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Defence in the United Kingdom

It is my great privilege to represent the men and women of the Royal Monmouthshire Royal Engineers in the town of Monmouth. We can sleep a little better in our beds knowing that those men and women will go out and do battle on our behalf, as they have been doing. The regiment has distinguished itself since 1539, most recently in Iraq in Operation Telic. I was honoured to be invited to breakfast with them on the morning of their departure for Iraq, and I was very impressed with the level of commitment that those young men and women showed as they went off. Although we have such fine men and women who are willing to serve our country, we are treating them in a monstrously unjust fashion. We are in the midst of a series of prosecutions that have been brought against soldiers serving in Iraq. Nobody in the Chamber or outside could support any indication of brutal treatment on the part of our Army, but some of the cases have clearly been brought on the basis of evidence which one judge described as weak and vague. That is not good enough. Something similar is happening in Northern Ireland. Yesterday at Prime Minister’s Question Time, it was telling that although the Prime Minister waxed eloquent about how proud he was of our troops in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone and Iraq, and rightly so, he failed to mention Northern Ireland. For the past 30 years, the men and women of our armed forces have faced incredible danger in Northern Ireland. They went out there to protect civilians, Protestant and Catholic alike, and they did so against an enemy who wore no uniform, who struck without warning and whose favoured method of attack was to blow up innocent civilians with bombs. It is possible that the reticence of our Prime Minister stems from the fact that his Government are announcing a policy that seems to amount to little more than a ““Get out of Jail Free”” card for IRA terrorists. That would be bad enough, but what makes matters worse is that at the same time as we grant a pardon to IRA terrorists, we are setting up an inquiry to examine the actions of every soldier who served in Northern Ireland. That is a disgrace and an insult to the 760 or so men and women who lost their lives serving in the Province and doing an extremely difficult job. When we asked the Leader of the House about the matter last week, he said that one sometimes had to make difficult decisions. There is absolutely nothing difficult about appeasing terror. The difficult decision is to stand up to terrorists, and I am glad to say that many Ministers have done so over the past few years. I am proud to have done my bit in a very small way—I served in the Territorial Army—but Salisbury plain was the nearest that I got to a battlefield. Some Conservative Members have been on a battlefield, and I cannot imagine what it is like. If the bullets, bombs and bodies were all around me, the last thing that I wouldwant to think about as I was defending myself would be the prospect of being dragged in front of the courts by the very people who had given me a gun and a uniform and put me into a dangerous situation. I would not appreciate the ““It’s not me guv”” attitude of those Ministers who have tried to make out that the matter has nothing to do with them. I am proud to have played a small part in our armed forces, and I am very proud of what they have done, but I am utterly ashamed of how they are being treated. It is high time that the Government started to think about the loyalty, duty and commitment that our armed forces have always given to the nation, and began returning it.