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Burma

I welcome the Secretary of State's confirmation of that line and I am glad that we have that on the record. There was some ambiguity, and I would hate there to be any suggestion in the international community that Britain, which has been one of those working hardest to encourage the sense that we live in one world with a mutual responsibility for fellow citizens, was resiling in any sense from that general principle. It is important that that is clearly on the record. No one underestimates the complexity of this issue, or of any other—including Zimbabwe and Darfur. We are not children and we all understand that we have to have a pragmatic approach as well as a principled approach. My wider concern in this debate is that it is one thing for some of the members of the Security Council to be anxious that we do not interfere unnecessarily in matters that should be the sovereign responsibility of member states, but the suspicion must be—in Darfur or in Burma—that the self-interest of those members is uppermost. The international community cannot function on that basis. That may mean that we have to try to expand the Security Council to bring in other member states—which has been discussed for a long time and is unfinished business—but we need to ensure that the UN and its institutions match the needs of the 21st century.