| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. Forth: In fairness to the Minister, we were told that he did not want the Bill rushed through in an unseemly manner. He was thinking of the Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the hon. Member for Neath (Mr. Hain), who was going to attend an important conference--
Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. We have already heard that many times.
Mr. Wilshire: I have anxieties about the protocol, but the Minister, hon. Members and you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, will be relieved to know that I have fewer questions about the Bill. My right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst was so effective and efficient in going through the detail before you made your ruling, Mr. Deputy Speaker, that he raised all the points that I was going to make.
I see that the Minister is poised with his pen. I shall therefore refer him to clause 4(2), which provides that an authorised officer may appear "at any reasonable hour." I am suspicious of such phrases. They get into legislation only to make money for solicitors and barristers, who can argue about what constitutes a reasonable hour. I hope that the Minister will give that serious thought. An authorised officer can either go somewhere or he cannot. Of course, that is to prejudge whether it should be allowed to happen in the first place.
- The powers of an authorised officer who enters premises . . .
- to take with him such other persons and such equipment as appear to him to be necessary . . .
We should reflect on how the Bill has come about and what has led to tonight's circumstances. As I said earlier, and as other hon. Members have pointed out, the Bill is an unexpected consequence of the Gulf war. At the time of that war, we had no idea that our safeguard arrangements were inadequate. Our discovery that Iraq
has been developing nuclear weapons while the agreements to which it has signed up exist means that we have to take action. We have made the same discovery about North Korea.We must establish whether the United Nations, as an international agency, or the security services of various countries of the world extracted that information. In the case of Iraq, perhaps the armies of the world made the discovery. While there is some consensus about the need to make the agreement stronger through the protocol, we must ask about the way in which we made the discovery. If the safeguard agreements did not reveal what was going wrong, why are we confident that a United Nations- orchestrated additional protocol will do that? Perhaps it would be more sensible to ask whether we should look to our security services and those of other countries to ensure that international treaties are not breached.
We must ask ourselves whether the Bill will do the trick. If we have more information, inspectors and reporting, will the world be a safer place? I do not suggest that I know the answer, but the question must be asked.
We must consider human rights, which are relevant to the debate. You will be pleased to hear, Mr. Deputy Speaker, that I shall not into detail. My right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst raised the matter and I shall say only that I wholly appreciate his anxieties and those of my other hon. Friends. I shall not repeat them, but I hope that the Minister has listened to them, and will not believe that we raised them spuriously.
There are genuine human rights concerns. It is proposed that international inspectors can come into the United Kingdom without the civil safeguards that we have come to take for granted over the centuries. When the Minister mentioned the subject at the beginning of the debate, he suggested that we were wrong to think of them as foreign inspectors coming into the United Kingdom. I tried to intervene, but the hon. Gentleman was too kind in giving way to everybody else, and missed my jumping up and down. He suggested that we were being paranoid by referring to foreigners and pointed out that they might be Englishmen and women. Yes, they might be cuddly Englishmen and women--
Mr. Forth: They might be Welsh.
Mr. Wilshire: No, Welsh is different. We shall stick with English because I am English and proud of it, and I believe that the suggestion that my fellow countrymen and women might carry out the inspections is relevant. The Minister was not making a fair point. He failed to tell the House that if Englishmen or Englishwomen sign up to work for the United Nations or any other international organisation, they have to give an undertaking that they will put to one side their nationality, or any bias or affection that derives from being Englishmen or women, and work as though they were internationalists. It is as if they sign up to be foreigners. The Minister failed to make that point.
Mr. Keetch: To follow the logic of the hon. Gentleman's argument, if an Englishman who joins the United Nations ceases to be English and becomes international, an Iraqi who joins the United Nations ceases to be Iraqi and becomes international. We should therefore fear none of the inspectors.
Mr. Wilshire: I leave it to the hon. Gentleman to decide whether he welcomes international inspectors,
wherever they were born. The hon. Gentleman has a right to welcome people who come in to the United Kingdom with hobnail boots, go where they will, search where and whom they will and turn places upside down in defiance of people's human rights and civil liberties. I trust that his electors will notice that. I do not agree with him.
Mr. Fabricant: Does my hon. Friend agree that there should at least be some reciprocity? People should not inspect us unless they belong to nations that have signed the agreement. That would enable us to inspect them.
Mr. Wilshire: I am sure that that is a valid point. In those circumstances, we would have to consider the additional protocols that other countries were signing.
All that said, even though the Bill is brief, it raises big issues. Its introduction is an admission that the NPT is not working as well as it should be and that the safeguard agreements that have been signed up to are unsatisfactory. The Bill is an admission of failure thus far. Its introduction also implies that the additional protocols should be our top priority. Are they the best or the only way forward? I do not know. That is for the Minister to say, but he gave no justification for that point.
As my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst said, the Bill raises serious human rights matters and also diverts the attention of those who are not satisfied that that is the top priority from other crucial nuclear weapons issues that I have not been able to discuss in my brief contribution. I conclude that the Bill will probably make good boys such as us feel better, but will do little, if anything, for world peace.
8.1 pm
Mr. Harry Cohen (Leyton and Wanstead): I apologise for missing the early part of the debate. I was meeting the new chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality in my capacity as secretary of the all-party race and community group, and to show my commitment to equality I missed all three Front-Bench speeches. I apologise to those Members and to the Speaker, who has responsibility for upholding the conventions of the House.
Chunks of the speech of the hon. Member for Spelthorne (Mr. Wilshire) were interesting. He asked the key question, "Will the Bill make the world a safer place."? The answer is an unequivocal yes. I do not mind scrutiny being applied by the right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth)--I did the same from the Opposition Benches--but the Opposition should not lose the overview of the Bill's purpose. What is the alternative to non-proliferation and treaties authorising verification and what would we get if we dismantled those treaties? It would be nuclear weapons chaos--a free for all. There would be more rogue states because there would be no treaty to contain them. There would be greater danger to us and greater risk of war, and it would be more likely that nuclear weapons would be used.
I give the example of North Korea, which wanted to opt out of the non-proliferation treaty. Only United Nations pressure, which persuaded it to sign up, made a difference. I support the principles of the Bill, which strengthen the international non-proliferation regulation and verification system.
Mr. Fabricant: Surely the hon. Gentleman accepts that the treaty will have no impact unless the rogue states
become signatories. Will he explore the possibility of applying sanctions, although I do not know what sort, to what the UN would call rogue states--North Korea and even Libya, for example--that have so far not signed the treaty?
Mr. Cohen: I am not in favour of sanctions, which lead to all sorts of problems. Iraq is an example of that. It is better to have a treaty system in place so that rogue states can be included and encouraged to sign. If there were no treaty system, there would be no incentive and no pressure to sign up to anything, and that would lead to more rogue states.
As a long-standing supporter of controls on nuclear weapons and the materials that could be used to make them, I support the strengthening of nuclear safeguards carried out by the International Atomic Energy Agency. It is imperative that those strengthened safeguards are applied equally across the globe and I am proud to see a Labour Government helping to enhance the global effort to stop nuclear proliferation.
As a long-standing supporter of the goal of global nuclear disarmament, I am keen for the nuclear weapon states--the United Kingdom, the United States, Russia, France and China--to be covered by stricter safeguards arrangements. The hon. Member for Spelthorne made the interesting point that there was dissilusion in non-nuclear weapons states because the nuclear weapons states have not been seen to make enough progress. Subjecting them to stricter safeguards arrangements is a way of making a bit more progress.
Nuclear safeguards form an important part of the international verification measures that will be required when we achieve a world free of nuclear weapons. The more experience of verification measures that all those states acquire, the more confident they will eventually become in moving to a world free of nuclear weapons. The Bill is a good measure, but a few matters could be tightened up. The most significant of the issues that I want to raise is Crown immunity, which has been discussed previously. In the 1980s, Lord Ashley said that a lot of Crown immunity should go from legislation. The previous Government, under the right hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Major), introduced the citizens charter, which recognised the problem that legislation did not always cover Government activities. In a written answer, the right hon. Member for Henley (Mr. Heseltine), who was then President of the Board of Trade, stated:
- An Act of Parliament is presumed not to bind the Crown unless the contrary intention is clearly stated, or there is a necessary implication that the Crown is to be bound . . . Crown immunity is being . . . reduced, as legislative opportunities arise.--[Official Report, 22 June 1995; Vol. 262, c. 376W.]
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |