Equality Bill

I do not intend to draw upon my rather inglorious career in national service as a second lieutenant in the Royal Artillery, although I should say, as one who was at 24 hours’ notice to help invade Suez, that I do not think that if the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Low, had been in force, we would have been any less effective in some areas than we proved to be. That, though, is beside the point. I shall explain why we so strongly support the noble Lord, and not only for the reasons given in the report by the Joint Committee on Human Rights, to which I was party. I shall not read the relevant two pages of the report now—they are there for everyone to read. Instead, I shall explain why the Ministry of Defence and senior members of the Armed Forces have in the past persistently opposed the application of equality legislation on very similar arguments to those that are now being deployed in relation to disability. Not only is that true of the Armed Forces but it was once true of the police service. The case that I am most proud to have argued in my career was not about the Armed Forces but about the police service in Northern Ireland. In 1986 the chief constable of the Royal Ulster Constabulary had decided, a few years before, that in order to combat the IRA and terrorists it was important that the part-time reserve police force should be composed of men, because it was ungallant to expose women to the risk of death by terror and because men were more likely to be effective than women in combating terrorism in the police service. The Minister of the day blocked the women’s access to justice by granting a national security certificate, which was, like the present law in relation to disability in the Armed Forces, a blanket ban allowing of no exceptions. We eventually finished up in the European Court of Justice, this being a case about sex discrimination, and the court said, "Even in terms of national security, you must not have a blanket ban". The case went back to Belfast, I had the privilege of cross-examining the chief constable, evidence was given in camera, and of course it turned out that the women were every bit as able as the men—more able, in certain posts—in combating terrorism. In the end the chief constable had to concede and the policy had to change. That was a case about police power, not Armed Forces power, but it involved violence, the use of weapons and all the rest of it. Next, the Ministry of Defence decided, in its wisdom, that women could not enter the Armed Forces if they were pregnant, nor if they became pregnant. It became necessary for us to bring a judicial review challenging that on the basis of European law. Ridiculous though it seems, that was the policy, and it was deployed with powerful arguments by the military in the same way that it is doing now. The Ministry of Defence was forced reluctantly to change that policy. The next case was with regard to homosexuality. There was a blanket ban on becoming a member of the Armed Forces if you were openly gay, so Mr Lustig-Prean and others eventually had to go to the European Court of Human Rights in order to establish their right to equal treatment and overturn the blanket ban. Now we are faced with a ban on disability. The Joint Committee on Human Rights questioned the Minister from the Ministry of Defence, received written evidence and so on. We could not understand how it was possibly justifiable to ratify the UN Convention on Disability with a blanket reservation allowing any discrimination on the basis of disability rather than a flexible test that, of course, made sure that members of the Armed Forces were combat-effective in the posts that were needed. Now we face very sensible amendments by the noble Lord, Lord Low, which introduce proportionality and flexibility, while maintaining the combat effectiveness of the Armed Forces. I have no doubt whatever that Ministers will have to get up on behalf of the Ministry of Defence, which—and I say this with the utmost respect—has never knowingly been in the vanguard of reform in the equality area, to explain why the Government cannot accept these amendments because the MoD will not allow it. Very well. If that is the Government’s position I predict that, at some point, somebody or a group of disabled people will challenge the Government in the courts and they will succeed. For those reasons I oppose the blanket ban and strongly support the noble Lord, Lord Low. I admire him hugely for his persistence in raising the matter and I only wish that glasnost would come to the MoD.