Operation Banner is not the past. It is the precedent

Operation Banner is not a settled chapter but a live precedent. How it is judged now will shape how those sent to act in Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond can expect to be judged in the future.

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.