Worth noting that MPs don’t vote entirely independently, but rather are marshalled (using a variety of implicit threats) by the party officials to vote in suppo

Worth noting that MPs don’t vote entirely independently, but rather are marshalled (using a variety of implicit threats) by the party officials to vote in support of party leadership. Many of those 411 would have been backbench MPs with scarcely more access to government information than the general public. So they probably either believed what the government were saying about WMDs, or were incentivized to vote for war by the party machine. I wouldn’t give them a pass as such, but it’s several steps removed from the culpability level of Blair (who in turn was a rung down from Bush, incentivized to support the USA in much the same way as the British MPs were incentivized to support the PM).