Overseas Operations (Service Personnel And Veterans) Bill

Laurence Robertson Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons
Wednesday 23rd September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Laurence Robertson (Tewkesbury) (Con)]

I have been in the House for 23 years, and the hardest decisions that I have had to make in voting have been when we have been asked whether we want to send our armed forces abroad to conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria or Libya. When making those decisions, I have known, as all Members have known, that our armed forces would have to put their own lives at risk, they may have to kill people and they may be killed themselves. We have had to think very carefully about the justification of such actions. As I say, those have been the hardest decisions that I have taken in the House.

As we consider this Bill, it is right to applaud what our armed forces do for us. They strive to keep peace, they strive to protect us as individuals, and they strive to protect the United Kingdom as a country. In the same way that we have rightly applauded our NHS workers and other vital workers recently, it is right to remember what our armed forces have done for us and continue to do for us.

It is also right to remember that, when our armed forces are acting on our behalf, they uphold very high standards, and that is right. The difficulty is that the people they are fighting against do not uphold those very high standards. They can be indiscriminate. They really do not care who they kill—men, women, children; innocent people. That puts our armed forces at a disadvantage. It is still probably right that we uphold those standards, but it is surely wrong that those soldiers should face vexatious claims many years afterwards, when they have been under such tremendous pressure.

I would say the same about our veterans who served in Northern Ireland. I served as Chairman of the Select Committee on Northern Ireland Affairs for seven years, and it greatly troubled me that our armed forces who served there were fighting against an enemy who called it a war. They used the term “war” so that they could excuse their indiscriminate murder of men, women and children, yet members of our armed forces had to abide by the yellow card—they had to abide by very strict rules. It is wrong that they are facing prosecution up to 40 or even 50 years after events, and even more of them may face prosecution. That is very wrong, so I urge the Minister to introduce legislation similar to this to cover Northern Ireland as soon as possible.