Armed Forces Bill

Al Pinkerton Excerpts

Committee of the whole House
Tuesday 2nd June 2026 Commons Chamber

[Mr Francois]

I thank the hon. Member for that intervention. I think she may have been here just a few months ago when we had a debate about the history of the Gurkhas in British service. I echo everything she said about the bravest of the brave. I therefore look forward to her supporting the new clause in the Division Lobby this evening.

The Royal British Legion and Poppyscotland have campaigned on this matter for a number of years. I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon for taking up the cudgels so effectively on their behalf this afternoon. As he argued powerfully, Governments of both colours have indicated in the past that they were minded to make this change. Indeed, it is worth reiterating that this proposal was in both the Conservatives’ and Labour’s 2024 general election manifestos, but the change has yet to come to pass. Having re-examined the issue within His Majesty’s Opposition and consulted shadow departmental colleagues, I am pleased to tell the Committee that should my hon. Friend seek to press the new clause—and should you grant that request, Madam Chairman—we on the Opposition Front Bench will support it. We encourage all hon. Members to do so, too. There would be a cost to the process, but we believe that, in return for service to this country, the Ministry of Defence should absorb that cost in its wider budget. The annual cost would be a very modest outgoing, given the scale of the defence budget. In other words, the Department would bear the cost, not those who have served or their families. People should not be disadvantaged for having offered to serve this country in uniform.

My hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon put the case very well, and I will not try the House’s patience by repeating it. Suffice it to say that I believe that there is a strong moral case for doing this, and I very much hope that the Government might be prepared to accept the amendment. If they are not, I hope that my hon. Friend will press his amendment to a vote, and in that case, I hope that the whole House will find it in their heart to support it.

New clauses 1 and 6 relate to the European convention on human rights and its effect on armed forces personnel, including, potentially, reservists who might be mobilised under the auspices of the Bill. How did we get to a situation in which the convention has spread to the battlefield, not just in Europe, but globally? The history is significant here; it lies behind why we tabled the two new clauses. This all came about because of something called the al-Jedda case, which was heard before the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords a couple of years or so before the United Kingdom Supreme Court was created back in 2009. The al-Jedda case was about the treatment of a prisoner detained in Iraq during Operation Telic, and was brought by a now disgraced lawyer called Phil Shiner. His name will be known to anyone who has ever served in the British Army. For the record, Shiner was subsequently convicted of fraud and struck off as a practising solicitor.

Phil Shiner instructed legal counsel to put forward his case to the House of Lords. The lead appellant in that case, before he became a Member of Parliament, was one Keir Starmer QC. The Minister for Veterans and People got into some trouble over that, because when we highlighted the matter in the Commons, she was adamant that he had not been working for Shiner. Unfortunately for the Minister, we had the court records from the House of Lords, which showed very clearly that Keir Starmer, as he then was, was the lead appellant appointed and instructed—that word is used in the records—by Phil Shiner’s law firm, Public Interest Lawyers. The Minister had the embarrassment of having to come to the Commons in February to correct the record and admit that our version of events, as explained to the Commons, was true.

Phil Shiner was a persistent man, particularly when money was at stake, so several years after losing in the House of Lords, he took the case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. To be clear, Keir Starmer was not acting in that action. Shiner won, so the Strasbourg Court ruled that the European convention on human rights would then apply to any theatre in which British armed forces personnel were serving. Through that judgment, an industry was effectively created, which Shiner then massively exploited. He brought literally hundreds of cases against current and past British armed forces personnel. Many of the cases were funded by British taxpayers through legal aid, and were completely and utterly fabricated for money. It was the use of the ECHR that allowed him to do that.

In other debates in the Chamber, we have heard senior Ministers, including the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, say that there is no such thing as a vexatious prosecution. Self-evidently, there must be, because otherwise why was Shiner struck off and convicted of fraud by a court of law? There can be—in fact, there were—hundreds of vexatious prosecutions against British military personnel. It was, for the record, Johnny Mercer, a former Member of this House, when he served on the Defence Committee some years ago, who led a sub-Committee investigation into this issue. Its very powerful report helped to bring Shiner to book, no doubt saving the taxpayer a lot of money, and leading to Shiner’s career ending in disgrace.

To come to the present day, what if there were a ceasefire in Ukraine? Let us posit a situation in which, under the auspices of the coalition of the willing, British service personnel were deployed to Ukraine. If, by some happenstance, they became involved in a firefight with Russian troops who had made an incursion across the line of ceasefire, who is to say that years—maybe decades—later, those personnel would not end up in a court of law for obeying what they believed to be perfectly legitimate orders, after some second-guessing by a human rights lawyer, perhaps with Russian assistance?

In short, we cannot allow this Government’s obsession with human rights to put our armed forces at risk, either now, in the future or historically, and potentially force them to fight ruthless opponents with one arm tied behind their back. This issue will not go away, and at some point, the Government will be forced to address it, be it through the Northern Ireland Troubles Bill or some other mechanism. The purpose of these new clauses is to force them to address it today.

[Dr Al Pinkerton (Surrey Heath) (LD)]

I should like to quote a few words from the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Ben Obese-Jecty), speaking just a couple of months ago in this Chamber:

“This month marks 20 years since I returned from serving on Operation Telic 7 in Iraq. While I was there, we patrolled Basra in Snatch Land Rovers, and 34 British soldiers died in Snatch Land Rovers. They were called “mobile coffins” and “suicide wagons” for a reason. In 2006, it was highlighted to the Government that those vehicles were unsuitable, and it was not until years later that they were replaced.”—[Official Report, 15 April 2026; Vol. 783, c. 842.]

It was not the ECHR that put British soldiers’ lives at risk in Iraq, but it was the ECHR that provided the legal basis for the families of those victims to seek justice. I think that the right hon. Gentleman is looking through the wrong end of the telescope on this one. By seeking to remove us from the ECHR, he is potentially putting British service people at greater risk, rather than offering them protection.

[Mr Francois]

It is extremely sad that the hon. Gentleman is seeking to conflate two completely different issues, and I suspect that anyone who actually served on Operation Telic would understand that.

Having made that point, let me turn to the Opposition’s new clause 2, which would require the Secretary of State for Defence to lay a defence investment plan before Parliament within a month of the passage of this Act, if it had still not been published by then, which, for reasons I will come to in a minute, is not as fantastical as it might seem. For context, today is the one-year anniversary of the publication of the Government’s much-vaunted strategic defence review. There is a lot of good in the document, but one of the criticisms made at the time was that much of the programmatic detail on which new equipment the Government intended to purchase for our armed forces was omitted. For instance, the Government talked about buying “up to” 12 new nuclear attack submarines. That could mean two.

All that detail was going to be provided in the defence investment plan, but one year on, it has still not been published. This has drawn serious criticism from right across the defence industry, and also from the authors of the SDR. Indeed, the lead author, Lord Robertson, a lifelong Labour man to his fingertips, has accused the Prime Minister of “corrosive complacency” because of the ongoing delay in saying how the Government will fund the strategic defence review and its attendant equipment requirements. When we were in government, we used to publish a 10-year plan for the purchase of military equipment, universally known as the equipment plan.