My Lords, I was very glad to add my name to the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Hain, and will speak briefly in its support. I also pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, for the way in which she introduced this mammoth group of amendments.
As I listened to the noble Baroness, and to my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Hain, I kept thinking of those immortal words from the Irish story: “I wouldn’t have started from here.” What we have is a terrible ragbag of a Bill. Of course, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Hain, that if our amendment were accepted, the Bill would be very significantly improved. However, we really need to go back to the drawing board here. The Bill is far too complicated and complex. It tries to treat a whole range of people with what I would call an artificial equality and, in the process, upsets everybody. We have heard that quoted time and again, at Second Reading and in the debates today. You cannot please everybody; you have to try to be fair and just. In particular, you must have regard for those who have been slaughtered or maimed in terrible incidents of which they were not the perpetrators and where they were seeking to defend what was right.
The House does not need me to give a whole series of encapsulations of dreadful events such as Enniskillen. But we cannot have this Bill because it does not recognise—as the noble Lord, Lord Dannatt, put it graphically earlier in our debate today—for instance, the proper desserts of the veterans of those forces who were seeking to defend, and who were not engaged in terrorist acts.
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I paid tribute earlier, very genuinely, to the Minister, my noble friend Lord Caine. None of us envies him his task today. We all sympathise with him and we all know that his heart is most certainly in the right place. But the Bill has to be filleted and replaced by a Hain provision, as in the noble Lord’s Amendment 72, with much of it discarded. Otherwise, it will be a question of going back to the drawing board, having some proper pre-legislative scrutiny and seeking to come up with something that is just and fair—and regarded as such by those whom it is ostensibly designed to help, because nobody is helped by the Bill if it is enacted in the way the House has before it tonight.
I said earlier that I supported the initial amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, which I did. I also accepted her recognition of the fact that this House has to perform its constitutional duty. But this House will not be performing that duty if it allows the Bill, in anything like its present form, to go on to the
statute book. I will leave it at that, but I wish my noble friend the Minister all success in his endeavours, because I know that he wants to get this right.