Armed Forces Bill

Lord Balfe Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 7th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I join in welcoming the Bill and paying tribute to the Armed Forces, but I do reflect that, while we make a tribute to the Armed Forces, during the time of Covid the Government made tremendous efforts to get people off the streets. I claim no great role in that, but I did notice the huge number of ex-military personnel who are homeless, who felt left out of society, who were sleeping on the streets and who were part of that homelessness.

I must also say that, as someone who has had a fair amount of dealings with the United States and its legislative assemblies, we pay far less attention to our military than they do in the United States. To be an ex-soldier in the United States is an honourable situation. To be an ex-military person in Britain is something that is referred to from time to time with warm words but seldom followed up very effectively. So one thing I hope can come out of the Bill, the covenant and what follows, is a more humane look at the need to deal with post-service life as well as service life, and to face up to the problems that one gets.

If we are running a military operation, we should be clear what we are doing. We are operating a killing machine. The main purpose of an army is to go and kill people, and, if you bring people into that sort of situation, you get throwback in the sense of not only post-traumatic stress disorder but enormous pressure on people and the way in which they see the world. We have to face up to that. I spent a long time, as some noble Lords know, in the European Parliament and I was for some years vice-chair of its Security and Disarmament Committee. We used to go to NATO and, when it existed, the Western European Union and talk to people from all over Europe. It was very clear, talking to some of our Nordic friends, that they did not want to get their soldiers anywhere near military action that would involve killing the opposition—and they did not want it for quite good psychological reasons. I make this point because I think we sometimes romanticise this, saying “Oh, yes, Tommy soldier, great person”. I cannot remember the quote, but Kipling made it and we all know it: sometimes we love them, sometimes we don’t, but mainly we forget them. I think we need to remember that.

We also need to come to terms with the fact that the whole nature of warfare is changing. While 100 years ago the idea of mass killing was accepted—“Over the top you go” at Ypres or the Somme—that would never now be acceptable. Time has moved on. I predict that we are coming to the end of military operations as we have known them up to now. Afghanistan may well turn out to be the last big operation of its kind, and maybe we are moving forward to operations where drones and targeted killings are much more the case. Let us be honest: it is much easier to sit in a bunker in Lincolnshire and destroy someone on the ground in the Middle East than it is to face them across 300 yards or 300 metres of desert.

So I put it to the Minister, not as part of this Bill but as a consequence of this Bill, that we need to come to terms with how we deal with ex-service personnel, many of whom have severe mental problems partly caused by the situation in which, you can say, they have put themselves, but actually in which we have put them. We owe a duty of aftercare, and if there is one thing that Covid taught me, it is the huge number of people in society, on the streets, who come from a military background. I was actually shocked to learn how many, as a percentage, there were. I notice my good friend opposite—I am not sure whether I am allowed to call her a friend—the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, who lives in Cambridge, the same city as I do. Much of my evidence came from there, where the Government gave Cambridge City Council money to get people housed and people were still on the streets. I spoke to some of them and went round with some of the welfare workers, and I discovered a shocking level of mental incapacity that we also need to tackle.