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Mr. Fabricant: I shall not give way to the hon. Gentleman as others wish to speak.
Body language and face-to-face contact are important. They would be lost in a trial by satellite link with a 2.5 second delay. Would anyone suggest that we need not turn up in the Chamber? Perhaps we could all sit in our offices or go on fancy fact-finding visits around the world.
Dr. Julian Lewis: So that is where all the Labour Members are.
Mr. Fabricant: Perhaps Labour Members are doing just that. They may be sitting in their offices or on fact-finding visits to the United States and Australia.
Dr. Godman: They may be watching the debate.
Mr. Fabricant: They may be watching it, but could we have an effective debate--the stakes here are not so high as in a trial which might result in imprisonment--by satellite or by television? Of course we could not. After the Chamber was bombed in 1941, there was a discussion in 1945 or 1946 about how large the new Chamber should be, and whether it should be big enough for 650 hon. Members. It was decided to make it small--
Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. The hon. Member is going wide of the debate.
Mr. Fabricant: Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker. My point is simply that we chose a small Chamber because face-to-face contact and body language are important. As I say, wide-angle lenses prevent the interpretation of body language. In addition, with a 2.5 second satellite delay it would be impossible to operate the camera remotely and to zoom in. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Greenock and Inverclyde (Dr. Godman) is making a lot of noise. I will give way if he wishes to intervene.
There has been a debate on whether broad or narrow band communications should be used. The Minister said that broad band communications would be easy. The Government and the Ministry of Defence mainly use Inmarsat for their satellite communications. But that is not broad band; it is a narrow band communication medium. I hate to correct my hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury, who made that point, but when he talked about megabytes he meant megabits. However, he made the point eloquently. The practicality is that at certain times and from certain locations broad-band transmission would not be possible. Even broad-band transmission would not enable one to pick up the nuances, the circumstances and the demeanour of people giving evidence.
Mr. Key: It was a good soundbite.
Mr. Fabricant: It was a marvellous soundbite--
Mr. Fabricant: Yes, a sound bit.
I shall not go on any longer because I know that at least one other Conservative Member wants to contribute.
Dr. Julian Lewis: There is no one on the other side.
Mr. Fabricant: Indeed, no Labour Members want to contribute to the debate.
Like so much other legislation, the Bill has not been thought through carefully. I suspect that reams of Government amendments will be tabled to it, as has happened to so many other Bills. The measure is not practical. More important, because the practicalities have not been thought through, the Bill is not just.
6.25 pm
Mr. Nick Hawkins (Surrey Heath): I am delighted to have the opportunity to make a brief contribution to the debate. Following the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Lichfield (Mr. Fabricant), I am tempted to say that, for the Government, the debate is a case of the biter bit.
My interest in the Bill stems at least in part from the fact that I come from a services family. My grandfather was a career soldier, my father was a naval officer in submarines during and after the second world war and I was a Royal Navy cadet. I have a specific interest in armed forces discipline because when the previous quinquennial Armed Forces Act was passed, I was Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Ministers of State at the Ministry of Defence. All the service disciplinary issues that are tackled only in the quinquennial Act came before a special Select Committee. Some newer hon. Members may not realise that, uniquely, the quinquennial Armed Forces Bill is considered by such a Committee, not a Standing Committee. Some hon. Members, at least one of whom is on the Opposition Benches, were involved in that Committee.
It was apparent during the passage of the Bill when we were in government that the then Opposition did not dare trust the average group of Labour Members. They consulted only very senior people--the few with services experience. Many of them had been national service men. Only those Labour Members understood services discipline. Sadly, the Labour party has forgotten some of those lessons since being in government.
As many of my hon. Friends made clear, the Bill is unnecessary. Debates in another place made it clear that our current service discipline policies could happily co-exist with the European convention on human rights. Perhaps Labour Members realise that the Bill is unnecessary; few of them have bothered to turn up to support a Government measure.
I represent a military constituency, whose main town in Camberley, and many of my constituents are serving and retired officers and service men. My main anxiety about the Bill is the dangers that it poses for the chain of command. As my hon. Friend the Member for Aldershot (Mr. Howarth) said in an effective speech, and as other hon. Friends emphasised, the measure will undermine the chain of command. It is an invitation to the barrack-room lawyer.
I declare an interest. I am a barrister, and I have done some court martial work, although not for several years. Many of my friends in my former chambers still do court martial work, and one of my closest friends appears regularly in international war crimes cases. If I had longer to speak, I would refer to some of the experiences of my friends in chambers. They would share the anxieties that my hon. Friends, especially my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for North-East Bedfordshire (Sir N. Lyell), expressed. Perhaps I shall have an opportunity to revert to some of those
matters in a future debate. I shall not be able to serve on the Standing Committee that considers the Bill because of commitments to other Committees.Important questions have been asked in another place and in our debate today about the practicality of implementing the Bill in the field. The judicial officers for which the Bill provides will be gold plated. Duty officers could happily undertake their role. Who will pay for those judicial officers? What will be the extra cost for the taxpayer? Where will they be located? My hon. Friend the Member for Lichfield referred to the practicality of video links. I have been interested in their use in normal court proceedings, particularly those involving children, but they will not work for the reasons that he set out.
There is so much that one could say, but unfortunately time is against us and I want to ensure that my hon. Friend the Member for Grantham and Stamford (Mr. Davies) has the chance to press the Minister. Although I know that he will not have an effective answer to our concerns I hope that they will be taken seriously--not only in the House, but well beyond.
6.30 pm
Mr. Quentin Davies (Grantham and Stamford): On behalf of my colleagues on the Front and Back Benches, I congratulate the Under-Secretary of State for Defence on his elevation to the Government. I hope that his luck improves because it is absolutely clear that he has lost the argument before saying even his first word in the Government's defence from the Front Bench. [Interruption.] It is no use the Minister for the Armed Forces laughing--that is not my judgment, but that of the House.
We have debated the Second Reading of the only Bill relating to defence matters that the Government are introducing this Session. Precisely one supportive contribution was made from those on the Labour Benches, even though there are about 400 Labour Members of the House. We can draw one of two logical conclusions from that: they are totally uninterested in defence and anything to do with the defence of the nation, or they have so little stomach for the Bill that they are not even prepared to sit mutely on their Benches to provide Ministers with some encouragement and support. Not even two of the governing party's MPs came to the House to defend the measure. The House of Commons can be as eloquent in silence as when it speaks explicitly. If that silence is not damning, I do not know what is.
The hon. Member for Walsall, South (Mr. George) was the only Back-Bench Labour Member to contribute. Although he spoke in his usual good-humoured and charming fashion and we all enjoyed listening to him, he did not have much enthusiasm for the Bill. I noted his remarks--he said that there was "no option", which was pretty grudging. Perhaps he meant that his Whips had given him no option. He agreed explicitly with Conservative Members that it was necessary to explore the possibility of a derogation from the European convention on human rights for armed forces discipline. That represents strong criticism of the Government's negligence in not pursuing that option.
Labour Members were not prepared to come to the House to defend their own Bill, so the Liberal auxiliaries were drafted in--two contributed, including the hon. Member for Hereford (Mr. Keetch). A fine military unit is associated with his constituency, but I imagine that it has few disciplinary problems. His argument was extraordinary. He accepted our view that there would be serious difficulties in enforcing the 48-hour rule under which detention could be continued only with the agreement of a military lawyer of some kind--for example, a Trident submarine might be at sea and under the surface for months on end and the rule could not apply in those military circumstances--but argued that such exceptions did not invalidate the Bill. However, we cannot legislate knowing that there are certain situations in which the law cannot be applied. The Liberal party's approach strikes me as extraordinary.
My hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Mr. Viggers) made a fluent and interesting speech. He said that he thought the Bill was untimely, ill-considered, expensive and damaging. Dealing with those four points lucidly and persuasively, he demonstrated that those adjectives were, in fact, an understatement in the context of the judgment that the House should make.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Fareham (Sir P. Lloyd), who has considerable military experience, suggested that the human rights of service men might be served better by the existing system, under which the accused can opt for court martial only after the commanding officer has made his judgment. I hope that the Committee will pursue that interesting point, if the Bill is given a Committee Stage.
My hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Mr. Blunt), who was a serving officer for 12 years, spoke frankly. He told us that he had not only delivered military justice but, on one occasion, been in receipt of it, so he must be considered an expert. He made a number of important points. He clearly felt that the Bill's main weakness lay in the proposal for an appeal court after the making of a summary judgment by a commanding officer. He said that every service man would appeal if the rules of the game were those in the Bill, which prevent the appeal court from imposing a harsher sentence than that originally imposed. Someone who had been accused and dealt with by his commanding officer would have nothing to lose--only something to gain--by lodging an appeal.
It is logical to assume that, in such circumstances, everyone will proceed to the appeal stage. As my hon. Friend pointed out, if only 20 per cent. of cases were subject to appeal, there would be 5,000 appeals per year. It occurs to me that if the number of cases were 100 per cent., although I do not think that anything will ever amount to 100 per cent. in this world, there would be 25,000 appeals per year. The Government's budgeting, however, has been based on the assumption that 800 cases a year would go to the appeal court, and they have managed to run up a prospective expenditure of £6 million on that alone.
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