How Britain Lost the Language of Duty

The legacy debate exposes a political and intellectual culture that has lost the language needed to understand what soldiers and police were asked to do.

A remark attributed recently to Hilary Benn offers an interesting window into the legacy debate. According to one source who spoke with him, Benn said he could not envisage killing anyone under any circumstances.

Taken in isolation, that sentiment sounds humane, even admirable. Most people would hope never to face such a moment.

But the remark also raises a more serious question.

What happens when those responsible for judging past operations cannot imagine the circumstances in which lethal force might be necessary?

This is not about criticising individuals. It is about understanding how Britain arrived at the current morass over legacy investigations.

The observations experienced figures from the conflict — former SAS commanders and RUC Special Branch officers — point to several deeper problems beneath the present controversy.

First, there is the widening moral distance between those who had to confront violence and those who now judge it.

For soldiers and police officers operating against armed terrorist organisations, lethal force was not an abstract ethical puzzle. It was a professional responsibility that might arise at any moment.

They were trained for it and accepted it as part of their duty to the state.

Most civilians, and most politicians, will never experience that burden.

That distance is understandable. But when it becomes too wide, it distorts judgment.

Second, there is the persistent refusal in parts of official thinking to recognise that what occurred in Northern Ireland often amounted to combat.

One source recounts that Benn rejects the idea that SAS actions in Northern Ireland should be classified as combat. That position is revealing, to say the least.

If engagements with armed terrorists are not recognised as combat, then the entire framework through which those actions are judged changes. Soldiers cease to be combatants confronting lethal adversaries and instead become subjects of a law-enforcement narrative that can be revisited decades later.

Language matters here. If the state cannot acknowledge that its forces sometimes fought armed enemies, it becomes far easier to treat those same forces as suspects rather than defenders.

Third, several veterans point to the influence of a particular “conflict resolution” doctrine that developed during the peace process surrounding the Good Friday Agreement.

According to this view, advanced by figures such as Jonathan Powell and others involved in negotiations, revisiting the actions of the security forces became part of the price paid to bring terrorism to an end. In effect, subjecting veterans to investigation was seen as a tolerable cost if it helped stabilise the political settlement.

If that interpretation is correct, it explains a great deal. It suggests that the present difficulties are not accidental. They arise from a framework in which the reputations and legal security of former soldiers were never central considerations.

The result is the strange position Britain now finds itself in.

The men who were sent to confront armed terrorists are repeatedly drawn back into legal processes decades after the events. Meanwhile, the language used to describe what they were doing has steadily shifted. Operations become “incidents”. Engagements become “shootings”. Combat disappears from the vocabulary altogether.

When that happens, moral clarity disappears with it.

Understanding this problem is the first step towards resolving it. Endless procedural battles over individual cases will not solve the deeper issue. What is needed is a recovery of clear thinking about the nature of the conflict itself.

That means several things.

It means acknowledging that Northern Ireland was involved in sustained terrorist violence directed against the state and the public — in fact, an armed insurrection.

It means recognising that soldiers and police were deployed to confront that violence, sometimes at close quarters and sometimes with lethal consequences. And it means resisting the drift towards moral equivalence between those who defended the state and those who sought to destroy it.

None of this requires hostility towards peace or reconciliation. On the contrary, a durable peace depends on a truthful understanding of what actually happened.

The difficulty today is not that politicians dislike killing. Most of them would be incapable of it. The difficulty is that many of those now shaping legacy policy struggle to imagine the circumstances in which others were required to do exactly that.

Until Britain recovers the language to describe duty, force and the responsibilities of the state, the legacy debate will remain trapped in the same unresolved arguments.