Select Committee on Public Administration Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 19-36)

PROFESSOR JACK HAYWARD, MR RON BRIDGE AND MRS ANN MOXLEY

1 DECEMBER 2005

  Q19 Chairman: Could I welcome you very much, Professor Hayward. You were the subject of the Ombudsman investigation, so we are particularly glad that you have been able to join us. Mr Bridge, you chair the Association. We are very glad to have you and also Ann Moxley, a former internee. We are very glad that you are able to join us. The Committee thought that it would be extremely helpful if we had a little time with you before we saw the Minister, because we wanted to get your feelings about this. Could I perhaps ask Professor Hayward first? Could I start, if it is not going to be too upsetting, by going back even further and asking, just very briefly, about the experience which has triggered the whole issue? Would you like to say what happened, when it was, and how it was?

  Professor Hayward: I was a very young boy at the time, in my very early teens. Since then, I have put that experience pretty firmly behind me. I did not dwell on it. I do not think that it has marked me for life, though it may have given my education a slightly peculiar twist, in that obviously I did not have a normal schooling in the camp. Some of the words that are being used in this whole affair have, I must say, somewhat surprised me. The word "distress" keeps cropping up. I have not felt particular distress. I have felt anger and outrage at the central question that it seems to me has come up in this matter and which is of cardinal importance. It is the question of what it means to be British and what it means to have an identity as someone who is British. I happen to regard it as having inestimable value for me personally. People who apparently do not have that view have decided that they can discriminate between different categories of the British. Irrespective of the fact that I spent some years in the camp, therefore, it seems to me that there is a wider question. I do not want to go round, showing wounds and bruises. That, to me, is not the central question. The central question is why the British Government is repudiating and casting a slur on some of its fellow citizens who were at the time British; who are now British; who feel British; may not be biologically British. The Japanese, as has been repeated on a number of occasions in this affair, did not enquire of my family, myself, and others like me what our blood links were with the United Kingdom. Perhaps it was just as well that we were not in the hands of the Nazi Germans, because then they might have been interested in blood links. So all this seems to me, in a way, bizarre. What worries me in this whole affair is that a muddle and a mess of people in the Civil Service—who, as I think the Ombudsman has just said, often rush to do what their political masters, after a long delay, tell them to do something about—then get things wrong, try to cover it up, and get themselves in an ever-worse mess; but, in the process, add insult to injury to people who feel, on the whole, that their own government is not where they expect this to be coming from.

  Q20  Chairman: And, when they come up with this wretched £500 so-called "apology" payment, you have told them what to do with it, have you not?

  Professor Hayward: I told them even before. Why I went through the Ombudsman and not through the courts—which the Ministry of Defence go on about—is, happening to be a political scientist, I know that the Ombudsman has access to papers and people. She and her staff were able to get at some of the information which a court, I suspect, would not have done. Therefore when she, as she has done, reported to you and to the Department, she is putting you in a position to see how this mess was arrived at. There are smoking guns, and more than smoking guns—if I may put it like that. It seems to me that the result, therefore, is that the process of going through to look at maladministration gets at the injustice, in a curious way, that a court of law finds difficult to get at justice.

  Q21  Chairman: Thank you very much for that. Could I ask Ann Moxley to give us your perspective on this?

  Mrs Moxley: Yes. I totally agree with what Professor Hayward has said. In fact, he has pretty well said what I was going to say. If I may, I would just like to amplify a bit on the question of why. My mother was a nurse. She had a number of friends who were nurses and they were working in Hong Kong at the time. We were in Shanghai, but they were in Hong Kong. When the Japanese came in, they threw the nurses on top of their patients, raped them, bayoneted them and the patients in their bed, and chopped them up; and there were body parts everywhere, I am told. I have just heard recently—I do not know whether any of you heard a programme called The Reunion with Sue McGregor—one of those people explained that she had been a child who had been picked up. Her father and brothers had been taken off, but her mother and she, and possibly a couple of sisters, were taken into a camp. The only place they could put them to bed was in those wards where this had happened. I do not know whether the bodies were still there or not, but the floor was covered in blood because she, as a child, could not move her legs. It was sticky, and that is all she remembers about that. I do not know whether all those children's great-grandmothers had had the wit to give birth in Britain. It seems to me to be absolutely nothing to do with where their grandparents were born. They were given British nationality. In fact, the British consul in Shanghai gave the Japanese the lists of people who were Britons. They were interned as enemy nationals. To turn round now and say, "Well, actually they weren't really enemy nationals", because something happened subsequently—I do not know what—that took their British nationality away—if it did—what the heck has that got to do with whether they should be reimbursed or not? I am lucky: I was reimbursed. I can show my grandparents' birth certificates back to about 1500, because I happen to be interested in genealogy. Does that make me more valuable therefore as a Brit? Should I have had five times as much as them? It is a nonsense. It is totally irrelevant. If they were there, they should be paid the same as me, and the same as everybody else. I think that it is quite disgraceful. I do not think that it is understood or was understood in government, because I went to an AGM of the ABCIFER some years ago now, where Kit McMahon—and he was in at the time when John Major was Prime Minister—was trying to sell us a scheme the Japanese were apparently wanting to put forward, introducing bursaries and educational visits—a pro-Japanese, pro-British kind of liaison. He was voted out 100 per cent. There was not a single person who did not vote against him on that occasion. We all thought that it was a matter of principle and should go ahead as a matter of principle that we were all claiming together. That was five or six years ago—I am not quite sure how long ago it was. Ron could tell us, I am sure. Just after the meeting he turned to me and said, "You're all fools. You'll never get the money, and you're going to waste an awful lot of time and money". I said, "I don't think this is about money, do you? It's about the principle". We were all willing to spend our money then to try and get that principle established, and I am very glad that we have. I hate the idea of the present government or the MoD, or whoever is responsible, actually watering it down, because it seems to be quite wrong. We should be concentrating on who was there and making sure they are being paid, and they should be paid the same as everybody else. I feel very strongly about that, and so do a lot of other people I know.

  Q22  Chairman: Thank you very much for that. Certainly from our experience some of the strongest representations have come from those who have had the payment, but who are incensed that people with whom they were interned have not had it.

  Mrs Moxley: There is an awful lot of feeling about that, there really is. I did not realise until very recently that people I knew, who live in this country, in fact had not been paid. I am absolutely astounded that they have not.

  Q23  Chairman: Is not Professor Hayward's point the one that you are making and others make: that it is nothing to do with the blessed money? It is to do with the idea that there are two classes of Britishness?

  Mrs Moxley: Absolutely. That is the essential. If you applied it to the country now and said that everybody who did not have a grandparent born here was not entitled to the Health Service, or education, you would not stay in office very long, any of you! It is just not right, and should not be muddled. There should be no irrelevant rules at all; that criteria for the settlement should be proscribed by the treaty that was abandoned. I think that was absolutely disgraceful, and I would personally like to sue the person who made that decision—but I suppose that is beyond it. However, Ron Bridge has a huge amount of information and we should use it.

  Q24  Chairman: Could I move quickly to Mr Bridge and say this? One of the issues that arises is how many people. Is it possible to say with any certainty how many people have been affected?

  Mr Bridge: When the announcement was made, the only information that the Government had of the numbers was an estimate that I had given them, because I had the list of three camps with the ages. I took that to a firm of actuaries and persuaded them to do it for free, and to tell me how many of those people would still be alive. Applying that to the total number that I knew had been in the camps, they came up with the figure of 3,000 maximum that should be alive now. As far as the total number in the camps is concerned, there are various documents in the National Archives at Kew. They vary from 15,012, which was the number of civilians the Japanese Government declared they had in custody to the surrender documents on September 3, 1945, to a figure of 16,586, which the Colonial Office had come out with as the number of civilians held in January 1945—the discrepancy there was probably because the Colonial Office were not aware of deaths—and a figure of some post-war studies that were done in the 1950s, which suggested that there could be as many as 20,000. So I based all my calculations on the highest figure. If people should wonder why there is this discrepancy, it can be pretty well explained in that the members of the Volunteer Forces in the Far East, who had been recruited by the Colonial Office, were considered at the end of the war by the War Office—the precursor of the Ministry of Defence—as being civilians, because they had not been recruited under the auspices of the War Office. The Japanese considered that merchant seamen were civilians, and also the military DEMS crews—that is, the defensively equipped merchant ships' anti-aircraft gunners—although they were serving, they were considered in the Japanese camps and in the Japanese records as civilians. There was also some dispute as to whether policemen were civilians or military. So that explains the discrepancy. However, I am pretty confident that 20,000 was the maximum that were incarcerated, and I am pretty confident that it is about 3,000 who are alive now. Having said that, the Ministry of Defence had no records. They asked me for records, which I tried to give them. In fact, I helped them in a variety of things. A number of people who had received the £48 10s, which was the list they had for authority to payment as being interned, were actually not interned, because the payments on that scheme were slightly different. They had been captured by the Japanese and in fact shipped home as members of the diplomatic staff, and the rest of it. So those people got paid. Other people who were in Red Cross homes or Church homes were also accepted, because they did not know. This is cited in documents which I have now seen, which I had no knowledge of at the time. However, I do know people where I have been asked for verification that they were in the camp, and where I quite categorically said, "No, he was not there, but his father was in that camp", because I have now got the list of something like 45,000 names. Not all British of course, but you can then track it down.

  Q25  Chairman: No, you are the absolute expert on this, which is why we are pursuing you. What I was really after was this. What is your best estimate? If the scheme had been implemented as we thought it had been announced in November 2000, before the blood-link stuff came in, and if the worry from the MoD is perhaps the floodgates argument, what is the number of people that would come in if it was implemented as it was believed in November 2000 it would be implemented? What is the number and what is the cost?

  Mr Bridge: Three thousand people, which would be £30 million. In fact, I did do a paper to that effect which I sent, because I assumed policy emanated from Whitehall, to the Minister of Defence. It was sent on to the War Pensions Agency in Blackpool, and I had an acknowledgement from them to say that they were looking into it and would give me a reply within 28 days. So I then wrote another letter to the Minister and pointed out that, as it was policy, I thought that policy emanated from Whitehall and perhaps he would like to answer my paper. That was 19 June 2001. I am still waiting for a reply to that paper. It was fairly obvious—it is obvious now—that in fact they had made their minds up, "Don't confuse us with facts. We're not shifting".

  Chairman: You have been an absolutely assiduous defender of this cause and, unlike most lobbyists, you know more about what is going on than they do. We are very grateful for that.

  Q26  David Heyes: I agree entirely, Chairman. I just want to put on record the experience of one of Ron Bridge's members, a constituent of mine Celia Meade. She is 68 years old now and was taken into captivity as a four-year-old in 1942. She meets the blood-link requirements. Her family were second-generation colonial administrators, getting on with the business of running the Empire, when the Japanese arrived. She meets this bizarre, Nazi-like test of racial purity but she cannot prove it, because the first thing that happened was the house was bombed and all the records that would have allowed her to prove it were destroyed. Despite her best efforts over the years, she has not been able to produce a sufficient quality of information. Despite being able to trace, like Ann Moxley, her family back many generations, it has not been enough to meet the requirements. Briefly, her circumstances were that her mother was raped by a Japanese officer and then punished for not thanking him profusely enough after the event. She witnessed that as a four-year-old girl. She saw her nine-month-old brother die in captivity from malnutrition. She survived on maggots gathered from the latrines in the camp. I could go on. She suffered the most desperate privations, which resulted in the death of her father shortly after the war, broken mentally and physically. Both she and her mother, who did survive, were delighted when the £10,000 awards were announced. Little enough compensation as it was for what they had suffered, they felt that at last there was some recognition for what they had gone through. They therefore applied and, in June 2001, were turned down because they could not meet the test. I think that it is worth putting that on the record, but for me the question that flows from it is this. Why on earth did the Ombudsman need to get involved in this? Why did natural justice and common decency not prevail? I would just ask you to comment on that, Ron.

  Mr Bridge: I think there was a case to be looking at it. The various departments of government had resisted doing anything for a number of years. It was not until we found a document at Kew, in which there was categoric proof that the Foreign Office had in fact decided not to do its best for British subjects under the Peace Treaty—where they could have reopened the Peace Treaty under article 26, because Japan had done a better deal. The footnote on that document is, "We must never let this get out because, if it ever gets out, there will be a monumental political row". That was written in 1955, and whoever it was certainly had a crystal ball. When this occurred, the Ministry of Defence were given the job to do. They would not communicate at all with the civilians. They did not want to know. In fact, the then Minister of Defence reported to our lawyers that he was not the slightest bit interested in civilians. The numbers that I gave I had to give to Number 10's private office, and they would pass it on. When they made an announcement and there was a meeting on the implementation, I asked "What do you mean by the term `British'?", because I dealt with war pensions and, at the time, war pensions were payable only to those born in the United Kingdom. There were various definitions of "British" and I said, "What do you mean?". They came back on 24 November 2000 and said, "What we mean is British under the then rules. It doesn't matter where they live or what their nationality is now". Then they introduced the grandparent. They still would not talk. I produced a paper. It is not a long paper; it is only three pages. I would have thought they could have at least discussed the matter. Subsequently, Andrew Dismore, who is chairman of the all-party group on this, has tried to get a meeting with various ministers. They do not want to know. In other words, they are frightened of the facts. They have made their minds up and that is it. They have dug a hole and, as far as I can see, they are still digging. I would add just one point. I was in a camp too. My paternal side are from Empire, having been out there a long time, but my mother was born in Yorkshire—and that was allowed as being part of the British Isles!

  Chairman: It is good to have that on the record!

  Q27  Julie Morgan: I think that we all very much admire your determination in fighting this case. I notice in the memorandum which you gave to us that you did seem to imply that you had been warned off from continuing with this. I wondered if you could say a bit more about that.

  Mr Bridge: The only contact I have had with previous ministers was when, as you will know, various government departments do have the odd reception, and I turned up at them, and I was told quite categorically that I was wasting the time of the Ministry of Defence; that I should get off it, and there was no way that I would ever win. Frankly, all that did was to steel my resolve that I will win in the end—and I will win in the end. I am determined to. I have received it. That is fine. But I have seen these people—people who shared the same watery soup, the same mouldy bread—who were there because they had a British passport and who are now being rejected by their own government. It is actually downright criminal.

  Q28  Julie Morgan: I agree with you. So you were told that you, as individuals, could not succeed against the might of the MoD?

  Mr Bridge: That is right, yes.

  Q29  Julie Morgan: You said earlier on that you felt that the MoD had made a decision, and that was that.

  Mr Bridge: Yes.

  Q30  Julie Morgan: That was the reason you were not able to get any further in relation to this relatively small group of people and relatively small amount of money. Could you say a bit more about that?

  Mr Bridge: If payments were to be made to those who were entitled to a war pension under the Personal Injuries (Civilians) Scheme 1983, which is the last piece of legislation on that subject, they would have had to have been born in the United Kingdom—because that legislation requires the person to have been born in the United Kingdom. I received the money on 1 February. As I had been born outside the United Kingdom, my father had been born outside the United Kingdom, obviously they were therefore not using it. I find it significant that the bulk of rejection letters were sent out on one day, 25 June 2001, and it was the day that a caveat to the war pensions policy, signed by Hugh Bayley MP who was then the Minister, came into effect—widening war pensions to those who could prove that their grandparents were born in the United Kingdom. I think that they therefore latched on to a change in a different field and hoped that they could browbeat that through. I think that is what went through their minds, though I do not have the mind of the Ministry of Defence, fortunately. It goes a little bit further. There are enormous repercussions, because some of the people who have been paid have had to prove that their grandparents were born in the United Kingdom, when in fact they were born in the Far East while their fathers were serving in the British Army. They had British military birth certificates. Those were not good enough for the Ministry of Defence, however, as being British. They had to prove it in relation to their grandparents. If you follow that logic through, it means that every person born of the British military who has been stationed in Germany since 1945 is not seen as British by the Ministry of Defence. The repercussions of that are enormous.

  Q31  Julie Morgan: Under their criteria as it is now, do you think there have been many wrong payments?

  Mr Bridge: I would suspect that there have probably been about 150. I know from the documents I have subsequently seen, signed by Mr Alan Burnham, that there was something like 30-odd people from Rosary Hill, which was the International Red Cross home in Hong Kong, who had been paid. That is their own admission. I do know that there were about 25 or 30 who had come through and they asked me for proof of internment, and I said, "They weren't interned. Their father was". In those instances, their mothers were born locally. Once they went into a camp, the Japanese had to feed them. So they gave families options -wives who had children, generally under five, and there were quite a lot of those in Shanghai—to stay and live on the economy. Effectively, Japan at the time was interested in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, did not want to upset those born in the Far East and living out in the Far East—except of course people with a European connotation—and they were trying to placate them. It was also very much the whim of the local military commander, the Japanese commander, as to who went into camp. In fact, my grandfather and grandmother were left to stay outside of camp. They were in their late-seventies and he was very much an invalid, having been beaten up by the Japanese in 1937—but that is a different story. The point was that they were allowed to live on the economy because the local commander thought, "Actually, a 78 or 80-year-old isn't really a threat to Japan's military might".

  Q32  Julie Morgan: Excluding the people in the Rosary Hill camp, it was about 120 people, was it?

  Mr Bridge: This is how I come to the figure—when they talk about 1,400 still not paid, or that sort of figure—that I think there is only about 800. I had 900 names sent to me, with dates of birth and, taking the proportion of those who I knew were not in camp, and said so—that they still had on the records and who they felt were in camp—I said that I could not give a certificate to them that they were in camp. I have had advances from people who have been trying to bribe my signature. I am afraid my signature is not for sale.

  Q33  Julie Morgan: Are you aware of any people who have died during this period, who were entitled to this and did not get it?

  Mr Bridge: Yes, quite a few died, some of them abroad—who have gone abroad for their health. Quite a few of them have died, yes. Obviously time is catching up when people are in their late-seventies and eighties, and particularly when they have been through an experience like that.

  Julie Morgan: Which is why we need to settle this. Thank you.

  Q34  Chairman: Rounding off this section, we are about to see the minister. What would you like to ask him—all of you?

  Professor Hayward: In a way, it is the sort of question I would like to put to members of this Committee as well as to the Minister. It is to say this. If you were denied your British identity when you feel you are entitled to it under the legislation that then existed, and you are either a Member of Parliament or, in his case, a Minister of the Crown, do you think this is conduct worthy of the office you hold?

  Q35  Chairman: It is a formidable question, which we will attempt to do justice to. Ann?

  Mrs Moxley: I think that is a super question. I suppose, at the other end of the scale, it is perhaps a silly question but it is, "Haven't you got something better to do than to mess about with all of this?"!

  Q36  Chairman: That is also a formidable question. Ron?

  Mr Bridge: "You have picked up a problem that was in existence before your time. Are you satisfied that your department is prepared to make decisions contrary to the facts, and to be too proud to try and establish the facts before they make any decision?"

  Chairman: Thank you very much indeed for that, and thank you for coming along.





 
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