Armed Forces Bill

I want to be brief, because we need to make progress. There is a long list of amendments. I am going to wrap my remarks up quite soon. What about the 2,700 soldiers who were sentenced to death, but had their sentences commuted? Will they be affected? Will they receive a pardon? We heard about the Farr case, which was moving and tragic. However, every single case is different. If one has a look at the breakdown, as some colleagues have already, out of the 346 soldiers who were executed, 37 were executed for murder and will not benefit from the pardon. I mentioned earlier in an intervention that there were five who were executed for disobedience to a lawful order. One of them was a private in the Royal Norfolks who disobeyed four separate orders, on four different occasions. He was given umpteen warnings. He was sentenced to death by firing squad for disobedience to those lawful orders before he even got near the front, so he certainly could not have suffered from any form of shell shock. As my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Wyre (Mr. Wallace) pointed out, 18 soldiers were sentenced for mutiny and various other offences. The issue is complicated and every single case is different, which is why I took the view that perhaps we should have set up a tribunal of Commonwealth judges or learned judges to look at every single case totally separately on its merits. In my judgment, what we are doing is illogical. Whatever colleagues say, if we not rewriting history, we are certainly writing it. What happened in the great war was horrific and tragic, but we are looking at it from a modern-day perspective. We are imposing our modern-day values on events that happened nearly 100 years ago. Of course those men would not have been executed today. In the second world war, there was not a single British soldier executed by firing squad. I gather that one American was executed during the battle of the Bulge. To put that into perspective, 10,000 German soldiers were hung for either desertion or cowardice in the last war and 25,000 Russians were shot by firing squad—probably double that number were shot by the commissars who were attached to each single unit. Should we really be questioning the motives and the rationale of the Army commanders in world war one? Should we be questioning the decisions taken by the much reviled Field Marshal Haig? How far back should we go? Should we go back to the Boer war and Breaker Morant, or the Zulu war, or the Crimean war? What other categories of offence will be covered by future initiatives of this kind? What about the British traitors who were hanged during the second world war, such as Lord Haw-Haw and John Amery and many others, who may well not have had a fair trial at the time? We have had an interesting and, in many ways, moving debate, with a lot of excellent contributions. Those of us who have doubts about this matter should not be taunted by the other side for not putting it to a vote, because we have asked a lot of sensible questions. Can the Minister really give us a categorical assurance that this measure will not set a precedent? Is this really a one-off? We are all decent, compassionate human beings. Of course we can regret the past and observe the deeds of our ancestors with astonishment, incomprehension and even sad regret. Obviously we can feel only pity towards those luckless soldiers who were executed nearly a century ago. There is little doubt that many of them showed incredible bravery and astonishing mental toughness when they were finally led out to be shot, blindfolded and alone. We have to applaud their courage in extremis. They were as much victims of that war as the three quarters of a million of their comrades, in addition to the millions of other soldiers, who were killed. However, I do not believe that we should reinvent the past to suit our wishes today. That way lies madness. That is why I have serious regrets about what the Government are doing and I am looking forward to the assurances from the Minister.