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Fourthly, both Israelis and Palestinians have a desperate wish for peace in their lives. There are numerous organisations and projects for furthering understanding and contact between those peoples. I visited an outstanding example in a marvellous school in Jerusalem, where Jewish, Muslim and Christian children are educated by Jewish and Arab teachers in Hebrew and Arabic and all festivals of all three religions are celebrated. It is one of four such schools in Israel of the Hand in Hand organisation. It was wonderful to speak to these children and one has to admire them, their teachers and their parents. I was very much reminded of visiting Belfast under the auspices of the Northern Ireland Council for Integrated Education, or NICIE, and seeing the brave achievements of some very brave schools there.
Fifthly and lastly, but certainly not least, there is the quartet envoy, Tony Blair, with his special experience of difficult negotiations and his unique ability to bring about conciliation. The conference in Annapolis, for which he and my right honourable friend the Prime Minister as well as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are working so hard to achieve maximum attendance, with the aim of achieving concrete results, is a truly unique opportunity for a breakthrough, but only if Arab Governments actively pledge themselves to the cause of settling the Israel/Palestine question once and for all. What is required above all else is political will, which I believe is there. There are answers, which everyone knows, to the much-vaunted impossible “final issues”, such as Jerusalem and the right of return of refugees. The
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On Jerusalem, a very senior Israeli experienced in negotiations with Palestinians said to me that Jerusalem was already divided. In the evening Jews do not go to East Jerusalem nor Arabs to West Jerusalem. So what is de facto could become de jure and the old city with the Muslim, Jewish and Christian holy places could be put under international or UN control. This is close to what Resolution 181 of 1947 envisaged for Jerusalem, but the 1948-49 war resulted in Jordan taking the old city with subsequent desecration of Jewish sites and no access allowed to Jews—a situation which continued until 1967 when I visited the old city and witnessed the desecration that had taken place.
On the right of return of refugees set out in the much quoted UN Resolution 194 of December 1948, there have been various plans proposed whereby Palestinians could return to the Palestinian state or other Arab countries with generous financial help for resettlement towards which Arab Governments have a responsibility to co-operate and contribute. The Palestinians deserve no less. Neither side will get everything it wants—Israel on Jerusalem or the Palestinians on the right of return—but the basis for a real settlement is definitely in place; it requires only everyone of good will to work to achieve it.
4.36 pm
Lord King of Bridgwater: My Lords, it is a particular pleasure to address the Queen’s Speech in the presence of one of my most distinguished predecessors, the noble Lord, Lord Healey, who has just entered the Chamber. I hope that I may take him with me in some of my remarks, which although critical of certain aspects of the Government are motivated by what I hope is a bipartisan approach to the importance of defence for our country at this time.
My noble friend Lord Howell said that the Commonwealth got only one mention in the Queen’s Speech. As the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, said, defence and the Armed Forces got none. As the earlier speeches made clear, this is against the background of the very dangerous situation that we are in. There is no question about that. In his eighth response to a Queen’s Speech, my noble friend Lord Strathclyde said last year that the world was a more dangerous place. I do not think that anybody would challenge the fact that, whatever it was like last year, it is certainly no safer now, and in many ways it is much more dangerous. The recent events in Pakistan and the appalling bomb outrage in Baghlan province yesterday, which killed five Afghan MPs in a province which was previously thought to be safe, indicate the seriousness of the challenge that we face there.
I have sought to address the Queen’s Speech against the background that this is the new Prime Minister’s message to the country and to Parliament, and to examine how his approach to defence is being carried through in the actions that he has taken so far. Comments have been made—I do not endorse them; I
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Mr Adam Ingram attracted considerable support and respect for the way in which he sought to address his duties as Minister for the Armed Forces. A slightly less noticed change is that he has gone and at this critical moment for our Armed Forces, deployed as they are in these theatres of extreme danger and hazard, Mr Bob Ainsworth, who was the Labour Deputy Chief Whip, has now taken over as a completely new Minister with, I believe, no previous experience in the defence field.
I endorse everything that the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, said about the noble Lord, Lord Drayson. I found him admirable in the sense that he was the only Minister on either side of the House that I ever remember saying to me, “You were one of my predecessors in defence. Any advice you can give me I would be very willing to receive”. New Ministers are not noted for acting in that way, and I admired him for it. Given the responsibilities that he carried and the abilities that he brought to the task, his absence is a great loss to the Government. He had experience on the commercial side. I do not know the noble Baroness’s commercial background but she is taking on a challenging undertaking, given the scale of the contracts for which she is now responsible as the Minister for Defence Procurement and the difficulties that the Ministry of Defence has in organising its procurement in an efficient and reliable way.
But it is worse than that. Another of the noble Lord’s responsibilities was for the Defence Export Services Organisation. The decision to close DESO down in the Ministry of Defence—it has been widely welcomed by the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, and is trumpeted on its website at the moment; I have no doubt that it will trumpet the departure of the noble Lord, Lord Drayson, as well—is a major blow to the defence industries of this country. I can see the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, who was active as a Minister in helping to promote a lot of companies in the defence field. I am not talking about the arms trade and undercover arms sales, but a lot of good British companies that bring a lot of income and jobs to this country, are much respected and relied on DESO as their agent and assistant in dealing with Governments across the world.
I do not want to suggest anything about the loyalty and decency of the noble Lord, Lord Drayson, which allowed that press release to go out about him taking up Le Mans 24-hour driving. However, what happens if you close down part of a Minister’s responsibility without consulting him—if he is actually doing rather a good job at that—and without any idea what you
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I am concerned, because there is a crisis in morale in our forces. They are entitled to feel the support of the leadership of the country—the Government and Ministers in the Ministry of Defence—because of the challenge. The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, and I faced that challenge in the first Gulf War. When our forces are in the front line, facing the dangers that they do, the challenge for Ministers is to ensure that the country is behind them—that the country understands why they are there, that it supports the mission that they are undertaking, and that the casualties that they take are fully understood. They must be respected by the country as a whole.
There has been a serious problem of credibility of government ever since Iraq and the dodgy dossier. There is a lack of proper reporting back. Also, many people in the country lack belief in what seem overoptimistic reports of what is going on, and there seems an unwillingness sometimes to reveal the full extent of the casualties that we are taking. I was not aware of the scale. I looked at a report about 3 Para coming back from six months with the 16 Air Assault Brigade in Helmand. It earned a Victoria Cross and a George Cross, and lost 14 dead with 46 more wounded. That is one parachute regiment in the front line in Helmand. In the first Gulf War, we faced no casualties of anything like that proportion. As was said by the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, we know now that we may be there for a long time with challenges to face, so it is the responsibility of Ministers to ensure that the resources are there, and that the country—by Ministers’ own efforts, communication and persuasion—understands why the forces are there and that they have public support for what they undertake.
Against that background, I challenge something that the noble Baroness said during her appallingly daunting task of having to stand up at five minutes’ notice and make the opening speech. We know it is not true that the burden in Afghanistan is equitably shared between the NATO allies. We know that there is great difficulty in getting any of the NATO allies to continue or in any way increase their commitment. They certainly do not wish to do so in the more hazardous areas of Afghanistan. We face a challenging time.
I apologise to the House for overrunning. My simple message is that what the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, called “the covenant”—the duty of a nation to see that, if our forces are in harm’s way and on the orders of the Government are serving our country in the way that they are, they are entitled to the fullest possible support in every respect, whether on the front line, with equipment, in housing, in medical treatment, in the question of compensation for injury. There is a whole range of things. At the
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4.45 pm
Lord Kerr of Kinlochard: My Lords, I had planned to say a word about the EU treaty among other things, but, inspired by the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, I plan to speak about the EU treaty only. I plan to urge that the debates in this House, as we consider ratification, focus on the relevant and leave aside the irrelevant. I heard two irrelevant questions today.
Irrelevant question number one was the extent to which the reform treaty replicates in substance, if not in form, the constitutional treaty. The noble Lord, Lord Howell, discussed the matter at some length. Many Opposition spokesmen cite statesmen in the large majority of EU member states where the constitutional treaty had already been ratified. Naturally, and for obvious reasons, such statesmen tend to say that not much has been lost in the reform treaty. For them, that is true. Our Government, by contrast, tend to stress the difference between the two texts, as they apply to the UK. The new red lines have been successfully defended, the new exemptions, opt-outs, opt-ins, emergency brakes have been inserted specifically and only for the UK. They, too, are correct, although in other member states it is seen as puzzling and, to me, it is a little shaming, that the treaty should be commended here not for what it says but for changes, unique to the UK, compared to an earlier text which Ministers had previously agreed, signed and recommended for ratification. I hope that our debates here will not focus on textual comparisons, but on what the current text actually says. We are where we are.
The second irrelevant question that came up this afternoon was whether the UK should be putting forward in the EU another prescription, better than the reform treaty. Some argue that the Brussels institutions have outlived or exceeded their purpose and that what is needed is the presentation by UK Ministers of a blueprint for a looser union, with some powers returned to the member states. I think that that is what the noble Lord, Lord Howell, was prescribing this afternoon. The Conservative Party’s principal spokesman in the convention that drafted the original constitutional treaty in 2002-03 did just that—with great energy and eloquence—and secured six supporters; six, in a convention of 207, and not one of those supporters came from a governing party or a party in a governing coalition. As I understand it, the Tory leadership has since been scouring eastern Europe for support for the Howell concept—the looser, weaker union—and has found some, mainly on the far right, mainly strongly nationalist, and hence against EU enlargement and immigration; mainly agrarian and hence against free trade and CAP reform. One might think them rather odd bedfellows for the party of Robert Peel, or of the noble Lord, Lord Howell.
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All 27 member state governments have, once again, followed a different course, agreeing on the present reform treaty, by unanimity. One can change the treaties only by unanimity. The “flat-earth” prescription is not negotiable; therefore, it is irrelevant; we are where we are. We have to consider the ratification of the existing treaty, not whether there should be a different kind of treaty.
As we consider it, your Lordships might wish to look at four aspects, as they are probably seen across continental Europe as the most important. First, if the treaty is ratified, the European Council will have a full-time, fixed-term president. Six-monthly rotation worked well for six, nine, or 12 member states but does not work well for 27. Continental federalists, who have always been wary of the European Council, because it did not feature in Jean Monnet’s original vision, initially opposed the creation of the full-time presidency of the European Council. They thought that the creation of a second full-time senior post might undercut the authority of the President of the Commission. I favour the reform: technicians, like me, have a bias towards efficiency. Those who would prefer the EU to be inefficient might wish to oppose it. The House should consider where the UK’s interests lie.
The second key aspect is the voting system. Qualified majority voting in the Council would, if the treaty were ratified by all, be by a new dual-majority system, requiring a majority of population as well as a majority of member states. Currently, there is a very weak correlation, weakened by successive enlargements, between population and votes. Representatives of 100,000 Maltese or Luxembourgers have the same voting weight as representatives of 3 million Germans. That looks like an anomaly that should be put right. Initially, small member states opposed the reform for the obvious reason. I always favoured it, not just because UK voting weight would go up by about 40 per cent, but also because I thought that the increase in QMV, made inevitable by enlargement, made it important to enhance the democratic legitimacy of decision-taking. Those who do not want the EU to be more democratically legitimate, or those who might want the UK to be more often outvoted, so making the EU more unpopular in this country, might wish to oppose the reform. It is for the House to decide.
Thirdly, the coherence of the EU’s external diplomacy will undoubtedly be enhanced when the High Representative of the EU, already responsible for conducting the Common Foreign and Security Policy, is allowed to chair the Council and take part in debates in the Commission.
Finally, the treaty tries to bring the EU closer to the citizen, and make it easier to follow. Now is not the time to debate the details of red and yellow cards. The central point is that national parliaments would be able, if they chose, to monitor EU legislation more effectively. How we in this House could best use those new powers is, I know, an issue to which the chairman of the EU Select Committee is now devoting considerable attention and his considerable energy. Making the election of the Commission President one of the first acts of each newly elected European Parliament would also give more meaning to
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We should keep in mind one other consideration as we think about ratification. What if we say no? The reform treaty is about making the EU work better. Unlike the Single European Act in 1985—with major extensions of qualified majority voting, which were necessary for the single market, and with the introduction of the Common Foreign and Security Policy—and unlike the 1991 treaty on the European Union—with its provisions for economic and monetary union, and the start of co-operation in justice and home affairs—this treaty is not about the conferral of new powers. This is about making the present systems work better.
That is not an accident. In 2002, the EU convention consulted public opinion to discover what was wanted, and the answer was clear: try to introduce more transparency, simplicity and, above all, efficiency. Hard on the heels of 9/11, and at a time of severe splits over Iraq, people wanted the EU to be more effective in helping Governments to deliver security, and more effective in pursuing European interests in the wider world. Very few wanted extensions of EU powers. Even fewer wanted reductions in EU powers. Everybody wanted the show to run better, and that was before the further complication of enlargement from 15 to 25, and now to 27. Five years on, 27 Governments think that this reform treaty has, in a modest way, done just that; that it will deliver efficiency; that the EU will work a little better. Most of our partners think it too modest, but better than nothing.
I wonder what would happen, what signal we would send, if we were to decide that, on reflection, we do not favour efficiency, and do not want it to work better. They have put up with us reopening, in the first intergovernmental conference, deals struck in the Convention; and then reopening, in the second intergovernmental conference, agreements reached in the first. They have put up with us discovering new red lines, requiring new provisions particular to us, and further watering down the provisions applicable to all. Salami-slicing has been extremely skilfully done, and the sausage for the UK has got smaller and smaller. After all that, if we now take a straightforward Luddite line, saying that, on reflection, despite all the concessions to us, we would actually prefer to stick to the existing treaties, and existing unreformed institutions, because we do not want the EU to work better, our counterparts in other capitals might well be tempted to ask whether we really want to obstruct their wishes, and those of their people, or whether we would not prefer to step outside. Norway has access to the single market—though not, of course, to its rule-making—and willingly pays a price in the form of a contribution to, though not, of course, any receipts from, the EU budget. Is that what we want?
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I believe that to step outside would be a profound mistake. I also believe that the entry into force of the reform treaty is in the interests of the United Kingdom, on its merits. Those who take a different view on the latter question owe it to the House also to address the former, without resorting to “flat-earth” fantasy.
4.57 pm
Baroness Northover: My Lords, the Queen’s speech briefly mentions a range of foreign policy and development areas, and the Climate Change Bill. So what will this mean and what will also need to be addressed over the next year?
We know that many Asian countries are powering ahead. Even Vietnam, with its terrible history, is likely to reach middle-income status within a year or two. But many African countries—and many people within the developing economies—are being left behind. In many countries, achieving the key MDGs is a distant hope. We are looking, in the words of Oxford academic, Paul Collier, at the “bottom billion”. Conflict and bad governance contribute in a major way to countries’ inability to develop, and failing states are expensive to us all, not only financially but also in terms of our security.
Climate change has a huge potential to destabilise, so will the Climate Change Bill be tough enough to make a difference to the poorest countries? The poorest people are most vulnerable. What is happening in Darfur is due partly to the expansion of the Sahara and the subsequent displacement of people. As we have heard, a target of 60 per cent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 is too limited. Scientific evidence suggests that emissions must be reduced by at least 80 per cent. Britain ought to be carbon neutral by 2050. Will the Government adopt that target and a scheme of annual, rather than five-yearly, targets to hold Ministers to account?
What about governance? As Hilary Benn, then Secretary of State for International Development, stated last October,
- “without good governance we will not be able to defeat poverty, or climate change, or war, or famine”.
Two months later we had the case of BAE and Saudi Arabia. When the Minister replies, could he tell us where he and the new Prime Minister stand on combating corruption, even if it seems to hit British interests?
Conflict undermines development. The noble Baroness spoke optimistically about DfID’s role in Iraq. Can the Minister tell us how effective he thinks it can be in the midst of insecurity and destruction? What is happening about those who help us there as interpreters? When we assess for asylum, it is on the basis of risk. Surely we need to do that here: the risk is likely to be as great for someone who has worked with the Army for 11 months as for someone who has worked for a full year.
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