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Mr. Paterson: Will my right hon. Friend give us the benefit of his experience in the Home Office and tell us whether he thinks that the provisions are workable as drafted?

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Mr. Maclean: I think that there is a dangerous precedent in the subsections that I want to delete.

Mr. Hayes: Could not the problem that my right hon. Friend has described be dealt with by developing the non-statutory codes of conduct that my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Mr. Hogg) suggested? That would make it possible for the conduct that he describes to be controlled at least in some way, albeit voluntarily.

Mr. Maclean: I am happy for there to be voluntary codes of practice setting out the duty of the directors, the officers and the chief executive. Presumably, some of the terminology in the new clause is designed to catch BBC governors and director-generals. They must be the "other similar officers", just as the wee secretary involved in selling dodgy hamburgers was caught by the previous Bill. However, I do not want voluntary codes of practice to be used to keep secret our information that we have given to the Department of Social Security. Why should my constituents aged 74 and over have to depend on a voluntary code of practice to ensure that summary information about them is not published by BBC companies or the BBC itself?

We know that the summary information will be used to put extra leverage on the Government at a time when they might decide not to increase the licence fee or to restrict the concession or claw it back. If there was a little bit in the press in a couple of years saying that the Government were finding the concession too great, too onerous or too costly, within months, information issued by the BBC under commercial acolytes collecting the fee would point out how many thousand desperate pensioners there were in each constituency. If Parliament wanted to vote for such a measure, we would be blackmailed into not doing so by the weight of the numbers argument. I am not saying that the Government would be blackmailing us--the BBC and others would be blackmailing Parliament and the Government.

There is no need to issue summary information. I appeal to the Minister to keep it all secret and thereby ensure that people have confidence in the system that the Government are trying to set up.

Janet Anderson: The Government have brought forward the Bill in good faith, because we believe that it is the easiest and simplest way of ensuring that pensioners get the free licences to which they are entitled. Given their antics, we can only assume that the Conservatives are intent on scuppering the scheme.

Mr. Maclean: If we wanted to scupper the Bill, we could have done so ages ago. The Minister is endangering her legislation by adding a new clause--

It being five hours after the commencement of proceedings on the allocation of time motion, Mr. Deputy Speaker, pursuant to Order [this day], put forthwith the Question already proposed from the Chair.

Question put and agreed to.

Clause read a Second time, and added to the Bill.

Bill read the Third time, and passed.

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Serbia and Iraq (Sanctions)

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.--[Mr. Robert Ainsworth.]

1.55 am

Mr. Tam Dalyell (Linlithgow): I wish to concentrate on Iraq, because my hon. Friends the Members for Halifax (Mrs. Mahon) and for Chatham and Aylesford (Mr. Shaw) and I were able to have 35 minutes of the Prime Minister's time a couple of weeks ago, with his PPS and his Foreign Office secretary, and he kindly said that he would consider some of our proposals.

My first question is: the United Nations has been reporting since August 1999 on the stock situation in Iraq involving food and medical supplies, and these monthly reports show a satisfactory distribution picture. Why are Her Majesty's Government continuing to identify a picture of hoarding of these humanitarian supplies? That is my first question.

My second question is that the President of the Security Council in January 1999 reminded the Security Council that there should be monitoring of the impact of sanctions on the human condition of those countries under sanctions, and also that the chairpersons of sanctions committees should visit their respective countries to obtain first-hand information on the ground. Why does that not happen in the case of Iraq, and what are the Government planning to do about it?

The third question is that there is no sign of an end to the stalemate between the UN Security Council and the Government of Iraq with regard to resolution 1284. This stalemate is entirely at the expense of the civilian population. Keeping that fact in mind, what do the Government propose as an initiator of the resolution to end the stalemate?

The fourth question is that the educated public in Iraq refer with increasing frequency to the suffering of the Iraqi people under sanctions, and to evidence of violations of human rights and international law. How do the Government answer that observation?

My fifth question is that it is by now well known that the smuggling of oil occurs across all of Iraq's borders. It is also known that large amounts of the income from illegally exported oil are used by the Iraqi regime for expenditure on items of no value to the deprived Iraqi population, including the building of palaces. What do the Government propose be done about this? Why are ships carrying illegal oil intercepted in the Gulf, while large fleets of trucks--I am told at least 200 a day--carrying illegal oil from northern Iraq into Turkey are left unhindered?

In September of last year, I went to Baghdad for the second time--I had been there first in 1994--with the former Taoiseach, Albert Reynolds, who is not a naive man. We were appalled by the degradation of human beings. This country is perhaps the oldest part of civilisation. It is not all a question of the manipulation of propaganda; there is real human tragedy. It is also true that the Iraqi people are proud, and that they will therefore never allow the inspectors to return, given what has happened.

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One helpful action would be to ease student travel and allow the new generation of Iraqis to see something of the outside world from which they have been cut off. Secondly, financial responsibility should be returned to the Iraqi Government. Thirdly, Iraq should be allowed to become a member of OPEC again--a belief held very strongly by Hans von Sponeck, the German diplomat who resigned his post as UN co-ordinator on a matter of principle.

Fourthly, reconstruction and an early overhaul of the Iraqi oil industry should be allowed. Oil experts around the world, and especially the Japanese, are amazed that the industry there should function at all, given the sanctions regime. Finally, water supplies must be monitored. In high summer, the great Tigris and Euphrates rivers have been reduced to little more than sewers.

Confidence-building measures should be taken, where possible. Do rogue countries exist, or just rogue regimes? Behind the statistics stand real people. The UN co-ordinators, Dennis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, went to Iraq as objective people. They say that 167 children die every day, on average. We must remember the fathers and mothers of those children.

The problems in Iraq have been going on for something like 10 years. Where is the conscience of the world? We cannot believe blindly that economic sanctions will deliver solutions, because they have not done so. If Ministers could see what I and Albert Reynolds saw, their consciences would not allow them to sleep at night.

Risks must be taken for peace. Nothing is solved by sanctions. We are concerned about the degradation of human beings.

This debate is also about Kosovo, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and Serbia. I thought that my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax was going to speak in the debate, but I can tell the Minister that we are worried about depleted uranium. I hope that the Foreign Office will reflect on an article by Felicity Arbuthnot that appeared in the Sunday Herald in Scotland. It stated:


That is a real problem. A seven-page United Nations report has come into my hands. It was issued to UN personnel at the UN headquarters in Pristina, and it marks out the worst-affected areas of depleted uranium concentrations in that country. My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Medway (Mr. Marshall-Andrews), who went to Serbia in March, knows how much concern there is in the hospitals about the issue.

I conclude with one thought: the imposition of sanctions, which is the subject of the debate, far from weakening the position of those who are in charge of Governments, such as Mr. Milosevic or Saddam Hussein, actually strengthens them. Sanctions mean black market revenues, and who do those black market revenues go to?

Mr. Robert Marshall-Andrews (Medway): I would like my hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow (Mr. Dalyell) to reflect on a simple issue that is political,

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not economic. He and I have been to hospitals in Belgrade. As a first-world country, Serbia had a success rate of 35 per cent. in dealing with almost all cancers. It has now been reduced to 15 per cent. People are dying in hospitals, entirely unnecessarily. The anger that is felt by professional--not necessarily political--people at what is being done to their patients in those hospitals is politically entirely contrary to what we wish to deliver. Those people, who are opinion formers in Serbian society, are now all anti-Milosevic, but they are silenced by what we are doing.

I know that my hon. Friend will reflect on this. Moreover, no one in the House has a more honourable tradition of fighting against regimes of this kind than the Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, my hon. Friend the Member for Neath (Mr. Hain), particularly when it comes to sanctions. He must know that the distinction in this case is that we are encouraging the regime by imposing sanctions. As I must ask a question in this intervention, will my hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow reflect on that?


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