Armed Forces Bill

As a Lancashire MP, I join in the tribute paid to the soldier of the 2nd Battalion of the Duke of Lancaster Regiment who was killed in Basra on Monday. He will have been doing his best for, and with, his comrades, and carrying out the task that the Government sent him there to perform. We shall not forget him on Sunday, and I hope that his family derive some comfort from the personal support that I know that the Secretary of State gives to all the victims of the current Iraq and Afghanistan conflict. I thank the three Ministers from the Department for staying for the debate. We do not often see the full complement, on either the Opposition or Government Front Benches. The Secretary of State and the Minister of State for the Armed Forces should be congratulated on staying, and I welcome that they have done so. War is tragic. It is full of fear, and full of people who do not know what the next day will mean for them. War is confusing, and it separates people from those whom they love, and, very often, young men of all classes and all educations find themselves in positions that they would rather not be in. However, few of them feel that there are people to blame for the position that they are in. They do what they do because they feel that it is the right thing to do at the time. Many of them look back and ask, ““Should I have been doing that? Should I have been in Northern Ireland? Should I have been carrying out the wishes of the Government of the day?”” However, tragedy—feelings of loss and suffering—is part of war, and that tragedy cannot be picked apart because that suits us by our values of today. The case that has been put forward for the pardons is, in my view, misguided. Much of that case is also full of inaccuracies. For example, the fact is that we did recognise shell shock at that time, but what we did not do was treat it correctly. We often took officers out of the field and sent them far back to Blighty, where they received what we now know to have been the wrong treatment. But although we got our medical treatment wrong at the time, should we judge the people of the day because their knowledge of medicine was not as good as ours is now? That case is also full of inaccuracies because the names of many of the people for whom pardons are sought have changed—they have fluctuated. It is interesting that the Government cannot produce a definitive list of those who were executed in the war who deserve a pardon. As we know, there is a lack of records. Members of various parties have made it clear that in the cold light of day, perhaps by judicial committee, they could not make decisions on whether a pardon would have been an appropriate way of dealing with some of the problems. I am mystified that people convicted of ““mutiny and sedition”” under section 7 of the Army Act 1881 will be pardoned. Mutiny is not cowardice. Mutiny is not desertion. Mutiny is undermining the very core of military discipline, sometimes for subversive reasons. As many of the French corps and British units in the first world war knew, it can cause catastrophic problems for fighting on the front, and, in the end, it can lead to a breakdown of the whole war effort. I am amazed that a pardon for that has been added. It is important that we recognise that these are real offences that have a real impact on war-fighting. In today’s world, if a warehouse security guard falls asleep, someone comes in and nicks all the stock. But if someone falls asleep on sentry, they might well condemn their men to death—not only their men in their platoon, but also, perhaps, their men in their company. There are plenty of historical war stories of such events occurring in every conflict; they have occurred in Northern Ireland, and they have happened since time immemorial. This is not the kind of issue that we can just move aside because that suits us. Some of these offences have real consequences for other people who were doing their job: hundreds of thousands of such people have died in the first world war and many other conflicts. It is dishonourable for us in this House, in this century, with our values, to decide whether people of that era would have a different view. I was not around in 1918 or 1916. I know that, as a soldier, I would never have the audacity to compare my military experience today with that of those who were in the military nearly 100 years ago. We all face different challenges in different conflicts, and our values will always be different. For us to go back into the first world war and pick and choose what suits us is an insult to all who fought in that campaign, and all who did their best to make sure that Britain was victorious in a war that would have affected our freedoms if we had failed in it. The class issue has already appeared in today’s debate. There is a romantic notion that General Melchett was condemning people to death from behind the lines. Many of the men concerned were tried by their peers from their battalions, who themselves had been through the same conflicts. People did not appear from nowhere dressed in nice pressed shirts to judge these men; they were often tried by their peers. We might not like the trial process that they faced, but sometimes they faced those trials because of the conditions that people were in—because they did not have the luxury of being able to leave the front line, as they had to get on with doing their job, which was playing their part in defending Britain and ensuring victory in the first world war. We should not be persuaded by such romantic visions, or by the comedians whom we often see on television.