Armed Forces Bill

I forgot my manners earlier in failing both to welcome the Under-Secretary and to congratulate him on the excellent start that he has made. The hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) made a powerful speech. He put me firmly in my place by making the point that, just because someone has not served in the armed forces, that does not mean that they cannot understand them. I could not agree more—the last thing that I want to do is to try to set myself up as someone who can lecture. All that I can do is bring my rather dated knowledge to bear on our proceedings. I salute the contribution of the hon. Member for North Durham (Mr. Jones), who has spent a great deal of time on armed forces matters without any previous service experience, although I disagree with him. Briefly, clause 116 attacks important relationships at unit level across the three forces. I hope that the Committee will forgive me if I limit my remarks to the Army, because that is where my experience lies. The rank of lieutenant colonel and its equivalent in the other forces is crucial, as commanding officers have powers at their disposal that are the acme, limit or horizon for the private soldiers, seamen and airmen who serve under them. To attack that relationship is to diminish those powers and take something terribly important away from the way our armed forces are asked to do their business. It is worth pausing for a moment to think about the circumstances that surround our armed forces in Iraq. It would seem that it is unique—a new theatre of operations; that counter-insurgency, counter-terrorism, peacekeeping—call it what you will—are something new to our forces; and that this is not conventional war. However, precisely these conditions pertained in the 1960s and early 1970s before the armed forces got heavily involved in Northern Ireland. They were the anvil on which the Army Act 1955 was founded and subsequently amended to work at unit level. We have heard about the commanding officers welcoming the proposed changes to the Army Act or to military law generally. That is as may be. I was never faced with very serious crimes committed on active service, but I had some extremely difficult crimes to deal with inside barracks, and I would have loved to be able to say, ““Nothing to do with me, youth. You’ve got to go now into the military justice system and I don’t have to make a decision about you, Private So-and-so.”” That would have been great; I would have loved it. It would have been a cop-out for me as the commanding officer. But that attacks precisely the relationship between the private soldier and the commanding officer of his unit. Let us bear in mind what we are talking about. The bulk of kids fighting in Iraq today—they are kids—are aged about 18½ or 19. They come, for the most part, from very difficult circumstances. I was interested to hear earlier how the House regards these fine upstanding individuals and their ability to make decisions. They are fine upstanding individuals, but by golly, they come from difficult backgrounds, for the most part. It was my experience that they needed every bit of leadership, guidance and protection that their officers and non-commissioned officers could provide for them. That is why the regimental sergeant-major, standing outside what we called commanding officer’s orders—in other words, a commanding officer acting as a magistrate inside barracks or on operations—would say to a private soldier, ““Are you guilty?””, to which the private soldier would generally say, ““Of course I’m guilty. I daren’t say I’m not.”” Clearly, that is nonsense. It was up to the commanding officer to say, as a soldier came in front of him to get summary justice, ““Look, son, you are now in front of a court of law. Just because you’ve gone through your platoon commander, your company commander and now your commanding officer, that does not mean to say that you are necessarily guilty.”” The private soldier depends on the commanding officer to be his advocate, his leader, his protector. The private soldier who is sleeping for four hours a day in two two-hour bursts, who one minute is being shot at by well armed terrorists and the next is expected to dish out food aid or whatever to injured and hungry civilians—that man requires a lieutenant-colonel or his equivalent also to have had four hours sleep that day, also to be operating in conditions of 100º Fahrenheit, and also to be required to carry a 60 or 70 lb set of webbing.