Andy McDonald

It is an absolute pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Lagan Valley (Sorcha Eastwood). I thank her for her eloquence and advocacy. She communicated with such power, conviction and sense, and I thank her for what she has said. I thank all hon. Members, right hon. Members and gallant Members for the incredible contributions that have been made over the last two days. People have come to this vexed and troubling issue with a great deal of commitment and determination to get to the right outcome for a better future and a better understanding of the past, and I thank the hon. Lady for that. I was not born in Northern Ireland, and I do not live there, but my grandparents were from Belfast. They were a Protestant and a Catholic who left for the perfect, peaceful idyll that is the west of Scotland. My maternal great-grandparents were from Carrickmacross in County Monaghan, and all my wife’s family are from Tyrone. That part of the world supplied the working-class labour that brought about the burgeoning iron and steel industry. Our connections and associations with the island of Ireland are deep, and there is a passion for people to see a positive outcome and resolution and to include the many working-class men who found themselves on the streets in Northern Ireland in their tender years. I thank again the hon. Member for Lagan Valley. I welcome this Bill as an important improvement on the previous Government’s deeply flawed legacy Act. Repealing the conditional amnesty scheme and restoring civil proceedings are significant steps towards delivering truth, justice and accountability. I recognise the vital importance of treating former service personnel fairly, including by acknowledging the extraordinarily difficult circumstances in which many served. I had the pleasure of being one of the founding members of the Royal British Legion’s Solicitors Group, which is pro bono. I have worked with service personnel at close quarters, and I am overwhelmed and overawed by their commitment and dedication to their duty. It has been said in recent hours in this debate that nobody is questioning the performance of our service personnel who found themselves in that situation, and that it is not veterans against civilians. I met two senior retired Army officers last month—Lieutenant Colonel the Reverend Nicholas Mercer and Brigadier John Donnelly CBE—thanks to Amnesty International and the Centre for Military Justice. Both of them challenged the suggestion that British forces have faced a flood of vexatious litigation under the European convention on human rights, and I worry about the scaremongering that has been perpetrated in that regard. As Nicholas Mercer has argued, the application of the Human Rights Act is vital, because it means that the guilty can be held accountable and the innocent exonerated. That is an important principle. Human rights protections are not the enemy of fair treatment for veterans; they are part of what makes that fairness possible. However, I must express my concerns. The Government have chosen to publish such a voluminous package of amendments with barely seven days’ notice and have given us just two days to consider them, and that is a concern. I am also concerned about some of the tonality, which has explicitly presented the Bill as providing additional legal protections and safeguards for veterans. Whatever the Government’s intentions, some of these measures may be viewed very differently by victims’ families, particularly those who spent decades seeking answers about the actions of the state and the circumstances in which their loved ones died. What is presented to veterans as reassurance may be experienced by those families as another barrier to justice. That matters enormously. The Secretary of State has a responsibility to not only improve the legal framework for dealing with the past, but rebuild confidence among communities whose trust in the institutions of the state has been profoundly damaged by their experience of the troubles. He said yesterday—I think I am quoting him correctly—that the principle of the duty of candour will be imported into this legislation when the Public Office (Accountability) Bill passes. I hope he will intervene on me, because I am seeking some clarification. Surely the duty of candour will be imported into this legislation, not simply the principle.