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RACE RELATIONS (AMENDMENT) BILL [LORDS] [MONEY]
Queen's recommendation having been signified--
Motion made, and Question put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 52(1)(a),
Question agreed to.
Mr. Deputy Speaker:
With permission, I shall put together the motions relating to delegated legislation.
Motion made, and Question put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 118(6) (Standing Committees on Delegated Legislation),
Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.--[Mr. McNulty.]
Mr. Martin Bell (Tatton):
I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to raise this most important issue. All hon. Members have a variety of causes and campaigns clamouring for attention--an independent Member has perhaps more than most--but we know that if we take them all up, we will be ineffective on all of them. However, every now and again, a cause comes along that is so just, so right, so compelling and irresistible that it has to be adopted. Such is the case that I speak of today--the case for a one-off British Government gratuity to our heroes: those thousands of still surviving British service men who suffered for so long in Japanese prisoner of war camps.
Most of them now are in their 80s or 90s, although some of them are still in their 70s. It is therefore not a cause that will wait while intergovernmental consultation goes on in back rooms. The need will fade away, as old soldiers fade away. The Japanese Labour Camp Survivors Association has reported the death of 293 of its members in the past calendar year. It may well be that another died today, and that another will die tomorrow. They are dying out by the natural process of attrition.
I have been drawn to this campaign not only by its urgency and its justice, but by some personal associations for which I make no apology. I was one of the last soldiers to be enlisted in the Suffolk Regiment--the Twelfth of Foot--one of the great infantry line regiments of the British Army. Fifteen years before I joined it, the Suffolk Regiment had two battalions--the Fourth and the Fifth--in Singapore, when Singapore fell. Of the Fourth Battalion, 286 men died in Japanese prisoner of war camps. Of the Fifth Battalion, 271 men died. There was a similar terrible death toll among the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Battalions of the Royal Norfolk Regiment and the First and Second Battalions of the Cambridgeshire Regiment, which made up the Eighteenth East Anglian Division.
There is not a community in my native East Anglia that has not been touched in some way by that. We remember it, as do so many communities in the north-west, part of which I now represent. On 24 June, I shall be leaving my constituency early to attend a reunion of 300 of those grand old soldiers, who belong to the South Suffolk Association. I very much hope that I shall be able to join them and congratulate them on the successful conclusion of this campaign. It is a campaign of great importance.
More than 50,000 British service men were captured by the Japanese, mostly in Singapore, but others after naval engagements, in 1942. Of those 50,000, almost a quarter were killed or died in captivity. Many were executed in cold blood in the act of surrendering. I shall return later in my speech to deal with the conditions of captivity, as that it is an important part of the case for special treatment.
So far as is known, there are now 7,335 surviving British far east prisoners of war. With 3,300 widows, that comes to a little over 10,600 people whom we believe should qualify for compensation.
The case was taken up by the Royal British Legion last autumn, and this is the first time that we have been able to make the case in the House of Commons. The campaign has the open and declared support of 328 Members of Parliament--almost exactly half the membership of the House. Earlier this year, a delegation from the Legion met the Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the hon. Member for Leeds, West (Mr. Battle), as did a parliamentary delegation composed of the hon. Members for Winchester (Mr. Oaten) and for Southampton, Test (Dr. Whitehead) and me.
We found the Minister sympathetic, but the case calls for very much more than sympathy. It calls for active intervention. We now believe that our pleas for justice--for it is justice--and the case of the old soldiers themselves are being heard in No. 10 Downing street. I hope that, in his reply, the Minister will provide those necessary assurances.
Mr. Patrick Nicholls (Teignbridge):
The hon. Gentleman will know of my longstanding interest in the matter. I agree that the case that he is making is now absolutely compelling. In April 1998, the late Derek Fatchett, who was then Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, said that the Government would no longer be pressing the Japanese Government to meet their moral responsibilities. However, have not the Isle of Man and Canada said that, if the United Kingdom Government will not press the Japanese on the issue, they themselves will step into the breach?
Mr. Bell:
I agree entirely with the hon. Gentleman. Such action from the Government would draw the acclamation not just of the entire House, but of the entire country.
It has been argued that compensation should properly be a matter not for the British, but for the Japanese Government. So it should have been. Japan made a compensation payment in 1952, following the 1951 treaty of San Francisco with the United Kingdom and other countries. That compensation payment was £76 per veteran. Not only was that sum trivial, knowing what we know now of the treatment of those men, it was insulting. It was made from the sequestered Japanese assets in this country.
New evidence has since come to light that the British Government failed in their duty in 1955 when they decided not to take advantage of an article of the San Francisco treaty that would have provided for further claims if Japan had concluded more advantageous arrangements with other countries. Lord Reading's reasoning at that time is now in the public domain. In a footnote, he stated:
So it was that the far east prisoners of war were abandoned by the Government of that time and left to do what they could through the Japanese courts by their own actions and at their own expense. It cost a lot of money, took a lot of time and was not successful. Time was not on our side. All that the Japanese had to do was nothing and the problem would conveniently fade away.
It therefore seems to me and to the old soldiers that the one Government to which they can reasonably turn for help is their own. The case for gratuity payments is strong and there are precedents. One comes from the United States. The American Government agreed in 1989 to pay a $20,000 gratuity to each of the citizens of Japanese origin who had been interned--in extremely benign circumstances--in the United States during the second world war. The other precedent comes from Canada. Fifteen months ago the Canadian Government announced that they would pay compensation to their former far east prisoners of war at the rate of 18 Canadian dollars a day for each day of captivity, up to a maximum of 24,000 dollars. The Ministers announcing those payments said that the issue had gone on too long and that the time had come to do the right thing. If that was the case for Canadian veterans then, how much more so is it the case for ours after the further passage of time?
This is not a poor country--it is one of the richest in the world. We live in peace and prosperity--a situation that has, to a large extent, been bought by the sacrifices of those who served and suffered. Nowhere were those sacrifices greater than in the Japanese prison camps. The death rate was higher there than in any other theatre of war, including the Normandy landings. I respectfully argue that it is payback time--indeed, it is beyond payback time.
If compensation is paid to former prisoners of war of the Japanese, an objection may be raised that the former prisoners of war of the Germans should also receive something. I believe that the British people, including those who were held in German prisoner of war camps, accept that the cases are different. The Japanese behaved with consistent brutality and disregard of the Geneva conventions, which the Germans, on the whole, did not. The declining band of forgotten heroes, the former far east prisoners of war, are a special case. The survival of each one of them is a miracle.
I have here some letters sent from German and Italian prisoner of war camps to my father, Adrian Bell, who wrote a book called "Corduroy", which many soldiers carried in their kit bags, because he wrote of a peace in England and a farming way of life to which they wanted to return. Those who wrote those letters knew that they would return. Their repatriation was all but sure. He never got a letter from a Japanese prisoner of war camp and neither did anyone else. The Geneva conventions were not observed. The Red Cross was kept out. People died, people were killed and there were war crimes every day.
From time to time I have spoken in the House about the peace and security that we enjoy in this country and how little we understand the nature of modern warfare. How much less do we understand the nature of what happened to them and how they suffered, yet the documentation is there.
I have here the testimony of one of them, Harold Lock of Sudbury in Suffolk, in a pamphlet called "The Forgotten Men". He was 15 when he joined the Royal Navy, and not much older when the destroyer on which he served, HMS Jupiter, was sunk in the battle of the Java sea and he was lucky to struggle to shore with a companion. The Japanese soldiers made them dig their
own graves and they were just about to be executed when they were saved by an English speaking officer. He writes in his book of what they went through:
One of the service organisations that I support is Combat Stress, the ex-services mental welfare society, which recognises that long after the body has recovered from such an ordeal, the mind has not. No one suffered more than the thousands of British who were ill-treated by the Japanese.
It is remarkable how cheerful so many of them are, how normal they seem and how slow they have been to campaign for themselves. They are the very reverse of whingeing campaigners. To some extent, we owe it to them to campaign for them.
That, for the purposes of any Act resulting from the Race Relations (Amendment) Bill [Lords], it is expedient to authorise the payment out of money provided by Parliament of--
(a) any increase in expenditure of a Minister of the Crown, government department or other public authority which is attributable to complying with any provision made by virtue of the Act; and
(b) any other increase attributable to the Act in the sums which are payable by virtue of any other Act out of money so provided.--[Mr. McNulty.]
That the draft Education (Student Loans) (Repayment) Regulations 2000, which were laid before this House on 17th February, be approved.
That the draft Occupational and Personal Pension Schemes (Penalties) Regulations 2000, which were laid before this House on 22nd February, be approved.--[Mr. McNulty.]
Question agreed to.
7 pm
We are at present unpopular enough with the Japanese without trying to exert further pressure, which would be likely to cause the maximum resentment for the minimum advantage.
Hon. Members might care to think about the diplomatic cast of mind that such a comment represents--a triumph of expediency over principle that has been the curse of our diplomacy down the ages.
Four prisoners made a bid to escape, but were reported to the Japanese by some natives from whom they tried to get a boat. They were brought back to the camp and shot. We were all assembled to witness this barbaric act, but no one showed any emotion. Death had become commonplace, and we were getting like robots, all feelings disappearing except the desire to cling to life. It is strange how precious everything seems when you are on the verge of death as most of us were.
For three and a half years those who survived were treated like that, facing the imminent prospect of death at all times. It is difficult for people who have not been close to death to know how that affects people. Those who could not work died. Those who could worked on in vermin-ridden rags. All of them, I believe, were marked for life. To come through such an experience was like living a nightmare for the rest of their lives.
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