What we’ve seen since the autumn is a concerted effort, led by the right-wing think tank Policy Exchange, to compel or embarrass by hook or by crook this British government into dropping its manifesto pledge to repeal the Legacy Act.
Last month we had Policy Exchange’s paper ‘Misjudging Parliament’s reversal of the Supreme Court’s judgement in R v Adams’.
This paper objected to the government’s decision to make a Remedial Order setting aside sections of the Legacy Act preventing people wrongly interned in the 1970s from claiming compensation.
Leading the charge was Lord Caine, former special adviser to Conservative proconsuls and then junior minister here.
Caine was largely responsible for piloting the Legacy Act through parliament and seems determined to do everything he can to resurrect it.
He has the ranting Conservative press on his side as well as the new right-wing TV news channels.
Zeroing in on the prospect of Gerry Adams receiving compensation was a neuralgic choice guaranteed to ignite outrage in those outlets.
The fact that hundreds of others (whom no-one in Britain has ever heard of) are also entitled to compensation was rarely mentioned.
It was as if Adams was the only person. Indeed he was the only person named in a question to Keir Starmer in Parliament which produced the disgraceful reply from the prime minister that he was looking at “every conceivable way” to stop him receiving what he is legally entitled to.
Now this week we have ‘The £2 billion+ Cost of Legacy in Northern Ireland: Measuring the Financial Burden on the UK’; a full broadside from Policy Exchange.
Though they don’t say it openly, the consequence of their proposal to crack down on inquiries and other court investigations would be essentially to return to the provisions of the infamous Legacy Act.
The paper can hardly claim to be objective since two of its authors have long supported unionist policies and one was a minor UUP politician.
Policy Exchange’s funding remains a mystery. The ‘Who Funds You’ website gave Policy Exchange its lowest rating E for transparency, and the think tank Transparify ranked it among the three least transparent about its funding in the UK: “highly opaque”.
Nevertheless, it has friends in high places and can readily find MPs to support its claims.
Former Chancellor Jeremy Hunt wrote the foreword to this week’s paper. Then again, if his successor Rachel Reeves’s opinion is anything to go by, Hunt is used to endorsing fiction.
Indeed some of the figures in the current document are fictional or at least imaginative. The authors include up to £1.4 billion already spent on inquiries in their £2 billion+ figure, but add £1.3 billion for future expenditure, much of which is highly speculative.
For example, they include estimates of inquiries and compensation in cases not yet even heard.
Policy Exchange has in the past been associated with Conservatives who have advocated leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) like Michael Gove, one of its founders.
It’s difficult to see how cutting inquiries and reducing other investigations would be possible without leaving the ECHR, whose Article 2 seems to irritate the authors.
They ignore the fact that if British governments had complied in a timely fashion with their requirements under the ECHR, lengthy inquiries into events 50 years ago would be unnecessary.
You can’t fail to draw the conclusion that the whole paper is just another shot in the Conservative party’s objection to any investigation of military killings in the north.
It hasn’t occurred to the authors who totted up £1.4bn in inquiry and court costs over the years to look at what it cost the UK to pay off what has been called “the security constituency”: £500 million for Patten RUC redundancy, £250m for UDR/RIR pay-offs, £20m gratuity to RUCR, £70m for prison officers – totalling £840m.
Don’t forget by the way that over 90% of this money went to the unionist community, 99% in some cases.
What about adding the incredible £135m in 2014 to former RUC and some PSNI for hearing loss due to firearms training? That prompted some wags to predict that former police would be claiming next for eye strain from being dazzled by the shine on the toecaps of their boots.
The latest Policy Exchange ‘report’ has no credibility at all. If it weren’t for its connections in former Conservative governments and the right-wing Tory media, it would be ignored if not derided.
So far the Labour government’s response is less than robust. In a statement they say “The last government’s Legacy Act has been found to be unlawful, so whoever was in government would have had to change it.” Is that repeal?