Queen’s Speech

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Wednesday 11th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer (LD)]

My Lords, the gracious Speech mentioned continuing work on the issue of Iran and nuclear weapons. That is an important but only small part of the nuclear weapons challenge. The gracious Speech was silent on the fact that all the work to go into the next Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, which will take place in May 2015, needs to take place this year. The NPT is an opportunity that comes up every five years for the world to take a step away from the abyss. We have heard a lot today about instability and conflagration; that has been painted very vividly in this Chamber. If noble Lords take into account that proliferation is a fact of life as well, they will see that we really need this NPT to succeed.

One of the inadvertent consequences of fixed-term Parliaments for the UK is that, as in 2010, the next conference will fall at election time. The preparations for the 2010 conference were very thorough. The UK went into it with a constructive and active stance, but then political attention was entirely diverted because of the election. There was then a different Government with somewhat different policies—our coalition Government—and there was a change of stance from the UK during the conference. It confused the other countries, which were trying to get somewhere with that 2010 conference. We have to solve that issue before the 2015 conference. I do not have the answers, but the Government and all the political parties here need to come to some consensus on our contribution to the NPT. UK government policy is now to rely more and more on the NPT as the forum where these nuclear issues will be solved.

I attended the UN open-ended working group that Ban Ki-moon called in Geneva. Our ambassador’s absence was a matter of a lot of speculation. People asked me why the UK did not attend. I asked some Parliamentary Questions when I came back and I was told that the UK Government think that the NPT Review Conference is the place for such discussions. I then asked some more questions about why we did not go to Norway or Mexico when those countries hosted two conferences on the humanitarian consequences of nuclear war. The reply was of course the same: that the forum for such things is the NPT Review Conference. The Government are putting all our eggs in the NPT basket. We owe it to the rest of the world to ensure we have a coherent stance that will carry over from one Government to the next. Earlier in the debate a noble Lord—I am sorry, I cannot remember who—called for more involvement from us in international treaties. This is an absolutely classic case for more involvement.

Earlier, I mentioned increasing proliferation, and I have taken some press from the past couple of weeks. On 4 June this year, there was this from New Delhi:

“India’s first indigenously built nuclear submarine quietly pushed out of its base for sea trials … India will join a club of just six nations with nuclear submarines carrying ballistic missiles”—

and a doctrinal challenge, as India has always separated the delivery mechanism from weapons. Who knows what will happen now there have been elections: that may not change, but it may. My second bit of press states:

“China has deployed three nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarines to a naval base in the South China Sea”.

That was reported on 28 May. These are just intentional actions. If noble Lords were to look at accident reporting, they would see that on 4 June the Daily Telegraph reported a “close to death” situation in a nuclear submarine when the air conditioning failed. We have increasing proliferation and the continual possibility of accidents: as more and more fissile material is used, it is more and more possible to have accidents.

Finally, I refer noble Lords to the European leadership group, some members of which come from this Parliament—indeed, some from your Lordships’ House. That group makes it quite plain just how important this NPT conference is in addressing these matters. Its statement, which came out very recently, underlines that the situation in Ukraine and many of the issues that noble Lords have raised today make nuclear non-use ever more pressing.