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Armed Forces

My Lords, our indebtedness to the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Inge, is shown by the length of the list of speakers today. If noble Lords were to place me on the political spectrum, I imagine that many would classify me as green and dripping—in other words, as a weedy wet. But in at least one respect, noble Lords would be wrong. In matters to do with the Armed Forces, I find myself in an entirely different area of the political spectrum. I suspect that that is to do with my generation and my age. I grew up during the war, when my elders all went off to fight. I watched the Battle of Britain and lived within sight of London burning. I am deeply concerned that we should have effective Armed Forces and that we should look after them properly. In my volume of Other Men’s Flowers, no poem resonates more than Dorothy L Sayer’s poem, published in the Times in 1940, ““Thank God now for an English war””. It is because I feel deeply that I am very worried, as many of your Lordships undoubtedly are, about the present situation. Our Armed Forces are seriously under strength, recruiting figures are low, and there appears to be a malaise felt or at least recognised by all who care for these matters. There are no doubt all sorts of minor points which can be put right, but it seems that the root of the matter is very basic. The population of this country is very dubious about the ends to which these forces are being deployed. In 1939, we knew that a tyrant was taking over Europe and that our liberties were in danger. The doubts of Munich disappeared when we heard the broadcast which told us that we were at war. I heard that broadcast within a mile of the house in Bletchley where as much as anywhere the war was won. Our men and women willingly went out to fight, secure in the knowledge that their country was wholeheartedly behind them. Since 1945, we have on the whole been able to feel that in military matters we have been doing our duty. In Malaysia, we were protecting a population for which we were to a large extent responsible. In the Falklands, that was also the immediate task, although some of us felt that we should never have been landed in such a situation in the first place. However, two international situations in which our forces have been deployed in my lifetime seem to have a bearing on our situation today. Korea was a very nasty war—not that any wars are nice—where our forces fought with great courage, secure in the knowledge that their efforts were legitimate. We believed that we had moved on from the world in which we went to war because we thought that it was right to fight, to a world where we had shared responsibility with an international body—the United Nations Organisation. We fought the Korean War under that banner. The other situation, which has been mentioned once or twice in this debate, was that of Suez, where we appeared to have reverted to the moral quagmire of the Boer War and were able only slightly to salve our consciences by the belief that our Prime Minister had been off his chump when we did it. If those are two serious types of national behaviour, as I believe that they are, there can be little doubt about which of them we find ourselves closest to today. We have appointed ourselves the world’s policeman or, if the USA is the world’s policeman, we have appointed ourselves as one of the new kind of peace aides you see about. But we have neglected to ask the world whether it wants us in that role. Many of our fellow citizens, among which I number the whole of my party, believe that the Iraq war is illegal and much more akin to Suez than to Korea. After all, the UN has not sanctioned it, nor has our national Parliament. If that is so, it is little wonder that recruitment is not high, that various forms of behaviour in the theatre of war are beginning to seem morally and even legally dubious, and that morale—not of the men in the line, but of the whole network of support echelons reaching back to ourselves in this building—is low. The defence forces of this country are one of our most precious heritages. There is no doubt whatever that we in this Parliament value them intensely. That being so, we should not allow them to be deployed in dubious causes, no matter how speciously those causes are argued. This is not an English war, it is an American imperial adventure; and we should not be lending—or giving, since some of them will not come back—our men and women to it, no matter how readily and valiantly they go.