Armed Forces

My Lords, I would like to breach the conventions of your Lordships’ House by thanking my noble friend Lord King, who I am afraid is not in his place; perhaps he heard that I was going to speak. I and your Lordships owe him a colossal debt for giving us the opportunity to have a debate on the Armed Forces today, when we have heard so much in your Lordships’ House and elsewhere this week about the huge spread of activities and duties of our enormously brave, successful and unique Armed Forces all over the world. I shall be impudent again. It is 66 years and three days since I lost my father. He was classified as a noble and gallant Lord—if your Lordships’ want to find out why, they should go to the end of the Royal Gallery— although he did not achieve high office. From the age of four I was imbued with something like military duty, if not quite that. I am old enough to be one of, I think, four speakers in the debate today who are conscripts. There may be more and certainly others may have started as conscripts and then continued to distinguished regular professional careers. As far as I am aware, four of your Lordships who have spoken in this debate have served full-time as professional soldiers or perhaps sailors, so here we can see an enormous spread of the Armed Forces’ military duties. I served two years in my father’s regiment. Being, as Hilaire Belloc put it, somewhat short of sight, and what is called vertically challenged, my commanding officer decided that it might be better if I were not on the Queen’s Birthday Parade on 13 July 1958. Instead, I was sent to the small arms school for weapons training in infantry weapons at Hythe. Being somewhat short of sight, I borrowed the glasses of a kind Welsh Guards colleague and stunned the staff by achieving 94 out of 100. It may considerably shake up some of my colleagues, not least the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, to know that we were the first course to use the new self-loading rifle—the .300 SLR. I thought this was a Mercedes sports racing car but was told that it was not. That was 51 years ago today. There was I, a young second lieutenant, taking that two-month course in weapons training. On 14 July 1958 the grins were wiped off our faces. At Windsor, 1 Battalion Scots Guards were dressed in public service tunics and bearskins and marching with pipers to Windsor Castle perhaps every 48 hours. We were warned for duty in—guess where—Iraq. I was allowed by the late father of my noble friend Lord Cathcart to be in charge of the entire weapon training for my battalion. As a 19-year-old, that really shook me but I realised I had to do a professional job. There is one thing that I ask—please—the Minister to do. She knows that I have the good luck to be secretary of the House of Lords defence group. Alas the noble Baroness, Lady Dean, is not in her place, but one of my colleagues—I will not say where or who—made a reference and comparison involving her as chairman of the Armed Forces Pay Review Body, Attila the Hun and a pussycat. I will leave your Lordships to draw the necessary conclusion. She is simply a wonderful chairman of our group, we are grateful to have her and she leads me and other noble Lords to learn, visit, see and discover all aspects that concern servicemen and servicewomen. I will lightly and quietly breach one more convention of your Lordships’ House. Among the speakers who alas are not in their places is a young colleague in my regiment, the noble Earl, Lord Stair. I am thinking of 13 June 1982, when he led his platoon from 2 Battalion Scots Guards at Mount Tumbledown in the Falkland Islands against the fifth battalion of the Argentine marines. He and the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Bramall, might well be the only two Members speaking in the debate—there might be more— who have faced enemy action and hostile fire; we are lucky to have them. It is with that in mind that I hope the Minister will be able to reassure me today or later that the standard of training that the noble Earl, the noble Lord, Lord Burnett, others and I received will continue. I see that I have about one minute left. Your Lordships have been kind enough to refer—I would like to join in the tributes—to my noble friend Lady Park, who has been an enormous help to me. I served in Northern Ireland for five and a half years—six summers, I will call it—and my boss was the then Secretary of State, the institutor of today’s debate, my noble friend Lord King. One evening in August 1987 he had been staying with me. He moved to Tullybeagles in Perthshire where he was called from his bed at four o’clock in the morning because he had to fly across to Belfast and on to the hideous attack at Ballygawly. I cannot remember how many light infantrymen lost their lives. In April 1988 my noble friend had to fly once again to Belfast following the appalling murder of two corporals who were trapped in west Belfast. I happened to be 500 yards away—little further than we are from the other place. There was a helicopter flying above my head; I happened to be the duty Minister but that was nothing to do with me. I was pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, referred to what he had seen at Omagh. The fighting that our wonderful servicepeople carry out in Afghanistan or in areas of conflict is no less important and no less vicious than what he saw in Omagh and what my noble friend Lord King and I saw and appreciated on other occasions in Northern Ireland. I conclude by thanking my noble friend Lord King for giving us the opportunity to speak today and praise each and every member of our Armed Forces. I apologise for taking a slightly personal view but I am a mere second lieutenant among noble and gallant Lords, including marshals of the Royal Air Force, and others who have spoken. It is crucial that even a mere timid, vertically challenged platoon commander of the Scots Guards should also be heard.