Armed Forces Act (Continuation) Order 2010

Lord Borrie Excerpts

Monday 19th July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moonie]

I rise briefly as a former Minister for Defence who was lucky enough to take two Bills through the House. This was quite rare: it was bad enough getting one, but to have two was an excessive pleasure. I rise to support this order and to say how important it is, at a time when our Armed Forces are under such pressure, that this Act retains support on all sides of the House and that the defence of the realm is governed by all-party consensus, as has been the case in recent years. If any problems arise with the Act, it would be good to get advance notice of them in this spirit of co-operation. I say in passing that, had it not been for my vehemence in support of the Armed Forces Act, I doubt that it would have been brought to the House by 2006, because there was every chance that it could have taken another three or four years. However, I am delighted to see that it is working well.

[Lord Borrie]

My Lords, I intervene briefly. Perhaps the Minister is surprised at the greater interest in this than he imagined might be the case. My own interest goes back 50 years-plus to my national service, when I had a lot to do with courts martial. I did a little background research, as did the Minister for his work today. The idea of a standing army being a threat to the populace in the 20th and 21st centuries, as compared with the 17th century, has always struck me as amazing and extraordinary, yet we have gone on, year by year—occasionally I have attended the appropriate proceedings in this House—with the order that allows a standing army to continue for another year.

Now that we have a coalition Government, of which I am somewhat suspicious from the opposition side, I am anxious about even suggesting that we should have anything different in the way of a thorough re-examination of our constitution, of those of other countries, of how they manage and so on, because, although I trust the Minister as an excellent man of high repute, I do not trust the coalition to come up with something ideal. Therefore, at present, I would rather the Minister did not pursue his researches too far and did only the minimum to secure the changes needed for another year.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I thank all those who have intervened in this extremely brief debate. The noble Lord, Lord Borrie, is clearly worried about whether the coalition will stick to the constitution. We are assailed about this on the airwaves all the time. Mr Ed Balls has asserted that the coalition is already deeply unconstitutional. I would not have thought that he was one of the most constitutionally minded members of the previous Administration, but there we have it.

We should not take military acceptance of civilian authority for granted. We have seen many other countries in which the professional military has developed a sense of corporate identity and a conviction that it represents the nation that have led it to resist civilian authority. It is one of the great benefits of the military tradition in this country that the acceptance of civilian control has been unquestioning. Perhaps this annual ceremony is one way in which we maintain and reassert that worthwhile tradition.

The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, raised the issue of human rights. The impact of the Human Rights Act is an important and delicate question that we all understand. My notes state that Her Majesty's Government are satisfied that the legislation is compatible with the rights provided in the European Convention on Human Rights. This whole area is one that we will need to look at in the coming Act, although there are many other aspects of changing circumstances which affect the operations of troops in the field. We all understand that service discipline needs to affect the immediate needs of operations at a distance. We also now understand that, with modern communications, the visibility of the way in which your troops behave in operations at a distance very often comes back immediately to the press and the media in one’s own country. So we are in a very delicate and rapidly changing area.

I also had in my notes that I would say a little about the military covenant, which, as some noble Lords will know, was one of the areas touched on in the coalition agreement. This order does not concern the military covenant, partly because the fulfilment of the promises made in that agreement to renew the military covenant will require a lot of work throughout Whitehall with other government departments—with the Department for Education and Skills, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and others—in order to fulfil some of the pledges that have been made. However, we are deeply committed as a coalition to carrying through that renewal of the covenant.

Having said that, and looking forward to the debate that we will have early next year in time for the expiry of the current five-year Act in November 2011, I commend this continuation order.