Immunity for Soldiers

Steve Baker Excerpts

Monday 20th May 2019 Westminster Hall

[James Heappey (Wells) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bone, and to follow the speeches of so many hon. and gallant Friends who have spoken so compellingly about their service and how that translates into how they see things now as policy makers. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Southport (Damien Moore), who opened the debate with great clarity; his speech would have been well received by all ex-service people watching the debate. It pains me, however, that the Northern Ireland Office Minister responding to the debate is my immediate constituency neighbour—my hon. Friend the Member for Weston-super-Mare (John Penrose). He and I are great friends, but I am afraid that I must not pull any of my punches: I feel that the Ministry of Defence should be responding to the debate, rather than the Northern Ireland Office.

[Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)]

I am most grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way, although I missed the beginning of the debate. I hope that he will join me in asking the Minister to address the Stormont House agreement when he responds. I rather fear that the reason why we are in this predicament with Northern Ireland veterans relates to the terms of that agreement—in relation to historical investigations, in particular.

[James Heappey]

I very much agree. My hon. Friend is right that the political angle to this is most unfortunate. I will come to that later in my remarks.

I am deeply concerned by any suggestion of equivalence between the actions that I and so many other service personnel have taken on operations and the actions taken by terrorists out to take life illegally. There is no equivalence. In the debate on the urgent question on Thursday morning, the Government deployed a disappointing line, which seemed to suggest that comfort letters would not endure and, if they did not, all would therefore be open to prosecution. Although that corrects an imbalance, by definition it creates an equivalence, in which we say, “At least both sides can be investigated and prosecuted.” That is simply not acceptable: there is no equivalence.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Penrose]

I certainly am. I hope to come on to at least some initial comments about the actions we might be able to take as a Parliament, a Government and a society.

[Mr Baker]

Will the Minister allow me?

[John Penrose]

Very briefly, and then I must make progress.

[Mr Baker]

I am sure we are all concerned to get to root causes, so I hope the Minister will get to the Stormont House agreement.

[John Penrose]

That is indeed one of the points I will make when we come to the actions. I will briefly mention the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), who made one of the most emotional contributions; he served, I think, in Northern Ireland himself, and he is absolutely right in his enjoinder that we must all be honourable and do right by our veterans.

One of the most thoughtful examples of controlled anger of the afternoon came from my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Plymouth, Moor View (Johnny Mercer), who said that we must do more. I think everybody here would agree with that. He also said that we are not asking for an amnesty for war crimes and that a statute of limitations, pure and simple, cannot work because there should never be a time limit on serious criminal behaviour, although he also said that something around the announced presumption of non-prosecution looks promising. In a point that I think we would all echo, my hon. Friend was also rightly contemptuous of the false narrative of hope that the legal teams of the lawfare profession are using to manipulate victims’ grief.

I will not go through everybody, but I wanted to say that my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith) rightly stated the point I was just making: the fact that this is UK law rather than service abroad cannot be used as an excuse for failing to help Northern Ireland service versus service abroad. That cannot stand, and it is a deep injustice.

I am under pressure of time, so I will gloss over some of the other comments, but they were all valid. My hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset, himself a former Grenadier Guard, made the point that our words must match our actions, and he is right. My hon. Friend the Member for Wells, a former rifleman, asked how legal cases can justly be tried decades later, after the fog of war has passed.

My right hon. Friend the Member for North Shropshire (Mr Paterson), himself a former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and thus a man with personal experience of many of these policy issues, said something that, again, I think would be echoed rightly around this Chamber: no further legal process should happen unless there is clear and categorical new evidence, a point also made by my hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Robert Courts), who said we should not go anywhere near what used to be called the double jeopardy rule, under which someone cannot be tried twice for the same offence.

What must we achieve? We must achieve an answer that will do several things. Of course it must work for veterans in the armed forces, but it must also work for former police officers, prison guards and wardens too. They are not in the armed forces and they work on a different legal basis, but the answer must work for them as well. It must work for innocent, peaceful Catholics and Protestants alike in Northern Ireland—people who have never served or wanted to serve, but were potentially in the line of fire from some of the actions that look place.

Our answer must work for the victims and the families of the victims. We have heard some of that, but it needs to be emphasised. Most importantly, it must work in court so that, when the inevitable legal challenges come from the lawfare brigade, this thing is robust and stands up; if it does not, we will have failed in our duty to protect our former servicemen and women. There is no point coming up with something that sounds great, but falls over the first time a clever lawyer pokes it in court. That will not stand.

Finally—I have treble-underlined this in my notes—our answer must draw a line and allow people to move on. It must allow not only the victims and the veterans, but the whole society in Northern Ireland, to draw a line. That is why I come back to the point made by the Chairman of the Defence Committee. There is not an exact comparison between Northern Ireland, which is a unique place, and South Africa, but there are many parallels. We must find some way of creating an approach that will allow people to get closure, truth and justice.

What I hope and expect we will do is, first, to publish very soon the results of the consultation so we can all see what people in Northern Ireland genuinely think about the details of the questions. Secondly, promptly after that, I expect us to announce the Government response, which must be actions, not words. The Stormont proposals are a starting point, but there are genuine concerns on all sides about the details of those proposals. They cannot stand as they are, but they are a good starting point and we need to work on the details of how we modify them so that we can bring forward a Bill.

The crucial thing is the point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green: when natural justice collides with the law, the law must change. That is what we do here.