Theresa May is holding an emergency Cabinet meeting today on how to respond to the latest chemical weapons attack in Syria. Already sources are briefing that the Prime Minister is prepared to take military action without a vote in Parliament, which has naturally enraged a number of parliamentarians.
Jeremy Corbyn has said that ‘parliament should always be given a say on military action’, and the SNP have said that a failure to do so would be a ‘scandal’. As we know from the military interventions of the past few years, parliament does not have any formal right to a vote before action, but since the Iraq War, it has become the convention for Prime Ministers to seek approval from MPs anyway.
But then again, as we have seen from the past few years, the debates running up to those votes are often not so much about the detail of the decision in question as much as they are about MPs ruminating on previous interventions – to the extent that, during the 2013 debate on action in Syria, a number of MPs accidentally called Assad ‘Saddam’, suggesting their minds were elsewhere.
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