The Troubles were a very difficult period in the history of Northern Ireland. For decades, a brutal sectarian conflict was played out in the streets of Belfast and Londonderry and in rural areas, too. As terrorists, from both Republican and so-called Loyalist organizations murdered innocent civilians, both Catholic and Protestant, standing between them, trying to uphold the rule of law, often as “piggy in the middle” were the brave soldiers of the British Army, deployed on “Operation Banner” – which lasted almost forty years, from 1969 to 2007.
Some 300,000 British Army regular troops, supported by reservists of the Ulster Defense Regiment (UDR) and what was then the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC GC) – fought to keep the terrorists at bay. Over 700 British soldiers were killed on Op Banner and thousands more suffered life-changing injuries, at the hands of both IRA and Loyalist bullets and bombs.
Many of the soldiers who fought this battle were very young, recruited from the backstreets of gritty northern towns, from Blackpool to Barnsley and Bury to Bolton; towns which we would now call “Red Wall” constituencies and which are, currently, overwhelmingly represented in Parliament by Labor MPs. So, why on earth would those same MPs want to dishonor their local veteran's service by voting in Parliament for a Bill to re-open a seemingly endless cycle of investigations and reinvestigations into their now elderly constituents, often at the hands of Sinn Fein and their old comrades, in the IRA?
Well, on Tuesday, 18 November, those same MPs will be heavily whipped to vote for Labour's new Northern Ireland Troubles Bill – which does exactly that. Few Labor MPs will have even read the Bill, let alone understood its contents but they have apparently been told by their Whip's that this is necessary in order to “pursue the IRA.” The hypocrisy of this, has, literally, enraged many elderly Army Veterans, who bravely fought the terrorists but who are now being thrown to the wolves, because of Labour's obsession with the Human Rights Act – and the associated European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
This is “two-tier justice”, plain and simple. There is no other country on earth that would treat its brave veterans in this way. But then there is no other country that is run by a group of human rights fanatics, in the form of the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer; his Attorney General, Lord Hermer and the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Hilary Benn (son of Tony). These politicians come from the same party, Labour, which, during Tony Blair's premiership, released hundreds of convicted IRA terrorists, after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and then gave hundreds more so called “letters of comfort”, effectively granting them immunity from prosecution – a fact which only emerged many years later, with the prosecution at the Old Bailey of the alleged Hyde Park bomber, John Downey, whose trial collapsed when he produced his comfort letter in court and the judge abandoned the proceedings, as a result.
No-one gave our soldiers any letters of comfort. For years, they faced a “conveyor belt” of inquests and private proceedings, often inspired by Sinn Fein, until the last Conservative Government, passed the Legacy Act in 2023, to halt this process. However, Labour's Troubles Bill now seeks to repeal the Tory Legacy Act – and thus restart the conveyor belt, all over again. Hilary Benn has recently admitted in Parliament that there are already nine further inquests ready to commence / recommence – including surrounding the incident at Loughgall, in 1988, when the SAS successfully intercepted and killed eight heavily armed IRA terrorists, who were in the process of using a digger, carrying a massive bomb in its bucket, to blow up an RUC station and murder anyone who somehow survived the blast. The IRA weapons, captured afterwards, when forensically examined were found to have been used in dozens of other Troubles-related murders.
Sinn Fein now desperately wants an inquest, in the hope of the coroner somehow finding the SAS soldiers guilty of murder and then eventually seeing them prosecuted in the criminal courts, as a result. This is all part of their wider campaign, to rewrite history and try to portray the British Army as oppressors and the terrorists as “freedom fighters” – a propaganda campaign which Labour, rather like Lenin's “wise fools”, are now effectively helping Sinn Fein to pursue.
This new Bill has alarmed not only retired Veterans but also those who used to command them. That's why, in an act unprecedented in living memory, eight retired senior Army Generals (including three former Heads of the British Army) and one retired RAF Air Chief Marshal, wrote to The Times just a few days ago, describing Labour's proposals as “a direct threat to national security.”
Those are powerful words but they are fully justified. If this process goes ahead, put bluntly, fewer people will join the Army and more will leave, especially among our highly-trained special forces, like the SAS. Why would people want to sign up, to risk their lives in uniform, including fighting terrorists, if they might then see their actions, perhaps including split-second decisions, being second-guessed in a courtroom, on a potential charge of murder, up to half-a century later? Many young people who join up do so to follow in the footsteps of family members, their father, uncle or sister who previously served in the military but, sadly, many Veterans today are now actively dissuading their children from joining up- for exactly this reason.
However, just as you might expect from Army Veterans, they are not letting this go without a fight. Many of them, from across the country, will now be gathering outside Parliament on Tuesday lunchtime, to protest against Labour's wretched Bill, before planning to go into the Strangers Gallery, to exercise their right to attend the debate – and hear the arguments directly, for themselves.
Our Shadow Defense Secretary, James Cartlidge, has already pledged to do “whatever it takes”, in terms of legislation, to restore those previous protections for Veterans, if the electorate gives us the chance. In the meantime, we will fight Labour's Troubles Bill, in both the Commons and the Lords and hold their MPs to account for how they voted on it.
In short, we will now do our best to defend those who defended us.