Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Committee stage & Lords Hansard
Tuesday 9th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I will speak in support of Amendment 14 in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Robertson, Lord Alton, Lord West and Lord Campbell, and Amendment 36 in the name of my noble and learned friend Lord Hope of Craighead. In doing so, I apologise for not having spoken on Second Reading, due to an inadvertent mistake over timing.

I back the amendments not out of any objection to the Bill as a whole. The Bill’s objectives are laudable ones of giving protection to our service personnel against vexatious inquiries and prosecutions. However, the Bill as drafted actually increases those risks rather than reduces them. I oppose these defects, which the amendments seek to remedy on the grounds of both practicality and principle. The practical problem is a very obvious one. While the Bill places limitations in time in our domestic law on the pursuit of inquiries and prosecutions, it does not and cannot impose such limitations with respect to our international obligations under the Rome statute, which established the International Criminal Court and which Parliament ratified and gave effect to before its entry into force. The Rome statute, in whose negotiation we participated fully—I was myself involved to a modest extent when I was the UK’s Permanent Representative to the UN in 1995—contains no such limitations with respect to the crimes identified in the statute. The risk is therefore, as many other noble Lords have said, that our service personnel could be prosecuted in the International Criminal Court even though we had declined, under the provisions of this Bill, to take any action.

That is no theoretical risk. Quite recently, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court decided not to pursue cases against our personnel on the explicit grounds that we had domestic legislation to deal with the alleged offences and had demonstrated our willingness to use it. This could therefore be a case, I fear, of being out of the frying pan and into the fire if we do not take steps to remove from the scope of the Bill the extraordinarily serious offences set out in the Rome statute.

The argument of principle in favour of these amendments leads on from the practical argument. The International Criminal Court is an important part of that rules-based international system which the Government have argued, quite correctly in my view, that it is in our national interest to sustain. In recent years, the Government have done a good job in doing precisely that against the intemperate onslaughts of the Trump Administration against the International Criminal Court. Here, however, we are being asked to legislate in a way that could put us in contradiction with our obligations under the Rome statute. That clearly is not a sensible or principled thing to do. At worst, it could lead to British service personnel being prosecuted unnecessarily in the ICC, which would inevitably lead to an outcry in this country, possibly challenging the basis of our membership. Less dramatically, it will be seen by the critics and opponents of the International Criminal Court around the world—in places like Russia and China, and the US in some parts of the body politic—as a weakening of our support of the court and as undermining its authority. For both the reasons of practicality and principle, I hope that the Government will, before we get to Report, reconsider these flawed aspects of the Bill and remedy them.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Tuesday 7th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, I doubt that many people would dispute that Britain’s foreign policy—its role in the world—played only a minimal part in the recent general election and figured only marginally in the Queen’s Speech we are debating today, so this is surely a moment when we need to address those issues. This is all the more necessary because we are living through a period of considerable turmoil and disruption, some of it caused by our closest ally, the United States, and we will be embarking on these troubled waters in our new post-Brexit capacity, with less ability to influence policy developments in both Brussels and Washington than we had in the past. Power relationships are shifting, often in ways that do not favour us and our allies and friends. The framework of the rules-based international order, which we ourselves did so much to create over the past 75 years, is being challenged and shaken to its foundations.

During 2020 we will participate in four important international gatherings which will do much to shape the world we live in, for better or for worse, and determine our collective response to some of the main global challenges we face. These four are the nuclear non-proliferation treaty’s quinquennial review in May, which is incidentally the treaty’s 50th anniversary; the ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization in Kazakhstan in the summer; the stocktaking on the UN’s sustainable development goals, five years into their 15-year span, in the autumn; and, at the end of the year, the COP 26 meeting in Glasgow on climate change.

The background to the NPT review conference in May is certainly not encouraging. The risks of nuclear war, whether by accident or design, are on the rise; the golden era, from the end of the Cold War in the 1980s until about 2015, when we felt able to discount any chance of nuclear war, has ended; arms control agreements are eroding, with the INF gone and New START, limiting Russian and US strategic weapons, needing renewal next year; and the NPT itself, a cornerstone of international peace and security, is living dangerously, with challenges from North Korea and Iran. How best can the world be moved back on to a path of incremental disarmament and arms control? Can a dialogue on strategic stability between the world’s principal nuclear weapons states, such as existed even at the height of the Cold War, be resumed? Can nuclear weapons states’ military doctrines be made more transparent? Can it be stated again that a nuclear war must not be fought and cannot be won? All these and more questions need to be addressed. I would like to hear how the Government plan to address them during our current rotating chairmanship of the P5 recognised nuclear weapon states, and in New York in May.

On the second event, world trade, for so long an engine of global economic growth, is in the doldrums, disrupted by trade wars, by the unilateral flouting of international rules and by the paralysis of the WTO’s dispute settlement procedures as a result of the US refusal to allow the appointment of new panellists. No part of the rules-based international order is under greater and more immediate threat than the WTO. What plans do the Government have to reverse that trend and to circumvent the paralysis of dispute settlement procedures if the US cannot be persuaded to relent? What prospects are there for plurilateral agreements on trade in services and on digital exchanges, on which so much of our economy now depends? A ministerial answer to these questions would be welcome.

On the sustainable development goals, it would be good to hear how the Government intend to put to good use our leadership role due to the commitment we have made to 0.7% of GNI. How do they see the main thrusts of that expenditure being developed? What are the main shortfalls in the SDGs which need to be remedied this coming autumn, and how will the Government set about doing it?

The task facing COP 26 in Glasgow is a formidable one, whose daunting nature has been underlined by the relative failure of COP 25 in Madrid last month, and it will have to be done without any help at all from our principal ally, the US. It will require advocacy and diplomacy at the highest political level, as was deployed by France when the Paris agreement was put together some years ago. It will also require us to set an example—in actions, not just in words—with our own domestic environmental policies. All the diplomatic advocacy we deploy in the run-up to Glasgow will count for little if we are not putting our money where our mouth is. It would be good to hear something of that in the Government’s plans.

All that is to come in 2020, as well as the 75th anniversary of the UN’s founding. How well we rise to these four challenges will certainly test the claims the Government have made that Brexit will enhance and not diminish our influence in the world. We shall see. That we need to address them with seriousness and determination is surely not in doubt.

D-day: 75th Anniversary

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Tuesday 4th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, a commemorative debate, such as we are having today, needs both to look back to the event being commemorated and to situate the lessons from that event in the context of today, never more so than in the present instance when the controversy surrounding the state visit of President Trump risks overshadowing the real and continuing significance of D-day. First and foremost, we should salute the courage and the sacrifice of those Americans, Canadians and others who joined our own Armed Forces in a truly unprecedented military operation that led a year later to the liberation of Europe. Let us face it: they saved our bacon and helped deliver a victory that we could not have delivered on our own.

Are we sufficiently grateful? I sometimes doubt it. For example, why have we not, as the French have so generously done towards our D-day veterans, honoured all those surviving? Should we not now be honouring all surviving US veterans of D-day? I think we should. In the context of today, we need to realise that the Anglo-American alliance remains as important to our continued security as it was then. This is easy to forget when the Trump Administration take a whole range of decisions contrary to our view of our national interest—for example, on policy towards Iran, on the United Nations, on climate change and on trade policy—and does so without paying much attention to our own Government’s views. But we must not let our criticisms of and our opposition to this Administration metamorphose into that ugly brand of anti-Americanism which so disfigured our politics 40 years ago. We must do our best to ensure that the NATO summit to be held in this city in December strengthens the alliance and demonstrates its continuing validity.

Then there are the lessons of D-day for our own place in Europe, of which we are an integral part, not just geographically but culturally, economically and historically. Our failure to recognise the full implications of that in the 1920s and 1930s contributed to our having to fight our way ashore in Normandy 75 years ago.

There are of course no direct analogies with the present day but we need to realise that no isolation-from-Europe option for our present predicament is available to us that will not damage our future prosperity and security. We need to remember that D-day was fought to uphold a range of values—democracy, freedom of thought and speech, and many others—that were eloquently set out in the Atlantic Charter, which was drawn up by Roosevelt and Churchill two years or so before D-day, and which then became those of the United Nations when that organisation was founded in 1945. Among a lot of loose talk in recent months about the rebirth of nationalism, we need to recognise that our compatriots died to uphold those values and we must not desert them now.

Reconciliation: Role of British Foreign, Defence and International Development Policy

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Friday 14th December 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, we should all be extremely grateful to the most reverend Primate—as I certainly am—for having chosen, as the theme for the annual debate on which he leads, a topic which looks outwards to the rest of the world and not inwards, as the national obsession with Brexit tempts us to do. He has done so at a time when the rules-based international order, to whose construction this country has devoted so much time, effort and resolve, is under fundamental challenge, not least from our closest ally, the United States. It is a time when wars between states are less frequent than wars within states, which are typically those that most urgently require reconciliation when they are over if they are not to recur. One has only to look at the successive killing orgies between the Hutu and Tutsis in Rwanda and Burundi for an example. It is a time too when tensions between those professing different religions, or even in some cases between different branches of the same religions, are on the rise in a manner not seen since Europe was convulsed by them in the 17th century and lost a considerable proportion of its population.

What can we in Britain hope to do in the face of those threats? First, we can work to strengthen the efforts of the United Nations to prevent conflict, to resolve conflicts and build peace where some peace has been achieved, and to promote human rights. An example of what the United Nations can do was yesterday’s events in Stockholm, when the appalling civil war in Yemen was brought to a very temporary halt by an agreement on exchange of prisoners and by the opening of the port of Hodeidah. Do not let us throw our hats in the air—this is the beginning of a very long road that will require a great deal of reconciliation as well as a great deal of statesmanship by all concerned, but it shows what the UN is capable of when it gets the support of its principal members.

Of those members, Britain, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, has a duty to strengthen the UN. As a medium-ranking power with global interests, we have a major interest in doing so. Therefore, we should provide more resources to the UN’s role in conflict prevention. I believe that we should contribute more troops to UN peacekeeping missions, and we should make a reality of the responsibility to protect, not so much in terms of military intervention, which must always remain a last resort, but in using every diplomatic and economic tool in the international toolbox to prevent wars breaking out and to prevent gross breaches of international humanitarianism—war, massacres and genocide—which have often occurred.

Secondly, we need to put to the best possible use our commitment to devoting 0.7% of our gross national income to aid and development, and defend that commitment against those—there are plenty of them—who wish to reverse it. I applaud the Government’s decision to devote a substantial proportion of that commitment to fragile and failing states, where very often there can be no effective development until there is security and reconciliation. That commitment, too, ensures that we play a leading role in the effort to implement, by 2030, the UN’s sustainable development goals, which constitute the essential underpinning of reconciliation in fractured societies.

Thirdly, we need a bit of humility when approaching reconciliation. It cannot successfully be imposed from the outside; nor can it be successfully imposed from the top down. The most reverend Primate made that point very effectively. It has to come from the citizens of the countries concerned if it is to be durable. It requires that we do far more to nurture the growth of non-governmental organisations and other institutions of civil society in countries at risk. It requires too the nurturing in those countries of the rule of law, which is every bit as important as democracy. It requires us to strengthen the application of our own laws to ensure that we are in no way complicit in genocide, war crimes, bribery, money laundering or the payment of ransoms—whether openly criminal acts are involved or it is merely aid to oppressive Governments.

What can and should we do against the emergence of religious fundamentalism around the world? It is by no means confined to Muslim countries. There are plenty of Buddhist, Hindu, Christian and Jewish fundamentalists who do not believe in the value of tolerance for other religions. The Church of which the most reverend Primate is leader does believe in those values, and that is admirable. It helps to promote reconciliation.

What can be done? Most importantly, we must avoid lumping any advocate of religions other than our own together into a single category, as if to be judged by the crimes committed by the small minority in their ranks. We must realise that there are many hundreds of millions of devout Muslims who bitterly condemn the crimes committed in the name of their religion by IS, al-Qaeda and Boko Haram. The manifestations of Islamophobia in this country—and, alas, occasionally even in this House—will only serve to strengthen the fringe movements to which I referred.

In this new epoch, in which—Brexit or no Brexit—this country will need to navigate and to shape its international policies, we will need more co-operation and joint effort with other countries. That is why I found the call to re-invent separate national identities in the speech by the US Secretary of State in Brussels last week, which fortunately did not get a lot of press coverage, completely aberrant. We Europeans tried that prescription in the first half of the 20th century and it was not a huge success. Let us not go there again but rather follow the precepts of reconciliation, support for a rules-based international order and tolerance, which are at the heart of the most reverend Primate’s own teaching and advocacy.

Counter-Daesh Update

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Tuesday 7th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

I can give the noble Lord that assurance. Clearly, we do not want to move assets back when it may turn out that they are needed in theatre again. I am not aware of what decisions are being taken on that front, but we are clear that we do not want to wreck our chances of playing the part we want to play in the coalition.

As for identifying returnees, I asked my officials that very question before this debate and am assured that mechanisms are in place to identify returnees at the border, even if iris recognition is not in place. The names of those on the wanted list are very clear and have been distributed, and I am advised that the mechanisms are secure in that respect.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

Will the Minister perhaps cast some light on a point that was not covered in the Statement—the situation on the border between Turkey and Syria, where there are substantial Kurdish forces? He spoke about the Kurdish situation in the part of Iraq ruled by the regional Government, but not the tensions that exist between the Kurds in Syria and Turkey. There is a real risk that the coalition, which has so successfully dealt with Daesh thus far, will now start fighting among themselves. Could he confirm, too, that the evidence of the UN inquiry that the Assad regime still has chemical weapons means that that regime is in contravention of the chemical weapons convention, which it was persuaded to sign four years ago, and that, in any peace settlement, the chemical weapons convention organisation will need to have complete access to all sites in Syria and to be able to ensure that never again are chemical weapons kept, stored or used there?

[Earl Howe]

I can tell the noble Lord that Syria is certainly in breach of the chemical weapons convention, which it is a party to. I am aware that those charged with investigating the manufacture and use of chemical weapons in Syria are seeking access to the relevant sites, and no doubt news on that score will emerge as the days pass. As regards clashes between Iraqi security forces and the Kurdish Peshmerga, we are aware of reports of violence between those forces. However, we very much welcome the discussions brokered by the global coalition to co-ordinate security arrangements between the parties so as to avoid violence, and we have called upon all parties to continue to de-escalate the situation and refrain from provocative statements which could lead to conflict. It is critical that all parties quickly refocus on our shared priority: the fight against Daesh, preventing its re-emergence and working together to rebuild liberated towns and villages, and lives.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Thursday 22nd June 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, this is the first debate on the Address since last June’s referendum resulted in a narrow majority in favour of leaving the EU. It is also the first since the assumption of office by a new US president, Donald Trump, whose “America First” slogan, and, even more so, policies on climate change, trade issues, NATO, the UN and human rights, put him at cross purposes with our own policy objectives. Therefore, I make no apologies for focusing my remarks on these two matters and their consequences for our own foreign policy-making.

Much of the debate about Brexit concentrates on important, but often quite narrow and technical, questions of trade in both goods and services, the status of EU nationals, including our own, and our future domestic policies on regulation, immigration, agriculture and fisheries. That is, of course, exactly as it should be, and those aspects will be debated later in this debate next week. They are important matters. We must not, however, overlook the wider strategic consequences of our decision to leave the EU in terms of Europe’s security and the future direction of the European Union’s foreign policies. It seems to have been almost completely overlooked at the time of our vote last June that we risked turning our backs on something like 500 years of British foreign policy, during which we played an integral—often crucial—part in the formulation of policies relating to European security and the balance of power among our nearest neighbours—an area you could describe as stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals, to coin a phrase. Now we risk becoming not just semi-detached but fully detached from that tradition, and that to our cost, I suggest, as we found in earlier periods when we occasionally drifted off into isolation.

It is no good thinking that these risks can be avoided simply by repeating meaningless mantras such as, “We are leaving the EU, but not leaving Europe”. Nor is NATO a full answer to the problem, although it is certainly part of the answer. It seems that the problem requires us to fashion a close, operationally effective relationship on foreign and security policy with the European Union, and in particular with its principal members, France and Germany. Several other previous speakers, including the noble Lord, Lord Howell, concentrated on that point. I hope that the Minister will say something about how we plan to set about doing that when he replies to the debate, because so far we have heard nothing but aspirations in this area.

Then there are the challenges we face from across the Atlantic, not just from the erratic and intemperate policy pronouncements which have so far been the hallmark of the Trump Administration. There are more fundamental problems than that. The policies of that Administration are already undermining the whole structure of a rules-based international community, which successive British Governments have, over the last 70 years, worked so hard to create and on which our own future prosperity and security will rely to an even greater extent if and when we leave the European Union. An adequate response cannot simply consist of the rather feeble kinds of triangulation which presumably motivated our refusal to sign up to the statement of France, Germany and Italy when the US notified its decision to withdraw from the Paris agreement on climate change, nor the rather pusillanimous attitude we have taken to supporting a two-state solution to the problem of Palestine. Nor is—I am afraid that I agree with my noble friend Lord Ricketts—the untimely invitation to President Trump to make a state visit to London this year likely to help very much. Perhaps the Minister could elucidate what the absence of a reference to that in the gracious Speech is meant to mean. However, of course we must not fall back into that knee-jerk anti-Americanism which has so often been a feature of the left in British politics. That relationship of the United States will be of crucial value to this country long beyond the tenure in office of a particular US President.

The two themes I have mentioned criss-cross when one examines the chaos in the Middle East, a set of issues which were addressed in the report of your Lordships’ International Relations Committee, which several other speakers have mentioned and which I very much trust we shall have an opportunity to debate in full before the Summer Recess. The intemperate nature of US policy-making has been clear in the Middle East most recently in the rhetorical onslaught against Iran, which took place only two days after the very welcome re-election of President Rouhani, who said that he was committed to greater engagement with the outside world. To stoke up Saudi-Iranian rivalry is not in Britain’s interest. Plenty of criticism can be levied against some aspects of Iran’s external policy. However, I hope that we will work for a kind of modus vivendi between these two important regional powers, not organise a Thirty Years’ War between Sunni and Shia. Perhaps the Minister can say how we view the current tensions between members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, which have broken out in the bans on travel between a number of Qatar’s neighbours and that emirate. That, too, does not seem to be likely to move the region into a better place.

Armed Forces Act (Continuation) Order 2017

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Tuesday 21st March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, it is with some trepidation that I participate in this debate, which is after all mainly about defence policy, but I do so because in my view the international rules-based order is under greater and more existential challenge than it has ever been since our predecessors began to piece it together amid the ruins of two catastrophic world wars. I do so also because those challenges and the necessary responses to them cannot be confined to the spheres of defence and security policy; they need to go much wider than that.

To understand this, along with the need for a wider vision and response, we need only look at the period between the two world wars. Of course history does not repeat itself exactly, but it does contain plenty of lessons that we would be foolish to ignore. The world experienced then a perfect storm in which economic, political and military developments fused into a single mass which overwhelmed the totally inadequate rules and international institutions that had been established after the First World War. The 1929 stock market crash led to mass unemployment, trade protectionism and tit-for-tat monetary devaluations. These and other factors fuelled the rise of populist political parties across Europe, while the weakened democracies averted their eyes and turned inwards. Does that sound familiar? Is there any parallel with the faltering response to the financial crisis of 2008-09 and the emergence of political forces such as those which propelled Donald Trump to the White House and are fuelling the political bids of Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders and Beppe Grillo? It is not an exact parallel, of course, but it is quite enough to cause us to worry very seriously.

I will look at three pillars of our rules-based order which are under threat: the open global trading system, symbolised by the World Trade Organization; the nuclear non-proliferation treaty; and the functions of the UN with respect to international peace and security. The arrival in the White House of a President and a trade policy team who seem to regard protectionism as a path to prosperity, and bilateral trade balances as something to be eliminated by any means, including by measures that would run roughshod over WTO rules, is a challenge to all of us, and in particular to this country which has, quite rightly in my view, nailed its post-Brexit colours to the mast of being a champion of free trade. That will require more than just words. It will require standing up to the forces of mercantilism and protectionism wherever they emerge and defending the rules of the WTO. If we fail, we will end up poorer and less able to generate the resources we need to defend ourselves and our allies, in NATO or elsewhere.

The nuclear non-proliferation treaty has been for a considerable time now one of the cornerstones of our rules-based world, but has been under considerable stress for some years, particularly from North Korea, which cheated on its obligations under the treaty and then withdrew, and from Iran, whose nuclear programmes gave much legitimate cause for concern. The only thing the two challenges have in common, I suggest, is that in neither case is a military response either sensible or to be anticipated or planned for, other than as an extremely last resort. There is no doubt about the immediacy and reality of the challenge from North Korea. Clearly, our own position can only be an ancillary one, but do the Government share the view that China has to be a key player in any effective response? Antagonising China, either politically or in trade policy terms, is unlikely to be the best way of securing its support.

As to Iran, we have the rather oddly acronymed JCPOA. Can the noble Earl confirm that the Government’s policy is to remain committed to that agreement and its rigorous implementation, whatever the US attitude may turn out to be? Is that policy properly understood in Washington? Is it not time, too, that we began thinking about globalising and generalising the constraints in the Iran agreement, thus extending its duration, which is rather on the short side, and ceasing to make it so Iran-specific, which makes it less attractive to Iran?

The United Nations, too, is under stress, even as it has more than 100,000 peacekeepers, both military and civilian, deployed worldwide. Often, as in South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic, they are the only forces that fulfil the responsibility to protect civilians—forces that the rulers of those countries are either unwilling or unable to provide. The Government’s decision to strengthen our commitments to UN peacekeeping in South Sudan and Somalia is very welcome. Can the Minister say something about the Government’s medium and long-term policies on UN peacekeeping? Is the shift in policy we have seen in the last year here to stay? Is it built in to our security strategy and destined to play a more prominent part in it than has been the case in the recent past?

Others have covered the crucial issue of NATO and the uncertainties about its deterrent capacity as a result of some of the things that the new President of the United States said during his election campaign. My neglect of that issue merely shows, I think, what an extremely wide scope for debate today has offered us and how important it is to focus on all parts of it.

Multilateral Disarmament

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Monday 28th November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

The noble Lord makes some very good points. Among the actions that the UK has recently been taking is work with Norway on disarmament verification, as my noble friend Lord Trefgarne referred to. We initiated the P5 process in 2009 to bring together nuclear weapons states to build the trust and confidence that I referred to. We proposed a programme of work at the conference on disarmament held in Geneva in February this year with the aim of reinvigorating the conference’s work—in fact, that was eventually blocked but we made a good attempt at it—and we continue to press for the entry into force of a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty. So there is work that we are trying to push along.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, are the Government giving any thought to globalising and generalising some of the constraints in the agreement between Iran and the P5+1, thus building a basis on which that agreement could extend far longer than the 15 years it will currently last?

[Earl Howe]

I completely take the noble Lord’s point. It is early days to be thinking in those terms, although he is right to do so. It is encouraging that the November IAEA report to the board of governors confirmed that Iran remains compliant with the nuclear-related measures set out in the joint comprehensive plan of action. We welcome the findings of the DG’s report. We praised the IAEA for its progress and continued work on that very challenging task, but no doubt lessons and messages will emerge from that strand of work.

Counter-Daesh: Quarterly Update

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Tuesday 24th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, there is no doubt that Syria needs transition to a new Government able to meet the needs of the Syrian people as a whole. That is why our position on Assad is unchanged. That regime is responsible for the current crisis in Syria. The barbarity it has meted out—the barrel bombs, the chlorine, the siege tactics, the interception of medical supplies to those in need—is the main driver of the refugee crisis. We do not think that Assad can form any possible part of a future regime, and the transition has to take place by another means.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, will the Minister enlighten the House as to how many elections President Assad won without the will of the people?

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, I am sure the noble Lord is better informed than I am of the political history of Syria. There is no doubt that Assad does not now command the support he once clearly did.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Monday 23rd May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, as several noble Lords have said, this debate is taking place exactly one month before the 23 June vote on Britain’s membership of the EU. It is the most significant strategic choice that this country has faced for many decades. No one should delude themselves that it does not much matter which way the vote goes; it does. A decision to leave the EU would reverse all the tenets of British foreign policy over the past 70 years, adversely affecting relations not only with our closest European neighbours and partners but with the United States, NATO and leading members of the Commonwealth, while undermining our own capacity to play an effective and influential role in the major multilateral organisations to which we belong: the UN, the IMF and many others. So I have no hesitation about devoting my remarks to that aspect.

Every single sounding of opinion around the country comes up with a common concern, a complaint that individuals need to know more about the basic facts before they make up their minds how to vote. It is understandable that they do not have total confidence in all the facts provided by the two campaigns—all the more so when one of the leaders of the leave campaign is travelling around the country on a bus emblazoned with the figure for Britain’s contribution to the EU budget that is nearly twice the amount of our actual net contribution. That is before we come to nonsensical claims about teabags and bunches of bananas.

However, the Government, responding to requests made by Parliament, have in every case provided a large amount of factual material—to my count, six major studies on different aspects of our membership. The leave campaign’s sole response to these documents is to belittle them as dodgy dossiers, which they are not, or to say that Treasury forecasts are always wrong. These are members of the Government whose Treasury it is that has made the forecasts. It is a little odd to describe it as always wrong. That really will not do if we are to have a decent national debate on this. I fear that the fact that the former Mayor of London has now deserted history after his brush with the ghost of the Führer to futurology in today’s Daily Telegraph does not give me a lot of confidence that this debate is getting more serious.

A lot is said about what is called Project Fear, at least when the risks of leaving are raised by the remain campaign. Eurosceptics should know plenty about that, because they have been running a Project Fear of their own on pretty well everything the EU does for the past 40 years. But risk analysis must surely be part of any major policy decision of the kind the electorate is being asked to take. No business would think it responsible to take a leap in the dark without such an analysis. Of course, that has to include the risks attendant on remaining in the EU. The remain campaign has no reason to fear such an analysis and is not in a position of doing so.

Clearly there has to be—and here I do feel that some of the criticisms of the remain campaign have some force—a strong, positive side to the campaign to stay in the EU, as well as the arguments on the risks of leaving, fundamentally important as those are. Here are just a few of the positive sides with which I think all those in the remain campaign would agree. They are: competing with the common market in services—that is nearly 80% of our economy; creating a level playing field for the digital economy throughout the EU; building up an energy union and a capital markets union; switching the emphasis of the EU budget spending further towards research and innovation, at which we excel and which Europe needs; bringing freer trade negotiations with the US, Japan, India, Australia, New Zealand and Mercosur to a successful conclusion; strengthening the aspects of EU security policy that are complementary to NATO’s, and working to maximise co-operation between the two organisations; ensuring that EU countries lead in implementing the UN’s 2015 sustainable development goals and the Paris climate change commitments; working more effectively with our EU partners to combat serious organised crime, including in particular terrorism, cybercrime and human trafficking; and facing up together to the challenges from Daesh and from an assertive Russia. That, surely, is quite a list—quite a bit to be getting on with, apart from those unforeseen events, so many of which we are more likely to be able to deal with and cope with effectively in concert with the other Europeans than acting on our own.

All that will be on the table in June, and much else as well: for instance, whether the electorate’s decision then will strengthen or weaken our own union within these islands—a vote to leave carried on English votes against any or all of the votes of to remain in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland would, I believe, inevitably weaken our union; whether or not we will put the people of Gibraltar at risk by leaving them more exposed to Spanish unilateral action; whether or not we will undermine the Good Friday agreement in Ireland, and perhaps also the common travel area arrangements; whether or not we will increase intergenerational tensions within our own society if the older half of our population with a higher propensity to vote imposes an outcome on the younger half who will have to live a lot longer with its consequences. Well, that is plenty for one day. I just hope we get it right.