Lords Sitting of 23 April 1980

Preamble
The House met at half-past two of the clock: The LORD CHANCELLOR On the Woolsack.
Prayers—Read by the Lord Bishop of Carlisle.

URANIUM IMPORTS FROM NAMIBIA
Lord BROCKWAY: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether Britain has been importing uranium from Namibia for more than 10 years in contravention of United Nations decisions.
Lord TREFGARNE: My Lords, imports of uranium from Namibia began only recently. The contract between Rossing Uranium Limited and British Nuclear Fuels Limited, approved by previous Governments, conflicts with none of our international obligations. United Nations decisions on the subject are not binding in international law.
Lord BROCKWAY: My Lords, in two respects is not this importation of uranium from the RTZ Company at Rossing illegal? First, is it not the case that there is a partnership with the South African Government which has been declared illegal and an action against international law? Secondly, did not the United Nations General Assembly, on 13th December 1974, adopt a decree for the protection of the natural resources of Namibia, which declared that no natural resources may be removed from the territory without the consent and permission of the Council of Namibia set up in 1966 to replace South Africa administratively?
Lord TREFGARNE: My Lords, I am sorry to say that the noble Lord is mistaken on almost every count. The trade is not illegal. There is no international obligation on us to prevent trade of this kind with Namibia. As for the so-called
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decree, that, too, is not binding. We do not recognise the Council of Namibia's claim to be the administering authority of Namibia or to take decisions binding on the international community, as we do not accept that the United Nations General Assembly acted within its competence under the UN Charter in setting up the council. May I add that mandatory sanctions, such as I think the noble Lord thinks exist, can in fact only be imposed by the Security Council after a finding under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter that there exists a threat to international peace. In this case no such finding has been made.
Lord BROCKWAY: My Lords, I shall not retort by saying that the Minister is wrong in every respect. However, is it not the case that the Hague Tribunal declared the South African Administration illegal and that partnership with it—even paying taxes to it—should therefore be considered illegal? Secondly, despite what the noble Lord has said, has not the Assembly of the United Nations but also the Security Council endorsed the decree to which I have already referred?
Lord TREFGARNE: My Lords, the noble Lord started talking about taxes. The Question on the Order Paper is to do with the trade in uranium. The Security Council resolutions in this matter are only mandatory when they are coupled with a finding under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter.
Lord HARMAR-NICHOLLS: My Lords, could my noble friend proffer to the House any explanation as to why any Member of this House would want to denigrate this country's adherence to legal procedure in international affairs—as did the noble Lord opposite—on such flimsy grounds? Can he give any explanation for wanting to do such a thing?
Lord TREFGARNE: My Lords, I hardly think that that question is directed to me.
Lord HALE: My Lords, did I understand the noble Lord to say that decisions of the United Nations were regarded by Her Majesty's Government as not binding upon them in this connection? Does that not raise a very complex and important question as to the efficacy of international law which has always been regarded as a

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matter of some doubt by many Governments? Is this not a matter that must be cleared up, whether it concerns Namibia or the international relations of Governments with the United Nations? Was any protest made to the United Nations at the time it made this decision to the effect that it was acting ultra vires?
Lord TREFGARNE: My Lords, there is no question of any contravention of international law in this matter. The position is quite clear. The resolutions which we are talking about are not binding upon members of the United Nations.
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, is it not a fact that for many years—indeed, since the South African Republic took on itself the occupation and, therefore, the administration of former South West Africa—this country, like other countries, has refused to recognise that situation? Nevertheless, as the noble Lord says, is it not also a fact that the mandatory content of the United Nations response to this situation is as he has said? The third question that I should like to put to the noble Lord, and indeed to the House, is as follows: Do not these exchanges reinforce the argument for pressing ahead with every possible speed to secure for Namibia an orderly and democratic procedure into independence on the analogy of what we have achieved in Rhodesia?
Lord TREFGARNE: My Lords, as regards the last point the noble Lord is quite right. We are doing what we can to push forward with the negotiations for a settlement in Namibia. As regards the present position, to which the noble Lord referred at the beginning of his remarks, it is true that we regard South Africa's presence in Namibia as unlawful, but we are working towards a South African withdrawal and, as I have said, Namibian independence.

CHEMICAL WARFARE
The Earl of KIMBERLEY: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they can confirm reports that
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the Russians have recently used chemical warfare near Jellalabad in Afghanistan.
Lord TREFGARNE: My Lords, the Government cannot either confirm or deny these reports.
The Earl of KIMBERLEY: My Lords, I thank my noble friend for that Answer, which I rather expected. Will it be possible for him to give an assurance to your Lordships that, if at some time in the near future proof is obtained, the people of this country will be informed of this fact so that certain elements may realise that there is a war going on in Afghanistan?
Lord TREFGARNE: My Lords, hesitate to give an assurance to inform your Lordships or my noble friend of something like that, because I foresee difficulties in actually producing the proof to which my noble friend referred. However, I shall bear what he says in mind.
Lord GISBOROUGH: My Lords, in view of the fact that paragraph 707 of the Statement on the Defence Estimates says:
"Furthermore Soviet forces could make intensive use of electronic warfare and have large stocks of chemical munitions"—
and there is another reference further back—is it not time that we not only produced our own defence against chemical warfare, but that we also produced our own quantity of this noxious weapon as a deterrent?
Lord TREFGARNE: My Lords, that matter was referred to recently by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Defence, and I should not want to go further than he did then.

THE DEFENCE ESTIMATES: DEBATE
2.45 p.m.
Earl CATHCART: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask the Leader of the House whether he would agree that any debate on the Statement on the Defence

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Estimates which might be held in this House should be divided into two separate debates on the same day, each part dealing with an important aspect of defence policy.
The MINISTER of STATE, MINISTRY of AGRICULTURE, FISHERIES and FOOD (Earl Ferrers): My Lords, the House has in the past welcomed the opportunity of a general debate on the annual Defence Estimates as a whole. I am not sure that it would be right to alter what has become a well-established procedure unless there is agreement from all quarters of the House. While I recognise the arguments behind my noble friend's Question, the creation of two debates where one has previously sufficed would entail more speeches: your Lordships might not consider that to be a happy prospect. The second of the two debates would inevitably begin at a late hour. The House has had, and will continue to have, the opportunity to discuss the more specialised aspects of defence policy on separate occasions. For these reasons, I think that one general debate would be for the greater convenience of the House as a whole.
Earl CATHCART: My Lords, I thank my noble friend the acting Leader of the House for his reply. Will he not agree that the most effective debates in your Lordships' House are those that deal with a particular aspect, rather than those debates which try to deal with the whole wide range of a particular subject, such as defence, in just a few hours?
Earl FERRERS: My Lords, I see the force of that argument, but, of course, inevitably the Defence Estimates themselves cover a whole wide range of subjects, and I do not think that it is very easy to restrict such a wide range to a relatively narrow debate, particularly if that will be a question of having two debates. I appreciate the problem of my noble friend, but I do not think that there is any reasonable way of getting round it.
Lord SHINWELL: My Lords, will the acting Leader of the House give this matter rather more detailed consideration? Is he aware that when discussing defence matters—and in particular the Defence
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Estimates—we in your Lordships' House have been inclined to roam all over the ground and ignore the specific item: namely, the strategy of defence, which, after all, is the most important consideration? Is the noble Lord also aware that in another place they not only discuss the Defence Estimates in general terms, but also the Army, the Navy and the Air Force? I would not go as far as wanting us to to that. Will the noble Lord not give the matter further consideration in order to widen the range of our debates, so that we can address ourselves specifically to important items, which are crowded out when we deal with the general subject of defence?
Earl FERRERS: My Lords, I was not quite clear what the noble Lord, Lord Shinwell, meant when he said that he wished to widen the range of debates; I thought what he was saying was that he wished to narrow the range of debates. The noble Lord said that people roam rather wide; I think that that requires a discipline which noble Lords who take part in debates of this nature must place upon themselves. The noble Lord also said that in another place they have debates on separate subjects. Of course, under the Unstarred Question procedure we have the ability to have debates on specific subjects. I would simply draw the noble Lord's attention to the fact that on 5th March the House had the opportunity of a whole day's debate on home and civil defence; we also have the annual Army, Air Force and Naval Discipline (Continuation) Order, which gives the House an opportunity to discuss matters obtaining to that.
Lord ALPORT: My Lords, in view of the very great importance of this subject at the present time, and the very large resources of experience which are available within this House, would it not be appropriate for us to have two days for this debate when the time comes?
Earl FERRERS: My Lords, that is a matter which could certainly be discussed through the usual channels, but at the moment I cannot see the likelihood of a two-day debate being particularly helpful, unless more than the normal number of speakers wish to take part. Were that to be the case, we should certainly consider it.
Lord SHINWELL: My Lords, surely the noble Earl the acting Leader of the House will agree—setting aside the point that I ventured to put to him that in view of the existing international situation, and the apprehensions of many people in your Lordships' House and elsewhere, defence subjects—particularly the strategic elements involved—deserve more than a one-day debate. Surely we can find time to give that consideration. After all, the conclusions of some debates which take place in your Lordships' House are never implemented. At least let us do something about defence.
Earl FERRERS: My Lords, I would not wish to underestimate the importance of the subject of defence. Indeed, if there is the requirement to spend more than one day on defence, then we would certainly consider this. I would only put this to the noble Lord. As I understand my noble friend's Question, he wanted to concentrate people's minds on various aspects of defence. If we accepted Lord Shinwell's suggestion by having a two-day debate on defence, I fancy that that would merely diffuse the situation.
Lord INGLEWOOD: My Lords, my noble friend spoke of Unstarred Questions as occasions when noble Lords might wish to raise a debate on a special question. Would he not agree that the procedure for Unstarred Questions means that the Minister speaks at the end? No noble Lord has a chance of questioning the Minister on anything he says about Government policy and he in fact has a safe escape route at the end of the Unstarred Question debate; and that is not the point of a defence debate.
Earl FERRERS: My Lords, it depends of course on what my noble friend wants as a result of a debate. If he wishes to air his views, then an Unstarred Question on a particular subject is an excellent way of airing particular views. I would remind him that the particular subject under discussion is the question of the Defence Estimates. In other words, it is the Government producing an opportunity for people to discuss a Government document as a whole. I should have thought that it is very difficult to separate the contemplation of the document as a whole into small different aspects.
Lord GLADWYN: My Lords, nevertheless, in the event of the Government agreeing that there should be a two-day debate, would it not be possible to say that on the first day, as indeed we say on the Queen's Speech, that the debate would be largely concentrated on matters of home defence, and the second on strategical matters connected with the operation of NATO?
Earl FERRERS: My Lords, that of course would be perfectly possible, but I would remind the noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, that the only purpose of a two-day debate is if there are so many speakers that you cannot accommodate them all on one day. The point I would draw to your Lordships' attention is that if you separate the debate into two different parts, on one day, you will inevitably have the problem of Peers who say they want to speak early because they have to leave early, and they will then be introducing into the first part of the debate matters which would necessarily happen in the second part. You would then have the problem of Peers who wish to make maiden speeches, when the convention is that they will come early in the debate, and they would have to make a speech possibly on a subject which would more properly be kept to the latter part of the debate. There are difficulties here. I shall certainly consider the views of the House. If the noble Lord, Lord Shinwell, asks, Will I consider it again?—of course I will. But I would merely remind him that the problems are not quite as easy as might appear when the Question was put down.
Lord PEART: My Lords, may I say that noble Lords should remember that today there are two debates on defence. All I am saying is that I broadly support what the Lord Privy Seal—the acting Leader—says.
Earl FERRERS: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Peart, (a) for agreeing with me, and (b) for elevating me to the level of Lord Privy Seal, which was the first I knew about it!
Lord DAVIES of LEEK: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that any intelligent Member of the House who has an Unstarred Question, if he does the courteous thing of letting the Minister who is to reply

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know the general line of his questioning in the debate, will get an excellent answer—even from that side of the House?
Earl FERRERS: My Lords, I am still wondering from Lord Davies of Leek's question who are those who are not the intelligent Members of your Lordships' House.
Lord HANKEY: My Lords, before we leave the subject, may I make a constructive suggestion with a view to avoiding—
Several noble Lords: No!
Earl FERRERS: My Lords, of course the noble Lord may, provided that it is in the form of a question.
Lord HANKEY: My Lords, I am asking a question. With a view to avoiding either diffuseness or superficiality, both of which dangers we have to avoid, would it not be possible to put down one or two amendments to the Motion on which the defence debate takes place, and for those amendments to concentrate the discussion at two points in the afternoon so that we would deal with them in detail?
Earl FERRERS: My Lords, of course that is certainly a possibility. I am bound to say that the idea of it simply horrifies me, because I can imagine no better way of muddling the whole debate than by having about three amendments to one simple question.

TENANCIES: LEGAL PROTECTION
2.55 p.m.
Lord JANNER: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they will consider introducing measures on a similar basis to the Leasehold Reform Act to prevent those who have held tenancies in their homes for a large number of years from having to vacate them because of the exorbitant prices they are asked to pay for long leaseholds or freeholds.
The PARLIAMENTARY UNDERSECRETARY of STATE, DEPARTMENT of THE ENVIRONMENT (Lord Bellwin): My Lords, as I have responded to similar Questions from the noble Lord in the past, the Answer again has to be, No.
Lord JANNER: My Lords, would the noble Lord reconsider the position? Is he aware that the present situation is even worse than that which prevailed when the Leasehold Reform Act had to be passed? Is he aware that tenants now are not even being taken into consultation by landlords who hold the freehold when outside repairs need to be made? Will he see to it that he reconsiders the position from this point of view: the way things are going at present, thousands of people are being deprived of their homes, and if this continues you will have whole districts being deprived of their homes in the same way as when the leasehold system came to that particular pass which was bound to result in legislation being taken, the Leasehold Reform Act, to protect the tenants.
Lord BELLWIN: My Lords, so far as requirements under the various tenancy Acts not being adhered to, if the noble Lord has any specific instances I shall be glad to look at them. As to the second part of his question, as to whether I am aware that whole districts are in danger of being taken over in the way that he suggests, I am not sure that that is something that I am aware of, most of all to that extent. I do not know of that. I know of the concern that exists, and it is a matter that the Government are thinking about, but it would be quite wrong of me to try to imply anything further than that at this moment in time. I can only say again with some regret that I fear that there is not more that I can say to the noble Lord to help him in this matter, which he raises regularly and which he is probably quite right so to do.
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, may I ask the noble Lord whether he is aware that the original intentions of the Leasehold Enfranchisement Act were very drastically altered during the short Parliament of 1974 by the party of the noble Lord, to require the market price of the house to be charged at the end of the lease? Will he consider this so that the original

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intention of the leasehold enfranchisement which had the support of all parties, could be adhered to, and those who have had leases, so-called trustee leases, of 50 years and over, will have the chance to remain in their houses for a modest amount?
Lord BELLWIN: My Lords, to use an expression I have learned since I came to your Lordships' House and to another place, I hear what the noble Lord says and certainly will take note of it. That does not necessarily mean that that is the end of it, but of course this whole area is a very difficult one indeed, as I have said before. As your Lordships will no doubt have seen from a statement made by the Minister in another place only in the last week, there have been pronouncements as to what might be done to make certain modifications to the Leasehold Reform Act. That indicates, I am sure, that the matter is one which is under consideration all the time. If that does not go so far as the noble Lord would like me to do, I should have to repeat again that it is because it is under review the whole of the time.
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that up to this change people were able to buy the freehold of their houses for only a thousand or two pounds if they had been there a long time, whereas now others in the same street whose long leases are coming to an end are being asked £150,000? Does the noble Lord think that that is equitable?
Lord BELLWIN: As I have said before, my Lords, this is a matter which is of considerable concern. I trust that it was of equal concern prior to 12 months ago when the previous Administration had the same problem with which to deal, though I do not know that they did anything about it. We have said, and we say again, that we are certainly looking at the matter.
Lord JANNER: My Lords, may I thank the noble Lord for saying that he is going to look at this matter, but will he speed it up? It took 15 years of looking at it before the Leasehold Reform Act was passed. Can he manage to do it within 15 days, 15 months, or some period like that?

IRAN: EEC DECISION
3 p.m.
The SECRETARY of STATE for FOREIGN and COMMONWEALTH AFFAIRS (Lord Carrington): My Lords, with your Lordships' permission, I shall make a Statement on yesterday's decision by the Foreign Ministers of the Members of the European Community concerning Iran. I am arranging for a copy of the text approved to be placed in the Official Report.
As the House will recall, my colleagues and I had adopted a decision in Lisbon on 10th April, which was in effect a last appeal to the authorities in Iran to release the hostages in conformity with international law. Our ambassadors in Tehran were instructed to convey this appeal to the Iranian President and to request him to name the date and method by which the hostages would be released. They did so on 12th April.
Mr. Bani-Sadr's reply was, I have to tell the House, unsatisfactory. The most he would say was that he hoped a decision on the future of the hostages would be taken by the new Iranian Parliament when it had been elected and established. While holding out the prospect that visits to the hostages might be arranged, he could give no firm assurance as to when the Parliament might meet, or whether it could be relied upon to act as he hoped.
When this matter came up in this House and in another place on 14th April, the mood of the House was unmistakable. The phrase,
"the utmost solidarity with the United States"
was used from the Benches on both sides. There was a general feeling that diplomatic methods had, for the time being at least, been exhausted, and that the time had come to find some more concrete and far-reaching way of expressing our abhorrence at the continued defiance of the rules of international behaviour and the opinions of the civilised world.
Your Lordships will find this mood reflected in the decision adopted yesterday in Luxembourg. In accordance with a suggestion made last week by the United Kingdom, it was decided to proceed in two stages. In the first stage, the Nine

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will put into effect to the extent that they are not in force already, certain measures, mainly of a political nature. We shall reduce still further our embassy staffs in Tehran. We shall insist on a parallel reduction in the Iranian embassies in our own capitals.
We shall reintroduce a visa system for Iranian citizens, after giving due notice, and we shall formally ban export of defence equipment to Iran.
The measures to be adopted in stage two are much more far-reaching, and it was this paragraph which occupied most of the time yesterday. If I may, I will read the key sentences. Ministers
"decided to seek immediate legislation, where necessary, in their national Parliaments to impose sanctions against Iran, in accordance with the Security Council Resolution on Iran, dated 10th January 1980, which was vetoed, and in accordance with the tenets of international law.
They believe that these legislative processes should be completed by 17th May, the date of their informal meeting in Naples. In the absence of decisive progress on the release of the hostages, they will then proceed immediately to the common implementation of sanctions."
These are decisions of great gravity. If it becomes necessary to implement them, a wide range of commercial activities will be affected. It is of course our hope that, at this eleventh hour, the Iranian authorities will draw the inescapable conclusion that the continued detention of the hostages is not in Iran's own interest, and should be brought to an end without delay.
If this does not happen, we shall face the situation which we contemplated when we cast our vote for the Resolution presented to the United Nations Security Council in January, except that now the action taken must be on the basis of national measures, and not on the basis of a Resolution of the Security Council of the United Nations.
The necessary measures will be laid before your Lordships, and I know that the Government can count on the cooperation of the House in handling them with the least possible delay.
The customary Statement on the other business of the Foreign Affairs Council is being made separately, in answer to a Written Question.
Following is the text referred to:
"DECISION BY THE FOREIGN MINISTERS OF THE NINE ON IRAN:
1. "The Foreign Ministers of the nine member States of the European Community meeting in Luxembourg on 22nd April discussed the implications of the recent events in Iran in the light of the reports by their ambassadors following the demarche to the President of Iran decided upon by the Foreign Ministers at their meeting in Lisbon on 10th April.
2. "The Foreign Ministers expressed the solidarity of the Nine with the Government and people of the United States at this time of trial.
3. "While welcoming the visit by the ICRC to the hostages on 14th April and noting the assurances given by President Bani-Sadr as to the living conditions of the hostages, the Foreign Ministers expressed their profound regret that the Iranian Government has been unable to give precise assurances about the date and methods by which the hostages would be released. The Iranian Government continues to ignore the clear call of the UN Security Council and the International Court of Justice to bring to an end a flagrant violation of international law and release the hostages.
4. "Since the hostages were first detained, the Nine, in full respect of the independence of Iran and the right of the Iranian people to determine their own future, have insisted that they must be released. The fact that after six months they are still detained, despite the efforts of the Nine and the clear condemnation by the community of nations, is intolerable from a humanitarian and legal point of view.
5. "The Foreign Ministers of the Nine, deeply concerned that a continuation of this situation may endanger international peace and security, have decided to seek immediate legislation where necessary in their national Parliaments to impose sanctions against Iran in accordance with the Security Council Resolution on Iran, dated 10th January 1980, which was vetoed and in accordance with the tenets of international law.
"They believe that these legislative processes should be completed by 17th May, the date of their informal meeting in Naples. In the absence of decisive progress on the release of the hostages, they will then proceed immediately to the common implementation of sanctions.
"Ministers consider that, pending the entering into force of the measures mentioned above, no new export or services contract with persons and organisations in Iran should be concluded as of from now.
"Steps will be taken within the Community in order that the implementation of the measures decided upon should not obstruct the proper functioning of the Common Market.
6. "The Foreign Ministers decided meanwhile to put into effect without delay the following measures, to the extent that they are not already in force :—

(i) Reduction in embassy staffs in Tehran.

(ii) A reduction in the number of diplomats accredited by the Government of Iran in their countries.

(iii) The reintroduction of a visa system for Iranian nationals travelling to member countries of the Nine.

(iv) The withholding of permission for the sale or export of arms or defence-related equipment to Iran.

7. "The Foreign Ministers decided immediately to contact the Government of the United States through the Presidency and to inform it of the decisions taken by them.
8. "The Foreign Ministers of the Nine, believing that this situation should be a matter of concern to the whole international community, call upon other Governments to associate themselves with these decisions.
9. "The Foreign Ministers instructed their ambassadors to return to Tehran in the interval in order to convey the present decision to the Iranian Government, to follow the situation, and to undertake all possible efforts to alleviate and improve the living conditions of the hostages pending their release.
"They express the hope that the Iranian authorities will take action accordingly."
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, the House will be grateful to the Foreign Secretary for the Statement that he has made. May I ask whether he is aware that there will be general accord in all quarters of the House and, I imagine, in the other place and in the country, with the agreement reached yesterday as to how, at this stage, to support the United States in the very difficult and dangerous situation that is continuing to develop in Tehran, and how to make absolutely clear, in concert with all civilised countries, our abhorrence of this flagrant breaking of international law, defiance of the International Court, and persistent cruelty to these hostages and to their families at home?
If I may put the matter interrogatively, is the noble Lord aware—I am sure he is—that this is an agreement among the Nine? May I ask whether it will quite quickly be brought to the attention of the other members of NATO, at least all 17 of them, and also whether other countries will be asked to co-operate on a national basis but, as the noble Lord said, in accordance with what was supported, though vetoed, in the United Nations`? May I ask the noble Lord whether he is aware that even action by nine countries, unilaterally as it were, might harm those countries more than it might move the Iranians, if the rest of the world, or a large section of the rest of the world, having voted in the United Nations for this kind of action, does not join in? Can the noble Lord give an assurance that there will be quite intense diplomatic action to persuade others to join in and to accept the lead of the Nine, a lead which in turn is due to the lead given by the United Kingdom and by the noble Lord?
Will the noble Lord make clear to our friends and allies in the United States that it is no small action that this country is taking, as a country which at the moment has an annual trade with Iran of some £400 million sterling, which is, I believe, expanding after the setback inevitably caused to it by the events of last summer? So this will be a sanction on Britain and on British industry, as well as on Iran, and may we hope that our American friends will take this fully into consideration when they have even the slightest doubt about the loyalty and support of this country in connection with their action.

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Finally, may I refer to the penultimate paragraph of the noble Lord's Statement, where he assumes, rightly, if I may say so, that the Government can count on the co-operation of this House in handling whatever measures it proves necessary to lay before the House, and no doubt before the other place? The answer to that assumption is, Yes. I put the question in order to give the answer. We shall co-operate in every possible way.
Lord GLADWYN: My Lords, I think I am on record as suggesting from these Benches a little while ago that the time had come to apply the measures proposed in the vetoed Resolution of the United Nations, and I am glad that this is to be the case. However, would not the Government agree that necessary though these present and prospective measures are—and how much we must hope that they will be successful—we cannot, so long as the Ayatollah is in command in Qom, be at all optimistic that they will result in the liberation of the hostages? Therefore, would not the Government further agree that if, unfortunately, this proves to be the case, any further measures of pressure, presumably of a military nature, would not only probably result in the murder of the hostages, but would also have far-reaching results, which, to say the very least, could only be counter-productive?
3.10 p.m.
Lord CARRINGTON: My Lords, I am grateful to both noble Lords for what they have said. I think it reflects, generally speaking, the mood on all sides of the House; and I am particularly grateful to the noble Lord opposite for what he said about helping the necessary legislation through the House, which will be very welcome to the Government. I have of course already been doing what the noble Lord suggested about informing other members of NATO, and also Japan, because he is of course quite right in saying that the measures will be that much more effective if all the industrialised countries take them. The Japanese Foreign Minister was in Luxembourg, and I had the opportunity to talk to him over a period on this subject. I feel that he is very well aware of the circumstances in which this action is being taken. I also very much agree with the noble Lord about the sacrifice that we are making. I think the
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noble Lord's figure is a little too high, but it is certainly a very large figure and it will have a significant effect upon this country. It certainly is a measure which the Government have taken having regard to the consequences it will have, and I have no doubt that our American friends will be aware of that. Indeed, I might say in passing that there are other countries which are even more affected than we are, particularly Italy. This is a decision on the part of Europe which can in no sense be regarded as inadequate to the situation.
With regard to what the noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, has said, I do not think I should like to make a judgment as to whether or not the hostages will be released while the Ayatollah is still in Iran in the position he is at the moment. I hope very much that they will be, but one cannot of course say. I do not think, equally, I would care to anticipate what the decision of Her Majesty's Government might be, or indeed what the Americans might do, in the event of the failure of these measures.
Lord ALPORT: My Lords, may I ask my noble friend whether he is aware that there was an almost exactly parallel position in about the 1880s in the relations between Her Majesty's Government of the day and the Abyssinian Government, and that we solved that, and released the hostages which were taken, by our own efforts and at our own very great expense? Does he not think that there are great dangers in the internationalisation of a bilateral problem, however serious and dramatic it may be in the eyes of the countries concerned?
Lord CARRINGTON: My Lords, I think there are great dangers in any action you take on this subject, and you have to weigh up the disadvantages and the advantages of any course which is open to Her Majesty's Government. I believe that we have weighed up the advantages and the disadvantages correctly.
Lord BLYTON: My Lords, is the Minister aware that, while I agree with the Statement he has made as far as he has gone up to now, there is a great apprehension in the country? With the land forces of Russia to the North of Iran and the battleships in the Persian Gulf,

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there is a terrible fear in the country, and I hope we are not committed. Will it lead us to a war in the Persian Gulf?
Lord CARRINGTON: My Lords, that, of course, is a situation which it is the object of all of us who are concerned to avoid. I would only point out that I do not believe that the best way of avoiding a war is to see your ally humiliated in world opinion and not to support them when they are in trouble.
Lord CHELWOOD: My Lords, in their reactions to the situation in Iran and in Afghanistan, the United States and the European Community have shown some very clear signs of being seriously out of step. Is my noble friend giving some careful thought at present—I am not asking him to make a definite statement now—to the need to improve the machinery for political cooperation between the Community and the United States?
Lord CARRINGTON: My Lords, I would not say that everything was perfect, but I would have thought that the Community demonstrated yesterday that the Community and the United States were not in disarray and in competition or disagreement with each other.
Lord BROCKWAY: My Lords, I think all of us would want to recognise the quite extraordinary, constructive activity of the noble Lord: here yesterday morning, in Brussels in the afternoon and late at night, and here this morning preparing this complicated Statement. All of us would want to pay tribute to that. But may I add that some of us are disturbed by these developments, beginning with diplomatic and economic limited arrangements and proceeding to full economic sanctions, followed by military action by the American Government. Those of us who were active politically before the First World War see now a terrible parallel of sliding into a war situation. Are not these actions likely to unite and make more militant the people of Iran? Will there not be dangers for the lives of the hostages, rather than making for their release; and may these actions not lead to a situation of war? Would not continued patient diplomatic action, difficult as it would be, be more likely to save the hostages than the course on which we have started?
Lord CARRINGTON: My Lords, I think these are difficult matters of judgment, and I think that one can very well argue the way the noble Lord has argued. I would only say this, that when one talks about patience and diplomatic activity I think all of us have got to remember that the hostages have now been held in Iran for six months, and that the United States have show n unparalleled patience in dealing with this situation. Certainly they have decided that patience and diplomacy is not going to release the hostages; and they in their judgment have decided that they have to go one step further, and apply diplomatic sanctions. I think all of us are very acutely conscious of the dangers which there are in the situation, both in Iran and in Afghanistan, but I can only repeat what I said to my noble friend behind me. Having seen the difficulties, having looked at the difficulties and having examined the situation, I believe we have come to the right decision—and it has been a difficult decision. With regard to the first part of the noble Lord's question, I would only say that he is far too kind. I am getting rather worried.
The Earl of ONSLOW: My Lords, would my noble friend please confirm that we will not withdraw all diplomatic personnel from Iran?—because I think it would be a mistake to do so when it appears that, in effect, there is no Government in Iran at all, or there is no central control in Iran. This is what makes the release of the hostages so difficult—that there is nobody with whom it is possible to negotiate. Therefore, it is very important to keep as many diplomatic personnel as possible in Iran, for information for my noble friend and for Her Majesty's Government.
Secondly, is it not true that there could be a danger of worrying about Iran—which is unstable, there are 50 hostages, it is American election year and it is all against international agreements, et cetera—whereas the real danger is Russian aggression in Afghanistan? That is far more dangerous to our way of life and to the Western World than the immoral, illegal hostage-taking in Iran by a Government which has no control of its own citizens.
Lord CARRINGTON: My Lords, it is the intention of Her Majesty's Government

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to thin out the embassy in Tehran, and this was decided yesterday in Luxembourg; but it is not the intention to withdraw the embassy staff completely. Indeed, it is not at the moment the intention to withdraw the ambassador, who later on will be returning to Tehran and, with his eight Community colleagues, will be once again seeing Mr. Bani-Sadr, telling him of the gravity of the situation and, in the light of what the Community has decided, asking him to release the hostages.
There is no intention of withdrawing totally any kind of diplomatic representation in Iran. Indeed, it would be quite wrong to do so because there are still some British citizens there. With regard to the second part of my noble friend's supplementary question, I think that both of these "incidents", Afghanistan and Iran, (if one can call them so) are serious. I should not like to say which is the more serious of the two. Inevitably, one is inclined to rub off on the other. I think we have to consider very carefully the action we take having regard to the situation in both countries.
Baroness LLEWELYN-DAVIES of HASTOE: My Lords, while wholly understanding the extreme difficulty of the present situation and how it should be dealt with, and that the whole country is deeply concerned with this matter, may I ask the noble Lord whether he could comment upon the report in The Times today that the Iranian Government and the Soviet Union have signed an economic agreement and that the Iranian Government spokesman has said that whatever boycott were to be applied—particularly by the United States but I think, also, internationally—their friends in the Soviet Union would help them to get through it?
Lord CARRINGTON: My Lords, I cannot add very much to what the noble Baroness has said, because she has said everything that I know. The only comment that I might make is that I think that possibly the Iranian Government, if they are relying upon the Soviet Union as trading partners in substitution for the West, will find it a lot more difficult to get hard currency from them.
Lord MISHCON: My Lords, is the noble Lord the Foreign Secretary aware that reports have also appeared in the
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Press that the United Kingdom, while still not being fully self-sufficient in oil, has offered, in the event of sanctions having to be imposed, part of its oil supplies to those who will suffer as a result of Iranian oil supplies being cut off? Is he aware that this will be particularly important in regard to such countries as Japan which are so much dependent upon Iranian supplies? Is he further aware that if Her Majesty's Government have made this offer, it will have national support?
Lord CARRINGTON: My Lords, the resolution on sanctions which was vetoed by the Soviet Union and approved by everyone else did not in fact include oil. There is no prohibition on the purchase of oil from Iran. All that has happened is that the United States have asked us and others not to purchase Iranian oil at a price sharply different from that ruling in the rest of the world. It follows from that that the report in the newspaper is not accurate. But it may well be that oil will be cut off in the end. I do not know. Should that happen there is an agreement in the IEA which triggers off, below a certain percentage of shortfall, a sharing system with which all countries who belong to the IEA have agreed. Short of that, if there is still a shortfall but not sufficient to trigger off the IEA action, there is an agreement in the Community that we shall consult with each other.
Lord TAYLOR of BLACKBURN: My Lords, in view of the Statement by the Foreign Secretary on this situation, and in view of the consensus of agreement on all sides of the House, I feel that we should be foolish in continuing this discussion because the situation is so fluid at the moment and is moving day by day and hour by hour. I feel that we should leave it like that.
Lord CARRINGTON: My Lords, I wish that the noble Lord came in more often.
Baroness LLEWELYN-DAVIES of HASTOE: My Lords, in spite of the fact that the noble Lord wishes that my noble friend would come in more often, I hope he will forgive me if I return to what I asked—and I do not wish to press him too far. Does not this whole issue of economic assistance from the USSR raise

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the whole spectre of what the world is mainly worried about? I understand the point about Russia not being too good at providing hard currency, but—and again I do not want to press him too far—is there not a danger in this kind of economic boycott of driving Iran in a direction in which they would never have thought of going?
Lord CARRINGTON: My Lords, I think the noble Baroness is quite right. On the other hand, I am not sure that fundamental Mohammedism is very likely to find much attractive in Soviet communism. Equally, I think it would be a little unlikely that the Iranians would be able to substitute—entirely, at any rate—Russian trade for Western trade.
Lord GORE-BOOTH: My Lords, in the hope that it might be a helpful point, may I ask whether we are using in our diplomacy and elsewhere the point that there has been in recent years a welcome revival of the Mohammedan religion and that what the Ayatollah is doing now is well served to destroy the improvement which has been made—which could be most unprofitable and extremely regrettable for Iran itself?
Lord CARRINGTON: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for that remark.

BRITISH RAILWAYS (CASTLEFIELD) BILL
Read 2a, and committed to an Unopposed Bill Committee.
CLIFTON SUSPENSION BRIDGE BILL
Read 2a, and committed to an Unopposed Bill Committee.

DEFENCE EQUIPMENT: POLICY ON OVERSEAS SALES
3.26 p.m.
Lord NEWALL Lord NEWALL rose to call attention to the present policy for overseas sales of defence equipment; and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords,
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it is most appropriate that, on St. George's Day, we are discussing a problem which is vital to this country. In fact, we have two debates which touch on defence aspects and I consider myself fortunate that we have been able to have this debate ahead of the White Paper debate and dealing with only one narrow aspect of defence. I can assure the noble Lord, Lord Noel-Baker, and his colleagues that I will not be touching on the nuclear aspects at all.
The Defence White Paper, on pages 81 and 82, deals specifically with defence sales. It is only a summary and there is nothing there that anybody who has a reasonable mind could disagree with. But it cannot go far enough as it is only a summary. In the Hansard of the other place of the 15th of this month, an Answer was given by the Government that 61 countries bought some sort of defence equipment from this country in 1979. It may surprise some noble Lords to know that our defence exports total 21 per cent. of our total exports, a very significant figure and one which, I believe, is not beaten by many industries, if any at all. These defence equipment manufacturers employ some 80,000 people. I expect that the Ministry of Defence are fairly pleased with this sort of figure of employment, but I hope that they are not complacent. I believe firmly that we have the best industries to make things like this; we have the best brains to design and devise new defence equipment and different systems, some of which are produced to kill or to hurt an enemy. But if we can produce better ones than others can, surely we can save lives by so doing. No one wants war, but it is only from strength that we can avoid one. The Russians, I believe, are currently proving this point that strength can count.
Our forces and our equipment have been run down to a somewhat abysmal degree under the previous Administration. I am glad to see that the noble Lords, Lord Shinwell and Lord Winterbottom, are to speak from the opposite side of the House; and I feel that they will probably not disagree with much of what I have to say. If and when we need weapons in an armed conflict, we certainly need the capacity and the expertise. Our own defence requirements are fairly small so that we have to sell to others. We have to keep the industry going and our costs down; and we have to be ready to expand if an emergency should arise.
In 1980–81 we expect to sell something like £1,200 million worth of defence equipment. I do not think that that is nearly enough. In 1973–75 we sold more and I think that we can do much better. We could be more efficient. We even import arms. In 1979, according to the White Paper, we spent £41 million-plus on imports of small arms and ammunition. I consider that this could have been done much better by using our own industries and so helping our balance of payments instead of hurting it. Some ammunition was made in India and Pakistan because our own Royal Ordnance factories could not supply enough. I do not think that that is good enough. We are a leading industrial nation and it was certainly wrong that we were an importer of small arms in both world wars to meet our military requirements. Through our continued policies we have bolstered the profits of many foreign manufacturers, especially the United States.
The world is not a peaceful place. Terrorism has grown alarmingly, to enormous proportions in some areas. We have security checks every time we travel by air and sometimes in hotels and shops. A person's life often seems less valuable than it was a few years ago. The divisions that there have always been between police, special security personnel and the army have narrowed somewhat due to the times in which we live. If anybody is against arms sales—and I am sure that there are some—they must be living in something of a dream world. We cannot have a perfect world. If we could we would say: "Right, no more arms, no more ammunition". That obviously is the real solution; but we know that it is not practical. We must defend our own country and we must have that capability.
Defence sales of course should be made to Governments—and I stress "Governments" and not to individuals. Sales on an individual basis are usually purely for profit and they are not to be welcomed in large numbers. Even Governments are not blameless—sometimes they have been known to buy defence equipment and sell it on, making a profit on the way. Sometimes also this is only a limited possibility, and they are often accountable for their actions. Perhaps we should press harder for an international arms registry for all defence
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sales. That would be welcomed by many in the West even though we may not get the co-operation that we should like from those in the East.
Perhaps I could mention some anomalies in defence sales. When we consider sales to other countries, we often apply our own strict guidelines from the outside on another country, based on our own view, and we apply sanctions to them. We often refuse to sell things to them. But are we always in the best position to judge? Many Western nations pay lip service to not selling things to South Africa because of their apartheid policy; yet the Russians and the Czechs openly sell arms there. We refuse to sell diesel engines for tanks that we supplied some years ago, some new engines to refurbish Centurion tanks. Now who is supplying them?—the Americans, one of our major allies. The German and United States Governments have made many statements about not selling arms to South America, yet there are German rifles and American revolvers being assembled in Colombia. We even have a factory in this country which is assembling German rifles and sending them to Jordan. I do not think that this is the best policy. It is just as well that there are some good things, too. We allow India, for instance, to manufacture British-designed tanks under licence.
Lord PEART: My Lords, the noble Lord referred to a British factory assembling rifles. Is he in a position to reveal the name of the factory?
Lord NEWALL: My Lords, I should not like to reveal the name here. Perhaps we could speak about it afterwards. It is a fact and I have it on good authority though I have not seen it myself. So far as India is concerned, there is something good to say. We have an agreement with them that they will manufacture British-designed tanks under licence. I think that we could do much more, and I consider myself extremely fortunate that less than two weeks ago I was able to raise this question with Mrs. Ghandi in Delhi and discuss defence sales with her on a broad basis.
There are many other examples referring to different countries, but perhaps I have said just enough to show that Government can use many devious means for selling

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their arms and defence equipment abroad, sometimes assembling them in a third country for purely commercial reasons. I wonder whether the Government know of another small instance where German small arms were given to our own SAS; and now our own soldiers, as they travel around the world, have often been heard to be recommending these German arms to foreigners. I do not think that that is a good idea, any more than the idea that we should ask for the Americans to supply revolvers in Ulster.
I have already mentioned the great need for industry to export. Exports help to retrieve our research and development costs and minimise our expenses. Much of our defence sales industry has been run down to a rather depressing degree in the past. Much of the equipment that can be used for military purposes can also be used for civilian purposes; things like tents, boots and even uniforms. I am glad to say that Rolls-Royce, who design many excellent diesel engines for tanks, have nearly always been able to put them to good industrial use and recommend that they should be used for such purposes. I do not think that we do enough to encourage our defence industry. Our own annual production of small arms will probably sustain us for only two weeks in an emergency.
What do other countries do about it? The French are nearly always quoted by commercial firms. They sell very hard and in their ex-colonies they virtually control all defence sales. Their embassies sell. Their Government supports them frequently and fully, knowing how helpful it is to a healthy economy to have export sales of defence equipment. The Italians and Belgians also sell hard. I believe that they have made great strides in Libya where we banned our own people from selling, and now they are reaping the benefits which we were not able to do.
Lord AVEBURY: My Lords, was it not alleged on very good authority that the Libyans supplied arms to the IRA? Does the noble Lord think it is a good idea for our European allies to sell arms to a country which is prepared to do such a despicable thing?
Lord NEWALL: No, my Lords, there are many anomalies in the whole thing.
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I am only bringing out one or two small instances to show how if we do not sell it does not deprive another country. Some of our own allies in many fields go out and make the money that we could have made, although we perhaps should not do this. I am not suggesting that we should always make all these sales; but I just want to make the point that we often do things for the wrong reasons.
The Germans are good salesmen and are quite prepared to sell all over the world. Nearly all these countries get full support from their own Governments. Salesmen plan ahead. They study the basic future needs of different countries. Replacement times on equipment can be forecast. There are many lists available of who buys what. I can mention one: the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. It is a very useful guide for arms salesmen, even if there are some details omitted regarding smaller countries. Foreign salesmen often go and sit in a potential customer's country. They get the right contacts and talk to the right people. If a deal becomes imminent their Governments are ready with credit, reciprocal bartering or package deals. These salesmen stalk their prey and get the deals. They often break OECD limits. There are limits on defence sales and on credit. They blatantly defy these rules. As credit is the one key to defence sales, we are sometimes at an enormous disadvantage by playing to the rules.
What do we do? There are many commercial firms who are excellent at selling. Sometimes they are helped by the Government; sometimes they are hindered. There is a very good organisation which helps companies to sell defence equipment. It is called the Defence Sales Organisation. Most firms are high in their praise of this organisation and they have only good words to say in its favour. I believe that the Iranian tank deal—which of course now is defunct—could not have gone ahead without the great help of the Defence Sales Organisation. They have helped in many other areas as well.
However, they have limitations. They are not part of the cut and thrust of company incentives, commissions and bonuses. They cannot really challenge the private salesmen. Perhaps I could give an example. In marine defence sales prior to 1977, which was the nationalisa-

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tion year, the three leading warship builders were Vosper Thorneycroft, Yarrow, and Vickers. They had good order books and they were profitable while most other yards were making a loss. Since then, their order books have shrunk alarmingly despite major rearming in NATO countries and other non-communist countries. The British shipbuilders have had only one new major naval order since that time, which is a frigate for the Sultan of Oman. They have had nothing else at all, and I am very glad that some reorganisation is on the way for warship sales.
In my view, nationalisation is obviously not good for sales, whatever other attributes it may have. Nationalised industries lack an instinct for competitive survival. In the private sector, if you do not get orders you do not have a company and you do not have a job. It pays to work hard. Also, foreigners do not like dealing with Governments and they do not like dealing even with companies which are one step away from Governments. Governments have a habit of changing their minds at the stroke of a pen. For instance, the president of some banana republic may put on red socks one day and be in a bad temper. He says something detrimental about this country and so the Foreign Office decides "no sales today", and that can also affect spare parts.
I have great admiration for many of our military defence attaches abroad. They are tremendously useful sources of information, but they certainly are not chosen for their effectiveness in selling. They have been known to suggest that it was beneath them to sell, and certainly their knowledge of methods being used by foreign competitors falls far short of reality in some cases. They change every two or three years, and contacts are vital in these matters. I believe that a recent order from Iraq for ships worth about £900 million, which was obtained by Italy, was denied to us because of advice given to private and public companies by the local embassy.
The bad selling that we have become renowned for helps the "cowboys". They proliferate; they are entrepreneurs—sometimes British—who willingly barter arms for large or small commissions and are always motivated by their pockets. They have no allegiance to their country;
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they often sell foreign arms and they do not worry where they go to.
How do our sales work in practice? Supposing I have a recoilless ground-to-air missile to sell to the President of Utopia: probably I will get an unofficial view from Harry or Bill at the Defence Sales Organisation and they will tell me whether or not it is worth while putting in an official request. But if I have some new and untried fuel on which engines can run at 100 miles per gallon, and that was an unknown quantity, then Harry and Bill could not readily give an opinion. Therefore I have to go through the official channels—through the Defence Sales Organisation, to the Foreign Office for political clearance, which often changes its policy from time to time, through to the Ministry of Defence to see whether or not it is a sensitive product. All that has to be co-ordinated by the Department of Trade and Industry, who do not really know a great deal about it—masses of faceless men who are answering repeated inquiries without a decision. Months may pass and sometimes after more inquiries a "no" is easier than a "yes". The system seems rather prehistoric. Sales are like hot potatoes and they often have to be made very quickly if they are to succeed. Quick decisions are needed to sell, and so the system has to be streamlined drastically. Licences have to be granted much more quickly.
There are many doubts about the defence sales policy going around in industry today. For instance, do they sell only for the public sector or for the private sector as well? Is their role to open doors at high level or will they project-manage a potential sale, using the supplier as a sub-contractor? Many people consider that they lack product expertise, and the channels of communication between industry and defence sales are not at all clear. Some large companies with big export order books are not clear, and so I believe the situation ought to be reorganised and should undergo some structural changes. I hope the Government are looking at that.
May I also ask the Government to look at certain elements of the post-Rhodesia sanctions problems? If an amnesty is to be given to companies who have done naughty things, what about the good boys'? I have been told about one

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case, a company called Racal which sells radio equipment. They sold to Rhodesia through South Africa and are now poised for a big break-through as a supplier which is known to Zimbabwe. What about the people who behaved, such as Marconi? They refused to break sanctions and now they are at a very distinct disadvantage. I hope that the Government will give them some help.
I have already mentioned that the key to good sales is credit finance and ECGD help on defence equipment is often very difficult to obtain. Another branch of the Ministry of Defence is International Military Services, which sometimes seems to compete with the private sector and sometimes works as a Government agent to help companies. Its exact role is uncertain, and many companies are not sure about it. Often American banks can lend money more quickly on better terms than British finance houses. This area of credit finance and the exact role of the IMS is a vital area which needs to be streamlined and closely re-examined so as to avoid the uncertainty that is definitely felt by many people I have talked to. Today's Financial Times carries a very good article which bears out some of these points and I hope that my noble friend Lord Strathcona will tell us today of some improvements that are on the way. I know that consideration had been given to changes in structure since last spring, and the time is now ripe for some decision.
The United Kingdom has international goodwill and technical expertise in the defence field, but currently we are not gaining our rightful share of the world market. We are depriving our own people of readily available jobs and we are not adequately building up our defences in a realistically priced market. We must give defence sales a higher national priority. I beg to move for Papers.
3.47 p.m.
Lord SHINWELL: My Lords, the well-informed and admirably delivered speech of the noble Lord, Lord Newall, might be regarded as an overture to the important defence debates which will come before your Lordships' House shortly. He will, of course, agree that the subject is highly controversial: it always has been. Even
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before the First World War there was controversy to an intense degree among politicians of the various parties as to the desirability of selling arms to other countries. It was regarded by some as immoral and improper—a contribution to further wars and conflicts of various kinds, both minor and major.
The advantage of this debate is that when the major debate comes before us we shall have disposed of a controversial subject, because the Defence Estimates themselves are highly controversial. After all, a nation cannot engage in expenditure of something like £10,000 million and expect to avoid controversy—controversy that is based on the need for economy and also based on what are regarded as moral principles. So the noble Lord, Lord Newall, may be congratulated not only on furnishing information of a wide-ranging character, but also on enabling us to avoid this aspect of defence controversy when it comes to the crux of the problem.
Therefore, almost every aspect of the subject having been covered, I find myself confined to two what might be called minor aspects of the problem. In speaking to them, it is likely I would not regard it as probable—that I may be able to refute some of the absurd allegations that are used by those who are opposed to the sale of arms by the United Kingdom to any other country.
I take, to begin with, what might be described as the moral argument, psychological, philosophical and ethical in its aspects, according to one's opinion and judgment. But in my view, for what it may be worth, the sale of arms to another country, whichever form it may take—tanks, rifles or even in a wider and more destructive and dangerous form—is no more immoral than selling to another country oil which might be used in battleships, in frigates, in carriers and the like, and even in aircraft; or even selling, as the United States and Canada have been doing for some considerable time, thousands of tons of grain to Soviet Russia and to some of the Soviet Union's satellites. That could, I should think, on careful analysis, be regarded as just as immoral in its subsequent effects as the sale of arms. So, from that point of view, and dealing with that aspect, I would regard what might be described as the moral objection to selling arms to another country as hardly worth consideration.

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Anyhow, no matter what the objection may be, no matter what controversy is raised, the fact is that almost every nation which produces arms for itself endeavours to sell arms to other countries. It is a remarkable fact. I suppose that Members of your Lordships' House who are interested in defence matters are aware that there is not a single country in the world, throughout the whole globe, the whole of the cosmic scheme—superpowers, those who would like to be super, some who think they are super and some not much larger than this Chamber in which I am venturing to address your Lordships—which is not in possession of arms. What for? Ostensibly, they are for the purpose of protection, of security.
That is precisely why we produce arms for ourselves and create a force, which is not as large as I should like, but which is quite adequate alongside our allies—perhaps they are more adequate than we are. We do this not to engage in a conflict, which is not our desire, never has been our desire and, I hope, never will be our objective, but to deter a conflict which we, at some time or other, apprehend. So when there is talk about nations defending themselves, purchasing arms and all the rest, I sometimes think of a country like the State of Israel. Without the arms, where would it have been? It should never have been a State at all. The same can apply to several countries. So much for the moral argument.
There is another argument, which is that by selling arms to other countries we are assisting in the promotion of another conflict, promoting war. What is the answer to that? I am venturing on a challenge to those who disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Newall, and myself on the subject of the sale of arms to other countries. Let them produce evidence of any country that has gone to war with some other country because it has purchased arms from a super-power or from any quarter. That has never happened.
There are two instances that occur to me, as I seek to address the House. There was the Korean affair, when North Korea sought to invade, and did actually invade, South Korea for political motives. One was Communist, the other was non-Communist and it obtained the assistance of the United States having obtained, not immediately but eventually, in the course of events, the consent and endorsement of
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the United Nations and the Security Council when that event occurred. North Korea did not go to war against South Korea, nor did China assist North Korea—which it did at the time and which may, eventually, have led to the Vietnam affair—because they had purchased arms from a super-power or from any quarter. That had nothing at all to do with it.
The same applies to the Middle East. I challenge contradiction on this issue. Nothing that has occurred in the Middle East—the Suez affair, the seizure of the Suez Canal by Nasser and a variety of other misdemeanours that occurred in that area, leading to some conflict—was in any way attributable to the purchase of arms from the United Kingdom, the United States, Czechoslovakia or any other country. All that happened was that Czechoslovakia sold arms, we sold arms and the United States sold arms wherever we could. But there was no contribution to conflict. Conflicts occur for other reasons into which I need not enter, but of which I think Members of your Lordships' House are fully cognisant. That is the situation. So much for that.
This controversy has been interminable and I recall it taking place before the First World War. If I may turn to that period for a moment, there was the action of Germany, the attitude of France, which was a little ambivalent, the attitude of the United Kingdom after some controversy and difficulties in the Cabinet of the period, and even division in the country. There was certainly more division in the country then than there was in the Second World War, when the country was, if not unanimous, united. But the Germans did not go to war against the United Kingdom and France because they had purchased arms from other countries. This is a foolish argument, a stupid allegation, which is used by those who claim to be ethical, and who indulge in moralising, sermonising and all the rest of it. I would regard it—and I say so with the greatest respect—as just hypocrisy, sometimes humbug. Wars do not occur because of the sale of arms. Sometimes they could occur because of no sale of arms and no possession of arms if a country is incapable of defending itself. So I dispose of the arguments against the sale of arms and I agree with almost every word the noble Lord, Lord Newall, has said.

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I would rather it were otherwise. If international tension vanished, if there were no danger of conflict, if our apprehensions were disposed of, for one reason or another, how happy we should be. We should not require to spend £10,000 million—or perhaps more in the course of time—or to rely upon our allies to assist us, and sometimes to rely on allies who let us down at the last minute. I do not want to mention any names or to be too controversial on this subject.
It seems to me that, in all the circumstances, there is nothing particularly wrong with the sale of arms. Although I would rather it could be avoided, it has to be done. It helps to build up our own industries. It contributes to the manufacture of adequate arms for the United Kingdom for the purpose of deterrence and for the purpose of security. That is our purpose. Therefore, I support the Motion and have not the least doubt that your Lordships' House will accept it.
4.2 p.m.
Lord ORR-EWING: My Lords, I think we all owe a debt of gratitude to the noble Lord, Lord Newall, for his raising of this very important subject and for the admirable content of his speech. He always takes infinite trouble in collecting information, and it was a speech which was full of very useful information. It also had the benefit, as it always does when he speaks, of being succinct and to the point. As I have to chair a meeting shortly after 4.15 p.m., I was particularly grateful for his shortness. I would ask for the indulgence of the House if I go away, but I shall of course return to this debate as soon as the meeting is over.
First, I have to make an apology. On 18th December we had a short debate initiated by the noble Earl, Lord Kimberley, on the British nuclear deterrent. I had cause to criticise the BBC "Panorama" programme on that same subject which was transmitted on 10th December. 1, and many others, thought that it was biased towards the political Left. In referring to Doctor Rotblat I said that his views were of the extreme Left, or Marxist. Since then I have had the opportunity to meet and discuss this matter with him. I now believe that
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I did him a grave injustice and that I was wrong. Ever since he worked with the United Kingdom team at Los Alamos he has believed passionately, and understandably, in nuclear disarmament—and even in unilateral nuclear disarmament. Therefore he has taken part, in the past, in Aldermaston marches, but unlike some others on those marches I believe that he was motivated by horror and by compassion, not by sympathy for Marxist or Soviet views. I accordingly withdraw and apologise and try to correct the injustice I did him. I make that statement now because this is the first opportunity afforded to me to do so in a defence debate. Unfortunately, our main defence debate has been brought forward to May 8th, when it clashes with a meeting which I shall have to attend of a Panel of the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris; I shall not therefore have the opportunity to be here on that occasion.
I want to concentrate on the importance, as I believe it to be, of increasing the total of our overseas sales—not that I think that we have done badly. In 1970 and 1971–10 years ago—we were exporting in 1979 terms £870 million of defence equipment. In 1973 and 1974 there was the peak of £1,229 million of equipment, but that was helped by large sales to Saudi Arabia and to Iran. In the year just ended, 1979–80, we exported £900 million of arms. To that should be added another £140 million for works services, for support and for advisers. This latter item of £140 million is becoming increasingly important as we sell arms. The arms have a high technological content; therefore instructors and support are very necessary.
Looking back, I think that one of the blunders of the Labour Government, apart from the rundown of defence, was made in 1964. They have always been slightly pathological—though excuse my saying so—about Spain. When I left the Admiralty in 1963 I knew that we were a long way towards receiving an order for ships of British design, fitted with a great deal of British equipment, for the re-equipment of the Spanish navy. Unfortunately, all that was cancelled because at the time Franco was at the helm. Had they been able to see ahead, I think there would have been very, very valuable orders for our ancillary maritime equipment and that we should have had ships designed to

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British standards now equipping the Spanish navy. The same applies to Portugal. Even manoeuvres with Portugal were forbidden. Both of those nations are now democratic and an important part of Western defence.
I think we have been well served by successive heads of defence sales. I knew them all. Sir Raymond Browne was the first; Sir Lester Suffield was the second and Sir Ronald Ellis is currently in office, and has been for some years. They have done outstanding work and have certainly opened doors which those in industry would not have been able to open without their help. It was well worth while setting up, and I pay tribute to the Labour Government. It was their initiative which did it. I think that it was brave and that it was correct.
Despite that, I still think that we ought to be and should be doing even better. One only has to look and see how France has done to realise the potential. France had a smaller aerospace industry than ours and certainly was insignificant compared with our strength in avionics and electronics. Let us, however, take the figures from SIPRI, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. I realise that all such figures are liable to error because sometimes the bases are different. There it records that in 1978 France was selling three times as much as this country.
There is one place where our imbalance of sales has not got any better. It was in September 1975, nearly five years ago, when a Memorandum of Understanding was signed with the United States of America to try to improve the two-way flow of arms—the two-way street as it was called. Even today, despite efforts, there is a grave imbalance, in that we are buying between three and four times as much from the United States as they are buying from us. If we succeed, as is likely, in selling the Rapier surface-to-air missile, or if they place the order, as we urgently hope they will, for the AV8B—the United States version of the Harrier—this will make a very big impact on that balance. But it has not yet happened. Every opportunity therefore must be taken by our Government to make clear to the United States that that obligation still is there so that we may hope to keep them to the understandings and the undertakings which were signed nearly five years ago.
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I think that we in this country must particularly specialise in our defence sales in the high technology industries. As our prowess and, regrettably, our leadership in the traditional heavy industries of shipbuilding and heavy engineering—and, in the earlier days, railways—have declined, and as our sales have deteriorated in those areas, so it has become vitally important that we should renew our efforts in aerospace, electronics, and other high technology industries.
I have spent the whole of my working life associated with electronics and aerospace and light engineering, and I know how vitally important the research and development contracts emanating from the Ministry of Defence are to the success and competitive position of British industry. Profit margins are not great and they are controlled. Of course they are limited, in favourable cases, to as high as 14 per cent., but they can be as low as 11 per cent. It is very difficult in an inflationary world, when delivery is wanted in three or four years' time, to quote a price, sometimes a competitive price, which will hold up against the inflation of three years—inflation which is perhaps much greater than one estimates.
Moreover, in quoting for long-term sales, both here and for export purposes, it is very difficult to forecast the borrowing rate which will apply over the intervening years, and if one is having to borrow money from one's bank at something like 20 per cent. it makes desperate inroads on the profit margins available. So I urge my noble friend to have a look and to see whether the profit margins today are realistic in view of the 20 per cent. inflation and the difficulty when borrowing rates are very high of making ends meet.
A further difficulty arises if a firm is locked into a development contract to meet a Ministry of Defence requirement or perhaps to meet the demands of the Civil Aviation Authority or some other public body: that contract may be cancelled at short notice and one is placed in a parlous position when one has set aside the efforts and the brains of one's research and development staff, and gets no orders and does not fill one's production factory, and yet all the overheads have to be carried as a result.
I do not think we should forget the enormous contribution which defence

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work makes to employment in this country. This admirable White Paper sets it out extremely well in paragraph 735, where it points out that 200,000 people owe their employment directly to the production of defence equipment and another 200,000 are working for sub-contractors in the defence field. So that is a total of 400,000 people directly and usefully employed in the defence of our country and in the sales of defence equipment.
I would also ask my noble friend to see what France is doing to increase her share of the export markets for defence equipment. A circular has come into my hands which states:
"France dominates the Middle East defence sales".
It goes on to say that there is a possible sale of as many as 450 Mirage 2000 fighters to Saudi Arabia within the next ten years. It quotes the setting up of a joint French-Jordanian factory in Jordan for the manufacture of the Mirage 2000. It is perhaps significant that President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing recently made a 10-day visit to the Middle East and to the Gulf and it may be that these orders have been helped by that.
Let us take an example—the French effort. They have done one thing: they have driven for sales and they have succeeded in making them and above all else they have looked after their own defence industry within their country. It may be said that we are bound by international law not to do the same. Self-interest is a very important and dominant factor in any nation's economy and I ask my noble friend to take notice of a memorandum prepared by the Electronic Engineering Association and submitted to him. Could he take counsel with Sir Keith Joseph and the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, to see what can be done to help our British industry to no greater extent but to no lesser extent than France and the USA look after theirs? If we could do half as well we should not be exporting £1,100 million or £1,200 million of defence equipment in the coming year but I believe we should be able to raise the figure to £1,500 million and to £2,000 million and perhaps even approach the level which France has succeeded in attaining.
I urge my noble friend to consider the consequences if we always buy in the
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cheapest markets. If we do not look after our own industry we shall become a deindustrialised agricultural country again and in that instance this Government will not be in power and I suspect that the social democrats will not be in power either. We shall have an extreme Government of some sort in this country; we shall have serious unemployment and we shall no longer play a leading part in the free world. So I urge my noble friend to look at this memorandum, to consider its implications and to see what action can be taken to protect our high technology industries and make sure that they are kept usefully employed and exporting, as they have always done in the past.
Lord CARVER: My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, will he say whether he has considered the point, which was frequently made to me by my French colleagues, when I was a Chief of Staff—that their forces suffered very considerably from the fact that the French Government put the needs of defence sales overseas before the needs of their own forces, and the forces were therefore forced to accept equipment which they did not want and which was designed primarily for overseas service? I would have said that this applied very much to French aircraft.
Lord ORR-EWING: Yes, my Lords. I recognise the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Carver. The French build naval ships on spec hoping to sell them to overseas customers, and if they do not do so they are added to the strength of the French Navy. They may not be the ideal weapon, but they are at least something in the hand. I feel at the moment that it is better to have something in the hands of our troops, who are under-armed (and, where they are armed, it is not with the most modern arms) than to wait for the most perfect weapon which completely meets our operational requirement. So, although I am most grateful for the noble Lord's intervention, I think there is another side to the question.
4.18 p.m.
Lord WINTERBOTTOM: My Lords, I should like to join with other noble Lords in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Newall, for introducing this debate. His speech was factual, cogent and short, and these are virtues in speaking which this House appreciates.

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One of the things which surprises me as I look at the defence scene is how little we look at the experience of previous generations. The Romans said quite clearly,
"If you wish for peace, prepare for war"—
"si vis pacem, para bellum"—
and they knew something about running a world system. In today's debate I think that no speaker would deny that the actual selling of our defence projects abroad is not to our national interest. It involves 75,000 jobs; £1,200 million worth we hope will be sold next year. These are very important economic figures, and perhaps more important still is the fact that by selling some of our equipment abroad the unit cost of that equipment drops. Because of the very high cost of research and development and of production facilities, it is cheaper for us to buy our Rapier air defence system if we are selling it in larger numbers abroad. I wish to put four questions to the noble Lord, Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal, who is to reply to the debate. I give him due warning, and I think he might perhaps indicate what is the significant saving in cost to this country in perhaps one or two weapons systems, where we have been successful in selling abroad substantially, for instance, the Rapier air defence system and, say, the Lynx helicopter.
My second point is to discuss what my noble friend Lord Shinwell (who speaks much better English than I do) described quite simply as the "moral argument". I was going to use the rather more pompous phrase, "the ethical parameters of selling weapons abroad". It is quite clear that as a nation we cannot neglect our moral views or our national interest in selling weapons abroad. The noble Lord, Lord Orr-Ewing, who has made an important contribution to this debate, made a point of praising France for her activities in the field of defence sales overseas. She has, of course, been very successful, but I doubt whether her ethical parameters are as narrow as ours.
One would perhaps draw attention to her selling a type of nuclear power station to Iraq, which she is attempting to force through, as an example of a very destabilising operation closely related to defence sales. For that reason we are not quite as limited as the French in our thinking when we come round to our defence policy
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and selling abroad. It is quite clear that a very large amount of equipment and materials which we send abroad are morally neutral, defensive equipment, defensive clothing, anti-riot equipment and so on. There is a whole range of other equipment which is purely defensive.
But at a certain point we must start questioning what we do and what we permit our industry to sell abroad. Of course one sells to one's allies, and I want to talk about the two-way street in a moment. We sell to many neutral nations and one must question what we sell to them. We even sell to communist countries. Do not let us forget that we are supplying and helping to create a production industry both in Romania and China for the Spey engine, which is an absolutely first-class jet engine for use in military aircraft. We do this because we believe that our interest is to support the Romanian and Chinese defence industries. That is a most unusual exception.
Whatever we do in this field must be related first of all to national interest and, secondly, to moral attitudes within this country. No one is going to expect us to sell abroad tactical nuclear weapons, although I presume it would be within our power to do so. I think it would be very helpful in this debate if the noble Lord, Lord Strathcona, would give certain indications—it is a very large subject, so he will want to limit his contribution—of what the ethical parameters are for the selling of weapons abroad.
The next point I want to make is again a comparatively simple one and contains a question. We enter into agreements with foreign nations to supply them with equipment and after-sales services and spares. Then the leadership of that nation collapses, the nation becomes unstable. We are left with vast unfinished contracts. I am thinking in particular of Iran. I should like to ask the noble Lord how, for instance, we are coping with the problem of the Shah-Iran tank. The Shah-Iran is a very important development of the Chieftain. It is a magnificent piece of military equipment. I expect that in the ordnance factories of this country there are pieces of Shah-Iran in all sorts of stages of production, from heaps of spares to finished vehicles.
Have we any policy for absorbing into our own armed forces half-finished equip-

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ment which could be of value to our own armed forces, at considerably less cost than if we were starting from scratch, because a substantial part of the development cost and manufacturing cost has been paid for by some other nation? In particular in relation to this problem, I believe there is a fleet supply ship for Iran completed and awaiting dispatch, but apparently not being dispatched for reasons which perhaps we shall be told today.
I come to my last point. The noble Lord, Lord Orr-Ewing, raised the question of the two-way street. Of course, it is not only the two-way street with America; there is the general collaborative effort we are bringing about with our allies within NATO. Is the noble Lord, Lord Strathcona, satisfied that the collaboration is as close and as active as we would all wish it to be? We are, of course, having our successes; the Tornado, the Howitzer, and, of course, very interesting future development work, are examples of collaboration. In his summing-up would the noble Lord indicate whether the Government are satisfied that our allies are collaborating to the degree we would all wish to see?
4.27 p.m.
Lord CLIFFORD of CHUDLEIGH: My Lords, I also would like to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Newall, on bringing up this very important subject, particularly at this time. An ex-agent of mine, now in his eighties, has just written a book which is called Twice in a Lifetime. When he deals with the Second World War he says that so many of his contemporaries who had also been in the First World War entered into it in a great sense of disgust at having been let down twice in their lifetime by our politicians who had not prepared them for the holocaust that was to come.
A successful arms industry is an absolute essential for being prepared for war, or even continuing one once we are forced into it. That is why I think we should do all we can to encourage our overseas sales of arms, so as to have, if and when war does break out, a successful arms industry for ourselves, as well as for equipping ourselves at the moment. What better way than encouraging the private sector? What better way than ordering
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twice the number we need, for example, of ships, tanks, wireless sets, planes, et. al., for our forces so as to sell the surplus overseas? Of course, you can make a greater number more economically because you thereby reduce the unit cost.
What better way than encouraging industry to try out new ideas? Though it was not for sale overseas, the example we can all think of is the Spitfire and how it came to be developed before the last war in spite of official lagging behind. During the debate on 5th March we heard, for example, from the noble Lord, Lord Renton, how the countries which are now cited as the best prepared for civil defence—Switzerland, Sweden and so on—came to us for ideas and equipment, and that is what started off their civil defence. What happened to ours? We abolished it in 1967. We did not go on producing, except for a few minor smaller companies, because there was no longer the demand for the volume of equipment. Now when they come to renew, for example, their radiac equipment, they are quite likely to go elsewhere. Why should we not get back into the race by re-equipping those forces to which I have just referred and to which the noble Lord, Lord Renton, referred, and at the same time get that industry going again and back into the export market that we had previously?
Other examples can be quoted which are on the borderline, for example, between military and civil matters. When we had the old civil defence organisation we had what was then quite a good fire-fighting machine. We abolished civil defence and we put the green goddesses into mothballs. As regards civil defence we do not have an up-to-date vehicle. But why not help ourselves and our exports by, if necessary, subsidising to a certain extent this type of equipment? Surely the best thing economically is to get up-to-date and to sell as much of our equipment as possible. Home defence forces are road bound and are equipped with two-wheel drive vehicles. Why not give an impetus to equipping them with what they should have—namely, four-wheel drive vehicles, which is the modern up-to-date equipment for regular forces and which could, in a way, be self-financing by selling a proportion. We have dropped behind, having lead the way in four-wheel drives. Those are only a few examples of

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the way in which we could help our industries and ourselves to have a good machine and to be prepared.
Finally, pay no attention to the moaners of the "defence at all costs" school. Their taunts of being "merchants of death" are purely hypocritical. I remember an ex-Labour Minister of Defence talking to us—I think that I see the noble Lord, Lord Winterbottom, nodding his head—and saying that his strongest critics in another place would come to him privately and say, "What about a defence order to my constituency?" and so on. I hope that he told them, "You cannot have it both ways".
I hope that the Minister and the Government will take heed of the Motion of the noble Lord, Lord Newall, and that we shall have in future Government assistance for defence arms sales to get us off the ground and back to where we were previously.
4.34 p.m.
Lord BETHELL: My Lords, I should like to join with others who have congratulated my noble friend Lord Newall on introducing this extremely timely debate on arms sales overseas. At a time when our arms sales in various parts of the Middle East are severely hit by international crisis and various disagreeable events in Saudi Arabia and Iran, it is particularly appropriate that we should concentrate our minds on how the situation can be remedied.
If your Lordships will permit me, I should like to concentrate for a moment on what I see as the fundamental difficulty facing the United Kingdom in building an efficient and profitable arms industry at present. Let us face it: we are no longer the major arms producing country that we were decades ago. We are now a medium-sized industrial country and probably a less than medium-sized military country. It is very difficult for us to produce weapons profitably—given the difficulties that face British industry at the moment—from our present industrial base. The result has been what my noble friend Lord Orr-Ewing referred to as the one-way street with the United States—the sad fact that we sell to that country only one quarter of what we buy from it in the field of military equipment.
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How can we right that wrong? How can we turn the one-way street into a two-way street? I shall suggest a possible solution to which I hope my noble friend Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal will be able to give attention. He will recall that we have already been in correspondence about it. I am referring to a greater involvement on behalf of our partners in the European Community. The Community is, after all, the only comparable industrial market to those of the super powers, the only market which could—if a system could he worked out—enable us to produce weapons with the same sort of markets and the same sort of outlets, as the United States.
In the past we have tried to approach the problem of the narrowness of our market by the system of the consortium. With the aid of the Independent European Programme Group, we have set up consortia among our European allies bilaterally, trilaterally and quadrilaterally. But I think that it is generally agreed among producers of sophisticated arms in this country—including those who have taken part in consortia—that it is not the ideal way to produce the best weapon and the weapon that will sell the most and make the most profit.
Different countries have different systems of subcontraction and they will not undertake to purchase a weapon unless they, as part of the consortium, make part of the weapon. The result is often cumbersome. If it is said that a camel looks like a horse designed by a committee, I must say that a sophisticated weapon produced by a European consortium very often looks like a machine designed by a committee. No wonder the United States manages to outbuild us, outpace us scientifically, and out-sell us in this extremely important market.
Therefore, I should like to urge the Government and my noble friend to take another look at the whole question of European arms procurement. He will know that it has been considered in the European Parliament many times" in the past years and he will, of course, he familiar with the Klepsch Report. He will know of the debate last September in the European Parliament, when a broad consensus was felt among members from all member States that some Community element needs to he brought into arms

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procurement as part of a common industrial policy. I do not mean a common defence policy; I mean an industrial policy of the Nine, which already exists in many areas, but which for the moment is excluded from the Treaty of Rome. It is particularly right that we should think about this at the moment because there is a new mood on the question of defence coming to the fore in the European Community.
I wonder whether your Lordships have read, for instance, the interview given by President Giscard d'Estaing in Le Figaro two weeks ago, in which he spoke in a way which no French President could possibly have spoken a few months ago on the question of European defence and European co-operation in defence. Until a few months ago that was anathema to every French party, but now across the Channel they are beginning to think about it and, of course, it needs little imagination to understand why they are beginning to think about it. The matter is now urgent. It must be considered and it seems to me that this is the only solution to the problems of middle-sized countries which cannot efficiently produce sophisticated weapons.
Therefore, can I ask my noble friend to give us his latest ideas on this subject of European co-operation? What has he done about the ideas expressed in the Klepsch Report? Does he still have a fundamental objection to participation by the European Commission in building a defence element into European industrial policy? It seems to me that very often there is something of a block on this subject—the question of involvement of the European Commission in the industrial base—in the Ministry of Defence.
Finally, I am not suggesting that the European Community should produce rifles and ammunition; this can quite simply be done on a national basis, provided that basic agreement can be worked out among allied countries about harmonisation. But it seems to me that just as in the field of energy it makes no sense for a country of our size to go it alone, so it makes every sense for us to combine with countries of similar industrial potential to pool our resources and build an energy policy. It makes every sense to have the JET project, with the help of
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European industry, sited in one Member-State, which in this case happens to be this country. By the same token it makes sense to conceive a European element in arms procurement, not in order to produce small arms—such as revolvers—but in order to produce the underwater weapons, the satellites, the computers and the tracking equipment which only very sophisticated industry and very large investments can produce on a profitable and high-level basis. Can my noble friend please consider this matter and let us know his thoughts?
4.42 p.m.
Lord PEART: My Lords, first, I should like to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Newall, for introducing this short debate and for the way in which he did so. As one of his colleagues said, he always speaks succinctly; it is a credit to him and I am glad that he has raised this subject. In a way it is rather a pity that we are not debating this matter when we debate the major Defence Estimates.
I understand the idealism in relation to European unity and the Community which prompts the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, but I take the view that the French should recognise that NATO is the main organisation for the defence of Europe and the West. Whatever the noble Lord may say about the French attitude, that is their problem and they should show more sympathy towards NATO. As he knows, there have been difficulties. I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal. who will be replying for the Government. will agree with me that the policy of Her Majesty's Government is to strengthen NATO. The noble Lord. Lord Bethell, referred to the need to have a European arms organisation; that body should be within NATO, and quite separate from the European Community as such. I think that the noble Lord would probably appreciate this if he were to read carefully the treaty that set up NATO itself. I am not opposed to the EEC at all, unlike my noble friend Lord Shinwell. who takes a very different view from me. But I believe that defence should be in the hands of NATO and not in the hands of the European Community.
Lord BETHELL: My Lords, if I may interrupt the noble Lord, Lord Peart,

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very briefly, may I ask him whether he appreciates that defence is not an isolated matter; it must be connected with the industrial base of allied countries? If one has a united industrial policy among the European Community, does it not follow that there will be overlapping with the defence procurement policies of those same countries?
Lord PEART: My Lords, we can still have a common industrial policy, but there should be no overlapping; NATO is the main body and should be responsible. The noble Lord shakes his head; I am sorry, but we disagree on this. I think that this has been a good debate. The noble Lord, Lord Newall, mentioned the value of defence for our people, with exports also affecting the employment of 80,000 people. Many parts of this industry employ skilled technicians; indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Orr-Ewing, is an example—he is a physicist and knows the industry. It is true that with the sophisticated methods that we now have, inevitably this industry attracts distinguished people and makes a major contribution to our country. I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Newall, asked whether we could expand our small-arms sales and mentioned that we import from different parts of the world. Reference has been made to how we import from the United States on a ratio of 4 to 1, which shows that we have a long way to go in the field of supplying equipment which is so important.
I know that we have had our successes. Tornado, which we debated recently, is one example, and another is the Harrier aircraft. Therefore, do not let us be too pessimistic. Let us remember that the arms sales' department is important. The noble Lord, Lord Orr-Ewing, rather chided the previous Labour Government! we did set up an organisation; it was a Labour Government which started it. When my noble friend Lord Shinwell was Minister of Defence, generally speaking, he always got his way in a Labour Cabinet. Therefore, it is wrong for anyone to assume that this is a party issue. I have been a member of several Labour Governments and have played my part. not as a Minister of Defence, but as a Minister for another department. I can assure noble Lords that we always concentrated upon seeking to build up our defence position.
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Therefore it is very wrong to drag up old arguments of who was responsible in the past. After all, I could go right back to the 1930s when Mr. Chamberlain ran this country, and mention the sorry mess that he made of it, including the AngloGerman Naval Agreement, and matters of that kind. But we must forget that; we must think in terms of building up an efficient sales organisation. I believe that this will be appreciated by many people and will improve our trade.
The noble Lord, Lord Newall, said that he wanted small-arms in an emergency. He asked about France; I have dealt with France; I think that France should play a bigger part in NATO, but so far she has not. There is no question about the home Government on this matter. I believe that the last Labour Government and the present Government are still seeking to build up our organisation. The Defence Sales Organisation exists. Mention has been made of the Iranian tank; there is also the marine defence sales, dealing with Vospers, Yarrow and Vickers, which was mentioned by my noble friend Lord Winterbottom who, as noble Lords and I know only too well, is a very distinguished former Minister who has played a major part in speeding up the defence needs of our country. I pay tribute to him. I was only sorry that he left me at that time. Nevertheless, he still takes a passionate interest in this matter.
Then there is the question of a larger share of our market. My noble friend Lord Shinwell spoke about some of the moral aspects of the problem, and about those who oppose arms, and I agree with him. On the other hand, I recognise that we must have a correct balance. There is no question that in some parts of the world tractors are as important as tanks; I remember making a speech in the Council of Europe on this matter. But we need to ensure that we have adequate defences and if, at the same time as supplying our own industry, we can export, that is all to the good. I would argue that our country is well aware of the importance of this matter. Indeed, the Statement on the Defence Estimates mentions a figure of 200,000 people. It is a very admirable document and one of the best documents that I have seen emanate from the Ministry of Defence over the

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years. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal, that his colleagues have done well to produce this.
Mention has been made of France, how she dominates the Middle East, and her Mirage fighters, and how important it is that we should have a sensible diplomacy which will enable us also to play our part there. Whether this can be done, I cannot say. In this short debate I would only argue that we must try to do our best, and over the years we have been fairly successful. Some of our tanks have been sold in different parts of the world—the Chieftain is one example—and the aircraft which I mentioned. I am not going to waste the time of the House tonight. I believe that the noble Lord has made his case. There are others still to join in the debate, and I said I would be brief. We have nothing to apologise for, and we should not have any party policy on this issue.
4.51 p.m.
The MINISTER of STATE, MINISTRY of DEFENCE (Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal): My Lords, I, like all other noble Lords, am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Newall, for the fact that he initiated this debate and for the manner in which he did it. May I start by telling him that, as I hope I shall establish, we certainly are not complacent on this question of defence sales. Indeed, I am not even sure that it is true to say that we are wholly pleased. Nevertheless, they are an important and not totally unsatisfactory part of the defence scene.
I said before, when we were talking about the Harrier, that defence debates of this kind on comparatively minor issues make a contribution, and this was something that the acting Leader of the House was pursued about almost to the point of harassment earlier this afternoon. I believe that debates of this kind are extremely useful for clearing the air on specific issues before we get down to the major debate associated with the defence White Paper. I must not lose this opportunity of thanking the noble Lord, Lord Peart, for the kind remarks he has made about the defence White Paper. I shall return in a minute to the question of dis-
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closure of information, which is always a vexed issue in the defence world.
On a number of occasions in the past noble Lords have voiced concern about certain aspects of the arms trade. In a way, it is rather sad that those noble Lords who feel like this have not chosen to participate in this debate, because we have had almost total unanimity. I suppose I ought to be grateful for that, but in a sense it blunts the thrust of our debates when we get quite the degree of agreement we have had this afternoon on this issue. I am sure that underneath that surface there in fact exists a considerable body of opinion, which I believe we should respect, which differs from us on this issue. I shall try in a moment to deal with the ethical parameters of the noble Lord, Lord Winterbottom, but may I start by addressing myself to the problem of human rights, which has occurred on a number of occasions, and this might give some indication of the ethical approach of the Government to this difficult question.
The views of our critics are strongly held and sincerely felt, and we respect them. We also have to accept that the sale of defence equipment is an emotive subject. It brings in all kinds of contentious moral and philosophical views. In particular, defence sales to countries where there are gross abuses of human rights inevitably raise controversy, and the Government recognise this. But the situation varies from country to country, and we believe that it is unrealistic and impractical to try to adopt a simple single rule of thumb by which we can measure the extent of these abuses which should, or should not, influence the sale of defence equipment.
Governments not only in this country but elsewhere are bound to take a more pragmatic view. This is not to say that in this country and in this Government we do not take full account of the character of the regime concerned in arms sales and its record on human rights and the use to which equipment is likely to be put. I am saying that human rights are a factor which is constantly in our minds in the consideration given to individual sales proposals and in the decisions which are reached upon them by Ministers. It would be too much to expect that noble Lords would accept that the Government always get the right answers, but I should like to assure noble Lords that human

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rights are invariably taken into account and are given their full weight. Of course any United Nations' embargo is fully respected.
This gives me an opportunity to deal with some of the specific questions I was asked on 10th March in this House. Perhaps I can do a brief tour d'horizon of some of the countries concerned. First, Uganda. Once the nature of the Amin régime emerged, the current contracts for the delivery of armoured vehicles were cancelled and no further export licences for military equipment were granted. Secondly, the Palestine Liberation Organisation. I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Janner, is not here. British-made equipment may well have found its way into the PLO hands—perhaps they have a recognition of the superior quality of British-made equipment. But the sale of equipment by the Government to the PLO has not been, and would not be, considered, much less approved.
Thirdly, there is Ethiopia. Defence equipment has not been supplied to Ethiopia in the last two years or so and there is no intention that it should be at present. Fourthly, Argentina. The Government's view is that a general embargo on defence sales would not be justified. However, we continue to withhold approval for the supply of equipment which could be used against the civilian population in Argentina. It is in this sense that I referred, during the debate on 10th March, to withholding the supply of arms to those countries which were guilty of torture.
Fifthly, Iran. Here I am in a slight difficulty because the situation may have changed even since I got myself briefed for this debate. However, no arms or defence equipment have been sent from this country to Iran since the hostages were seized in November of last year. You have to remember that in taking action of this kind you run the risk of losing your credibility with the countries with whom you have signed contracts. Britain's reliability in their willingness to perform contracts into which they have entered is an important input into the likely success which you will achieve in arms sales.
The noble Lord, Lord Winterbottom,
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asked me—and I should love to duck the issue—about the question of the "Kharg". She is indeed completed. It is an embarrassment to us. She has not been delivered to the Iranians, and we sincerely hope that she will not be until the hostages are released—in fact, she certainly will not be. But it is a very difficult situation. A large sum of money is involved. The shipyard concerned stands to lose a lot of money on a day-by-day basis until the ship is delivered; and it is a contract that we are having to dishonour. We are doing our best to avoid this becoming a major disagreement with a country with which we believe ultimately we shall once again want to do business.
Perhaps this is a good moment for me to deal with another question that the noble Lord raised, regarding the frustrated contracts that were entered into with the Shah; and in particular the question of the large number of tanks. As is known, some of those tanks have now been sold to the Jordanians, and we are looking at the possibility of taking some of the improved version, of what used to he known as the Shir II and which is now known as Challenger into the British Army in order to give it the benefit of the Chobham armour with which they are equipped. There is also the Rolls-Royce engine. It is currently the engine for those tanks, and it is intended to be the engine to be used in the next generation of tank to be developed for the British Army. This is a matter which is not easy to accommodate within the defence budget, but we very much hope that we shall be able to do so, and a decision cannot be very long delayed.
Coming back to arms exports to certain countries, I should say that Pakistan has also cropped up. Pakistan now has 80,000 Soviet troops in neighbouring Afghanistan, and we believe that in these circumstances it would be imprudent for us to withhold the sales of appropriate defence equipment, should the Pakistanis look to us for it. Of course there is always the little matter of finance. So far as Indonesia, Singapore and Turkey are concerned, a refusal to sell defence equipment there would be totally at variance with our overall relationship with these friendly countries. Turkey's position as a member of NATO on the exposed flank

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is an added consideration, but it is no secret, my Lords, that the Turkish economy is in a mess, and the Turks have no money. However, that particular issue is not the one that we are addressing this afternoon.
I hope I have indicated that the Government take a responsible attitude towards defence sales. I merely thought, particularly since the noble Lord, Lord Winter-bottom, had raised the issue, that it was right to emphasise that this Government, and other governments, are bound to take into account a range of factors—political, strategic, security, in the world sense and in the economic sense—when considering our arms control and our international obligations. These also bear on the question of defence sales—
Lord AVEBURY: My Lords, is the Minister aware that there will be great disappointment that he has resiled from the categorical statement that he made in the House on 10th March that we would not export arms to a country which is guilty of torture? Is he also aware that that statement is readily monitored and policed, whereas the general assurances that he has given, following his predecessors, that we take into consideration human rights factors in the sale of arms, are very difficult to evaluate in particular cases? However, in the case of Argentina, which he was talking about the other day when he said that we would not export arms to a country which is guilty of torture, does the fact that we would not sell arms of a particular kind where they could be used against the civilian population show that we recognise the truth of the assertions which have now been made—following many others, such as those by Amnesty International—in the recent report of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission, which indicated that torture is still prevalent in that country?
Lord STRATHCONA and MOUNT ROYAL: My Lords, the question of establishing the existence of torture and the definition of torture is inevitably a very difficult and an emotional one. After all, it is worth reminding the noble Lord that this country has been found guilty of practising torture. I think that we would be rather keen to deny that, but the fact is that we have been accused, and indeed
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to a limited extent have been found guilty, of so behaving. So I believe that this matter is exceedingly difficult, and I dare say that under some definitions there are practically no countries in the world which do not resort to what some people would regard as torture. I suggest to the noble Lord that this is not a black and white issue. We must do our best to try to use a balanced judgment in a matter of this kind. If what I have just said disappoints the noble Lord, I am sorry, but it represents a statement of the Government's position on certain countries, one of which is Argentina. I should like to add one further point on this. Because we choose to do a trade in arms with a country, it does not necessarily mean that we are placing any kind of seal of political approval upon the complexion of the government in that particular country.
Perhaps slightly late in my speech I may turn to the more positive aspects of defence sales, which in fact have already been covered very well by a number of noble Lords. First, may I say that there is no doubt of the Government's view, with which I wholly go along, that there are substantial benefits for this country associated with defence sales. It is an obvious point that these sales make a contribution to both the economy and employment. Noble Lords have already produced a number of figures, but I think that they bear repeating. Defence sales overseas represent between a quarter and a third of the output of the defence industry of the country and over half the output of the Royal Ordnance factories. As the noble Lords, Lord Newall, and Lord Orr-Ewing, paid, the value of defence sales in 1979–80 was estimated at about £1,100 million, which represents about 2½ per cent. of total United Kingdom exports. It is worth making the point that the figures that the noble Lord, Lord Orr-Ewing, used have been corrected for the purposes of inflation, and in fact the figure for defence sales has remained remarkably steady, apart from a rise during the two years when we were selling to Persia.
It has also been said that defence sales are estimated to maintain about 70,000 to 80,000 man-years of employment per year directly, with probably as many man-years again indirectly, although that is of course more difficult to estimate—
Lord STONE: My Lords, may I interrupt the noble Lord for a moment to put just one question? Have the countries referred to paid for all these items?
Lord STRATHCONA and MOUNT ROYAL: My Lords, I wonder whether the noble Lord is referring to the countries involved in the defence sales of £1,100 million, or to the other countries that I was talking about. I would hope, and believe, that the general answer to the question is, Yes, but I have no doubt that the countries are not all perfect in this respect—and here I can think of one country in particular. However, generally speaking, the answer is, Yes, and, again generally speaking, fairly specific arrangements are made to ensure that the money is successfully collected. It is true that many of the Iranian contracts were paid for ahead, but perhaps we should not draw too many deductions from why that was done. The fact is that it was done.
We are saying that there are distinct benefits to be derived from defence sales, which we should not lightly cast aside, and they help us to maintain a vital industry for ourselves. I cannot give the figures for which the noble Lord, Lord Winterbottom, was asking regarding the effect on the unit costs to us of selling equipment overseas. This is not a very easy equation to work out, as the noble Lord will appreciate. However, I think it beyond question that any sales made overseas are bound to contribute to reducing the initial overhead costs incurred in designing the equipment and in setting up the productive capabilities for making it. Of course, having our own defence industry is an important safeguard for our own security; and, indeed, it is also a very valuable source of technical innovation which it is very doubtful we could achieve in almost any other way. The spin-offs that we get from research done for military purposes are extremely valuable and very considerable, and would probably be unobtainable were it not for having our own defence industry.
My Lords, I have dealt with the question of the contribution which is made by longer production runs, but it is difficult to produce chapter and verse and to give your Lordships an indication of what contribution this makes. There is a slightly less specific but nonetheless valuable benefit in terms of the political and
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defence relations that we maintain with our friends and allies to whom we sell equipment, and I believe this is possibly an aspect which is of increasing importance as we witness the kind of Soviet aggression which we have seen recently in Afghanistan.
In the past, questions have been raised about the Government's general approach to the disclosure of information on defence sales and the details of individual transactions. This is one of those items which have traditionally not been answered by way of Questions in either House. This is something that was touched upon in the Question period on 10th March, and contrasts were drawn between our practice and that of the Americans. The release of information to Congress is a well-known feature of the American system, and potential customers are of course aware of this. They are prepared to accept the penalties—and they are penalties—which this involves. The fact remains that, as in the civil sector, the sale of defence equipment is a very competitive business, and we are in no doubt that, in general, our customers prefer to maintain the confidentiality of their transactions. There may be a number of reasons. There may be political reasons, there may be national security reasons or there may be commercial reasons which lead them in this direction; and, frequently, this is an attitude which is shared by the supplier of the equipment, as well. We seek to respect the views of both the supplier and the customer in this respect, but if they are prepared to release the information about their transactions, we take the view that that is a matter for them and it is not one in which the Government would wish to intervene. But in fact the Government do release rather more information in connection with defence sales than some people realise. We believe that, taken together, all that is available represents a considerable flow of information on the defence sales issue which enables those who are interested to study it.
Perhaps I may now turn to some of the more specific issues about which I was asked. There was the question, which I do not think was asked in a wholly kindly way by my noble friend Lord Newall, about International Military Services, and whether we were about to restructure them. We see undoubted advantages in

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the commercial approach to defence sales, and the IMS are well placed to bring this to bear. But consideration of policy of this sort involves questions of both commercial and Government accountability, and it takes a little time. As soon as we are able to announce anything on this, Parliament will be informed. Then the noble Lord asked me about delays in export licensing. The Defence Sales Organisation aims to provide general guidance in response to preliminary inquiries within about three weeks, and I really do not think it would be reasonable to expect this period to be shortened. But if my noble friend has examples of longer delays I should be very happy to look into them. The licence applications are a matter for the Department of Trade. We try to establish overall policies, but for reasons I have already explained it is not a very easy matter.
So far as concerns the question of German arms and the use by us of American small arms for our forces in Northern Ireland, these are not the same issue; and there was in fact a third issue of the SAS use of German equipment. I would say as a general point that it ill becomes us to be too narrow in our outlook about our willingness to buy better equipment when it is available abroad. If we are going to claim the right to sell our equipment abroad and expect people to give it a fair assessment, then it is difficult for us to say that we will not buy it if it is not invented here. So far as concerns the question of the manufacture of German-designed equipment in this country, to which the noble Lord has referred, I am bound to tell him that it is news to me but if he would like to give me some more details I should be very happy to look into the matter.
I ought perhaps to deal with the matter of the two-way street. It is true that the ratio between sales by the Americans to us and sales from us to the Americans is still between three and four to one, but one has to bear in mind in judging this that there is an enormous disparity in the industrial base and the purchasing power of the Americans. I do not think we do all that badly, but we are constantly seeking ways to improve this situation. I can assure noble Lords that some of the bargaining is tough and very long-winded, and they should never under-rate the
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power of the American industrial lobby, which makes it exceedingly difficult. A lot of noble aspirations are mouthed, but it is very difficult to turn these into reality. Noble Lords who have had experience will know very well that there have been many disappointments down this road. There is one other point which my noble friend made. I thought my noble friend Lord Newall was rather over-sweeping in saying that arms buyers do not like negotiating with Governments. In fact, there are certain Governments, notably the Governments of the Middle East, who do not like doing business with anybody other than other Governments. One has to recognise that practice and attitudes in different countries vary to quite a substantial extent.
I turn now to the question raised by my noble friend Lord Bethell. With great respect to him, I do not think it really has a great deal to do with the question of arms sales. I do not think our view has altered, and I was grateful for the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Peart, on this question. This is essentially a matter for NATO. The countries in NATO are different from the countries in the EEC. It is exceedingly difficult to see how you could relate having an armament industry policy in the EEC, which is one group—and goodness knows they are not noted for their ability to decide about anything—to a coherent policy within NATO—and it has to be said that even that is not too easy. I have said in this House before that the difficulty of collaboration on equipment goes up in geometric proportion to the number of countries engaged. It is very difficult to get collaboration with one other country; it is at least four times as difficult to get collaboration with two other countries, and I have no doubt that it will be 16 times as difficult to get collaboration with three. It is a much tougher proposition than many people would imagine. I am bound to say to the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, that I would view with the gravest of doubts the prospects of getting involved in a major bureaucratic operation involving the EEC in an arms production policy for Europe. That is not to say that we do not recognise the need for standardisation and the many logistical benefits and production benefits that come from it if it can be achieved successfully.
Baroness GAITSKELL: My Lords, do we have to say that there is torture in this country in order to point out that there is a great deal of immorality about the sales of arms? I have been troubled about noble Lords saying that we have torture in this country.
Lord STRATHCONA and MOUNT ROYAL: My Lords, I must tell the noble Baroness that I was not saying we had torture in this country. I was saying that other people have said that we have torture in this country; and I was saying that to indicate to her that assertions about the existence of torture are extremely difficult to establish and it depends on who you are listening to. Very few people would agree on exactly what constitutes torture in the sense that the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, used the expression. That was my point.
The matter of the French. Very difficult. I was grateful for the contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Carver, nobly standing up, as no doubt he did in his uniformed days, for our services. The French services occasionally feel that they are having to take second place to their industrial lobby. As one who deals with the matter of equipment and who passionately believes in exports as a benefit to this country, I am bound to tell him that there are moments when I wish we had a policy more on the lines of the French policy so far as the relationship between our industry and our services is concerned. But it is not our present policy. Currently we aim to get the best equipment, and what we believe to be the most appropriate equipment, for our own forces and then to try to persuade other people abroad that what we think is good for us ought to be good for them.
I do not know that I should try to sweep up the various comments I have made because I should be in danger of repeating myself. Already I have gone on for too long. We try in all our examination of export issues to give the proper weight to all the issues, including those of human rights to which noble Lords have drawn attention, but at the end of the day—let us say it again—this is a trading nation and my noble friend Lord Orr-Ewing is right that we must go increasingly for the sale of sophisticated equipment because that should be our expertise and this
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country will not survive unless it maintains it.
5.23 p.m.
Lord NEWALL: My Lords, with half an hour left of the two and a half hour debate there is a small temptation for me to go on a bit and say all the things I wanted to say and, perhaps, pick up some of the pieces. I can assure noble Lords there is no chance of that happening. I think that the subject of defence sales is undoubtedly a very controversial and emotive one. We have heard some good speeches. I am grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part, although, like my noble friend Lord Strathcona, I am rather sad that we have not had a fighting speech from somebody who thinks that the whole thing is totally wrong. Everybody who wanted to speak has had the opportunity. Many points have come out which I hope the Government will study. I am quite sure we have a long way to go before we get the picture right.
I know that the difficult question of human rights which has been mentioned recently by my noble friend Lord Strathcona is a very tricky one; but sometimes I think we ban the sales of arms to the wrong countries. However, I did not go into that in my original speech; neither did I discuss different countries; so, without further ado, I should like to ask leave to withdraw my Motion.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

NUCLEAR WEAPONS
5.25 p.m.
Lord NOEL-BAKER Lord NOEL-BAKER rose to call attention to the speech made in Strasbourg in May 1979 by the late Lord Mountbatten of Burma on the subject of nuclear weapons and their use in which he said of nuclear weapons that "Their existence only adds to our perils"; and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords, I rise to draw attention to a speech in Strasbourg in May 1979 by the late Lord Mountbatten of Burma. The speech was made to the Scientific Council of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, widely known as SIPRI. It was about the danger of a nuclear war. Some noble Lords knew the late Lord Mountbatten in greater intimacy than I, but I

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worked with him when he was the last Viceroy and Governor of the Indian Empire and I was almost the last Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations. Together we prepared the Bill for Indian independence which I passed through the other place. So I had an opportunity given to very few to understand the historic value of his work as Viceroy and the genius and statesmanship which he displayed. I could spend an hour describing the magnificent achievements of his magnificent career. But your Lordships know it all.
I want only to stress this afternoon that by any test he was the greatest authority in the world on every aspect of armaments and war. His speech was a passionate protest against the present preparations to use nuclear arms in war. But it was not only a warning that we could not fight our wars with nuclear weapons; it was a warning that we must not fight our wars at all. His speech was a passionate plea that the arms race must be arrested and reversed and that the world must speedily and drastically disarm. He judged—rightly, as I think—that the present arms race has reached a point of frenzy, with some new and terrible device appearing almost every month: last year, it was the MX, the US mobile missile, and the Soviet SS20; in December, it was NATO's Cruise and Pershing missiles; three weeks ago in our Defence White Paper, it was our return to poison gas and germs and our giving guns to women a long step downwards to the pit.
Seventy years ago I lived through the arms race before the First World War. A great Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Earl Grey of Falloden, made desperate efforts to avert the outbreak of war. When it was over, he wrote his long-considered verdict on its cause: the arms race.
"The moral is obvious",
he said,
"great armaments lead inevitably to war. The nations must disarm or perish".
Today the Governments of the world have seven men under arms for every one that they had in 1913. They are spending 10 times the real resources on armaments that they were spending then. Their weapons are a thousand times as powerful and destructive. Like Earl Grey, Lord
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Mountbatten judged that the arms race is not a policy that makes sense, increasing military expenditure every year, planning new weapons for the 1990s. It is not a policy, it is a drift to what he called the precipice. Seeking security by expanding arms, with each side saying that it can only negotiate from strength, is to chase a mirage in the desert sand. The arms race is not a policy; it is a drift. It is the paralysis of thought and reason, an acceptance of the unacceptable.
Lord Mountbatten began his speech with the sentence which was the key to everything that he said:
"Do the frightening facts of the arms race show that we are rushing headlong to the precipice, which make any of those responsible for this disastrous course pull themselves together and reach for the brakes?"
He argued in his speech that he had made his views quite plain when he was chairman of the British Chiefs of Staff. And so he had! In March 1961 the Prime Ministers of the Commonwealth met in London. There were 13 of them. For three full days and some hours more they discussed disarmament. At the end they unanimously adopted a declaration of which I quote the first two paragraphs:
"(1) The aim must be to achieve total world disarmament subject to effective inspection and control.
(2) In view of the slaughter and destruction experienced in conventional wars and of the difficulty of preventing a conventional war once started from developing into a nuclear war, our aim must be nothing less than the complete abolition of all the means of making war of every kind".
The author of that declaration was Lord Mountbatten and so persuasive was he that it was adopted by the five Prime Ministers from the old Commonwealth—all Conservatives—and by eight Prime Ministers of the new Commonwealth, including Pandit Nehru and also Field Marshal Ayub Khan of Pakistan. Mountbatten held that view on armament.
But some noble Lords may ask: "Was it really Mountbatten's view? After all, he was a military man". Yes, my Lords, it was his view. Some years ago, in an earlier meeting of the Scientific Council of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute I took part with him in a disarmament debate. I made a speech in support of what Lord Selwyn-Lloyd proposed to the United Nations General Assembly in 1959: the reduction

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of armament to the level at which no Government retained more forces and equipment than it needed to keep internal order, and to make a contribution of manpower to a United Nations peace force. Lord Selwyn-Lloyd defined his purpose in alternative words. Using the language used by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1944, he said:
"Reduction to the level at which aggressive war becomes impossible because no Government has the armaments to start it".
As we rose from the table at the end of the debate, I said to Lord Mountbatten, who had been sitting next to me, "Dickie, did I say anything you could not take"? He replied with warmth: "My dear boy, I agreed with every word".
Lord Mountbatten began his speech, as I have recounted, by his all-out condemnation of the disastrous course of the arms race which is rushing us headlong to the precipice. He ended it by reflecting on the great advances which science rightly used, could give to all mankind. He said that it is up to the people to make a moral and philosophic choice. It is up to mail to save himself from himself.
I conclude with two reflections on the present arms race. I have a young and lovely friend who has worked in recent times as a district nurse in Fulham. She has found things that have deeply shocked her: a family of six living in a single room; children so hungry that when they go to school they cannot learn their letters and they cannot do their sums; adults so permanently underfed that they are always ill. In the last great war the British people were united and I joined Sir Winston Churchill's coalition on the principle of fair shares for all. But no fair shares in our Welfare State in 1980. There are 800 million people in other countries who now starve. Millions and millions are spent on improving tanks and adding frigates to our fleet—perhaps irrelevant to the nuclear attack which the Government say that they think we must expect.
Secondly, I recall a paradoxical result of the Vietnam war. In that war the lovely forests of Vietnam were destroyed by poison gas and most forest people suffered with the trees. But the tigers flourished. They grew in numbers; they became more daring and aggressive, readier to invade a village and steal a baby from its mother's door. They had
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learned the lesson of gunfire. When the firing ceased they hurried to the scene of battle and found fresh human corpses and helpless wounded men whom they could eat. There are others beside the tigers who batten on the arms race. They have become more numerous and more powerful, and they are attacking the basic right on which our democracy is built: the right of the citizen to know.
Twelve years ago the BBC made a film called "The War Game", which featured what would happen if an H-bomb fell in Kent. The film was never shown on the television screens by the BBC. Under some kind of pressure, sinister but unexplained, "The War Game" was suppressed. In 1978 a Special Session of the United Nations Conference on Disarmament was held. It was the greatest international conference that ever met. I was there. It had sensational front-page news for every paper in the world, but it went unreported. Under some kind of pressure, unexplained, there was a conspiracy of silence—so much so that most people in this country and in North America do not know today that the Special Session ever met.
In 1979 Lord Mountbatten's speech was by far the most dramatic and the most sensational utterance that was made; but not a single organ of the media reproduced a line, and they have not used it yet. The conspirators, the tigers, thought they had buried it for good and all. But Lord Mountbatten told his friends that he hoped to be remembered by this speech. It was his last gift, his last service to his nation and to the nations of mankind. The speech has been rescued from oblivion: It is becoming known to the nations of the world. In it he said that the peoples must make a moral and a philosophic choice: They must decide what they will do.
The speech is known today in every country. Thanks to Mountbatten, the peoples have begun to learn the frightening facts of the arms race. Thanks to him, they will make the moral choice of which he spoke. Thanks to him, they will decide that science will be used for human welfare and not for war. Thanks to him, we may yet see the magic transformation of our world society of which, for long ages, seers and philosophers have always dreamed. My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.
5.45 p.m.
Lord GLADWYN: My Lords, we must all thank the noble Lord, Lord Noel-Baker, for giving us this opportunity of debating the great speech which the late Lord Mountbatten made in May of last year. I feel sure that most of your Lordships, like myself, will undoubtedly agree in principle with everything that the noble Lord, Lord Noel-Baker, has said. Unfortunately, the possibility of world disarmament, controlled and monitored, is still far away. The limitation of armaments is nearer and in both directions but particularly in the latter, we should make every effort to make progress, even if we do not think it is likely to come about fairly soon.
In this short intervention, I should like to dwell on one inference only which may be drawn from Lord Mountbatten's speech. Your Lordships may perhaps recall that for at least 10 years I have held and expressed in this House, the view that, whatever the importance of nuclear power may be as a deterrent against the exercise by others of such power, the nuclear weapon itself is not one that could possibly be used with profit by the countries of the North Atlantic Alliance in a first strike in any circumstances whatever. I may be contradicted, but I believe that is the essential message which was conveyed by the late Lord Mountbatten and, if I interpret his words correctly, by the noble Lord, Lord Zuckerman, in his excellent piece in The Times last January.
I would go further and say that no such action could be authorised by any Head of Government who was not either crazy or the potential victim of a group of crazy supporters. It follows that the present NATO strategy of "flexible response", which involves the possible employment in Europe by the President of the United States of so-called "tactical" nuclear weapons on a first strike is no longer tenable, in the sense that only if the Soviet Government believe that the President of the United States may go off his head can it be regarded as in any way "credible". Perhaps they will not discount this possibility, but it still strikes me as a rather shaky basis for a long-term policy.
For it must be obvious, now that the Soviet Union has achieved nuclear parity, and in all probability nuclear superiority,
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that the come-back to such an action would be immediate and devastating and that the resulting nuclear exchange would almost inevitably escalate. Conceivably, such escalation could, owing to the existence of the British and French strategic nuclear forces, be confined to central Europe but it would be rash to depend on this. What would be almost certain is that the two super-powers would see no advantage in bombing each other. Even the theoretical possibility that the Soviet Union could, on a first strike, eliminate all the American land-based ICBMs can probably be dismissed as much too risky. So, though a Soviet offensive might or might not be halted as a result of a nuclear exchange in Europe, the continent would undoubtedly he devastated on both sides of the dividing line, but chiefly on our side, owing to the greater density of population.
When I say "devastated" I mean largely destroyed, for even if the exchange—a neutral word beloved by nuclear strategists—were limited to military objectives, such as ports, airfields, ammunition dumps (and what would happen if they were exploded, more especially if they were nuclear dumps?) marshalling yards, command posts, barracks or communication centres or whatever, the damage done and the number of people killed or injured, however accurate the weapons might be, would be vast on both sides, so much so that it would be difficult in practice to distinguish between limited and all-out nuclear war, which would of course be so horrifying as to beggar all description.
It follows that civil defence against possible nuclear attack is a dangerous delusion: a delusion because even the expenditure, in peacetime, by a Government possessing what would have to be wartime powers for spending many billions of pounds could only notionally save the lives of a few million people, who would nevertheless find life intolerable after the holocaust; dangerous because it would create the impression that our Government could, with advantage to the nation, give the signal or acquiesce in the giving of the signal for a "first strike" of nuclear weapons in the event of general hostilities.
Now, happily, all this does not mean that nuclear war, or even a so-called

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conventional war, is inevitable. There is no reason to suppose that—Afghanistan or no Afghanistan—the Soviet Government has taken leave of its senses. Nor does it mean that we should go in for unilateral disarmament, which, as I understand it, was rightly condemned both by Lord Mountbatten and by the noble Lord, Lord Zuckerman. What it does mean is, first, that if for any reason there should be an unresolved clash between the super-powers anywhere in the world it could hardly be localised; and, secondly, that the West would perforce have to rely primarily for its defence on conventional weapons. If reason is any guide, first use by the Soviet Union of nuclear weapons should be discarded for pretty obvious reasons on which I need not elaborate. When you come to think of it, even a physical take-over of Western Europe by the Soviet Union in the event of success in a conventional war might present considerable disadvantages. I need not elaborate either on what those might be. They might involve the fall of the Soviet empire.
So, my Lords, within my allotted 10 minutes I approach a conclusion. It is possible, even if unlikely, that the Soviet Union may soon push things to a point at which some confrontation is inevitable. It is even possible that, out of fear or wounded pride, the United States might do the same. In either event, it seems probable that the Russians would embark on an offensive in Europe, relying on the likelihood of the West's not deciding to use nuclear weapons in its own defence. To guard against this possibility, the West must obviously now decide greatly to strengthen its conventional defences, which, if it set its mind to it, it could undoubtedly do over the next few years.
It is consequently on this, always assuming that no real progress is possible in negotiations for the limitation of both nuclear and conventional armaments, that we should now be spending money, rather than on the replacement of our own so-called independent strategic nuclear force which, though it may for the time being have a very limited deterrent effect, can, in practice, never be used independently unless we are prepared to wipe ourselves off the map, or unless we have been wiped off the map already.
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Besides, if we really are considering spending half a billion a year for 10 years, and probably much more, on this useless project, we must presumably, in our present financial state, substantially cut either the BAOR and the Air Force in Germany, or the Navy, or both—something which would be in the nature of a national disaster. I need hardly add that, when and if it becomes clear that the Russians have little chance of winning a conventional war, the prospects of agreement on arms limitation of all kinds, for which we must all work, would be far better than they are at present.
Unfortunately, we cannot exclude the possibility that the Soviet Union may eventually gain virtual control of the entire world without firing a shot. For unless the West can somehow come to terms with the undeveloped and underdeveloped world—and Iran is very much a case in point—it is more than likely that these countries will turn in desperation to the Soviet Union. If this happens, then the West will experience great difficulties in obtaining the necessary raw materials and a persistence of the slump may well result in the emergence, even in the industrialised West—even here—of Governments only too willing to make some deal with Moscow.
I therefore end by quoting the wise words of Harold Brown, the former United States Secretary of the Air Force, repeated, very rightly, with approval by the noble Lord, Lord Zuckerman, in his powerful article,
"We must seek national security through other than strictly military means".
and, indeed, by repeating the noble Lord's own final words; namely,
"defeat is indivisible in a world of nuclear weapons".
5.55 p.m.
Lord RITCHIE of DUNDEE: My Lords, I do not need to remind you that rising to one's feet for the first time in this august Chamber is a daunting experience. I was present one afternoon when the noble Lord, Lord Noel-Baker, made reference to his experience when making his maiden speech here, and he spoke of the nervous anguish which he experienced at that time. I, for my part, could never hope to approach the splendour of his oratory, when that afternoon

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he made us relive that terrible day in Hiroshima in August 1945, but I can hope to approach the nervous anguish of which he spoke. I must ask your Lordships' indulgence if, like the loyal subjects of Duke Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream.
"I shiver and look pale, make periods in the midst of sentences, throttle my practis'd accent and even dumbly break off".
I am no expert in this awesome subject, and my temerity in rising to speak is by virtue of the strength of my feelings, not by virtue of my authority. I think it is true to say that there are two subjects which most of us dare not allow ourselves to dwell on. One is the prospect of nuclear war; the other is the plight of the suffering millions in the Third World. I wonder how often we consider the close connection between these two phenomena of our time. May I quote a few figures to your Lordships to illustrate my point, and may I ask the indulgence of those of you who, by your special interests, know them only too well already. I draw my information from a United Nations report which was published in 1978. I am afraid I have little reason to suppose that the situation will have changed greatly since then.
Half a billion human beings throughout the world are living at starvation level. Millions more are undernourished. Millions of children suffer from diet deficiencies, impeding physical and mental development which is likely to threaten the health of the next generation. Meanwhile, 350 billion dollars a year are diverted to military purposes throughout the world. The World Health Organisation spent 83 million dollars in eradicating smallpox from the world. That amount of money would not be enough to buy a single modern strategic bomber. The world spends daily about 9 million dollars for military purposes, twice the cost of eradicating malaria from the world. I understand that the replacement of Polaris with Trident would cost £5 billion.
The first wave of victims of the nuclear weapons was at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I suggest that the second wave are the hungry millions in the Third World now. If Voltaire had written a satire, in which he described how the resources of the world were being diverted from the mouths of
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the hungry in order that the well-fed might exterminate themselves, we might think he was over-reaching himself, but I do not believe it is very far from the truth.
May I speak briefly about Lord Mount-batten's statement that the existence of nuclear weapons only adds to our perils. Few people would deny the need for a nation to maintain conventional armed forces adequate for its defence against a potential aggressor. In 1945, this traditional idea of minimum military necessity was convulsed by the advent of nuclear weapons. Quite simply, except on one notorious occasion, they were felt to be too devastating in their effects to be used. Yet powerful nations felt they must be in possession of them in order to threaten each other.
The new situation which grew out of this made some sort of sense until, I think, about the mid-1960s when an approximate nuclear equivalence was achieved between East and West. Then would have been the time to stop. Certain top experts in America then expressed the view that further testing and elaboration of nuclear weapons would produce the paradox of a decline and not an increase in national security. Mr. Robert McNamara was then Secretary for Defence. I should like to quote a few words spoken by him at the University of Chicago last May:
"The concept of security encompasses far more than merely military force, and a society can reach a point at which additional military expenditure no longer provides additional security".
In thinking about what followed, my mind constantly reverts to a picture once drawn by a pupil of mine. It was a large pencil drawing and it depicted a fort or gun emplacement in the middle of a desert. From every aperture of this structure there protruded the barrels of guns—of every size and shape, pointing in every direction—North, East, South, West, and heavenwards. The place was literally bristling with violent weapons, and all around was nothingness, emptiness, reaching to the horizon. I said to the boy, "Where is the enemy? Who is all this directed against?" and his answer was unhesitating: "Oh, there is no enemy; there is nothing. It is entirely imaginary".
I am not suggesting that there is no potential enemy for the West, or the East,

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alas! What I am suggesting is that the arms race has been fuelled largely by fear, mistrust—almost paranoia, and that exaggerated reports of the strength of the other side have played an insidious part in it. I believe there was an example of this very recently in connection with the protests in East Anglia.
Since the 1960s, the world has gone mad. An arms race has developed to the point at which the powers are in a position to annihilate each other and the whole world many times over. What is the sense of this? How, indeed, can it do anything but add to our perils? Have we ever felt less secure? My own son has said to me, "Me and my pals must do our own thing because we expect to be blown up soon". There is a widespread sense of fatalism in the country—a most disquieting sign. What can we do? I am convinced that the remedy for these ills—the distrust and suspicion and alarmism and fatalism and sense of doom that hangs like an evil cloud over the world—is to work actively for peace in every way in which we, even as individuals, can. One thing—obvious enough—strikes my simple mind quite forcefully. It is this. In the whole of this formidable arms build-up since the last war, all the decisions affecting the lives of millions have necessarily had to be taken by very small numbers of men. This has always been so, of course; but never before, surely, has the fate of so many been vitally affected by so few. Government defence policies have to be shaped by the advice of military strategists, who in turn must listen to the scientists. So the sort of war we might have to face would be one involving the use of weapons, against which we know of no protection, which we do not begin to understand, which have effects we cannot conceive of, causing diseases of which we hardly know the symptoms.
How can we reverse this apparently irreversible process? Let me take a simple, if rather abstracted and generalised view of it. Let us say that we have reached our present plight for two reasons: because we have come to worship science and technology, and because we have relinquished our individual human responsibility to the gods of this new religion. If these propositions were true, what nemesis could one expect but precisely the one that threatens us?
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Can we not, and must we not, then, reverse the process by reasserting our human responsibility and by demanding that these weapons be destroyed for ever? We are not, God be thanked, living in a State where individual human opinion is gagged and silenced. If enough human beings in the Free World demand strongly enough that there should be a change, surely we can bring about a change throughout the whole world. How else have the great changes of history taken place but ultimately by the will of the great mass of humanity?
I humbly suggest that this can best be done through the World Disarmament Campaign, already under way. The campaigners aim to place a mighty petition before the United Nations Special Session on Disarmanent in 1982, signed by millions. Perhaps then, if not before, each of the nuclear powers would agree to dismantle one weapon in the name of humanity. And perhaps this might begin a reverse process whereby funds will gradually be released to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, heal the sick, house the homeless. And perhaps we of the northern hemisphere will at last be able to enjoy true peace and security.
6.7 p.m.
Lord ZUCKERMAN: My Lords, I think we are all immensely grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Noel-Baker, for having initiated this debate and for having done so in so eloquent and moving a way. The matters to which he has directed our attention grow more and more critical as every month passes—perhaps, in the light of current events, as every week passes. Of one thing I am certain: Lord Mountbatten himself would have been very pleased had he lived to see his Strasbourg speech sparking off this debate.
Here may I turn to the brilliant and moving maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Ritchie of Dundee. He has left us with some very big questions. Whether or not—as I have been following both armament and disarmament for very many years—it is going to be possible to dismantle armouries in the way suggested is, I fear, debatable.
Lord Mountbatten wrote to me immediately after he delivered his Strasbourg speech—I have his letter here—to say that he was greatly upset by the fact that no

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interest had been shown at the time. And by "at the time" he meant at the meeting—and not only at the meeting but at the Press conference which he held afterwards. He described the Press conference. It was pathetic. Yet look at the interest which has now been manifested in the matters which he raised.
Lord Mountbatten wanted to send his speech to the newspapers. It was on my advice that he refrained from doing so. In the letter in which he expressed his regret about the immediate response to his speech he said that I had been wise to prevent him from what he called "stirring up trouble personally"; it was the responsibility of SIPRI, a governmental body with an international advisory board, to go on publicising an issue whose immediate significance to the whole future of humanity transcends almost all others. I, certainly—and he, too—had clearly overestimated the impact which SIPRI would have on the world Press. In this letter he said:
"It simply was a damp squib and doesn't appear to have been referred to anywhere".
Well, as this debate shows and as matters have turned out, his speech has proved anything but a damp squib.
Lest it be supposed that this was the first time Lord Mountbatten had spoken out in the terms of his Strasbourg speech, may I remind your Lordships that in 1970, the noble Lord, Lord Wigg (who was in your Lordships' Chamber until recently) published an article in The Times of London criticising the then apparently new policy of NATO of so-called flexible response. Lord Mountbatten happened to be in Paris at the time, but he immediately arranged by telephone to have published a short letter in The Times, and with your Lordships' permission I should like to read it now:
"Lord Wigg's article in The Times on February 19, The Perils of Defence on the Cheap, exposes the fallacy of relying on tactical nuclear weapons. During my six years on the NATO Military Committee I never missed an opportunity of saying loud and clear that the actual use of tactical nuclear weapons could only end in escalation to total global nuclear destruction and for that reason no one in their senses would contemplate their use".
That is roughly what the noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, has said in the course of his speech today. I am referring to this letter because one or two letters which have appeared in the Press have rather
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implied that Lord Mountbatten's Strasbourg address was an aberration, the meandering of a man in his 80th year. I worked with him closely over many years and I can assure your Lordships that these were views which he not only expressed loudly in military circles but which he encouraged.
I certainly shared the views which he expressed at Strasbourg. It was in February 1962 that Foreign Affairs carried an article of mine called Judgment and Control in Modern Warfare. It was based on a speech which I delivered at the annual meeting of the NATO commanders in the summer of the preceding year and, encouraged by Lord Mountbatten, it was published by permission of my friend, the noble Viscount, Lord Watkinson, (who was then the Minister for whom I was working), and General Norstadt, then the Allied Supreme Commander. In it I expressed grave doubts about the place of so-called tactical nuclear weapons in any armoury if they were to be considered as real weapons which could be used in field warfare.
I have elaborated this issue in many places since, and I am referring to the matter now because the then Prime Minister, Mr. Harold Macmillan was questioned in another place as to the relationship of the views which I was expressing (being an official) to Government policy. Among others, he was pressed by Mr. Hugh Gaitskell and by the then Mr. George Brown, now in your Lordships' House; he was pressed as to whether the Government of the day had approved or disapproved of the conclusions in my article. Mr. Macmillan's answer was that my article was a contribution to the consideration of a very difficult subject and he thought it was of value that it had appeared. I looked up the exchanges the other day and was much amused to see that it was a contribution to a discussion such as we are having today.
Recently I had a letter, after the appearance of the article of mine in The Times, to which reference has been made, from a friend who was General Montgomery's G3. When he left the Army I think he was still the youngest major general, and I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Carver, knows whom I am talking about. He played out one of the NATO war games in which I partici-

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pated, in which the Russians had intruded into NATO territory. When the Russians play war games we intrude into their territory. In this particular instance he assumed that the Russians had come in and had made some considerable advance without the use of any nuclear weapons. They then dropped an armoured brigade into East Anglia. He chose East Anglia because it happens to be where I live, and he ended his letter: "How do we get them out?". I myself do not know, but I am sure that we shall not get them out with nuclear weapons.
It is absolutely important that this whole subject should be discussed properly. There cannot be a sensible discussion on these nuclear matters without more facts being more widely available than they are now. I have looked at this excellent production the Government's White Paper on Defence. Let me assure your Lordships that it is better than any of those in the production of which I played a part. It is much more colourful, and so on, but it provides very little information. I have looked through the section on theatre nuclear forces, and almost any American magazine carries better information on this subject than this document does. I cannot imagine there could be a useful discussion unless we have some better information available to us than it contains.
I think it was in 1968 that the Secretary-General of the United Nations, then U-Thant, convened a working party of which I was the United Kingdom member, to write a book for the United Nations on the effects of the possible use of nuclear weapons. There is no policy statement in this document; it is merely a statement of fact as seen by people who knew the facts. This report is now being updated by a different group which the present Secretary-General has convened. I have been fortunate enough to be shown some chapters in draft. It goes into much more detail than the earlier book to which I contributed, but it contains any amount of information which we treat as being top secret here. I do not know how this can be altered because when one wants to bring some fresh air into the discussion the only way one can do it without in any way contravening the Official Secrets Act is by talking to one's friends in the United States. I also have in my hand the December issue of Harpers magazine. If anybody wishes to see exactly where the
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strategic arms race has got to they should read it. The facts in it are reliable.
What I should now make absolutely plain, because there has been some misunderstanding about this, is what Lord Mountbatten did not say. Lord Mountbatten was not pleading for unilateral disarmament. He was no more a starry-eyed unilateral disarmer than I am. I have never heard the proposition of unilateral disarmament coming from any quarter of the Soviet bloc. In his letter to me, Lord Mountbatten told how he had to reply to one of the questions put to him on this subject. It was not the reply of a unilateral disarmer and I want that to be absolutely plain. What we want is mutual disarmament, particularly nuclear disarmament, but we want it on a planned basis.
The tripwires of war are being spread everywhere at the moment. However much we seem to be able to tolerate the non-nuclear conflicts now taking place, the survivors of a nuclear war would never be able to comprehend the full horror or the reality of what had happened. Yet we cannot push the nuclear genie back into the bottle. What we must do is learn, and learn quickly, that the only value of nuclear weaponry is that of deterrence. We should continually remind ourselves that there are no political prizes, no benefits to be gained in the name of freedom, no enhancement of national dignity, no national face-saving that would be worth the price of the actual use of nuclear weapons. We all realise that nuclear proliferation is dangerous; we are party to the non-proliferation treaty. The nuclear arms race which now goes on between the two super powers is no less so. My Lords, once the threshold of mutual nuclear deterrence has been crossed there is absolutely no point in the continuation of a nuclear arms race.
6.21 p.m.
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, the House is extremely grateful to my noble friend Lord Noel-Baker for this opportunity of debating this extremely important question. Before I make a number of remarks about his speech, may I pay my respects, with the rest of the House, to the noble Lord, Lord Ritchie of Dundee, for a most impressive maiden speech, and following, as I do, my noble

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friend Lord Zuckerman, say once more how moved and impressed I always am to hear him speak on these immense matters with such authority and clarity.
My noble friend Lord Noel-Baker, with his accustomed eloquence and sincerity, once more voiced the mounting horror and alarm which all rational people feel when they observe the acceleration of the arms race, especially in nuclear weapons. This is a feeling that cuts across all parties and I believe national boundaries. He quoted a remarkable speech by the late Lord Mountbatten, remarkable for its content and also for its origin. Here was a former Commander-in-Chief of our Forces on land and at sea speaking about the dangers of nuclear weapons, and denouncing in the strongest terms the catastrophic folly of depending on the increasing arms race in nuclear arms for peace and security. He did not, as the noble Lord, Lord Zuckerman, reminded us, go on to a plea for unilateral disarmament in this department or any other department. What he said was that clearly we must come to an agreement to arrest the nuclear arms race and progessively to lower the level of armaments on a consistent basis of mutual equivalence. Indeed, there can hardly be any alternative to this policy if the world is to avoid the ultimate catastrophe.
The search for peace and security by the competitive escalation of arms, especially nuclear arms, must end in disaster. As more and more resources in manpower, money and machines are devoted to an upward spiralling of the arms race, there must come a point when one side or the other finds it impossible to continue without destroying its own economy and its own society. At that point there will be a temptation to supplement the arms race which they are losing by recourse to other, perhaps even more dreadful weapons.
The ban on biological weapons achieved since 1972, the partial ban on environmental warfare will go for naught, and the draft proposals for a ban on chemical warfare, which owe so much to the British initiative, will be aborted. As one side or the other finds that it cannot keep up with, let alone overtake, its rivals, it may well look around for other additional means of competing. But even before that point is reached, the very escalation and
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proliferation in the nuclear arms race will in themselves multiply the possibility of accident. The next, the third and final world war, may well arise not from Sarajevo or Danzig but from something like Harrisburg. In a world heaving and seething with thermo-nuclear devices and material, human fallibility may let loose catastrophe which human purpose never intended. It may not be necessary to have a war to destroy the world; it may destroy itself through the actuarial incidence of human accident in handling these things.
The world is already spending the staggering sum of £200,000 million a year on arms, the greater part of it on nuclear arms, because they are more expensive, with all that means: the temptation to use, at the point when the choice is either pre-emptive strike or surrender, the possibility of accident, and the reduction of resources for social progress, especially in the underdeveloped world. But not only there. At hazard from the increasing diversion of resources to the nuclear arms race is not only the improvement of the conditions of the people in the underdeveloped world, but the survival, let alone the standards, of the populations of the developed world. This is something which is eating up the essence of production, and increasingly so, and threatening our survival in every part of the world, not only through the classic possibility of war as we have always defined it, but in itself because of its nature; because of the demands it makes on human effort and human wealth and the possibility that human skill may not always be able to control it.
So the alternative is not achieving a balance of power, a deterrence based on a balance of power, on an escalation—that way sooner rather than later disaster lies—but, as Lord Mountbatten explained, through a descending process of expenditure on arms, especially nuclear arms, so that we achieve an equivalence of power and therefore a deterrence, on a progressively lower expenditure of money and other resources on nuclear arms.
The speech that we are discussing and to which our attention has been especially drawn by my noble friend, puts this very clearly indeed. As my noble friend Lord Zuckerman reminded us, the solution is not unilateralism, but multilateral progressive disarmament, at each stage being

837
verified, and achieving at each stage a clear equivalence of power thus fortifying the feeling of security and confidence on both sides. That was put forward by my right honourable friend Mr. Peter Shore in another place when he spoke last January, I believe, of the process of not achieving equivalence upwards, but of achieving it downwards. I think that the Opposition has thoroughly grasped the point. I wonder whether the Government are as sensitive to the truth of this as one would wish them to be?
It does not lie in the mouth of anybody speaking in a debate of this type to accuse anyone of being inadequately sensitive to the threats that surround us in this department. One understands the sincerity of those who regard deterrence as being a kind of auction whereby you match the other fellow on an upward basis—an open-ended kind of Dutch auction. There is no future in that. Sooner or later one side or the other will not be able to keep up and will have recourse to action of the kind that I have tried to describe. One would like to have an assurance from the Government that they really do take this view and that they will apply themselves with vigour to the policy of seeking broad equivalence of power at decreasing levels between East and West. That—if there is a recipe for deterrence followed by disarmament—is the only recipe. The other, the spiralling theory of equivalence, may succeed for a time and it may have succeeded for the past 20 or perhaps 35 years. But, as we were reminded, with every week and month producing new horrors and new possibilities of horrific destruction, the time that we have ahead of us is very short indeed.
I would also welcome an assurance from the noble Lord that Her Majesty's Government, despite the negative attitude so far of the Soviet Government to the December 1979 proposals of the North Atlantic Council, despite the Russian coolness on this matter, will persevere with our friends and allies in NATO with those proposals. Not every one of the proposals is above criticism, but the package contains some very useful, very hopeful and very constructive suggestions. For example, there is the offer to negotiate substantial reductions in the level of long-range theatre nuclear forces and that is all the more necessary, I suggest, in
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view of the decision taken at the same meeting to modernise NATO's long-range TNFs by the deployment in Europe of United States' ground-launched systems. The "intention to modernise", as it is called, must be "counterparted" by the strong reinforcement of the proposal to reduce, otherwise our own posture will prove to be, and will be regarded as being, as negative as that of the Soviet Union has been so far. The other proposal was for an interim Phase 1 agreement in the MBFR negotiations with the aim of establishing a common ceiling in land force manpower for both sides of about 700,000 in Europe, or a combined air and ground force ceiling of about 900,000.
These measures, like those applied to the tactical nuclear weapons, would of course include effective monitoring provisions. The Vienna proposals, as I call them, the more conventional proposals, do have a relevance to our debate this afternoon because the present Soviet and Eastern European advantage of some 150,000 ground, conventional personnel in Europe, has obliged the West necessarily to fill the gap with a strategy of flexible nuclear response. The attainment of a common ceiling might remove the need for the West to insist upon a flexible nuclear response which in any case, as we have heard this afternoon, comes occasionally under very heavy criticism.
The third point that I should like to put to the Minister is that we welcome the Government's support for President Carter's clear statement that he looks to trying to get the ratification of SALT II as soon as possible despite the difficulties which recent events in Afghanistan have placed in his way. This is essential, because if we get SALT II ratified, then SALT III—which is even more important—lies ahead of us and can only be achieved if, in fact, SALT II has been ratified. Nevertheless, the negotiations about SALT III, can proceed now.
I should also like to ask what progress is being made on a comprehensive test ban and on the air control in space negotiations. Both of those show signs of being negotiable and of becoming facts of international acceptance. It is the possibility of agreement on extremely important matters like this which encourages noble Lords and others who work in the disarmament field to press for the

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kind of policy that we have heard described this afternoon.
It is not impossible to get both sides to see the point of deterrence through equivalence by stages, because in a number of areas this has been done already. I refer to the biological warfare ban—that has been a fact for some years. It may be in peril now, but it was achieved. The chemical warfare ban, largely a British initiative, may well be achieved because the Russians and the Americans have taken the draft with them so that the "supers" can agree and then hand it back to the Geneva Disarmament Committee. The kind of apprehension that was voiced this afternoon about the possibility of Russian use of chemical weapons might thereby be allayed. There are other fields in which disarmament has proved to be at least partially possible. So there is no need to throw up our hands in horror and say, "It can never be done; all we can do is arm to the teeth until the time when even that is no good and catastrophe takes over". There is every reason to be hopeful and every necessity to be active, with all the skill and will that we can command, in negotiating with other countries deterrence on a basis of equivalence, proceeding downward instead of upward.
Once the momentum is achieved—however slow—and all the parties feel that the momentum is proceeding on a basis of assurance and there is a feeling of security, backed by proper verification, then the full objective will be in sight. The other kind of momentum is with us now. We are all hurtling together in competitive madness, trying to deter by mounting horror, and insufficiently aware that that cannot go on for ever, and that its only end will be mutual extinction.
6.41 p.m.
The Lord Bishop of TRURO: My Lords, I must confess that it was with some trepidation that I put my name down to speak today in this debate. I am not an expert in the technicalities of nuclear weapons, and over the years the more I have sought to inform myself, the more complex I have found them to be. But I believe that I should not have had such trepidations because the issues before your Lordships are not simply those of tech-
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nology, military strategy or the relative merits of nuclear weapons. I believe that we must resist the temptation to be paralysed by suggestions that they are, and by other attempts which are made—I do not say consciously—to lull us by using neutral words to describe the horrors of nuclear warfare.
The issues are fundamentally ethical, and it is for that reason that I believe that a voice should be heard from these Benches today. It is about the significance of nuclear weapons for the ethics of defence that I wish to speak. I use that phrase deliberately, for although I believe that it is possible to speak in ethical terms about the existence of nuclear weapons for deterrence and what it is right for us to do in the situation in which we find ourselves, it is impossible to give any ethical justification whatever for their first use. I, too, welcome the opportunity given to the House by the noble Lord, Lord Noel-Baker, for this debate and for enabling your Lordships to draw attention to the speech of the late Lord Mountbatten; not least because, particularly in his concluding sentences, he referred to the moral choice in which we are all involved.
It is not merely a question of abstract moral reasoning. As President Sadat has reminded us in the context of the Middle East, it is the will of the people for peace which matters; and it is to the desperately urgent need for us to encourage a responsible determination that a way should be found to achieve disarmament and peace that I wish to draw your Lordships' attention.
Like the noble Lord, Lord Ritchie of Dundee, to whose speech I should also wish to pay tribute, as I talk to ordinary people I detect on the one hand the growth of a disturbing apathy with a fatalistic acceptance of the inevitability of nuclear war—an apathy which can only serve to increase the likelihood of it occurring—and, on the other hand, a blindly optimistic hope that somehow, perhaps with the aid of technology, such a disaster will be averted in spite of the attitudes of men and women.
I believe that all who have the welfare of mankind at heart must strain every nerve to alert people to the appalling horrors of nuclear war, but do so in such a way as to evoke a sense of responsibility,

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a will for the solutions of conflict by peaceful means, and a determination that a nuclear holocaust should not occur. As has already been mentioned in this debate, this will involve—particularly in this country—breaking the conspiracy of silence about the nature of such a war and its effects.
But how is this to be achieved? Here I must confess that Christians and others who believe that a new ethical dimension has been introduced because of the nature of nuclear weapons, are not altogether of one mind. Some are pacifist in the strict sense and in principle. Others maintain that nuclear war is so evil that it must be avoided at any cost, even to the extent of acquiescing in action which may well result in a situation in which freedom as we know it is not to be found and in which rights essential to human worth and dignity are denied. Others, accepting that nuclear weapons exist and while recognising the horrors of nuclear war, believe that the right course is, in the words of the late Lord Mountbatten:
"… to press for both sides to replace the attempts to maintain a balance through ever-increasing and evermore costly nuclear armaments by a balance based on mutual restraint".
This will not happen unless there is a will and a determination that it shall happen.
The position of those who are pacifist in principle is one that I respect. Its single-mindedness and its insistence on one absolute principle has its appeal. But while some are called to adopt that position—to witness to us all, by their total commitment to non-violence, to the fact that we are all called to be makers of peace—it is the way of redemption by suffering, and I do not believe that morally a Government can call upon all to share that way. With regard to the second position I mentioned, I have two difficulties—one of principle and one pragmatic. I believe that a concern for quality of life—not just life—requires us to look for a middle ground between the gospel of non-violence and mutually assured destruction. Secondly, the adoption of the second view, with its minimising of the claims of truth and freedom, can have a very enervating effect upon our desire to achieve peace. A mere concern for survival without a concern for quality of life can, in fact, undermine our concern to preserve peace. After all, peace is not
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an end in itself; it is to enable men and women to live fully.
I have sufficient faith in human beings—even though, as noble Lords will realise, I believe that we all need redemption—to believe that there is a middle ground in the choice before us, and that what matters is our will to achieve it. We must begin—and I apologise if at this point I appear to preach to your Lordships—by recognising the evil of aggression and the evil of the fear which springs from the threat of aggression at any level in human life. We must begin by a determination to resolve any disputes by fearless negotiation as rational beings, and neither by appeasement nor by confrontation. We cannot expect to have peace at the international level if we are not working for it at the national and local level, and at the personal level.
Secondly, I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Zuckerman, has destroyed any argument, if ever there were any, to prevent us from supporting all efforts which are made for progressive multilateral disarmament, and I believe it is our duty to support them in every way we possibly can. Thirdly, I would wish to support what the noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, said, that we must maintain an adequate level of conventional weapons; ideally, of course, under international control. I say maintain that level somewhat reluctantly, but we must be realistic. There probably will be disputes which negotiations fail to solve, and there must not be a vacuum which will then be filled by nuclear weapons. However, the most important point, yet the least spectacular, must be the constant encouragement of people in the world to take heed of Lord Mountbatten's words, to make the moral and philosophical choice for peace, not war.
6.51 p.m.
Lord CARVER: My Lords, like other noble Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Noel-Baker, for initiating this debate on what we must all realise is an extremely important subject. I should also like to join other noble Lords in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Ritchie of Dundee, on an extremely eloquent and moving maiden speech. I find myself in agreement with a great deal of what Lord Mountbatten said in his

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speech, and I should like to draw attention to some parts of it.
First, he said:
"To begin with"—
that is, to begin with in achieving practical measures of nuclear arms control and disarmament—
"we are most likely to preserve the peace if there is a military balance of strength between East and West".
I would note that he did not say "a military balance of weakness", but "a military balance of strength". I would also agree with him that any nuclear war, whatever you call the weapons used, leads to almost total devastation. Although it is a slight exaggeration to have said,
"In the event of a nuclear war there will he no survivors. All will be obliterated",
I think that is not much of an exaggeration. There will be some survivors, not everything will be obliterated, but it might be more humane if there were none.
Finally, I agree with him in his comment:
"I cannot imagine a situation in which nuclear weapons would be used as battlefield weapons without the conflagration spreading".
Where I find myself in disagreement with him is in his condemnation that it is in the existence of tactical nuclear weapons—or, as they are sometimes called these days, theatre nuclear weapons—that the main danger lies, and therefore the inference that if they were done away with we should be a great deal safer. Indeed, I feel exactly the opposite. It is not a concept which any sensible, responsible, military person now holds that you would fight a war in Europe with tactical or theatre nuclear weapons and thus avoid a strategic nuclear exchange.
That is one of the dangers in the concept which appears to be arising that there must be some sort of balance in theatre nuclear weapons. It was Helmut Schmidt's reaction to the results of a theoretical exercise of this nature when he was German Minister of Defence which led to a great deal of discussion in the nuclear planning group, and indeed to the initiation of the neutron bomb, the idea being that it would kill the enemy tank crews but not make so much damage to the countryside. Of course, the fallacy there is that you have to be certain that the other side will use it too. No, the
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aim of the tactical nuclear weapon is to make the nuclear deterrence to war more credible. It had ceased to be credible in many ways because nobody could believe that if purely conventional forces invaded Western Europe there would be an automatic, immediate recourse to an intercontinental strategic exchange between America and Russia. What there would in fact have been is what the Germans fear most—what is called in NATO circles, a "decoupling" of the nuclear deterrent to war from that of a Russian invasion of Western Europe.
What the existence of the tactical nuclear weapon which is designed fundamentally to attack the enemy's military forces does is to maintain the nuclear deterrent to war of any kind in Europe. It makes it almost incredible that any sensible nation would indulge in it. It maintains the risk of any war in Europe turning into the holocaust and so it keeps high the risk of going to war at all. Therefore, it contributes powerfully to preventing the war taking place at all. It ensures that there is no doubt that the risks of war would be unacceptable to those who engaged in it.
If you abolish the tactical nuclear weapon, you return, as I see it, to a position in which the nuclear deterrent to war is not credible. If you abolish nuclear weapons altogether, you abolish a nuclear deterrent to war, and you have no other deterrent to war other than the sort of deterrent to war that has not worked previously, of the damage, the horrors of a conventional war. I certainly do not doubt—would your Lordships doubt?—that if there were not nuclear weapons in the possession of the United States and Russia today we should in fact be facing a war situation as a result of events in the Middle East, which at the moment, although it may yet be so, we are not.
Having said that, I strongly agree with Lord Mountbatten and with what my noble friend Lord Zuckerman, and the noble Lord, Lord Goronwy-Roberts, said about the need. I quote Lord Mountbatten again:
"The real need is for both sides to replace the attempts to maintain a balance through ever-increasing and ever more costly nuclear armaments by a balance based on mutual restraint. Better still, by a reduction of nuclear armaments I believe it should be possible to achieve greater security at a lower level of military confrontation".

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I support most wholeheartedly every word of that. But if you were to abolish nuclear weapons I believe that you would have brought back a situation from which we certainly suffered in my youth, in which the risks of going to war appeared acceptable to statesmen and leaders of nations. But, as the noble Lord, Lord Zuckerman, said, you cannot put the ink back into the bottle. The knowledge of how to make nuclear weapons, the basic physics of it, is now known to every schoolboy. Therefore, if you open up again the risks of going to war you will open up a serious situation in which sooner or later, even if you have theoretically abolished nuclear weapons, they will reappear. I can imagine no international situation more dangerous than one in which you have a large number of nations with a small number of weapons. That would be instability and danger indeed.
The noble Lord, Lord Ritchie of Dundee, in his maiden speech, asked, have we ever felt less secure? I believe that yes, indeed, we have. I certainly have. I felt less secure in 1939, and on a number of occasions between 1939 and 1945. I believe that at the moment a great many people have confidence that because the risks of war among the major nations are so high, they would step back from the brink, if they ever considered going to war.
So I believe that peace depends on our being prepared to face the possibility of war, but with the knowledge that if it does occur, it must be limited in aim and limited in the methods by which it is conducted, and I am absolutely certain that peace will not come about by unilateral disarmament.
Baroness GAITSKELL: My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, may I ask him a question? Am I to understand from his speech that what he is saying is that so long as somebody else has the bomb, we have to have some kind of equivalent deterrent? Is that what the noble Lord has been saying to us this evening?
Lord CARVER: My Lords, the noble Baroness has not got it quite right. I believe it is a good thing that both sides should have it.
7.1 p.m.
Lord RITCHIE-CALDER: My Lords, it is a great privilege to follow those noble Lords who have spoken in the debate, for which we are very grateful, and may I say to my noble friend Lord Noel-Baker how much this has contributed to what is the aim and object, certainly, of those of us who are with him in the campaign for world disarmament. I am also very grateful for, and acknowledge my admiration of, the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Ritchie of Dundee. At least I have a half namesake. I am very grateful not only for his speech, but for the fact that, in case there should be any confusion, he and I are, I believe, practically speaking the same language. So if he gets my cuttings, he will not have to take libel action.
I believe that this is a great occasion because in a very real sense it provides a landmark by bringing on to the record and into debate in your Lordships' House the quite remarkable speech of Lord Mountbatten. It is also some consolation for those of us who were in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament all those years ago to find that the manifest truths that we were declaring over 20 years ago have now become conventional wisdom, which can be rationally—seriously—debated in your Lordships' House. Lord Mountbatten's speech at Strasbourg was in fact the justification of the main contentions that we were making all those years ago. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Zuckerman, strongly disagrees, as does the noble Lord, Lord Carver, with unilateral disarmament.
I would remind your Lordships that 25 years ago unilateral disarmament in the British sense was a real option; that is, that at that moment if we in Britain had decided not to pursue, or persist with, the nuclear bomb, recognising manifestly what has proved to be true—that we could not afford it, and would in fact become only a surrogate nuclear power—we would, by that demonstration, have profoundly influenced the course of world events. We would then have been in the position of renouncing something. Now it does not matter. If we renounce the nuclear bomb, or even the British component of the NATO forces, all that would happen is that we would be instantly replaced by the Germans, who would be co-opted to

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fill the vacuum with their nuclear contribution. I am speaking now about the opportunities that were lost. I am not saying that we in CND were wrong, but that the opportunity was lost. We opposed, and we still do—all of us who are involved in these matters; certainly from my point of view—the fallacies of the deterrent. Now, as the noble Lord, Lord Carver, has said, with great authority and with effective argument, there is something which is the deterrent. Anyway, we can say we have not had a nuclear war. But all that can be said is that the deterrent has deterred the deterrent. That is all. It has not prevented the wars over the last 30 years in which over 10 million people have died, since the end of World War II.
The deterrent, which means the threat to use nuclear weapons, has proved of no avail in Indo-China. It has proved of no avail in rescuing the 50 hostages in Iran, nor in preventing a potential confrontation, the invasion of Afghanistan. It will not rescue the Soviet Union from its Vietnam—because it is going to have a Vietnam in Afghanistan. It will not relieve us from the situations which are generating our misery today. It is the elephant and the mouse, and the eagle and the flea, or the dinosaur too massive to manoeuvre, and sinking under the weight of its own armour into the bog of helpless uncertainty.
Conventional power politics, the ploys of diplomacy, have been paralysed by nuclear psychoses, by the apocalyptic absurdity of overkill, by the mad maunderings of first strike, counterstrike, this, that, the next thing, and all the wrap-up words about which the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Truro was properly complaining. We have masked the real meaning behind these phrases.
Today one cannot see a better demonstration of the failure of the nuclear deterrent, with all deference to the noble Lord, Lord Carver, than is contained in the situations around us. Short of just deciding to obliterate mankind, there is no way in which there can be a nuclear take-out of any situation. You cannot deliver the hostages—we have failed even by implicit threatening to rescue the hostages—as you will not stop the kind
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of crisis situations which, as in the case of Saudi Arabia today, can be provoked by a television programme.
There is a reduction of the human capacity to manage a situation. It is a reduction to absurdity. Diplomacy has gone. Politics have gone. We are in a mad world in which we are relying upon things which are not even available for us to handle, except at the moment of complete and utter madness when we decide that we have had enough of it and we are committing suicide. Where is the human capacity to control? Judging from the way we are going, it is certainly not in the people who have been mismanaging, or even, if I may say so, in the military staff or their political masters. It may be—and with the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Truro and the noble Lord, Lord Noel-Baker, I hope it is—that the capacity is still with the people. I think that we can still mobilise the capacity to prevent this craziness. We can get back to Salt III. We can get back to an area of complete disarmament in which we can really conduct ourselves rationally.
It is an appalling thought at this moment that, having gained possession of the secrets of nature and of nuclear energy, having exploded an apocalyptic bomb, having now even got to the stage where we can manipulate the secret of life (through DNA and so on) we are fumbling like dotards. Think of all the wonders and marvels, such as the micro-chip and everything else that we have at our disposal. Yet we have not the ability to run our own affairs. The inventive ingenuity of Man the Maker, Homo faber, has outstripped Thinking Man, Homo sapiens, the moral and political being. Thinking Man has lost the capacity to behave like a thoughtful person. Now we have to come back to the truth that we are living in a nuclear nightmare which is of our own creation.
There is nothing to fear, as Roosevelt said, except fear itself, and it is a fear that we ourselves have deliberately created and from which, at this moment, we cannot see a way to escape. This was the most powerful argument in Lord Mount-batten's speech; and, with all deference to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Truro, there is the new thinking and

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the new awareness on the part of the younger generation, who are experiencing something of the dilemma of the 1950s. All right—at that time it was not apathy, it was fatalism. There was no future; they had no future. All the meaningfulness had gone from their lives, and that is when they marched. Now we have got to get them, all over the world, to march again.
7.11 p.m.
The Earl of CORK and ORRERY: My Lords, it is St. George's Day. We have neglected our patron saint to such an extent that I hardly think he will respond to a call this evening, as he might have done, conceivably, in other circumstances. According to Byzantine iconography, his destruction of the dragon was a posthumous miracle carried out on behalf of a persecuted village. If he were to come back this afternoon in response to our prayers, I am inclined to think that the dragon to which I would invite him to pay his attention, or one of the dragons, would be the dragon which I would describe very nearly, but not quite, as defeatism. Defeatism is not part of our make-up, and it has certainly played no part in this afternoon's debate; but something not unlike it has, I believe. One might describe it, as did the noble Lord, Lord Ritchie of Dundee, as a sense of doom which hangs like a cloud over the world. I think I have his words right from that memorable and moving maiden speech which we were privileged to hear him make earlier in this debate.
My Lords, I do not know how it has come about but for the last few months only, I believe, there has been a strange pessimism evinced in printed articles and in speeches in high places, in Parliament and elsewhere, indicating the inevitability of war. We hear references, not to "a" Third World War as a possibility, but to "the" Third World War, as though it were a kind of pseudo-certainty; and with that go references to the nuclear Third World War, or at any rate an implication that this war, when it comes—and it is more or less certain to come—will be a nuclear war.
I do not know what the justification is for either of those points of view, which I do not hold or agree with in any way myself. Of course I know the dangers.
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Nobody could possibly fail to be aware of the horrors and the perils which have been spelled out this afternoon by one and all, practically, from the noble Lord who initiated this debate onwards. We know these things, but they have not suddenly become more perilous—unless, that is, the noble Lord, Lord Goronwy-Roberts, is right, as indeed lie may be, in supposing that the sheer numbers of weapons have given rise to the actuarily far greater possibility of accidents. This may or may not be so; I do not know, and, with respect, I am not quite sure that he knows, either, though it seems a reasonable argument, I agree.
But, my Lords, we have not had a war. Certainly, 10 million people have been killed in wars, as the noble Lord, Lord Ritchie-Calder, has pointed out; but I believe that without nuclear weapons, without nuclear fission, the Third World War (if I can refer to it with the definite article) would have started in 1946. Certainly there have been several other occasions since then, in various parts of the world, when a world war could have been started and when, without the nuclear bomb, I believe, would have been started. But if we did not have it at all we should, as the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Carver, has said, have been at war by this time, and we should have been defeated, if not destroyed, because we cannot fight a successful defensive war on what I prefer not to call conventional grounds.
This is not an argument in favour of nuclear weapons, by any means. This is a horror and a nightmare with which we have to live. Nor is there anything to be said in favour of what is referred to as the nuclear arms race. There is no point whatever in continuing to make more and more bombs, or almost no point, once you have enough to frighten the other side, which is what it is all about—both sides being mutually deterred by fear of what the other side might do. Once you have got to that point, the continued proliferation becomes not only pointless but lunatic, except in one conceivable respect, and that is that the more you have the less likely it is that what you have will be put out of action by one shot from the other side before you are ready.
That is certainly a strategical consideration, but that is not the one on which this so-called race is based. I think it must

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be conceded and agreed that this is altogether a lunatic situation, and by all means that we can consider should be brought to an end. But it should be brought to an end as part of a general reduction in armaments, and I was particularly glad that the noble Lord, Lord Noel-Baker, mentioned that earlier speech made by Lord Mountbatten in which he referred to this—a speech to, I think (I am not quite sure; he will correct me if I am wrong), the Commonwealth Prime Ministers—because in the speech which forms the subject of this debate (unless I read him wrongly, though I do not think I do) he refers only to nuclear disarmament. This, I believe, was not his point of view; and, indeed, if he had said it I should have risked the displeasure of Lord Noel-Baker by saying that he was mistaken. But I do not think he said that. One thing he did say, though, which I am emboldened to disagree with slightly, is that the existence of nuclear weapons "only adds to our perils." I do not think it "only adds to our perils." I have probably indicated already that I think they have in fact kept us safe for 30 years, and that their reduction would have greatly increased the dangers to which we were exposed.
Nonetheless, let them be done away with, together with all armaments. But, in the meantime, we have to live with what we have got, to use the phrase, in a slightly different context, of the noble Lord, Lord Ritchie-Calder, I think. We must try to live without fear. This is the evil that is placed upon us. Fear itself is an evil, and it is no good for the leaders of the country. The generality of the public may be exposed to fear and cannot escape it, but fear must not be a guide for anybody who has charge of the conduct of affairs. In the words of Emerson, I think:
"Never strike sail to a fear. Come into port greatly, or with God sail the seas".
The point of view which is probably the only constructive one (in the sense of anything likely to hold out a real hope of producing a positive result) that I have heard lately, and that includes this afternoon, comes from an historian. We have heard very little history in the course of this debate, and I cannot imagine any subject which would he more vital for its prosecution. I refer to an article by Professor A. L. Rowse, printed a week ago
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and published, I think, in the Daily Express, on Wednesday, 16th April. He was speaking about Soviet Russia, and mentioning the majority of peoples in the Soviet Union who are, as he put it, held down, including—and I am now quoting him—
"some 40 million Ukrainians; Kirghese, Kazaks, Turcomans—all those Moslem peoples of their southern borderlands; not to mention Georgians in the South, Finns in the north by the White Sea; and the Baltic peoples of Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, who had their national freedom between the two German wars.
"The historian can see a fundamental trend in history which offers the Americans, and the West as a whole, hope.
"It is this: when peoples arrive at a certain degree of maturity"—
and this is in italics—
"they demand to govern themselves".
Here, I think, my Lords, lies a hope on which we must pin some of our faith. It requires patience, it requires endurance. We have got to live with this, and to a certain extent sweat it out while doing what we can to bring about mutual agreement on the reduction of arms. In the meantime, if we withdraw from this position in any way, I hope that we shall not do so from fear itself, because, of all the weaknesses that flesh is heir to, fear is the most dangerous because it is the one, the only one, which neither gods nor men forgive.
7.20 p.m.
Lord GARDINER: My Lords, may I first congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Ritchie of Dundee, on what was one of the best maiden speeches that I have ever heard. We shall all want to hear him again, soon and often. May I first say on the debate something which has been said before and apparently there is still doubt about it. It is that the Campaign for World Disarmament is not for unilateral disarmament. It is squarely based on the decision of the General Assembly. It is for agreed and verifiable disarmament; in other words, it is for détente, SALT II and SALT III, and so forth. No doubt it will be supported by unilateralists (as they are entitled to do) but it is not for unilateral disarmament.
I was somewhat shocked by the fact that the late Lord Mountbatten's speech was, in effect, refused entry to the British Press—in effect, suppressed. I must own to a bias here, for all my life I have been pretty violently in favour of freedom of

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speech. I was the first chairman for some five years of the organisation which publishes an index on censorship, a record of every country's state of affairs in relation to religious and political opinion and a subscribing member of CAPA, the Campaign Against Psychiatric Abuse, on which I have written to Mr. Brezhnev on this habit of the Soviet Union of thinking that anybody who does not agree with the party must be mental, taken to a psychiatric hospital and forcibly given drugs treatment.
Here, having had the pleasure of knowing Lord Mountbatten, it seemed to me extraordinary that, with one exception, his speech was never reported or referred to in any national newspaper. Does anyone doubt for a moment that if Lord Mountbatten had made a speech saying that we were getting behindhand in relation to the Russians and that we must have more and more nuclear arms, that would not have been published? I said, "with one exception". The Times is the exception because The Times was not being published at the time the speech was made. Therefore, I wrote to Mr. Rees-Mogg and suggested The Times might like to publish the speech. He said it would want some special occasion; and he said he could not. Ultimately, it was published in The Times, but only as a paid advertisement. It seems extra-ordinary that people must pay The Times to put in the speech of a man of this character. I gladly agreed to the campaign to send a copy of his speech to all Members of Parliament with a brief note from me. I have had a good many replies, some rather odd. One was from a noble Duke writing from his ducal castle who said that as soon as he saw the speech, lie thought it a clear sign of senile dementia.
What has disturbed me is the number of letters suggesting that the whole case against nuclear war was very much exaggerated and that only if we had enough civil defence, if only we had enough fallout shelters, we should get through it all right. I think that the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Carver, would agree that the whole concept of deterrence from nuclear weapons would itself be reduced if people began to think they could get through a nuclear war all right.
I have taken a little trouble to obtain
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for this debate the latest thinking in the United States upon this point. It is a report which was made at the request of the Foreign Relations Committee of the Senate, and produced by the Office of Technology Assessment. It has been available to Members of Congress only since May and to anyone else only since August. It answers a series of questions of "What would happen if …". What would happen if one large bomb was dropped on Philadelphia; or one large bomb was dropped on Leningrad? What would happen if the Soviet Union attacked all the silos of the United States; or vice versa? What would happen if there was an attack by the Soviet Union on all the oil refineries in the United States; or by the United States on all the oil refineries of the Soviet Union?
The results, of course, are very much the same. They take into account the state of civil defence in both countries and every known factor. In the case of the oil refineries, they found that some 64 per cent. of all the oil refineries of the United States would be destroyed and some 77 per cent. of those of the Soviet Union. Then they take the case of an all-out nuclear attack by one against the other. In dealing with the supposed attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, they first point out that it would be mainly on towns; and they say:
"The majority of urban deaths will be blast induced, e.g., victims of collapsing buildings, flying debris".
I stress that sentence because fall-out shelters are useless if the main damage is to be by blast. Then, under the heading, "The First Few Hours", they say:
"Rescuing and treating the injured will have to be done against near unsurmountable odds. Fire and rescue vehicles and equipment not destroyed will find it impossible to move about in any direction. Fires will be raging, water mains will be flooded, powerlines will be down, bridges will be gone, freeway overpasses will be collapsed, and debris will be everywhere. People will be buried under heavy debris and structures, and without proper equipment for lifting such loads, the injured cannot be reached and will not survive. The fortunate ones that rescuers can reach will then be faced with the unavailability of treatment facilities. Hospitals and clinics in downtown areas would likely have been destroyed along with most of their stocks of medical supplies. Doctors, nurses and technicians needed to man makeshift treatment centres are likely to have been among the casualties".
They sum up the general effect in this one sentence:

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"The number of deaths and the damage and destruction inflicted on the US society and economy by the sheer magnitude of such an attack would place in question whether the United States would ever recover its position as an organised industrial and powerful country".
This is the danger we face. It does no service to anyone to pretend that there is any defence against a nuclear attack. Unlike the noble Earl, Lord Cork and Orrery, I am persuaded that if we go on with nuclear armament, it is only a question of time, and probably only a very few years, before there is a nuclear war whether by design or by accident. I think it not at all unlikely that it will start by accident. It was President Eisen-hower who made it plain that we are not going to get the Governments of the world to agree lightly unless the people of the world insist on it. That is the object of the campaign.
7.30 p.m.
Lord TREFGARNE: My Lords, I want first to pay tribute to the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Ritchie of Dundee, which, as other noble Lords have said, was a remarkable one. I too hope that the noble Lord will intervene again soon in the debates of your Lordships' House, and do so regularly thereafter.
I welcome this opportunity to participate in this debate. The threat of nuclear war and the terrible results which would follow the use of nuclear weapons are the subject of great public concern just now. It is entirely appropriate that the basis of our discussion should be the late Lord Mountbatten's remarkable speech made in Strasbourg less than a year ago. That speech deserves to be read widely and carefully. It is also appropriate that this debate should be introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Noel-Baker. His efforts in the cause of disarmament have been widely recognised over very many years.
Lord Mountbatten's speech ranged widely over nuclear security issues. In commenting on his thoughts and on the points which noble Lords have raised, I should like to base my remarks on the twin principles of our nuclear security policy: namely, maintaining effective deterrence on the one hand, and pursuing balanced and verifiable measures of arms control and disarmament on the other.
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Our starting point must be the recognition that nuclear weapons today form a vital part of the fabric of European security. We have to take account of the fact that the Soviet Union is continuing to devote massive resources to its military forces, including its nuclear forces, far in excess of what is required for any legitimate defensive needs. Moreover, the Soviet Union is a closed society. We cannot judge with any certainty what Soviet intentions may be. We and our allies are therefore obliged to base our defence policy on what we know of their military capability and the use they make of it, rather than on what they say. In recent years Soviet nuclear weapons programmes have been especially fast growing. In the strategic nuclear field they have achieved parity with the United States. In the theatre nuclear field they have recently introduced new and highly sophisticated missiles and nuclear capable aircraft of particular concern.
Lord GARDINER: My Lords, when the noble Lord refers to equality, will he make it plain what he is talking about? Is he talking about warheads, or what? Is there not a large United States' superiority in the number of warheads—about 50 per cent. more?
Lord TREFGARNE: My Lords, if the noble and learned Lord will allow me, I will come to that in more detail later. In the theatre nuclear field they have recently introduced new and highly sophisticated missiles and, as I said, nuclear capable aircraft of particular concern. They are also continuing to modernise their shorter range nuclear weapons.
We are thus faced with an unrelenting nuclear build-up. In these circumstances we believe the best—indeed the only—strategy to preserve peace in Europe is one based on deterrence. We must impress on any adversary that the potential gains of aggression are far outweighed by the potential losses. To do so we must maintain the full range of military forces which will enable us and our allies to meet any aggression at any level with an appropriate response. A potential aggressor must not be allowed any illusions about the nature of the response an attack might provoke or how the conflict might develop thereafter.

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To this end, for the reasons which were explained in another place on 24th January, the Government have stressed that they intend to maintain the effectiveness of our strategic deterrent. On the same occasion, my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Defence announced a major improvement programme to the present Polaris force that will ensure that it remains effective into the 1990s. We intend to make certain that our strategic deterrent remains effective for as long as required thereafter. This is not the occasion to go into the options that are being considered. As has been made clear, decisions are likely in the fairly near future.
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, may I briefly intervene? The noble Lord has made a statement of very considerable importance. He will recall that in the debate in another place on 24th January the Government were specifically pressed to make sure that there was full investigation and full debate in the House and in the country on the question of a possible post-Polaris programme before a decision was announced. The noble Lord has just said that a decision is imminent. We would take very grave exception indeed—very serious exception—to a decision which was announced to the country as the decision of the British Government to proceed with a post-Polaris programme without first ensuring what I have described as a full investigation of the need and of the options, and a full debate based on the kind of full information that we heard the noble Lord, Lord Zuckerman, and others, refer to.
Lord TREFGARNE: My Lords, I can certainly assure the noble Lord that the Government's consideration of this matter will be carried out with the utmost care and depth. I will also undertake that whatever undertakings were given in the other place—and I do not have them in front of me—will of course be honoured and respected. However, I do not think that the noble Lord wants me to go into those details now.
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, I hope that I have made the point. It is not that I expect the Government to give adequate consideration to this matter. What I am pressing for—as my right honourable friend did in another place—
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and what we shall go on pressing for, is full consideration and debate by the people of this country, armed with the necessary information before the Government come forward with a decision.
Lord TREFGARNE: My Lords, I am not going to be pressed to give any more undertakings than were given in the other place on this matter. In the last resort, these decisions must be taken by the Government, and they will be.
Lord Mountbatten commented on tactical or theatre nuclear weapons. He rightly drew attention to the likelihood that the use of these smaller nuclear weapons would lead to nuclear escalation. Many noble Lords have repeated that this evening. Of course any use of nuclear weapons would be horrifying, and could lead to a devastating nuclear exchange. For that reason, it has long been recognised that the use by the Russians of their medium-range missiles could unleash a strategic nuclear war. It is precisely this fear of escalation which Lord Mountbatten identified. It is the prospect of response in kind and of escalation which in our view serves to deter any potential adversary from resorting to aggression in the first place. This is the essence of deterrence and, if it is to be effective, it depends on NATO maintaining its ability to respond at every level.
Lord Mountbatten also recognised the importance of maintaining a military balance between East and West. The alarming increase in Soviet theatre weapon systems has put the previously existing balance seriously at risk. In these circumstances, we have played a full part in the recent Alliance decision on the modernisation of NATO's long range theatre nuclear forces. As part of this decision we have agreed—as has already been announced—to the basing of 160 American ground launched cruise missiles in the United Kingdom, starting in about 1983. We regard this recent NATO decision as a vital step in preserving the full range of deterrent forces at the disposal of the Alliance.
The noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, referred to the possibility of NATO's first use of nuclear weapons. We are fully aware of the supreme importance of ensuring that nuclear weapons never need to be used.

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But a ban on use is not a practical measure for Western countries in Europe where nuclear weapons form an essential element of security and stability. NATO's strategy of flexible response envisages that NATO would respond to an act of aggression at the most appropriate level. Any undermining of the credibility of this policy by pledges of non-use or no first use would, we think, increase the chances of miscalculation and instability.
This requirement to maintain adequate deterrent forces is only one part of our nuclear security policy. The Government are also committed to pursuing measures of arms control and disarmament. We share Lord Mountbatten's view that it should be possible to achieve greater security at a lower level of military confrontation. The Government have confirmed their commitment to achieve greater stability through arms control, despite the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
In the nuclear field, the Government have supported the SALT process. This represents a major attempt to control the nuclear arms competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. We understand the reasons which have led President Carter to defer the SALT ratification process. But we hope that the SALT II Treaty will be ratified in due course and that in the meantime both sides will continue to abide by its provisions. A world without SALT would not, in our view, be a better place. It would, on the contrary, be more unpredictable and more dangerous.
We have also supported the American offer to negotiate with the Soviet Union on threatre nuclear forces in SALT III. This represents a further serious attempt to expand the scope of SALT to limit medium range systems of both sides. We and our allies have made it clear that we are prepared to modify the Alliance programme to modernise its theatre nuclear forces in the light of results of such negotiations. There are still about three years to run before the first deployments of the American systems in Europe. With political will, this allows time for negotiations. Unfortunately, the Soviet Union has so far rejected the American offer, but it remains open. We hope that in due course the Russians will be prepared to discuss these issues without the
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unacceptable preconditions which they have so far attached, namely that the Alliance's modernisation programme should be halted while Soviet deployments of new systems would effectively continue in the meantime. I hope that meets one of the points raised by the noble Lord, Lord Goronwy-Roberts.
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: Yes, my Lords. I do not want to detain the House but, having been "non-detentive" on the Polaris issue just now, perhaps I might be allowed to express my pleasure at hearing these assurances from the noble Lord. They are of immense importance that, despite Soviet negativity, the motives for which may he various, nevertheless this offer, this package, remains on the table; that NATO, and we with NATO, are determined to press forward with these very constructive proposals.
Lord TREFGARNE: My Lords, I am obliged. We are also continuing negotiations in Geneva for a comprehensive test ban. We want to secure a treaty that will help curb the development of new types of nuclear weapons without adversely affecting security, and assist in strengthening generally the non-proliferation regime. I am sorry to have to say that progress, particularly on verification, has been regrettably slow.
Preventing the spread of nuclear weapons to new countries is a basic objective of British nuclear arms control policy. There is no technical solution to proliferation; we must continue to tackle it through political action. The non-proliferation treaty lies at the heart of our efforts to allow peaceful nuclear technology to flourish while preventing nuclear weapons following in its wake. The treaty now has 115 parties and we, as a depositary power, are actively seeking more. We are also deeply involved in preparations for the important Treaty Review Conference in August.
Like Lord Mountbatten, we cannot but be disillusioned by the lack of progress in nuclear arms control and disarmament so far. The horrors of nuclear war are self-evident, and have been described by several noble Lords today. The urgency is daily more apparent. I would only make two comments: one by way of caution and the other of ex-

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planation. First, in our desire for progress I think we must all try to avoid unrealistic expectations. Nuclear arms control is a matter vital to national security. It is unrealistic, however desirable, to think in terms of quick and sweeping results.
Secondly, we have to consider the realities of the Soviet attitude to which I have already referred. The Russians, as we are today only too well aware, continue to attach the highest importance to their military effort, which permeates every sphere of their activities, whether in terms of their economic priorities, their relationship with the United States or in their influence with the Third World. Hardly surprisingly, in arms control and disarmament matters they frequently appear more interested in rhetoric than in substance, in gestures rather than in real negotiations. This is true whether we look at the nuclear or the conventional field. This latter, although not the subject of this debate, is of particular importance in Europe. Moreover, as I have mentioned, Russia is a closed society. The Soviet Union's refusal to contemplate adequate measures of verification, which must accompany any serious measure of arms control, is all too often the greatest single technical barrier to real progress.
I should now like to deal with one or two of the points which have been raised. The noble Lord, Lord Goronwy-Roberts, asked me about the mutual and balanced force reduction talks which are going on in Vienna. These continue despite Afghanistan, and the Western goal remains the agreement of verified common ceilings on both NATO and Warsaw Pact forces. Such an agreement would do much to lessen the risks of nuclear war by removing the important military balance between East and West. However, as in the talks at Geneva, progress is not very fast, I am afraid.
The noble Lord also asked me about the chemical warfare treaty. The United Kingdom, as he knows, is committed to seeking a verifiable ban on the development, production and stockpiling of chemical weapons. We believe all Governments should support efforts to this end; but the Russians are unwilling to accept the essential measures of verification, and thus I fear we cannot hope for early progress. In the meantime, the
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Soviet possession of a very substantial chemical capability poses a serious threat to the United Kingdom which we cannot ignore, and it is in this context that the whole subject of chemical warfare is being kept under review. I do not have available the information about the latest developments on that particular front, but perhaps I can look into it further and let the noble Lord know.
The noble Lord, Lord Noel-Baker, in his admirable opening speech, rightly stressed the need for disarmament under effective inspection and control, which has been mentioned several times. He also emphasised the need for complete disarmament. The Government share the view of all other members of the United Nations that general and complete disarmament, under strict and effective control, is the ultimate goal of arms control efforts. But that ultimate aim cannot be achieved quickly, and we think it is more realistic to take a step-by-step approach through specific and verifiable measures of arms control which maintain the balance of security at progressively lower levels of military capability.
The noble Lord, Lord Ritchie of Dundee, to whose excellent maiden speech I have already referred, and also the noble Lord, Lord Noel-Baker, referred to the World Disarmament Campaign. The Government welcome proposals for arousing public interest in arms control and disarmament, and will continue to play their part in spreading information on this work, for example, through the Arms Control and Disarmament Newsletter. We shall study with great care any proposals put forward by members of the World Disarmament Campaign.
The noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, and also the noble Lord, Lord Zuckerman, referred to the fact that unilateral disarmament cannot be contemplated, and I think I have now said enough to make it clear that I endorse that sentiment.
In conclusion, I think it would be appropriate for me to return to the words of Lord Mountbatten, in answer to the question which he posed himself: how should we set about achieving the practical measures of nuclear arms control and disarmament? He said:
"To begin with, we are most likely to preserve peace if there is a military balance of strength between East and West".

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Those words were quoted, I think, by the noble Lord, Lord Carver. Lord Mountbatten went on to say:
"The real need is for both sides to replace the attempts to maintain a balance through ever increasing and ever more costly nuclear armaments by a balance based on mutual restraint. Better still, by reduction of nuclear armaments, I believe it should be possible to achieve greater security at a lower level of military confrontation".
This is a view which lies at the heart of the Government's two principles which I have described and which we fully share.
Lord GLADWYN: My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, may I ask him one question which arises out of a point that I made—
Lord SANDYS: My Lords, I think that this debate is due to end at five minutes to eight and there is a facility offered in the programme for the noble Lord, Lord Noel-Baker, to withdraw his Motion. Therefore, I do not think it would be for the convenience of the House to have further questions.
7.51 p.m.
Lord NOEL-BAKER: My Lords, I wish to thank all noble Lords who have taken part in what has been a very valuable debate. In particular, I thank my noble friend Lord Ritchie for his remarkable and brilliant maiden speech and my noble and learned friend Lord Gardiner who, with his great authority, has added much, as has my noble friend Lord Ritchie, to the value of tomorrow's Hansard. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, who has answered for the Government, for what he has said about the Government's acceptance of general and complete disarmament as the ultimate objective, and for what he said about the World Disarmament Campaign.
I reiterate my profound belief that only the general and complete disarmament of the world to the Selwyn-Lloyd level, and the reallocation of resources to welfare, constitutes a realistic system of national defence. I add that the very purpose of Lord Mountbatten's speech, as of the article in The Times by the noble Lord, Lord Zuckerman, was to show that nuclear weapons are not a real deterrent.
In withdrawing my request for Papers, may I express a desire? Lord Mount-
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batten's services to the nation were fabulous in every regard. The key lay in his command of his flagship, the destroyer "Kelly", which was sunk off Crete. The noble Lord who will next address your Lordships, the noble Lord, Lord Hutchinson, was sunk with Lord Mountbatten. They swam together for hours in the oil-covered sea before they were picked up. In view of all the services which Lord Mountbatten rendered to Britain, to NATO, to India and to the world, I wish that the Government could agree to print his speech at Strasbourg as a Government paper, and to give it the widest possible circulation by official means. Subject to that desire, I beg leave to withdraw my Motion for Papers.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

CONCESSIONARY TRAVEL FOR HANDICAPPED PERSONS (SCOTLAND) BILL
7.54 p.m.
Lord ROSS of MARNOCK: My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time. I am glad to note that my name is Ross and not Hutchinson. I am not the next one to speak. But if I may just strike another note, there were many occasions on which I had to pass on the opinions of Lord Mountbatten to the War Cabinet offices, because I was, for quite a time, his special signals officer. I was certainly in full agreement with many of the things that my noble friend said about Lord Mountbatten.
This is a short Bill and it applies only to Scotland. Its purpose is limited, seeking to end an anomaly in the concessionary travel legislation as applicable to Scotland, which has been to the disadvantage of certain handicapped persons North of the Border. The Bill gives to regional authorities and islands authorities in Scotland exactly the same discretionary powers to offer concessionary travel to handicapped persons as are already available in England and Wales. So that we are not seeking to steal a march on England and Wales. What we are doing is, seeking to catch up with England and Wales, and to do justice to a deserving group of people in Scotland. It will, I hope, help to clarify the law of Scotland on this subject,

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and end this injustice which is affecting the mentally handicapped and certain groups of physically handicapped persons in Scotland.
This anomaly has existed since about 1974—it has developed since that time—and it came to light only just over 18 months ago. Perhaps it will be as well for me to explain how the anomaly arose, the extent of the anomaly and how the Bill seeks to remedy it and, indeed, to ensure that in future Scotland will not be left behind in such desirable welfare provision.
The Travel Concessions Acts of 1955 and 1964, and the Transport Act 1968, had United Kingdom application, applying to Scotland as to England and Wales. They empowered local authorities to offer concessionary fares to the elderly, to blind persons and to those suffering from disability or injury which was seriously impairing their ability to walk. But these schemes did not include the mentally handicapped and certain other groups of handicapped people. So they were without this right to concessionary travel until 11th February 1974, when the Secretary of State for Social Services further empowered local authorities in England and Wales to extend concessionary travel schemes to physically and mentally handicapped persons who were not covered by the existing concessionary travel legislation.
He did so by direction in a circular D/N.120/8 of 11th February 1974, and therein specified the categories to whom it would now apply as well—the blind, the deaf or dumb, other persons substantially and permanently handicapped by illness, injury or congenital deformity and those suffering from mental disorder. He also made it clear that it included "those who are partially sighted" or "who are hard of hearing". That power of direction stemmed from Section 29(1) of the National Insurance Act 1948. That was the revolutionary Act which was a great advance, and which ended the Poor Law and listed the welfare services that were available to those in need, under the National Assistance Board and under the local authorities. I think it was Part III of that Act that listed those matters for the local authorities.
Your Lordships may ask: "It was a United Kingdom Act, so why was this not applied to Scotland?" I stand here
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draped in sackcloth and ashes. In 1968, Scotland made a tremendous advance—I was reminded of it when the noble Baroness, Lady Faithfull, was speaking last night on a very important amendment—because we instituted the Social Work Act in Scotland, which was much more comprehensive than that which followed later in England. But in doing so we repealed, so far as Scotland was concerned, Section 29(1) and restated the duties of local authorities in much more general words. We did not specify them, as had been done in the 1948 Act. The terms being less specific, there arose doubt as to whether or not concessionary travel would apply in Scotland as it did in England. That has been the cause of the trouble. I do not know whether at that time the Scottish. Office thought that it did.
One must remember that the extension applied to England and Wales from 1974. It was not until 1978 that the question arose in Scotland—I think in Strathclyde where the father of an adult person who suffered from mental illness was refused a travel warrant in respect of his son, so he got on to his Member of Parliament. The question was also raised by, I think, the Lothian regional council who got on to the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities. They contacted the Scottish Office.
It was appreciated that something needed to be done and the result is this Bill. It was a Private Member's Bill introduced by Mr. Ian Campbell, the Member of Parliament for West Dunbartonshire, on 29th June of last year. There is something to be said for the way in which we in Scotland deal with legislation. Very few Private Members' Bills have come from another place, and they have been sandwiched between the Abortion Bill and the Seat Belts Bill. However, this one Scottish Bill got through because we have a special procedure which is to the advantage of Scotland; in another place there is a special Scottish Committee that can deal with Scottish Bills. So it is the one Private Member's Bill which has survived, and it has all-party support, the support of the Scottish local authorities and the blessing of the Government. I should like to pay my own tribute to the Scottish Office for their help in the drafting of the Bill and in other ways.
I think your Lordships will agree that it is desirable that we should close the

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gap and make this provision, and I am perfectly sure that I shall have the full support of the House. I had better explain the clauses, for many a time I have complained about people not explaining clauses. It is a short Bill.
Clause 1 enables local authorities to extend the concessionary travel arrangements to those handicapped who are not already covered in respect of their own transport system, if they are a transport authority, in respect of passenger transport executives—there is only one in Scotland, the Greater Glasgow Transport Executive—or in respect of other transport authorities: for instance, the Scottish Bus Group. Clause I also gives the power to co-operate with other authorities and to take over their burdens with regard to the payment of cost.
Clause 2 is important. It is the interpretation clause and it reinterprets the handicapped persons to whom this will apply. They are the handicapped persons who are not covered by previous legislation. Then, just to make sure this time, it more or less takes the specified list from the 1948 Act, as brought up to date by the Mental Health (Scotland) Act of, I think, 1960 and also introduces the assurance which was given by the Minister in his circular reply to the partially sighted and the partially deaf. So we in Scotland now have exactly the same power as exists in England. In addition, we make sure that we shall not be left behind by giving the power to the Secretary of State to prescribe further disabilities, if they come to light in the future, without the need for primary legislation. But any extension in that way has to be done by regulation, and that is subject to the negative procedure in either House.
So far as finance is concerned, the power is discretionary. I have heard it said that the number of people who might be involved might number 8,000, but when one takes into account that not all of them will be able to avail themselves of public transport and, secondly, that there may not be any public transport where they live—which is one of the serious weaknesses of the concessionary travel legislation—your Lordships will appreciate that the cost will not amount to very much. Indeed, it is entirely in the hands of the local authority as to whether or not to apply
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it. I think that most of them will. But then, they will have to appreciate that they must abide by the cash limits, as laid down, and fix their own priorities in respect of them.
The concessionary travel legislation has been of inestimable value to many people who would otherwise be isolated. Because of the rehousing which now takes place in towns, old people are separated from their grandchildren by miles and miles. Taking into account the state of affairs at the moment and the rise in fares, without these concessionary travel arrangements they will not be able to afford it. It really is an injustice, one which we must put right as soon as possible, that a very deserving group of people should be left out. It has been incidental and it has been accidental, and it may not he a great injustice, but it is an important one which I trust noble Lords will put right by giving a Second Reading to the Bill. I beg to move.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 2a.—(Lord Ross of Marnock.)
8.7 p.m.
Viscount THURSO: My Lords, it gives me great pleasure from these Benches to welcome this little but valuable Bill, one which, if I may say so, is compassionate and indeed Christian in its provisions. On behalf of my noble friends on these Benches, I should like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Ross of Marnock, and his honourable friend in another place for having brought forward this Bill since it is indeed very much needed by certain classes of disabled persons in Scotland. It has also been a fine sight to see the noble Lord, Lord Ross of Marnock, discarding his sackcloth and shaking the ashes out of his shaggy locks!
In giving this welcome to the Bill, may I please ask the noble Lord one or two questions, and even ask the Government one or two questions. May I also draw your Lordships' attention to one or two points that arise as a result of the Bill. I follow the way in which the categories of disabled persons have been enlarged. To the blind, to those who are impaired in walking and to old-age pensioners, we have added those who are disabled in other ways, including those who are mentally disabled.

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We have said that any local authority may contribute to any cost incurred by other local authorities, and any local authority may contribute to the costs of this scheme. However, I am still a little puzzled as to how post buses and rural buses are covered by this scheme. I have tried to follow this by means of the references to the Acts mentioned in the Bill, but I have been unable quite to follow the authority which allows post buses and rural buses to use this scheme. I am satisfied that these services are using this scheme for the other categories of disabled persons who already benefit from travel concessions, but I am not quite clear how this Bill ties in with the various Acts mentioned relating to this question.
There is an anomaly which arises from the use of a post bus, because a post bus goes only in one direction. For instance, the post bus which goes to Altnabreck goes from Altnabreck in the morning to Halkirk and Thurso but there is no return until the following morning, so that if you want to get back to Altnabreck you have to go on the train. When one is forced to use a post bus, it seems a pity that there is no way of being able to complete one's journey, to go to where one wants to go, do one's shopping and return.
I have tried to follow something else and found it extremely difficult because, as I followed back into the Transport Act of 1968 and the Travel Concessions Acts of 1955 and 1964, I found that very large chunks of these Acts had in fact been repealed. I did my best to find out where the money was coming from and how this was affected by such things as cuts in local authority expenditure and so forth. I am really asking this from the point of view of clarification, because it seems to me that if we read the Bill as it is written these provisions appear to be cut-proof. Expenses will be allowed to provide money for
"… any increase attributable to this Act in the sums payable out of such moneys under any other Act".
So this particular one seems to me to be cut-proof, but as I am not quite clear how the provision of the finance works I feel that at this stage I have to ask somebody how it does work.
The other point that arises in this connection is that of course all these
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provisions are discretionary. Local authorities may or may not apply them; they may apply them to a greater or to a lesser extent. In fact, at this moment if you are a disabled person and you happen to live in the Lothians region, you are extremely lucky because within your region you get free transport; but if you happen to live in the Highland regions you are not quite so lucky because you only get half of the cost of the fare.
I think that the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities is worried about this and would prefer to see a little more uniformity in the way in which these concessions are given as between one region and another. Clearly, it is easier for a region that already owns the buses to give concessions, but I do not think that ought to be the only criterion. If we are trying to do away with the disadvantages which disabled persons suffer from, then we should try to do away with the disadvantages wherever they may hurt the disabled person and, to the same extent, wherever that disabled person may happen to live. Having asked these questions and made that particular point about the anomalies between the different areas, may I say how greatly we welcome this measure and that we consider it to be an advance that has been truly desired and will he greatly appreciated.
8.15 p.m.
Lord SANDYS: My Lords, I think that at this juncture it would be for the convenience of the House if I were to make the announcement that, by agreement with all the speakers who were going to take part in the Unstarred Question tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Hutchinson of Lullington, this will not be proceeded with this evening but on a future occasion.
The Earl of LONGFORD: My Lords, I should like to ask a question. May I say, as one of the speakers and one who is so docile that I will agree to anything, however absurd it may be, that I think it is monstrous that this very important Question should be treated in this way? I hope there is no sense of complacency about the situation. A number of speakers, highly expert, have been mobilised tonight to speak on this Question and now, by some extraordinary misarrangement of the business, the whole thing is off.
Lord SANDYS: My Lords, I should like to make it quite clear that this initiative has come from the speakers themselves. It was not the intention of the usual channels to arrange the business in any other way, but those who were intending to participate have now sought to withdraw.
The Earl of LONGFORD: But, my Lords, this is a rather important Question, and I think a lot of people are shocked by the arrangement. They are only thinking of withdrawing because of the failure of the Government managers to give them a possible time to come on. When I last inquired, I was told that the debate would come on at 9.15. That is just an example of a muddle; I cannot put it more plainly than that, but I should not like the Government to think that in some mysterious way this whole initiative arose from the speakers and that they were very happy at the way it had been managed.
Lord SANDYS: My Lords, I think there are many precedents when an Unstarred Question has come on at quite a late hour—sometimes as late as 10 o'clock. This is really a matter for the Procedure Committee and I shall be happy to pass the matter on through the usual channels for them to deal with.
Lord HOWIE of TROON: My Lords, I should like to make only one very brief point which relates to the manner in which we do our business in this House. I had no intention of taking part in the debate, although I am interested in the subject and might have been interested to hear what was said about it; but I do not really think it is quite good enough for an announcement merely to be made to us that some piece of business will not be proceeded with. I think that when a case of that sort is presented to us an explanation should be given to us at the time when the announcement is made. The explanation should not have to be drawn out of the Minister piecemeal as it is being done tonight.
Lord SANDYS: My Lords, in response to the noble Lord, Lord Howie of Troon, think I made it clear that what has taken place is with the consent, agreement and wholehearted support of all the speakers. The business managers in this case are acting on the advice of those who were intending to participate.
Baroness LLEWELYN-DAVIES of HASTOE: My Lords, far be it from me ever to defend this Government in anything they ever do, but I must say that this was a very difficult situation. I think that, as the people who were to participate in the debate did not wish to proceed, the Government Whips really had no alternative, and I think we ought to thank the noble Lord, Lord Sandys, for his courtesy in interrupting the previous debate so that nobody stays unnecessarily.
Lord FERRIER: My Lords, as somebody who over the last 20 years has been continually mischievous about Unstarred Questions, I find the passage that we have just heard extremely interesting. I hope that the Procedure Committee will apply their minds to it and to the point that Unstarred Questions are important contributions to the proceedings of the House and they should be watched very carefully.
One great thing about what has happened is that we in this important little debate do not need to feel under pressure to hurry on because we are keeping people waiting. Therefore, it enables me to speak for a little longer than I had intended.
I want to support the noble Viscount, Lord Thurso, in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Ross of Marnock, on introducing this important little measure and on his robust treatment of the whole thing. I am reminded of an occasion when I was travelling in a ship which sailed from Castlebay at 3.30 in the morning and I joined a party in the saloon at breakfast time at the island of Coll and a fellow passenger said to me, "You are a Conservative, I can see." I said, ".Yes, I am." "Och," she said, "Willie Ross is the man for me". Well, on this occasion, Willie Ross is the man for me and I support this Bill wholeheartedly because indeed I have some experience of the problems of handicapped folk in rural areas in Scotland, and I support any scheme which can be devised to provide concessionary travel for such folk as the noble Lord, Lord Ross, has described. It will be interesting to see how the noble Viscount's questions are answered.
It is not my intention to take much of your Lordships' time, but I ask myself, and I ask the Minister, about the paucity, indeed the complete absence, of public transport in many rural areas. In East

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Lothian there is a scheme of tokens available for old age pensioners, and I think Lord Ross will confirm that that does not extend to handicapped people unless they are old-age pensioners. These tokens, collectable twice a year, are accepted by the buses and the railways in complete settlement of the fares required for the journey to be undertaken, and it is—or was if it is not still operating—a most acceptable concession and to be highly commended. But, my Lords—and this "but" is what I want to draw to your Lordships' attention—sometimes there is no bus service at all or a very infrequent bus service.
As the noble Viscount pointed out, the post bus concession is a very good one, but it only goes one way in the day, and when there is a public bus service it is very often at very awkward hours for old or handicapped people. There is generally a neighbour who has a motorcar and who would help if petrol could be provided. I say it that way because in any case my experience has been that a lot of handicapped and aged people are proud and are unwilling to accept or to seek favours from neighbours, but would not hesitate to do so if they could contribute by providing petrol. Is it possible that a scheme could be evolved which would enable the local authority to issue some sort of voucher convertible into fuel at a petrol station? I cannot think how it could be done. Perhaps someone could work it out.
Viscount THURSO: My Lords, I do not know if the noble Lord is asking for an answer. I believe that, totally illegally but pragmatically and thriftily, certain people in the north and west of Sutherland used to cash their tokens in with the garage and get petrol in exchange; the garage would then cash the tokens in with the bus company when it filled up the buses. This would be one way in which you could do it. I am sure it is totally illegal. It could only be done in the Highlands.
Lord FERRIER: My Lords, that is a most interesting angle and I am looking forward to what the Minister is going to say in reply. I am convinced that if something of this sort were possible it would provide really helpful assistance to the handicapped, in addition to the
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assistance with public transport fares. I am not suggesting that it should be in substitution, because assistance with public transport fares is of immense use to the handicapped in urban areas. With those remarks, I support Lord Ross's Bill.
8.24 p.m.
Lord LYELL: My Lords, the Government welcome this Bill, which will give Scottish local authorities the same discretionary powers to offer concessionary travel to handicapped persons as are already available to local authorities in England and Wales. It is clearly appropriate that Scottish local authorities should be in the same position in this matter as the local authorities south of the Border, and the Bill simply seeks to rectify a legislative anomaly which came to light recently, as we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Ross. Despite the need to effect expenditure economies, I believe that Scottish authorities will welcome the availability of powers to take such steps as they see fit, of course within the available resources, to assist the disadvantaged members of the community to whom this Bill especially relates.
My Lords, the Government are very glad that the scope of the Bill as initially introduced in another place was widened in the course of its passage through that place to include not only mentally handicapped persons, on whose behalf concern was originally expressed by the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities and other interested parties, but also to certain other groups of disadvantaged persons, such as the deaf, the dumb and those substantially and permanently handicapped by illness or by injury. This again simply places the Scottish local authorities in a similar position to those in England and Wales. By giving sympathetic consideration to this Bill, your Lordships' House will be able to show that it is concerned about vulnerable members of the community and is willing for Scottish local authorities to have a discretionary power to offer these concessionary travel facilities to a group of people whose needs are clearly greater than those of others among the general public.
We should like to congratulate the honourable Member for Dumbartonshire West in another place for his special efforts in introducing and promoting this

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legislation. The House will also be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Ross, for the admirable way in which he has described the purpose and content of this modest and humane Bill. We are also grateful for the support from the noble Viscount, Lord Thurso, and from my noble friend Lord Ferrier. I think I would not wish to add anything to what I have said, apart from pointing out to them that this Bill is simply giving to the local authorities discretionary powers to grant these concessions. It is, as I have said, a simple Bill, but we wholeheartedly commend it to your Lordships.
Lord ROSS of MARNOCK: My Lords, I am very grateful to those noble Lords who have spoken and given their support to the Bill. I was touched by the thought that the noble Lord, Lord Ferrier, would in any way be inhibited; I have never appreciated that he could be inhibited whether by time or anything else. As far as the paucity of public transport is concerned, all I can do is agree with him. But I cannot see any local authority providing, under any piece of legislation which at present exists, tokens for transport on buses that do not exist. This is the great weakness of his scheme, albeit illegal, and it was a very unwise man who rose in this House to declare the illegality of what was happening—I do not believe it for a minute—in the north of Scotland.
The noble Viscount, Lord Thurso, did raise the question of categories of transport. I can assure him that they are all covered. If he looks closely at Clause I and that subsection which gives them the right to make arrangements in respect of their own transport, it says:
"… and other transport provided by other persons".
That could include any private purveyor and also, of course, the post buses that he mentioned.
So far as money is concerned, it is one of the great tribulations of a Private Members Bill to get any money. It is all right if there is some fund there; then you can get away with it. This Bill could not have proceeded unless the Government had agreed to this particular formula. It is the usual formula; it just means that the money the local authorities get for the general purposes under the rate support
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grant can be used for this particular purpose. As to whether or not they will use it, I point out that it is not mandatory: it is discretionary and the extent to which they give the concession is entirely up to them.
The noble Viscount touched upon a point which is a sore point with many people. Different kinds or forms of concession are given by the different local authorities in the different regions. I remember that in Ayr, under the old authority, the pensioners—of whom I am one, but I never made any claim—were issued with so many free tickets and, when the free tickets were used up, that was it—it was finished.
Now with the general Strathclyde procedure it is a question of getting one's particular card. It may well be that they are more careful in Strathclyde than in the more northern parts and the tickets are not transferable or cannot be reduced to cash. But it is not true to say that it is only available where local authorities own their own buses. It is much wider than that. My regret, of course, is that in certain parts of the country there are no rural bus services and so many people are denied this extremely useful and very desirable concession. But I think we shall agree that it is right that this should go ahead and I very much appreciate the support that has been given to the Bill in your Lordships' House.
On Question, Bill read 2a, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

EDUCATION (SCOTLAND) BILL [H.L.]
Reported from the Joint Committee with amendments, and recommitted to a Committee of the Whole House; Bill to be printed as amended.