My Lords, I rise to support the amendments in my name and the name of the noble Lord, Lord Godson, and to comment on Amendment 174B in particular; he has given a full exposition of the thinking that lies behind it. I would like to add one thing, and one thing only, to his exposition: the reference to the way in which the Saville inquiry created a kind of patent for this type of investigation. We definitely
need a public history. I have long been an advocate of it; it is now a point in time when it is a job for a younger cadre of historian to carry out the work.
Let us stop and think what happens if we do not do that. I was a historical adviser to the Bloody Sunday inquiry, which led to the very eloquent apology given by David Cameron, to which the noble Lord, Lord Swire, referred. As a professional historian, you are often scrubbing around for documents, pleading with the Government and the Public Record Office for them. The amazing thing about the inquiry was that they were delivered to my door by trucks, and the material is still in my garage, now published by the Saville inquiry. It lays out a lot of really sensitive stuff: Cabinet minutes and discussions about Northern Ireland which were not then in the public domain—they mostly are now, but they certainly were not at the time of the inquiry —and intelligence documents about the debriefing of IRA informers and discussing the role of Martin McGuinness. These are really sensitive things which were released to me to work on. I produced an analysis which played into the statement to the inquiry by Christopher Clarke KC. In a Leverhulme lecture on contemporary British history, I was subsequently allowed to give my own take on what those documents meant.
That is why I strongly support Amendment 174B: that type of openness should be the patent for any subsequent work or research carried out. The world did not fall in; I have tried to indicate that this material was sensitive—it included discussions between the most senior military officers in the days and weeks before Bloody Sunday. This was not low-grade stuff. We did it, we published it, we took an honest decision about what it all meant—there was other evidence that Lord Saville had to consider—and we had the final conclusion, reached by David Cameron. However, if we say, “That’s it”, we will be saying that the only real public history the UK Government are interested in is—let us be clear—one of the very embarrassing moments of British history and the British state’s role in Northern Ireland, and that we are not interested in the rest of it. We will reveal stuff, and spend money and resources for that purpose, but we are not going to discuss in the round what really happened, which will inevitably lead to other occasions which are less than glorious.
None the less, it seems to me a simple proposition: if you do not support this proposal for a public history, you are saying that we need to deal only with that one particular inquiry—that is all; the rest is closed. For some reason not clear to me, it is the only time we are going to open to scholars the sensitive material which will allow—as it did—a full evaluation of the political, military and other dimensions to Bloody Sunday. It is in the interest of totality and a broader approach to history that I strongly support Amendment 174B.