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Mr. George: I am not trying to evade the question and I promise the hon. Gentleman that I shall return to it, but there is a higher goal. Although the Opposition might not want to empathise with the Government, they should--in the light of their activities during recent events in Kosovo--show people outside that there are no basic differences between us on defence and security policy. Objections could have been made in Committee, as they were by Conservatives in the other place. The Opposition should not give the impression that there is a schism between them and the Government. That is unfortunate.
The amendment's criticism of Government prevarication over the consolidation of the single service Acts amuses me enormously. The hon. Member for Salisbury kindly reminded me of the question that I asked during the Armed Forces Bill Committee proceedings, which were chaired by the hon. Member for Gosport (Mr. Viggers)--a former member of the Defence Committee who I hope will return to it. We had a little bet on how long it would take before the Ministry of Defence went on the back foot and I think that I won with two minutes and 10 seconds or three minutes. It was put on the defensive when I asked what happened to the recommendations on consolidation in the 1996 Select Committee report. After all, they followed from the recommendations of the 1991 report. We are talking about prevarication and the previous Government prevaricated over consolidation so, "Physician heal thyself." However, I shall not go too far and rub it in by discussing Army medical services. I recall the questioning vividly and we asked why there was prevarication. The explanation was that a
parliamentary counsel who had been loaned to the MOD spent two years working hard on consolidation, but went back to his previous job. The process fell apart. Those who appeared before us in 1996 said, "Sorry, we have not taken it any further."The Defence Committee does not always support the Government, but the problems of delay in consolidation have been exacerbated by the Strasbourg ruling. I hope that the leader of the team that deals with armed forces law will be given sufficient staff to create some rationality in service discipline by the time that the Armed Forces Bill Committee meets in 2001. Consolidation is part of that process. I thank the Minister for his kind remarks about the Defence Committee and the speed with which the evidence session was printed. He recognises that MOD legislation is rare. When it is introduced, I hope that there will be pre-legislative scrutiny and that that task will fall to the Defence Committee.
I agree with a number of the remarks made by the hon. Member for Salisbury. There are fat manuals of service law and Parliament spends a lot of time on the subject. It is considered by a Select Committee of the House of Lords and the Armed Forces Bill Committee meets quinquennially. The other place dealt with the Bill competently a few months ago, we are considering it now and it may return to the other place, so the outsider would say, "Isn't the situation in the armed forces sufficiently grave, because of criminal behaviour and misbehaviour, to merit so much time?" Many people think that the armed forces are Leicester City, Manchester United and Chelsea writ large, but we all know that they are not like that. When we consider the misbehaviour and the crimes that are committed and dealt with, we should bear in mind the number of service personnel--they are equivalent to a small city--and the fact that they are subject to service discipline. When I became a Member of the House the number of people in the armed forces was the same as the population of a large city, but I shall not criticise the Opposition in great detail at this juncture. I am trying to be bipartisan.
We should pay tribute to the members of our armed forces--and their dependants--because despite the fact that they enter a career in which one assumes that they are encouraged to show a great deal of physical aggression, in most cases that is canalised in the right direction. There is no correlation between the time that we and civil servants devote to armed forces law and the purpose of that law, which, in fact, is fairly limited because our personnel are so well-behaved.
The hon. Member for Salisbury may have gone to Colchester at the same time as me. When I went there, we were taken around by a very articulate young man. We were gobsmacked to discover later that he was not one of the instructors, but one of those undergoing temporary incarceration. He went AWOL--not after we met him, of course--and set up a successful business. Only when the business took off did he feel that it was better to go back and receive the punishment that he admitted that he deserved. His progress towards millionaire status--and, if I remember rightly, an appearance on "Gladiators"--was deferred, if only temporarily.
Meeting people who are in the glasshouse is not like visiting Strangeways prison in Manchester. These are not your criminal classes; they are people who committed acts that would have gone unnoticed in a place like this. We are talking about the misbehaviour of soldiers in garrison
towns. I do not visit the Strangers' Bar often, but anyone who goes there--I issue an invitation now--will see rather noisy colleagues of mine letting off steam. If they were subject to service discipline, their conduct would no doubt lead to an inflation of the criminal behaviour statistics.The Bill, which has been rather disparaged by certain Members of the House of Lords, has had an eventful genesis. We should look abroad, to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg--although I should not mention that name, because it is European. The court upholds a tradition of human rights that is decades old; moreover, it confronts another tradition going back hundreds of years--the tradition of preserving human rights while also achieving the objectives set by Government, which involve the use of military force.
There is clearly a clash. Justices coming, in some instances, from countries with a less than strong martial tradition are imbued with a set of legal principles that clearly cause difficulties for the Ministry of Defence and the armed forces. In recent years, history has shown that when there is a clash between Strasbourg and the Ministry of Defence in court, the Ministry--as I have said in the Select Committee--has the same success as the district attorney in "Perry Mason", Hamilton Burger, who, on Sunday nights, lost every case on which he embarked. [Interruption.] I will tell the hon. Member for Hereford (Mr. Keetch) about that later, but I think that he is older than he looks. Indeed, there are probably repeats of "Perry Mason", in colour.
As I have said before, problems are involved. Some would argue that the main purpose of the military is to fight and win wars, rather than to constitute an active microcosm of society. However, in 1951 a Government--I am not sure whether they were Labour or Conservative--signed a treaty by which we are bound. I have not heard Opposition Members or their predecessors urge us to extricate ourselves, in full or in part, from a convention that whoever it was willingly signed.
Mr. Gerald Howarth: I think that a Labour Government signed it, but I know that, whichever Government did so, Ministers at the time were determined to be convinced before signing that our existing legislation was wholly compatible with the convention. Since then, there has been so much reinterpretation of the original convention that we are experiencing an endless stream of invitations to adjust our laws accordingly.
Mr. George: I think that, in this respect, the French were either wiser or stupider than us--probably the former rather than the latter--in not signing until 1974. As the hon. Gentleman knows, once a country has signed, it is difficult for it to extricate itself from what binds signatories, and we were a signatory in 1951.
I appreciate the Government's dilemma, which would have been a dilemma for the last Government. Whatever brave face the Government may put on it, the Bill may affect a commanding officer's ability to maintain respect. In my view, however, there was no alternative. We kept losing cases. Conservative Members, given their interest in business efficiency and their desire to reduce expenditure, would surely ask, "Why should we continue
to lose cases? Why should we spend money on expensive lawyers, before losing cases and running up bills for the taxpayer?" I suspect that the Government had no real choice, and I would have expected some sympathy, if not support, from Conservative Members.Our lawyers have regularly been beaten around the head by their European counterparts. Even if the Bill becomes law, as it should and presumably will, there are no guarantees for those who have lost cases as often as my local football club has lost matches this season--although I still have faith in it. The Bill has been described as gold-plating, over-insurance and over the top, but even if compensatory measures that may not appear entirely necessary now are introduced, a Government who have lost so many cases in Strasbourg would surely be prudent to say much more than "We lost in the past; our new legislation will ensure that we do not lose in the future".
Mr. George: As a military man, the hon. Gentleman can respond to that when he makes his own speech.
The trouble with the military, it is said, is that they are too keen on fighting battles that they have won and lost. The trick is to anticipate the next battle, and it strikes me as prudent to gold-plate. We have been given examples of the next bunch of cases that are being dealt with, or are about to be dealt with, in Strasbourg. I think that the Bill is an instance of commendable efficiency and far-sightedness, a quality for which the Ministry of Defence is rarely known and to which the Opposition have never succumbed.
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