Justice is being politicised, warns one of our sanest MPs
MOST revolutionary statement of the week came from Tory backbencher Richard Benyon: ‘It is time for this House to reflect the mood of the vast majority of people in society.’
Mr Benyon probably knows, in his heart, that this demand will never be met. The System would never stand for it.
He was proposing that soldiers, such as those who served in Northern Ireland decades ago, should not be chased in the courts for long- distant allegations. Mr Benyon (Con, Newbury) himself served in Ulster in the early 1980s as an officer with the Green Jackets but he was not speaking out of self-interest.
He described how former warrant officer Dennis Hutchings, now 78, is facing charges including attempted murder 43 years ago. Mr Benyon wanted a time limit placed on such cases. Mr Hutchings was, said Mr Benyon, ‘an exemplary soldier’ who in 1974 was leading a patrol in Northern Ireland at ‘a time of intense terrorist activity’. The patrol fired on someone who died. In 1975 Mr Hutchings was told no action would be taken against him, a decision confirmed years later by the Director of Public Prosecutions.
Officialdom has now changed its mind and Mr Hutchings, who is frail, is up before the beak. ‘No new evidence is being laid before the courts,’ Mr Benyon told the Commons yesterday lunchtime. ‘In fact there is less evidence, as two of the three witnesses are dead and the firearms, casings and original file have been lost.
‘Many fear we are seeing a form of retributive politics. Extreme nationalists-leaning individuals in the Northern Ireland justice system have decided to reignite such investigations.’
Consider that accusation, ladies and gentlemen in the court of public opinion. Here was a senior backbencher and former minister, one of the sanest and most civilised men at Westminster saying, in all seriousness, that justice in part of our country has been politicised.
This surely demands wider attention. It is, dare one suggest, more electrifying a matter than any of this stuff about oglings and gropings in or around the Palace of Westminster.
Mr Benyon was speaking to the House just after an uneventful PMQs. For those who like to know about such things, Theresa May held her own without much difficulty.
But now the House was emptier. Around Mr Benyon sat a few likeminded Tory MPs – among them the likes of Colonel Bob Stewart, defence select committee chairman Julian Lewis and Sir Nicholas Soames.
Mr Benyon’s ‘Ten Minute Rule Bill’ (it is a parliamentary device which almost never becomes law) was cosigned by Labour’s Kevan Jones and Madeleine Moon and by the DUP’s Emma Little Pengelly and Jim Shannon, along with several Tories.
Of the 3,600 deaths in the Troubles, said Mr Benyon, 90 per cent were at the hands of terrorists. They ‘went out with the express intention of killing and maiming’ whereas ‘the security forces went out with the express intention of saving lives’. Yet septuagenarian ex-soldiers are pursued while former terrorists are given an effective pardon with ‘onthe-run’ letters.
THIS was ‘a grotesque charade’, said Mr Benyon. ‘Can we imagine any other country in the world doing this to its veterans? Do we really want to see people who should be appreciated – even revered – for what they did, being taken from their homes, questioned and prosecuted for action they took on our behalf many decades ago in one of the most impossible campaigns of modern times?’
And it was then that he said it was ‘time for this House to reflect the mood of the vast majority of people in society’.
Parliamentary democracy is meant, within reason, to do just that. But we have reached a point where it thwarts the common will (need we mention Brexit?). The obstruction in the case of the unfortunate Dennis Hutchings? It is, you may not be surprised to hear, the Human Rights Act, plaything of a technocratic, legalistic elite that has lost sight of Parliament’s very purpose.