Britain’s Bill of Shame

The day after the Queen’s Speech, the bereaved families of the Ballymurphy Massacre quietly marked the one-year anniversary of a landmark inquest which found all victims ‘entirely innocent’—more than fifty years after the British media ran credulous stories, fed by the British army, which cast civilian victims as death-deserving IRA gunmen. 

What does this bill mean, then, to victims’ families, who protested yesterday—in Derry, Belfast and London—against what they are calling Britain’s ‘Bill Of Shame’?

‘It’s very disturbing,’ John Teggart, who was 11 when his father was shot 14 times by the Parachute Regiment during the Ballymurphy Massacre, tells Tribune. ‘They’ve made it quite blatant that they’re trying to black out the war crimes committed by state actors like the British Army and those involved in running paramilitaries who were state agents.’

If enacted, the bill threatens to scrap all forms of legal redress: criminal proceedings, inquests, civil actions, police investigations, and even police ombudsman investigations. 

It performs three functions for the Tories. It soaks up political support from noxious English nationalist elements and veterans by at once disproportionately targeting Irish republicans and protecting veterans, sets a precedent of impunity for future human rights abuses arising from imperial occupations or wars, and whitewashes Britain’s imperial past.                            

Even more striking than the hypocrisy of the military wing of the British establishment, emblazoned in Ukrainian flags for the past few months, is its continuity of outlook: lawfare is the unofficial order of the day when British troops are at risk of exposure. 

Drawing criticism from entities as varied as the US Congress and the UN, Boris Johnson announced last year what was in effect a crude blanket amnesty, harkening back to the 1970s when such amnesties—designed by the departing military dictatorships in Latin America—afforded impunity to their leaders, professional exterminators, and torturers-in-chief. 

Experts read the plans as one of the ‘broadest forms of impunity’ ever put forward, exceeding the kind concocted by Pinochet after he left office. What is being presented now, then, by Brandon Lewis (the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland) as some kind of historic reconciliatory breakthrough is merely a notch down from blanket amnesty, an explicit bid to bubble-wrap British veterans from prosecution and investigation. 

This conditional amnesty bill proposes the creation of a new independent body (the Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery) to conduct investigations, granting ‘immunity from prosecution, based on an individual’s cooperation with the body’s inquiries’.

As well as audaciously providing for direct government control over this body’s proposed mechanisms, the plans also appear to create an asymmetry of outcomes—something very few commentators have noticed. 

Clause 19(1) of the bill states that a request for immunity would be invalid if the applicant ‘has a conviction for a  relevant Troubles-related offence’. This bill, therefore, ensnares thousands of men and women who served prison sentences in connection with the IRA campaign—membership of the organisation alone was, one should remember, a criminal offence—while carefully shielding from prosecution many military veterans, who have no similar convictions by virtue of decades of impunity. 

Ignoring its unjustifiability morally and its legal dubiousness, this conditional amnesty is especially egregious because all of the main parties in the North of Ireland—for different historic reasons—vigorously oppose it, rendering it yet another arrogant, undemocratic imposition on Ireland.

Boris Johnson signalled in parliament that the amnesty represents a neat denouement to the threat of so-called ‘vexatious prosecutions’ of elderly veterans, while also casting a light on its truer purpose: ‘to enable the province of Northern Ireland to draw a line under the Troubles…’ In other words, this is an attempt to dehistoricise and decontextualise Britain’s role colonising, partitioning, and occupying Ireland, amnestying it all away in the hope history itself evaporates. 

Opening the second reading debate for the bill in the Commons yesterday, Lewis lied (as victims groups have made clear) when he claimed that his team have spent the past ten months ‘hearing the pain and perspectives of people from all viewpoints and communities.’ 

What goes unsaid is that these views derive exclusively from military-aligned backbenchers and reactionary veteran organisations. Victims groups have not been properly consulted. Stormont parties have been locked out of the discussions. The wishes of Dublin have been stoutly dismissed.

A chorus of condemnation

A group of academics at the Queen’s University Belfast, in a report released on Tuesday, deemed it ‘unworkable, in breach of the Good Friday Agreement and binding international law…’ The Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission is provisionally convinced that the bill is ‘fatally flawed’, incompatible with Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights and, by extension, the Human Rights Act 1998. 

The Pat Finucane Centre rightly points out that the proposals are actually worse than the current ‘piecemeal’ legal processes. Amnesty International called the plans ‘a de facto amnesty designed to make perpetrators of heinous crimes untouchable’. 

Across the political spectrum in the South and North of Ireland, the proposals have been lambasted, from the relatively forceful admonitions of the Dublin government to Michelle O’Neill, Sinn Féin’s Stormont leader, who incisively attacked the legislation as an effort to ‘cover up and close down any investigation into British state policy in Northern Ireland over the last 50 years’. 

Conversely, on anti-republican grounds, Gavin Robinson, speaking for the DUP, reiterated his party’s opposition to any form of amnesty, arguing that it drives ‘a coach and horses through the pursuit of justice.’ Even in the self-defeatingly cautious world of NGOs and politicians, the consensus is clear. 

But aside from treating victims with contempt, this is part of a broad strategy ‘to distort the image of a colonial past and the reality of Britain’s neo-imperial present‘. Little surprise, then, that these proposals arrived with the promise of ‘an Official History relating to the Troubles’ that, mercifully, has attracted the ridicule of many historians. 

But how have years of heightening Tory military-worship transformed into a blanket amnesty, then shifted to conditional amnesty? To answer, we should first recap recent approaches to so-called legacy issues in the North of Ireland.

In 2015, the Stormont House Agreement slightly opened the door for an independent approach, seeking to introduce long overdue mechanisms to deal with allegations of illegality. The agreement stipulated that prosecutions could be sought but emphasised the need to create historical archives of non-legally binding accountability. 

Conceived from this was the Historical Investigations Unit—a new independent body which assumed the mantle of investigating Troubles-related deaths from a unit of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, the Historical Inquiries Team (HET), which was clearly compromised given its relationship to the state. 

We can probably trace the Conservatives’ heel turn to amnesty back, however, to before the Stormont Agreement. In 2014, the then Northern Ireland secretary Theresa Villiers decried a ‘one-sided approach which focuses on the minority of deaths in which the state was involved’. 

But, as Daniel Finn pointed out, the HET had by 2017 completed investigations of 1615 cold cases in which almost two-thirds of those cases were attributed to republicans. ‘To the extent that there has been a focus on the record of the state in some high-profile inquiries,’ Finn writes, ‘that simply reflects the prior record of impunity.’

Burying the truth

Buoyed by a resurgent English nationalism exercised by Brexit and its attendant effects on the ideological composition of the Conservative Party, this bill is the latest in a string of authoritarian legislation. Despite the best intentions of the Tory party, this bill ironically drags the politics of history and the history of politics into the present. 

Martin Flaherty, a human rights law scholar, is surely correct to say that an amnesty in Ireland is a deliberate attempt to shield British soldiers who committed atrocities in Iraq or Afghanistan from prosecution, or even investigation. 

While South Africa’s momentous Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been cited as a model on which to base the conditional amnesty, a full-disclosure test prevailed in the South African context, where high-profile, accessible quasi-legal hearings were held in which a judge made his determination in front of victims, who could contest the granting of conditional amnesty, as to whether a person fully disclosed the truth. 

Whatever its flaws, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission at least strove on to live up its name. In this instance, the opposite is true: this is a nakedly opportunistic Tory effort to bury the truth, leaving old untreated wounds to fester. 

Against a backdrop of proliferating repression, these developments are grimly predictable. Clambering to appeal to the various arms of the military state, the Tory party’s recent legislative moves cannot be delinked from its present-day foreign policy and geopolitical ambitions. For instance, Johnson has approved a £16.5b rise in defence spending, a portion of which the RAF hopes to use for deployments to the so-called Indo-Pacific, where Britain is striving for twenty-first century hegemony. 

The UK has also passed a battery of legislation to facilitate and militate against blowback for its covert operations. The Covert Human Intelligence Sources Act, also known as the Sky Cops Bill, gives undercover British agents the ability to murder, rape and torture without consequence, while the Overseas Operations Bill gives British soldiers the green-light to commit war crimes. As Oliver Eagleton stresses, ‘All this points to neo-imperial ambitions which, as under Blair, are more than merely gestural.’

While victims groups must also be championed, the British left, historically mute and misguided on Irish issues, must pinpoint and elaborate the materialist and ideological explanations for this and other similar bills. 

In other words, personal stories must be complemented by a structural analysis of the British state. While the extra-parliamentary balance of forces are stacked against the Conservative Party, a volte face on human rights-related bills should not automatically be expected, as recent history has taught us. 

But speaking to Tribune, John Teggart remains defiant, couching the Ballymurphy families’ struggles in the language of class warfare. Comparing the fights of the Grenfell and Hillsborough campaigns to theirs, he acknowledges that the bill forms part of a wider constellation of culture war battles being waged against activist groups, human rights organisations, and campaigners like himself. 

‘Some people here are maybe focusing too much on this one bill, that they are missing other human rights issues [with various bills] which the Tories are trying to push through,’ says Teggart. ‘They’re bringing in all of these bills to counteract any form of protest or holding the state to account.’