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Debate on the Address

My Lords, we have listened to two extremely important and significant speeches, from the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe. Both implied that they believe that there has been a breakdown and failure in British foreign policy. That is not the issue to which I wish to address my short remarks. There has been a second and equally troubling breakdown; that is, in the entire strategy followed by the Anglo-American coalition in the Middle East. In the recent meeting between General Musharraf, the president of Pakistan, and our Prime Minister, General Musharraf said: "““War cannot be won by military action alone. You have to come up with a broader strategy””." We share the huge respect expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Drayson, for the gallantry of British troops. One of our great concerns is that British troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, and other coalition troops, are being flung into increasingly hopeless situations because there has been no effective reconstruction and no effective winning of hearts and minds. It is not in any way unhelpful to our troops to raise issues about what they cannot be asked to deal with—they cannot be asked to hold the line against the growing disillusionment in the Middle East. In the next few weeks, there will be a major switch by the new Democratic Congress towards pursuing inquiries into what happened in Iraq, what is still happening and what may yet happen. I assure the House that those Congressional inquiries will be very fierce indeed. I take only one example. The committee headed by California Representative Henry Waxman is one of the most significant in the United States Congress, and it is addressing whether there was any truth in the so-called purchase of yellowcake from Niger—the French west African country—which was one of the key factors in President Bush’s arguments for going to war in Iraq. That information came from the United Kingdom, as did certain other key pieces of intelligence. Our own Government and our own people will have some rather uncomfortable weeks ahead and we will begin to see more and more of the unravelling of the arguments for the invasion of Iraq. I completely agree with what my noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire and the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, said about the centrality of the Israel-Palestine conflict. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, for whom I have huge respect—I know what a crucial part she is playing in the Middle East—that, quite bluntly, the support of the Prime Minister for not bringing about a rapid ceasefire in Lebanon, plus the acceptance only a week ago by the British Government of the continuation of not regulating cluster bombing, undermines the sort of support that we need if we are to be effective in the attempt to bring about some meeting of minds between Israel and Palestine. What we are seeing at the moment in Gaza is so appalling that we should all feel ashamed. Of course, it is wickedly wrong for Gaza to use rockets against the citizens and civilians of Israel. But it is also wickedly wrong for Gaza to have two people out of three with no running water or to have persistent collective punishment directed against them, with children and elderly people among the many victims, and, not least, to see them slowly starved into something close to surrender. There are 550 permanent checkpoints in Gaza alone and many more in the West Bank therefore to talk about a viable Palestine is rubbish. Yet those of us who care, and I care very deeply, about one of the most gifted peoples on Earth—the Jewish people and the Jewish state—desperately want to see some alternative to the deeply destructive strategy of permanent coercion directed against Palestinians in the Middle East. That is why whatever our Government can do is so important. It is also why it is so sad that no attempt was made to include the United Kingdom in the recent European Union initiative headed by France, Spain and Italy. We did not even know that it was happening. Frankly, the United Kingdom was not regarded as a helpful signatory to the list. My second point concerns the breakdown of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the remarkable treaty that has somehow stopped the proliferation of nuclear weapons throughout the world until very recently. In the past few days, colleagues in this House will have read about the disturbing resumption of missile tests, first, by Pakistan and then by India. It is a very restless part of the world. We have to underpin and strengthen the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. How can that be done? First, we must strongly support the initiative to try to get a fuel bank which would exchange highly enriched uranium for guaranteed lowly enriched uranium. Sooner or later we must wake up to the fact that the single greatest nuclear danger that we face is not so much the development of yet another nuclear power—although, God knows, most of us would work very hard to ensure that Iran does not move in that direction—it is ensuring that the large amounts of desperately dangerous nuclear material all over the world are secured and held in safe hands, and are not available for any terrorist who has the money and willingness to buy them. We talk so much rubbish about terrorism, but we hardly address at all the crucial act of securing fissionable materials of biological and chemical weapons on the international stage. Yet, bluntly, it is not difficult to find some rogue plant or individual who would sell radioactive materials—and who probably will in the next few years unless we strengthen the situation. Lastly, the United Kingdom needs that debate about Trident. We are sorry that, to some extent, it has already been pre-empted by the statements from the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer. We should have had a Green Paper and not a White Paper so that there would be a genuine debate. I am not sure where I stand, although there are real difficulties about seeing Trident as a weapon of the future against terrorism rather than a Maginot line directed to the Cold War backwards. Having said that, we must have this debate, which is vital for our democracy. It must be open and lively and, frankly, the Government should not pre-empt it by declaring their position in advance.