Beijing Winter Olympic Games 2022

Lord Addington Excerpts

Wednesday 10th February 2021 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Addington]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the calls from human rights organisations to boycott the 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing.

[The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon) (Con)]

My Lords, we share the deep concern of these organisations regarding human rights violations in China, particularly those perpetrated against Uighurs and other minorities in Xinjiang. The UK has repeatedly taken a leading international role in holding China to account for its actions, including at the UN. We shall continue these efforts and keep further actions that may be required under close review. In respect of the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022, no decisions have yet been made about ministerial attendance. The participation of the national team in the Winter Olympics is, of course, a matter for our national Olympic committee, which operates independently of government, as stipulated by the International Olympic Committee.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

I thank the Minister for that reply. Will he take back to anybody who is dealing with this the plight of the individual athlete, who may well be making a decision about their one chance to be at the absolute peak of their career—something they may have given their life to? If anybody decides not to go, or is told not to go, they should be given a chance to train sufficiently well to stand a chance the next time around, or possibly to make a career change, because that much we do owe them.

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

The noble Lord, as I have become accustomed to, makes a very pertinent and important point about the investment that is made in a person’s training for the Olympics. One look at me and noble Lords will know that I have never aspired in that respect—but, on a serious note, I totally hear the noble Lord, and of course I will take his sentiments back to colleagues within government.

Nagorno-Karabakh: Genocide Emergency Alert

Lord Addington Excerpts

Monday 2nd November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sugg (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I agree with the noble Lord that this is a deeply complex and historic conflict and that it presents a risk to regional stability. We are absolutely trying to avoid any instability within the region. The UK is taking an active role. We are not co-chairs of the Minsk Group, but we fully support it, and we are working with our international partners bilaterally and multilaterally. We have regular contact with the Foreign Ministers of both countries and continue to urge the de-escalation of this conflict. We know that there will not be a military solution, and we need to see both parties return to the negotiating table. The UK will continue to press for that.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that we have to look at this in the round, bearing in mind that there is a long history of distrust and a search for revenge in both parties? As the noble Baroness, Lady Cox, said, Genocide Watch gives Armenia a rating of eight and 10, so it is not without some blame or concern. Could the Minsk Group be kicked into life? Could the Government make sure that the US, this week or next week, takes this problem seriously and make sure that there is some activity there? At the least we need observation on the ground of what is going on, because knowing that if you commit crimes you pay a price might be a way of reining people in.

[Baroness Sugg (Con) [V]]

I thank the noble Lord for his question. I agree that we must see both sides come to the table and that both sides need to compromise. We fully support the Minsk Group, which has been working hard to make progress. We have seen meetings in Moscow, Paris and Washington but, sadly, despite these efforts there has not been a sustained ceasefire. However, significant efforts will continue and we will continue to support the co-chairs in their work to bring about a sustainable peace.

Nagorno-Karabakh

Lord Addington Excerpts

Wednesday 7th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sugg (Con)]

My Lords, we support the role that the US is playing in the Minsk process; I mentioned before the strong statements from the President and the Secretary of State on this issue. We believe that the Minsk process is the best way to bring about an end to this conflict. The role of that group is to facilitate the negotiations—as I said, it has proposed a set of basic principles—but it is for the parties themselves to negotiate a peace agreement. We recognise that that must involve compromise and hard choices, but there is no military solution. We need the parties to return to the negotiation table, with the help of the co-chairs—the US, France and Moscow—and we believe that that is the best way to bring about an end to this conflict.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, would the Minister agree that this is a conflict which has a long history, where everybody blames everybody else and everybody blames the backers of their enemy? Could the Government put as much pressure on as possible to allow journalists in, so that the rest of the world knows what is going on? We could do without propaganda from both sides clogging our view.

[Baroness Sugg (Con)]

My Lords, I agree with the noble Lord that the roots of this conflict are complex and predate the collapse of the Soviet Union. Apportioning blame is not the solution. I also completely agree about the importance of media freedom. We are concerned about disinformation in this conflict, and we are concerned about reports of lack of access to the internet. We will do all we can to facilitate access to the region so that we can understand what is happening.

Schools: Great British September Clean

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 24th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con) [V]]

The Government committed, in our 2019 manifesto, to introduce a deposit return scheme for drinks containers, and we are seeking powers in the Environment Bill to enable us to establish deposit return schemes. The Bill needs to complete its journey through both Houses, and I very much hope that will happen as quickly as possible. The specific details of a DRS will be presented in a second consultation in very early 2021.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, if the Minister has that meeting with the Department for Education, will he consider the fact that there is no shortage of subjects that would like a little bit of curriculum time? At the moment we have a very squeezed curriculum because of the pandemic, and there was not that much space there in the first place. Before taking time out of the school day, please have a think about what damage that may do to the rest of the education system.

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con) [V]]

Increasingly, many schools put emphasis on an environmental component of the curriculum. I have spoken at hundreds of schools, and I am yet to visit one where the environment is not a major focus. What is useful in the approach of most schools today is that they weave this issue through existing curricula. In addition, the Government have been ramping up our support for national clean-up days, and we have been proud to support and endorse many of those events. This month, for instance, we are encouraging as many people in business as possible to participate in the Great British September Clean and the Great British Beach Clean, and we anticipate that numerous young people will join in those events—and, we hope, become lifelong environmentalists.

China

Lord Addington Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, none of China’s actions should have come as a surprise to anybody. There has been a warning for quite a long time on its attitude to human rights and to Hong Kong. When did the Government let it know there would be consequences to a continuation of these actions? Do we have certain red lines and standards saying that if it goes further there will be further action?

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon]

I am sure the noble Lord will recollect that we warned we would take action, particularly on BNOs, if the national security law was enacted. We informed the Chinese of that. They continued with their actions and we responded with the announcements we have made. We will continue to monitor the situation in Hong Kong, mainland China and other parts. Taiwan was raised, and while we retain our position on the importance of negotiations between the two sides, the issue of human rights has not gone away. It remains live and we will continue to monitor it. Where we need to act, we have acted.

Qatar: Football World Cup

Lord Addington Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, does my noble friend not agree that it might be a good idea if the British Government made sure that all British bodies responsible for planning and helping at any future international sporting events ensured that a commitment up front to very good health and safety practices was an important part of that support, and that we would vote against any future bid where that was not the case?

[Baroness Anelay of St Johns]

My Lords, my noble friend makes a very good point. Indeed, the United Kingdom is one of 46 countries that adhere to the OECD guidelines for multinational enterprises. The guidelines provide detailed voluntary standards for responsible behaviour among companies bidding in such contracts, including standards relating to promoting development and encouraging suppliers and other business partners to act responsibly. That is the right way forward.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Addington Excerpts

Tuesday 10th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, in a long debate such as this, covering so many subjects, it is probably reassuring if you are the first person to raise a particular area. Before I start this speech, I have one or two interests to declare because I shall talk about the changes to the disabled students allowance proposed by the Minister, David Willetts. I have already raised this once but I think I might have to raise it again, or indeed repeatedly over the next few months, because whenever a Minister grabs at something and says, “We’ll change it”, but has clearly not been that well briefed they will get themselves into a bit of trouble. We have a situation where dyslexics or people with specific learning difficulty—I repeat that I have never been a person with specific learning difficulty but am somebody who is dyslexic, as I do not know why we use four words when one will do, even if it is a long one—get a specific mention here, as we did in the Written Statement that came out.

It is true that this fund has expanded dramatically over the years and has not been reformed since it was created in 1990. However, I find it very worrying to be suddenly stating that we are to get rid of lots of it and make lots of savings, when one clearly does not have a hold of its real function or how it works. That is what has happened here. The first interest, which I should put on the record straightaway, is that I am chairman of a company called Microlink, which was one of the first companies to deal with this back in 1990, if not the first. However, I am not totally against any form of change in this field. I can safely say that this is an increasingly small part of that company’s activity; indeed, we would quite happily get rid of it because what we have left has been loss-making in the past couple of years. There is a degree of knowledge there not wedded to the current system.

We have been taking on dyslexics, who are the biggest disability group in the country. They are 10% of the population, to use our definition, but 20% if you use the American one. They are one in five in the United States. It is stated that this group has expanded and is using a computer as standard to get hold of this technology, which will now run on a standard computer, and that everybody has a computer. Just to pull that apart, it is true that access to the software is the vital bit. Without a computer that functions and can handle that software, you do not have access to the software so you cannot use it. The voice-to-text or text-to-voice technology does not work unless the computer gets down there. People will tell you that it is just about okay. We have all had a computer that can just about handle the program—until it gets a bug or is a little old, or a little overloaded with its memory going down. If the software you are using is slightly updated, it is incompatible. You must have something reliable to get the benefit out of it. I do not think there is any great rocket science involved in that; it is just the way it is.

Now we are being told that the universities will provide the software and support, and that if you cannot afford to have that computer there will be other funds, such as hardship funds or bursaries and so on, to meet it. However, those hardship funds or bursaries were not created for this and do not have the capacity. If you meet this cost here, you will inconvenience somebody else. It is true that it has expanded in size and has greater recognition, and that there is waste in it. There is the fact that you get X number of hours of non-medical help, if I remember the term correctly, given to you. If the computer works for a dyslexic properly—let us stick to “dyslexics”—they probably do not need 30 hours a year of extra support, as they might have had in 1990 from an amanuensis acting to get them through, because the computer does it for them. There could have been a change there.

Regarding the assessments, which are expensive and take time, if you have identified somebody in the school system whose brain will not radically change between, let us say, the ages of seven and 19, they will still be dyslexic. They will have learning strategies in place and will presumably have learnt to cope, if they have got through, so they do not need another assessment. However, you do under the current system so changes could be made. Something has to be done to allow these students to access the system. Why? Because if you do not, people will fail or underachieve—or, if they succeed, do so at an immensely high personal cost.

It may be morally wonderful to say to somebody, “You worked twice as hard to get your degree”. I do not think that is in the spirit of the Equality Act or the Disability Discrimination Act in front of me. Why should a person have to flog themselves half to death to get through? Why should they take a greater risk of underachieving or failing? Underachieving at university is probably the great one as if you are two grades down, you miss all the jobs that you are supposed to get afterwards. Does a bad degree qualify you for as much as having done another course? I doubt it, so how are we to make sure that that level of access is provided?

There is considerable room for reform and change in this field but just picking on the computer is ridiculous, as it is about 5% of the total cost but the thing that can guarantee that the technical aspect comes through. It is possibly less than 5%, according to the figures that I have. Other forms of help could be looked at more but please can we rethink this to make sure that the technical assistance that goes through can be used? That applies to all disabilities that use technical aids and assistance. If we cannot get that through, we will be getting people who will not achieve and who, under those circumstances, would not get there when they probably should.

Just to put the cherry on the cake, your Lordships will of course realise that other departments, such as the Department for Work and Pensions, do give assistance with similar types of technology and access to work. So there is school and access to work but the bit in the middle that links it all together is to be changed and probably removed from people. Please can we get some coherence going through this system? It is not too late to change it and get something coherent but it will have to be fairly soon so as to be ready for the 2015 intake. Can we have another look at this? If we do not, we will end up getting people half way through but dropping out or underachieving. This will basically mean saving a little here and wasting a lot somewhere else.

NATO

Lord Addington Excerpts

Tuesday 29th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington]

My Lords, first, I apologise for being one of those people who has not read the letter, but never mind.

I find myself in agreement with the main thrust of what was said by the noble Lords who have just spoken. Indeed, in a debate not so long ago in this House, I drew attention to the fact that NATO’s major problem with Russia is that Russia is probably very frightened of NATO. The Russian successor state has found itself in a declining sphere of interest, with its own borders being pushed back and what it regards as its justifiable interest being constricted at all times. We must also remember that Russia is an incredibly important and powerful state to this day. The importance of Russia in the current situation in Syria probably clarifies how we must speak to Russia and try to get it to at least communicate in language that we understand, so that we can reduce conflict throughout the entire world, if not just in Europe and the closer parts of Asia and Africa.

Of course, everybody sane agrees that there should be fewer nuclear weapons. They then disagree violently about what that actually means to the state at the time. If we are worrying about Russia’s position, we should worry about the position of members of NATO and NATO’s allies. If you are a Pole, Czech or Latvian, just how much more secure do you feel having those low-level nuclear weapons around? It may be an illusory security blanket—one that will mean that you simply die of radiation poisoning slightly later on—but it is there. Unless we can bring that into our discussion more fully, we are always going to struggle.

What do we do with the non-nuclear capacity within NATO? It is not difficult to find somebody in uniform who will tell you, “Don’t spend money on nuclear weapons; spend it on other things”. Aircraft carriers and battle tanks are usually the first call, rapidly followed by the latest whizz-bang fighter jet or bomber. But does that increase tension as well? Does it increase tension within the organisations that you are dealing with and with your potential enemies, who are also your potential allies? How we handle that situation—that ongoing relationship—is going to be incredibly difficult. Getting a holistic approach is also going to be very difficult.

There is also the flipside that we if expand our conventional weapons, how do we deal with the peacekeeping and conflict resolution capacity of NATO, which has had its successes and failures but has been a new area of activity? As long as we are worrying about the nuclear stockpile, we also need to consider how to make better use of our defence spending. As my noble friend Lord King pointed out, the eternal question is: what do you spend money on in terms of preparing military force? It has always been a case of blood and gold being spent together. Preparing to spend blood and gold is how you define your defence capacity. That has always been the case, going back to when people first decided to spend a little bit more money going from bronze to iron weapons.

How to make better use of our defence spending is something that we must bear in mind. If we have this hugely expensive nuclear stockpile, which leads to a great deal of justifiable fear even if it just sits in its bunker and decays, there will always be greater stress on our conventional forces if they are in the same budget. It would be quite honest of the Government—or indeed any Government—to separate out those two budgets. That might be a starting point.

If we are going to encourage things such as missile defence—and the Chicago summit tried to make it clear that it is not aimed at Russia, it is aimed at someone else; the subtext is Iran—it will only work against nations that can fire a limited capacity of missiles. The way to deal with this defence system is to swamp it, as has always been the case. You simply launch more missiles; you take out missiles individually and then some will get through. As Tom Lehrer put it,

“Oh, we will all fry together when we fry”.

If you fry once or fry 100 times, you are still fried. The idea of guaranteed mass destruction worked in the past.

The noble Lord is quite right that without some sort of coherent idea about how to approach making a reduction that reassures Russia, we are never going to progress as quickly as we should towards reducing nuclear weapons to the bare minimum or getting rid of them altogether. I hope that my noble friend the Minister will give us an idea about progress. That is what we are talking about here: are we encouraging coherent progress, at least among our allies?

EU: Defence Pact with Russia

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

I agree with the noble Lord, and indeed that was the implication of my first Answer. We do not look for an actual defence pact or any kind of development which would, as the noble Lord says, impair the integrity of NATO operations. Nevertheless, there are all sorts of strands of increased co-operation. I have mentioned the NATO-Russia Council. There is also the Meseberg initiative and the modernisation pact, and there are other opportunities in fora where we can carry forward good relations with regard to that part of Russian policy with which we can work in a positive way.

[Lord Addington]

Does the Minister agree that, when the general normality of relations is based on dialogue, we should really be looking at a few areas where we do not talk so as to avoid misunderstandings in the future?

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

Yes, I agree with that. I repeat that we would like to see operations such as the Meseberg initiative developed, as they are fora where that kind of approach can be adopted.