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Chinese People's Liberation Army

The Minister clearly has not read all the parliamentary answers that he has been given; he has been reading the questions but not the answers. What came out from the answers was that there was no discussion with the Foreign Office or with United States representatives on the issue. The record will speak for itself. The thing that I find amazing, coming from a Government who are so European-focused about many things, concerns the Madrid declaration: right or wrong, the part of it that is absolutely clear, which specifies the"““interruption by the Member States of the Community of military cooperation and an embargo on trade in arms with China””," is not a unilateral option that one can pull out of. If the Government wish to break it—there has been pressure to do so for many years—that must be done together. The European Commission officials to whom I spoke this morning are absolutely under the impression that military co-operation goes hand in hand with the arms embargo. If it is the Minister's intention and the Government's to remove that as well, they should say so.