Armed Services: Claims

Lord Dannatt Excerpts

Thursday 24th November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dannatt (CB)]

My Lords, I add my thanks to that of other noble Lords to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, for proposing this important debate and to the other Cross-Bench Peers who voted that we should discuss these matters today.

However, we should not be having to spend valuable parliamentary time on this subject in the first place. The fact that we are having this discussion today is not as a result of a plethora of cases of abuse and wrongdoing by British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan but as a result of an abject failure by Her Majesty’s Government to back members of Her Majesty’s Armed Forces in their carrying out of difficult and dangerous duties on behalf of the people of this country.

Rather than hundreds of soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines facing indictment for a range of alleged offences, it is the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Justice that should be facing popular indictment for an abject failure to stand up to the threats from the International Criminal Court to take over the investigation of British service personnel. The lack of faith in the good conduct of the vast majority of British service personnel is lamentable—little short of shameful. The only exonerating mitigation available is that the Prime Minister had the moral courage to cross Whitehall and meet with the service chiefs on this issue. However, it should never have come to this. As my noble and learned friend Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood’s Motion states, it should not do so in the future.

At the heart of the issue is the willingness of government Ministers and officials to believe the fallacious allegations of Iraqis and Afghans, themselves manipulated by unscrupulous and commercially driven lawyers, rather than to have confidence in the Armed Forces’ chain of command and the tried and tested processes of investigation and judicial disposal.

Like other Members of your Lordships’ House who have spent time on operations around the world, I am fully aware that there are incidents of abuse and wrongdoing by members of the Armed Forces when deployed. Such incidents are, of course, deeply regrettable and where credible allegations are made, investigations follow and, if appropriate, due process of law is applied. One such example is the action taken in the genuinely outrageous Baha Mousa case, which resulted in a court martial and a conviction. But this stands in shameful contrast to the treatment of Sergeant Rachel Webster of the Royal Military Police. She was arrested in the early hours of the morning in her home by members of the Iraq Historic Allegations Team, an experience she described as,

“tantamount to being kidnapped by the state”.

The fact that Rachel Webster, who served for 24 years in the Army, was subsequently paid a four-figure compensation sum illustrates the degree to which this whole matter has got out of hand.

In conclusion, I want to ask the Minister a number of questions. How many cases of abuse and wrongdoing have been alleged to the Iraq and Afghanistan historic allegations teams? How many of those cases have led to formal criminal justice proceedings? How many convictions have there been? It is my understanding that the answers to my own questions are: thousands in Iraq and hundreds in Afghanistan, with no more than a handful of cases going to court at most, and there have been no significant convictions to date. Furthermore, will the Minister tell the House what the financial cost of these inquiries has been to date?

Finally, does the Minister agree with me that the financial cost is nothing whatever when compared to the loss of morale and operational effectiveness by members of the Armed Forces and loss of confidence in the Government, in whose name, on behalf of the people of this country, they have been operating? We must never put our soldiers, sailors, airmen or marines in this position again.