Sir Iain Duncan Smith

I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. [Laughter.] In those conversations, we decided that there was clearly no future for us in the Army. Now, I did stay on a bit longer, but many left who I knew were very competent and very good people, and it is difficult to fill those posts. That is the bit in the armed forces that is critical to everything else that happens. If we do not have a cadre of middle-ranking and senior non-commissioned officers, we do not have an Army. We just have a lot of orders from the top down but are unable to do them. What we speak about today is critical, because we have to send a message to our armed forces that we believe in them fully and strongly and will support them in every way. That is why it is a pleasure to see the hon. Member for Birmingham Selly Oak (Al Carns) sitting in his place after his resignation. He has the respect of many of my colleagues on these Benches, without question, not only for his past but for his present. I know what it is like to resign when you disagree with the Government—I have done it a few times myself—but the reality is that he will never regret it. The thing that matters most of all when we come to this place is not us or the debates that we have here and away; it is the people out there who put us here. If we do not plan to speak up, even when our own side does not want us to, we are not worthy of being in this place. I therefore congratulate him, not because I am in a party political game but because I respect him for having called out a problem that the Government face. All the Ministers on the Front Bench know that, as does he. The question is: what will we do about it? I want to start by talking about Northern Ireland, and I shall be here on 4 September, cheering my hon. Friend the Member for Spelthorne on with his private Member’s Bill. We cannot for one moment forget that we have reduced the morale of British soldiers who have served—veterans who are now often in their late 70s and 80s—and who find themselves persecuted. I say to the Defence Ministers that this really started in the Northern Ireland Office, which was overly persuaded by Sinn Féin that they could somehow change what had happened and come out as victors. As the hon. Member for Birmingham Selly Oak said in his resignation speech, they lost; they lost because of the efforts of the armed forces, and of all those who did not see another day and who died in the service of their country. More importantly, we forget that walking down the streets in your own country armed and trying to protect civilians against aggression is quite different from anything else that the armed forces were trained to do. In doing it, they had to figure out all sorts of complications. The trouble with the Northern Ireland Troubles Bill is that it does not deal with the sense of what we asked our soldiers to do in risking their lives to protect the British public on the streets of the United Kingdom. We therefore have to understand that the legislation that the Government have brought forward is wrong. That does not mean to say that what the Conservative Government brought through was fantastic. It was not. There were many flaws and failings in it, but many of us felt that we would support it because it did one major thing: it stopped the constant attacks on those poor veterans whose lives are now coming to an end and who see themselves being dragged through the courts all over again.