THERE IS ALWAYS IMPEACHMENT
The Guardian
Dan Plesch
Wednesday January 28, 2004
Original here

If MPs believe that the government was out of control over Iraq, they could revive a procedure used against Charles I - and Richard Nixon

Say the word "impeachment" and people think of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky or, before that, Richard Nixon. In fact, it is an English invention. The men who wrote the United States constitution borrowed it from the House of Commons, where it was used for much of the 17th and 18th centuries. But while impeachment has remained in print in the US constitution, in England it has been lost to history.

Nevertheless, it was to the high court of parliament that David Kelly gave evidence, as the MP Andrew McKinlay reminded him. And parliament could choose once again to act as a court. Another MP, Peter Kilfoyle, recently asked the House of Commons library for a briefing on whether impeachment was still part of the constitution, and was assured that it was. And senior Tory figures have let it be known that they would favour the impeachment of the prime minister.

Such is the length of English parliamentary history that there is even a precedent for reviving impeachment after a century of disuse. The process originated in the House of Commons in the late 14th century, the first accused being a merchant in the City of London. Impeachment was used as a tool to bring high officials to account and was used for around 100 years in the political battles of late medieval England.

Under the Tudor dynasty, parliamentary factions and parliament itself declined in importance. By the time of the Stuarts, Charles I sought to abolish parliamentary authority and create an absolute monarchy. As part of the parliamentary response, a committee was created to investigate ancient rights of the House of Commons that could again be put to use, and by the 1620s impeachment was revived as a way of pursuing Charles's ministers, especially the Earl of Strafford. Impeachment then remained a procedure used from time to time until the eve of the Victorian era, in the early 1800s.

There are reasons why impeachment has fallen out of use in the UK: the ability of the normal courts to try those accused of major corruption; the custom that ministers found to have lied to parliament resign; and the use of a no-confidence vote to remove a government and precipitate an election. These all provide good safeguards in usual circumstances.

In the case of Iraq, though, there may well be an argument for bringing back impeachment. As things stand, we have the inquiry by a single law lord, Lord Hutton, into the death of Dr Kelly. As many people have pointed out, there needs to be afurther inquiry into possible wrongdoing over the way the war was sold to the British people and to members of parliament, and into the uses and misuses of intelligence.

The matter of an inquiry into whether the truth was told over Iraq, and whether any falsehoods were deliberate, is too serious a matter for MPs to delegate to a law lord, however competent. Nor can the matter be given to a normal select committee, which has insufficient power to handle the issue.

MPs and political journalists assume that there is no other constitutional tool available to bring ministers and officials to account. They are wrong. A process of impeachment could be set in motion.

The Commons itself could debate whether there are sufficient grounds to bring impeachment proceedings against one or more ministers or officials.

The process of impeachment works through the Commons prosecuting a case before the whole House of Lords, who act as judges. It is from this practice that the US adopted its procedure, in which the House of Representatives chooses both a committee to draw up articles of impeachment and a prosecutor to present the case before the Senate, which then acts as judge and jury. In Britain, a committee of both houses should be convened to clarify how the impeachment process would work today.

There are some MPs who believe that a great crime has been committed over Iraq - a crime without precedent in modern British history. If their concern is as serious as they say, then impeachment is a tool they should use. At the very least, raising impeachment on the floor of the Commons would be an act that would reverberate around the world.

The party whipping system is powerful, and so it is likely that a government majority could be found to prevent an impeachment process from moving forward. But it would be much more difficult to prevent the case for consideration from being heard on the floor of the house. Would MPs be told that they should forget our history, that to remember the origins of our democracy is simply a frivolous distraction?

An impeachment process is a very serious one, that might match the extraordinary situation into which Britain has been plunged over the Iraq war. It is up to MPs and the public to decide how grave a threat to democracy has arisen over Iraq, and if impeachment will once more be the remedy of a Commons and a people faced with a government that is beyond control.

Dan Plesch is a research fellow at Birkbeck College; his book The Beauty Queens' Guide to World Peace is published in June by Politico's