Servicemen ruling will open the floodgates

By George Tyndale on May 21, 09 11:31 AM

The Court of Appeal has ruled that servicemen and women serving overseas are protected by the Human Rights Act.

This decision threatens to unleash a flood of compensation claims from the families of men and women killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. It will also create a new level of nightmare on the battlefield. Senior officers feel operations will be hamstrung by decisions being affected by or even questioned under the terms of the Act.

The case has been pursued by Catherine Smith the mother of Private Jason Smith who died of heatstroke in Iraq while working in temperatures of 50C.

But the outcome stands as a monument to three policy decisions by New Labour that rank as the most disastrous and shameful in modern political history.

First was the decision to adopt the confounded Human Rights Act into British law and unleash its blithering idiocies onto our way of life.

Second was adopting a policy of under funding and over extending our military forces.

The saga of action in both Iraq and Afghanistan has been littered with scandals in which lives have been squandered because of equipment that has been in short supply, outdated or inadequate. Or all three.

And third was the invasion of Iraq. If the nation had not been conned into this totally pointless invasion then the life of Pte Smith--and hundreds of thousands more--would not have been thrown away.

When the first compensation case comes to court we shall truly be witnessing a moment of history. A law which should never have been saddled with being used to seek compensation for deficiencies that should never have occurred in a war we should never have been fighting.