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Mr. Beard: The food standards agency was included in the Gracious Speech.
Mr. Robathan: It was included, but there will be no legislation. The hon. Gentleman must know that it has
been pushed gently into the long grass. There will be a little more consultation, which I am not against, but we have been discussing this matter for the past 18 months.
I welcome the commitment to the public-private partnership for the Commonwealth Development Corporation. I am a member of the Select Committee on International Development, which has already discussed this sensible measure.
I also welcome the Government's policy on Iraq. Although it was alluded to only briefly in the Queen's Speech, we are now talking about indicting Saddam Hussein. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd), who has been pushing this matter for some time, as have I. The Foreign Secretary has always dismissed the idea of bringing Saddam Hussein before an international tribunal before a United Nations international court is established. I am delighted that we are now considering setting up a special tribunal to indict Saddam Hussein, and to separate him from the peoples of Iraq, whom he terrorises.
An asylum Bill is proposed. The Labour party bitterly opposed the Asylum and Immigration Act 1996. I understand that the Bill will give a de facto amnesty to up to 30,000 asylum seekers. Past practice shows that 25,000 or more of those asylum seekers would be judged to be economic migrants. Such a Bill is not good for the workings of the system or for justice, because it would let down asylum seekers who behave properly. My constituents, be they of English or Asian descent, would feel that the justice system had failed.
On the European Union, the Queen's Speech says that the Government will work to reform the common agricultural policy. All right-thinking hon. Members would applaud that, but the Government will need to have a great deal more influence. It is easy to say that they want to reform the CAP--I want it to be reformed--but what will they do about it? I fear the answer is that they will do nothing. We have insufficient influence, and in my opinion the CAP is not reformable. It is highly costly, environmentally destructive and corrupt and should be scrapped.
Why does the Queen's Speech contain nothing on the single currency? It is because the Labour party is split on that issue. The Prime Minister spent half his speech attacking Tory policy, but he did not say what his policy is, because that would have shown up the divisions in his party. Perhaps we should ask Rupert Murdoch what Labour's policy will be. I would love to hear Labour policy being trumpeted from the rooftops, instead of the Prime Minister being negative and acting as if he is still the Leader of the Opposition.
There is a commitment to the reduction of the homosexual age of consent. The Government are out of step with their focus groups. Apparently, 75 per cent. of the British people believe that the homosexual age of consent should not be reduced. The Lords did the Government a favour in the last Session. The amendment tabled by the hon. Member for Bassetlaw was defeated on a free vote. I understand that the Government intend to bring it back, and I think they are right to do so if they are to reduce the homosexual age of consent. I shall oppose the measure, because it has nothing to do with equality, but the Government should acknowledge that the Lords did them a favour.
Finally, I shall deal with the abolition of the hereditary principle in the House of Lords. As I said to the hon. Member for Barnsley, West and Penistone, this should be a matter of principle for all of us. What is proposed is not reform, because that would lead to a new second Chamber. A unicameral Parliament has been suggested. That is a respectable position to take, although it is not one that I take. The hon. Member for Wolverhampton, North-East (Mr. Purchase) and the right hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr. Benn) thought that that would be agood idea. To replace an admittedly imperfect system with one that is worse--a system of cronies and appointed patronage--cannot be right.
Who might the cronies be? They may have been the Prime Minister's pupil master or someone who had shared a flat with him--both are Ministers in the House of Lords. They could be people who have attended dinner parties with the Prime Minister as part of the so-called Islington mafia, or people who have been donors to the Labour party. That would not provide an independent Chamber. All right-minded people in the House and outside believe that it should be a sensibly reformed second Chamber, perhaps even an elected Chamber, but not one that is in the pocket of the Prime Minister of the day. The current plans do not serve democracy. The royal commission should report and we should have a sensible discussion so that we can improve the second Chamber.
The most interesting aspect of the Prime Minister's speech was the reaction of Labour Members. While he was speaking, the Strangers Gallery emptied. I counted three Labour Members who went to sleep. I was bored stiff, and I was not alone, because I looked at the faces on both sides of the Chamber. Labour Back Benchers were most certainly not convinced by what the Prime Minister was saying. They could not see the point of it all. That is the reason for abolishing the rights of hereditary peers: it is the one thing that unites Labour. Every time it is mentioned, Labour Members cheer, and they refer to it in their speeches. We even heard the words "hear, hear" in the House of Lords during the Gracious Speech. It was not a rumble of Tory peers' discontent, as the Evening Standard alleged; it came from hon. Members under the Gallery who had come from the House of Commons.
Mr. Nigel Beard (Bexleyheath and Crayford):
Like the previous speakers, I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw (Mr. Ashton) and my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Edinburgh, Pentlands (Dr. Clark) on their witty and eloquent introduction to the debate. I welcome the measures in the Gracious Speech to modernise Britain and to bring the best out in all our citizens. That is what the British people wanted when they
Like a fool playing in the road to hinder the next stage of the great expedition, the Tory party will incur the wrath of the British people if it mobilises feudalism to block Britain's progress into the 21st century. How barren the Tory vision is in the coming years, given that the two great occasions that it can foresee are the battle for the hereditary peerage and the battle to isolate Britain from the mainstream of Europe. Gone is the Churchillian vision of Britain in the world; it has been replaced by the pathetic illusion of "Britain is the world".
For all that we must and will modernise Britain, we must not narrow our vision to a preoccupation purely with issues at home. There are currents in the great ocean of international affairs that could knock us off course at home if we do not deflect them, or at least dissipate some of their energy.
Practical men and women may justifiably say, "But at home we can do something. These international issues are intractable: they involve action by others besides ourselves, and we cannot move unless the Americans lead." I recognise some of those realities, but they do not absolve us from doing what we can, and what we can do may be many times greater than we imagine.
At present, the American President is incapacitated by threats of impeachment; the German Chancellor is new; the Russian President is ill, and faces the bankruptcy of his economy. Japan is so near to crisis that natural introspection is being intensified. Moreover, the European Union is in as strong a position as the United States, economically, to give a world lead. No country is better placed than Britain--through the European Union, NATO, the Group of Seven or the United Nations, or through direct diplomacy--to give such a lead.
What, then, are the commanding international issues? First, there is the stabilisation, through regulation, of global financial markets, to stem the maverick forces of financial fluctuations on economic policy management. That includes the reflation of European markets to counteract the recessionary forces that are arising from both Asia and Russia. Secondly, there is the promotion of stable economic growth in developing countries, and the fostering of democratic integrity among the regimes that run those countries. Third, and by no means least, is the managed elimination of nuclear weapons and civil nuclear hazards. That includes the future of the START 2 treaty, the future of the non-proliferation treaty and the decommissioning of unsafe nuclear power stations.
I want to consider those issues in turn. Following the east Asian and Russian financial crises, the Group of Seven has agreed codes of practice designed to give an accurate and clear picture of the financial condition of individual countries--so-called transparency. The position will be monitored by the World bank and the International Monetary Fund. There is no doubt that that constitutes a good first step, but a good first step is what it is. There are countries in which effective government does not operate, and in that context such an orderly process will be meaningless unless it is added to.
Equally, measures that treat American practices as a common worldwide standard at best will not suit the diversity of economies that are developing their own style and idiom, and at worst will be treated with hostility and suspicion.
In the next few years, the world will need to establish institutions that command the confidence of both developed and developing democracies, while allowing capital flows between countries without the destabilising effect of laissez-faire international capital markets. Britain--as a long-time ally of the United States and as a member of the European Union and of the Commonwealth--has a pivotal role to play in the early evolution of such an international financial accord: a Bretton Woods for the 21st century.
Such moves are a precondition for avoiding the worst of the world recession. Europe could indeed be the engine that helps to lift the world out of recession. France, at the start of the Mitterrand era, demonstrated the difficulty of a Keynesian expansion of demand in one country where exchange controls had been lifted; but that need not be true if all the countries of the European Union reflated their economies together, in a controlled and co-ordinated way. With left-of-centre Governments in power in most European countries, the political climate is right for such a move, which would, at the same time, address the problem of unemployment in Europe.
There are two aspects of the problem of nuclear weapons. The first is the control and progressive reduction of the nuclear weapons piled up in north America, western Europe and Russia; the second is the need to avoid the proliferation of nuclear weapons elsewhere in the world.
Progress towards mutual reduction of stockpiles is at an impasse, because the Russian Duma is reluctant to pass the strategic arms reduction treaty that followed START 2. It is crucial for the impasse, and the suspicions that go with it, to be overcome.
Current proposals for the expansion of NATO eastwards not only prevent that impasse from being overcome but, in the unstable Russian political climate of the moment, play into the hands of revanchist Russian nationalists. That is too real a danger.
The position is made worse by the April resolution in the United States Senate which claims the right to station all types of troops in the new NATO territories, and which includes nuclear weapons. It rejects even the concept of the Russian proposal for a nuclear-free zone in central Europe. Moreover, it is possible that putting nuclear weapons in the former East Germany breaks understandings that were solemnly given to President Gorbachev--at least, he believes that they were given to him--by United States Secretary of State Baker and Chancellor Kohl at the time of German unification.
Further afield than Europe, the explosion of nuclear weapons by India and Pakistan has established a dangerous trend throughout the developing world that could in itself nullify all attempts to sustain the non-proliferation treaty.
All those issues are connected, to a greater or lesser extent. A Russian Government struggling with a collapsed economy may well agree to reduce their nuclear armoury in exchange for economic help. A developing country may well forgo the crippling expense of nuclear weapons in return for a guarantee of military help from NATO, and a programme of development aid.
We in the developed world are becoming complacent about many of the issues. Because we have institutionalised negotiations in one form or another, we have come to believe that we have resolved those issues, but we have not. Perhaps if we had had a peace treaty, a
peace conference, to mark the end of the cold war, we would have begun to resolve some of them; but we did not. Now we need an initiative to deal with the complex of interwoven and counterpoised issues that will threaten the 21st century if we do not begin to resolve them, deliberately, at the outset.
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