A FORMER adviser to Tony Blair has blasted a potential Labour leadership challenger for “disgracefully smearing” victims of the Troubles.
Political strategist John McTernan, who served in Downing Street from 2005 to 2007, hit out at Al Carns over his resignation speech on Tuesday.
Carns, who has hinted that he would challenge Keir Starmer for the premiership if a contest is opened, hit out at Labour’s plans to replace the Tories’ contentious 2023 Legacy Act, which banned inquests and civil actions against British soldiers.
Labour’s plans have been drawn up in partnership with the Irish government and would reopen inquest-like hearings into killings, as well as lifting conditional immunity for soldiers or agents of the state and the ban on civil proceedings.
Delivering his resignation statement in the Commons on Tuesday, Carns said he had quit the Government partly because he “could no longer ignore the continued failure to address the treatment of our veterans in Northern Ireland”.
He added: “The IRA failed to achieve its political ends through the use of terrorist tactics, and we must be exceptionally careful that we do not help them achieve those ends through other means.
“Constant, never-ending legal wranglings that undermine the contract between the nation and those who serve is neither a good use of taxpayer money nor an effective execution of strategy. Having inquests, inquiries and an independent commission creates a hierarchy of truth.
“It will cost us hundreds of millions for 15 years, painting the state as an aggressor, supporting our adversaries, leading to political objections and causing untold anguish for those who only ever deployed to protect us.”
McTernan said Carns’s comments made the former Royal Marines officer unfit to be prime minister.
In a social media post, the former Downing Street aide said: “No one who believes that Irish families do not deserve justice should be anywhere near Labour leadership.
“And disgracefully smearing those families is of a part with the arrogance that made the Brits feel they were untouchable.”
In a separate post, responding to a tweet from Carns which said that Labour had been “chiselled out of the mines” and “forged in the factories”, McTernan said: “Labour was also built by Irish Catholics. Justice for families in Northern Ireland is personal to the Labour family.”
