Professor Kieran McEvoy:

That is a really interesting question. Obviously, there has been a rightward shift in UK politics since Boris Johnson came to power. Interestingly enough, my colleague, Dr. Bryson, and I are writing something academic on this.

I was going through tabloid newspapers from during the elections before the leadership of the Tory Party. At that stage, The Sunproduced a stand up for our veterans campaign and a set of pledges requiring the signatures of leaders who were running for the Conservative Party leadership at the time. Boris Johnson signed up to that pledge, in effect, to get our boys off from being pursued. Obviously, it is linked to Brexit and all that right-wing populism and the tabloid media and all of that.

The other significant thing that happened within the Tory Party was the emergence of the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill. There was an investigation into the activities of allegations of torture by British soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. The courts held that in places where the UK, in effect, had sovereignty over territory, the European Convention on Human Rights applied. Therefore, those people were able to sue. They had Article 2 rights to proper investigation and Article 3 rights for torture and so on. I think there was outrage within the military establishment within the Tory Party at this idea that courts were reaching deep into the military operations in theatre and there was a big reaction to that.

Part of it is anti-European Convention on Human Rights and part of it is also anti-left-wing human rights lawyers. That has become increasingly part of the populist discourse in the Conservative Party. Brexit kind of let loose that English nationalist instinct and populism and the veterans became like the epicentre of this imagined version of the English past and also going forward.

It is a complex thing but in particular, the sea change where we saw the shift from the UK Government saying let us manage this sensibly with the Irish Government and engage with all the local Northern Ireland political parties was when the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill came in and the UK Government then made promises that our boys who served in Northern Ireland would be given the equivalent levels of protection in terms of the presumptive amnesty. That is where it turned.