Armed Forces Parliamentary Scheme

Bob Russell Excerpts

Wednesday 11th September 2013 Westminster Hall

[Sir Bob Russell (Colchester) (LD)]

I appreciate that, Mr Walker. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire (Mr Gray) on securing the debate, and I endorse the comments made by previous speakers.

I would just like to put on record my involvement with the armed forces parliamentary scheme. I have participated in it twice, in 1999 and 2008-09, spending 25 and 31 days respectively with the Army. In addition to a series of high-level briefings with senior Ministry of Defence officials and leading members of Her Majesty’s armed forces, I also took part in an exercise with the armoured division in Poland, during which Sir Neil Thorne joined the scheme participants, and in a NATO exercise in the snow and under canvas in Germany. I have also camped with Gurkhas in a remote area of Kenya, visited peacekeeping forces in Bosnia and troops at Camp Bastion in Afghanistan, yomped over the Brecon Beacons in Wales, and taken part in a night-time exercise on Salisbury plain.

The participants in 1999 were the “famous five”: me, my hon. Friend the Member for Aldershot (Sir Gerald Howarth) and former Members of Parliament, Christopher Fraser, David Drew and Lorna Fitzsimons. In November 1999, I tabled early-day motion 82, which was signed by 44 Members, including my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire. The motion read:

“That this House salutes the 10th Anniversary of the establishment of the Armed Forces Parliamentary Scheme; notes that a total of 90 honourable Members of both Houses have participated in the AFPS enabling them to speak with greater authority on matters relating to Her Majesty’s Armed Forces; appreciates the support given by the Armed Forces and various sponsors; and congratulates Sir Neil Thorne for his initiative in starting the scheme and for his continued involvement with it.”

As we have heard, more than 260 Members of both Houses have now taken part in the scheme. Today, after 25 years, we are witnessing a new chapter in the scheme set up by Sir Neil, who rightly goes into the record books not only as the founder of the scheme but as the life president of the trust that takes over from it. As an aside, I want to say that Sir Neil also established the police service parliamentary scheme.

I am conscious of your comments, Mr Walker, but I feel that it would be appropriate to draw attention to an article that appeared last April in Defence Focus magazine, which quotes Sir Neil as saying:

“When I entered the House there were very few Members of Parliament with direct military experience and there are even fewer today, which was having a serious effect on the quality of our debates on defence issues.”

One of the problems is that very few of us have knowledge of what it is like being in the armed forces. Sir Neil went on to tell Defence Focus:

“I know from when I was a member of the House of Commons Defence Committee that the military tend to treat you as if you are at least a two-star officer”.

The magazine graphically describes how,

“from the outset, the idea behind the scheme was to give politicians from all the main parties a chance to get access at an appropriate level. Which means getting MPs into a uniform sweating alongside soldiers, sailors or airmen.”

The scheme has Ministry of Defence backing, which is vital because the MOD provides the attachments. I want to place on record my appreciation of the liaison officers and all the people at the MOD who make the scheme possible for Members of Parliament.

Sir Neil also told Defence Focus:

“For a period after the Second World War, and with national service lasting into the early 60s, it used to be that Parliament was full of people who knew military business first hand. But it isn’t like that now, and meanwhile the world is a tricky place, so AFPS has to be a good investment for national parliamentary knowledge and decision-making”—

a statement about the scheme that I endorse. Sir Neil perceived another equally important role, which continues, for his initiative, as reported in Defence Focus:

“I always say to the MPs on the scheme, ‘look, the Admirals, Generals and Air Marshals always have avenues they can follow to make their points—it’s the soldiers, sailors and airmen who haven’t got a line to the Secretary of State, that are relying on you to speak up for them’.”

Thanks to Sir Neil, the armed forces parliamentary scheme and the past 25 years, when we politicians speak we hopefully know a bit more of what we are talking about than would otherwise be the case. I look forward to the new chapter with the trust.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Lewis]

I could not have expected or desired a more reassuring comment.

I now look for a second reassuring comment. I will not get it immediately, but I am looking to my old Front-Bench colleague of many years’ standing on the former shadow defence team—he is now, thank goodness, the Minister—to address what one might call the issue of trust. The reason why the scheme has worked so well is that people have been given privileged access to members of the armed forces at every level. There has been, as it were, an unwritten understanding that that privilege would not be abused. When one considers the very large numbers of colleagues of all parties who have been through the scheme, it is remarkable that there have been hardly any cases—in the low single figures—of raised eyebrows about someone going on the scheme and immediately tabling a raft of hostile questions on the Floor of the House.

That excellent outcome is very different from what might have been predicted at the start of the process. As something of an amateur military historian, I look forward to the day when I can go to the National Archives at Kew and look for the file of correspondence that must exist relating to the period in which Sir Neil originally approached the Ministry of Defence to propose that MPs have direct informal access to all ranks of the armed forces.

[Sir Bob Russell]

We all look forward to those archives being open. May I suggest to my hon. Friend that informed questions, as opposed to hostile ones, are very much part and parcel of the experience of taking part in the scheme?

[Dr Lewis]

Exactly. That is precisely how people who have engaged in the scheme have understood their responsibilities, with very few exceptions. When one considers that the final stage of the scheme is membership of the Royal College of Defence Studies, that is quite remarkable. It may not be common knowledge, but those of us who are fortunate enough to be parliamentary members of the RCDS are taken on as full members and are considered to remain members for life. The essence of the RCDS course is meeting people, learning from them and establishing formal and informal contacts that will stand one in good stead in relation to one’s understanding of defence developments at home and abroad.

To inject a slightly quizzical note into my speech, that is why I was a little concerned recently to read an article about the eminent military historian Sir Max Hastings being refused the sort of informal contact that for many years he and many others have been allowed with senior serving personnel in the MOD network. That runs counter to the spirit of the armed forces parliamentary scheme, but I hope that it is simply a case of over-zealous application of some rule against leaking things to the media.

Certainly, if we reach a situation in which people like Sir Max Hastings—eminent historians and public commentators—cannot secure the degree of access that they used to have, or indeed if a similar bar is put on hon. Members, all I can say is that Ministers should take a deep breath, look at what has happened with the armed forces parliamentary scheme and realise that a tunnel vision approach to access by civilians, whether they are reporters or Members of Parliament, to the military is counter-productive.

The armed forces parliamentary scheme is a boon to hon. Members with little knowledge of defence, as it is to hon. Members when, as sometimes happens, their political party goes through a phase of anti-militarism. There was a period—thank goodness, long in the past—when the Labour party shifted in a unilateralist direction, and I am sure that it was very valuable to those courageous members of the Labour party who did not go in that direction to be able to recharge their intellectual batteries by having access to such a scheme. It is important that Members of Parliament who want to support the armed forces have the intellectual ammunition, on a non-partisan basis, to speak with authority about them.

I conclude by pointing out that the scale of the scheme when it started was for two Members of Parliament to visit each of the three armed forces, with two more visiting the Royal Marines, which is of course a subset—some would say, a superset—of the Royal Navy.