Tibet

Lord Steel of Aikwood Excerpts

Tuesday 26th February 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Warsi]

My Lords, we are concerned about the lack of meaningful dialogue to address the underlying grievances against a clearly worsening situation. We continue to encourage all parties to work for a resumption of substantive dialogue as a means to address the Tibetan concerns and to relieve tensions. Of course, we continue to make the case to China that any economic progress can be sustained only if there is social progress as well.

[Lord Steel of Aikwood]

Does the Minister, having read the report to which she has kindly referred, recognise that in the three years since, two important things have happened? One is that there was a change of leadership in China; the second is that the Dalai Lama has given up his political role as head of the Tibetan Government in exile. Therefore, would she and her colleagues try to encourage the Chinese authorities to enter into dialogue with the Dalai Lama as a religious leader in order to stop these immolations and try to improve relations between the Tibetan people and the Chinese?

[Baroness Warsi]

Many of us around the world recognise the Dalai Lama as a spiritual leader, but my noble friend will be aware of the position of the Chinese Government. That is not the way he is seen within the People’s Republic of China. The noble Lord will also be aware of the UK-China annual human rights dialogue, and we continue to raise these concerns at that point.

Israel: Arab Citizens

Lord Steel of Aikwood Excerpts

Thursday 13th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Steel of Aikwood]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Warner, and I want to pick up on his last point at the end of my speech. However, I begin by thanking the right reverend Prelate for introducing this debate so comprehensively. I am often under attack by some of my Palestinian friends for being a paid-up member of the Liberal Democrat Friends of Israel. I want to make it clear to them and to the House that there is a clear distinction between being a friend of Israel, which I am, and a friend of the present Government of Israel, which I am certainly not. That is an important distinction which we ought to keep in mind throughout the debate.

My experience of the area goes back to when I was a very young MP. In 1967 I happened to be with a parliamentary delegation to the General Assembly of the United Nations. I remember with pleasure the spirit of optimism in the British delegation. Lord Caradon was the British representative and a key figure in the formulation of UN Resolution 242, which was supposed to be the basis for peace in that part of the world. However, it is a very sad fact that the optimistic mood of 45 years ago has disappeared.

After I became the leader of the Liberal Party, I took a delegation around the Middle East to see for myself what the situation was on the ground. We went to Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt and were received by the heads of government of all those countries. Four of us wrote a report while sitting in the garden of the embassy in Cairo. The report bears examination today because it was a prelude to the two-state solution. The only member of that group who is still with us is the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool. But on that visit there was one head of government who did not meet us, and that was the Prime Minister of Israel. Why was that? It was because we had talked to Yasser Arafat in Damascus. Our colleague, the noble Lord, Lord Wright of Richmond, was the young ambassador in Syria at the time, and in those days no British Minister would talk to a member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation because it was a terrorist organisation. Officials could talk to its representatives, but I was the first party leader to talk to Yasser Arafat, whom I met over many years. I had great regard for his capacity as the leader of the PLO, but as the head of the administration, he was an absolute disaster—although that is another story. But not talking to the PLO was simply daft. Today we have come full circle because we do not talk to representatives of Hamas. Why is that? It is even worse now because, although like Arafat at that time, Hamas does not recognise Israel, it has actually been elected in Gaza. We do not like it, but Hamas is there. I do not see any point in continuing a policy of failing to speak to its representatives.

Against that background, it is not surprising that we have seen the appalling launching of rockets against the southern part of Israel, where I have also been. I feel great sympathy for what the population has had to endure. But there is no substitute for talking to people with whom you disagree. The latest threat from the Netanyahu Government to create 3,000 new settlement residences on the West Bank has sounded for the first time a long overdue note of alarm from our own Foreign Office. As described, these settlements would isolate Ramallah and Bethlehem from East Jerusalem and from each other, and would make a complete mockery of any possibility of the two-state solution. That should be deeply alarming not just to this House and the Foreign Office, but, as the noble Lord, Lord Warner, has just said, it ought to be of deep concern to the United States, a keen supporter of Israel, as well.

The right reverend Prelate gave us many statistics to illustrate the discrimination between Jewish and Arab citizens in Israel. These statistics are agonisingly familiar to those of us who have followed events in South Africa over many years. Because of my background as a boy in Africa, I was always a keen member of the Anti-Apartheid Movement. During my time as president of that movement I visited South Africa a great deal. One thing that strikes me is the comparison between what is happening to the Arab citizens of Israel today and what happened to the non-white citizens of South Africa then. For example, the resettlement of some Arab citizens from Jerusalem to the West Bank is reminiscent of the Group Areas Act of the apartheid regime. The separate roads in the West Bank used by Israelis and Palestinians to travel are a reminder of the public transport arrangements in apartheid South Africa. What I remember now but which did not strike me at the time concerns the work I did for the AAM with people in South Africa and over here. When one looks at the names of friends of mine from that time—Helen Suzman and Zach de Beer, and others who were not Liberals but perhaps members of the South African Communist Party such as Ruth First, Joe Slovo, Hilda Bernstein, Helen Josephs, Albie Sachs and Ronnie Kasrils—the extraordinary thing was that the leadership of the white resistance to apartheid came from the Jewish community. Why was that? It was because in the decades after the Holocaust there was a deep-seated revulsion against any idea of racial superiority. That is what the right reverend Prelate reminded us of in his remarks. The founding charter of Israel is quite clear on the issue and the present Government have departed very far from it.

I am not naive enough to think that if there was a settlement between Israel and Palestine, international terrorism would disappear, but there is no doubt in my mind that our failure to deal properly and independently with this dispute is breeding Islamic extremism and terrorism around the world. I would therefore argue that it is in our own interests to adopt a far more equable policy.

I want to end on an optimistic note. A couple of weeks ago some of us attended a meeting upstairs with a group of Israeli businessmen who have formed the Israeli Peace Initiative to mirror the Arab Peace Initiative. That is a hopeful sign. They are not politicians but businessmen in Israel who are fed up with the intransigence of their own politicians and who are promoting peace with the Arab world. It is in that context that the end of discrimination against Arab citizens can become a real possibility. I shall finish by making the same point as that made by the noble Lord, Lord Warner. I believe that as long as Israel consistently flouts international law, it is quite wrong that we in Europe should maintain a beneficial trade association with a country that is behaving in this way. We have got leverage and it is time that we used it.

Ugandan Asians

Lord Steel of Aikwood Excerpts

Thursday 6th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Steel of Aikwood]

I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Popat, on introducing this debate today and warmly thank him. I have to begin with an apology, because when I put my name down, I thought the debate was going to start at 2 pm and I have to attend an engagement in my former constituency this evening over snow-covered roads. I hope the Front Benches will acquit me of discourtesy for not being here at the wind-up and transgressing the Companion in that way.

I did not want to withdraw my name because of my own personal background in this matter. My father was a minister of the Church of Scotland, ministering for eight years to the Scots population in Kenya and Uganda officially, and Tanganyika unofficially. As a boy, I drove with him on his preaching tours during the school holidays throughout those three territories. I have used every excuse and opportunity to go back and visit those places whenever I can, and I will be again during the February Recess.

The problem for the Asians in east Africa started not in Uganda but in Kenya, with the Africanisation programme of the Kenyatta Government. At that point, the Asian population of Kenya was less than 2% of the whole. They had come there from 1895 onwards to build the railway and develop a considerable role in trading in the colony. Sadly, in 1967-68, when they started to come to Britain because of the Africanisation programme, there was a great controversy in this country about what should be done about it—against the wishes of people like Iain Macleod and Hugh Fraser, who had been the Ministers responsible at the time of independence of these territories. They had given the Asian—in fact, the whole expatriate—population two years in which to opt either for local citizenship or to retain British citizenship. Many had retained British citizenship, but the Government of the day decided to introduce the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968, which withdrew that fundamental right of entry into this country. It was something to which we in the Liberal Party at that time were very much opposed, and I was very proud of my party that we divided the House of Commons against the Second Reading of that Bill. We only had 10 Members at that time, but we attracted 62 others from the major parties into the Lobby in protest against that decision. Interestingly enough, I looked up what the vote was in this Chamber, and it was much closer. With the influence of the Bishops and other sensible people, the vote in favour of the Bill was carried narrowly by 109 votes to 85, which shows again how this Chamber was perhaps rather more principled than that of the Commons.

Anyway, I wrote a book about it at the time and that much neglected work I discovered in the Library here cost £2 at the time. I could not find my own copy, so I went on to Amazon and I found that I could get one for £44. I wish that everything I have done had risen at the same rate. That is slightly irrelevant, because the impact of that Act clearly had to be withdrawn when Idi Amin’s Government in Uganda started to expel the British population by force. In 1971, I went on a visit to Kampala to meet a member of Idi Amin’s Government who had been at university with me in Edinburgh; later I had to flee the country. The British high commission was not very happy to have a Member of Parliament on its hands, and insisted that I be driven back to Entebbe Airport for 21 miles—to which the noble Lord, Lord Popat, referred—in the daylight, getting there at 6 pm, when the plane from Nairobi was coming through at midnight. For six hours, I sat in the airport, accompanied by the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, who at that time was my assistant. We watched the exodus of the Asians: we watched their baggage being looted and dumped on the tarmac; we watched their jewellery and watches being taken off them. I wrote at the time:

“I have never witnessed such scenes of unbridled abusive power and virtual anarchy”.

It was a terrible episode.

I will be brief because I am not able to stay. Winston Churchill visited the colonies in 1908; he was Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies at the time. He wrote:

“It is the Indian trader who, penetrating and maintaining himself in all sorts of places to which no white man would go, or in which no white man could earn a living, has more than anyone else developed the early beginnings of trade and opened up the first slender means of communication. It was by Indian labour that the one vital railway on which everything else depends was constructed. It is the Indian banker who supplies perhaps the largest part of the capital yet available for business and enterprise, and to whom the white settlers have not hesitated to recur for financial aid”.

That was written in 1908 and it was that spirit of enterprise and adventure that these people brought so commendably to this country, and for which we thank them.

Lockerbie

Lord Steel of Aikwood Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

Yes, it is desirable and yes, indeed, it was the most monstrous crime. We are seeking confirmation from the Libyan Government regarding the reported detention of Abdullah al-Senussi. We have been clear that no effort should be spared in bringing him to justice. Al-Senussi’s arrest, if confirmed, would offer an opportunity to uncover the truth behind some of the former regime’s dreadful crimes. As I just said, the Government will continue to support the Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary’s investigation into the bombing. We would want any new evidence to be made available to it and indeed to the Lord Advocate. I am confident that the new Libyan Government will act in accordance with Chairman Jalil’s commitment to co-operate with the UK on this and other investigations, and bring closure to the concerns and misery of the families of the victims.

[Lord Steel of Aikwood]

My Lords, would my noble friend agree that it would also shed light on this matter if the report of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission were published in full, so far as is possible?

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

Of course, there has been the report of Sir Gus O’Donnell. It has been placed in the Library and it was fully discussed when it was produced some weeks ago. Further light needs to be shed on this and I am confident that, with the full assistance of the new Libyan Government, we will get the papers and the evidence to show exactly what was said and by whom.

Côte d’Ivoire

Lord Steel of Aikwood Excerpts

Wednesday 16th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

The noble Baroness is entirely right. What is happening in Côte d’Ivoire raises broad concerns that affect the global community, not just this country. I have particularly in mind the horrific murder of several women who only the other day were shot down in cold blood in Abidjan. I have been asked how we support these matters. We do it chiefly through the UN and the European Union. Our own Department for International Development is monitoring the situation and provides direct help, particularly to refugees, to whom the noble Baroness specifically referred. So, frankly, our support is not mainly bilateral but through international institutions and the EU, working in support of France which tends to take the lead in these matters. However, the situation is a worry for all those concerned with civil rights and the promotion of peace and stability in Africa. What is happening at the moment is extremely worrying.

[Lord Steel of Aikwood]

I hope my noble friend understands that I am not advocating that we send a gunboat, given that we have very few gunboats left to send. However, will he consider the successful operation in Sierra Leone a few years ago? Given the support that, importantly, the African Union has given to Mr Ouattara’s successful election, what practical help can the Government offer to try to get rid of the deposed president?

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

When it comes to detailed help, particularly if force is involved, ECOWAS is the organisation that is bound to take the lead. In principle we support the proposals made by ECOWAS, but we think that the authority of the United Nations is needed before they are taken forward. If there is to be that kind of pressure backing up the views of the African Union High Level Panel, of which I am afraid Mr Gbagbo took not the slightest notice, any such firm intervention should be made through the ECOWAS system.

European Council and North Africa

Lord Steel of Aikwood Excerpts

Monday 7th February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

I imagine the noble Lord is talking about Mr Frank Wisner. In the interests of diplomacy, I should be careful to avoid any specific notes except to say, as my right honourable friend the Prime Minister did in another place, that the special envoy’s views on the internal matters of Egypt and the position of the President seemed to deviate slightly from those of the American Secretary of State. I think I can say no more than that on that particular issue.

[Lord Steel of Aikwood]

My Lords, I am sure my noble friend will understand that the trauma and horror of the downing of the Pan Am flight was felt particularly strongly across the south of Scotland, where we all felt sympathy with the people in Lockerbie. For that reason, I will confine my questions to that issue.

He will recall, as he said a moment ago, that the previous Government told the public and the House of Commons that this was entirely a matter for the Scottish Government and that they were not putting pressure on them. That is true. Would he agree that Sir Gus O’Donnell has shown, as he quoted a moment ago, that policy was developed whereby the UK Government were doing everything short of telling the Scottish Government what they had to do to secure Mr Megrahi’s release and that we have to conclude that the Government were telling the truth but not the whole truth?

The other part, not mentioned in the prime ministerial Statement which the Minister repeated just now, is that Sir Gus O’Donnell’s report also tells us that the Scottish Government were raising other policy issues with the UK Government at the same time as dealing with that difficult and grubby issue. That had not come out before, either. Sir Gus’s report appears to cast some doubt on not the veracity—because lies were not told—but the straightforwardness of both the UK Government and Scottish Government at the time. In the words of the final sentence of a Scotsman leader this morning, “Something is being concealed”.

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

I do not want to move further than the words expressed by Sir Gus O’Donnell and the conclusions drawn by my right honourable friend the Prime Minister. My right honourable friend said that the report indicates that while there is—to repeat the words of my noble friend—no doubt at all about the veracity of the statements made by senior members of the previous Government, it is clear that there was more to tell and that some pieces of the total picture were lacking. That is where my right honourable friend and the Government stand on this matter. It must be for all those who were involved at the time to establish what they believed to be the position. Indeed, some of these remarks were made with force and feeling by the people who were directly concerned when the matter was discussed in the other place earlier this afternoon. I am not going to go further than that.

Tunisia

Lord Steel of Aikwood Excerpts

Monday 17th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Steel of Aikwood]

My Lords, I was about to question my noble friend on exactly that last point and ask whether he would welcome the announcement this afternoon of the formation of the interim Government. Under the Speaker, a new Prime Minister and members of the so-called opposition parties, plus civil society, there is at least a chance that order is being restored rather more quickly than we had expected. I am not surprised that he said in the Statement that a lot of members of the British community said they did not wish to return, because Hammamet, the main tourist area, has been largely peaceful. I was there recently, and should declare an interest as a member of the board of a company with interests there. Understandably, people want to complete their holidays. This may be tempting him too far, but does my noble friend agree that out of this tragedy there is a lesson to be learnt throughout the rest of the continent of Africa, and indeed the Middle East, that Governments who engage in corruption and lining their own pockets have a limited life shelf, and that others should be aware of what has happened in Tunisia and perhaps learn the lesson from it?

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

My noble friend offers some very wise and comprehensive comments on the overall situation. This is a lesson. We live in a much more transparent and e-enabled age, with television programmes in their multiple dozens, such as Al-Jazeera and others, fantastic media influence, fantastic rapid communication through the internet, e-mails or the varieties of web operation that we are beginning to know so well, and of course the mobile telephone. All these influence the transmission of both truth and rumour into situations such as the one in Tunis, which can become very volatile very quickly. The lessons should not be lost on others who seek to rule by failing to be transparent and failing to transmit all the knowledge and accountability that they should to their citizens. My noble friend has absolutely hit the nail on the head on that matter. He was kind enough to recognise the problem that the new Government have been formed since my honourable friend spoke in the other place. Now that they have been formed, we are very anxious to see that they go forward in a really constructive and balanced way, and we will do everything, through our embassy, our contacts and our colleagues in the European Union, to encourage that process.

British Indian Ocean Territory

Lord Steel of Aikwood Excerpts

Tuesday 14th December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

The view of the Foreign Office is embodied in the fact that we are involved in the case at the European Court of Human Rights, and we are really not in a position to comment further except to say that we stand by the arguments and the justifications that lead us to remain in that position in the legal process. As I said, my right honourable friend has said in another place that we continue to examine this in detail and to look at the policy, but I cannot offer the noble Lord anything other than to say that the case is before the European Court of Human Rights, that the arguments are on the table there and that this matter has to be resolved there.

[Lord Steel of Aikwood]

As another member of that non-influential parliamentary group, I ask the Minister whether he is not concerned that it appears that Foreign Office officials have managed to irritate both the Mauritian Government and the United States Government by using the marine protection agency as a cover for denying the Chagossians the right to return.

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

I do not know where my noble friend gets this concept of a cover from, except presumably from WikiLeaks. There is no question of a cover; they are completely separate issues. However, when it comes to handling them, we are concerned because we have inherited a situation in which there was certainly a lot of misunderstanding and even ill feeling between us and the Mauritian Government. We are very anxious to talk to the Mauritians again and to try to handle this matter better than it has been handled in the past.

Western Sahara

Lord Steel of Aikwood Excerpts

Thursday 25th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

I am sure that the noble Lord’s vast diplomatic experience can be applied on a whole range of issues in all parties and all sides of the House, as well as in the political establishment generally. I am very grateful to him for explaining to me more clearly an area that I did know about, but with which he is more familiar than I am. When these phrases come up, I always want to establish exactly what they involve. In this case, the paper contains a very firm and useful series of suggestions about how we take the human rights monitoring mechanism forward, and I believe that it will form a basis for a more constructive approach than we have had generally in the past on this whole unhappy issue.

[Lord Steel of Aikwood]

Does my noble friend agree that this whole saga does not reflect very well on the United Nations organisation? It must be more than 15 years since I visited the temporary refugee camps in Algeria. Is there any news from the last visit that Mr Ross made to the region and the talks that went on in New York between the Polisario Front and the Moroccan Government earlier this month?

Burma

Lord Steel of Aikwood Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

We all share the noble Lord’s absolutely correct assessment of our sentiments. We salute this very brave woman and want the world that he described to come about, with her at the centre of it. The situation is delicate in that how investigations into these sham elections can be made is still obviously in the minds of Aung San Suu Kyi and her party. I believe that she has authorised her party to look at irregularities, but we must be guided by her approach as she is in the midst of it while we are on the sidelines.

As to the other countries that have somewhat ambiguous relations with Burma and who have not been as strongly critical as we would like against this unpleasant regime—India is the obvious example—we are in discussions with them. I am not sure that we will make much progress with Beijing which seemed to welcome the elections and thought they were okay, so there is not much progress there. Other countries are united in recognising that this was not a serious election. It was rigged and there was all sorts of evidence of irregularities. The day will come, if we can keep up this pressure, when Burma can again join the comity of nations and be a prosperous, free and open place.

[Lord Steel of Aikwood]

My Lords, in the days before her telephone was cut off I used to be able to speak to Aung San Suu Kyi on the phone but that has not been possible for the past 10 years. Does the Minister agree that we should couple tributes to her with tributes to her late husband, Michael Aris, because when he was dying of cancer they refused him a visa to visit her, in the hope that she would leave and not come back? They were a remarkable couple, dedicating their lives to the furtherance of democracy. Will he press on regarding the question of the release of the other 2,000 political prisoners?

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

Most definitely yes to all those observations. We salute not only this remarkable lady and her husband, but the way in which she now comments on what must have been the appalling experience of her imprisonment over the years. As she rightly says in a remarkable interview in the Times today, revolution takes place in the mind, and her mind is a wonderful mind to be playing on this situation.