Category: Votes

On 20th January 2021, the Bishop of Portsmouth spoke at the second reading of the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill, questioning the effectiveness of the legislation and potential repercussions on legitimate claims against members of the the armed forces:

The Lord Bishop of Portsmouth [V]: My Lords, reflecting on the Bill, its intentions and likely legal effect reminded me of something I learned during my time as chaplain of Wadham College, Oxford, during the febrile days of the 1980s. Wadham was then, as now, a crucible of intellectual innovation, not least in literary studies. Its senior English fellow then was Terry Eagleton, who interested himself in a method of criticism known as deconstruction. This meant, I think, that the story we thought we were reading or being told was undermined by another narrative hidden within the text, so what we might have thought meant one thing often meant something entirely different.

The Bill before the House represents a model of deconstruction. The Government’s stated intention is, as we heard in the gracious Speech,

“to tackle vexatious claims that undermine our Armed Forces”.

I regret to say that I cannot see how the Bill, as drafted, fulfils that intention. The Government may then deserve two cheers for acting when other Governments have not, but action is not the same as outcome. The good intentions of Ministers and their statements in Parliament and the media do not match what the Bill will do. The Bill would do what the Bill states, not what the Government would like it to do, or what an MoD press release announces as its objectives. I leave it to other noble Lords far better qualified than I to reflect on the very troubling risk that the Bill might lead to crimes of torture going unpunished as well as providing an attractive precedent for those countries that have historically accepted lower standards than our own.