UK MP says May needs to take suitable actions
‘This is not about regime change, the use of chemical weapons must stop, and UK must react to their use in Syria’.
to the House of Commons to ask for a vote on Syria, she risks terrible consequences. We now have a hard-leftwingLeader of the Labour Party and a wafer-thin parliamentary majority. The vote would be ‘whipped’, and there is a real risk that it would be lost. And anyhow, asking for MPs to make the terrible decision to go to war in that way abdicates the PM’s responsibility for that kind of decision and emasculates Parliament’s ability to hold the Executive to account.”
“This is not about regime change,” says Gray “the point is that the use of chemical weapons must stop, and UK must react to their use in Syria.” Drawing a tangential comparison to the recent Skripalpoisoning, Gray suggests Russia is showing how powerful and threatening they are and contemptuous of the West. They are seeking a reaction. “In the face of these threats, we cannot say we are too frightened to do anything. We have to play our part in the humanitarian protection of the world. The decision should be with the person with the ability to make it, namely the Prime Minister. If the Prime Minister gets it wrong, she has to live with that decision and I reserve the right as a backbench MP to question her decision and call for her head”.
In 2015 James Gray and Mark Lomas wrote a book on this subject, Who Takes Britain to War ( reviewed by this reporter in The Sunday Guardian, 15 November 2014. Amongst other things, it advocates the Government introducing a British War Powers Act, which in essence would replace the now extinct Royal Prerogative with a Parliamentary Prerogative. “Such an act,”’ Gray explains “would establish the universal ‘Theory of Just War’ into British law; it would explicitly define the reasons for going to war, how war is conducted and ended”. Gray suggests the reason such a bill has not so far come to pass is because it constrains by law what the government can do. “Every pacifist organisation would have an opportunity to challenge the government in court on any aspect of any war. It would risk being not a matter for the Executive, nor for the Parliament, but for the courts.” James Gray is the MP for North Wiltshire and Chairman of the Armed Forces Parliamentary Trust.