Richard Holmes - Soldiers - Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors

A more recent case of a serving officer being disciplined for public criticism, this time of his own superiors rather than politicians, is that of Major Eric Joyce. He enlisted into the Black Watch in 1978 and subsequently attended Stirling University, graduating with a degree in religious studies. Joyce became a probationary second lieutenant while at university, attended the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst after graduation, and was commissioned into the Royal Army Educational Corps in 1988. His service took him to Northern Ireland, Germany, and Belize, and during it he obtained two master’s degrees. He was promoted captain in 1990 and major in 1992 – the year that the RAEC was amalgamated into the newly-formed Adjutant General’s Corps and became the Educational and Training Services branch.

In August 1997 the Fabian Society published a pamphlet by Joyce called ‘Arms and the Man – Renewing the Armed Services’, maintaining that the forces were ‘racist, sexist and discriminatory’. He had written it without getting the permission to publish required by Queen’s Regulations, telling The Times that ‘you can’t get radical ideas like this into the public domain if you go through the chain of command.’ 29Joyce denied that he was being covertly supported by ministers, but argued that ‘what I’m saying is broadly in line with the modernising agenda which the government is promoting.’ 30He went on to launch the Armed Services Forum, which was authorised by the military authorities but contained severe criticism of the forces. When at length the army moved to discipline him, he affirmed that it was ‘terribly important’ that soldiers should be allowed to speak freely. He also condemned the army’s obsession with an ‘officer class’, and argued that Queen’s Regulations, simply ‘a convention’, were not legally enforceable. 31The Conservative opposition saw the Labour Government’s hand behind Joyce’s continued survival. In December 1998 Keith Simpson MP, a former Sandhurst lecturer, told the Commons that the case ‘strikes at the heart of the important principle that our armed forces do not participate in party politics.’ He went on to argue that:

He has his own political agenda. As a serving officer, he has openly been a Labour party supporter and, for the past four months, has been actively seeking to become a parliamentary candidate. Not only has he repeatedly and blatantly broken every agreement that he has ever made, but he has become party politically partisan. 32

Major Joyce was eventually directed to resign his commission and did so in 1999. He went on to become Public Affairs Officer at the Commission for Racial Equality (Scotland), and, unsurprisingly, a Labour MP after winning the Falkirk West by-election the following year. He served as parliamentary private secretary (PPS) to a number of ministers, and in September 2009 resigned as PPS to Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth. As one of the few Labour MPs with recent military experience he had been a logical choice for the post, but his letter of resignation went to the heart of his old unhappiness:

The Conservatives … think they can convince the public that we have lost our empathy with the Defence community … I do not think the public will accept for much longer that our losses [in Afghanistan] can be justified by simply referring to the risk of greater terrorism on our streets … Most important of all, we must make it clear to every serviceman and woman, their families and the British public that we give their well-being the greatest political priority. Behind the hand attacks by any Labour figure on senior service personnel are now, to the public, indistinguishable from attacks on the services themselves. Conversely, in my view we should allow our service personnel greater latitude to voice their views on matters which make distinctions between defence and politics pointless. 33

Joyce’s resignation was overshadowed by the fact that he had become the first MP to claim more than £1 million cumulatively in expenses. The website Army Rumour Service suggests far more resentment amongst serving officers of an MP on the gravy train, than sympathy for a former colleague with a reformist agenda. His case underlines two hard old truths. First, no government, whatever its persuasion, relishes serving members of the armed forces pointing to political failings. Tony Blair abolished the individual services’ directors of corporate communication to reduce the risk of senior officers briefing the press ‘off message’. In that climate Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, when Chief of the Defence Staff, declined a ‘non-attributable’ lunch with the distinguished author Sir Max Hastings, regretting that he could only attend if a civil servant was on hand to take notes of the conversation. When General Sir Richard Dannatt spoke, within a few weeks of his appointment as Chief of the General Staff, of the need to withdraw troops from Iraq, it was immediately clear that he would not, as had been expected, succeed Sir Jock as CDS. Second, the army itself remains profoundly uneasy about criticism from within its ranks, especially when that criticism has an explicit political purpose.

For most of the army’s history its officer corps was closely aligned to the social class that sent members of parliament to Westminster. The proportion of serving officers sitting in parliament fell away substantially as the nineteenth century went on, but the two world wars of the twentieth century packed both houses with an unusually high number of folk with wartime service. That generation has now moved on, though in the second decade of the twenty-first century there are again MPs with direct links to the military. Modern wars have never been more political and senior officers are inevitably politically ensnared.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.