In an office stuffed full of books, Alex Burghart sits back in his chair, sipping on a mug of tea. Beside the Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary is a black and white photograph of a former army officer. ‘This is Brigadier Clive Tonry, a D-Day veteran’, he explains, when I inquire about the framed image. ‘When I was eight and nine, he taught me science and he had the most wonderful disregard for health and safety.’ Burghart fondly recalls being taught wind resistance by being strapped by Tonry in a parachute and dragged towards his school’s barbed wire fences. ‘He had two German helmets at the back of his classroom that he’d picked up from the beaches. He never told us they were men that he’d killed but that is what we guessed.’

It is Tonry and others like him that have been on Burghart’s mind this week. Legislation aimed at tackling the legacy of the Troubles in Northern Ireland has passed its stages in the Commons. On the floor of the House, passions ran high: Jim Shannon, a DUP MP, said that one IRA man killed in the Troubles ‘is burning in hell today – couldn’t happen to a nicer person.’ Many fear that the government’s law change will simply exacerbate historic prosecutions for British veterans who served there between 1969 and 2007. ‘They were often very young men were placed in impossible circumstances where you have to make life or death decisions at a moment’s notice’, says Burghart. ‘Mercifully, I don’t think many people in Britain today understand what that’s like.’

‘We have a few assets that make us indispensable to our allies. Our Special Forces are one of those assets’

‘We have a few assets that make us indispensable to our allies. Our Special Forces are one of those assets’

The bill will replace the previous Conservative government’s 2023 Legacy Act, which banned inquests and civil actions related to Troubles-era incidents. Burghart cites fears from Special Forces’ veterans that the new legislation will harm their operations. ‘We have a few assets that make us indispensable to our allies. Our Special Forces are one of those assets.’ He warns that ‘if we degrade that asset’, then he warns it will be ‘bad for the Western alliance as a whole. The SAS and people like them don’t just keep us safe – they keep a lot of other people safe as well. But they also help maintain Britain’s place in the world and its utility to its friends. And if it gets destroyed, it will be next door to impossible to put back together again.’

The legislation has now gone to the Lords where the government now faces a real ‘fight on its hands’. Burghart and other opponents are concentrating their firepower on two issues, in a bid to win over generals and lawyers in the Upper House. The first is on the threshold for new evidence to open prosecutions: the........

© The Spectator