Baroness Hunter of Auchenreoch (Lab)

My Lords, it is a great privilege to take part in this debate today, and I am so grateful to the noble Earl for his graciousness and generosity—I am afraid that I was just a little too keen. I congratulate the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Peterborough on her excellent maiden speech, and it is always a pleasure to listen to my good friend, and old friend, Lord Boateng. When I looked at the list of the great speakers in this debate, I thought how lucky I was, and I look forward to hearing from you all. Like many in your Lordships’ House—and, indeed outside it—I have been moved by the fly-pasts, the street parties, the concert last night and the King’s speech, among the many wonderful events in recent days to commemorate VE Day. As other noble Lords have said, the Second World War did not of course end until what is now known as VJ Day, following the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. I commend this opportunity—unprecedented, I am advised by the House of Lords Library— to mark VE and VJ anniversaries at once. I wish to address VJ Day for personal reasons. I was born in Kuala Lumpur, a colonial child. My father, mother, grandparents, aunts and uncles, their many friends and work colleagues in Malaya, where they all lived, all served, and some died, in the Asian theatre. Many were killed or captured in the fall of Singapore, incarcerated in the notorious Changi prison or, worse, forced to work on the so-called death railway. My father, Mac Hunter, a second-generation rubber planter, joined the Federated Malay States Volunteer Force at the outbreak of war and was called up following the Japanese invasion in December 1942. He fought his way down the Malay Peninsula to Singapore, chased by the formidable Japanese army. Of the 160 men in his unit, only 40 survived. He escaped in a fortuitously flat-bottomed fishing boat. In a letter a few weeks later, he wrote, “Five days out and up comes a sub, 100 yards in front of us, and looses off three torpedoes. Although I had been in action, ambushed, bombed, shelled, mortared, machine-gunned and several times almost captured, these were easily my worst moments. I honestly thought it was the end. But no, one passed in front and two went clean underneath. I arrived in Colombo in the clothes I stood up in and with 60 cents”. He spent the rest of the war in Force 136, the Far East branch of the Special Operations Executive, fighting behind enemy lines in the jungles of Burma and Malaya, training resistance units in intelligence-gathering, sabotage and hand-to-hand combat, and finally liaising with the forces parachuted in to negotiate the Japanese surrender in Kuala Lumpur. Meanwhile, my mother worked with her sister in the SOE cipher department, decoding signals in the allied HQ in Colombo. I salute the extraordinary courage of the men and women of the SOE in all theatres of the war. I encourage everyone here, if you are ever in Thailand or Singapore, to visit the cemeteries and memorials in Kanchanaburi and Kranji and the museums in Hellfire Pass and the Ford factory, where the many thousands of military personnel and civilian prisoners who died are honoured. The walls of the Kranji memorial in Singapore are inscribed with the names of over 24,000 allied personnel whose bodies were never found, including the name of my mother’s first husband. I join other noble Lords in thanking the Commonwealth War Graves Commission for the extraordinary work it does. We are all the beneficiaries of what the Second World War generation fought for in Asia, Africa and Europe. We have had 80 years of relative peace in a world bolstered and protected by the international institutions which they put in place—the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, NATO, GATT, the WTO and the EEC—a world of enduring alliances built on dreadful sacrifices by both sides in that war. As beneficiaries of their courage and sacrifice, and in their memory, we should keep this in the forefront of our minds.