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Armed Forces Bill

I very much welcome the government amendment and what my noble friend has said. I am grateful to him for the part that he has played in this, and to the Secretary of State, with whom I had several conversations in the summer about the amendment. I also pay tribute to the campaigners, who have worked very hard to achieve this end, and to my honourable friend Andrew Mackinlay in the other place, who has worked for longer than I have to seek the pardons that we now have the power to effect. The facts are well understood and I do not want to take any more time of the Committee, except to say that we are talking about young men, many of whom fought bravely for this country and some of whom were underage and lied to be allowed to join our forces. Sometimes the courts martial were very brief, and often in the heat of the fighting in the trenches there was no possibility of a defence or witnesses. The families were left with an understandable sense of injustice that men, some of whom we would describe as traumatised and shell-shocked—I do not speak medically—were then executed. For many years, the families have had a sense of grievance that people who fought for this country should have been stigmatised and punished in this way. We know that documentation and records do not exist for all the cases, so it is right that the pardon should extend to all of them. To pick out individuals on the basis of sometimes poor documentation would have been an invidious process and would not have given people the sense of closure which this all-embracing amendment does. Like my noble friend, I do not want to criticise the officers who were members of the courts martial that led to these results. None of us in the calm of today can understand what was going on in the trenches, although some of us might understand from books. The officers in the courts martial were doing what they saw was their duty on the basis of the mood, understanding and attitudes of the time, so I do not want pardons for one lot of people to be seen as somehow vilifying others. If there is to be closure, it must be for all concerned, so all the families of the victims as well as of the officers in the courts martial can have the sense that we have now brought this matter to what I hope will be a conclusion—I will not call it happy—that ends the stigma under which the families of these men have suffered. I warmly support what the Government have done.