No, prime minister: explaining the House of Commons’ vote on intervention in Syria

Abstract

On 29 August 2013 the UK House of Commons inflicted the first defeat on a PrimeMinister over a matter of war and peace since 1782. Recalled to debate and vote on UK intervention in Syria, the Commons humbled the government and crucially impacted the development of UK foreign policy. This article places that vote, and the developments leading to it, in the context of the role of parliaments in security policy and explores the relationships between parliamentary influence, leadership, intra-party and intra-coalition politics, and public opinion. From an in-depth analysis of leaders' statements and parliamentary debate, we find a combination of intra-party politics and party leadership were most significant. An additional factor -the role of historical precedent -was also important. Our analysis explores the fluidity and interconnectedness of the various factors for parliamentary influence in foreign policy and offers directions for future theoretical development and empirical research.Keywords: foreign policy analysis; decision-making; UK foreign policy; parliaments. 2'A leader humbled, a nation cut down to size ' (Rachman 2013 This was an unusual case of a parliament defying a PM's preference on a decision to deploy military force. This vote was unprecedented in UK politics and challenges conventional wisdom that Westminster has little influence in security policy. Yet this case also resembles instances of parliamentary influence elsewhere and the factors that explain this vote are consistent with other cases. After a brief description of the backdrop to the vote, we establish the theoretical context of parliaments' role in security policy, setting out the general expectation that parliaments are not particularly influential. At the heart of the article we consider -through a consolidation of previous research -factors that facilitate parliamentary influence in security policy and examine the impact they each had in the Syria vote. In concluding, we use this case to suggest directions for future research. Our aim is to explain this particular vote and to advance research and understanding about the role of parliaments in security policy. We ground our analysis of parliamentary influence in a conceptualisation of political dynamics focusing on group and individual actors from a decision-making perspective. From this wide-ranging research, we consolidate and specify several facilitating factors for parliamentary influence in security policy. They include:• Institutional powers of parliament; 8• Public opinion;• Cabinet type;• Intraparty factions; and• Prime Ministerial (PM) leadership style.These factors can, and often do, act together, but here we present the logic of each separately. Furthermore, none are deterministic; there are caveats to the logic of each of them. Following a comparative, general analysis of factors for parliamentary influence in foreign and security policy, we apply these to the Syria vote.

The party politics of legislative–executive relations in security and defence policy

“…Although scholarship discussing party positions on specific missions and/or individual countries is abundant (e.g. Kaarbo and Kenealy 2016;Strong 2014;Rathbun 2004), there is very little systematic and comparative analysis of party political preferences on the use of force and legislative-executive relations in security policies. In this article, we examine the extent to which both the substance and the procedure of military interventions have been contested among political parties.…”

Parliaments in security policy: Involvement, politicisation, and influence

“…By refusing to support military action against the Syrian government, British MPs not only influenced government policy but even changed the rules of parliamentary involvement for the future. While Parliament's legal and constitutional authority may have remained unchanged by the Syria vote (Kaarbo and Kenealy, 2016), it contributed to the emergence of a new convention. For some, this new convention implies that 'Parliament now decides when Britain goes to war' (Strong, 2015b) although its exact shape remains contested (Mello, 2017a).…”

“…The most prominent and intensely studied case certainly has been the informal veto of the House of Commons of the United Kingdom against military involvement in Syria in August 2013 (Kaarbo and Kenealy, 2016;Lagassé, 2017;Mello, 2017a;Strong, 2015aStrong, , 2015b. By refusing to support military action against the Syrian government, British MPs not only influenced government policy but even changed the rules of parliamentary involvement for the future.…”

Homes for heroes? Assessing the impact of the UK’s Military Covenant

“…Recent deployments to attack the insurgent terrorist group ISIS/ISIL in Iraq and Syria from the air including with the use of UK air assets, as well as the use of ground forces for training activities and possibly other duties, do not involve anything like the same number of service personnel as either the war in Afghanistan or Iraq did in the 2000s. This is partly due to the assessment of military need, but also because of the absence of public and political will that large-scale armed responses require, and that simply were not available to the government (Kaarbo, 2016). As a result, the military and defence civil servants are adjusting to the reductions in defence spending and personnel numbers that were set in train by the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review (UK Ministry of Defence, 2010).…”