My Lords, it is a real privilege to follow the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Dannatt, whom I greatly respect. He has raised some of the issues that we have been discussing over the last two days. I have made my views well known on those aspects, and I do not propose to challenge what he has just said. He is absolutely right in requiring there to be a duty of care set out in statute—a touchstone whereby the ways in which service personnel are dealt with can be tested.
In our own way, those who have practised in courts martial have seen the sort of improvements to which the noble and gallant Lord referred. I recall that, at the first court martial that I went to, there was a lot of swishing of swords—swords pointed at the guilty man when the decision was announced, and so on. Also, I think I played some part in the abolition of the process whereby an accused in a Navy court martial was marched into the court with a cutlass at his back. I put down a Question questioning that particular practice and, when I got up to hear the Answer from the noble Lord, Lord Bach, he announced that the practice had been abolished. But that is only symbolic of the very considerable changes that have taken place in the court martial system, which I believe have brought greater fairness and fewer problems of what one might call “shock and awe”—of a soldier going in to stand trial before a court martial of senior officers. In that way, we have sought I think to modernise the old court martial system, and we have been successful in that. If that sort of movement could be applied generally and not just in the very narrow area to which I have referred, it would be a very good thing. I wholly support the noble and gallant Lord in his amendment.