STEPHEN GLOVER: What kind of country hounds its veterans – yet spares murderers? 

Promises are sacred in politics as in life, and despite all that has happened, governments usually do their utmost to keep them.

Many fair-minded people welcomed a pledge in the 2019 Conservative Party manifesto that a Tory administration would introduce legislation to ‘create a system which prevents vexatious claims being brought against Armed Forces veterans’.

This undertaking was not to be delivered at some unspecified time in the future. It would be fulfilled within ‘the first 100 days of a Tory Government’.

Many more than 100 days have passed since Boris Johnson‘s stunning election victory, and the Overseas Operations Bill only passed into law last week. It provides some protection against ‘vexatious claims’ being brought against British servicemen.

But there is a whopping hole in what is now an Act that was not prefigured in the Tory manifesto. British Army veterans who served in Northern Ireland are excluded. They still face ‘vexatious claims’, most of which go back half a century.

Indeed, while servicemen who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan are probably now safe from baseless prosecution, there are about 200 former soldiers who, having served Queen and country in Northern Ireland, live in a state of dread.

They are old now. Forty or 50 years ago, they were young, usually working-class men, often recruited in the North of England or Scotland, who were plunged into the mindless violence of Belfast and Londonderry, where their lives were threatened by ruthless terrorists.

Flawed

We saw two of them in court in Belfast this week. Soldier A (aged 71) and Soldier C (70) were charged with the murder of Joe McCann in 1972. McCann was a 24-year-old IRA killer and ‘skilled gunman’ who has been blamed for the deaths of 15 soldiers in Northern Ireland.

Fortunately, Soldier A and Soldier C were acquitted after the judge ruled that the prosecution was using inadmissible evidence. It had accepted that statements made by the defendants in 1972 were defective, and yet relied on the fact that they had then gone along with these flawed statements in 2010. The judge wisely ended the trial.

Why the Northern Ireland Prosecution Service has pursued this case since 2016 one can only speculate, though some allege it has come under political pressure from Sinn Fein.

What is clear is that the exoneration of Soldier A and Soldier C, after what must have been a gruelling and bewildering few years for both of them, had nothing whatsoever to do with the British Government.

The 200-odd veterans who face prosecution may draw some comfort from the collapse of the trial since they too could be the victims of an appalling abuse of process.

But these old men, who once served their country and put their lives on the line, will not be able to live in peace until or unless the Government makes good its manifesto promise.

Boris Johnson once understood their plight. During his campaign for the Tory leadership in the summer of 2019, he said: ‘We need to end unfair trials of people who served their Queen and country when no new evidence has been produced and when the accusations have already been exhaustively questioned in court.’ Quite right.

He has subsequently discovered, or been advised, that protecting Northern Ireland veterans from ‘vexatious claims’ could be a legal minefield. If ex-servicemen were to be granted an amnesty, former IRA and Loyalist killers would claim the same indulgence.

Shameful

The fact remains that there is a de facto amnesty for former terrorists while a large number of veterans face possible legal action. Following the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, Tony Blair covertly authorised ‘letters of comfort’ which were sent to more than 200 suspected terrorists, guaranteeing them that they would not be prosecuted.

This led, in 2014, to the collapse of the trial of John Downey, a suspect in the 1982 IRA bombing in Hyde Park which killed four soldiers, after it emerged that he had been sent one of these comfort letters.

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of former terrorists walking the streets of Northern Ireland whom the authorities have either chosen not to prosecute, or else can’t for lack of evidence.

Meanwhile, Army veterans are targeted because they are law-abiding citizens and easy pickings. One of them, Dennis Hutchings, was interrogated by police on 25 separate occasions, ten of them on one day, despite his having a debilitating kidney disease.

He is due to stand trial later this year in Belfast at the age of 80 on charges of attempted murder and grievous bodily harm in County Tyrone in 1974. This is notwithstanding the fact that he was cleared at the time, and told in 2011 that the case was closed.

Isn’t the grotesquely unequal treatment being meted out to former terrorists and ex-servicemen shameful? What kind of country have we become that hounds veterans while sparing killers?

I have no doubt that some soldiers behaved recklessly and, on a few occasions, illegally. But even then they were not in the same moral sewer as the terrorists. British soldiers did not deliberately kill women and children, or blow up shops and hotels, or extort protection money. They were trying to keep the peace.

Note, too, that of the more than 3,500 people killed in the Troubles, fewer than 10 per cent were attributable to the British Armed Forces. Yet it is these Armed Forces, not the terrorists, who find themselves in the dock.

How depressing — if predictable — that the BBC should have responded to the collapse of the Belfast trial by parading Aine McCann (daughter of Joe McCann, and aged three at the time of his death) as though she were some kind of victim.

On Radio 4’s Today programme, for example, she was unchallenged during an interview when she claimed that her father had been ‘defamed’ during the case and faced ‘ridiculous accusations’. She denied, without being taken to task, that he had killed 15 soldiers, though it was part of agreed evidence in court that the IRA claimed he had.

Stain

Perhaps the BBC is simply ignorant about the recent past. Or perhaps it, too, has accepted the monstrous falsehood that there is no moral distinction between what terrorists did in Northern Ireland and the activities of British servicemen.

The Prime Minister may have a lot on his plate, but a promise is a promise. He originally backed the cause of the veterans — including Northern Ireland ones — because he believed in it. He must not drop it now because of legal complexities.

Incidentally, I can raise only half a cheer for Johnny Mercer, who resigned last month as Veterans’ Minister, citing the Government’s failure to help former Northern Ireland servicemen. He had been piloting the Overseas Operations Bill through Parliament for a year in the knowledge that they were excluded.

We cannot go on watching the persecution of old men who served their country while terrorists are allowed to get off scot-free. It is a shameful betrayal, a stain on the Government’s honour. Boris Johnson made a promise, and he must keep it.