Northern Ireland Veterans: Prosecution

Lincoln Jopp Excerpts

Monday 14th July 2025 Westminster Hall

[Louise Jones]

I thank the right hon. Member for making that point. It is important to note that only one soldier has been convicted in the past 13 years. I do not have time to go into the details of that case, but I urge him and anybody present to look into them. Whether or not a prosecution was in the public interest there, I note that he served only a suspended sentence.

The legacy Act has been found to be unlawful. It gives immunity to terrorists. No more needs to be said: it gives immunity to terrorists, and it denies justice to the families of the 200 service personnel who were murdered by terrorists during the troubles. It is not supported in its current form by victims, it is not supported by any Northern Irish party and many veterans are troubled by it. It must go and be replaced. Again, I call on the Minister to outline how we can protect veterans from malicious lawfare in relation to any conflict.

[Lincoln Jopp]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Louise Jones]

No, I really must finish.

I end by remembering all the victims of the conflict in Northern Ireland. Far too many innocent lives were lost and families changed forever. The peace process and the Good Friday agreement stand testament to the immense courage shown every day by communities in Northern Ireland—communities who every day choose peace. We have a huge duty here in Westminster to work with those communities, not against them, and I hope all Members present will reflect on that important undertaking.

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[Fred Thomas (Plymouth Moor View) (Lab)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. I congratulate the hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (John Lamont) on introducing this important debate. I pay tribute to the strength of argument and strength of feeling that we have heard from hon. Members so far.

I would like to put on record that no one in this Chamber wants to assist the IRA in any way to clean their record. I hope that this debate can be held with both sides of the House in firm agreement that no one here wants to do that. That is not what this is about; this is about one piece of legislation. It is not about an old piece of legislation, or some instrument that brought about the so far quite consistent peace that we have had in the UK for a generation; it is about something very new, passed about a year and a half ago. We have heard Opposition Members—many of whom served many years in this place without that piece of legislation, and without asking for or campaigning for it—say that they passionately support it. Since it came in a year and a half ago, some people are very much for it.

There are problems on both sides with this legislation, and I would like to hear balance in this argument. On one side, we have the absolute desire to prosecute, go after and bring justice against IRA terrorists for what they have done. They should absolutely not be walking free. There are victims’ families in this country—British people—who cannot see justice because of this Act.

On the other side of the argument, in the interests of balance, we need to protect our veterans. We have to do that. I have a personal interest in this issue because I represent Plymouth Moor View, where 500 people signed the petition. People do not need to organise a veterans’ coffee morning to meet a veteran in Plymouth; they can just go out of the house and have a chat with a neighbour. I served in the Royal Marines, where most of the men who trained me would do so by saying, “This is how we did it in Northern Ireland.” That memory lives very long.

[Lincoln Jopp]

The hon. Member is giving a powerful speech. Will he put on record whether he thinks that any of the 500 veterans who he has met are naive?

[Fred Thomas]

To clarify, I said there are 500 veterans in Plymouth Moor View who signed the petition, so I am not sure that I can answer the hon. Member because I did not meet with them recently to talk about this issue. I do not think that anyone is suggesting that veterans themselves are naive.

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[Lincoln Jopp (Spelthorne) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Lewell. I thank the 170,000 people who signed the petition, particularly those from my Spelthorne constituency.

I served four tours in Northern Ireland and dedicated three and a half years of my life to trying to bring peace to that place. My first tour was in Belfast in 1992. It was a guinea a minute—a young Captain Jopp and a young Lieutenant Ben Wallace were on the same tour. The IRA at the time was fully aware of our rules of engagement —the so-called yellow card that has been referred to today. In fact, the IRA designed a whole weapons system around it. It was called the coffee jar bomb. It was a coffee jar, funnily enough—usually Nescafé, although other coffees are available. The IRA would take a small piece of scaffolding and put it in the coffee jar alongside a detonator, a small amount of Semtex and what was affectionately known as “shipyard confetti”. The coffee jar also held a switch from a fridge so that when the jar was thrown and broke on the ground, the bomb went off and the bits went everywhere. We knew that these bombs were incredibly lethal because, a year before, one had been thrown at a dog handler called Darren, who had been feeding his dog. He had watched as his left leg flew 20 metres away, his other leg a smouldering wreck. We knew they were very dangerous.

When we were training to deal with these bombs, we went to a cine range. We would be there with a sub-cal, looking at a movie screen that showed a street scene. The film would stop and we would see a threat. We were trained, when we went to Northern Ireland, to identify the presence of the abnormal or the absence of the normal in order to set the context. We would see a perceived threat, the threat would build up and we would be invited to fire the round. A little yellow dot would go on to the screen, and our instructor would say, “Congratulations—you have successfully carried out the rules of engagement”.

However, the coffee jar bomb presented a massive dilemma. Could we shoot someone simply for having a coffee jar in their hand or being in the process of throwing one? It was purely designed to put soldiers, like me and the 24,000 others who served there, under incredible pressure. I remember one moment with a real dilemma in the cine film. I said, “Can I fire now?” The instructor said, “This is a very tough moment, but it is a moment to remind yourself, Sir, that it is sometimes better to be tried by 12 men than carried by six.”

Pretty chilling—particularly when two of our guardsmen on that tour subsequently had to make a judgment in a shooting situation. One of them believed they had seen a coffee jar in a plastic bag. It turns out that they did not get tried by 12 men; they were tried by one. They were convicted and given life imprisonment. That is the point: all the cases that we have come here to talk about went through a rigorous judicial process at the time. It is horrific double jeopardy, and in some cases treble jeopardy, to put our veterans through that process again.

The Veterans Minister knows this well, but there are three components to fighting power: the moral, the physical and the conceptual. It is a very well-known model; Napoleon said,

“the moral is to the physical as three is to one.”

We undermine the moral component of fighting power at our peril. I was recently appalled to see a GIF that a veteran sent me on my phone. It was a picture of the Prime Minister very recently addressing a number of troops. The subtitle underneath said: “We want you to go to Ukraine to do things which we are going to prosecute you for in 30 years’ time.”

We undermine the moral component at our peril.

To understand the context in which these mendacious and vexatious prosecutions will be pursued, I remind the Secretary of State of the moment when Stormont was recalled because someone had put a vase of flowers in the lobby, and the whole Assembly had to be recalled to debate the colour of the flowers. Why? Because after the Good Friday agreement, everything becomes a proxy answer to the question: who won? The Good Friday agreement was, by necessity, a compromise—it was a peace agreement. However, ever since, everyone has been trying to relitigate the question of who won. It is essential that we do not allow our veterans and their prosecution to become pawns in that proxy game.

I will leave it at that. I think the Veterans Minister and the Secretary of State are having a lively debate behind the scenes, but I invite the Secretary of State to listen very carefully to the Veterans Minister, who has the ear of veterans. I think I know where the Veterans Minister is coming from, and I expect the Government to do the right thing.