Afghanistan
Lord Harries of Pentregarth Excerpts(7 months ago)
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Lord Coaker (Lab)
We are trying to contact anybody on the list, whether they are in Afghanistan or Pakistan, who has been designated eligible for the scheme, to ensure that they understand that we will honour the commitment we have made to them. Whether they are in Pakistan or in any other country, we will honour the commitment we have made to them and try to ensure they get passage here. The noble Baroness will understand why I will not say any more than that, as it would compromise people we are trying to bring here.
Lord Harries of Pentregarth (CB)
My Lords, I say, if I might, how encouraging it is that the Government are working so closely with the Opposition on this issue. It helps increase respect for and trust in the British political system. It was absolutely right that there should have been a super-injunction. My question is related to the effect of lifting the super-injunction at this stage. The Rimmer report says that there will be no added risk and a human judgment has to be made about whether or not that is the case. Undoubtably, the huge amount of publicity about registering the super-injunction is going to have an effect. Will anybody in the MoD be looking at the lifting of the super-injunction to see what kind of result there has been and whether there has been a significant effect which has increased the risk of vulnerable people?
Lord Coaker (Lab)
We will keep everything under review and look to see what the consequences of the decision we have made are. Following on from what the noble Baroness said about women in Pakistan, our initial focus is to try to ensure that, for everybody who is eligible for the various schemes, we honour the commitment that we made to them. There are still hundreds of people; the number of people still to be relocated under the Afghan response route, which is the scheme that was not publicised, is 600. We are trying to ensure that we know where they are and to bring them here, with approximately 2,700 family members. That, along with our other commitments, is our first priority: to try to ensure that we bring to the UK those we have made a commitment to.
Defence Policy: Deterrence
Lord Harries of Pentregarth Excerpts(1 year, 3 months ago)
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Lord Harries of Pentregarth (CB)
My Lords, my interest in this area arises from my early academic research on the principles of discrimination and proportion in the just war tradition and their applicability in a nuclear age. This interest was further intensified in my time as dean of King’s College London during the 1980s, when I had the privilege of being a member of a number of think tanks reflecting on the nature of nuclear deterrence, many of them under the influence of the much-missed Sir Michael Quinlan, the architect of British defence policy in its strategic and ethical aspects.
I continue to support a policy of deterrence which contains a nuclear component, but I do so with moral fear and spiritual trembling. It is a morally awesome policy to support. It can be supported only in the belief that it is in principle fundamentally stable, not because human beings are any better than they were—far from it—but because, for the first time in human history, it could not conceivably be in the interest of any power to go to war with another which possessed nuclear weapons. In the words of President Reagan, a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.
I was never a supporter of CND, but it performed an important role in reminding the world of the horrific nature of these weapons. I was appalled a few years ago when there was a period of tension between India and Pakistan to listen to some of the generals involved talking about using nuclear weapons as though they were like any other weapons. They are not like other weapons, and we must never forget that.
We must also not forget that the moral principles which apply to the use of all armed force are equally applicable in a nuclear age: I mean the principles of discrimination and proportion. There are very distinguished ethicists who believe that even the threatened use of nuclear weapons would violate these principles, but when I was most involved, British defence policy was built on the conviction that this was not inevitably the case. I trust that this is so. In that connection, I want to identify with the question raised by the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, about graduated deterrence and the ladder of escalation, because that is fundamental to not only British deterrence policy but the possibility of maintaining the use of weapons which are discriminate and proportionate. It is a vital question to which I hope the Minister will be able to give a satisfactory response.
There is an old saying about fighting a present war with the outlook of a previous one. I believe that the major threat at the moment is not the nuclear weapons of another state but their capacity for cyberwarfare. Nuclear weapons are no deterrent to another country that has the capacity to render our whole command and control system inoperative. Although I continue to support our deterrence posture, with its nuclear component, my main concern is in relation to our ability to protect our own command and control structure and our capacity to deter other countries from disrupting it. I hope that the Government will be able to give some reassurance on that.