The Special Forces scandal is not going away
As published by the Spectator
What was the most important moment at Prime Minister’s Questions today? It was not the somewhat pedestrian back-and-forth between Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch on support for Ukraine. It was instead a subsequent point raised by David Davis on the subject of Britain’s Special Forces. Davis – a textbook example of a free-thinking backbencher – asked the Prime Minister about a ruling last month by Northern Ireland’s presiding coroner.
The ruling concerned a 1992 SAS ambush at St Patrick’s Church in Clonoe, County Tyrone. It found that the use of lethal force by British soldiers against four members of the IRA was not justified or reasonable. The quartet were shot dead minutes after they had carried out a gun attack on a Coalisland RUC station. But Mr Justice Michael Humphreys ruled that the Specialist Military Unit soldiers who shot them did not have an honest belief in the necessity of using lethal force and that it was unjustified and not reasonable. The ruling has sparked a considerable backlash: Mary Wakefield argued in The Spectator last week that Humphreys’ ‘delusional’ view of how such operations ought to be conducted produces ‘terrible injustice’ which ‘punishes the very people we rely on most.’
Davis has now taken up the issue with gusto. At PMQs, the former shadow Home Secretary told the House that ‘After careful reading, as far as I can see, this judgement is based on no evidence whatsoever’. He pointed out that more than 100 soldiers of the Special Forces had been summoned before the inquiries; ‘not one IRA leader’ has been ‘summoned in the same way’. The Yorkshire MP – himself a former SAS reservist – argued that ‘soldiers that serve our country with honour, heroism and country are being punished in their declining years’. He finished by asking the Prime Minister whether ‘he and his government have a duty to protect these soldiers?”
Starmer answered by saying that on the specific ruling: ‘I just haven’t seen the details, I’m afraid, so I can’t comment.’ But, on the broader point, he said that ‘it’s right that we should protect those who serve our country wherever they serve our country’. Starmer argued that ‘getting the balance right is critically important’. He suggested that the Conservatives’ Legacy Bill failed to achieve this balance but that ‘in the interests of everybody in Northern Ireland, we do need to renew our efforts to find a way forward on this really important issue’. Davis welcomed the response, writing on social media that ‘the Prime Minister appears to be open to doing something to protect our soldiers’ but adding ‘I will be pursuing the matter with him in the coming weeks’.
The evidence suggests that he would be wise to do so. In the six weeks since the Clonoe ruling, the government has given no signal that it intends to pursue a judicial review. Public focus on Special Forces’ prosecutions has only grown in recent months, with Paul Wood writing The Spectator cover on this issue back in November. There have even been reports that the SAS could go on strike if deployed to Ukraine, for fear of future prosecution for lethal force. Keir Starmer has promised to get ‘the balance right’: until he does, the Special Forces scandal will only continue to grow.