Contribution
In the seven years that I have been a Member of this House, I do not think that I have been in a more respectful, positive and high-quality debate. There have been some absolutely outstanding contributions from across the House. I am not going to reach that standard, but I am proud to participate in the debate. I particularly acknowledge the contributions made by colleagues from Northern Ireland. Having visited a number of times recently, I can attest that they do politics pretty well there; there is a standard of speech-making that reflects the seriousness of politics there, and we have all benefited from that this evening.
My observation about the Bill and the amendments brought forward by the Government is that they essentially still fail on a core moral principle, which I will come to. The amendments that have been adduced as improving the Bill and addressing the concerns that have been raised do not, I am afraid, offer new protections. Many of them relate to measures that are already in force and could be applied, particularly those on the opportunities for anonymity and remote hearings.
The amendments and the new clauses are mostly simply important moral statements of what should be obvious. In particular, new clause 32 states that there is no equivalence between terrorist action and legal actions. It is extraordinary that it needs to be said that “a relevant person” in an inquest or proceedings
“must have regard to…the fact that force may lawfully be used to prevent unlawful violence”.
And what a thing to need to say that lawful action is not equivalent to terrorism! Why would that have to be stated in law, unless the Bill might be thought to suggest the opposite—that the law as it stands, and the Bill, could imply that equivalence?
At the heart of why the Bill remains inadequate is the essential imbalance in the legal procedures that the legacy of Northern Ireland applies. I pay tribute to a group of veterans I met recently—some special forces and some others—led by Dr Robert Parr, an academic at Oxford who was a Royal Marine and in special forces. He has written a very powerful paper that makes the simple point that the legal system—this is not addressed by the Bill; in fact, the Bill consolidates it—
“privileges the claims of former paramilitaries over those of the men and women who served the Crown”.
Of course, that is not intentional—the intention is to provide equity and parity—but the problem is structural.
The fact is that only a 10th of the deaths that happened during the troubles were caused by the security services, but it is men and women in uniform who must bear almost the whole institutional burden under the law as it stands, and that will not change under this Bill. The IRA and other paramilitary organisations got letters of comfort, early release and pardons. They had their weapons decommissioned without any forensic testing being done. Meanwhile, the British Army kept its records—indeed, it operated under the chain of command. It had accountability built into the work that it did; in fact, it had all the elements that made its decisions as safe as possible, as a military operating under the laws of a democracy. It is those elements that are now used against the Army, and that is the structural imbalance we face. That was apparent right at the beginning, when the Good Friday agreement was being implemented.
A letter has been released recently from John Reid, the Northern Ireland Secretary in 2001. He was writing to Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, and he made it clear that the proposed arrangement, in which an amnesty would be offered to terrorists but not to British veterans, was asymmetric and unjust, but that for reasons of political necessity, that is how it had to be. As Dr Parr has pointed out, the asymmetric exclusion of the security forces was therefore not the product of principled legal reasoning or an honest assessment of comparative culpability; it was the price of republican acquiescence in a political settlement. Just consider the insult that that represents to our soldiers.
I pay tribute to and honour the point that the right hon. Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois) made. Our soldiers beat the IRA to a standstill. They fought it to the negotiating table, and then they had to take the final indignity, which is that they, not the IRA, would face the threat of the law and of prosecution.