Earlier this week the New Secretary of State for Defence, Dan Jarvis, was summoned to the Commons to answer a question about the Defence Investment Plan.
Of course, the devastating critique by his predecessor, John Healey, given in his resignation letter, undoubtedly put the New Secretary of State and his junior ministers in a very awkward spot.
Nevertheless, convention demands that when Mr Speaker grants the Leader of the Opposition an urgent question, then the Secretary of State comes to answer it. Instead, he sent a junior minister. The excuse being that Dan Jarvis was meeting the King. I’m confident that the King would have understood, had he been advised, that this was to be the first appearance of the new Secretary of State in Parament.
Well, whatever, the Junior Minister appeared at the dispatch box to answer Kemi Badenoch. He prefaced his remarks by saying that “It is no secret that I worked in lockstep with the former Defence Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Rawmarsh and Conisbrough (John Healey). He is a friend and mentor. I was his deputy and I am still standing at the Dispatch Box because he asked me to stay ….”
I couldn’t help responding with” The Minister told us that the former Secretary of State had asked him to stay. Had he not been so asked, would he have resigned too? How much persuasion did it take?”
Despite the laughter there was an awkward moment for the minister: The Key question that any defence minister now faces is whether John Healey and Al Carns, the Armed forces Minister who also resigned, were right in stating that the Government is failing the nation by underfunding Defence.
But there is more. In his own personal statement, explaining his resignation, Al Carns, who spent 24 years as a serving officer, added
“I left because I could no longer ignore the continued failure to address the treatment of our veterans in Northern Ireland. Whatever people’s view of the troubles, a country owes a duty to those it sent into harm’s way under lawful orders, and that duty does not end when the uniform comes off”
He was referring to the Government’s Northern Ireland Bill, which removes the immunities afforded to our veterans, provided for in the last government’s Northern Ireland legacy Act.
Regular readers of this column may recall that I have fulminated about the damage that the Government’s bill is bound to do.
It is a sop to the IRA, enabling it to try and rewrite history by putting our veterans in the dock, notwithstanding the immunities granted to terrorists in order to advance the peace process.
Although there will be court cases, inquests, trials, reviews and challenges, the prospect of conviction now is vanishingly small. The number of answers that victims will get will be minimal. All the while, veterans will be hauled before the courts, investigated for years and subjected to all the pain and ignominy that that will bring. That process alone has become a betrayal and a punishment.
The Legacy Act’s offer of immunity for information, based on the South African experience post-Apartheid, offered a much clearer path to truth for victims of ‘The Troubles’. Al Carns was right to resign over his Government’s plans.
Sir Desmond Swayne TD
