Armed Forces Bill

My Lords, I am grateful for the Minister’s response to my amendment. I have a wicked question to ask him, following the point made by the noble Lord, Lord West, about what happens if we start taking large numbers of casualties, especially if the circumstances of each casualty are different. Suppose in 100 days of an operation we take 10 fatalities per day. We are in for 1,000 inquests, and the circumstances of each one are different. Presumably at some point as a conflict escalated from peacekeeping to warfighting and, to put it bluntly, it was not going very well, we would have to suspend the system of inquests. It would be ridiculous—God forbid we could have 5,000 outstanding inquests! We would get to a point where we would have to stop the inquest system. That proves my perverse law that the scrutiny of each casualty is inversely proportionate to the number of casualties we take.