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Armed Forces: Future Defence Policy

My Lords, when the noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, spoke, she said that everyone would mention Afghanistan. I was going to prove her wrong and not mention Afghanistan, but suddenly I have been moved to mention it, because it is reported that the Prime Minister is going to make a speech today and, in that speech, he is going to say that we may not win. Is it possible to understand or think of any more irresponsible remark to be made by any Minister of the Crown? Can the Minister imagine Churchill saying in 1940, "We may not win"? Can he imagine Mrs Thatcher saying about the Falklands, "We may not win"? It is unforgiveable to say something like that. We are asking soldiers, sailors and airmen to risk their lives and then telling them they may not win. That is all I am going to say on Afghanistan except, incidentally, that the Prime Minister bothers to ring up contestants on the "The X Factor" but does not talk to soldiers coming back. That is disgraceful as well. I am very pleased to follow the noble Earl, Lord Stair, because I happen to know of his family’s previous experience with the Army. His great-great-great-grandfather was asked to pacify some parts of the Highlands, and he was given what later became the Scots Greys, the first royal regiment of Scotland. They were not sent to pacify the Highlands; they spent about two years building him one of the best gardens on the west coast of Scotland. That was a thoroughly useful use of defence expenditure. To turn from a mildly flippant intervention to a much more serious one, I was absolutely delighted when my noble friend Lord Freeman said exactly what I was going to say. There is nothing new about combat stress. I suspect that, had one gone around the stoa in Athens in 485 BC, there would have been people who were homeless and in distress who were veterans of the Battle of Marathon. My noble friend Lord Freeman rightly talked of those who could not speak about the First or Second World Wars. The Duke of Wellington always had a guinea in his pocket for any Peninsular War veteran whom he saw. My father started his war service in Egypt in 1941 aged 28 and ended it in 144 when he was captured at the Battle of Villers-Bocage. He was in a slit trench when things had gone totally pear-shaped. There were four of them in the slit trench; one person on either side of him was killed and two people were unharmed. He had 13 tanks blown up underneath him between 1941, at the Battle of Sidi Rezegh, and the Battle of Villers-Bocage, when he was captured. I do not think that he ever went to bed sober. He died extremely young, at the age of 57. Sometimes I worry and ask myself whether I began to understand him, and the answer is no, I did not. It is only since he died that I have come to realise that he must have been tortured by what he saw. I think that is very common among veterans of all wars. I was going to talk about stress, prison, suicide and homelessness. However, I shall start on a good note. I learnt this morning from a charity called Crisis, which keeps these figures, that the number of homeless ex-servicemen living on the street has fallen very remarkably due to efforts made by the Government and charities, so well done Government and well done charities on that. What is much less happy is the gap—the noble Earl, Lord Stair, mentioned this—between leaving the Army and asking for help. To a certain extent this is obvious, in that the people who tend to go into the Army tend to be macho and think it wrong to ask for help, so things bottle up and get worse and worse. Consequently, a higher percentage of them end up in prison than is the case among other sectors of the population. A very large number of them get involved in terrible family troubles, drunkenness and drugs. The other day I was told about a particularly heroic soldier who had had adrenaline flying and who had been immensely gallant and very brave. He was invited into the sergeants’ mess, they all got wildly drunk—I concede that has happened before now in sergeants’ messes—and he ended up by thumping somebody, breaking their jaw and being charged with grievous bodily harm. I know that soldiers get an adrenaline rush out of action and that that can lead to psychological difficulties. An article in the Guardian talked about a man from Cheshire who was involved in domestic violence, and another man from Kent. It is all there. Difficulties arise when servicemen leave the services as they sometimes come into contact with law enforcement agencies or do not even ask for help. I am told that the great difficulty is that these are the sort of people who do not ask for help. Somehow the Government must try to do something about this. There is no easy answer, but, as a civilised country, we cannot allow this sort of stuff to go on any more than it does. It would be wrong to do so. I beg the Government to try to do more. They have shown that they can do something about homelessness, but they must do more to tackle combat stress, psychological stress, criminality and the drug and alcohol abuse suffered by some ex-servicemen.