Fred Thomas MP’s recent comments on the Legacy debate reveal the increasingly difficult position many Labour MPs now find themselves in.

On the one hand, there is growing acknowledgement that elderly veterans should not face disproportionate, repeated, and effectively endless legal process decades after service in Northern Ireland.

On the other hand, the Government continues to advance legislation that many veterans believe will do precisely that.

The contradiction is becoming harder to ignore.

In his recent statement, Fred Thomas correctly recognises a reality veterans have warned about for years:

“It’s not the fear of conviction… it’s the fear of spending years of energy and effort defending themself in court.”

That point matters.

Because the central issue in much of the Legacy debate has never simply been conviction. It has been process itself.

The punishment increasingly becomes:

• The investigation

• The uncertainty

• The reputational damage

• The financial strain

• The psychological burden

• The reopening of events from half a century ago under entirely different political conditions

Many veterans believe that distinction is still poorly understood inside Westminster.

But there is another problem.

On 21 January 2026, Fred Thomas voted for the Government’s Remedial Order.

That order dismantled key parts of the existing 2023 Legacy Act framework before replacement safeguards had been fully defined, scrutinised, or enacted.

Then, on 27 April 2026, when the Government moved the new Troubles Bill into the next parliamentary session through a carry-over motion, he did not vote either way.

That sequence matters politically because Labour’s language around the 2023 Act has steadily shifted.

First, the Act was described as: “Illegal”

Then: “Unlawful”

Then: “Non-compliant”

And now increasingly: “Unworkable”

Those are not the same things.

After the Dillon ruling, the original sweeping political claims about the Act’s legality became much harder to sustain in absolute terms. The Court’s objections were narrower and more specific than much of the public rhetoric suggested, particularly around immunity arrangements and procedural restrictions.

Which raises a legitimate question the Government still has not properly answered:

What exactly was so fundamentally “unworkable” about the 2023 framework that it could not have been repaired through targeted amendment?

If immunity provisions were flawed, they could be amended.

If investigative safeguards were insufficient, they could be strengthened.

If oversight mechanisms required reform, Parliament could reform them.

Instead, the Government chose near-total legislative replacement while simultaneously asking veterans to trust that “protections” will emerge later in the process.

That is where confidence begins to collapse.

Because, from the perspective of many veterans, the practical sequence appears to be:

• Remove existing protections first

• Promise revised protections later

• Ask affected individuals to trust the political process in the meantime

That may make sense inside Westminster procedure.

It looks very different to ageing former soldiers, police officers, intelligence personnel, and their families who have already spent years navigating shifting political language, changing legal frameworks, and repeated reassurances.

None of this means there should be immunity from wrongdoing.

But there is an increasing sense that the debate is drifting away from principles of finality, proportionality, and historical reality, and towards a system in which process becomes perpetual.

That is why the language matters.

“Illegal” carries one implication.

“Unworkable” carries another entirely.

And if the argument has now shifted from legality to workability, ministers should explain clearly why amendment was impossible before dismantling the existing framework.

One aspect of today’s King’s Speech is impossible to ignore.

The Speech itself contains no explicit mention of:

• Legacy

• The Troubles Bill

• ICRIR

• Historical investigations

• Or veterans facing continuing legal scrutiny connected to Operation Banner

Yet within hours, the Northern Ireland Office issued a press release in which Hilary Benn strongly reaffirmed the Government’s commitment to delivering the Troubles Bill.

That is not only irony, but it is also a contrast that matters.

The King’s Speech certainly speaks instead about:

• Supporting “our gallant Armed Forces”

• Strengthening the service justice system

• Placing the Armed Forces Covenant into statute

• Trust in institutions

• National security

• Stability

• Collective resilience

The contentious political language around Legacy is nowhere to be seen in the Speech itself; instead, it comes in departmental messaging afterwards.

That may tell you something.

The Government clearly understands that Legacy remains politically sensitive, legally controversial, and emotionally divisive — particularly amongst veterans and former security personnel.

So the ceremonial national message centres on service and sacrifice.

Meanwhile, the operational political message arrives separately through the Northern Ireland Office.

And Benn’s press release, he describes the Troubles Bill as “the only viable way”, a means to “generate confidence across communities”, a mechanism to “put in place safeguards for our former service personnel”, and the “final chance to get legacy right”.

That word salad creates its own problem.

Because if safeguards for former personnel still need to be “put in place”, veterans can reasonably ask what exactly has existed for the past twenty-five years.

The deeper issue here is not simply legislation.

It is the growing gap between the language of national gratitude — not to mention self-serving photo ops or social media posts — and the lived experience of many former personnel who increasingly feel that:

• Service is praised ceremonially

• Managed administratively

• Honoured symbolically

• Scrutinised indefinitely

The King’s Speech salutes those who served.

The controversy surrounding Legacy is left to press releases.

The latter promises the process will remain the punishment.

The publication of the Peter May Review into the Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery (ICRIR) should concern anyone following the Legacy debate closely.

Not because troubled organisations are unusual. New institutions often struggle.

But because the Government’s response reveals something more important: instead of asking whether confidence can reasonably be placed in the machinery before it is expanded, the review is being used as an argument for expanding it.

That distinction matters.

The timing is also difficult to ignore.

The Review was commissioned after unnamed concerns were raised directly with the Northern Ireland Office.

Who raised those concerns? When were they first raised? Were they raised by ICRIR staff, Commissioners, former staff, auditors, requesting individuals, or another party?

The published material does not say.

Nor does it explain why concerns serious enough to trigger an independent review of the organisation’s culture and effectiveness remained undisclosed until now.

That does not prove orchestration.

But it does raise an obvious question: was this Review simply a diagnostic exercise into a struggling institution, or has it also become part of the political case for repurposing that institution under new legislation?

The Review itself is stark.

It identifies structural weaknesses, governance immaturity, financial management problems, leadership conflict, internal mistrust, and a culture described by staff as “toxic”, “divided”, and “disrespectful”.

It notes:

• Fear among staff about speaking openly

• Serious governance confusion

• Weak financial controls

• Data protection concerns

• Internal friction damaging morale and operations

• No final reports have yet been produced despite substantial expenditure

Most significantly, the Review identifies a lack of shared understanding between the Northern Ireland Office and ICRIR regarding what the legislation itself requires in practice.

That is extraordinary.

The organisation charged with handling some of the most politically and morally sensitive investigations in modern British history is itself unclear — alongside its sponsoring department — about how the system is supposed to function operationally.

Ordinarily, such findings would prompt caution.

Parliament might reasonably ask:

• Is this body sufficiently mature?

• Is governance stable?

• Is the investigative structure workable?

• Can confidence genuinely be placed in the process?

• Should powers be expanded before these questions are resolved?

The Secretary of State himself acknowledged the seriousness of the findings, stating:

“I am deeply concerned to see some of the findings in Peter May’s Review. What has been identified is unacceptable and falls below the standards expected.”

That is not the language of minor administrative difficulty.

Yet almost immediately, the Government response pivots from concern to justification.

The same press release states:

“Through the Troubles Bill, this Government is committed to reforming ICRIR — which will become the Legacy Commission — to improve the process for all involved and build wider confidence.”

That is the central contradiction.

The Review identifies an organisation struggling with governance confusion, internal conflict, weak controls, cultural dysfunction, and operational uncertainty.

But instead of asking whether confidence should first be rebuilt before powers and responsibilities are expanded, the Review itself is being used to support the case for expansion.

The argument effectively becomes:

The current structure has weaknesses. Therefore the new structure proposed in the Bill is necessary.

But that avoids the harder question.

If the current machinery is already struggling under the weight of governance confusion, leadership conflict, investigative complexity, and confidence problems, why should Parliament assume that repurposing and expanding the same ecosystem will solve those problems rather than deepen them?

Especially when the Review itself warns that some proposed changes may create new risks.

This matters beyond institutional process.

Legacy mechanisms do not operate in an abstract administrative space. They operate inside human lives.

For veterans, especially, confidence is not a technical issue.

Many of the men drawn into these processes were young soldiers operating in violent and politically chaotic conditions decades ago. The state now asks them to trust investigative structures that are themselves described as internally fractured, operationally immature, and culturally troubled.

That does not automatically invalidate investigations.

But it does mean confidence cannot simply be declared into existence through legislation, press releases, or oversight committees.

It has to be earned.

The greater danger here is institutional momentum.

Once a mechanism exists, political systems tend to assume the answer is always refinement, expansion, or reform of the mechanism itself rather than asking whether the underlying assumptions remain sound.

That appears to be where the Legacy debate now sits.

The May Review should have triggered a pause for reflection.

Instead, it risks becoming an argument for acceleration.

The phrase “agents of the state” may be legally accurate. But something important is lost when it becomes the only language used to describe soldiers and police officers who served during the Troubles.

In the One More Mission podcast, Lt. Col. Simon Barry argues that the current legacy debate risks flattening real human experience into abstract constitutional language.

Young men — often barely out of adolescence — were sent into impossible situations where hesitation or action could both carry lethal consequences.

The decisions about strategy, rules of engagement, and policy were made at the highest levels of government.

But decades later, it is often the patrol commander, the constable, the private soldier, and the junior NCO who remain under scrutiny.

Among the points discussed:

How phrases like “agents of the state” carry loaded political connotations that distort reality

Why veterans believe the debate increasingly ignores the human dimension of service

The growing concern that “process becomes punishment”

The widening solidarity between Northern Ireland veterans and younger generations who served in Iraq and Afghanistan

Why many now believe today’s legacy mechanisms risk damaging future military confidence and morale

The changing political atmosphere around the debate — and why MPs are beginning to listen more carefully to veterans and their communities

One of the most striking points raised is the contradiction now emerging publicly.

The Prime Minister acknowledged that split-second decisions made under extreme pressure are imperfect by nature, yet simultaneously supports systems that appear to judge those decisions decades later in slow motion and perfect hindsight.

As Simon Barry puts it, the people who “called the shots” were often far removed from those who had to fire them — or face the consequences afterwards.

Find the full episode here:

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The Supreme Court judgment in Dillon is significant. But nobody should mistake it for the end of the legacy battle — and nobody should misread what the Court actually decided.

The judgment removes two major legal routes that had been used against the Legacy Act.

The Windsor Framework argument failed. The Charter argument failed. The ICRIR was not struck down — and the Court went further than merely preserving it in principle.

It actively accepted that the inquisitorial model was capable, in principle, of satisfying the state’s investigative obligations under Articles 2 and 3 of the Convention, finding that the Court of Appeal had been wrong to assess the ICRIR against the standards of the adversarial legacy inquest system.

That matters. But the judgment does not declare the entire framework settled or beyond challenge.

What Remains in Place Against the Government

Declarations of incompatibility under the Human Rights Act remain in force because the Government abandoned that appeal — a decision taken after the change of government following the July 2024 general election.

Those declarations cover:

• The immunity provisions as incompatible with Articles 2 and 3 of the Convention

• The civil claims bar under Section 43 as incompatible with Article 6

• Section 8 on evidence admissibility as incompatible with Articles 2, 3 and 6

The Supreme Court confirmed that those declarations stand. It had no power to disturb them, and no appetite to do so.

Strasbourg risk remains real. The Court’s obiter treatment of the Veterans Movement’s reconciliation exception argument is instructive here. The Court found that the Strasbourg court has not established a reconciliation exception to the general rule that breaches of Articles 2 and 3 must be punished, though it has not ruled one out.

Under the domestic “mirror principle”, UK courts generally follow Strasbourg rather than anticipating new Convention principles before Strasbourg itself establishes them. The immunity provisions, therefore, remain exposed at Strasbourg, and the route there remains open.

The Troubles Bill also remains before Parliament and, if enacted, would significantly alter the legislative landscape — replacing the ICRIR, repealing the immunity scheme, allowing part-heard inquests to resume, and introducing legal representation for next of kin.

What the Judgment Does Not Close Off

The legal battlefield has narrowed, but it has not been vacated. Three fronts remain active.

First, Strasbourg proceedings are a realistic prospect. The declarations of incompatibility on Articles 2 and 3 provide a direct foundation for applications to the European Court of Human Rights. The reconciliation exception argument, while receiving no domestic endorsement, was explicitly preserved as a question Strasbourg has yet to resolve.

Second, individual ICRIR review challenges remain possible. The Court’s dismissal of the ab antechallenge — on the demanding standard that a breach must be shown in all or almost all cases — does not foreclose challenges to specific reviews once they are actually conducted. The Court was explicit that the effectiveness of an investigation can rarely be assessed until it is complete. Case-by-case challenges remain available.

Third, the Troubles Bill itself will generate contested terrain. Its provisions may give rise to fresh legal challenges from multiple directions.

The Supreme Court has removed the strongest arguments that the framework was legally unsustainable in its entirety. Any decision to repeal or substantially replace it now rests far more heavily on political judgment than legal necessity.

The Government can still say there are continuing legal drivers for change:

· Declarations of incompatibility remain formally in force

· Articles 2 and 3 exposure remains live at Strasbourg

· The Court did not endorse immunity as Convention-compliant

· The Court explicitly rejected, at least domestically, the reconciliation-exception argument

· Future ICRIR investigations can still be challenged individually

What Has Actually Shifted

The danger now is misreading the result in either direction.

For those who opposed the Legacy Act, the temptation will be to treat this as a decisive defeat. It is not. The declarations stand. Strasbourg exposure stands. The political battle over the Troubles Bill is live.

For those who supported the Act or who broadly welcome today’s outcome, the temptation will be to be complacent. That would be a serious mistake. The immunity provisions remain formally declared incompatible with the Convention. The Government that abandoned the appeal on that point has committed to repeal and replace the Act. The ICRIR’s legal viability has been confirmed, but its future remains uncertain pending the Troubles Bill.

The central issue has now shifted from whether the courts can collapse the framework to whether Parliament will dismantle or replace it by political choice. That is now the decisive ground.

For veterans, families, and all those with a stake in how this is resolved, the position is this: the Supreme Court has narrowed the legal argument and moved the decisive ground back to Westminster and, potentially, to Strasbourg. It has not delivered a final answer for either side.

This was not a final victory. It was a significant legal correction that changes the shape of the fight — without ending it.

BY DR ROBERT PARR*

The Northern Ireland Troubles Bill currently before Parliament is presented as a mechanism for truth and reconciliation. It is neither. It is the latest manoeuvre in a thirty-year political retreat — one that reopens the door to criminal investigations of security forces veterans, and does so through a framework designed and operated in formal partnership with a foreign sovereign power that has a declared political interest in the outcome.

I am not speaking abstractly. I served in Northern Ireland for several years. The men I served with — some now in their sixties and seventies, some dead — operated under lawful command, within defined rules of engagement, in a theatre where the state’s enemies were actively trying to kill them. They served the Crown. The Crown has a duty to them in return.

What they have received instead is a ratchet — each legislative iteration tightening the mechanism a further notch, each government assuring veterans that this time the settlement is fair, each settlement proving, in practice, to be a further accommodation of those who once sought to destroy the very state these veterans defended.

The Architecture of Asymmetry

The 2023 Legacy and Reconciliation Act imposed meaningful constraints: it barred criminal investigations into Troubles-related incidents by any body other than the ICRIR, and placed broader restrictions on prosecutions, civil claims, and inquests. For veterans, the practical effect was significant — it removed the threat of conventional police investigation. The new Bill repeals those constraints.

Section 88 removes the restriction on police-conducted criminal investigations, substituting a new Legacy Commission — a body whose independence and insulation from political pressure has yet to be established, and whose operating environment was shaped by negotiations in which veterans had no seat at the table.

Republican paramilitaries enter this environment with advantages no veteran can match. They have Sinn Féin — a party of government in both jurisdictions — providing political direction. They have thirty years of aligned legal infrastructure: NGOs, case files, Strasbourg litigation, and a collective narrative tightly managed and politically protected.

Veterans have regimental associations, some underfunded charities, and a government that has demonstrated repeatedly it will trade their legal exposure for political expedience.

The asymmetry is not incidental to the Bill’s design. It is load-bearing.

Since When Did Dublin Get a Vote?

Here is the question nobody in Westminster appears willing to ask aloud: at what point did the Republic of Ireland acquire legitimate standing to influence the prosecution environment for soldiers of the British Crown?

The answer is buried in Part 6 of the Bill. The Independent Commission on Information Retrieval — the ICIR — is defined in Section 72 as a body established by an agreement between His Majesty’s Government and the Government of Ireland, concluded in Belfast on 15 October 2015. Under Section 83, the ICIR must report annually to both governments simultaneously. The Secretary of State must consult the Government of Ireland before making regulations governing the destruction of ICIR records.

Read that again. A foreign government has a formal, statutory, co-equal role in the oversight of a body that handles information about deaths caused — and suffered — by British security forces on British sovereign territory.

The Republic of Ireland is not a disinterested party. The Arms Crisis of 1970 established that elements of the Irish cabinet were involved in arms procurement for Northern nationalists. The Barron Reports documented Garda failures that materially benefited republican paramilitaries. For decades, Irish courts declined to extradite IRA suspects on political offence grounds, providing the sanctuary British justice could not reach. These are not allegations — they are findings of official inquiries and matters of public record.

A foreign government with that history now holds statutory co-equal oversight of accountability processes for British soldiers. That fact deserves to be stated plainly.

Those who served in South Armagh, Belfast, and Londonderry were deployed under Crown authority, answerable to British law, operating within a chain of command that ran to Westminster. Their legal accountability is a matter for British courts, British law, and British constitutional process. That a foreign government has been accorded statutory standing to shape the framework within which those personnel now face investigation is an affront to the most elementary principle of sovereignty.

What This Actually Is

Let me be precise, because precision matters here.

I am not alleging that this Labour government consciously set out to destroy the men who served it. Malice is too simple an explanation. What I am alleging is something more insidious: that successive governments — Conservative and Labour alike — have made a series of rational political calculations in which the legal exposure of veterans was an acceptable cost. Those calculations were made easier by the fact that veterans, unlike paramilitaries, have no electoral bloc, no friendly government in a neighbouring state, and no thirty-year litigation infrastructure to make the cost of betrayal prohibitive.

They were, in the cold language of political economy, without leverage. And so they were traded.

The Northern Ireland Troubles Bill is the most recent expression of that trade. It does not protect veterans. It processes them — contains their grievance within a structure designed to exhaust rather than resolve, while providing the government with the appearance of having acted.

The British Government deployed these men. The British Government directed them. The British Government prosecuted the conflict that soldiers fought on its behalf. The debt that was created does not expire. It does not become negotiable because the passage of time made honouring it inconvenient.

A state that trades its soldiers is a state that has forgotten what soldiers are for. And a state that has forgotten what soldiers are for will, in due course, find itself without them.

That is not a threat. It is a prophecy. And it is one we are already watching come true — not least in the current exodus of personnel from our Special Forces, a strategic haemorrhage that should alarm every defence planner and every parliamentarian who claims to take national security seriously.

* Dr Robert Parr MBE AKC is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Changing Character of War Centre, Pembroke College, University of Oxford. He served for 25 years in the Royal Marines, UK Special Forces, and National Intelligence. He can be found on LinkedIn.

This is an edited version of Dr Parr’s essay, The Long Betrayal. The full version can be downloaded here:

Longest Betrayal

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Northern Ireland’s legacy debate is still being conducted as though the central question is what can be proved in law. That is necessary, but it is not sufficient. Law matters. Evidence matters. But neither resolves the deeper issue when the process itself is experienced as morally selective.

Legacy is not only a legal problem. It is a contest over moral status: who is treated as a victim, who is treated as a perpetrator, and whether those who served the state are entitled to fairness as well as scrutiny.

That is why the veterans’ case needs to be taken seriously on its own terms.

The evidence given to the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee is consistent and measured. Veterans are not rejecting accountability outright. They are rejecting a system that appears to draw them repeatedly back into processes that feel one-sided and unending.

• David Johnstone, the Northern Ireland Veterans Commissioner, described the gap between being “heard” and being “listened to.”

• Dave Holmes of the Northern Ireland Veterans Movement made the operational reality plain: decisions taken in seconds, under lethal pressure, are now dissected decades later with the benefit of hindsight.

• Chris Albiston, Northern Ireland Retired Police Officers Association, emphasised the importance of due process, particularly where reputations are at stake.

• Axel Schmidt, Ulster Human Rights Watch, coming from a different standpoint, argued for clearer recognition of victims and a sharper moral distinction between those harmed by terrorism and those who carried it out.

These are not fringe views.

They are variations on the same concern: context, proportionality, and fairness have been weakened in the way legacy is now handled.

Dr Robert Parr, a visiting Fellow at Oxford University’s Changing Character of Warfare Centre, in his essay The Longest Betrayal, pushes that concern to its most forceful conclusion.

His argument is not subtle.

The system does not protect veterans; it processes them. It contains their grievances within a structure that is procedurally elaborate but politically shaped, and which, in his view, reflects a long pattern of the state trading veteran interests for political accommodation.

The language is deliberately provocative, but the grievance underneath it is widely shared. Veterans see an asymmetry.

Opponents of the state enter the legacy space with decades of narrative development, legal infrastructure and political backing.

Veterans enter it largely as individuals, reliant on limited institutional support, facing processes that revisit their actions without restoring the context in which those actions were taken.

Whether one accepts Parr’s conclusions or not, the sense of imbalance he describes is not difficult to recognise.

Ian McBride, historian and author, goes some way to explaining why this dispute does not resolve itself.

Northern Ireland does not lack facts.

There is no agreement on what those facts mean.

The past is not a closed record waiting to be read; it is contested terrain.

Competing narratives — republican, unionist, state — carry different assumptions about legitimacy, responsibility and moral weight. The British state, meanwhile, has largely withdrawn from attempting to impose any coherent account of its own role, leaving a vacuum in which other narratives expand.

That withdrawal matters.

It helps explain why many within the unionist and veteran communities feel that their experience — service, sacrifice, and loss — has never been fully integrated into the public understanding of the conflict.

It also explains why legacy mechanisms are asked to carry more weight than they can bear.

They are expected to produce legal clarity, moral judgment, historical explanation and political stability at the same time.

Those aims do not align.

The strongest version of the veteran argument is not a demand for immunity. It is a demand for honest judgment.

It rejects the idea that actions taken under lawful authority, in a context of sustained terrorist violence, can be assessed as though they were equivalent to that violence, stripped of context and reduced to a legal abstraction.

The witnesses before the Committee repeatedly returned to the same themes: context, fairness, memory, proportionality, and due process.

That is not an attempt to escape scrutiny.

It is an attempt to ensure that scrutiny reflects reality.

At the same time, other stakeholders are pursuing different aims.

Victims want truth and recognition. Human rights advocates seek consistent legal standards. Historians insist on complexity and resist simplified narratives. Politicians want a process that can contain all of this without destabilising the present.

The difficulty is that legacy cannot satisfy all of these demands simultaneously.

A system that maximises legal accountability may undermine perceptions of fairness.

A system that emphasises reconciliation may weaken legal clarity.

A system that seeks narrative balance may satisfy none of the competing constituencies.

That is why Northern Ireland’s past remains unresolved.

The central struggle is not only over what happened.

It is over who gets to define it, who is trusted to explain it, and whose suffering is allowed to count.

The meeting, which included representatives from the Ministry of Defence, the Northern Ireland Office, and Downing Street policy teams, took place under Chatham House rules.

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A delegation led by former Parachute Regiment Major-General Dair Farrar-Hockley met officials at No.10 this week to raise concerns over the Government’s proposed approach to Troubles legacy legislation, in a meeting described as both “cordial” and potentially the first of several.

The meeting, which included representatives from the Ministry of Defence, the Northern Ireland Office, and Downing Street policy teams, took place under Chatham House rules. While specific details remain confidential, those present indicated that their concerns were heard—and, in some cases, recognised.

Speaking immediately afterwards, Major-General Farrar-Hockley emphasised that the delegation represented not only the Parachute Regiment but also the broader community of those who served during Operation Banner, including members of the Special Air Service and the Royal Ulster Constabulary.

“We felt reassured that not only someone was listening,” he said, “but that some of the issues we raised were already resonating.”

At the centre of those concerns is what many veterans describe as a return to a “failed approach” to legacy investigations—one they argue disproportionately targets former soldiers and police officers while offering little realistic prospect of resolution for families.

The Government’s stated aim—“justice, information and answers for all”—was challenged directly. With approximately 1,200 deaths still unresolved, Farrar-Hockley warned that the chances of delivering meaningful outcomes after nearly three decades are “vanishingly small.”

The timing of the legislation has also drawn criticism. The vote to carry the Bill forward comes amid renewed emphasis on defence readiness, following warnings from figures such as Fiona Hill that the UK is falling behind in the face of emerging threats.

For those who attended the meeting, the issue is not simply historical. It is tied directly to the present and future of military service.

“The first duty of any government is the defence of the realm,” Farrar-Hockley said. “This is the time to act.”

Alongside him, Paul Young of the Northern Ireland Veterans Movement described a growing sense of mobilisation across the veterans’ community.

Having previously welcomed the now-contested Legacy Act as a means of halting what he described as “lawfare,” Young said recent developments have forced campaigners back into action.

“We thought we had reached a position that, while not perfect, was workable,” he said. “Now we’re back on the campaign trail.”

According to Young, veteran-led groups—collectively representing well over 100,000 individuals—are increasingly aligning their efforts. Organisations connected to campaigns such as Operation Banner veterans’ advocacy, former soldiers’ groups, and wider support networks are moving towards a more coordinated approach.

He also struck a more sceptical note on the meeting itself, questioning the significance of its location in Downing Street.

“There was no need for it to be held in No.10,” he said. “It could have been held anywhere.”

Despite that, both men confirmed that further engagement has been agreed, with additional meetings expected.

Politically, the path ahead remains uncertain. Young pointed to the possibility of changes within government in the coming months, suggesting that leadership shifts—whether at Prime Ministerial or departmental level—could yet alter the direction of policy.

What appears clear is that the issue is not receding. If anything, the opposite is happening.

Veterans’ groups, including senior figures and regimental associations, are beginning to converge—seeking to present a more unified front as the legislation progresses.

“It’s not over,” Young said. “Far from it.”

To listen to their comments in full, listen to the One More Mission podcast episode featuring an extended discussion with those present at the meeting.

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A post justifying a missed vote on legacy legislation has triggered a surge of hostile reaction online, with veterans questioning where Alistair Carns truly stands. The response is not about procedure, but about trust, loyalty, and a growing belief that the system is no longer on their side.

There is a mood hardening around Alistair Carns — and it is not marginal or isolated. It is visible, vocal, and gathering pace.

Within hours of the post, engagement ran into the thousands. Views quickly climbed past 10,000, and the replies and quote posts followed a clear pattern: high volume, high emotion, and overwhelmingly negative sentiment.

This was not a mixed reaction. It was a pile-on with a consistent theme.

The dominant accusation is simple: absence from the vote is being read as avoidance. Not an operational necessity. Not competing priorities. Avoidance.

Examples speak for themselves:

• “That’s not the leadership I expect from a Bootneck… By avoiding the vote you’ve sided with the back stabbers. Where do you really stand?”

• “Labour hate the military… You are an MP for the party of military persecution.”

The language is unvarnished. It is also revealing.

First, this is not a technical disagreement about legislation. Very few responses engage with the detail of the bill itself. Instead, they go straight to character, loyalty, and alignment.

Second, the reaction collapses the distinction between the individual and the system. Carns is not being judged as an MP navigating a difficult brief. He is being treated as a representative of a political machine associated with Keir Starmer and, by extension, figures such as Richard Hermer. Whether that is fair is almost beside the point. It is how he is being perceived.

Third, there is a clear sense of betrayal framed through identity. The reference to “Bootneck” is not casual. It is a standard being invoked. The criticism is not simply that he missed a vote, but that he failed to meet what people believe someone with his background should represent under pressure.

That matters more than party politics in this space.

There is also a conspiratorial edge in some responses, referencing figures like Phil Shiner and alleging coordinated efforts against veterans. That should not be overstated, but it should not be ignored either. It reflects a deeper collapse in trust, where institutional explanations are no longer accepted at face value.

Taken together, the responses point to something more serious than anger over a single decision.

They show:

• A belief that the system is stacked against those who served

• A perception that political representatives will not break ranks when it matters

• A growing readiness to interpret ambiguity as bad faith rather than caution

This is the environment the original post has landed in.

Carns’ statement is measured. It speaks of balance, process, and working both publicly and privately. In a different context, that might have held. Here, it does not.

Because the audience is not asking for balance. It is asking for position.

That is the gap.

JusticeforVeterans.uk does not exist to inflame anger, but it cannot ignore it either.

If anything, this reaction reinforces the need for a different approach — one grounded in clarity, local engagement, and sustained pressure at the points where decisions are actually shaped.

The task now is to convert that energy into something that carries weight beyond social media:

• Clear, localised engagement with MPs who may not yet understand the issue

• Consistent framing of the core problem: process becoming punishment

• Relentless emphasis on the practical realities — evidential decay, repeated investigation, and the imbalance in how accountability is being applied

The responses to this post are not noise. They are a signal.

And they are unlikely to fade unless the underlying concerns are addressed directly, in language that leaves no room for doubt about where people stand.

There are moments in politics when a result looks decisive on paper but unsettled in reality. The passage of the Troubles Bill is one of them.

On this episode of One More Mission, former Parachute Regiment officer Lt Col Simon Barry sets out a clear view: the vote went through, but the ground beneath it is moving.

The Government’s majority held — but not as comfortably as before. Absences mattered. The margin narrowed. And beyond Westminster, something more significant is taking shape.

Veterans are no longer waiting to be spoken for. They are writing to MPs, meeting them, and turning what was once treated as a distant, technical issue into a constituency problem. That changes the calculation. MPs can absorb criticism from a niche group. They struggle when that criticism spreads across families, communities, and voting blocs.

Barry’s point is blunt: the Government may have misread the country.

The figure often cited — around 300,000 who served in Northern Ireland — only scratches the surface. Each of those individuals sits within a wider network: families, friends, communities. Many of those communities are the same working-class base that historically supplied the ranks of the Armed Forces. Ignoring them is not just careless. It is politically short-sighted.

That shift is becoming something more powerful than a campaign — it is a growing movement. Reports from the doorstep during local election campaigning suggest increasing awareness — and simmering anger — about what is being done to veterans, not for them.

This is where the argument moves beyond numbers in a division lobby. It becomes about legitimacy.

The Government continues to frame the Bill as a necessary correction to a failed settlement. Barry does not dispute that the previous arrangements satisfied few and resolved little. But replacing one flawed structure with another that produces the same practical imbalance is not progress. It is repetition, presented more carefully.

The deeper concern is motive.

If this were simply about fixing defects in earlier legislation, it could have been done quickly and directly. Instead, the previous framework was discarded and replaced wholesale. That raises a harder question: what is driving this?

Barry points to a convergence of political and strategic considerations—relations with the Republic of Ireland, alignment with wider European priorities, and the persistent pressure of legacy narratives shaped beyond the UK’s control.

In that context, the risk is clear. History becomes negotiable. Responsibility becomes blurred. And those who carried out lawful orders on behalf of the state find themselves exposed to processes that show little regard for time, evidence, or proportionality.

This is where the language of “law” and “justice” begins to diverge.

The episode returns repeatedly to that distinction. Law, as it is currently applied, is seen by many veterans as a tool — something used, managed, and at times exploited. Justice, by contrast, is what is missing. The absence is not abstract. It is felt in the imbalance between those pursued decades after the fact and those whose actions have never been meaningfully examined.

That perception — right or wrong — now has political weight.

It also shapes how recent events are interpreted. Incidents of renewed violence in Northern Ireland are not seen in isolation, but through the lens of history: pressure applied at moments of political decision, followed by concessions. Whether one accepts that reading or not, it is part of how veterans and many in their communities understand the present moment.

Against that backdrop, engagement with government continues.

A meeting at Number 10 with representatives from regimental associations is pending. Barry is clear-eyed about it. Dialogue matters. But timing matters too. A meeting after a vote raises obvious questions about intent. Without substance — without commitments written into law — process alone carries little weight.

That is a recurring theme: if protections are not explicit, they do not exist.

The same applies to the Government’s proposed amendments. There is much talk of changes to come, of safeguards to be introduced. Yet little has been set out in terms that would materially alter the position of those affected. Meanwhile, key external actors have already signalled limits on what they will accept.

That leaves a simple, uncomfortable equation. If the Bill depends on external alignment, and that alignment rejects meaningful protections, then those protections are unlikely to appear.

Someone absorbs the cost.

Barry’s conclusion is not rhetorical. It is practical. The momentum is shifting, but it is not yet decisive.

The “Green Army” — the wider network of regimental associations and veterans’ groups — remains fragmented. That is changing. Conversations are taking place across units and associations that rarely act in concert. A broader coalition is beginning to form.

For the first time in years, there is a sense that voices are being heard — not centrally directed, but locally amplified.

That matters more than headlines.

The next phase will not be decided in Westminster alone. It will be shaped by constituencies, local media, and direct engagement between veterans and those elected to represent them.

The vote has happened. The argument is still very much alive.

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There is a pattern in how this debate is conducted.

One side speaks in the language of rights, victims, and accountability. The other responds with process, fairness, and the lived reality of those being pursued decades later.

Both are speaking past each other.

What is missing is not more heat, but three things without which any argument for reform will continue to fail on its own terms — and opponents will fill the silence.

1. Acknowledge legitimate victim interests — genuinely and first

The families of those killed during the Troubles — civilian families above all, but also the families of combatants — have a lawful and legitimate interest in understanding what happened to their relatives. That interest is not a debating inconvenience. It is the foundation of the State’s obligations under Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Any argument for reform that does not begin by saying this clearly will be read, correctly, as an argument against scrutiny altogether. It is not. But the failure to state it prominently hands opponents the most powerful card in the deck.

The case for reform is not that investigation is wrong. It is that a system which subjects elderly veterans with severe PTSD to years of adversarial process — without producing reliable findings, and without any mechanism to hold those who directed terrorist violence to equivalent account — is not discharging its investigative duty. It is performing it.

The evidence submitted to the Joint Committee on Human Rights illustrates what this looks like in practice: a veteran with severe psychiatric illness ordered to give evidence under threat of contempt, then pursued through the Scottish courts for a £5,000 fine; a soldier shouted at by a coroner during a panic attack; a witness with catastrophic brain injury subjected to MRI and CAT scans to verify that he could not remember events he had not directly witnessed. These are not the outcomes of a rigorous system. They are the outcomes of a system that has lost its proportionality.

Acknowledging victim interests does not require accepting that every process, however prolonged or degraded by time, remains equally valid. It requires saying, plainly, that those interests are real — and that the current system is failing to serve them well either.

2. Explain why safeguards are not impunity — and show the precedents

This is where the argument is currently weakest, and where opponents are most effective.

Proposals such as requiring new evidence before reopening an investigation, limiting repeated examinations of the same facts, or accepting medical certificates confirming a witness is unfit to give oral evidence are routinely characterised as efforts to “close cases down” or to place soldiers above the law.

That framing is allowed to stand too often. It should not be.

Each of these measures has direct equivalents in ordinary legal systems that no one considers protective of wrongdoing:

• When Parliament created a mechanism to reopen concluded criminal cases — the Criminal Justice Act 2003, permitting re-prosecution after acquittal where new evidence is compelling and re-prosecution is in the public interest — it set a high evidential threshold as the condition of doing so. The “New Evidence Certificate” requirement applies the same principle to the investigative context: finality is the default; departing from it requires a defined evidential gate. The legacy framework is not being asked to accept a novel restriction. It is being asked to apply a standard Parliament has already endorsed in a more serious context.

• Medical evidence accepted as determinative of a witness’s fitness to give evidence is standard practice in civil and criminal proceedings throughout England, Wales, and Scotland. The coroner who dismissed consultant psychiatric evidence from Professor Seena Fazel in favour of a report from a less-qualified practitioner who had never met the veteran was not applying a rigorous standard. He was departing from one.

• Presumptions in favour of remote testimony now exist in many jurisdictions following COVID-era reforms, and are applied to vulnerable witnesses as a matter of course. Veterans in their seventies and eighties, many suffering service-related trauma, meet any reasonable definition of vulnerable witness.

• Statutory time-bar provisions — or, where no bar exists, judicial discretion to stay proceedings as an abuse of process — operate precisely to prevent the courts from becoming instruments of oppression rather than justice. No equivalent protection currently exists in the Northern Ireland legacy framework.

The point is not that veterans deserve special treatment. It is that the current framework denies them treatment that any other witness category would receive as a matter of course. A system that requires that gap to be closed is not granting impunity. It is restoring baseline proportionality.

This argument must be made with evidence, not assertion. Opponents will deny it. The response needs to be specific: here is the English law equivalent, here is the Scottish procedure, here is how every other mature system handles this. That is a rule-of-law argument, not a special pleading argument, and it is much harder to dismiss.

3. Confront the assumption that public interest is constant over time

There is a premise at the centre of the opposition’s case that is rarely named and almost never challenged: that the public interest in investigating past events remains the same whether the investigation takes place ten years or forty years after the events in question.

It does not. And the failure to say so clearly is a significant strategic error.

As time passes:

• Evidence degrades or is lost

• Witnesses age, die, or lose reliable recall

• Context is flattened or distorted by subsequent events and narratives

• The capacity of any process to produce findings capable of withstanding scrutiny diminishes

At the same time — and this is the part that tends to be overlooked — the human cost of requiring participation increases, not decreases. The veteran, who was 30 at the time of the events, is now in their 70s. The PTSD that was manageable with support is now, forty years on, something else entirely. The wife of the soldier referred to in the evidence as Soldier 4 put it plainly:

This is not sentiment. It is a description of what happens when a process designed for a purpose loses sight of whether it can still achieve it.

An investigation so degraded by time that it cannot produce reliable findings is not discharging the State’s Article 2 obligation. It is performing the appearance of discharging it, at serious human cost, while yielding nothing that serves the interests of families seeking truth.

The argument is not against investigation. It is that the threshold for continuing must rise as the evidential basis weakens and the human cost grows. This is not a concession to those who wish to evade accountability. It is a condition of a system that takes accountability seriously.

The emotional architecture of the debate must shift

There is a fourth element that the argument has not yet addressed, and it may yet be the most consequential.

The opponent’s human stories lead every media presentation of this issue. The families of those killed are the first voice heard. The veterans’ case is presented as institutional, legalistic, procedural.

The evidence submitted to the Joint Committee on Human Rights contains material that should reverse this. The account above of Soldier 4’s wife is one example. The description of a decorated veteran who cannot leave his home, cannot use public transport, and spent the years of legal process sitting in his front room waiting to be attacked, is another. These are not footnotes to an amendment schedule. They are the reason the amendment schedule exists.

The argument for reform needs to lead with what the current system is doing to people before explaining the statutory protections it proposes. The case for change is not primarily a legal argument. It is a description of a system that has become, in the words of one submission, “punitive in its own right” — and the legal argument is how the situation gets fixed.

Until that order is reversed — until the human cost is placed at the centre and the procedural remedy follows from it — opponents will continue to own the emotional register of this debate, and the argument will remain, structurally, defensive.

The issue is not whether the past can be examined

It is whether a system can do so without becoming, in effect, a form of punishment in its own right.

The argument for reform has the stronger case on the merits. But it is not yet making that case in the way that wins.

Four things are needed: a genuine acknowledgement of victim interests stated prominently and without qualification; a concrete, evidence-based demonstration that the proposed safeguards are standard legal norms rather than special privileges; an explicit argument that investigative legitimacy is time-sensitive and must be proportionate to what a process can actually achieve; and a reordering of the argument so that the human cost leads and the procedural remedy follows.

Without all four, the gaps will be filled by those with every incentive to do so.

—

This post draws on written evidence submitted to the Joint Committee on Human Rights by the Special Air Service Regimental Association, the Special Boat Service Association, and the Special Reconnaissance Regimental Association (NITB0019), April 2026.

The Government’s troubled Troubles Bill has been waved through to the next Parliament. And, while the bill may have been slowed, it is far from dead.

For anyone who wants more than a few soundbites about veterans’ opposition to the Troubles Bill, the Joint Committee on Human Rights has now published the evidence it received.

It is worth reading.

Not because it settles the argument, but because it exposes it. What sits on that page is not a tidy collection of views. It is a record of a political system struggling to explain itself.

This is being presented as constitutional housekeeping. It is nothing of the sort.

It is a live contest over how the past is to be judged—and, more importantly, who will be made to answer for it.

Strip away the language of “reform” and “balance” and the underlying question becomes unavoidable: is this a process designed to deal with the past evenly, or one that—by design or default—keeps dragging the state’s own veterans back into the frame while others slip out of it?

That is the argument running through the evidence, whether it is stated directly or not.

The Government’s line is clear enough. There is “no equivalence” between the security forces and terrorist organisations. Safeguards are in place. The system is fair.

But the more that line is repeated, the less secure it sounds.

Because the practical reality is harder to dismiss. The state can investigate its own. It has files, chains of command, records, and living institutions that can be compelled to answer. Paramilitary organisations do not. They leave fragments, not systems.

So a process that looks neutral on paper begins to tilt in practice.

That is where the anger comes from.

The inquest system sits at the centre of it. In theory, it is a mechanism for truth. In practice, in this context, it is the most reliable route for reopening cases involving soldiers and police—because those are the cases where the evidence still exists and the institutions can still be reached.

Legally, that may be defensible. Politically, it looks like a one-way street.

And that perception is now doing the real damage.

“Veterans versus victims” is a crude phrase, but it has taken hold because it captures how the process feels to those watching it unfold. Not reconciliation. Not closure. Something closer to a rebalancing of blame—long after the events themselves.

Many veterans do not believe they are being asked to support a fair reckoning. They believe they are being asked to accept a rewriting in which those who enforced the law remain under scrutiny, while those who broke it fade from view.

Once that belief settles in, the rest becomes procedural detail.

The Government may be right that the previous settlement failed. It satisfied almost no one and resolved very little. But replacing one failed structure with another that produces the same practical imbalance is not progress. It is the same outcome, repackaged to meet the expectations of a political class that cannot admit the limits of what can be resolved — or that is answering to pressures it is unwilling to name.

That is the risk now.

Because the problem is not simply a legal one. It is structural. A system that depends on records will always find the state first. A system that relies on testimony will always struggle to reach those with nothing to gain from speaking.

That asymmetry cannot be wished away. But nor can it be ignored.

If the outcome is that soldiers are, in effect, the only people consistently drawn back into formal scrutiny, then the claim of even-handed justice will not survive contact with reality.

And if that claim collapses, so does the legitimacy of the entire process.

That is why the JCHR evidence matters. It shows, in plain terms, that this is not a settled issue being tidied up. It is an unresolved argument being pushed forward under the cover of process.

Read it closely enough, and the pattern is difficult to miss.

The language is careful. The conclusions are not.

There are moments when a single piece of reporting cuts through the noise and exposes something deeper. A recent Spectator article by Richard Williams (who commanded 22 SAS from 2005 to 2008) and Sir David Davis (an experienced parliamentarian and SAS reservist) is one such moment.

After a recent visit to Washington, meeting politicians on both sides of the political divide, and military and intelligence services people, their central claim is stark: American political, military, and intelligence figures increasingly believe that Britain has betrayed its own special forces—and, in doing so, weakened the alliance itself. That is not media blather. It is a strategic warning.

Lawfare and operational risk

From Northern Ireland to Syria and Afghanistan, UK Special Forces have operated at the very sharp end of protecting the nation. Since 2001, US-UK integration has brought cutting-edge technology and tactics to chronically underfunded British units. That partnership is now fraying.

Decades-old counter-terrorist operations — where hesitation would have meant death — are being reopened under the Northern Ireland Troubles Bill and misapplied human rights legislation. Veterans are forced to defend split-second decisions taken under fire.

• SAS squadrons are understrength

• Experienced warrant officers are leaving in droves

• Recruitment for gruelling selection courses is collapsing

The practical outcome is immediate: the UK cannot provide the manpower or reliability that American counterparts expect. Some US operators are reportedly considering whether it might be safer to operate without UK forces, rather than risk hesitation due to legal exposure.

Propagandising the past

Their article revisits infamous incidents, such as Loughgall (1987), Coagh (1991), and Clonoe (1992). These were live-fire engagements designed to prevent lethal attacks. Veterans who acted decisively are now subjected to lawfare, decades after the fact.

Patrick Kelly’s squad at Loughgall confronted an IRA unit responsible for hundreds of killings. A fresh inquest, promised by Hilary Benn, does not seek to examine tactics or intent — it serves as a propaganda victory for those who opposed the state.

The article points out: “Kelly’s family peddles the narrative that they ‘went to blow up, not to kill’, an extraordinary claim given that they used a 400-pound bomb to destroy the police station, with the police officers inside. A scout involved in the attack confirmed: ‘The point of the [IRA] operation was to get in before they [the RUC officers] left, to take them out.’”

Strategic consequences

The consequences extend beyond individual veterans:

• UK Special Forces are weaker than ever

• The US may limit or withdraw operational cooperation

• Intelligence sharing and joint mission trust is eroding

• Britain risks becoming a second-tier partner in counter-terrorist operations

Veterans are at the sharp end of the state’s failure. Legal attacks, stress-induced illness, and reputational damage accumulate while national security itself is undermined.

A moral and operational crisis

Washington’s concern is practical: hesitation or legal entanglement could compromise operations. Britain’s enemies never forced the SAS to hesitate. Its own government is achieving what no terrorist could: turning the nation’s finest into political targets and operational risks.

This is not abstract politics. It is a strategic misstep with real-world consequences: lost trust, lost capability, and lost credibility with allies.

If Britain continues down this path, the very men who keep the nation safe will be sidelined by fear of legal repercussions, leaving the country more exposed than ever.

Veterans are not just history.

They are the present.

And a harbinger of many brave soldiers’ futures.

There are weeks when separate stories begin to align. This has been one of them.

A series of reports—across broadcast, print and specialist defence coverage—has converged on a single, uncomfortable truth: the United Kingdom still has no settled answer to what happens after it sends men to fight.

Start with the disclosures around the Attorney General. A detailed investigation by The Telegraph into Lord Richard Hermer’s role in the al-Sweady litigation is not a matter of speculation or political spin. It is rooted in documentary evidence—emails, legal notes, and years of proceedings.

The key point is not simply that the claims collapsed—they did—but that they ran for years despite mounting doubts about their credibility. The inquiry ultimately found the allegations to be “deliberate lies”. Yet the machinery of litigation continued to turn.

Alongside this, it has been widely reported that formal complaints have now been made to both the Bar Standards Board and the House of Lords Commissioners for Standards. The issue has moved beyond politics into professional scrutiny.

That is reinforced by the intervention of Ben Wallace, writing from direct experience of government and war. His account describes a pattern in which legal action, media pressure and institutional caution combine to produce sustained lawfare against British troops—something long observed within defence circles but rarely stated so plainly.

From there, move to the present.

Senior figures connected to the Special Air Service have publicly questioned whether the Attorney General is fit to oversee the Government’s Troubles legislation, warning of bias and a breakdown of trust. That concern has been echoed across multiple outlets and defence commentators, not confined to a single newspaper line.

At the same time, the legislative position itself is shifting. Hilary Benn has already been forced to concede “substantial amendments” to the Troubles Bill after sustained pressure from veterans and senior officers. The accompanying Remedial Order has been paused following resistance in the House of Lords—an unusual and telling retreat.

None of this is happening in isolation.

Former Army chiefs, including Sir Peter Wall and Sir Nick Parker, have warned that the current trajectory risks opening the door to a new wave of “witch hunts”. The Special Air Service Regimental Association has gone further, signalling potential legal action and even a boycott of inquests.

At the same time, there are credible reports of experienced personnel leaving elite units, citing concern over retrospective legal exposure. Whether the numbers are large or small is almost beside the point. The direction of travel is what matters.

This is where Operation Banner stops being history and becomes precedent.

The sequence is now familiar:

• Operations conducted under government authority

• A later legal environment reshaped by evolving human rights frameworks

• Repeated cycles of investigation and litigation

• The gradual transfer of risk from the state to the individual

The al-Sweady case fits this pattern. So too do continuing efforts to reopen or reinterpret incidents from Northern Ireland, from inquests to long-running prosecutions linked to events such as Bloody Sunday.

The common thread is not conviction. It is process.

Cases collapse. Evidence fails. Courts acquit. But the years spent under investigation—the reputational damage, the uncertainty, the strain—remain. The process itself becomes the punishment.

This is the context in which the current Troubles Bill must be judged.

The Government insists that safeguards will prevent unjust prosecutions and that cases will only proceed where there is compelling new evidence. That assurance has been offered before. In practice, it has proved elastic. Evidence is rarely final in contested conflicts; it is revisited, reframed and, when necessary, rediscovered.

What is being constructed is not closure, but continuity.

And that continuity matters far beyond Northern Ireland.

Modern operations—whether counter-terrorism, expeditionary warfare or grey-zone conflict—depend on a clear understanding between the state and those it deploys. That understanding has traditionally been simple: act within the rules as they exist at the time, and the state will stand behind you.

It is that understanding which is now in question.

If today’s soldiers, drone operators and special forces personnel conclude that their actions will be judged decades later under different legal and political conditions—without firm backing from the state—then behaviour changes. Initiative narrows. Risk tolerance falls. In some cases, people simply leave.

The unease now being expressed within the special forces community is not emotional. It is rational.

This is why this week matters.

Not because it settles the argument around one Attorney General or one piece of legislation, but because it exposes the unresolved tension at the heart of British defence policy.

The country has not reconciled its commitment to expanding legal scrutiny with its need to maintain an effective fighting force.

Until it does, Operation Banner will not remain in the past.

It will continue to set the rules.

The Special Air Service Regimental Association has issued a direct appeal to Labour MPs following a written statement and evidence to the Joint Committee on Human Rights by Hilary Benn confirming delays to the Northern Ireland Troubles Bill and the introduction of further amendments.

In his statement to Parliament, Benn acknowledged that more must be done to “safeguard our veterans community” and confirmed that a “substantial package of amendments” will be brought forward, alongside additional time for scrutiny, with the Bill now delayed until the next Parliamentary session.

The Government maintains that the legislation will improve outcomes for victims and families, enable cooperation with Irish authorities, and draw a clearer distinction between state forces and paramilitary actors. It also insists the Bill avoids the “false promise” of immunity contained in earlier legislation and will comply with human rights obligations.

However, the SAS Regimental Association has made clear that these assurances have not translated into confidence among those most affected.

In its April 23 letter to MPs, the Association argues that the Bill remains fundamentally flawed, describing it as “unfit for purpose” and warning that the Government’s proposed protections do not, in practice, protect veterans.

Key concerns include:

· No draft amendments have been shared with key stakeholders despite earlier commitments

· Proposals submitted by the Association months ago have not been incorporated

· Continued uncertainty over whether meaningful safeguards will be in place at all

The delay, presented by Government as necessary for proper scrutiny, is instead interpreted by the Association as evidence that the legislation is not workable in its current form.

More significantly, the Association has drawn a line: if the Bill proceeds without substantive change, it is prepared to mount a legal challenge — setting up a direct confrontation between former Special Forces personnel and the Government.

The intervention also reflects a deeper divide over how legacy cases are being handled.

While the Government frames the Bill as a “final chance to get legacy right” and deliver answers for families, critics argue it risks entrenching a cycle of retrospective investigation and prosecution — what is increasingly described as lawfare.

The Association points to recent court rulings, including the collapse of the Coagh case, as evidence of a system that allows weak or unmeritorious cases to run for years at high personal and public cost.

Its message to MPs is direct: vote against carrying over the Bill, or abstain.

Behind that instruction lies a broader warning. This is not simply about resolving the past. The framework being built now will shape how future operations are judged — and whether those sent to carry them out can rely on the state to stand behind them when the political and legal climate shifts years later.

When Parliament approved the Remedial Order on 21 January 2026, Hilary Benn told the Commons that the conditional immunity scheme was a “false promise” and “completely undeliverable”. He stated the measures “were never implemented” and had been “struck down by our courts.”

That line now underpins the Government’s justification for dismantling the Act and reopening the legal terrain.

It does not withstand even light scrutiny.

The weakness is simple. It rests on an adverse finding by one judge that the Government chose not to test to the end.

A Northern Ireland judiciary paper (April 2025) makes this clear: the High Court’s findings on Convention compatibility were not pursued because the appeal was withdrawn in July 2024. The Court of Appeal summary in the Bridie Brown case confirms that, following the Dillon ruling, officials had already begun work on a remedial order.

That is the pivot:

• One court found parts of the Act incompatible

• The Government chose not to pursue the appeal

• The finding, therefore, stands unchallenged

That does not make the ruling unreal. But it does mean the conclusion now presented as settled law was never fully contested.

Benn turns that into a broader claim: that the entire immunity offer was a sham.

That is rhetorically effective. It is also — to put it mildly — legally overextended.

A more accurate position would be this: the scheme faced serious legal difficulty, and the Government chose to concede rather than defend, amend, or refine it.

There is a further point often overlooked. Benn has argued that the scheme was never commenced and therefore never had effect. That is correct. No one received immunity.

But that is not the same as proving the scheme could not have been made to work. It simply means it was never brought into force.

What is being presented as impossibility is, in reality, abandonment.

The deeper issue is not that defects were identified. It is that those defects were accepted and then used to close down the argument entirely. A political decision is being framed as a legal inevitability.

And that is only half the picture.

The Act was not challenged in Belfast alone. The Republic of Ireland escalated the matter by lodging an inter-State case against the United Kingdom at the European Court of Human Rights in January 2024.

This was pressure from two directions:

• A High Court incompatibility finding in Northern Ireland

• An inter-State challenge by Ireland in Strasbourg

The Government’s response was not to hold the line, but to concede ground.

Labour has since treated the matter as effectively settled.

It is not.

The clean position is this:

• One judge found parts incompatible

• The Government chose not to pursue the challenge

• The Republic of Ireland internationalised the issue

• The Government moved to replace rather than defend

That is not the same as saying the Act was “struck down” and nothing more could be done.

More accurately, the Legacy Act did not collapse under domestic law alone. It was squeezed from Belfast and Strasbourg. What followed was not legal inevitability, but a political decision not to resist.

And, there’s more.

Under the emerging replacement framework, Benn is moving toward structured cross-border involvement with the Republic of Ireland. To be sure, this is not a transfer of jurisdiction; UK cases will not be handed to Dublin.

But the system is being shaped to include:

• Information sharing between UK and Irish authorities

• Coordination on cross-border investigations

• Access to evidence, witnesses, and records held in the Republic

• Alignment with obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights

That distinction matters.

This is not about control.

It is about influence.

Once a framework is built in which:

• Evidence flows across the border

• Cooperation is required from Irish authorities, and

• The system is designed to withstand external legal challenge

Then, the Republic becomes a participant in how cases are handled, even without formal authority.

That is the shift.

Not jurisdiction, but leverage.

Before anyone pretends that the Republic should have a standing role in the moral management of legacy cases, its own record regarding terrorism, collusion, and cross-border security deserves rather more honest attention.

The Republic of Ireland does not come to this issue with clean hands or an unimpeachable record. Its own history in relation to Northern Ireland terrorism includes failure, political caution, contested cooperation, and in at least one grave case, proven Garda collusion. That matters now that London treats Dublin as a credible partner in shaping the next legacy framework.

Ultimately, Benn’s entire claim rests not on a final contest of principle, but on an adverse ruling the Government chose not to appeal.

What is presented as legal certainty was, in fact, a decision to concede.

And what follows is not simply a domestic reset, but the construction of a system in which external influence is built in from the start.

Every few weeks, Operation Banner returns to the surface. A new inquest. A fresh legal argument. Another round of commentary, familiar in tone and predictable in direction. Each side advances its case. Each claims the ground of justice. And yet, for all the movement, nothing settles.

That is the real problem.

Operation Banner is still spoken of as a legacy issue, as though it belongs to a closed chapter. It does not. It is the test case for how the British state treats those it sends to act on its behalf. The conclusions drawn now — in law, in practice, and in public understanding — will not remain confined to Northern Ireland. They will carry forward into Iraq, Afghanistan, and whatever comes next.

The question, then, is not whether Banner should be examined. It is how.

At present, the system produces activity without resolution. Investigations reopen ground once thought settled. Legal processes operate through frameworks that have shifted over time. Political voices enter the fray as required. Campaign groups apply pressure. The press does what the press does best: it amplifies conflict.

Each element has its place. None is capable of delivering a settled, credible judgment on its own.

What is missing is something more basic, a way of distinguishing between things that are not the same:

• Criminal wrongdoing

• Operational error

• Lawful but politically contentious action

• Retrospective moral judgment

• Legal challenge driven by wider aims

These categories are regularly collapsed into one another.

The result is not clarity but confusion.

Actions taken in one context are judged in another. Decisions made under pressure are reassessed at leisure. The line between evidence and assertion begins to blur.

This is not justice. It is drift.

The deeper difficulty is structural.

The institutions currently doing the work are not designed to produce the kind of judgment required:

• Courts decide specific legal points

• Politicians signal positions

• Campaigners pursue outcomes

• Journalists surface and sharpen disputes

All of that generates heat. Very little, if any, of it produces settlement.

And, if truth be told, the arrangement suits most of those involved. Campaigns continue (and generate funding). Political capital is made. Legal processes roll on. Stories keep appearing. The system is self-sustaining.

The only party not well served is the public, which is left without a clear account of what happened, why it happened, and how it should now be understood.

That absence matters.

It creates a vacuum into which competing narratives rush, each claiming authority, none commanding it.

More importantly, it sends a message — not in words, but in practice — to those currently serving.

If this is how a long-concluded operation on British soil is handled, what confidence can those who served in Iraq or Afghanistan have that their actions will be judged coherently, consistently, and in context? Not in theory, but in fact.

And, what of all the chatter of deploying to Ukraine?

That question does not sit in a courtroom. It sits in the mind of anyone asked to act in dangerous, uncertain conditions, where decisions are made quickly — in the blink of an eye — and consequences unfold slowly.

Where confidence in the system is weak, behaviour changes.

Some will hesitate where decisiveness is required. Others will disengage from the idea that accountability is something real and not merely selective. Neither outcome serves the public. Both are entirely foreseeable.

None of this is an argument against scrutiny. Scrutiny is essential. But scrutiny without structure is not accountability. It is theatre.

What is required is not another round of reaction, but a form of judgment capable of doing the work properly.

That means a process that understands the operational realities, applies the law as it stood at the time, examines new evidence without arbitrarily reopening settled matters, and operates at a distance from both campaigning pressure and political expediency.

That is not a soft option. It is a serious one.

Without it, Operation Banner will continue as it is: not resolved, but replayed. Not understood, but argued over. Not concluded, but prolonged.

And if that becomes the settled pattern, it will not stop there.

Getting Op Banner right is not about drawing a line under the past. It is about ensuring that those sent to act in the future do so on ground that will not later be shifted beneath their feet.

Outrage is easy. Judgment is harder. It is the latter that is required — and still absent.

Whatever view one takes on the moral case for the Government’s Troubles Bill, the deeper problem is legal and constitutional. The Bill does not do what it claims to do. It says it reforms governance. It does not. Instead, it relocates accountability down the chain of command, towards those who executed operations, while leaving upstream State decision-making largely untouched.

That matters directly for soldiers and officers who do not control the decisions now being insulated from them.

The Government states that the Bill “reforms the governance and functions” of the new Legacy Commission. That is not a technical claim about process. It is a constitutional claim about how the State directs, controls, and accounts for the use of force. If governance is being reformed, it must address those upstream decisions. Reforming how a commission writes reports is not governance reform.

What governance means in military operations

In military terms, governance sits upstream of the patrol, the arrest, or the engagement. It concerns how operations are conceived and authorised; what intelligence is relied on; how confidence and risk are assessed; what legal framework applies; and who carries accountability for those choices.

Soldiers operate within those parameters. They do not design them.

If a Bill claims to reform governance in relation to deaths caused by State force, it must examine how the State planned and controlled operations, not just how the final moments are reconstructed after the fact.

This is where the Bill fails.

What the Bill actually does

Section 3(2) sets out the Legacy Commission’s functions. In brief, they are to investigate conduct linked to Troubles-related deaths or harm, examine the circumstances of a death, collect personal statements, and produce a historical record.

All of these functions are retrospective. They look back at events. They are incident-centred. They sit downstream of the decision to deploy force.

Retrospective investigation is not wrong in itself. The problem is that the Bill confines the Commission largely to the incident itself. It records what happened, but it is not designed to examine how the State set the conditions for it to happen.

What the Bill cannot examine and why that matters

The Commission’s principal functions, as defined in section 3(2), are incident-centred. They are designed to reconstruct events and produce records, not to make upstream State planning, authorisation, intelligence quality, or command decisions the primary objects of inquiry.

That omission matters because the law governing the use of lethal force does not focus solely on what a soldier did in the final seconds of an operation. It focuses on whether the State planned and controlled operations in a way that minimised the risk to life.

If the failure lies upstream, a mechanism that looks only downstream cannot fix it.

The practical effect: accountability flows to the wrong place

The consequence is predictable. If intelligence was weak, misleading, or later shown to be false, those who generated it, validated it, or authorised reliance on it can escape scrutiny under this scheme. The burden instead falls on soldiers and officers.

That is not reasonable. In practice, officers and soldiers must rely on intelligence passed down the chain of command. They do not have the mandate, time, or systems to interrogate its provenance or confidence. There are sound operational reasons why lawful orders are accepted without challenge.

We have seen in other campaigns what happens when upstream intelligence propositions later prove unreliable. Claims about “45 minutes” and assertions about biological and chemical weapons became decision-shaping propositions and then materially collapsed. The point is not to relitigate Iraq; it is to underline a governance reality. When intelligence fails at source, it is neither lawful nor just to treat the point of execution as the primary site of accountability.

The governance failure sits upstream: where single-source or low-confidence intelligence is presented as robust; where fragments are duplicated across reports and mistaken for corroboration; or where decision-makers are not clearly told what kind of intelligence they are relying on: contested, low confidence, or untested.

If intelligence validation is someone’s responsibility, it must be defensible. That means clear provenance, confidence grading, independent challenge, and a record of what was known, assumed, or merely asserted.

Why this is unjust to soldiers

The Bill risks producing a manifest injustice. It fixes practical responsibility on those who executed what appeared to be a lawful order, while structurally shielding those who shaped the decision environment above them.

This is not hypothetical. Long-standing case law accepts that soldiers may honestly believe their actions are necessary and act under superior orders. Where things go wrong, the deficiency is often found in the State’s planning, intelligence, and control, not with the individual soldier.

Responsibility can be shared; accountability cannot be delegated away.

The “looks broad, works narrow” problem

The Bill’s definitions are broad. But a broad scope is not the same as a functioning accountability architecture.

Even where upstream conduct is nominally within scope, the Commission lacks the powers and functions needed to examine the very decisions that lawful governance requires: planning, authorisation, and control.

The scheme looks comprehensive. It operates narrowly.

Why this cannot become doctrine

On any fair reading, the Bill does not do what it claims. It does not reform governance. It relabels downstream review while leaving upstream decision-making untouched.

There is a further and more serious risk. Once enacted, this model will not remain confined to Northern Ireland. Statutory architectures have a habit of travelling. If the State normalises a system that fixes accountability at the point of execution while insulating upstream decisions, that error will not be local. It will be portable.

Soldiers did not deploy themselves. A system that forgets that truth does not protect them. It quietly abandons them with constitutional consequences that will endure long after this Bill.

* Republished with kind permission from Dr. Rois Ni Thuama, founder of RTConsulting Limited, which helps boards and senior leaders make defensible decisions on cyber and operational risk before the crisis, not in the aftermath.

She is on LinkedIn, or you can visit her Substack to find out more.

At its core, former Parachute Regiment Lieutenant Colonel Simon Barry’s argument is straightforward: The proposed legislation does not resolve the legacy issue. In fact, it risks making it worse.

The 2023 Legacy Act, for all its imperfections, attempted to draw a line — an acknowledgement that Northern Ireland’s past could not be endlessly re-litigated without cost.

The current direction does the opposite.

It reopens inquests, invites repeat investigations without new evidence, and creates the conditions for sustained legal action that can stretch into the future for decades.

That shift matters.

It changes the trajectory from closure to permanent process.

What emerges from the conversation is not a demand for immunity, as is often suggested, but for something more basic:

• A clear time limit on investigations

• No reopening of cases without genuinely new evidence

• Proper distinction between lawful state actors and terrorists

• A system that does not incentivise legal action for financial or political gain

Without those guardrails, the result is predictable. The process remains the punishment.

There is also a growing recognition—reflected in the discussion—that public sentiment is beginning to shift. Barry points to moments when the issue has broken out beyond veteran circles and reached wider audiences, including defence forums and public debate. The message is starting to spread, but not far enough yet.

That gap matters.

One of the recurring concerns in the episode is the risk that the issue will remain contained within a “veteran echo chamber.” The conversation stresses the need to reach beyond that — into communities, associations, and public discourse where understanding is still forming.

The stakes are not abstract.

If nothing changes, the likely outcome is:

• Continued legal exposure for junior ranks and frontline personnel

• Increasing use of litigation as a mechanism of pressure

• No meaningful prospect of closure for most cases

A one-sided evidential landscape, where state records are used, but terrorist records are absent

That last point is often overlooked. The system being created relies heavily on documentation — and only one side kept it.

The discussion also returns to a central imbalance that continues to drive concern:

• Terrorist actors received comfort letters, amnesties, and political accommodation

• Veterans and police face ongoing legal uncertainty decades later

That is not a technical flaw.

It is a structural one.

Running through the episode is a consistent theme: this is not about relitigating the past for its own sake. It is about responsibility, balance, and the basic principle that those sent to act on behalf of the state should not be left carrying the burden alone.

Barry distils it to a single line drawn from recent commentary:

The episode is worth listening to in full. It avoids slogans and deals directly with the mechanics—how the system works, where it is heading, and who ultimately bears the cost.

Listen to the full podcast here:

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