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Medals (Armed Forces Personnel)

I congratulate the hon. Member for North Durham (Mr. Jones) on securing this debate. I am grateful to Colonel Richard Kemp CBE, who is no stranger to war, on pushing this campaign heavily in the Daily Mirror and who has made it a national issue. I am grateful to the Minister, as I know that he will give us a fair hearing. I am particularly grateful to the families who are here today. I can only imagine that this sort of debate is not a comfortable experience for them. Their very presence speaks of their courage as well as the courage of their sons, whom they have lost. Last summer, I buried a friend of mine in Chester. We had served together; he was a colour sergeant when I was commanding the battalion. He was commissioned, and he died as a captain in the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters regiment with his face to the enemy, doing his best to kill those who eventually killed him. Captain Sean Dolan was taken with full military honours to his grave just outside Chester, being carried by pallbearers from the regiment, with shots being fired over the coffin. His incredibly brave wife and son were standing by the side of the grave. As the box was lowered into the ground, his sword belt and medals were passed back to his wife, along with the national flag. The medals, of course, are the point. Not only had he been awarded the standard Northern Ireland medals, his Balkans medals, his long service and good conduct medal and his meritorious service medal but he also had the Afghan campaign medal; he had won it on a previous tour, when the regiment had been in a much quieter part of Afghanistan with hardly a shot fired. Sean went on his second tour and was killed by a direct hit from a Taliban mortar while serving with American special forces. Nothing at all lies in his wife's hands to say that her husband was killed in action. Yes, she has a campaign medal, but that is a campaign medal from a previous campaign, albeit in Afghanistan. That situation is wrong. I would like to pick up on a couple of points made by the hon. Member for North Durham (Mr. Jones) that I think are very telling. The first point is that a lot of opposition will come to this campaign from what is in my view the heel-dragging community. They will say, ““Why on earth should we do this? This is so American, so 'Purple Hearty'. We have never done anything like this before. Why should we emulate the Yanks?”” All of the Members of Parliament here, Miss Begg, yourself included, will see and hear, if they keep their eyes and ears open, exactly the point that the hon. Member for North Durham mentioned earlier on, when he referred to the bronze plaques that honoured the dead from the first world war. In my constituency, I appreciate that the sacrifice that was made principally by the Royal Lincolnshire Regiment and the Sherwood Foresters was extraordinary. None the less, if I go round the cottages, farms and working men's houses in my constituency, those bronze plaques are still there. They cost one shilling and nine pence for King George V, at his personal behest, to issue to the families of the dead. Each plaque is inscribed with the name of the dead soldier. Now, nearly 100 years later, those plaques keep the names of the dead alive. They are shown with huge pride, often alongside the campaign medals that the boys—they were all boys, let's face it—earned in the first world war. Therefore, anybody who says that there is no precedent for this medal that we are discussing today is simply wrong. The Army has a great habit of reinventing its own history. Let it look carefully and see what has happened in the past. It has been mentioned already, but I was appalled to see articles in the newspapers about the good conduct badges. Good conduct badges have been worn since 1803. I took great pleasure in awarding them to the soldiers in my battalion who qualified for them and those soldiers were extremely proud of them. How can we suddenly think that these things are being reinvented? They are not. There is a precedent for a plaque for the dead and we have heard, most movingly, about the silver cross, which is awarded in other Commonwealth countries and which I believe sets a very useful set of guidelines. The second issue is that of the wounded. I appreciate that giving medals to the wounded is less easy to administer than a plaque for the dead. However, I would just like to tell a little anecdote. My grandfather wore four stripes that he had won, principally at Passchendaele. My father wore two stripes, one for Anzio and one for El Alamein. According to my grandfather, my father was a card-carrying coward, because he had only two wound stripes. In fact, it was a source of great pride and even amusement between these two men, who are sadly now both dead. My father actually received 27 wounds when he got his first wound stripe; he was struck by one piece of shrapnel and 26 bits of grit that punctured him. What did he get? He did not get 27 wound stripes—of course not. He got one for that particular incident. There are all sorts of precedents for the administration and the wearing of some type of symbol for being wounded, be it a medal or a stripe. I would prefer a medal, but most importantly there is precedent for such an award. The British Army, Navy, Royal Air Force and Royal Marines have done this before; this is nothing new. Obviously, this brings into question the business of what sort of wounds should be recognised. Combat stress is a very difficult issue. It has already been mentioned, and I can see that there will be those who are suffering from combat stress to whom the award of a stripe, medal or badge of one sort or another may be painful. There are ways round that. Perhaps those individuals should be asked, ““Do you wish to apply? Do you wish to wear this thing? Will this drag up memories that you do not want to be dragged up?”” We can be sensitive about this issue; of course we can. Reverting to the issue of honouring the dead for a moment, we cannot simply give a plaque, a medal or whatever it is to the families without also giving them some day-to-day symbol. That symbol could be worn or carried in the same way that many people wear a little lapel badge showing that they have been awarded an MBE, OBE, CBE or whatever. I believe that there should be some enduring symbol for the next of kin to wear on a day-to-day basis and not simply at Remembrance day or whenever. The Yorkshire Regiment is in action at the moment in Helmand in Afghanistan. I have talked to one or two of its soldiers who have come back wounded and when I have proposed the idea of this award to them it was very clear to me that they would be extremely keen to have some sort of symbol. They seem to like the idea of a medal rather than anything else, but I am prepared to see that there are a number of different solutions to this problem. What those soldiers say, in stark contrast to what they said during my time in the Army, is that it seems that military fashion has changed. Twenty years ago, I think that people were not keen to wear badges or medals, but that was a different Army. Operational tempo was completely different. We are now fighting on two fronts and they are hot wars. I believe that the vast majority of the soldiery, the sailors, airmen and marines would be very much in favour of this award. As for the administration of such an award, we cannot be distracted by the footling cost of something such as this; objecting on the ground of cost is simply nonsense. Anybody who says that this award would distract from good medical care and proper pastoral care for the dead and wounded also needs to wake up and smell the coffee, frankly. The administration of this award is a matter of tens of thousands of pounds, tops. We managed to administer awards to millions of dead in the first world war; dead and wounded in the second world war, and even the families of civilians who were killed by enemy aircraft in the second world war. All those dead received recognition and they received it properly. If people have not seen the plaques or scrolls that have been awarded by various monarchs, I must say that they really are very moving and I would suggest that the cost of producing them is negligible. I think that we have already heard about the precedent that was set by the Purple Heart. Again, people will criticise it because it is American. I do not; I approve of the fact that America is a great nation that, in the 18th century, decided that this type of decoration was necessary. It managed to administer an army, navy and air force of millions on a day-to-day basis, and it got that administration right. Furthermore, the families of the dead are treated, quite rightly, as heroes and heroines in their own right, let alone those young men and women who come back horribly scarred and wounded from the fronts that the American forces have been involved in. I think that we have a lesson to learn from America. Similarly, there is the military covenant. The Minister knows how much we have heard about that. I think that this type of award is part of the deal. I believe that we civilians sitting here in comfort should be ready and open-minded to listen to our servicemen and women. I also believe that there is a groundswell of opinion in favour of this award. There may be some senior officers inside the Ministry of Defence who themselves perhaps have unencumbered chests and who do not quite understand what it means to be shot at; what it means to lose comrades, and what it means to bury comrades. I can see that this award is a nuisance for them; I can see that it is yet another burden on the military budget. Surely, however, those officers can cease to be so narrow-minded and can understand that the kids who are dying in fighting need to have some sort of symbol.