Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill

Lord Rooker Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 20th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rooker (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I congratulate the Minister and wish her well in handling the Bill as it goes through the Lords.

Having listened to the vast majority of the speeches today, I have to say that it crossed my mind that it might have been a good idea if the business managers had started the Bill in your Lordships’ House, rather than in the other place. In my experience, several major Bills in the past have benefited from starting in the Lords. However, the history is there.

I claim no experience. Indeed, the closest I came was in 1959 when I tried to end my engineering indentured apprenticeship to join the Fleet Air Arm as an artificer apprentice. My apprentice master refused; the rest is history. I pay tribute to all the Armed Forces —the front line and the vital back-up.

I can see how seductive the Bill might appear to some rank-and-file service personnel. My view of how the MoD treats service personnel comes from my 27 years’ service in the other place. It includes direct contact regarding poor-quality service accommodation, a lack of mental health help, post-traumatic stress disorder, veterans on the street, and those affected by nuclear tests in Australia. I never found the MoD, under either party, to be very supportive.

I do not agree with the apparently endless pursuit of members of the Armed Forces, whose lives are being ruined. We fail them if we continue to allow this abuse. Our forces are brave, professional and trained—yes, trained to kill within the rules of war; they are not trained to torture. As many have said, torture is prohibited by law and by the UN convention, the Geneva conventions and other statutes.

I have read all the briefings, but I want simply to rely on the views of two ex-service parliamentary colleagues: Field Marshal Lord Guthrie and Dan Jarvis MP. Dan Jarvis pointed out that the UK has a dark recent past when it comes to torture. As a former major, he powerfully pointed out:

“At a time when we are witnessing an erosion of human rights and leaders turning their backs on international institutions, it is more important than ever before that we uphold our values and standards and not undermine them.”—[Official Report, Commons, 23/9/20; col. 1009.]


In a Commons debate on 3 November last year, he said that torture,

“is never acceptable in any circumstances. … The rules on detention and interrogation are clear. The British Army’s training on detainee handling and tactical questioning is rigorous and leaves no room for doubt.”—[Official Report, Commons, 3/11/20; col. 223.]

I do not see how we can claim that we are professional and the best trained if we seek to give people immunity for no other reason than that they are members of the Armed Forces. The Government appear to have gone soft on this. Lord Guthrie said in what is now quite a famous letter to the Sunday Times in June last year that the Bill

“provides room for a de facto decriminalisation of torture.”

He went on to point out that the Bill’s

“proposals appear to have been dreamt up by those who have seen too little of the world to understand why the rules of war matter.”

Those points have been made by many others today. In this respect, the Bill does great harm to the reputation of the Armed Forces and puts them at risk. As such, it must be amended.