Northern Ireland Troubles Bill

Lillian Jones Excerpts

Monday 19th October 2026 Commons Chamber

[Stuart Anderson]

The hon. Member raises some valid points. A lot of people here have first-hand experience, and the RUC and the military did exceptional work during the troubles—beyond what it is possible even to explain here.

When I look at new clause 21 and amendment 47, I think about how we deal with memory and history. I will explain that in a bit more detail. The Secretary of State said that new clause 21 is illogical. I disagree. I believe that the bar should be exceptionally high.

I went to the Green Jackets reunion this summer. I had not been for 16 years, because—I have spoken of my history and my past—I had to have a break from my past. That is to say nothing against my friends, but I needed to move out of that environment until it was safe for me—given the violence, alcohol and other issues I have had—to go back into it. I had an amazing time at the reunion. I was with my colleagues, and people were telling me stories. Five of us all had exceptionally different memories of a story. People were telling me stories about when I got shot; I knew that they had joined the military five years after, but they were recounting it like they were there with me. It is not that they were making things up; they had heard it that many times that they believed they were there. You are reliving all of these points.

Let us have a look at what it was like to serve in Northern Ireland—this is the point that I want people to grasp in relation to amendment 47. I grew up in Hereford, and my dad was one of the first SAS soldiers to serve in Northern Ireland. We all knew people who had served in Northern Ireland. We knew young soldiers who would come back to the pub—I will not say what age I was first going to the pub—and people would say, “They’ve been over the water.” They did not talk about it; they did not want to talk about it. It was not that they were smashing the place up—some people did, but some reacted differently. They had seen things that their mind had not processed.

I have come through the other side of complex post-traumatic stress. I had therapy. I had witnessed and seen things in my life that my brain could not process. If you see something, you put it into a library in your brain. If you have a traumatic incident, you cannot process it and put it in the library, so it is sort of sat in the foyer. You cannot choose when you pull that up or when you do not. I went through therapy to reprocess all those things in my mind. I have many friends who I know have post-traumatic stress and have not dealt with it—they have just left those issues there. I went through EMDR—eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing— and cognitive behavioural therapy. That took me through things that I had no recollection of, but that the therapist was able to pull out of my brain. I had not remembered those things for many years.

We are going to ask people to go through that process with their memories. I am 50 now—I know that hon. Members are thinking, “You look a bit younger, Stu”—and I was at the very end of Op Banner. I was a teenager. We are asking one and two generations before me to recount things they might have suffered through post-traumatic stress—things that they do not want to remember or possibly cannot remember. If you ask two or three people about the same incident an hour after, they will all have a different reason for it. We have to stand for our veterans and draw a line under this. The Bill is not doing that.

The generals, some of whom I served with on operational tours, said that the Bill is a threat to national security, and I believe it is. It impacts on morale phenomenally. I am yet to find a group of veterans—people might disagree—who support it, and I have a very good network of people; my whole life has been spent in defence and security. I have not found anybody who supports what we are doing, and I believe that there will be unintended consequences. I do not believe that we are intentionally going after our veterans, but there will be unintended consequences and we will open the door to our veterans being in the dock for years to come.

[Lillian Jones (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (Lab)]

I would like to place on the record my thanks to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for taking the time to meet me and a formidable local veteran from Ayrshire, Alan Middleton, who does fantastic work with the local Army Cadet Force under the West Lowland Battalion. My right hon. Friend has worked tirelessly and, most importantly, has listened to those of us who feel strongly about this legislation and to the veterans who have concerns, which deserve to be heard.

When the Bill was first introduced, many veterans feared that the new legacy framework would simply become another route to the repeated investigations that have caused so much anxiety, frustration and trauma over recent decades, so I welcome the fact that the Government have listened and that the amendments they have tabled significantly strengthen the Bill.

New clause 32, for instance, recognises the unique context in which members of the armed forces operated during the troubles. Amendments 192 and 195 help ensure that investigations are rigorous and evidence-led, with clear statutory duties on the director of investigations before cases progress further. Perhaps most importantly, new clause 45 protects veterans from unexpected or intrusive contact by investigators years or, in some cases, decades after their service has ended. It places safeguards in law, including the involvement of the Secretary of State, and helps to ensure that veterans are treated with the absolute dignity and respect they deserve.

Taken together, these changes have made the Bill more balanced and, as a result, have secured my support. Nobody is asking for immunity; nobody should be above the law, but equally, there should be no witch hunt against those who served our country honourably. Investigations should be driven by genuinely new evidence, not by the endless revisiting of matters that have already been examined time and again.

The conversations I have had with veterans in Ayrshire, including those who served during some of the most difficult periods of the troubles, have left me in no doubt about the anxiety that the repeated investigations, or even the prospect of such investigations, have caused for them even decades after their service has ended. What they seek is not special treatment, nor to be placed beyond the reach of the law; rather, they seek a process that is fair, proportionate and focused on genuinely new evidence.

Ultimately, this legislation must command confidence among victims and their families, the wider public, and those who served their country honourably. I believe that the changes made to the Bill will help us move closer to that objective. They strike the right balance between accountability and fairness. For those reasons, I will be supporting the Government’s approach, and I urge Members across the House to do so too.

[Gavin Robinson]

I thank you, Ms Ghani, for calling me so early. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Lillian Jones), though I hope I might convince her not to follow the whole of the Government’s approach in respect of some of the amendments. I hope her ears are open, as well as her heart, to the arguments that we will make.

I indicated earlier in my interventions and, indeed, in the debate on the programme motion that the way in which we are considering these amendments today is far from optimal. In fact, we have had some good speeches and contributions already, and yet they did not touch on the amendments at all—that was subject to the Chair’s indulgence, of course—but were delivered in more general terms.

Amendment 52 was tabled by the hon. Member for North Down (Alex Easton), and signed by me, my colleagues and those around me. Similarly, amendments 21 and 22 were tabled by me and my colleagues in the Democratic Unionist party, and signed by those around us. Amendment 2 was tabled by the hon. Member for South Antrim (Robin Swann) on a similar thread, and amendment 1 was tabled by the hon. and learned Member for North Antrim (Jim Allister). There is a recurrent theme, yet whenever the Government table their own amendments to try to deal with the issues outlined in new clauses 33 and 34 they are totally deficient.