There are two kinds of people in this life: people who say Gavin Williamson is the least capable member of the Cabinet and people who have heard of Ben Wallace. The Secretary of State for Defence, in an intemperate answer in the Commons, claimed the UK waged ‘illegal wars’ under Labour.
Wallace was speaking during the second reading of the overseas operations (service personnel and veterans) bill, which is intended to protect British soldiers from lawfare. It was rather unfortunate, then, that in the middle of trying to pass such a piece of legislation, the Defence Secretary would make a jibe about ‘illegal wars’ to the Labour benches. Steerpike has the video, in which Wallace shouts:
‘Much of the mess we are having to come and clean up today is because of your illegal wars, your events in the past and the way you have run this, the, the, the… the safety for our forces.’
The legality of Operation Telic (the UK’s military campaign in Iraq) — and, to a lesser extent, Operation Herrick in Afghanistan — is the subject of political and academic debate, but neither operation has been determined to be contrary to international law by a court or other relevant body, such as the United Nations.
The more immediate political problem is that the Defence Secretary has, by implication, accused UK Armed Forces personnel of having participated in unlawful military aggression. In any other government at any other time, his position would be untenable. Fortunately for Wallace, he was an early supporter of Boris Johnson and that is the metric by which these things are apparently judged in this government.
Wallace served in the Scots Guards, including a tour in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, and of course he deserves our gratitude for that. If anything, however, it only makes his comments worse. No defence secretary should talk as blithely as this about conflicts in which British soldiers lost their lives but especially not one who understands better than most what it is like to be on the ground in such a conflict.
Unfortunately, this kind of thing is becoming a pattern with Wallace. Last August, he was picked up by a nearby camera suggesting to French armed forces minister Florence Parly that the government was proroguing Parliament to get Brexit done, sinking Number 10’s line that it was a perfectly innocent move to introduce a Queen’s Speech.
Two months later, he defended Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s incursion into northeast Syria, saying at a meeting in London:
‘Turkey needs to do what it sometimes has to do to defend itself.’
Only a few days earlier, Human Rights Watch had said:
‘Turkey and its allies have previously unlawfully killed, arbitrarily arrested, and wrongfully displaced civilians. This military operation risks repeating these abuses unless they take steps now.’
We have a defence secretary who accuses the UK of engaging in ‘illegal wars’ while defending the military adventures of Turkey.
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