It is a pleasure to speak in this debate, and especially to follow the brilliant, eloquent speeches that we have had so far this afternoon. Over the years, I have
been privileged to observe Armistice Day and the two-minute silence in some unique and special places. Twelve years ago, as part of the team that organised the 90th anniversary of the great war, I was at the Cenotaph with Harry Patch, Henry Allingham and Bill Stone, the three remaining veterans of that awful conflict. I defy anyone who was there that day or remembers watching it on TV not to have been moved by the sight of Henry Allingham, who was determined to lay his own wreath at the foot of the Cenotaph to pay tribute to his fallen comrades but was sadly unable to do so.
In 2015, I was with colleagues who worked with me at the European Parliament in Loos in northern France on a cold, grey northern French morning as the gloom lifted upon row upon row of British gravestones in the cemetery, many of which were marked “Known unto God”. We witnessed the residents of that town paying tribute to the British soldiers, 7,766 of whom gave their lives at that battle. Many of them were from the north-east of Scotland and Tayside. They fell in defence of that town for their country and for the freedom of France and its allies.
Of course, I think of my great-uncle Samuel Coyle who, at 19 years old, a young lad who had never left Greenock in his life, fell at Gallipoli and lies buried alongside 600 other British and Commonwealth soldiers at the Pink Farm cemetery in Turkey. We often focus very much on the sacrifices made by the generation of world war one and world war two, but this weekend I was struck that we should, of course, also be thinking of the guys and girls who served in our armed forces much more recently. It struck me that, barely six years after British troops withdrew from Helmand province in Afghanistan and the end of that operation, the sacrifices made by the men, women and service families much more recently are, if not being forgotten, already fading from public consciousness.
I will not forget, nearly every morning in those awful days of 2007-08, being at Dartmouth or Portsmouth, on deployment overseas or, indeed, here in London, opening a newspaper or turning on the news to read yet another name or hear about another cortège passing through Royal Wootton Bassett. I remember while based at RAF Uxbridge remarking to an oppo of mine as we watched the festival of Remembrance how sad it was that the war widows’ procession, which when I was much younger had been predominantly made up of widows from the world war two generation, was much more the families of young men and women of my age.
Although life in the rest of the country went on pretty much as normal, as we fretted about the financial crisis, the coalition Government or preparations for the Olympics, our young boys and girls were under fire and were prepared to give their lives for our country and for us in a foreign field. We should never forget them or those men and women who should still be here with us today, who might otherwise be standing in the House today or walking among us in the streets.
This debate is titled “Remembrance, UK Armed Forces and Society,” and one of my earliest and clearest memories is as a seven-year-old going out with all my primary school to watch the Gordon Highlanders parade through Inverurie, a town Madam Deputy Speaker knows well, to mark their disbandment and amalgamation with the Seaforth and Cameron Highlanders to form 1st Battalion, the Highlanders, which subsequently became
the Highlanders, 4th Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Scotland—4 Scots. In this identity, they have seen tours of duty in both Iraq and Afghanistan. I remember so many people being sad about that 200-year-old local link ending—the link to the north-east of Scotland, the unique, beautiful and fiercely independent part of Scotland where the regiment was proud to come from. The finest regiment in the world, as Winston Churchill called it, had come to an end.
The north-east is not unique in feeling that. Every area feels an attachment to its local regiment, and every area feels a deep sense of loss when the British Army, as it has throughout its history, goes through a reorganisation and modernisation process and merges, disbands, renames or moves regiments. However, there is a danger in removing that local link and taking the Army, or the Navy or Air Force for that matter, out of a local community, shrinking the size and therefore the visibility of the defence footprint across the country for whatever economic, strategic or political reason, that we run the risk of removing our armed forces, the men and women, from public consciousness and their becoming out of sight and out of mind.
I represent one of the biggest constituencies in the country. It covers Aberdeenshire, the fourth largest county in Scotland. Between Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire, we have a population of 490,000 people and cover an area of 6,498 square miles. We have not one regular Army, Navy or Air Force presence. It is incumbent on all of us, as we mark Remembrance Day today and go about our lives from now on, to remember the men and women of the armed forces serving today. Although they are not physically present in all the communities where they used to be, we should make sure they are ever present in our thoughts as we move forward throughout the rest of the year.
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