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Armed Forces Bill

My Lords, it is always a challenge and a privilege to follow the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Bramall. There can be few debates in this House which enjoy such a formidable body of distinguished, direct and relevant experience as we have with us today. It is good to be able to hear at first hand so much insight, experience and honest advice. As a layman, albeit a former junior officer in the Royal Air Force and a former defence Minister, I am glad to be able to take the opportunity presented by this debate to pay unqualified tribute to our servicemen and women, to the civilians who work so closely with them, to our service families—especially the bereaved—and to Ministers who carry so much responsibility on our behalf. The courage and sacrifice speak for themselves. We must never take them for granted. They bring home to us every day our own heavy responsibilities. It seems to me therefore essential to put the issues raised by this Bill in a wider context. The starting point in any objective consideration of defence issues is surely the nature of the threat. We then have to examine honestly the nature of the resources—personnel, equipment and organisational structure—that we have at our disposal and assess how far they meet the challenge. If the nature of the threat changes, radical responses may be necessary. Long established traditions and patterns of expenditure may prove inappropriate. Not to be honest about that—it can be very difficult—is to fail the country, to betray our servicemen and women and to waste public funds which could be put to better use. The unforgivable political crime is to initiate military action for which adequate and appropriate resources are not available. That can aggravate pressures and tensions which become acute with direct implications for discipline and justice. The world which confronts us in 2006 is highly complex. It is not, I would argue, more complex or dangerous than in the earlier years of many of us in this House, but with the end of the stark and clear confrontations of the overarching Cold War, the complexities have become more obvious. One of my uncles, a captain in the Indian Army, was killed in an uprising on the North-West Frontier in the early 1930s, having previously served in Baghdad. The present complexities have deep roots in history. These complexities were masked by the Cold War, but they remained as real as ever. The availability of highly lethal, flexible, orthodox and unorthodox weapons—whatever in reality can now be regarded as a valid distinction between the two—has added a sinister dimension to the dangers. From the private to the general, from the sailor to the admiral, from the airman to the air marshal, in the face of the complexities that I have described the demands are immense. They are not likely to diminish. That is the context within which we must approach our deliberations on military discipline and justice. It is not simply a matter internal to the services. It has far-reaching consequences for the political reality within which we expect our services to operate and for the political solutions we seek to crises across the world. A disciplined fighting force, such as we have seen in the past few days in Afghanistan, whatever the wider role—I trust that the planners have allowed for this—is as vital as ever. But other qualities are at least as vital at all levels of command. Diplomatic negotiating skills, humanitarian sensitivity and an instinctive commitment to human rights are essential weapons in the battle for hearts and minds. It must surely be clear to all of us that in the struggles with which we are confronted there is no escape from the reality that they are about a battle for hearts and minds. Peace has to be built: durable peace simply cannot be imposed. That is abundantly clear on every front. When things go wrong, when there are abuses, it is not just that they contradict the values for which we so vehemently claim that we are standing—of course, that hugely matters; it is that they play straight into the hands of propagandists for the extremists. To call a spade is a spade, such lapses are treacherous. This is the hard-headed truth. The weak and dangerous argument is that which rationalises and endeavours to explain away. To do that is to remove the ground from under the feet of every serviceman and woman who understands the nature of the challenge and who is endeavouring—often in the face of acute and cruel provocation—to meet it. It is argued that those we fight do not observe the same standards. That is abundantly and sickeningly obvious. But that is precisely why we have to be consistently, transparently and invariably about something different. To falter is to play for the other side. The Bill is about discipline and the administration of justice. I welcome much of it, not least the bringing more closely together on an inter-service basis the systems we have in place. But as we consider it, we shall have to have in mind how far it meets the requirements of transparency, of justice being manifestly seen to be done. It is necessary to weigh all the time the underlying culture and the adequacy of resources both in the judicial arrangements and in the service police. The importance of demonstrable, tough-minded objectivity cannot be over-emphasised. I enjoy the writing of Max Hastings. He is one of the more impressive journalists. Would that there were more of them. He makes me think. But I am not always completely convinced by his conclusions. The other day, he was arguing that it is not possible to expect young men and women, who are recruited to fight and to kill, to give priority to hearts and minds concerns. My contention is that if we fail in our recruitment, training and leadership at all levels to prepare our service personnel for the dual tasks—and they must be effective fighters; they cannot just become social workers in uniform—we are contributing to our own ultimate defeat. It is often what ordinary people encounter in the immediate incident which can have a seriously counter-productive—or, indeed, a significant and positive—consequence. Leadership, training and ethos are crucial. Systems of judicial administration, however theoretically perfected, are fairly useless without that context. Indeed, they can engender cynicism. We have to be careful lest, in any imposed methodology for what might be called corporate military ethics, we do not inadvertently undermine the role of leadership. The commanding officer, the NCO who is a living example of the fight for values, is worth any number of lawyers and judges. Before I conclude, I should like to refer specifically to Clause 8, which received a certain amount of necessary attention in the other place. I hope my noble friend will be able to convince us that this clause has been drafted with an objective long-term view and not because of the disturbing number of deserters and those going absent without leave in the context of the conflict in Iraq. The penalties are potentially draconian. Life imprisonment is a heavy sentence. Conscientious objection is a precious right which is central to the values we proclaim. We must never jeopardise it. In volunteer services, however, people volunteer to serve the nation in whatever way the nation requires. A central question is whether conscientious objection can then apply to a particular situation in which a volunteer is expected to serve. Of course, the principles laid down by the British and Americans in the post-Second World War Nuremburg trials are relevant. A serviceman or woman should be expected to refuse to carry out an order which he or she knows to be illegal. Such refusal should have our complete and unqualified endorsement. When it comes to participating in the occupation of a foreign country or territory, this makes it imperative that such an occupation is authorised under international law. The occupation of Iraq was, however reluctantly, post facto authorised by the UN Security Council. But to pretend that an argument does not still exist about the original action and occupation is perverse. I, for one, remain convinced that there should have been an ad hoc specific UN Security Council authorisation—not a subjectively interpreted authorisation cobbled together from past resolutions. This mattered in the cause of the international rule of law, but it also mattered in terms of global political credibility and the battle for hearts and minds. The collapse of the argument put forward in favour of the need for action—the absence of weapons of mass destruction—reinforces the issue. If Clause 8 is to apply, it would surely be appropriate to have explicitly on the face of the Bill a reference to an occupation authorised by the United Nations and under international law. What my noble friend has to say about this in his reply will be very significant. I conclude as I started, by taking this opportunity to pay tribute to our services—the men and women and their courageous and anxious families who serve on our behalf.