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Mr. Robin Cook: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Maples: I will in a moment, but I want to make another point first. Perhaps the right hon. Gentleman can answer this point as well.
We saw a similarly prejudiced reaction in the case of General Pinochet. Here we have a right-wing dictator, no doubt part of the demonology of the right hon. Gentleman's youth. The right hon. Gentleman showed how the Government were prepared to sacrifice the interests of a nascent Chilean democracy and the interests of the Falkland islanders to indulge again the stupid prejudices of his youth. There is no consistency in that policy, and the right hon. Gentleman should not have allowed himself to be exposed to this charge of hypocrisy.
Mr. Cook:
I make no complaint about the hon. Gentleman's attack on me, but I feel that he should reflect on whether he should begin by complaining that others attack him in their speeches in the House.
Let me return to the serious point that the hon. Gentleman made about Burma. He attacked me for what I said about that country. Let me get this clear: are the Opposition saying that our position on Burma is wrong? Is the hon. Gentleman aware that the Burmese Government are one of the rare Governments in the world who connive in the heroin trade? They have carried out massive ethnic cleansing of many Burmese tribes; they have been denounced by the International Labour Organisation for their practice of forced labour; they rule by power, and by power alone; they have 200 elected MPs in prison; and they refuse to deal with Aung San Suu Kyi. Is the hon. Gentleman saying that, in the light of all that, he thinks that we should support trade with Burma--yes or no?
Mr. Maples:
I think that the Burmese regime is one of the nastiest in the world and that we should do all that we can to improve human rights in Burma. What I am saying to the Foreign Secretary is that he contradicts himself: he has a policy that puts human rights in Burma at the top of the agenda, but not those in Cuba.
Let us deal with what the right hon. Gentleman did last week, at the Commonwealth summit. We are really tough on Pakistan, because it has a military dictatorship, but we are soft on Zimbabwe, Kenya and Malaysia, where political opponents are beaten up and imprisoned. In many such countries, Governments have even tried to kill them. We have the laughable situation of the President of Zimbabwe being on a high-level team to examine and settle the future of the Commonwealth. The President of Zimbabwe runs a Government who are probably the worst human-rights abuser in the Commonwealth, but the Foreign Secretary goes along with that. All I am saying is that foreign policy is and should be driven largely by the facts with which one is confronted. The Foreign Secretary has got into a mess, opening himself up to the charge of hypocrisy that I level at him, by the pretentiousness of elevating human rights as though it would be the sole objective of his policy.
Mr. Menzies Campbell (North-East Fife):
Can the hon. Gentleman clear up one ambiguity that has arisen as
Mr. Maples:
The Foreign Secretary can probably defend himself without the Liberal Democrat spokesman's intervention. I do not support the Helms-Burton Act. I have never supported the attempt to extraterritorialise United States trade policy, but the right hon. and learned Gentleman is virtually a part-time member of the Government. We have now found out that, before the election, the Liberal Democrats were conspiring with the Labour party, unknown to the electorate--[Hon. Members: "Answer the question."] I have answered the question: I said no.
Mr. Tony Worthington (Clydebank and Milngavie)
rose--
Mr. Maples:
Let me finish; I can deal with only one intervention at a time.
Mr. Maples:
No, I will not give way. I will turn to China.
Mr. Worthington:
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Maples:
I have said that I am not giving way for the moment.
China must have one of the worst human rights records in the world. The Foreign Secretary made a bad start by, as I have said, refusing to meet Wei Jingsheng. As we all know, China's record extends from the rape of Tibet to the kidnap of the Panchen Lama and the suppression of democracy activists who were trying to use their rights under a UN convention that China signed only last year. We laid on a state visit. Pinochet gets arrested, but the Chinese President gets dinner with the Queen.
The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Mr. John Battle):
The Queen visited China in 1986.
Mr. Maples:
Then we saw the obscenity of the heavy-handed policing.
Mr. Battle:
She visited China in 1986.
Mr. Deputy Speaker:
Order. I am sorry to interrupt the hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Mr. Maples), but the Minister of State must contain himself.
Mr. Maples:
Perhaps the Foreign Secretary could put the Minister of State out of his misery and let him make a speech in the Chamber some time.
The heavy-handed policing of the demonstrations when the Chinese President was here was extremely unusual. We now discover that it was conspired in the Foreign Office. I met Wei Jingsheng during the events of that week. He had been outside Buckingham palace on the pavement, standing peacefully. He had pulled a banner out of his jacket, which said simply, "Free political prisoners." He was grabbed by three policemen, two of whom pinned his arms to his sides. The other tore the banner out of his hand. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Rotherham should be ashamed that that happened. It did happen and there is no justification for it.
I saw Wei Jing Shen a couple of hours later. He said that Chinese secret policemen in the crowd were identifying people such as him to the British police. Labour Members choose not to believe Wei Jingsheng, who has better credentials than anyone in the Government on the matter.
We then found out as a result of questions to the Foreign Office that it had no less than eight meetings with the police before the visit and that 35 Chinese secret policemen accompanied the President. The reason was given away by the Minister of State, who said in a written answer:
Mr. Battle:
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Maples:
Not for the moment.
The Foreign Secretary and his officials conspired with the Chinese to prevent lawful demonstrations by human rights activists. I do not suppose that he will make a video about that. The self-styled champion of global human rights has been exposed as a fraud, a mouse that cannot even squeak, let alone roar, when the Chinese are the audience.
Mr. Battle:
Will the hon. Gentleman confirm that the Queen visited China in 1986 under the previous Government and that the recent visit of the Chinese President was a return visit? Will he also confirm that there are usually meetings between officials when there is any state visit? I spelled out in repeated replies in the House that there was no collusion between our Department and the police. There were no meetings between Ministers and the police. The Chinese were informed that there would be demonstrations in this country and that they would, as usual, be freely respected. Will the hon. Gentleman also confirm that no one was arrested, no one was charged or countercharged, and no one has reported having been arrested or charged as a result of the visit? What is the difference between that and the way in which the Department dealt with state visits when he was a Minister, except for the fact that he took no action?
Mr. Maples:
My God, have we touched a raw nerve? The hon. Gentleman gave the game away in answers to his hon. Friend the Member for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd). He said:
Before concluding, I want to move on to the two foreign policy issues on which we disagree fundamentally with the Government. They are profoundly wrong on the European security and defence identity. The policy will weaken our security and that of Europe; it will undermine the transatlantic alliance; and it breaches Madeleine Albright's three conditions of no duplication, no discrimination and no decoupling. There was a press briefing in the Foreign Office on the subject today. We are used to the press being briefed a few hours before the House of Commons is told, but no press release was issued. Apparently a paper is to be issued on Wednesday. I suppose that that is so that this debate is well out of the way.
The Government's position changed at St. Malo. At the Amsterdam summit, the Prime Minister refused to go along with the proposals on the European defence and security initiative. He said that it was an ill-judged transplant. He changed his mind last November because we were not going to be in the first wave of the euro and he desperately needed something to resurrect his European credibility and the good reception that he gets from other EU leaders. No other explanation has been given for that U-turn. The Berlin accords in 1996 clearly envisaged the development of a European pillar inside NATO, but the St. Malo agreement talks about it being inside or outside the NATO alliance.
The Foreign Secretary has repeatedly told me that the Americans are happy about the developments and that they were endorsed at the Washington summit, but that is not true. The strategic concept said that
"Foreign and Commonwealth Office officials and the Metropolitan Police discussed the proposed programme for the State Visit and the concerns of the Chinese authorities about the possible impact of demonstrations on the visit."
We are not talking about the safety of the Chinese President--of course he is entitled to that protection; we are talking about the impact of demonstrations. The Foreign Office sought to suppress those.
"Foreign and Commonwealth Office officials and the Metropolitan Police discussed the proposed programme for the State Visit and the concerns of the Chinese authorities about the possible impact of demonstrations on the visit."--[Official Report,28 October 1999; Vol. 336, c. 993W.]
It appears from the prompting that the Minister was getting that he did not know that the Queen had visited China until his hon. Friends behind him tipped him off, but two things have happened since then. The first was Tiananmen square, and the second is the Foreign Secretary's human rights policy. I have no objections to the Chinese President paying a state visit, but the Foreign Secretary should have if he believes in his human rights policy. However, we have found that his policy allows him to bully and lecture the weak while kowtowing obsequiously to the strong.
"the European Security and Defence Identity will continue to be developed within NATO."
That is not happening. Any ambiguity has been removed by the Cologne summit and the various bilateral summits this year. We are clearly talking about the European Union absorbing the Western European Union without dealing with the problem of discrimination against countries that are in NATO but not in the European Union, such as Norway and Turkey, or new members of NATO, such as Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, which are very unhappy about the development.
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