Remembrance Day

Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts

Thursday 10th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ramsbotham]

My Lords, I, too, begin by thanking and congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Selkirk, on obtaining this timely and important debate and on his masterly and moving introduction. In the wording of his debate, he has provided a possible let-out for the Government to extract themselves from an unfortunate position with regard to the Armed Forces covenant, to which I shall return.

Tomorrow uniquely, at 11/11/11/11, like many others I shall be remembering the sacrifice made and the recognition of it not only by citizens in the UK but in other parts of the world. I would like to draw attention to four of those places.

One lovely morning in early January in 1966, with the remainder of B Company The Rifle Brigade, I went to pay my last respects to the five members of my company who had died or been killed in Borneo and would not be coming back to the United Kingdom with us, knowing that they would be looked after by the Singaporean gardeners from that incomparable organisation, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. This has, in fact, happened.

Moving further west, I sometimes lecture at the battlefield of Gallipoli; a place of terrible beauty but also a place of extraordinary magnanimity which I can illustrate by two of the memorials. One witnessed by Lord Casey, later Governor-General of Australia, of a Turkish soldier carrying in a wounded Australian to the Australian lines. Secondly, a monolith beside that extraordinary Anzac Cove, a strip of sand on which the Anzac Corp was landed in error, containing the words of Kemal Atatürk, president of Turkey, who himself gained fame there.

“Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives,

You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country,

Therefore rest in peace.

There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets,

To us, where they lie side by side, here in this country of ours.

You, the mothers who sent their sons from far away countries,

Wipe away your tears.

Your sons are now lying in our bosom, and are in peace.

After having lost their lives on this land,

They have become our sons as well.”

They are wonderfully magnanimous words. And then I move further west to Hermanville in Normandy, where every year there is a ceremony, started by the French in 1946, with the 3rd Division which landed there on D-day. After has boat has gone into the sea and thrown out a wreath, and the French flags are lowered, a party led by the mayor and the general march to the village, where they are joined by the schoolchildren. In the cemetery, after the British flags have been lowered, the schoolchildren put flowers on every one of the 3rd Division graves. They have done that since 1946.

Finally, I move further west to Ocracoke Island on the coast of North Carolina, where I once went for a memorable weekend. My wife and I thought we had found a snow storm on the ground, but it was in fact a cloud of snow geese in migration. There, when having breakfast before going fishing, the man running the restaurant said, “Have you come to see our cemetery?”. I asked, “What cemetery?”. There are four graves of sailors from HMS “Bedfordshire”, which was a trawler sunk in May 1942, that are looked after every year by the United States Coast Guard; and Her Majesty the Queen is sending a new British flag this year to mark the anniversary.

Those examples show that our dead are acknowledged and recognised all over the world. The Armed Forces community this year was given a huge boost by the announcement of the Armed Forces covenant—an enduring covenant between the people of the United Kingdom, Her Majesty’s Government and all those who serve or have served in the Armed Forces of the Crown, and their families. This covenant is based on trust and goodwill. Each of those three partners has obligations. Among those laid on the Government is,

“special treatment for the injured and bereaved, as proper return for their sacrifice”.

The despicable defiance of the covenants by the metal thieves has been referred to by many noble Lords during this debate. However, to me, much more serious is the continued defiance of the covenant by the Government and, in particular, I name the Secretary of State for Justice in his refusal to appoint a chief coroner—as mentioned by my noble and gallant friend Lord Walker, the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, and the noble Lord, Lord Glasman. There were long-standing complaints about the failure of the coronial system to serve families up until the passing of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009, which appointed a chief coroner. The campaign was orchestrated by the Royal British Legion and the charity, INQUEST. Since then, despite the fact that the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats voted for the chief coroner, the Secretary of State for Justice has opposed that appointment on grounds of cost. However, the costs he uses are spurious, grossly inflated and have never been compared with the revised proposals made to him. Furthermore, he has produced no supporting documentation or explanatory calculations of cost-benefit analysis. If the costs were as high as he alleges, the Royal British Legion and INQUEST would share his concerns.

I am saying this not just because this is the eve of Remembrance Day, but because I believe that it would be a tragedy if the Armed Forces covenant was discredited before it was introduced. There is great danger of that happening over the issue of the chief coroner. I ask the Minister to say to the Secretary of State for Justice that it is not too late for him to reflect on the devotion of the Singaporean gardeners, the words of Kemal Atatürk, the actions of the schoolchildren in Hermanville and those of the US Coast Guard in Ocracoke. He should draw back before 23 November, recognising the damage that might be done to the trust in the Government’s honouring of the obligation that they owe to those who pay the ultimate sacrifice in the defence of this great realm of ours.