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Armed Forces Bill

I hope that the Committee will forgive my speaking, not having heard the earlier speeches, but I was committed—curiously, in view of the subject of the amendment—to be with the Czech ambassador at the laying of a wreath to the last of the Czech fighter pilots who fought in the Battle of Britain, and who was remembered today at the Battle of Britain monument on the Embankment. So the enormously difficult circumstances in both the Second, and even more so, in the First World War, have been much in my mind. Like most noble Lords, it is the case for my family that my father and his younger brother volunteered to join the Army in 1914 and fought through the war as infantrymen in the Middlesex Regiment. Quite remarkably, both survived. I found myself wondering what my father or my uncle would have said about this. I think they would have been very understanding about the sheer horror of the man whose nerve cracks; the man who is in fact simply no longer in control of himself. But I think they would have had the gravest of reservations about exercising any form of pardon for those, for example, who had deserted their post, or had simply fallen asleep while they were on duty as sentries and thereby imperilled their colleagues. Therefore, there is some hesitation in my mind about the amendment. It is both a pity and perhaps also a good thing at the same time that, as I understand it, the records are now so imperfect that there can be little distinction between the offences of which men were accused and found guilty and for which they paid with their lives. It is probably an act of humanity and generosity towards the families of those who suffered this fate; recognising that almost by any standards, even perhaps by the standards of the time, some of these sentences were unjust. We have to recognise that; but we also have to recognise that some of those who will receive pardons under this proposal do not deserve to have been pardoned. I always have hesitations about revisionism of history. What happened did happen. We are edging onto very dangerous ground in what we are doing, because it is being done in a manner that does not distinguish between those who genuinely suffered an injustice and those who deserved punishment. Once we start going into that second area, we are substituting our views today of what would have been the right punishment for that crime in the views of the people of that time. I think that is dangerous. I do not like saying that that which happened did not; or that that which was, was not. So I do not think that I can bring myself to vote against this, but we should understand that it is an amendment with very many faults, and if it is accepted it should be accepted as being a very imperfect instrument.