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Mr. Barnes: Is it not important to establish the standing of Amnesty International? The Labour party made considerable use of such reports in connection with developments in South Africa, for instance, and sought to proceed along the lines of those reports. I was very disappointed, in that the Minister of State seemed to place little significance on the Amnesty International reports; indeed, he almost seemed to put them on a par with those in the Daily Mirror. All of us would criticise that newspaper's approach.

Adam Price: The hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point, and I shall give him an example of what happened under a previous Labour Government. Following an Amnesty International report by Dr. Rastgeldi on alleged torture at the Fort Morbat interrogation centre in Aden in the summer of 1966, the then Labour Government set up their own independent inquiry into those allegations, which led to the Bowen report. When allegations were made about alleged mistreatment in internment when the subsequent Conservative Government were in office, they commissioned two independent reports: the Compton report of November 1971, and the 1972 Parker report. So the Government are departing from established precedent. When widespread allegations are made of mistreatment and human rights violations by British forces, the Government should institute a general independent inquiry in order to establish the facts.

Police investigations into individual incidents are taking place, in order to get at the facts and to assess the innocence or guilt of those accused. But we also need a general inquiry, so that policy lessons can be learned in respect of the very process issues to which reference has been made. For example, we were told that the practice
 
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of hooding was outlawed by legal directives on military interrogation, given in August 1972 and in the following year. Yet that practice was ongoing between April and September of last year. Why was the illegal practice of hooding, which may have contributed to the death of Baha Mousa, allowed to continue? [Interruption.] The Minister of State says that it was not allowed to continue, but British Red Cross officials said that they had a meeting a year ago with British Army commanding officers in Basra, at which those officers admitted that hooding had been going on. They promised a review, but why did that review of an illegal practice take until September to be implemented? If the Government are not prepared to answer those questions, we need an independent inquiry to get at the truth. The Minister knows that the UN Committee against Torture and the European Court of Human Rights have declared hooding to be a degrading and inhuman treatment. That is in addition to the practice being illegal in British law. The Minister must explain why that practice was allowed to continue for six months.

5.35 pm

Mr. Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab): First, I associate myself with all hon. Members who have paid tribute to the armed forces this afternoon. For the last three years, I have been privileged to be a member of the Defence Committee, which brought me into regular contact with the men and women in our armed forces. Last year, I also took part in the armed forces parliamentary scheme with the Royal Marines. I never cease to be amazed by the professionalism and dedication of some very young people whom we ask to perform a range of tasks to protect our society and make it a safer place.

I also associate myself with those who have condemned acts of torture and the degrading treatment of prisoners in Iraq. However, I believe that we should distinguish clearly between what the Americans have done and the treatment of prisoners in British-controlled hands. Many people and media make the mistake of not making that distinction. I would be the first to criticise the Government if action had not been taken against the perpetrators or if the accusations had not been properly investigated, but I am reassured by what I have heard.

We could debate the issue of condemning the Daily Mirror. If what the Minister said today is true and the pictures are false, I do not see how anyone could support what the newspaper did. Irrespective of that, however, the damage done to the coalition brand—a term used by the hon. Member for Mid-Norfolk (Mr. Simpson)—in the Arab world is immeasurable. Those people on the Arab street in the middle east who wish to perpetuate radical forms of Islamic terrorism are using the pictures as a recruiting tool. That will be a long-lasting problem, which the people responsible for printing them should take into account in the future.

I had the privilege last year of visiting both Iraq and Afghanistan. I know that some of my hon. Friends disagreed with the war in Iraq and I respect their right to hold that position. I voted in favour of military action in Iraq. It was a very difficult decision to take—perhaps one of the most difficult in my life—because it meant people were going to die. It may not be popular to say it now, but I still think that it was the right decision.
 
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During my visits to Iraq and Afghanistan last year I met some dedicated men and women who were working hard to bring about a better future for those countries. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Mr. Beard) that much of the good work that they do—in infrastructural work, rebuilding hospitals and so forth—is being wholly unreported. I met some people in Kabul who were doing that work in their own time, because they were dedicated to bringing about a better life for the people who live there. We should recognise the work of such people, which would help to bring about more balance in the debate.

I hope that over the next few weeks the media will report some of the good news stories about those people who are working, I have to say, sometimes in very difficult and dangerous circumstances. That applies to military personnel, people in the Department for International Development and in the Foreign Office. If we do only one thing today, we should say a big thank you to those people whom we politicians ask to do things on our behalf. Sometimes we cynically sit back and think that it is easy for them.

5.39 pm

Mr. David Kidney (Stafford) (Lab): They also serve who provide the logistics support to our front-line forces. Members of the logistics services also risk their lives: for instance, members of the logistics wing at Stafford have provided the lorry convoys from the port of Umm Qasr to Basra.

I have also seen the huge logistics effort going on in this country. Staff at MOD Donnington and RAF Stafford, which make up the north centre of the Defence Storage and Distribution Agency, have made a fantastic effort to keep the supply chain going, both during the ramp-up to the beginning of Operation Telic and in the year since.

The units at Donnington and Stafford have been required to work together and are a model of tri-service working. They perform 2.5 million transactions a year, and keep safe assets worth as much as £6 billion at any one time. It is a tremendous operation, achieving 40 per cent. efficiency savings as it goes on and employing about 1,000 people overall.

There is talk in the logistics service about the possible privatisation of our supply chain, but the people to whom I am referring deserve credit for the work that they do. They also deserve security in their work. I point out that when contracts break down in the commercial world, there is a right to sue in the courts. In contrast, when a contract breaks down in the industry that provides our military forces, it is people's lives that are at risk.

5.41 pm

Mr. Julian Brazier (Canterbury) (Con): After an unpromising start by the Minister of State, the debate has been of high quality. The hon. Member for Dunfermline, West (Rachel Squire) gave us a lot to think about in connection with manpower overstretch, and she emphasised the need to recognise the central importance of logistics to any military operation.

My hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Mr. Viggers) stressed the quality of our junior commanders in the British armed forces. The hon. Member for South Ribble
 
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(Mr. Borrow) placed on record some remarks about the Queen's Lancashire Regiment, and its disgusting treatment by the Daily Mirror. I think that the whole House will have agreed with him. Finally, my hon. Friend the Member for North Essex (Mr. Jenkin) gave us some very wise thoughts on the failures in post-conflict planning. I agreed in particular with the sober warning with which the hon. Member for North Durham (Mr. Jones) ended his speech.

Let me be clear, so that there is no misunderstanding—we in the official Opposition unreservedly support our troops in Iraq in the difficult and dangerous job that they are doing. Whatever doubts there may have been at the time of the invasion, all responsible commentators accept that we owe it to the Iraqis and to those who have given their lives in the conflict to see the matter through. However, supporting our valiant troops in this time of crisis does not imply any suspension of the task of holding the Government to account.

My father was a professional soldier and always maintained that, before undertaking any military operation, Britain's armed forces could do little wrong if their first strike was against the British Ministry of Defence. In my naivety, I used to think that he was joking. As Harold Macmillan observed, events are a politician's greatest enemy. In this case, however, events have largely resulted from actions taken by our Government and the Government of our principal ally, America.

The official Opposition supported the Iraq invasion in the belief that the Government had a clear plan for a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq. It is now clear that there was not very much of plan. We were assured that cheering crowds would throw flowers, and—yes!—there were cheering crowds, as we all saw on television. However, there was no follow-up in terms of development. As it has become clear that security had not been planned properly, the cheering crowds have steadily been replaced by baying hordes throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at our soldiers.

It is evident that the job is going to be much harder and take much longer than was envisaged. Are the forces in Iraq large enough? The 1945–48 campaign in Palestine took place in a country quite a lot smaller than Scotland, with a population of less than 1 million. Our forces there peaked at 120,000, yet today the coalition has about 160,000 troops to deal with 25 million people in a country twice the area of Great Britain.

Obviously there are differences, but one cannot help wondering whether, once again, our armed forces are being asked to do more and more, with less and less. A stable, democratic Iraq in the heart of that troubled region would be a wonderful legacy to the Iraqi people and the whole region, but the increasingly long-term commitment involved is making the problems of overstretch in our armed forces worse and worse.

The Government's published establishment manpower requirement across the three services has been cut by 3,000 since April 2000, yet on 1 January this year we were still 4,000 short of even that reduced target. At least a quarter of our infantry battalions have not been allowed the required time between tours of duty
 
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because of manpower shortages. The armed forces review board report of 2003 found that last year more than half of the personnel had to change leave arrangements for service reasons, often losing the holiday packages we take for granted, without receiving compensation. According to the figures, average working hours across the three services has reached the point at which pay for private soldiers, calculated on the number of hours they are on duty in a typical week, is approaching the minimum wage introduced by the Government.

Let us think of service personnel families, too. Between 1997 and 2001, the divorce rate in the armed forces, which already is much higher than that in the civilian community, increased by nearly half. Imagine how dispiriting it must be to win the war merely to lose it on the home front. The right hon. Member for Edinburgh, East and Musselburgh (Dr. Strang) made some salient remarks on that subject.

Canterbury is proud of the locally based Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and, from the regular troops, the Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment, which are in Iraq. We are also proud of the Territorial Army platoon from the 3rd Battalion—the TA battalion—of the Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment, which is based in my constituency and will be going to Iraq shortly. The truth is, however, that our reserve forces are just as overstretched as our regular forces. The TA has been cut by a third since 1997, with a disproportionate amount of the cuts falling on the infantry and the sappers, the very people we most need in Iraq. The Government have subsequently given the TA infantry the task of heading up the rapid reaction forces for our homeland defence.

A survey of TA personnel sent to the Gulf found that four fifths did not expect their employer to support any further deployments in peacetime. Some 63 per cent. of medical and technical staff in the TA said that they were thinking of resigning when they got back. In Westminster Hall I put a series of detailed questions, put to me by TA officers, to the Under-Secretary, who is normally a courteous man, and he promised that he would let me have a written answer. They were on the weaknesses in the new TA infantry battalion structure, the fact that the intelligence officers have no staff, and problems with the training regime. I would be grateful if he told me when he is likely to answer those questions.

In front of the Defence Committee on Wednesday 24 March, General Sir Mike Jackson said:

"This time last year the army was very heavily committed indeed, 50 per cent. plus. That is not sustainable . . . We can take that surge. What we cannot do is sustain it over any length of time."

That surely is the point. Our forces are being deployed on more and more operations and, in the case of Iraq, it is increasingly clear that we do not know how long they will be there. My hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Norfolk (Mr. Simpson), in his powerful speech, made it clear that if any organisation is stretched hard enough, standards will in the end start to decline, even those in our armed forces.

Furthermore, the allegations against our troops, and, much more potently, the revolting pictures of certain US soldiers committing those vile acts of human rights abuses, have further endangered the lives of our soldiers. The Minister did not answer most of my hon. Friend's
 
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questions. I have just two on that subject for the Under-Secretary. When were the British military authorities first informed of the accusations against American service personnel, and when did they first tell Ministers?

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