PROMINENT Labour MPs accused the Government yesterday of failing to make the case for war against Iraq, in a highly charged Commons debate.

Chris Smith (Lab, Islington South and Finsbury), the former Culture Secretary, moved the rebel amendment accused the Government of asking MPs to back an inexorable path to war in three or four weeks. To heckling from Conservative MPs, he said that United Nations weapons inspectors had been back in Iraq for just 11 weeks yet inspections between 1991-96 destroyed large amounts of Iraq’s chemical and biological warfare agents.

Mr Smith accepted that President Saddam Hussein had not complied fully with inspectors but claimed there had been an improvement. “Are we seriously saying because Saddam Hussein has complied with 70 per cent rather than 100 per cent that is a case for going to war?” he asked.

Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, intervened to challenge this, saying there was no basis for such a figure.

Mr Smith was cheered by Labour MPs when he declared the timetable was being determined by President Bush, not by the logic of events, and again when he said war would destabilise the Middle East. “Strength does not lie simply in military might. Strength lies in simply having an unanswerable case. It lies in making the right moral choices, it lies in maintaining the pressure and it lies in securing the fullest possible international agreement,” he said.

Frank Dobson (Lab, Holborn and St Pancras), the former Health Secretary, joined the rebels, saying he had supported war in Kosovo, Afghanistan and the previous Gulf War when he wanted Saddam toppled, but military action could not be justified now. It was the United States that was undermining the UN’s authority, Mr Dobson said, by saying that unless the Security Council approved its policy it would ignore the UN.

“They cannot claim to be the sheriff executing a warrant that the court has not granted them,” he said. Mr Dobson added that war would be a recruiting sergeant for terrorists. Another rebel was Gavin Strang (Lab, Edinburgh East and Musselburgh), the former Transport Secretary, who argued that Parliament owed it to Hans Blix to respond to his request for more time.

The most nakedly anti-American speech came from George Galloway (Lab, Glasgow Kelvin), who has close links with Iraq and appealed to Labour MPs to signal to the American public that the British people were against war.He claimed that a “born-again, right-wing, fundamentalist Republican Administration” wanted war and told Labour colleagues to be on the side of Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Thabo Mbeki, not George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle.

Peter Kilfoyle (Lab, Liverpool Walton), a former Defence Minister and another rebel, also criticised the Bush Administration, saying it contained “ideological hawks who have set out their stall for many years”.

Several Labour MPs heckled Mr Straw as he opened the debate by offering Saddam a final chance to disarm and drew a parallel with the UN’s credibility today and the demise of its predecessor, the League of Nations, saying it failed to stand up to dictators. Appealing to Labour MPs, he contrasted Iraq’s non-cooperation with the post-apartheid disarmament of South Africa’s nuclear programme which involved just nine inspectors.

Alan Simpson (Lab, Nottingham S) said he regarded the Government motion and the surrounding war rhetoric as reflecting “the disconnection of this House from the society we claim to represent. Mr Simpson said the case for war remained unproven and he would vote for the rebel amendment and against the Government’s main motion.

It was an indication of the “sorry state of the current Parliament,” he said, that the Government was “increasingly looking for a pretext for war, rather than for the avoidance of one. We appear to produce dossiers of mass deception, whose claims are dismissed as risible almost as soon as they are released.

“We have the embarrassment of a Prime Minister whose arguments chase from one discredited case to another in the search for something that will convince the public on the basis of a war which they don’t believe in.”

Gerald Kaufman (Lab, Manchester Gorton) supported the Prime Minister but expressed concern over the role of the most “unappetising United States Administration” he had known.

During Prime Minister’s Questions, before the debate, Terry Davis (Lab, Birmingham Hodge Hill) asked Mr Blair if any other Labour, Socialist, or Social Democrat party anywhere else in Europe supported the British and American approach for dealing with Saddam.

Eric Martlew (Lab, Carlisle) warned Mr Blair: “Tonight, in the vote on Iraq, there will be many of your backbenchers who will be supporting you in the lobbies but cannot support war against Iraq unless there is a second UN resolution.”

He urged the Prime Minister to allow MPs a debate and a vote before British troops were committed to war.

Donald Anderson, Labour chairman of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, backed action reluctantly. He said: “We are now in a phoney peace. War drums are rolling and I approach the next few weeks with a deep sense of foreboding.” Mr Anderson said he believed the focus must be on disarmament, not regime change, and that pressure should be maintained.

“Our Prime Minister took a strategic decision to stand alongside President Bush and there have been positive effects,” he said. “ It was a courageous position which has given him a unique leverage which should now be used to ensure that diplomatic issues are pursued. War is truly a last resort.”

Supporting the Government, Bruce George (Lab, Walsall South), chairman of the Defence Select Committee, said Mr Blair had faced opposition to intervening in Sierra Leone, Macedonia, Kosovo and Afghanistan, yet had been right: “I am prepared to give his judgment a further degree of endorsement because I have heard no reason why his perspective should be trashed as many people have suggested.”

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