Labour to rewrite military rules and give more veterans medals
VETERANS denied medals by obscure military rules will be rewarded for their service under Labour, the shadow defence secretary has said.
John Healey said the current process for awarding medals is “hidebound by rules and traditions” and would be torn up to make it easier to recognise veterans of unusual operations such as the withdrawal from Afghanistan or nuclear tests.
Speaking to The Sunday Telegraph ahead of Remembrance Sunday next weekend, Mr Healey said Labour would abolish current rules – including those that ban medals for operations that last less than a month.
It comes after a protracted battle to award medals to military personnel who took part in Operation Pitting, which lasted 16 days and rescued 15,000 people from Kabul after the Taliban seized power last August.
Veterans of the operation were initially denied a medal, but an award was later approved following a campaign.
But medals have been denied to veterans of the operations to test British atomic weapons in the 1950s.
“It has become clearer and clearer that we have to review the medals system,” Mr Healey said on a visit to Portsmouth, where he met Joe Cattini, a 99-year-old D-Day veteran. “You’ve got veterans who have a strong case who have to resort to political lobbying.
“Seventy years this month was the first British atomic test in the Pacific, and we are the only atomic nation that has no recognition and no compensation for those veterans who served.”
He added: “What we’ve got to do is recognise the way that service deployments are changing in the modern era, like in Afghanistan, whilst also having a system that can recognise the risk that our armed forces faced in the past.”
A previous review of medals ordered by David Cameron’s coalition government in 2012 found that the existing rules on when to reward veterans should not be changed, but that “there should be greater readiness to review past decisions”. Despite ministers’ claims that the review would draw a “definitive line under issues which in some cases had been controversial for many years”, the question of which servicemen and women receive medals continued to attract concern.
Last year Ben Wallace, the Defence Secretary, said personnel largely from 16 Air Assault Brigade, the British Army’s global response force, should receive a medal for Operation Pitting.
But he told MPs on Parliament’s defence committee that it was not a “unilateral” decision and that “committees on committees” were responsible for deciding whether veterans of an operation had satisfied the criteria of “risk, and rigour and time”. A medal was awarded by the late Queen in January.
Amid a dispute between Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor, and Mr Wallace over the defence budget in the Autumn Statement, Mr Healey refused to commit to a figure that Labour would spend.
“The reality of defence spending now is that day-to-day revenue spending is being cut in real terms,” he said, but added that Labour would want to conduct its own review of threats in government before deciding how to spend money on the armed forces.
‘We are the only atomic nation that has no recognition for those veterans who served’