Clause 2.—(TERMS OF ENLISTMENT IN REGULAR FORCES.) (Hansard, 2 May 1961)

§ Mr. Emrys Hughes
I beg to move, in page 2, line 7, to leave out from "term" to the end of the Clause and to insert: as if he had enlisted in the police force". The purpose of the Amendment is to give the soldier the same terms of service rights as a police officer. I hold the view that the serving soldier is entitled to just as much consideration from the community as the police officer and that if the soldier wishes to terminate his engagement in the Army on giving the same notice as a policeman, he should have that right.
I do not wish to argue this at length, except to say that soldiers who may have been attracted into the Army by television advertising or by reading the recruiting advertisements in the papers might discover after a certain length of time that they no longer wish to serve in the Army. I would give them the same rights as those possessed by the police officer who comes to the conclusion after having served three or four years in the police force that he wishes to leave. I would give the soldier the same opportunity to opt out.
I do not believe that we should keep people in the Army when they no longer wish to serve in it, any more than we are entitled to keep men in the coalmines when they no longer wish to serve there or to keep them in Parliament when they no longer wish to serve in Parliament. I would give the serving soldier the same opportunity of applying for the Chiltern Hundreds as any hon. Member who debates the Army and Air Force Act.
There might be a soldier who might enlist in the Army for the purpose of 1236 fighting to defend the country against the Russians. Then he might take an interest, as many soldiers do nowadays, in international affairs and he might come to the conclusion that he would not be serving the interests of the country if he were involved in a war over Formosa or Cuba. I would, therefore, give the soldier far more opportunity to exercise his freedom of judgment than there is at present. Just as a police officer is entitled to say, after a certain time, "I should be far better off if I retired from the police force and became a lawyer or a company director or a member of Imperial Chemical Industries", and just as the police superintendent can now decide to retire from the force and take up farming, so I want to give the soldier the same sort of liberty that we demand for the ordinary citizen.
I think, therefore, that the Amendment is perfectly reasonable. The police force at present protects the people far more than does the average soldier. When there is such a demand that we should deal with crime, when so much violence is reported in the papers and there is so much crime that hon. Members opposite get so indignant about, the man in the police force is serving his country far better and is doing a more useful service to the community than if he were serving in Egypt, Singapore, Hong Kong, or any other part of the world to which soldiers are called upon to go. I realise that this is not a normal view to introduce in debate on this Act, but greatly to my surprise the Amendment appears to be in order. I think that it is one of the most sensible Amendments that has ever managed to get on to the Notice Paper.

§ Mr. Mayhew
Would my hon. Friend help us by reminding us what the terms are for policemen who wish to leave the 1237 service? In other words, in what circumstances could a soldier leave the battlefield? What notice would he be required to give?

§ Mr. Hughes
I would say 24 hours' notice, if my hon. Friend wants a specific case. AM this appears to be very novel, but I can assure the Committee that, if soldiers had been able to give 24 hours' notice before a battle, there would have been far fewer battles in history—on either side.
I do not see why soldiers should be regarded as needing stricter discipline than the police or prison warders. I believe that we need prison warders more than we need soldiers at present. I believe that there is a public opinion in the country which would welcome soldiers saying, "We regard the enemy at home as more dangerous than the enemy abroad, and we will be doing far more useful service in protecting people against mailbag robberies in the City of London, or against bandits who go off with the pay on Fridays."
I know that the idea is novel, but I ask hon. Members to think about it. I ask the Secretary of State if he can give a logical argument against it. Is not the greatest enemy of our time the criminal, the bandit, the robber, the sex maniac, about whom all of us are indignant? The greatest enemy to our society is not Russia. The Russians do not intend to invade and rob this country. The enemy is crime, the indolence and the other things that cause crime. We need far more police to deal with the conditions which have been created by this disorganised and frustrated society of ours. I would welcome a great exodus from the Army into the police force, and that is the purpose of the Amendment.

§ Mr. Maxwell-Hyslop
I did not think that, after a few months in this House, I should hear a member of the Labour Party, and the hon. Member for South Ayrshire (Mr. Emrys Hughes) in particular, advocate that citizens of this country who accept public obligations should be free to discard them for reasons of private profit. But that was the principal argument that he put forward. He argued that people should be enabled to throw overboard the public obligations they have voluntarily undertaken in 1238 order to become directors of I.C.I., or something of that nature.

§ Mr. Emrys Hughes
There are respectable precedents. The last two Colonial Secretaries have left the service of the community to go into business.

§ The Temporary Chairman (Mr. John Arbuthnot)
Order. The hon. Member for South Ayrshire (Mr. Emrys Hughes) is going away from the Amendment.

§ Mr. Maxwell-Hyslop
The two cases to which the hon. Member has referred now receive his unqualified approbation, and I am extremely glad to hear it.
We must bear in mind that there are certain services, which we invite our citizens to perform and which carry with them certain obligations. The primary obligation is that, when their services are needed, they do not withdraw them. The gravamen of the hon. Member's argument is that, at the very point when those services may become least desirable to render, the people who voluntarily undertook to perform them should, because they are hazardous, be at liberty to discard them.
I wish as strongly as I can to rebut the hypothesis that, when a person takes public money to fulfil certain public functions, he should be at liberty to throw his obligations overboard when they become undesirable or, alternatively, when other opportunities become more desirable.

§ Mr. Marsh
I oppose the Amendment, but not for the reasons advanced by the hon. Member for Tiverton (Mr. Maxwell-Hyslop). The suggestion that a person who takes public money and accepts a public appointment is thereby debarred from changing his mind at some future date is extraordinary, and a suggestion which we do not accept in any other field of public life.
If a Member of Parliament wishes to cease being a Member, he is entitled to do so. As my hon. Friend said, if a member of the police force wishes to cease to be a member of that force, he, too, is entitled to do so. I oppose the Amendment, and I hope that the Under-Secretary of State will advise his hon. Friends to oppose the Amendment, but for reasons different from those advanced by his hon. Friend.
1239 Although I oppose the Amendment, my hon. Friend made an important point when he said that, whether one agrees with it or not, there is a tendency to reject anything novel. There is a tendency to place the Army in too much of a watertight compartment and to look on the person who joins the Army as having virtually surrendered all his civil rights.
My opposition to the Amendment is not on the basis of the individual's obligation to his public office, because I do not think that that argument can be sustained. It is not an argument which has been suggested in relation to any other public office. If the argument of the hon. Member for Tiverton were relevant to the Amendment, I should have thought that he would have argued not the case of people in the Army, but the case of all people in public service. It is difficult to understand why anybody who is in public service should be expected to be under a greater moral obligation than a person in private service. It would be a strange doctrine which held that the man who worked for a private enterprise firm had fewer responsibilities to his employer than a man who worked for the State. Surely the important thing is that they have obligations to their employers for as long as they are employed? But this does not meet the argument about whether they should be able by common consent to terminate that employment at some stage as a result of having changed their minds.
We must bear in mind that we have here the unusual position of a person entering into a contract for as long as twenty-two years. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for South Ayrshire (Mr. Emrys Hughes) that a person may undertake a contract and subsequently change his mind, which everybody does, in twenty-two years. The circumstances which caused him initially to consider joining the Armed Forces may have ceased to exist. The circumstances which exist subsequent to his enlistment might be the reverse of those which gave rise to his enlistment.

§ Mr. Maxwell-Hyslop
There is an important distinction. If one engages in private employment, with certain limitations one can foresee the conditions which will appertain during that engagement. 1240 When one engages in the Armed Forces, the most pertinent conditions are conditions of war, which are exceptional. Indeed, the House has extended its life beyond the five-year period laid down by law under conditions of what one might call an unnatural emergency.
Therefore, it is not unreasonable that when people engage in public service to render their primary service under exceptional conditions they should not be governed by the considerations which primarily concern normal conditions, rather than exceptional conditions where there is a danger not just to a limited range of interests within the country, but a danger to the existence of everyone in the country.

§ Mr. Marsh
I accept the hon. Gentleman's analysis of the position, but it brings me to an entirely different conclusion. The situation could exist completely in reverse. The hon. Gentleman approaches it as some moral argument and moral obligation on individuals in contracts which they have undertaken, but I would agree with him that it would be amoral, to say the least, for a person to undertake a particular contract in a period of stability and quietness and then suddenly want to "welsh" on that contract because the circumstances have got worse. If the hon. Gentleman pursues that particular argument he will find that it brings him to a complete reversal of the argument which he has been addressing.
Let us take the case of the person taking up military service because there is a state of emergency, because of the threat of his family being endangered by a particular situation, and because he is a sound citizen and wishes to take his part and accept his responsibilities to meet the threat which exists at that time. If the hon. Member's argument is to be accepted, one would presume that he was relieved of that responsibility if, in five, ten, fifteen, or twenty years, we achieved complete peace and stability, and those circumstances would no longer apply.

§ Mr. Maxwell-Hyslop
I am very grateful for the hon. Member for giving way again, but as he asked the specific question if I agreed with that proposition, I would merely reply that it has been open to this House every single year to reject the Army Act.

§ The Temporary Chairman
Order. The hon. Member is going a little wide of this Amendment.

§ Mr. Marsh
I understand that, in any case, the hon. Gentleman is wrong, but if you say that it is getting outside the terms of this Amendment, Mr. Arbuthnot, I do not think that we want to stray too wide.
What I am suggesting is that in so far as my hon. Friend said that the individual might well change his mind, the hon. Member opposite makes the point that he is obligated for all time by that decision which he takes at one time. [HON. MEMBERS: "Not for all time."] No, not for all time, but for the period of the contract; I accept that. This could be said of any other person, and my hon. Friend merely put the point that the contract should not be any more hard and fast than in normal circumstances. We accept that different circumstances exist in war time, when all laws are subject to the emergency, but, generally speaking, they should not be applied in any one aspect of the Service very differently from any other aspect.

§ Mr. Wigg
The very long engagements were introduced, not for the benefit of the Army, but for the benefit of the soldier, and one of the Amendments which we shall be considering at a later stage concerns the introduction of the 22-year engagement for the Royal Air Force, so that people may have their rights, because men who enlisted only for twelve years could not sign on for a pension. The introduction of the long-service engagement does not abrogate the soldier's right to break the engagement at an earlier stage. But there is a real demand inside the forces for long-term engagements by those who want to see it as their life's work and who want to qualify for their pensions. What used to happen in the old days, particularly in the Royal Air Force, is that these people enlisted and rose to the rank of warrant officer, and so on, and were then suddenly pitchforked into the street, which caused much hardship and heartburn.

§ The Temporary Chairman
Order. I think that we are getting wide of the Amendment.

§ Mr. Wigg
Naturally, Mr. Arbuthnot, I defer to the Chair if you think that I 1242 have been getting away from the Amendment, but the Amendment wants to bring the Armed Forces of the Crown on to the same basis as the police force, and surely I must be in order if I refer to the conditions under which soldiers and airmen can, in fact, already under the existing law have the right to leave the force if they give due notice. My argument is that the regulations have evolved to their present state to safeguard the rights of long-service soldiers and airmen. That fact needs to be borne in mind.

§ Mr. Marsh
My hon. Friend the Member for Dudley (Mr. Wigg), as always in our debates on these subjects, is a veritable mine of information, and he has brought facts to light of which I was not aware. With respect, however, I would have thought that the facts to which he has referred have nothing to do with the case for opposing my hon. Friend's Amendment. On the contrary, if this provision exists to safeguard the soldier, he will, presumably, be in a position to decide that he no longer wants his interests safeguarded in that way. That is a valid point in relation to pensions.

§ Mr. Emrys Hughes
It places the soldier in exactly the same position as the school teacher.

§ Mr. Marsh
I cannot see the point of that intervention at the moment.
We would all probably want to see a situation existing which would safeguard the rights of soldiers to pensions, particularly after long service. I am sure that nobody would be opposed to that. But if this is a major objection to my hon. Friend's Amendment, surely it is not beyond the bounds of possibility to enable such a person to aggregate his service in small sections rather than have to serve a long period and be bound by it.
Having said what I think of the arguments in favour of the Amendment, against which I do not think that a case was made by the hon. Member for Tiverton (Mr. Maxwell-Hyslop), I want to say a few words in opposition to it. If the Government decide to accept the Amendment some hon. Members on this side of the Committee will feel obliged to vote against it, but if the right hon. Member opposes the Amendment I hope that he will do so for reasons entirely different from those which have been put forward. My hon. Friend clearly 1243 holds views which are well known and respected, but which are not held by the overwhelming majority of our people. My hon. Friend is entitled to hold those views. My objection to the Amendment is that it would make the maintenance of a standing Army impossible, because we would never know, at any given time, how many troops we had. That may be what my hon. Friend wants. He holds views to which he is entitled, and he holds them consistently, but they are views with which the overwhelming majority of our people would find themselves completely at odds.
I would not like us to create a situation in which we imposed upon a soldier anything which we could avoid imposing upon him, if it were to his detriment. We appreciate that a person who joins the Armed Forces takes over disabilities as a result. I hope that hon. Members on both sides, while not wishing to remove those disabilities in their entirety, so that the Army, as such ceased to be able to operate as an effective concern, would wish to compensate the soldier for the disabilities which he undertakes by entering the Armed Forces. In that way we could maintain an Army—not necessarily a large one—which, especially if it existed on the basis of a long-term contract, at the same time compensated the soldier for the very real disabilities which he undertakes upon going into the Army.
It is pefectly understandable that one should not accept the situation that a soldier, by virtue of being a soldier, is a lesser type of human being and not entitled to the same sort of standards as other people. But because of the job he undertakes, it is impossible to apply some of those standards to him. Only for that reason, and in the national interest, I oppose my hon. Friend's Amendment. I hope that at some other time we may consider means whereby we can compensate the soldier for that disability.

§ Mr. Mayhew
So far, the Government have accepted three Amendments and resisted two. I think that the prospects are that the rejection of this Amendment may level the score, if I understand the mind of the Minister aright. I shall not recommend my hon. Friends to support 1244 this Amendment. The case against it has been well put by my hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich (Mr. Marsh). The fact is that the hon. Member for South Ayrshire (Mr. Emrys Hughes) is a pacifist and wishes to see the British Army disappear. He has drafted an Amendment extremely cleverly with a view to securing that objective.
The weakness of the hon. Member's case he put was revealed when he confessed that every soldier could leave the battlefield at 24 hours' notice. I do not know why he should demand that a soldier should stay on the battlefield for 24 hours. It is wholly inconsistent with his philosophy. Fancy asking a soldier to remain on the battlefield and commit what the hon. Gentleman admits is a gross breach of morals, and require him to stay there for 24 hours by Statute—

§ Mr. Emrys Hughes
It was a casual reply to an interruption. I do not propose to put that in the Statute at all.

§ Mr. Mayhew
No, but there may be a certain degree of misunderstanding about a soldier's obligation to stay on the battlefield were this Amendment accepted. With respect to him, the hon. Member has a great deal of Parliamentary experience but I do not think that he has ever served in a military unit.

§ Mr. Hughes
I beg my hon. Friend's pardon. I was recognised as a soldier in the First World War. I was in the Armed Forces for three years. The three years were spent in prison and I was court-martialled five times. I have a greater experience of how the Army works than he has.

§ Mr. Mayhew
The hon. Gentleman's adventures in prison, which do credit to his spirit, no doubt explain his partiality for the police which we find revealed in this Amendment. But perhaps he has not had as long experience of military service as some other hon. Members, including myself. When I imagine the impact on my fellow soldiers of a provision that they could leave the Army at 24 hours' notice I begin to wonder whether, had that been operational between 1939 and 1945, we should have had such a happy outcome of the war. The hon. Member is among the first to acclaim it as a just and necessary war, but had the provision in this Amendment then been in force, I doubt whether we should have won it.
1245 This is not a matter which one should labour too long but it shows the value of parliamentary discussion and the limitations of simply leaving everything to a Select Committee. Though the Select Committee included a number of extremely experienced and hard-working Members of Parliament, the conception behind this Amendment never occurred to any of us. Only when we come to the broader forum of this Committee do we find this extraordinary, novel, imaginative and wholly impracticable suggestion advanced by the hon. Member for South Ayrshire.
I am sorry that we cannot officially support the Amendment from this side of the Committee; but, not sharing the basic philosophy of the hon. Member for South Ayrshire, we cannot support an Amendment which, I think, more than almost anything else, would make a British Army an impossibility.

§ Mr. Wigg
In many respects I share the views expressed by my hon. Friend the Member for South Ayrshire (Mr. Emrys Hughes), but I think, judging by the light-hearted way in which he introduced this Amendment, that his main desire was that we should discuss the matter. As to my views on this subject, I am sure my hon. Friend knows where I stand. I intervene in the debate on this Amendment because of the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Woolwich, East (Mr. Mayhew), who referred to the subject of soldiers leaving the battlefield.
I urge hon. Members to recall what happened in the years between 1914 and 1916. Sixty per cent. of the men who went to France in 1914 were on the Reserve list. If in the infantry, they had completed eight years with the Colours and four years on the Reserve, and the other arms of the Services were in exactly the same position. Of course, a number of them came back to civilian life and were subsequently conscripted in 1916. But my hon. Friend the Member for Woolwich, East underestimates the patriotism of the regular Army. Although they could have walked out, they stayed on.

§ Mr. Emrys Hughes
They would have been shot if they had not.

§ Mr. Wigg
That is a slanderous statement. That is not only untrue, but my 1246 hon. Friend's kindness of heart appears to be departing from him. His statement represents a great slander to the many thousands of men who fought in the First World War. They would not have been shot. They could have walked out. Naturally, they had additional obligations, since the reserves had been mobilised for another year of additional service.
Let us remember that for many of these men their time expired before the introduction of conscription, which was not introduced until half way through the First World War. Thus, when these men were faced with the situation that has been envisaged by the hon. Member for South Ayrshire, hon. Members should realise that these men could have gone back to civilian life, to their families and to their comfort if they had so desired—but they stayed on.

§ Mr. Hughes
They had to.

§ Mr. Wigg
They did not.

§ Mr. Hughes
They would have been court-martialled.

§ Mr. Wigg
Where these men demanded, the Army discharged its obligations to them and brought them home. They returned to civilian life and, in this context, we must recall that conscription was not introduced until 1916. The ordinary process of transfer on discharge operated in the old Regular Army from 1914 to 1916.
I make that point to the undying honour of those men who preferred the path of duty, even though for many of them it ended in what was, perhaps, an inevitable way. A lot of lessons may be learned by one who has had the honour of being a regular soldier.

§ Mr. Mayhew
My hon. Friend the Member for Dudley (Mr. Wigg) picked up some rather light-hearted words used by my hon. Friend the Member for South Ayrshire (Mr. Emrys Hughes) and myself. I know that the hon. Member for Dudley did not mean to suggest that we were casting aspersions on the quality of British troops from 1914–16. I had in mind no so much the question of the battlefield and the day to day life of the soldier, about which my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley knows such a lot. I am sure that he will be the first 1247 to recognise that in peace time there should not be the easy way out by giving notice.
I was interested to hear that the hon. Member for Dudley realises the need for a certain degree of discipline and order in the terms of service of our Armed Forces. The hon. Member has often made that point and, when we come later to deal with the question of wastage from the Army, I have no doubt that my hon. Friend will have a good deal to tell the Committee about the undesirability of extremely easy release from the Armed Forces. That is what we had in mind in resisting this Amendment.

§ The Under-Secretary of State for War (Mr. James Ramsden)
We have had a good-humoured debate—we always do on matters initiated by the hon. Member for South Ayrshire (Mr. Emrys Hughes)—but I am afraid that I cannot advise the Committee to accept the Amendment. I admired the hon. Gentleman's ingenuity in presenting the Amendment, and the ingenuity with which he made some points that he seemed rather surprised to find were in order.
I assure the hon. Gentleman that I do not object to his suggestion because of its novelty but because it seems to me to be simply not practicable. He wants the soldier to have the same terms of service as a police officer, and the right to terminate his service almost without notice but, as has been pointed out by the hon. Member for Woolwich, East (Mr. Mayhew), it would be extremely difficult to organise an army on that basis.
I must admit that, like the hon. Member for Woolwich, East, I would have overlooked the point made by the hon. Member for Dudley (Mr. Wigg) about the old Regular Army, and I was glad that he mentioned it, but it is surely the fact that Parliament, having given a Second Reading to this Bill, has agreed on the necessity of our having an Army. If we have an Army, it must be in a position to fight. My short answer to the hon. Gentleman is that it is impossible to organise the Army in such a way that when it went on active service the soldiers in it could not certainly be available, because they were at liberty to terminate their engagement in the same way that we understand members of the police force can terminate theirs.
1248 There are ways in which a soldier can terminate his agreement, and if I do not now reply to the points made by the hon. Member for Greenwich (Mr. Marsh) it is because I believe that on later Amendments we can return to some of his topics.
The final argument of the hon. Member for South Ayrshire was more an argument for a larger police force than for different terms and conditions of service in the Army. He said that policemen at home are doing a more valuable job than are our soldiers, but another objection to what he proposes is that, in these days, there is need overseas for soldiers to do a job not dissimilar from that sometimes done by police. Another obstacle to the hon. Gentleman's proposal is that the police have no overseas commitment and, of course, soldiers who are not in a position to fulfil overseas commitments at need are clearly an impracticable component of any Army. With those observations, I must ask the Committee to reject the Amendment.

§ Mr. Emrys Hughes
No attempt has been made to meet my argument that the soldier should have the same rights of citizenship as the policeman or the school teacher. A school teacher can leave the school tomorrow, get his pension rights and join the Army, but the man in the Army who says, "I have made a mistake—I want to be a school teacher", or, "I think that it is more important that I should protect my wife and children against crime in London", must remain in the Armed Forces.
9.45 p.m.
My hon. Friend the Member for Dudley (Mr. Wigg) is an incurable romantic, especially about Service matters. His argument was answered by the Under-Secretary of State, who argues that we must have these coercive powers to keep soldiers in the Army. My hon. Friend says that men serve in the Army purely for love and from a desire to serve their country. This is pure bunk, pure sentimentalism. There was a time in 1917 when the Russian Army suddenly dissolved and someone said, "They have not voted for peace". Lenin said, "But they have voted with their feet". They are not getting people to join the Army because they are not voting for the Army with their feet. They have to bribe the soldiers to come 1249 into the Army. When the bribery fails, and when the soldier finds that the Army is not the Army of the television set, there has to be some kind of conscription.
In my constituency, one person joined the Army last January. Five people in Ayrshire joined the Army in January, 1961. I cannot see a rush to join the Army. When hon. Members on this side of the Committee go on the recruiting platforms to urge people to join the Army—

§ Mr. Dan Jones (Burnley)
I hope that that time will never come.

§ Mr. Hughes
If it comes, I should like to see my hon. Friend the Member for Burnley (Mr. D. Jones) on the recruiting platforms. The last time that I saw my hon. Friend, he was marching from Aldermaston to London.

§ Mr. Emrys Hughes
I beg to move, in page 2, line 10, to leave out "the age of eighteen years" and to insert: the minimum age for man's service".

The Deputy-Chairman
It will be convenient to take with this Amendment those in the name of the hon. Member for South Ayrshire (Mr. Emrys Hughes), namely, in page 2, line 11, at the end to insert: until he has attained the age of twenty-one years and when he has attained that age the term shall be", and in page 2, line 12, to leave out paragraph (a).
It will also be convenient to take with it the two Amendments to Clause 4 in the name of the hon. Member for Greenwich (Mr. Marsh), namely, in page 4, line 31, to leave out from "enlistment" to "may" in line 33, and in page 4, to leave out subsection (2).

§ Mr. Hughes
These Amendments are not as revolutionary as the Amendment which has just been negatived. The purpose of them is that no young person should be committed to a long term of service in the Army before he reaches a certain age, which we think should be 21. As we do not think that anyone under 21 should have the right to vote, or that he has reached the age of discretion, until he is 21, I do not believe that anyone between the ages of 18 and 21 should irrevocably commit himself to a long term of twelve or twenty years in the Army.

§ Mr. Wigg
On a point of order. In view of what my hon. Friend has said, it seems to me that the Chair, in selecting his first Amendment, must have overlooked the fact that by it he seeks to leave out the words "the age of eighteen years" and to insert: the minimum age for man's service". From what my hon. Friend has said, he is clearly under the impression that the minimum age for a man's service is 21. With respect, that is not so.

§ Mr. Wigg
I am sorry if I am wrong.

The Deputy-Chairman
It would be best if the hon. Member for South Ayrshire (Mr. Emrys Hughes) proceeded with his speech.

§ Mr. Hughes
It was worth while moving the Amendment to find that even my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley (Mr. Wigg) can be caught out on a matter of military organisation.

§ Mr. Ramsden
I meant to agree with the hon. Member for Dudley (Mr. Wigg).

§ Mr. Wigg
Section 2 (5) of the 1955 Act states that In this Part of this Act the expression 'minimum age for man's service' means the age of seventeen years and six months, except that in such classes of case as may be prescribed"— that is, under the regulations of Part II of the "Manual of Military Law"— it means the age of seventeen years. I was seeking to help my hon. Friend the Member for South Ayrshire (Mr. Emrys Hughes), because I knew from his liberal attitude that this was a thoroughly reactionary proposal which, perhaps, he had not considered, and it seemed to me that even the Chair had slipped in calling an Amendment which, clearly, is a piece of nonsense.

§ Mr. Paget
On a point of order—

The Deputy-Chairman
Order. It would be better if the hon. Member for South Ayrshire (Mr. Emrys Hughes) finished speaking to his Amendment and I was allowed to put the Question. At the moment, we are not discussing anything at all.

§ Mr. Hughes
I am assured by my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Northampton (Mr. Paget) that I am quite right, as I believe I am. Even if there is a technical irregularity in the first Amendment, which I do not admit, the 1251 subsequent Amendments make clear what the effect will be. The effect of these Amendments is that boys under 21 may commit themselves only until they are 21 and at that age they will have an opportunity to reconsider whether they wish to make the Army their career.

§ Mr. Mayhew
My hon. Friend says "boys under 21". Of course, he does not mean that. By his Amendment he rules out boys altogether. According to his Amendment nobody under the age of 18 may be enlisted.

§ Mr. Hughes
We have reached the stage of quibling. Had we been debating the first Amendment, there might be point in arguing about the technicality, but the effect of the three Amendments—and they must be the same, or they would not be taken together—is that nobody can commit himself until he is 21 and that at 21 he will have the opportunity to reconsider whether he wishes to make the Army his career. I suggest that anybody who is in the Army under the age of 21, whether he is called a boy, a serving soldier or anything else, is too young to commit himself to a long-term Army career. That is the substance of the Amendment.

§ Mr. Marsh
On this issue, I support my hon. Friend the Member for South Ayrshire (Mr. Emrys Hughes). My two Amendments in Clause 4, which we are also discussing, seek to achieve the same object. It is not a difficult issue, although I appreciate the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley (Mr. Wigg) concerning the other Amendment. The principle which my hon. Friend the Member for South Ayrshire has in mind is one which I had endeavoured to deal with in Amendments elsewhere in the Bill. It is briefly that a person under the age of 21 shall not be permitted to commit himself to a military engagement which could take him up to the age of 40. That is a simple proposition and one which should be argued on its merits. There are, no doubt, obvious military arguments which will be advanced.
On this issue, we should not lose sight of the fact that the Government are spending, and successive Governments have spent, enormous sums of money to turn the full forces of propaganda and publicity in support of their recruiting 1252 drive. All of us in the House of Commons are well aware of the considerable effect which those organs can have. I do not think that the Secretary of State would disagree—I do not complain about it—that there is an attempt by the Army publicity services to glamorise the Army. There is an attempt to make it look more attractive than the Army really is.

§ Mr. Profumo
It would be wholly wrong if the hon. Member tried to make the point that we are attempting to do a confidence trick. That is wholly incorrect. What we are doing with our recruiting campaign is to call the attention of the public to the advantages of service to Queen and country.

§ Mr. Marsh
I do not want to quarrel with the right hon. Gentleman personally, because I do not think that we are at issue on this. But I would say that romantic pictures of a young soldier in some far corner of the Empire, standing beside an attractive swimming pool with palm trees—

§ Mr. Profumo
It is quite true.

§ Mr. Marsh
It may be true, but in any Army there are also conditions of extreme unpleasantness and extreme discomfort. I see nothing wrong in the Government trying to recruit people. I personally should like to see a larger conventional Army. I am not quarrelling on this point. But I am saying, and I repeat, that the Government spend a considerable sum of money in painting the Army as a place of almost perpetual attractiveness.
The Government do not show pictures of men scrubbing floors or marching through mud. [Interruption.] If they do, I have not seen them, although I recently read an account which suggested that the Government's publicity service had changed its emphasis. It had discovered that the young man today was less attracted by the idea of sitting on a horse and wearing an elaborate uniform than he was with the idea of being a sort of Errol Flynn of the British Army—I cannot think of a British equivalent—enjoying a certain amount of danger and perhaps a certain amount of hardship. The suggestion that the Army is some great big permanent outward-bound trust or a series of boys' clubs is a misrepresentation of the position. I suggest that we have a situation today where 1253 very considerable powers are exerted with the specific intention of persuading young men to join the Armed Forces. With that I do not quarrel.

§ Commander J. S. Kerans (The Hartlepools)
Surely what the hon. Member has said of all the efforts made by the Army to get recruits is giving an entirely false impression to the general public.

§ Mr. Marsh
I was attempting to be quite uncontroversial about this. I am surprised if hon. Members opposite are suggesting that military service, even in peace time, is all pleasant romanticism. I have not seen advertisements which show the normal, mundane unpleasantness of Army life. I should not be surprised if one found advertisements which did, but all the advertisements and all the Government's considerable expensive publicity material taken together do not give a clear picture of what it is like to live for twenty-two years in the Army, any more than all the advertisements which are deliberately directed towards selling a product give an objective account of that product.

§ Sir Harry Legge-Bourke (Isle of Ely)
Give "Brand X" a chance.

§ Mr. Marsh
I think that the Government and the Army have tried recently to give "Brand X" a chance by inviting young men to go to units to see what it is like for a weekend or a week, but that does not give them an actual picture of what it is like for over twenty-two years.