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Iraq

My Lords, it is a great privilege to address the House and your Lordships on this first occasion, and I am immensely grateful to all those who have given me unstinting help in my arrival period here. Iraq, indeed, is a world theatre and it has a stage on which the British Armed Forces have played a consistently high-profile role during the past four years. In doing so, they have faced a degree of public scrutiny and analysis not experienced in recent years. They have been and they continue to be asked to operate along the roughest edges of humanity while observing the civilised norms of the society from which they are drawn. That is no easy task, and it has put an unusual strain on the relationship between soldier and nation. It is about this relationship that I would like to address your Lordships today. We of course are all extremely lucky. We enjoyan exceptional standard of living in a secure environment. Although there have been some appalling terrorist incidents during the past 30 years, the vast majority of British citizens have lived in peace and are able to go about their daily business without concern for their safety or that of their families. Indeed, society has rarely been so far removed from war. Periodically its effects come crashing in on our sensibilities, but even post-September 11 New York is far removed from the unrelenting social consequences of war. For many people, war and its instruments may as well be on another planet. They have no experience of the horrors of war or of the poverty and trauma that flow from insecurity and conflict. For most of us, of course, this is a very happy situation, but it has not come about by chance. It has been achieved only by constant vigilance; by actively identifying and dealing with threats, countering instability and, when necessary, using force to impose peace. Fortunately, too, there are those who understand that there is less discretion available in wars of choice than they might have believed—that failing to counter evil on its own ground merely brings it closer to home. Ultimately, whatever has been achieved has been through the sacrifice made in our Armed Forces. This sacrifice has been paid in blood by successive generations of service men and women who have served their country, not just those who fought in the two great wars of the 20th Century. Every year since 1945, with the sole exception of 1968, British service men and women have been killed on operations. Indeed, over that period some 5,500 have been killed in action. Today those same folk continue to defend our freedoms. Of course, it is not just those who die who makea sacrifice. All who serve on operations put theirlives at risk for our benefit. Countless numbers have been wounded, while many others have been psychologically damaged, something that frequently emerges only later in life. These are the hidden costs of freedom, and all too often they go unrecognised. Over recent months, as the noble Lord, Lord Hurd, has said, your Lordships will have heard much talk of the covenant that must exist between a Government and the Armed Forces—an unwritten but essential contract that, in return for the sacrifice made by those in the forces, the Government will ensure that they are equipped properly, given the best possible care if they become casualties, and treated fairly. On the one hand, the ethos of the Armed Forces is sustained by all service men and women doing their duty with an implacable will to succeed, accepting their grave responsibility and legal right to fight and kill according to their orders and their unlimited liability to give their lives for others. On the other hand, they must be confident that in return the nation will look after them and their families. Moreover, because these people are called upon to put the needs of the nation and the forces before their own, they forgo some of the rights enjoyed by those outside the Armed Forces. In the same way, the unique nature of military operations means that the Armed Forces differ from all other institutions, and must be sustained and provided for accordingly by the nation. Your Lordships will know that I am the governor of the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, which is in effect a self-contained village centred on its own chapel, its communal dining hall, its infirmary and its social club. It is a community of old and infirm veterans with similar backgrounds and like experiences. They are a present and constant link with the past, and the veterans of Mons, Malaya, Korea and Northern Ireland worship in the same chapel, sit at the same dining tables and take their ease in the same colonnade as the ghosts of Ramillies and Fontenoy, Plessey and Inkerman. Indeed, it will not be long before we see our Falklands veterans filling the wards. The battle honours inscribed on the panels of their great dining hall tell the enduring story of the British Army, but the institution is a living memorial to the sacrifices made and the very embodiment of the covenant about which we have spoken—which must continue to be there for our future veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, whether men or women. But this covenant is more than just a deal between the Government and the Armed Forces. That the Government have a grave responsibility in this respect is irrefutable, but there must also be a covenant between the rest of our nation and those who defend it and fight for its interests. Every citizen should recognise the price that has been, and continues to be, paid by others to sustain the freedoms they enjoy. We see very clear indicators that our people are less willing to make sacrifices for our Armed Forces. The South Atlantic Fund after the Falkland Islands conflict in the 1980s raised some £11.5 million; the first Gulf War of the early 1990s raised some£3.5 million. We have raised less than £300,000 for the current conflict. The British affinity between soldier and people is diluting. There are many reasons: the immunisation of our citizens to the horrors of conflict through saturation with media images, none more stark than those we see from Iraq; the resentment at our involvement there; and the damage done to the Armed Forces’ reputation through allegations of war crimes—even though nearly all have been ill founded—are but some. We know that elections are won on public services—education, health, law and order, and transport—but public submission, or even consent, to underinvestment in defence, arguably the greatest public service of them all, is as physically and politically painful, and potentially far more catastrophic, than underinvestment in hospitals and railways. If we, as a nation, are going to honour those who have served their country—if we are going to deliver on our part of the covenant—then I put it to your Lordships that every citizen of this country has a part to play, a debt to honour, a personal sacrifice to make, and that those who have benefited most from the freedoms we enjoy have the greatest debt. Once a year we proclaim, ““We will remember them””. But how many actually give expression to that beyond having a moment’s silence and buying a poppy? Surely that is not sufficient. To adapt a well known phrase, as relevant today as ever it has been: ““Their yesterday was given for our today””. None of us should forget that.