Westminster Report

BY Rt Hon Mark Francois, Member of Parliament for Rayleigh and Wickford.
Defending Northern Ireland Veterans Who Defended Us
In addition to my duties as Rayleigh’s constituency MP, I also wear another hat, in Parliament, as the Shadow Armed Forces Minister. In that role, I have recently been very involved in the campaign to defence Northern Ireland Veterans from prosecution.
By way of background, “The Troubles” were a very difficult period in the history of Northern Ireland. As terrorists, from both Republican and so-called Loyalist organisations 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.
Over that period, some 300,000 British Army regular troops, supported by reservists of the Ulster Defence 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.
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 zealots, 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 new 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 want an inquest, into Loughgall. 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 just 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 weeks 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.
Our Shadow Defence 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 give 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.
Picture: Mark having a “debrief” with veterans after opposing the Second Reading of Labour’s Northern Ireland Troubles Bill
Read more.
Visit: https://leigh-on-sea.news
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/leighonsea.news
X : @leighonsea_news
Contact us: https://leigh-on-sea.news/contact-us
Email: [email protected]