life and every home. It will affect everybody and at the very least our elected representatives have to vote for it. That principle must now be established beyond recall and once and for all.