Politics must not trump justice in the disgraceful Bloody Sunday prosecutions

What signal does it send to our Armed Forces if we persecute veterans despite a lack of new evidence?

We cannot yet know for certain whether charges will indeed be brought against the four ex-paras who were at Bloody Sunday in Londonderry in 1972. But if it is true – as seems very likely – that on March 14 they are charged with a number of offences, including murder, then I believe there will be a storm of utter fury from the public. And as that storm rages, some objections to the prosecution will be good; some will be frankly less good. It is important, therefore, to focus on what is truly nauseating in this affair.

Yes, it is incredible that we are on the verge of putting these old men on trial for crimes that are alleged to have been committed 47 years ago – and yet that is not the worst feature of the business, and certainly no reason, in principle, for stopping the trial. You could point out – and I would agree – that the mere lapse of time should be no protection for anyone guilty of a serious offence.

We pursue war criminals to the ends of the earth. Only the other day it was announced that a former Labour peer is to appear in court later this month charged for sex offences that he is alleged to have committed in the Seventies. I have no idea as to the strength of the case against him – but if he was guilty then, he is guilty now. No one should escape justice – where the offence is grave – just because it was all so long ago. And I am afraid that rule must apply to British soldiers as much as to anyone else.

Yes, it feels sickening that we are persecuting these elderly men for doing what they thought was their duty – in uniform, under orders, as members of the Parachute Regiment. Yes, it seems brutal and unfair that we should send them there as young men, require them to keep order in dangerous and volatile circumstances – and then penalise them decades later for a misjudgment they may have made in the pressure of the moment. Never forget that vital moral distinction: these men were not terrorists.

They did not get up in the morning with the intention of killing and maiming innocent civilians. What kind of a world is it – you may ask – where we can put former squaddies in the dock for murder, and simultaneously tell IRA killers that they can get away with it? Are we really proposing to send old soldiers to die in jail – after we gave dozens of wanted terrorists a get-out-of-jailfree card under the Good Friday Agreement? Is that balanced? Is that fair?

Well, of course it isn’t. And yet I am afraid – again – that this asymmetry does not in itself amount to a sufficient objection to a trial. We cannot know what really happened on that appalling day in 1972. I wasn’t there; you – in all likelihood – were not there. It wasn’t our finger crooked around the trigger. We can’t know exactly what impulses and calculations coursed through the minds of those young soldiers. We therefore cannot rule out the awful possibility that the deaths of those 14 protestors – and the injuries sustained by 14 more – were more than just the horrific result of a concatenation of confusion and panic.

We must accept that there is at least the possibility of a serious crime, and no one – not even an essentially loyal and well-meaning British soldier – should in principle be exempt from justice.

No – if these men are put on trial for murder, it will be an absolute outrage not because they are old, and may die in jail; not because Bloody Sunday took place 47 years ago; not because they were serving soldiers up against bomb throwers.

The reason this whole thing stinks to high heaven – and the reason it should be denounced – is that there is absolutely nothing new for any trial to discover. There is no new testimony to hear. There are no new facts – no DNA breakthrough, no new theory of ballistics – to bring before the court. The whole thing has been chewed and chewed again, super-masticated to oblivion.

It is not as though the United Kingdom has just undergone some kind of democratic revolution – overthrowing a tyranny and enabling for the first time the trying of historic crimes that have been suppressed by the regime. We have had stable and continuous government in this country – under the rule of law – and in the last 47 years we have gone to quite astonishing lengths to get at the truth.

We had the Widgery Report; and even if that was held to be a whitewash we then had the Saville Inquiry, set up by the Blair government. Those proceedings lasted nine years. They cost £200 million. I have come across lawyers whose mortgages have been paid and whose children have been educated thanks to the Saville Inquiry. These lawyers gave every appearance of being highly intelligent and hardworking. Did they really miss some crucial detail? Did they fail in their cross-examination?

No one has made any such suggestion. So much of the evidence has been destroyed since 1972; and there is so much doubt about who did what and which bullet went where that the chances of a conviction are surely remote – and so we are driven to ask what the hell we are doing? And the answer is that it is not about justice. It is about politics.

Why have we set up this new “Historical Investigations Unit” that has pushed to reopen the Bloody Sunday inquiry? The objective is not to get to the truth of this episode, or any other. It is just meant to be a concession to Sinn Fein, a gesture to nationalist feeling, part of the complex politics of restarting provincial government at Stormont. It will cost millions. It will achieve nothing except the misery of a few old men. It will serve as a terrible warning to anyone thinking of joining the services: that politics sometimes trumps justice – and when politics trumps justice, the members of the Armed Forces will know that they are on their own.

They will know that they cannot rely on the Army, the MOD, the politicians or anyone else to protect them or show common sense. The whole thing is a disgrace, and should be disposed of as quietly and as speedily as possible.