Lords Sitting of 8 June 1988

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

Minibus Services Since Deregulation
Lord Gainford Lord Gainford asked Her Majesty's Government:
How many minibus services have been started up since deregulation of local authority buses in October 1986.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Transport (Lord Brabazon of Tara): My Lords, information is not available in the form requested but there has been a substantial growth in the number of minibuses used on local bus services since deregulation. At the end of the first full year of deregulation some 5,600 minibuses were serving 370 places compared with only 400 vehicles in 40 places before deregulation.
Lord Gainford: My Lords, I thank my noble friend for that encouraging Answer. Has he any information about in which parts of the country these buses are noted for their service? Is there any information about the North-East of England?
Lord Brabazon of Tara: My Lords, these new services are spread all over the country where minibuses are providing fast, frequent and popular services in both rural and urban areas including, I understand, Newcastle.
The Lord Bishop of Manchester: My Lords, is the Minister aware that in many urban areas there is an impression that public transport— and bus transport in particular—has declined in quality? Many passengers do not know about the timetables and frequency of the buses. Some of these minibus routes, after making a start, have been taken off because they were not profitable.
Lord Brabazon of Tara: My Lords, one of the benefits of deregulation is that these services can start up and serve the needs of the customer. I am surprised to hear the right reverend Prelate state that some services have been taken off. That may be the case, although overall the numbers are still increasing.
With regard to frequency and timetables, it is in the operators' interest to publicise their services. Local authorities have powers to publicise, and many are doing so.
Lord Beloff: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that there has been a great improvement in bus services in the two towns in which I live: Brighton and Oxford? This is very largely due to frequent and well-publicised minibus services.
Lord Brabazon of Tara: My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for that question which bears out what I have been saying. It is an example of how deregulation has made bus operators respond to the needs of the customer.
Lord Underhill: My Lords, does the Minister appreciate that we are also pleased to see the development of the minibuses? They originally began with one of the subsidiaries of the National Bus Company before it was taken over as a result of privatisation. However, his answer to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester was rather disappointing. The big problem in many areas is still the lack of information about timetables and services. In many cases this responsibility falls on the county council. Some do it very well. However, the passenger transport authorities are the only bodies to carry out this job effectively. We were debating last night the problem of the possible secession and collapse of those authorities.
Lord Brabazon of Tara: My Lords, we had a long debate on that matter at a very late hour last night. It does not seem very long ago! However, at the end of that debate the Committee decided that the Government's proposals were right.

South Africa: UK Trade Missions
2.40 p.m.
Lord Hatch of Lusby Lord Hatch of Lusby asked Her Majesty's Government:
What assistance is being given to the United Kingdom-South Africa Trade Association delegation to South Africa and whether this is consistent with their commitment to the agreement made at the Nassau Commonwealth Conference in 1985.
The Secretary of State for Trade and Industry (Lord Young of Graffham): My Lords, officials both in the United Kingdom and overseas provide information and advice on the market to business visitors to South Africa, whether they travel there as individuals or as members of a trade mission. Such assistance is not contrary to any of our undertakings on South Africa.
Lord Hatch of Lusby: My Lords, has the Secretary of State the slightest understanding of what is at stake here? Is it not correct that the Prime Minister signed the communiqué in Nassau which pledged each country in the Commonwealth to dissuade trade with South Africa? How is that consonant with the Department of Trade and Industry not funding but promoting this trade association mission by giving it the opportunity of diplomatic support in South Africa, and attempting to increase trade between Britons and South Africa? How is that consonant with the communiqué at Nassau in 1985?
Lord Young of Graffham: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Hatch of Lusby, may be suffering from this difficulty: I have a very clear idea of what was agreed at the Commonwealth Heads of Government

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Meeting at Nassau in October 1985. We agreed—and agreed explicitly—that no funding for trade missions to, or participation in, exhibitions and trade fairs in South Africa would be undertaken by the Government. We undertake that to the letter. But we did not stop trade with South Africa; nor do we intend to do so; nor is there any implication that we would do so. We do not believe that sanctions are an effective means of ending apartheid. We believe that they would hurt those we seek to protect and that they would prolong the conflict.
Lord Cledwyn of Penrhos: My Lords, do Her Majesty's Government advise British companies to invest in South Africa? Is the British Embassy in Pretoria also advised and authorised to accommodate this association and to encourage it in its work?
Lord Young of Graffham: My Lords, we take the view that the level of civil trade in South Africa should, within the limits of our international obligations and undertakings, be determined by the commercial judgment of those engaged in it. With the exception of funding for outward missions and trade fairs, there are no constraints on the advice and support which my department offers to exporters to South Africa.
Indeed, I should remind the House that South Africa remains a major market for UK exporters. Our exports increased by some 13 per cent. in the period January to April 1988, compared with 1987. In accordance with the agreements which we entered into and honour with the Commonwealth Heads of Government in Nassau, there is a voluntary ban on certain new investments within South Africa.
Lord Walston: My Lords, will the noble Lord tell us whether it is the policy of his department and Her Majesty's Government to encourage still more trade with South Africa, to discourage trade with South Africa or to remain absolutely neutral in the matter?
Lord Young of Graffham: My Lords, everything I say today, and everything that my department does, does not in any way indicate that we are content with the present policy which is carried on by the Government of South Africa with regard to apartheid. We do not see that we can cure the problem by means of sanctions in that sense. The answer that I have already given to your Lordships this afternoon is that we leave the level of trade to be determined by the commercial judgment of those engaged in it.
Lord Chalfont: My Lords, will the Minister confirm, to put this matter in a broader context, that any citizen of this country, whether sportsman or businessman, is perfectly free to conduct his business anywhere he wishes in the world, whether in the Soviet Union, South Africa or anywhere else?
Lord Young of Graffham: My Lords, I am very happy to agree with the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont. However, there are other matters which affect sportsmen, who are not within my province; but in the case of businessmen I agree wholeheartedly.
Lord Hatch of Lusby: My Lords, we are talking here about lives and liberties—
Noble Lords: Question!
Lord Hatch of Lusby: We are talking here—
Noble Lords: Question!
Lord Hatch of Lusby: My Lords, we are talking here about lives and liberties. I am asking the Secretary of State how he can equate the pledge that was given at the Nassau Commonwealth Conference to dissuade traders in each of the member countries from carrying on trade with South Africa with the government support that is being given to trade association delegations.
Is it true that Mr. David Bell, who is the chief executive of the British Overseas Exports Board, visited South Africa in February this year on behalf of a government department to promote and increase trade, despite the pledge that we had given in Nassau to dissuade any companies in this country—not to prevent them but to dissuade them—from continuing trade with South Africa?
Lord Young of Graffham: My Lords, where I suspect I am in full agreement with the noble Lord, Lord Hatch of Lusby, is in our dislike for apartheid, but where I believe we disagree is the best method to help to persuade the South African Government to proceed with political reform.
We agreed in 1985 and 1986 with our partners in the Commonwealth that we would restrict our funding for trade missions and our participation and funding in exhibition and trade fairs in South Africa as a signal to the South African Government of the need to press ahead with political reform. It is not in any way intended to discourage trade with South Africa nor to harm the South African economy since in the view of the Government that is not the best way to advance the needs of those who would like to see an end to apartheid.
Lord Mellish: My Lords, is it not a fact that if all trade between ourselves and the South Africans were discontinued immediately the first people to be hurt would be the coloureds?
Lord Young of Graffham: My Lords, I suspect that the black and coloured communities would be the first to suffer in the event of the economy really turning down. We are adamant in our desire to continue to help to persuade the Government of South Africa to end apartheid. The measures we have taken have been a signal to that Government that we stand by each and every word of the undertakings we have given.
Lord Hatch of Lusby: My Lords, is the noble Lord then saying that his Government did not agree to dissuade companies in each of the Commonwealth countries from pursuing and extending their trade with South Africa? Is that what he is saying?
Lord Young of Graffham: My Lords, in addition to the ban on funding for outward trade missions, the measures we agreed which most affect our civil trading links with South Africa were a ban on the import of certain gold coins, a ban on the import of certain hulk iron and steel, and a voluntary ban on certain new investments within South Africa. As I have said before and as no doubt I shall continue to say, we stand by every word we then agreed.

Bail Decisions
2.50 p.m.
Baroness Macleod of Borve Baroness Macleod of Borve asked Her Majesty's Government:
What measures they are taking to assist the courts in reaching decisions on whether or not to grant bail.
The Earl of Arran: My Lords, work has been done on providing better information to magistrates' courts through bail information schemes; resources are being provided over the next three financial years for about nine new bail hostels; improved training on bail decisions for magistrates is being prepared. The Home Office has recently issued a circular to magistrates' courts drawing these threads together.
Baroness Macleod of Borve: My Lords, I warmly welcome the statement made by the Minister this afternoon about the increase in the number of bail hostels. Can he tell the House of the likely effects as a result of that increase?
The Earl of Arran: My Lords, on completion the extra nine hail hostels should provide approximately 200 extra places. That should mean that a further 900 people a year will be able to remain within the community while they await trial. Bail hostels are intended essentially for those who are homeless or for those whose domestic circumstances are considered to be unsuitable.
Lord Henderson of Brompton: My Lords, in view of the success of the pilot bail information schemes, which were jointly undertaken by the probation service and the Vera Institute of Justice, may I ask this question. Will Her Majesty's Government consider expanding the number of such schemes more widely than was indicated by the noble Lord in his Answer, especially in the metropolitan areas?
The Earl of Arran: My Lords, as regards the bail information schemes, eight pilot schemes were established in 1987 to provide the Crown Prosecution Service with verified information about defendants which is relevant to the decision whether to oppose bail. A report on the scheme by the Vera Institute of Justice was published on 25th May. It showed that the schemes enabled better informed decisions to be taken on bail and no increase in failure to answer bail. My right honourable friend the Home Secretary is now considering how best to build on those schemes.
Lord Mishcon: My Lords, is the noble Earl aware that the circular to which he referred (Circular No.
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25/1988 25 1988) is most useful? Is he equally aware that the courts in this country are concerned with what happens still to prisoners who are on remand and as yet unconvicted, and that the conditions that they must suffer in police cells, very often, and in prisons are quite unconscionable? Despite the planning that he indicated, can he tell the House when it is likely that we shall no longer have people who have not yet been convicted in police cells on remand?
The Earl of Arran: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Mishcon, rightly raises the question of remand prisoners in police cells. I believe that from this Dispatch Box the Government have frequently made mention of the fact that my right honourable friend the Home Secretary is doing as much as he can as fast as he can to alleviate the situation. As a result of considerable interest, I visited Brixton Prison only this morning where I was able to see the situation at first hand.
Lord Mishcon: My Lords, I should like to express the gratitude of every member of your Lordships' House to the Minister for his enthusiasm and zeal in a very proper cause. However, is it not possible, in the planning being done by the Home Office, to indicate when it is programming the end of an era where people on remand are still being put into police cells?
The Earl of Arran: My Lords, an era is a very long period of time. As distasteful as this situation may be, I believe that it would be entirely inappropriate for me to answer the noble Lord on that particular question. However, I shall of course draw to the attention of my right honourable friend the Home Secretary the comments that he made.
Baroness Seear: My Lords, the noble Earl has told us that 900 people who would otherwise be in prison in custody will be in bail hostels. Can he say what that number is as a proportion of the total number of people on remand? He may say that this is a different Question, but it is surely related. Can he give the comparative cost of keeping a person in a hail hostel as compared with keeping that person in prison? I believe that that is approximately £200 per week.
The Earl of Arran: My Lords, I cannot give the comparative cost to the noble Baroness. Bail hostels are entirely voluntary, and it depends on whether the individual wishes to take advantage of the bail hostel. Although I cannot now give a comparative cost, I shall undertake to write to the noble Baroness giving her that information.

Woodlands: Planting Figures
2.55 p.m.
Lord John-Mackie Lord John-Mackie asked Her Majesty's Government:
Whether they are satisfied that their planting target for forestry will be achieved in such a way as to satisfy and increase the growing level of investment in wood-processing plants.
The Minister of State, Scottish Office (Lord Sanderson of Bowden): My Lords, we see no reason why the new woodland grant scheme should fail to stimulate the desired levels of planting. So far as the next decade and immediately beyond is concerned, it is the ever-increasing volume of wood from existing forests which will help to stimulate further investment in wood-processing plants. New planting carried out today will allow the continuing development of the wood-processing industry well into the next century.
Lord John-Mackie: My Lords, I thank the Minister for that Answer. I should like to ask him why he is so sure of his figures when, since 1980–81 when the Government set it, the target has failed by 30 per cent? Because of what, in my opinion, has been the Government's ham-fisted handling of the tax relief aspect, I believe that the situation will be worse this year. Does the Minister not believe that the way to solve the problem is to let the Forestry Commission come back with its target of roughly half of private planting which would solve his problem immediately? I am sure the Minister is aware that the Question is promoted by the "Focus" articles in The Times, one of which was headed "Factories hungry for forests". I believe that if the Minister reads the articles carefully he will appreciate that he cannot possibly consider that the situation is in a good condition unless he reaches his target of 33,000 hectares.
Lord Sanderson of Bowden: My Lords, I am aware of all the points made by the noble Lord. He has expressed concern about the figures which are being reached. Although final figures have not yet been confirmed, I believe that he, along with me, will be happy to hear that they have risen for the year to the end of March, 1988, to 28,000 hectares. That is a considerable advance on the figures of 1983, for example, which showed a total of 21,000 hectares.
I should like to turn to his question of whether there will be enough wood for the wood-processing industries. By the year 2005 we expect wood production from existing British forests to have increased from its present 5.6 million cubic meters to some 9.7 million cubic meters. That means that for the next five to six years in particular the planned and present production will be roughly in line with what is available for the expansion for which I know the noble Lord will look.
Lord Renton: My Lords, will my noble friend say which of the planned wood-processing plants have been completed and where they are situated? Would not the answer that he gives have a bearing on the Government's decision—perhaps rightly made, in spite of what I said on an earlier occasion—to have conifers planted mainly in Scotland rather than south of the Border.
Lord Sanderson of Bowden: My Lords, as regards the major processing plants and those which are already "up and running" (that is the expression I should like to use), Shotton is the major user of pulp, and that involves the use of conifers. As regards the
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planned production, the factory in Irvine which is to be opened next year will take a very sizeable amount of pulp. However, I must point out that in addition to what is available from the forests, we have to take into account the availability of waste-paper as a raw material for some of these factories.
Lord Gisborough: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that the new grant scheme, whereby the grant is only paid over the first five or six years for maintenance, will make people plant varieties which do not need subsequent maintenance; namely, the sitka spruce, the one variety which causes the most antagonism with the public? That will achieve the exact opposite of what the Government want.
Lord Sanderson of Bowden: My Lords, I believe that we are moving slightly away from what is required for the downstream activities of the wood processing industries in the short term and looking ahead to what is available for the future. The question of maintenance has been raised on a number of occasions. Many owners will benefit quite considerably from the reduction in the top rate of tax and the transitional arrangements available until 1993 will provide a breathing space to enable owners to adjust and also allow time for us to assess the impact of the changes and to consider whether anything more needs to be done.
Perhaps I may emphasise, particularly to the noble Lord, Lord John-Mackie, that it would be very helpful if he could persuade some of his colleagues in another place of the importance of the transitional arrangements.
Lord Taylor of Gryfe: My Lords, perhaps I may ask the Minister whether the encouraging figures which he has quoted for 1988 are the result of the previous tax regime which is now abolished. Will the Minister confirm that the planting programme of the Forestry Commission in the past eight years has been reduced from 15,000 hectares to 5,000 hectares? Is it true that private planters are now cutting back on their nursery orders, which suggests a total cutback in their planting programme? Can the Minister inform the House where the new investors are coming from?
Lord Sanderson of Bowden: My Lords, I know of the noble Lord's great interest in this subject. I know that on 31st March I answered some of the questions which he has now asked. However, I repeat that it is the Government's view that in achieving their targets—they will watch this matter carefully—there will be investors available to invest in new planting. In answer to the noble Lord's point about the Forestry Commission and its planting, as an example the figure for 1984 was 8,382 hectares and there were steady figures for 1985 and the succeeding years of 5,100, 4,300, 5,300 and 5,000.
Lord John-Mackie: My Lords, the Minister made the point about present supplies. However, we are interested in future supplies. It is because of the planting that was done in the past that the present supplies are sufficient or reasonably sufficient. That is the point I should like to make. Is the Minister sure

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that the policy will ensure that over the next 50 or 60 years planting will carry on at the same rate as in the 1970s and early 1980s?
Lord Sanderson of Bowden: My Lords, I pay tribute to the work of the noble Lord, Lord John-Mackie, in this regard. We are now reaping the benefits of the investments of previous years; that is quite obvious. That is why in the figures I have given we are looking forward to an increase in production from those forests up to the year 2005.
As regards what is available in the future, of course we shall assess how the new tax regime is working. However, when the situation before the budget was described by one of the noble Lord's colleagues, the noble Lord, Lord McIntosh of Haringey, as grotesque and obscene, then I feel that he has a nerve to criticise me on what we have done.

Business
Lord Denham: My Lords, with the leave of the House, I should like, as usual, to say a word about the two short debates standing in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Cledwyn of Penrhos, and the noble Baroness, Lady Ewart-Biggs. It is customary in short debates that the mover is allowed approximately 15 minutes and that the Minister should rise to reply not less than 20 minutes before the scheduled end of the debates. In the case of the short debate in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Cledwyn of Penrhos, this means that all other speeches should be limited to a maximum of 10 minutes and in that of the noble Baroness, Lady Ewart-Biggs, to seven minutes. If any noble Lord should speak at greater length, it would be at the expense of subsequent speakers in the debate.
Perhaps I should elaborate and point out that that means that noble Lords should sit down when the figures nine and six respectively still show on the clock.

Middle East Conflict
3.5 p.m.
Lord Cledwyn of Penrhos Lord Cledwyn of Penrhos rose to call attention to the continuing conflict in the Middle East and to the efforts of the United States Secretary of State to convene an international conference; and to move for Papers.
The noble Lord said: My Lords, I am sure that the whole House will agree that the conflict in the Middle East is a most intractable and possibly the most dangerous problem facing the international community today. That is why we believe it is appropriate to discuss the matter in this short debate.
There are also other reasons for debating the subject today. The Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary will be meeting the United States Secretary of State in Madrid tomorrow and on Friday, and we assume that this subject will be high on the agenda. Secondly, Arab leaders are holding a very important
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three-day meeting in Algiers and their conclusions and willingness or otherwise to consider the possibilities of a conference could be of immense significance. Therefore, our debate is being held at the right moment.
The Motion refers to the efforts of Mr. George Shultz to convene an international conference. I believe that we would all agree that his patience and persistence over a long period in seeking some measure of agreement between the leaders of the countries concerned deserve our admiration and full support. He has often been received coldly and frequently been discouraged. It has seemed time and again that his mission is hopeless. Some have said that he should call it a day, and I am sure that he himself has felt at times that his confidence was ebbing. On the one hand, he came up against Mr. Shamir's refusal to give clear approval to the central elements of the plan that he was putting forward. On the other hand, he faced the criticism of even moderate Arab states of what they see as an American bias towards the Israelis.
When he asked about possible future talks, Mr. Shultz said:
"I am willing to keep this thing rolling".
He also said:
"We want to avoid any war that will be unlike any conflict we've seen before, involving more casualties, and harder to contain".
He referred to the continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as a "dead-end street" and the belief that it can continue as "an illusion". He has done some plain speaking and the Arab leaders must have seen that it was plain speaking to Mr. Shamir.
However, it is to his very great credit that Mr. Shultz did not abandon hope and that he has been in the Middle East again over the past few days to pursue his peace initiative. It may be said that the prospects are bleak but I do not see them as entirely gloomy. Mr. Shimon Peres and Mr. Yitzhak Rabin have indicated support for the plan. Mr. Rabin said recently:
"The Shultz initiative is the most concrete proposal placed before the Israeli Government, and the Governments of Jordan, Egypt and Syria and the four additional powers since 1982".
He went on to say:
"if we do not accept the initiative in principle we will miss an opportunity that might not return".
Furthermore, we should note that, apart from the PLO, no Arab party has rejected Mr. Shultz's peace plans outright. I am sure that neither I nor any noble Lord would minimise the difficulties.
Mr. Shultz's mission began last February following the outbreak of violent unrest in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza. Over the past five months these outbreaks have claimed the lives of 186 Palestinians and two Israelis. That is one of the prices of failure to reach an agreement. If an accord is not achieved the rioting and killing will go on and on, with unpredictable results. Anyone who tries to argue that this is none of our business is talking irresponsibly.
Of course, we recognise that any eventual settlement must emerge from the Middle East itself, with the approval of the Arabs and the Israelis. However, there has been sporadic communal conflict

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in these areas since the end of the mandate for which we were responsible. We remember in particular the riots which occurred on 29th November 1947 and the recommendations made at that time by the United Nations. We cannot wash our hands completely of those events. While there is an obvious limit to what we can hope to do 40 years later, we must also use our best endeavours to help towards a settlement.
The communal violence in the occupied areas has caused grave concern, especially to those who are friends of Israel. For example, Oxfam, which has a splendid record in the field of human rights, is concerned about the way in which the workers in Al-Haq have been treated. Oxfam reports that since the beginning of the uprising the Israeli Army has arrested people wholesale without distinction, especially at the scenes of demonstrations and confrontations. Since January, four Al-Haq workers have been arrested in these wholesale sweeps even though they carried identity cards clearly showing that they work for a human rights organisation. Their presence at demonstrations is either fortuitous or because they are collecting evidence of human rights violations.
The European Parliament, at the suggestion of Oxfam, passed a Motion in May requesting Israel to respect the identity of Al-Haq workers. Unhappily no response has yet been forthcoming from the Israeli Government. Al-Haq is an internationally recognised human rights organisation which has won a number of international awards for its work. It is also the local chapter of the International Commission of Jurists. Oxfam argues strongly that Israel should be asked again to respond on the question of protection for Al-Haq workers if its claim to govern by the rule of law is to be considered valid. I am sure that every democrat in Israel—and the great majority are democrats—will wish to respond to that plea from Oxfam.
What can a British government do to help towards a resolution of these awful problems? The answer is that Her Majesty's Government can operate through several channels; and I was glad to note that on 24th May the EC urged the United States and the Soviet Union to put the Middle East on their Moscow agenda in order to keep the United States' sponsored peace talks alive, and that Mr. Hans Dietrich Genscher, the current President of the EC Council, said that it was important that "there be no marking of time" in the Middle East peace process.
One significant and necessary development would be the resumption of diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and Israel. We hope this was discussed between Mr. Gorbachev and President Reagan last week. President Reagan stopped in London on his way home to discuss this matter with the right honourable lady the Prime Minister. Perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Glenarthur, can comment on that and also on any other proposals which the Government may have in mind for the European Community summit in Hanover to be held in a few days' time. I am sure that we are all glad to learn that Mr. Shamir is to meet the Soviet Foreign Minister, Mr. Shevardnadze at the United Nations this week. This will be the highest level of contact
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between Israel and the Soviet Union that has taken place for several years. We hope that the talks will be constructive.
We remember the previous efforts to find a settlement at Camp David, and on other occasions. We know how complex is the situation. Therefore, what is Mr. Shultz now proposing and will he fare any better than those who went before him? As the House knows, his plan envisages self rule for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and negotiations, within an agreed timetable, on the final status of these territories. His plan further proposes that talks would be initiated by an international peace conference at which all regional interests, together with the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, would be represented. This latter proposal would give strength and stability to any agreement. It would also bring the Soviet Union on to the scene. There would be a chance of permanent peace for the first time.
The uprising in the occupied territories has reunited the Arab world around the Palestinian cause. The Algiers Conference points to that. It could also open the door to a change in the status quo. Conversely, it could be a lost opportunity and a wasted sacrifice. I say that because it does not appear that Israel is going to withdraw unconditionally from the occupied territories with the subsequent emergence of an independent Palestine state.
A more sensible assessment may be that the uprising could lead to real progress in the peace process, leading to an agreed Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza. What stands in the way is Israel's rejection of the PLO, on the one hand, and the PLO's refusal to recognise Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state, on the other. Those are the two obstacles in the way of real progress. A refusal by both sides to make a reconciliatory move, to be resilient enough to find negotiating possibilities in Mr. Shultz's plan, will only result in more violence, more brutality, more deaths and more suffering. The unfolding tragedy of the Middle East stems from this unwillingness to take one small step towards conciliation. That is the major tragedy of the Middle East.
The Question often asked is why the United States does not bring more pressure to bear on the Israeli Government. The invasion of Lebanon by Israel and the treatment of the Palestinian rioters by some members of the Israeli Army shocked many friends of Israel, including American-Jewish opinion which is very powerful as noble Lords will be aware. Furthermore, on the practical side United States military and economic aid to Israel is immense. Military aid is about £1·8 billion per annum and economic aid is in the region of £1·2 billion per annum.
It certainly appears that Mr. Shultz has brought pressure to bear on the Israeli Government but that Mr. Shamir has unfortunately responded coldly to that pressure and to the the proposals made. Another factor we would not wish to overlook is that general elections are pending in both Israel and the United States. In this country we well know the implications of that.
The view of my noble friends and that of the Labour Party has been made clear by Mr. Kinnock and Mr. Gerald Kaufman. They have called for full support for an international conference which should provide for guarantees of secure borders for Israel; for the demilitarisation of the West Bank and Gaza; for a homeland for the Palestinian people; and for equal treatment for all without regard to race and religion. Those objectives, which are broadly supported by the Security Council resolution, also have I believe the general support of Her Majesty's Government.
I admire the State of Israel and have done so for 40 years. We want to see a prospering Israel within secure and guaranteed borders. That is the objective to which all of us subscribe. We also want to see a fair and compassionate resolution of the Palestinian problem. These objectives are attainable and their achievement would bring stability to the Middle East, with all that that implies. A great responsibility lies on Mr. Shamir and his colleagues. An equal responsibility lies on the Arab states. The need is that both sides should be prepared to accept moderate solutions. If Her Majesty's Government do all within their power, through all the avenues I have mentioned and which are at their disposal, to help towards this most necessary end of beginning the peace process in the Middle East, they can rely on our total support. My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.
3.19 p.m.
Lord Thomas of Gwydir: My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Cledwyn of Penrhos, because despite our occasional political differences, we have long been old friends. As far as I am concerned, he is an old and valued friend whom I have long admired. I should like to congratulate him on his speech which was delivered, as I would expect, with authority and quality, and much of it I accept. I believe that the objectives which he spelled out are ones which most of us would hope for as a proper solution to the problems of the Middle East.
Not surprisingly, in his speech the noble Lord concentrated almost exclusively on the Arab-Israel conflict, in particular on the Palestine problem. He referred to the problems that exist on the West Bank and in Gaza. The Motion he introduced calls attention to:
"the continuing conflict in the Middle East".
I believe it is agreed that the Israel-Arab conflict is riot the central problem in the Middle East as regards world peace. It would be a delusion to think that with the removal of conflict between Israel and her Arab neighbours the Middle East would be a peaceful place. Events in Iran and Iraq, North and South Yemen, Sudan and other places, have no connection with the existence of Israel. However, it seems true that their common hatred of Israel is probably the one unifying force among the Arab leaders now meeting in Algiers.
It is of interest to reflect that 12 of those leaders—that is more than half of all the Arab countries—attained office as a result of violence against their predecessor and in most cases death. In
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Israel, not so long ago, Mr. Peres, in accordance with agreement, peacefully handed over the premiership to his political opponent, Mr. Shamir. As far as I remember, all Israeli Prime Ministers have, in their time, relinquished office democratically and peacefully. In the Middle East such behaviour is clearly eccentric.
Those among us who seize every opportunity to criticise and attack Israel should remember that she is the only democracy in that part of the world and the only reliable ally of the West in an area seething with inter-Arab conflict, where terror flourishes and where instability is the norm. Over the past few years I had the good fortune to visit Israel on many occasions and to meet her politicians and her people. One thing is quite clear: what the Israelis yearn for is peace—"Shalom" is their habitual greeting.
However, for the whole of the 40 years of its existence as a nation, Israel has faced furious hostility from its neighbours and a succession of military attempts to destroy it. In addition, it is the target of unremitting terrorism both at home and abroad. It is therefore understandable that Israelis seek not just peace, but peace with security. A peace settlement is only possible if it secures Israel's right to a peaceful existence and is seen by the Israelis themselves to do so.
It is now 20 years since Resolution 242 was passed at the United Nations and accepted by Israel. It is that Resolution that is the basis of all the peace plans and initiatives that we and others have supported over those years. The Camp David agreement was an unprecedented event of major significance and the continuing relationship between Israel and Egypt and Egypt and Jordan is of optimistic importance. There is widespread acceptance that only a peaceful political settlement of the Palestinian problem can provide the key to stability and harmony in that region. It was hoped that the Camp David accord would provide it but differences arose between Egypt, Jordan and Israel as to what was meant by "autonomy".
It is clear that there can be no solution to the Palestine problem without the active participation of Jordan. However, King Hussein was not prepared to negotiate openly with Israel except under the umbrella of an international conference. As I can see it, the Shultz initiative is designed to meet that reluctance.
As the noble Lord, Lord Cledwyn, said, the Secretary of State's plan is that the United Nations' sponsored conference would involve all the permanent members of the Security Council, including the Soviet Union, and it should act as a framework and a launching pad for bilateral negotiations between Israel and Jordan. The Palestinian issue would be discussed with a Jordanian-Palestinian delegation, and any decisions reached would not be referred back to the international conference which would have no power of veto.
I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Cledwyn, that that is an initiative worthy of support. I also agree that it is particularly important, because of its influence on Syria, that the Soviet Union be included.

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I hope—I believe that the noble Lord agrees with me—that if the international conference ever materialised the Soviet Union would by then have resumed diplomatic relations with Israel. As the noble Lord pointed out, a major problem is the composition of the Jordanian-Palestinian delegation.
When one considers the PLO manifesto which still calls for the liberation of the whole of Palestine and the total elimination of Israel, the reluctance and concern of the Israelis to negotiate with the PLO is understandable. Yesterday an Arab mayor who co-operated with the Israel administration was stabbed in an attempt to kill him. The sad question is this: are there any Palestinian leaders brave and strong enough to disavow terrorism; to recognise UN Resolution 242 and to agree to Israel's right to exist? I confess that I do not know the answer.
Today's news indicates that Mr. Shultz's initiative has suffered, to say the least, some setback. He left yesterday, after his fourth tour of the Middle East with little, if any, support from the Arabs. If the report in today's issue of The Times is correct, the conditions spelled out in Algiers yesterday for an international conference are obviously unacceptable and demonstrate a clear rejection of the Shultz plan. They reject negotiation between parties and insist that the international conference should dictate a pre-ordained solution.
The majority of the Arab leaders have no interest in a peacefully negotiated settlement. I have no doubt that today's meeting will show that they are more concerned with fermenting and orchestrating the continuance of riotous demonstrations in Gaza and the West Bank. Despite those obvious setbacks, I do not believe that the problem is insoluble.
The noble Lord, Lord Cledwyn of Penrhos, talked in terms of perseverance and patience. That is what is required. I believe that the Shultz plan has the germ of success and deserves every support.
3.30 p.m.
Lord Mayhew: My Lords, I know that my noble friends would wish me to thank the noble Lord, Lord Cledwyn, for initiating this timely debate and to associate those on these Benches with his call for an international conference. We entirely agree with him in the respect we feel for the patience and persistence of Mr. Shultz in his four visits to the Middle East. On the other hand, we would not share the hopes about the Shultz initiative just expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Thomas.
One major reason for the failure—and it has failed—of the mission is that Mr. Shultz would try to deal with the Palestinians by negotiating with King Hussein of Jordan. Why should one suppose that that is a road to peace? The Palestinians do not accept that. Overwhelmingly, the majority of the Palestinians support the PLO. A peace initiative that is based on negotiations with the monarch of a neighbouring territory is doomed to failure from the start. The failure of the Shultz mission was predictable. It is hard to expect Mr. Shultz to influence Mr. Shamir when he states publicly in advance of his talks that the United States will never
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pressure Israel to change its policies, and that the United States will continue massive military and economic aid to Israel at a level of 3 billion dollars a year no matter how abruptly Israel rejects advice about its future and the future of Palestine. As a result Mr. Shamir can and does happily and frequently bite the American hand that feeds him, relying on the strong hold of the pro-Israeli lobby in the United States over the Congress and the Administration.
That is the reality. In saying that I say nothing to denigrate the real efforts and the persistence of Mr. Shultz. But nor can he expect to influence the Arabs when again he says, publicly and in advance, that he opposes any question of self-determination for the Palestinians—not self-rule, which is very different—and contacts of any kind with the PLO. If, on the other hand, Mr. Shultz's visits improve the electoral chances of Mr. Peres, that is probably something gained. The Israeli Labour Party does not have a good record. It was in power for 10 years—10 years when the possibilities of a settlement were far better than they are now, and before the two sides became radicalised. The Israeli Labour Governments failed to take their chances. Nevertheless the Labour Party in Israel does at least want an international conference and does at least accept the principle of trading land for peace. Therefore those who want a settlement in the Middle East must hope for the success of the Labour Party in the coming elections. Whether that will happen is another matter.
We must not deceive ourselves. The international conference would be a start. However, unless it addresses itself to the heart of the problem it is almost certain to end in deadlock. With respect to the noble Lord, Lord Cledwyn, the heart of the problem is not the mutual recognition of the two parties, though that is vital. Mutual multilateral recognition would be a tremendous step forward. It is absurd to expect the Israelis to recognise the PLO unless the PLO recognises Israel. It is absurd to expect the PLO to recognise Israel when one Israeli leader after another has said that even if it did so the Israelis would not recognise the PLO. However, the heart of the problem surely is trying to reconcile the Palestinians' demand for self-determination with Israel's perception of its security. That is the heart of the problem.
I do not believe it is widely felt, even in Israel, that a Palestinian state in itself would present a military threat to the Israelis. Even if it were not demilitarised by the treaty—as it would be—even if there were no peace keeping forces between the two states under the treaty—and there would be—the idea that this tiny open territory, embraced on three sides by Israel, could present a serious military threat is obviously ridiculous. No imagination is needed to see that a Palestinian government would be powerfully motivated to keep the peace with Israel. It would be infinitely vulnerable to economic and military reprisals, and even to reinvasion, and it would be far more motivated than the PLO is today to establish proper relations with Israel and to repress acts of violence against Israel. That is the reality.
Israel may still worry that the other Arab governments might join the PLO in military

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adventures against her. But why should the establishment of a Palestinian state make the Arab governments more aggressive towards Israel? Today, when the Palestinians are oppressed, when Israel is in many instances in breach of international law and United Nations' resolutions, not one Arab government dreams of contemplating military action against Israel. So when the Palestinians have been given a measure of justice and freedom, when Israel is recognised under the treaty, and when Israel's security has been underwritten by the treaty, why in those circumstances should the Arab governments be more aggressively inclined? It is common sense that the granting of self-determination to the Palestinians would increase and not diminish the security of Israel.
And what alternatives are there? How far does occupation increase Israel's security? It is turning her closest friends into enemies; it is dividing her own people; it is unifying the Arab governments; it is embarrassing the Americans and dividing them from their NATO allies. It calls for huge defence budgets, for prolonged conscription, for increasing censorship, for regular punitive raids on Lebanon. And all the time the long-term balance of power is moving against Israel—economic, financial, demographic, political, diplomatic and even military. Continued suppression of the Palestinians in the occupied territories would spell disaster for Israel.
However, finally, we must consider whether an Israeli Government can be persuaded or pressed into acknowledging this and into acting on it. When visiting Brussels recently, Mr. Peres said:
"Europe can and must play a role in the search for a different future for the Middle Fast, one of peace and economic prosperity".
My noble friends and I warmly agree with that. The Community, with the British Government playing a distinguished part, has laid down the right principles for a settlement—security for Israel, self-determination for the Palestinians and the participation in the peace process of the PLO. On past occasions, members of the Community have offered active participation in a peace-keeping force in Palestine. The Foreign Ministers recently discussed an informal Italian proposal for an interim administration of the occupied territories by the Community, subject to the United Nations.
With the failure of the Shultz mission the time is surely ripe—perhaps at this conference in Hanover—for the Community to make a fresh initiative along these lines. Perhaps a new Israeli Government and a new Administration in Washington will be readier to co-operate. It is in the interests of the Palestinians and of the Israelis alike that such an initiative should be made now, and should succeed.
3.40 p.m.
Lord Greenhill of Harrow: My Lords, I join with other noble Lords in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Cledwyn, for bringing forward this important matter. Unlike the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, I cannot claim any recent experience of the Middle East; but I have been familiar with the problem for a long time—indeed, since the associates of the present
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Prime Minister of Israel came near to blowing me up in the King David Hotel.
In my view, the outlook is extremely gloomy, and I do not share the gleams of hope that I detected in the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Cledwyn of Penrhos. The fourth visit of Mr. Shultz to Israel seems to have brought nothing new except some very plain speaking of a most disturbing kind. The outcome of the Arab summit in Algiers—from what has been revealed so far—does not seem to suggest either compromise or goodwill. However, it is right to draw attention continuously to the potentially dangerous situation in the area. Nevertheless, international attention will not necessarily bring an early settlement; but it may give the conflicting parties pause for thought and hold them back from extreme adventures. The recent visit by Mr. Shultz should have had that effect and it is especially important because it has taken place as an election approaches in Lebanon, in Israel and in his native country, the United States of America.
I think the details of the plan which Mr. Shultz has tried to have adopted are familiar to many noble Lords. However, it seems to have been rejected by all the parties thus far. Nevertheless, the prolongation of dialogue and the talk about an international conference cannot be unhelpful at this time.
I fear that there is little hope for a resolution of the conflict for several years to come. There are far too many apparently irreconcilable factors involved. Perhaps I may remind the House of some of those factors and ask the Minister whether he feels able to comment upon what I say.
First, there is the call for universal recognition of Israel's right to exist. Of course that sounds simple enough. But, right to exist within what frontiers and with what guarantees of security? The present Prime Minister of Israel makes the widest claims for the ultimate extent of Israeli territory. As I understand his claims, this would include not only the occupied territories but also the wider areas which are claimed as a biblical inheritance. Can the Minister confirm that there have been signs that those wide territorial claims are gaining increasing acceptance in Israel, especially among the younger people, and that once again the question of the relocation of the Palestinians is often spoken about?
Prime Minister Shamir has not hesitated to "cock a snook" at the efforts of the American Administration for several years, and I see no reason why he will not continue to do so. It is by no means certain that the outcome of the November election in Israel will permit a more flexible attitude on its territorial claims.
Secondly, the Palestinian claim for an independent state on the basis of self-determination is now so firmly established, and supported internationally, that I do not believe that local autonomy for Palestinians is acceptable, except possibly as a short, temporary step towards full independence. Further, I can see no compromise in sight on the future of Jerusalem.
I should like to ask the Minister what he believes has been the effect of the current Palestinian uprising? Surely it has been to consolidate the PLO's position

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and to reduce the likelihood of any Palestinian negotiators emerging who would be acceptable to the Israeli Government. Arab children may be ready to go back to school, as we have gladly read, but no doubt they go back with increased hatred and resentment.
Then there is the unsolved problem of the Palestine refugees in those appalling camps in Lebanon. They must eventually rejoin their compatriots. Moreover, their presence in Lebanon is an obstacle to the revision of the religious balance which is an essential prelude to the end of the civil war in Lebanon and an overall settlement of the problems of that country.
What does the Minister think will be the effect of the inevitable demographic changes in the region? The Arabs will soon equal the Jews in numbers within the existing state of Israel; and the Arab populations in the occupied territories and the areas surrounding Israel are rapidly increasing. It was recently said that more Jews were leaving Israel than arriving. Then there remains the problem of the future of the Jews in the Soviet Union. If glasnost permits their greatly accelerated emigration, will they bypass Israel on their way to other destinations—especially the United States—or will they be received in their homeland and be seen as a further threat to the Palestinians?
Does the Minister believe that there will be a change in Israeli policies as a new generation gradually takes over political control and replaces those with bitter personal memories of Europe, the Holocaust and the wars that involved the founding of Israel? The Israeli Government believe they can continue to rely on strong American support—even stronger if Mr. Dukakis becomes president of the United States.
However, since the ill-starred invasion of Lebanon, has Israel the same confidence in its military domination of the Arab countries as there is now the ominous presence of nuclear weapons and long-distance missiles? What will be the effect of the new relationship of the superpowers and the likely growth of Soviet influence in the area? Of course I do not expect the Minister to be able to answer those questions, but I ask them in order to emphasise to the House the magnitude of the many problems with which we are all faced.
An international conference on the lines presently supported by Her Majesty's Government, and other countries, cannot quickly solve those problems. Of course there may be virtue in discussing them frankly around an international table as a first step; but far more vigorous pressure on the parties to the basic conflict by the superpowers and by EC members, over a long period, will be necessary even to patch up a lasting truce which will hold until the passage of time creates attitudes which may bring a final settlement within reach. It is idle to pretend that in the interim there is not a danger of a further war.
3.50 p.m.
Lord Kennet: My Lords and Ladies, the arguments in this discussion are being broadly and swiftly covered. I wish to start with the question of the Israeli nuclear weapons programme. The Government (in
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the person of the noble Lord, Lord Glenarthur) have recently committed themselves to the view (col. 316 of Hansard for 17th May) that there is no evidence either to confirm or deny the existence of an Israeli nuclear weapons programme. That is an extraordinarily strong position to take. It means that all the old news about the military capability of the nuclear facility built with French assistance in Dimona was false
Further, it means that the spate of stories—especially over the past two or three years—from the United States about nuclear weapons information obtained by Israeli spies operating in the United States was also false. Above all, it means that Mr. Mordecai Vanunu, whom we remember pretty well, I think, was a liar. Perhaps the Minister can tell us something about this. I wonder what was the nature and scope of the inquiries made by the Government which enabled them to come to the forceful conclusion that all those reports were false, a tissue of lies, and that there is no evidence of the existence of the programme.
If those inquiries were in any way less thorough than they should have been, our country is going blindfold into a dangerous future. The matter is of more intense interest these days because of the existence—the noble Lord, Lord Greenhill, has already referred to this—cif the Israeli theatre ballistic missile capability—the Arrow missile. While all these things are going on, the British Government, through the machinery of the strategic defence initiative in Washington, are contributing in double harness with Israel to the next generation's military hardware problems.
It is also worth noticing that Spain is now using an Israeli firm to update its French-built Mirages and we must never forget that the NATO supreme commander and other American NATO commanders are national commanders of American forces in the Middle East. When talking about Israel, we are not talking about a country with which we are not linked. That is not the case. We are, through the American alliances of both this country and Israel, closely and militarily linked to Israel.
I turn now to the United States peace efforts in the Middle East. I of course join all those who wish Mr. Shultz success in his long trail. The United States has never got very far in this matter. Henry Kissinger got a little distance ahead 15 years ago, but he had a professional grounding in the history and ethology of the sovereign state as a form of human organisation, including the effects of massive concentrations of weapons in one state paid for by another.
In the past two generations, the West has created many sovereign states in the Middle East. It is unrealistic to expect them to behave differently or better in any way than sovereign states elsewhere have throughout their history. However much goodwill successive Secretaries of State may bring to the project, the United States cannot hope to succeed—this point was touched on forcefully by my noble friend Lord Mayhew—while maintaining the greatest military aid programme, possibly in the history of the world, and certainly in the history of the post-war world. I mean, of course, relative to the

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population of the receiving country—Israel. The scale of American military and civil assistance to Israel is a unique phenomenon. The scale of Soviet military assistance to Syria is outstanding. By Soviet standards it is at a high level compared with the receiving population. The two naturally stand or fall together. It is fair to say that it was not the Russians which started it.
Successive American administrations have believed that in some way they can have a role in settling the Middle East problem which is separable from their patronage of Israel. They also believe that they can have a role which need not be matched by the Soviet Union. At least, they believed that until recently. What is most hopeful about the Shultz approach is that he seems willing to agree that at the proposed international conference the Soviet Union should be present, because it is the military patron, especially, of Syria, in the same way that the United States is the military patron of Israel.
The United States has some difficulty in grasping how Israel is perceived by its Arab neighbours. All noble Lords should lay their cards on the table at this point. I have had the benefit of visits to Israel and all four of her neighbouring countries within the past three or four years. Her Arab neighbours see a country which has invaded and occupied, illegally and against United Nations declarations, part of their territories. Of course, the Jordanian view is slightly different because the legal status of the West Bank is different.
Two of the four occupied territories have been mentioned repeatedly in the debate—the West Bank and Gaza. We must not forget the continued military occupation of part of Southern Lebanon or—a place which has not been mentioned—the Golan. I call it the Golan because to say the Golan Heights is to adopt the Israeli position. It is true that the top of the hill called the Golan is very high above the Israeli plain, and it is not very high above the Syrian plain on the other side; but, nevertheless, if the suitability of the top of a mountain range to be a frontier is to be judged by the height of the descent on the other side, there is no common sense in the world. No, the Golan is as serious a problem as any one of the other three, and will have to be handled if peace is to be brought.
The signs are perhaps good. It is already the Arab view that there must be an international conference with decision-making powers. I believe the American position—that it should have decision-making powers except in so far as may already have been agreed between Israel and Jordan—is not practical and will have to give way. The big conference must have the final powers. The Arab position is also that the PLO must be represented at the conference. There again, the Americans will have to give way. The whole business is about certain stateless people who are represented—though not perfectly because it is difficult to have perfect elections when one is stateless—by the PLO and the various factions which make it up.
The Arab summit position is that the five permanent members of the Security Council should be at the conference, which is obviously a sine qua
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non for progress. Their position is that the Palestinians must have self-determination, including the right to demand an independent state. I believe that that is their wording. The shape of that independent state and its relationship with any neighbours are left wide open.
Before I come to the flowers for Israel, one more regret: the fact that Jerusalem, which is by an extraordinary gift of history sacred to all three versions of monotheism—namely, Judaism, Christianity and Islam—has been annexed and is used as the capital of a confessional state that stands in the name of only one, is a tragedy. If it can be corrected by the big conference, much will have been gained.
Lastly, like anyone who has been there, I think I should say that I was overcome with admiration and love for the great achievements of successive governments of Israel towards their own people in their own allotted territory—allotted in 1948. If they could devote their vast energies, spiritual, intellectual and technical, to exporting to their neighbours the knowledge of how to do what they have done rightly in their own country, instead of standing on their neighbours' necks, the world would indeed be grateful to them ever hereafter.
3.58 p.m.
Lord Kilbracken: My Lords, it was the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, who drew attention to the fact that my noble friend's Motion calls attention to the continuing conflict (in the singular) in the Middle East, although, as he pointed out, there are many conflicts in that area. Neither he nor any of the subsequent speakers have referred to any of those conflicts, although the fighting in the so-called Gulf War (the Iraq-Iran war) is far more serious in terms of human suffering and loss of life than any other in the area.
I wish to turn to that area, and to be even more eccentric by devoting most if not all of my remarks to the 20 million Kurdish people who inhabit the Middle East, and in particular to the 6 or 7 million who are in Iraq and are therefore very actively caught up with the fighting there. I have been deeply involved with the Kurdish people for over 20 years, since I first went there in the time of the Mulla Mustafa Barzani. Indeed, I hope to revisit them shortly in their homelands.
The remaining Kurds are divided between Turkey and Iran, with enclaves in the Soviet Union and Syria. The division took place as a result of the British reneging on the Treaty of Sevres, which was signed in 1920 and which would have given a united Kurdistan independence as a separate state. Therefore the British still have some responsibility for the troubles in which the Kurds find themselves today.
The Kurds in Iraq find themselves caught up in the Gulf War and have suffered the most appalling atrocities committed against them by the Baghdad Government. Yet extremely little attention has been paid to them by politicians and by the media in the West. I wish to give three examples of the Kurds' agony. I could give many more. First, some 3,000

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villages in Iraqi Kurdistan have been razed to the ground by government forces in recent years. These are villages inside Iraq. People there were executed or imprisoned without trial or transported to other parts of Iraq in pursuit of the hateful policy of Arabisation. Secondly, thousands of Kurds of military age, males, have been abducted by the all-powerful security forces and have never been heard of again, either by their families or by the senior Kurdish politicians with whom I have very close personal contacts.
Worst of all, in the past year chemical warfare has been extensively waged by the Baghdad Government against the Kurds of Iraq, culminating in the devastating attacks on Halabja on 16th and 17th March this year in which at least 2,000 and probably up to 4,000 civilians—most of them women and children, because the men were all away fighting—are known to have been killed by cyanide and nerve gases. Reports of this massacre alone have appeared in the press here.
The Kurds of Iraq have fought for decades and are still fighting for basic human justice and self-determination. Until recently, they have been content to state their aim as the achievement of a wide degree of autonomy — that is the word they chose to use—within the framework of the Iraqi state. But now they will accept such autonomy only if the Ba'athist regime in Baghdad is first replaced by a democratic regime. So long as Sadam or his party are in power the aim is to achieve full independence.
From time to time over the decades Iran has found it expedient to support the Kurds of Iraq, first under the Shah, until the Algiers Accord of 1975, when he withdrew his support and at once the Kurdish revolution collapsed, and now under Khomeini. But in both cases this has been very much a marriage of convenience. Certainly now there is no sympathy on the part of the Kurds, who are Sunnis and who arc not a very religious people, but they are Sunnis, with the Shi'ite fundamentalists. So they are waging a completely separate struggle, although both the Kurds and the Iranians seek the same end; that is, the departure of President Sadam and his regime. Kurdish involvement has a major impact on the balance of power in the Gulf War because some 80,000 Iraqi troops are tied down on the northern front.
Significant territorial gains have been made after bitter fighting by the Pesh Merga guerillas of the PUK and the KDP, the two nationalist parties who exist in Kurdistan and who have now formed a full alliance. They now control several thousand square miles of their homeland, more than ever before in their history. This fighting, which is continuing, has been largely unreported in the Western media, as have the gains on the northern front by the Iranian army, which far outweigh the much trumpeted reoccupation of the Fao peninsula by the Iraqis themselves.
I support the Kurdish people in their just aims. I believe that the people and the governments of the West should be more aware of their part in this conflict in the Middle East and more forthright in the condemnation of the atrocities that are still being committed against them.
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Since I see that I have a couple of minutes left, I should like to close by referring briefly to reports that have appeared lately in the press about my supposed involvement in the release of the hostages in Beirut, which I take also to be part of the conflict in the Middle East.
Last Sunday, sitting at home in Ireland, I picked up the Sunday Express. Turning to page 2 I saw a headline: "Peer in hostage rescue bid". I turned to it with much interest, to see which of your Lordships might be involved in this rescue bid, and was amazed to find that it was me. The report begins by saying that I am leaving shortly, mounting a mission to rescue the hostages, and that I intend to go to Tehran for a meeting with the kidnappers' leaders, including Sheikh Muhammed Faldallah—spelt wrongly—spiritual head of the Hezbollah. It happens that I hope to go to Tehran shortly. I am not leading any mission. Sheikh Faldallah is, as far as I know, not there anyway. I have had no contact of any kind with him.
The paper went on to say that I would be meeting Speaker Rafsanjani to talk about the hostages. If Speaker Rafsanjani were inclined to give me an interview, as a visiting journalist, I would be perfectly delighted to meet him, but I have not made any such arrangement. The figure "9", perhaps fortunately, is on the clock, but I should just say that I brought a message from the Hezbollah to the Foreign Office via another intermediary. In this case it is the other way round and the Foreign Office denies that I ever brought such a message. Therefore I do not quite know what to believe; but that has been the full extent of my involvement.
4.9 p.m.
Lord Reay: My Lords, the Middle East is everyone's concern. It is the crucible of hatred in the world. The hatreds fomented not least in the territories occupied by Israel spill out in terrorism directed principally against European countries. The danger of war is ever present, and each war has the capacity to be more calamitous than the last, as missiles acquire longer ranges, wider distribution and more ominous warheads. No one can say what countries may be sucked into, and perhaps destroyed by, another war. So Europe's vital interest in the Arab-Israeli conflict is established even without reference to factors of commerce and national resources.
In addition, European countries are experienced and knowledgeable in Middle Eastern affairs. Yet Europe's influence—in which the British influence is subsumed—is only marginal. Why is this? The reason is that Europe, because her security is dependent on America, dare not mount too strong a challenge on the American position.
So we wait upon America. But America is in thrall to Israel. The influence of Israel on America, through the pro-Israel lobby in America, is far greater than that of America on Israel. It seems that at no point has America been able to restrain Israel. America forgives every defiance by Israel of American advice or American preference, and if the consequences of that defiance have been expensive, nevertheless America pays for them.

1425
However intransigent Israel has been and whatever illegal acts she has committed—establishing territories, deporting Israeli-Arabs, carrying out cautionary or punitive raids on neighbouring states or the massively destructive invasions into Lebanon—American aid rises inexorably, almost exponentially, to the enormous levels which have been referred to by the noble Lords, Lord Cledwyn of Penrhos and Lord Mayhew. It amounts to a constant transfusion without which Israel could hardly be expected to survive, and certainly not defy the world and survive.
In addition, Israel has a free trade agreement with America. That is not something to be sneezed at with today's protectionist clouds on the horizon. For this thraldom America pays dearly in political terms too. It should not be forgotten that Israel played a leading role—not just the role of an agent—in the events of Irangate.
As regards policy rather than influence, Europe established its position by means of the 1980 Venice Declaration. I am sure that the principles stated in that hold good today. They are that the Palestinians should have self-determination and that the PLO should be accepted as negotiating partners. It makes no sense to look for other representatives of the Palestinians, whether it is Jordan or anyone else. The Palestinians cannot have representatives imposed on them other than those they want themselves, or they will not be representatives. Moreover, if Israel really wanted to negotiate, she would not be deterred from talking to the PLO, even if its members were terrorists. After all, that was the road to the solution in Algeria. France sat down with the enemy.
As regards an international conference, I am inclined to the view that it should include on a continuing basis the permanent members of the Security Council. Without them there is surely the danger of a conference developing into a competition between the Arabs and the Israelis to see who can manoeuvre the other into the position of blame for its collapse.
The value of the United States involvement would be for its potential influence on Israel; and that of the Soviet Union for its influence on Arab parties. Moreover, it seems a propitious time to involve the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is demonstrating a reinvigorated and remarkably flexible new diplomacy in the Middle East. The Soviet Union's paramount interest there at the present time, I should have thought, was similar to Europe's; namely, to neutralise a dangerous area by means of a political settlement.
Europe's role at such a conference would be as an honest broker and to encourage realism, in particular to encourage the acceptance by the Arabs that in return for the recognition of the Palestinians' right to statehood, there must be recognition by them of the right of Israel to permanent existence in conditions of security. But this process can only be started by Israel, which is the party in possession, deciding to negotiate.
And so we come back to the obstacle and, in my view, the single overriding fact today, which is that
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Israel wants to deny, and if possible to destroy, Palestinian aspirations to nationhood. All the other arguments—that the PLO is a terrorist organisation, that it must first state that it recognises Israel's right to exist and other such reasons—are a camouflage for that essential fact.
Nevertheless, while Israel tries, as she does now, to veil from international eyes her handling of the uprising, as South Africa does, she would do well to reflect on the effect that such brutal repression has on her image. The Jewish people risk forfeiting the special position of sympathy which they have deservedly occupied in Western consciousness since the end of the last war, if Israel persists in her cruel persecutions.
Over 40 years ago the Jews horrified the world with the revelation of their unique wartime fate, and in doing so plunged a generation into guilt for not having addressed itself in time to prevent those awful crimes. Today it is the Palestinians who are exposing to international view the wounds which have been inflicted on them in the intervening years. It remains only for them to receive the same due recognition—and may it not, this time, come too late.
4.16 p.m.
Lord Hylton: My Lords, I must start by apologising to the Minister in case I am unable to be present to hear the whole of his reply to this debate owing to an inescapable commitment to a voluntary organisation. I cheerfully and gladly undertake to study his words in full in Hansard tomorrow.
I venture to speak very briefly in this debate as a visitor to Israel and the occupied territories of Arab Palestine on three occasions during the past 11 years. The most recent one was just after Easter of this year. This beautiful area is an archeologist's paradise which is bound to make one think historically. My mind went back to the Crusader's little state, and to the condition of Ireland during the 17th century prior to 1690.
Such thoughts can be dangerous as every historical analogy and parallel needs to be corrected by an understanding of the differences of context, cultures, technology and countless other factors. The state of Israel has been recognised by Egypt and now enjoys an agreed and internationally accepted frontier on its western side. Recognition and an agreed boundary are desperately needed on its eastern side. Here we have to notice that weapons developed since 1948 and 1967 have totally changed the nature of a defensible frontier. Missiles and aircraft now make Damascus, Amman and Cairo as open to attack as Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. Israel needs an agreed eastern boundary, while the Palestinians deserve a reasonable measure of autonomy and self-determination.
Since 1967 the inhabitants of the occupied territories have been deprived of normal human rights in ways which it is hard to imagine when one lives in Britain. It is, I suggest, in the interest of all the neighbouring Arab states, as well as in the interest of the superpowers and the European Community, that those human rights be restored before worse befalls.
It is in the interests of Israel to cease coercing an unwilling Palestinian population, if it wishes to

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remain a democracy within its own proper boundaries. Territory will have to be ceded in return for recognition. I think that we all accept that, and we know perfectly well that it has already occurred in Sinai. Like the noble Lord, Lord Mayhew, I question why it is so often assumed that Jordan must be brought in as a guarantor of stability among the Palestinians. True, it is the nearest neighbour. However, are there not other Arab states with vastly greater resources and populations?
The noble Lord, Lord Greenhill of Harrow, properly reminded us of the irreconcilables in the situation. He indicated that the outlook may be quite gloomy. However, I was surprised to learn while I was in Israel that there exist within that state and the occupied territories at least 50 distinct peace movements and organisations. Perhaps that appears less remarkable when one considers the major divisions—religious, cultural, theological and so on—that exist within Judaism and Zionism on the one hand and within Christianity and Islam on the other, all inside the borders of the former Palestinian mandate.
I had the privilege of meeting members of three of those many groups. It was a delight to visit the hamlet of Neve Shalom—The Oasis of Peace—between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. There Jews, Moslems and Christians live together co-operatively and run their own primary schools. They follow their own traditions and teach respect fo those of others. They organise courses and conferences for young Jews and Arabs who might otherwise never meet. Last year they held a rally for about 20,000 of their graduates.
Oz ve Shalom, which means strength and peace, is a movement within orthodox religious Judaism. It is non-violent and seeks to persuade all it can reach of the necessity for serious negotiations. The mere existence of that group is important because it shows the whole world that the Gush Emunim, or block of the faithful, are not the sole representatives of orthodoxy. The settlers within the territories have no monopoly and could perhaps ponder over the session of Yamit in Sinai.
Among the Christian Arabs in Galilee, some of your Lordships may have heard of Father Elias Chacour, who is now widely known as a speaker and author. I visited his parish of Ybillin, not far from Acre. Although he was abroad, I met his fellow-workers and saw some of the schools, libraries and community centres which they have developed. By such patient work they build up the morale and self-respect of their people and help them to play a full part within a reconciled country.
I conclude by asking Her Majesty's Government whether they will encourage contacts, both official and unofficial, with those who work for peace. I am delighted to see the Minister nod. I believe that it is their policy to be in touch with so-called dissidents—those who work for human rights and the implementation of the Helsinki agreements—in the USSR and Eastern Europe. I suggest that there is a close parallel there with the peace movements of Israel, of the Left Bank of the River Jordan and perchance of the Gaza Strip.
4.25 p.m.
Lord Weidenfeld: My Lords, at twelve o'clock noon a week ago I found myself at Clock Square in Ramalla in the West Bank. Flanked by an Israeli military patrol and shielded by sharpshooters on the roof, we stood by expectantly, for noontime usually spells trouble. Youths tend to come out of recently reopened schools and out of alleyways, quite often in an ugly mood. It so happened that last Wednesday and indeed all last week it was calm there. One could almost say, "All quiet on the West Bank". However, just as in Erich Maria Remarque's historic novel, even that laconic phrase conceals horror, pain and suffering experienced on both sides that very day.
Of course the reality on the ground is often somewhat different from the media-radiated image. Unrest ebbs and flows. However, there is also widespread non-compliance with the directives of the Shabba, the new, young Arab leadership. Over 70 per cent. of the Palestinian Arab workforce that crossed the state line before the troubles still works or has resumed work in Israel. More Palestinian civil government employees and policemen return every day to their jobs and thus defy, at their peril, the threats of the Intifada's organisation. It is perhaps significant, as Defence Minister Rabin explained to me, that 50 per cent. of all petrol bombs or molotov cocktails are used by Arabs against Arabs, on those who fail to comply with the directives.
As the noble Lord, Lord Greenhill, has said, the outlook for peace is gloomy. It is one of stagnation at best. However, paradoxically the long-term perspective looks better as new factors come into play. Secretary Shultz's trip was clearly aimed more at preventing a breakdown rather than achieving a breakthrough. The immediate portents are not encouraging. The Arab summit in Algiers will certainly not lift sinking hopes for early negotiations. The PLO have formally declined the Shultz plan. The King of Jordan will not move without the PLO. The Syrians have rejected it, though perhaps less impolitely than before. The Russians have reacted positively to some components but have rejected others, leaving a wide and as yet unbridgeable gulf between their own and the American perceptions. The Egyptians have come closest to endorsement.
As for Israel, Shimon Peres has always sincerely, courageously and almost formally endorsed, the American plan for a conference. That brings us to Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. I believe that his attitude requires clarification. It is not the first time that he has been misunderstood. It is my personal impression that although he may have set his mind against the Shultz scheme of an international conference and in favour of direct bilateral negotiations between Israel and her neighbours, he could shift his ground if the constellation were to change.
If the Soviets normalise relations with the state of Israel and agree to leave the parties to themselves without an imposed solution from the super-powers, and if a genuine gesture comes from the Arab side that is as clear and dramatic as Sadat's flight to Jerusalem, then the Likud movement, which is more plurastic and flexible than some people think, could

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be moved from outright hostility through benevolent scepticism to a pragmatic reappraisal of the concept of an international conference. In the absence of a major shift of ground on the part of the Arabs and the Russians, Shamir and the Likud will not move away from their insistence on bilateral negotiations.
I am somewhat mystified by the allusions made by the noble Lord, Lord Greenhill, to the wider areas which Mr. Shamir referred to. I should be grateful for clarification. My noble friend Lord Kennet, who spoke in favour of self-determination, mentioned Jerusalem. I believe that the undivided city of Jerusalem, with 450,000 inhabitants, has a Jewish population of 300,000, which would probably vote for Israel.
What are the more positive long-range factors which argue for compromise? First, there is a realisation in Israel as well as in the Arab world that the arms race—the alternative to negotiation—is ruinously costly. We have the absurb spectacle of the super-powers and Europe bent on reducing their armoury while the scale, cost and deadly efficiency of armament in the Middle East is escalating beyond all reason. The range of ground-to-ground missiles acquired by Syria, the Saudis and Iraq recently expanded from 300 kilometres to 2,800 kilometres. Chemical warfare is looming ominously in the background. It is terrifying to think that by focusing on the reduction of chemical capability of the superpowers we are neglecting, ignoring and thereby almost legitimising the proliferation of chemical weaponry and its use in regional conflicts. The spectre of Iraq's chemical massacre of thousands of Kurds haunts the corridors of the Defence Ministry of Israel, where it is well known that Syria may have chemical warheads for her Russian-supplied missiles.
The fear of a new arms race that could lead to the bloodiest and most lethal war ever fought in the Middle East is certainly a factor that makes for compromise. In this respect it is interesting to note that a group of high-ranking retired generals and brigadiers of the Israeli Army has recently come out for a defence reassessment, downgrading the strategic importance of the West Bank.
The third factor is the prospect of an American-Russian detente and co-operation in the Middle East. Gorbachev's Russia is increasingly perceived as one that has a vested interest in peace in that region. The Gulf War, the growth of fundamentalism, with its spill-over effect on the Moslem parts of the Soviet Union and the retreat from Afghanistan are all considerations which might cause the Russians to lean on their clients, Syria and the PLO, to come to the negotiating table. Russian contacts with Israel, though still mainly scientific and cultural rather than political, are multiplying and there is every pointer towards diplomatic normalisation.
The Soviets know that there is no peace in the Middle East against or without Israel, and Russia's Arab friends have been forewarned that only as a valid interlocutor with Israel can Russia champion some of their causes. One of the most interesting passages in Secretary General Gorbachev's speeches at the summit was his appeal to break down the
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prejudices, the received ideas and the stereotypes through close personal contact and direct talks. I am sure that that remark was not lost on either Yasser Arafat or President Assad.
The key issue is when and with whom among the Palestinians Israel can negotiate. The rigid stance against recognition of the PLO still remains official policy for both Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir. But if the Palestinian leopard were to change his spots the situation would radically change. I once heard, years ago, the late Golda Meir answer that very question on what conditions she would parley with the PLO. She answered with a typically homespun parable:
"If my grandmother were suddenly to change her arms and legs into wheels she would cease to be my granny and become a motor car."
If the PLO accepted Resolutions 242 and 338, abjured the use of violence and terror, and distanced itself from the covenant to destroy Israel, the vast majority of Israel's people and their supporters all over the world would endorse negotiations and seek accommodation and ultimate peace with a Palestinian leadership.
If this perspective of immediate stagnation and the prospect of flux and forward movement at the turn of the year is anywhere near correct it entails a vital challenge for Britain and Europe. Neither Britain nor Europe has the immediate political and material clout to push the litigants into the conference chamber, but they can render yeoman service in preparing the ground and using their influence. More specifically, I think it is a fact that the right honourable lady, the Prime Minister, has a unique position in the Middle East conflict. She is possibly the most even-handed leader on record who is not only friends with Egypt, Jordan and Israel, but who has also had the courage of her convictions and paid personal visits to both sides.
The British Government, in league with their European allies, should use the next few months to good purpose and advance the peace process by pursuing these four specific ends. First, to urge the Russians to establish normal relations with the state of Israel. Secondly, to urge the King of Jordan to reopen talks with the Palestinians for a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation. Thirdly, to reassure the Palestinian leadership that recognition of Israel's right to exist will result in Israel's endorsement of far-reaching Palestinian self-expression in their political life. Fourthly, to induce the Israelis by a show of compassionate understanding of their traumatic sense of insecurity to believe that "Geneva" is not Munich and that peace is not only necessary but could be truly lasting and secure.
In conclusion, that brings me to an urgent plea as well as a challenge to Her Majesty's Government. What lurks beneath so much of the malaise and deep anxiety of ordinary people throughout the Middle East is not just the uncertainty about the future but indeed quite often mistrust and fear of peace itself. The other day, when asked whether the West Bank was not a terrible headache for the Israelis, a well known public figure replied:
"Better a headache than no head "

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In that grim irony lies that gnawing doubt about the future.
Let us remember that in the middle of the last war, in fact in the winter of 1943, Jean Monnet unfolded his earliest plans for the European Economic Community. In the very week that he was outlining his plans the Germans were at the outer perimeter of Stalingrad, the first carcasses were piling up at Auschwitz and one of the bloodiest massacres of the Maquis occurred in the steep hills of the Massif. Those were far darker days for Europe than they are in the Middle East today.
I think that it is incumbent upon us to lay the groundwork for an economic, social, cultural and human rights plan for that region—copyright in Europe—bounded by what was the Greater Palestine of the British Mandate; a plan that would be a beacon of hope, a light at the end of four decades of darkness and a purpose for which to live, for which to fight—and for which to compromise.
4.35 p.m.
Lord Caradon: My Lords, I have listened with special interest to the speech which we have just heard. I am anxious to speak for only a very short time to my own prejudice and my own understanding.
When I was very young I went to Palestine. I went from Cambridge to Jerusalem. I spent 10 years or so in that country, and I think that I rode to every village in Palestine. I know the people—I know them better than they allow themselves to be known now. As a people they are generous, brave, and eager to play a useful role in their part of the world. I greatly respect them.
I wish that over the years my own Government had been more ready to give them the respect that they deserve and not listened only to a few loud voices but tried to understand and work with the wonderful people of the Palestinian hills.
I felt that in this debate I should make some special plea for the Palestinians and for the Middle East dispute not to be regarded as a situation which cannot be dealt with by normal means. I believe that the Palestinians deserve a much greater respect than they have so far achieved. I wish them well. I hope that they may emerge from the rivalries and disturbances of the present Middle East situation with a place of their own in which they can take pride and make the contribution of which I know they are capable.
I recall that at one time we made a British contribution—a much more effective one I may say than the American contribution. At that time I was representing this country in New York. We searched for some basis of agreement and future action which could win universal support. I do not forget the day we found it when, to my joy, as I looked round at those voting I saw that not only the Americans were voting with us but the Soviet Union too. It was a unanimous vote of the Security Council in favour of the resolution known as 242.
I do not think that any one of us wishes to go back on that undertaking. I believe it should be the basis from which we work in the new effort which must
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now be made to find a better way. I do not believe that the so-called Shultz formula can possibly be a success. Going back to the declarations we have made in the past, particularly at the time of Resolution 242, I think we could make a vital new contribution which—although perhaps not immediately—might bring about peace.
Let us go back and look at what we did in those previous years with a proper respect for the people of Palestine who have no need to be pawns of great powers elsewhere. They are a people who have a right to be heard and a right to live freely with some hope for the future. I believe that with greater respect for the Palestinian people whom I know and much respect, a new formula should be found on the basis of what we looked for and what we found before. Listening with great interest to what is being said this afternoon, I most strongly urge that a new formula be found that could give to the Palestinian people the right to live, not subordinated and cruelly overwhelmed, but free and secure.
4.42 p.m.
Viscount Buckmaster: My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to thank the noble Lord, Lord Cledwyn of Penrhos, for initiating this interesting debate because he has supported me on many occasions when we have both spoken on similar subjects.
As your Lordships probably know, I have spent the greater part of my adult life in the Arab world, 35 years or so. I have a great many Arab friends, including many Palestinians. I am now one of the vice-presidents of an organisation called CAABU, which is the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding. It follows therefore that I shall quite unashamedly present the Arab case. I say unashamedly because over the past six years or so during which I have been speaking on these subjects in your Lordships' House the balance of opinion on the whole has tended to favour Israel.
I have spoken on six or possibly seven previous occasions on the Middle East. As the noble Lord, Lord Mayhew, knows very well, he and I have generally both spoken. On each occasion, pretty well all the speakers have been conscious of an atmosphere of sterility and frustration with no sign of any way forward. Several speakers have mentioned that today. I fear that that is the position with which we are now confronted, as I see it. In fact, we might almost regard ourselves as looking down on a whirlpool in which two corpses perpetually revolve.
Much has been said in this debate and in previous debates about the possibility of an international conference. It was very much to the fore in the early part of 1987; it was one of the cornerstones of the debate that I initiated on 8th April that year. Much has been said today about Mr. Shultz and his initiative. I do not wish in any way to denigrate or belittle this great man, but I feel very strongly—the noble Lord, Lord Mayhew, made this point with great clarity and all I can do is reinforce it—that the Shultz initiative is getting us nowhere. It is getting us nowhere because so far Shultz has spoken about Palestinians but never to them. He may have had some talk with what we might call quisling Palestinians now established in the state of Israel, but

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he has so far consistently failed to meet and talk with representatives of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation or the Palestinian National Council. Until that impasse is resolved, I cannot see any progress being made.
The stumbling block seems to be the almost irreversible concept of the PLO as a terrorist organisation. I have spoken about this many times, and I hope that I shall be forgiven for repeating what I have said before. The PLO is a large umbrella organisation: it consists of some eight different groups and the control over these groups, exercised by Yasser Arafat, is somewhat loose. However, by no means all these groups are involved in terrorism; in fact, only a very few of them are. The largest group, Fatah, to which the PLO representative in London, Faisal Awaidha, belongs, is one of the more moderate. It may be argued—I have heard this advanced— that the extremist elements, those who are in favour of terrorism and so on, will influence the others. In the words of the Bible, one might describe it as,
"a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump"
I can assure your Lordships that this is not so. Until people come to realise that the PLO is the one authoritative representative of the Palestinians and until we and the Americans can open up a meaningful dialogue with the Palestinians through the PLO, I am afraid that the peace efforts are largely doomed to fail.
It may be helpful at this stage if I give a few statistics to put the whole problem into perspective. There are altogether now some 1,500,000 Palestinians in the occupied areas, that is to say, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and Jerusalem. There are also some 700,000 Palestinians living in Israeli territory and roughly 60,000 Israelis who are occupying 30 settlements. I think we must bear in mind that the regime in the occupied areas as a whole has been very harsh to the Palestinians. For example, Israel now controls no less than 95 per cent. of all the water resources of the country and 52 per cent. of the cultivable land. Restrictions on water are numerous and often applied with great severity. One of these is the imposition of a well-boring limit on the Palestinians, who are forbidden to drill wells to a greater depth than 30 metres, whereas the Israelis have access to the abundant deep level water, as is apparent from the swimming pools and so on found in many of their settlements. For many of the Palestinians, sad to say, water is very hard to come by.
The Palestinian farmers in the occupied areas face a number of restrictions. For example, they face restrictions on land usage, which is very strictly controlled, and on the planting of trees. They have taxes imposed on them which the Israelis do not have to pay. They are restricted in the sale of their produce.
Sad to say, human rights violations continue. I have, as it were, a trump card in my hand. It is information provided by a British visitor who has just returned—in fact I saw him last night—from the occupied areas. He told me that the stories we have heard of tortures, patients being dragged from their hospital beds to be beaten up, and so on, are all too
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true. He described one detention centre where there are 57 detainees held before trial in one room measuring five metres by eight metres. The wretched people inside this room are given no facilities for exercise. They have the most primitive sanitation, consisting of one pail emptied once a day. They have no access to lawyers. Medical facilities arc embryonic if not non-existent. That is the kind of thing that is going on. I do not wish to exaggerate. I am presenting facts which have been presented to me by an entirely objective Englishman who has returned from that area.
It is impossible to present all the facts in this very complex and difficult situation because, as many noble Lords know, the Israelis actively discourage media investigation. However, I hope that I have at least pointed out some of the very sad happenings that are continuing in these areas. I hope that perhaps I have presented a picture which in some way may shatter the pro-Israeli illusions of the public and indeed of certain Members of your Lordships' House.
4.53 p.m.
Lord Stewart of Fulham: My Lords, my noble friend Lord Cledwyn may feel fully justified in having raised this subject before the House this evening. Indeed, in 1922 this House debated the Question whether Britain should accept the mandate for Palestine and decided by a vote of 60 votes to 29 that it would be better not to do so. Governments did not pursue that line of thought. It is idle now to bewail that. Here it is, and here we are, as well as other protagonists in the struggle.
I shall interpret "Middle East"—as most speakers have done—in the narrow sense to mean the Palestine problem. I fully recognise, as the noble Lords, Lord Thomas and Lord Kilbracken, have said, that a good many other problems can properly be said to be located in the Middle East. However, frankly, in a debate of two-and-a-half hours' duration, the Palestine problem is enough for one topic. I shall therefore confine myself to that.
Apart from any other consideration, it is a problem full of dangers for us. They may be as serious as the noble Lord, Lord Kennet, suggested, if we consider the possibility of the development of a nuclear programme by Israel. But as we are not in possession of accurate facts on which to base definite conclusions, I do not think that one can pursue that further, other than to notice that the danger is there and will not go away. It may get worse as time goes on.
What makes the problem still more dangerous is the apparently totally irreconcilable attitude of the two parties, with the Israelis on the one side and the Arab nations—and the Palestinians in particular—on the other. We have seen from what they say about each other and what they do to each other how irreconcilable the position apparently is. It is not surprising that my noble friend Lord Greenhill of Harrow was led to a rather pessimistic conclusion. Quite frankly, I do not know that I can entirely disagree with him. However, I believe that there arc some things the British can attempt to do at this time. I do not know whether they will be successful. I think,

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however, there is a duty to attempt them, whether an optimistic or pessimistic view of the situation is the most justified one.
Where does this irreconcilability lie? On the one hand, there is the proposition that the state of Israel has a right to exist. But not everybody means the same thing by the words "the state of Israel". Does one mean the area on the map designated in 1947 by the partition decision of the United Nations; or the armistice lines decided in 1949 by the United Nations; or the position created after the war of 1967? According to whoever one talks to, one will get different definitions of "Israel" and what has a right to exist.
Against that, we are told that the Palestinian people have the right to nationhood. Here again, we find that some people conceive the Palestinians as capable of being, and entitled to be, a nation. That was the view certainly of my noble friend Lord Caradon whose very moving account of his acquaintance with the Palestinian people impressed us all. Others regard Palestinians as a kind of appendage of the Kingdom of Jordan or as a people who can live in some kind of semi-independent situation provided that it does not endanger the security of the state of Israel.
I see no immediate way of reconciling those attitudes. If one takes people with those various points of view and sits them at a table together, I do not see that one will get further with them. Irreconcilability is not merely a matter of argument. We have to allow for the fact that between the two sides now there is the fearful river of blood that has been shed on both sides over so many years. It is not blood shed only on the battlefield—which can in certain circumstances be forgiven—but the blood of old people, men, women and children, killed not only on the battlefield but in the streets and the villages by acts of terror and violence carried out without pity and without justification. These factors, added on both sides, make a well-nigh intractable situation.
Israel has now found that while one can win a war, and for the time being safeguard one's territory by occupying it, the process of occupation presents one every day with frightful choices. There is the choice between what it is necessary to do for security, and what humanity says ought to be done, or what humanity says ought to be regarded as forbidden. This situation continues all the time.
For that reason, we welcomed the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, who pointed out that there are people on both sides who are endeavouring to find a better way than this. They are unhappily few, but we are glad to notice that the Minister expressed a certain degree of sympathy for what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Hylton. Perhaps we shall hear a little more on that.
It is clearly impossible to expect the parties concerned to come together to reach agreement. There seems to be no possibility of that whatever. It is that that makes the case for an international conference of some kind. How many Israelis in prominent public positions are prepared to say that they will recognise the PLO as the representatives of
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the Palestinian people? Hardly any, my Lords; but if that view is expressed with the full weight of an international conference, what people cannot as a matter of pride surrender by themselves they may, without loss of dignity, be prepared to concede if they see that the whole weight of world opinion is on the other side. The same may be true similarly with leading members of the PLO. If one asks whether they are prepared to accept the right of the state of Israel to exist, one will not often receive an answer. But if behind that request were the weight of an international conference, one may get somewhere towards the possibility of an agreement.
As I see it, that is the purpose of an international conference: to draw the attention of both these irreconcilable parties to the fact that while this horrible game of being irreconcilable can be played for a time, they cannot go on playing it in face of the disapproval of more and more of the whole world.
I am thinking of an international conference that may begin with an European initiative. Europe has already given certain declarations that may be useful, in the way that the Venice declaration is useful. But to be effective such an international conference must in the end have behind it the full authority of the United Nations. That will mean persuading the Soviet Union to play a fuller part than apparently they are at present prepared to play. There seem to be some possibilities that the Soviet Union is prepared to come forward to take part with the United States and the other powers in reaching an agreed solution.
As my noble friend Lord Caradon pointed out, we nearly achieved that with Resolution 242 which carried the full authority of the United Nations behind it. Certain things happened between the establishment of Resolution 242 and the present time that might make Resolution 242 not fully up to date; but I believe it is the beginning of the argument and from there we might be able to find a workable solution that will be accepted by all sides.
A terrible thing about the whole problem is that one cannot talk about it without being reminded of how the same problems have recurred year after year. What one has said has often been proved wrong some years later; but I remember some years ago expressing sentiments not unlike these and being ridiculed and told that they were fit only for a Sunday school. That at least would be an improvement over what we have at present in the Middle East. It is possible that what I am suggesting is wildly optimistic and that there is no possibility of achieving peace along these lines; but I confess that I do not see any other. I am convinced that whether there is great hope or little, the duty to try is there. I hope that the Government will take the same view.
5.4 p.m.
The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Lord Glenarthur): My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Cledwyn, has brought us back to an issue of great international concern at, as he indicated, a particularly sensitive and important moment. I am grateful to him for his constructive approach and for the careful and interesting interventions of other speakers from all corners of the House.

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The Motion concentrates on one important conflict in the Middle East. Some would argue that it is the central conflict; that is to say, the conflict which exists between Israel and the Palestinians. As my noble friend Lord Thomas of Gwydir said, there are other reasons why the region remains such a source of instability and a potential flashpoint for broader consultation. These include the bloody conflict between Iran and Iraq, the tensions in the Gulf and the continuing tragedy in Lebanon. The world will not know peace and stability as long as those conflicts remain unsolved. But, like the noble Lord, Lord Stewart of Fulham. I should like to concentrate the bulk of my remarks on the deeply troubling situation in the territories occupied by Israel since 1967.
Since last December, over 220 Palestinians and three Israelis have died. Well over 6,000 Palestinians have been taken into detention. These are shocking statistics. Even so, they are but one indication of the tensions, oppression and suffering which characterise events in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. Everyone is affected: there can be few Palestinian families who have not had someone beaten, detained, deported, injured or even killed. But equally, there can be few Jewish families whose sons or daughters, fathers or brothers have not faced stone-throwing crowds. The personal grievances and bitterness are accumulating. Israel's international reputation is suffering. So is the peace process. Israel has a duty to maintain law and order in the occupied territories. But she must do so in accordance with international law and human rights standards.
Those laws and standards are all too frequently abused. I gave the figures just now. As well as the use of excessive violence, we deplore also the illegal deportations and collective punishments such as house demolitions and the closure of education establishments. The treatment of the A1 Haq workers described by the noble Lord, Lord Cledwyn, is a further example of the extremes to which the Israeli authorities have gone.
For peace to come a way must be found towards a negotiated settlement of the underlying dispute and for that there must be dialogue. The bridges between the communities need urgent repair, not further destruction. If the extremists have their way the violence will continue. Violence breeds violence. The status quo is unstable and cannot be sustained. Time is on no one's side. No man of compassion could stand back in contemplation of such suffering.
The noble Lord, Lord Hylton—who I see is still here—asked me particularly about encouraging contacts with the 50 or so separate peace movements and organisations. I assure him that we shall remain in contact and continue to encourage the efforts of all those making a constructive contribution to the cause of peace.
The noble Lord, Lord Mayhew, in talking about Israel's policy, described the difficulties with two parties involved in one country at the same time. It is essential for both halves of the Israeli Government to realise that the status quo offers no basis for Israel's future as a free democratic Jewish state. Only imaginative and courageous decisions in favour of
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negotiations and the principle of trading land for peace offer a way forward to a just, durable peace. We hope that in the next elections due in November the Israeli people will choose that path rather than move further towards extremism.
The noble Lord, Lord Cledwyn of Penrhos, indicated that Britain has a particular historical interest in respect of the Arab-Israeli dispute. Unhappily some on both sides of the dispute choose to dwell on what they consider to be the shortcomings of the British policy over the past 70 years. At least we can be satisfied that equal criticism from the two sides illustrates the balance that we have always tried to maintain in our policy.
We certainly do not shrink from this traditional close interest in the affairs of the region. We must recognise that we are dealing now with the constantly changing political realities of the present day. The Government arc fully aware of the need to act in response to the dangerous situation in the occupied territories which I have described. But we must have no illusions about the influence we can bring to bear. Neither we nor anyone else can impose solutions on the parties or set out to dictate the way forward.
The point then arises of what contributions we can make. The noble Lords, Lord Cledwyn and Lord Stewart of Fulham, gave their views. First, we and our European partners will maintain the pressure on the Israeli Government to end their abuses of human rights in the occupied territories. We shall lose no opportunity to urge them to replace oppression with dialogue and negotiation.
The Twelve continue to play an important role in urging the parties to recognise each other's legitimate rights. The noble Lord, Lord Cledwyn, specifically asked about the role of the European Community. We shall consider any further specific proposals for further EC action. But clearly the impetus remains with Secretary Shultz's initiative, and I shall deal with that aspect later. The US engagement is a vital element and Mr. Shultz has our full support. Any other initiative at this time would stand little chance of success, and to some extent risks are counter-productive.
The noble Lord, Lord Mayhew, raised in part the point about the proposal for an EC administration in the occupied territories. We see many difficulties in the idea as described so far. They are both political, in the drafting of any mandate, and practical in its implementation. Would there be stomach throughout the Community for exposing our young men to the opposition and violence that they would certainly face? However, that said, we should be prepared to study in detail any formal proposal submitted in European political co-operation.
The noble Lords, Lord Cledwyn, Lord Weidenfeld and Lord Stewart of Fulham, referred to the need to strive to encourage co-operation, particularly the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and Israel. We welcome the possibility of any high level Soviet-Israeli contact. There are many important issues to be discussed: bilateral relations, Soviet Jewry and the peace process. I hope that the continuing contacts can lead to new openings in these key areas. The noble Lord has put his finger on an important point.

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On the humanitarian level we support the sterling work of the relief agencies such as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. We agree with the United Nations Secretary General when he calls for an expansion of their role to meet the changing needs of the expanding refugee population. In addition, we have recently given £24,000 of emergency aid for families seriously affected by the unrest. The EC has contributed £450,000 of emergency aid since December 1987. We try to encourage the economic development of the region. We aim to give £1 million of bilateral aid to the occupied territories, plus our share of the European Community aid. In 1987 that was about £2 million. Together with the European Commission we have maintained pressure on the Israelis for early implementation of the measures which will allow preferential access to the European Community market for Palestinian producers. We are glad to note the assurances recently given by the Israeli Foreign Minister, Mr. Peres, in that regard and we trust that those assurances will soon be fulfilled.
Important though those matters are, they cannot resolve the underlying problems. Economic palliatives or relief handouts cannot be expected to satisfy a people seeking their legitimate rights. Israel's right to secure existence will not be achieved at the point of a gun or through the demolition of houses. The parties must move on towards a negotiated settlement of their conflict. We look to the political leadership in Israel to come forward with constructive, forward-looking policies which can lay the foundations for a proper and peaceful relationship between the peoples of the region. We look to the leaders of the uprising—what is now universally known as the intifada, a word used by the noble Lord, Lord Weidenfeld—to ask themselves how they can move from stone-throwing towards political progress.
But, as I have already explained, only the parties directly concerned can tackle the main issues. The United Kingdom, the Twelve, the United States and the USSR can signpost the way. We can urge courses of action but we cannot actually take the steps on the road to peace. Any just and durable peace requires sacrifice and compromise on both sides, a willingness to give up some long-cherished but unattainable objectives. There can be neither historical Palestine nor Eretz Israel, except at the price of perpetual conflict. Israelis and Palestinians need to recognise that maximalist positions are outdated and that they are fated to live alongside each other.
From this Dispatch Box I have repeated many times what we are convinced must be the basis of any solution: recognition of the right of all states in the region, including Israel, to a secure existence, together with the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination. I was also struck by the moving words of the noble Lord, Lord Caradon, whose experience in international affairs is well known to us all. I am pleased to have this opportunity to salute the great achievements of the noble Lord in the drafting of United Nations Security Resolution 242. I assure him that our support for the current US peace initiative is based on its adherence to one of the
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central principles of that resolution; the exchange of land for peace.
The noble Viscount, Lord Buckmaster, has heard me say previously that we do not regard the PLO as a terrorist organisation, but several of its component organisations have deplorable terrorist records. The PLO enjoys wide support in the occupied territories and among Palestinians elsewhere. However, we do not accept its claim to be the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. It lacks any such mandate. The PLO can and should put itself in a position to play an important part in the peace process. The people it claims to represent desperately need peace and justice rather than violence and confrontation. The PLO cannot expect to play that constructive role until it renounces violence, accepts UN Security Resolutions 242 and 338 and recognises Israel's right to exist.
The terms of a settlement are for the parties to agree. How should they do that? We, like my noble friend Lord Thomas and the noble Lord, Lord Mayhew, believe that an international conference under United Nations auspices can provide an effective framework for the necessary negotiations. But to succeed, such a conference cannot have the power to impose solutions nor to veto agreements reached by the parties. Such a conference will provide the opportunity for a just and lasting peace settlement. It will not be a trap; no man of good will need fear it.
As regards the question of procedure, which was raised by my noble friend Lord Reay in his reference to the suggestion that the five permanent members of the Security Council should be involved, I must say that the structure and terms of reference of the conference are complex issues. They touch on the substance of the dispute and it is for the parties to work out mutually acceptable arrangements. It will be wrong for the United Kingdom or any other party to dictate terms from outside.
As today's debate has made clear, there is common praise and support for the current effort of the United States Government to advance the cause of peace on this basis. In particular, we salute the work of Mr. Shultz as he comes towards the end of his latest shuttle mission in the region. We look forward to hearing the results of that mission. As the noble Lord, Lord Cledwyn, said, my right honourable and learned friend the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary will be meeting Mr. Shultz in the course of the North Atlantic council meeting in Madrid later this week.
A number of your Lordships, particularly the noble Lords, Lord Weidenfeld, Lord Thomas and others, appeared to be writing off Mr. Shultz's continuing efforts prematurely or prejudging the outcome of the Algiers summit. I believe that we should avoid these traps and be careful not to offer self-fulfilling prophecies of doom. We must keep faith with those working so hard—and hard it is—for the cause of peace. We should show the same stamina as Mr. Shultz in building on the process already achieved and in bringing the countries of the region to face up to current political realities.
Perhaps I can say to the noble Viscount, Lord Buckmaster, that recently Mr. Shultz met two members of the Palestinian National Council in

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Washington, Professors Edward Salid and Abu Lughod. I trust I have the pronunciation right. He also offered to meet Palestinians in Arab East Jerusalem during his earlier shuttle mission. On that occasion the Palestinians stayed away.
I am grateful to the noble Lords, Lord Greenhill. Lord Kennet, and Lord Weidenfeld subsequently for drawing attention to the new dangers posed by missile and nuclear technology and the military implications. Nevertheless, the development of the military might of both sides underlines a fundamental point; namely, that Israel cannot guarantee her security by weapons and the control of territory. More than ever Israel needs peace with her neighbours.
I come to the point in all this that of course no realistic peace plan can deliver anyone's ideal package. I am sure however that your Lordships will join me in urging both the Israeli Government and people, as they prepare for their next elections, and the Arab world, as their leaders meet in Algiers, to turn away from conflict and confrontation. They should not spurn the efforts of the international community to help them achieve peace.
The noble Lord, Lord Kilbracken, referred to the conflict involving the Kurds and that in Iran and Iraq—the conflict in the Gulf. We deplore the continuation of this terrible conflict now in its eighth year. We are deeply saddened by the enormous loss of life and suffering which it has brought to the people of Iran and Iraq. We deplore indiscriminate attacks on civilian centres of population and, as the noble Lord would have me do, we condemn the use of chemical weapons by either party. However, our position is one of strict neutrality. We call on both sides to abandon the conflict and to negotiate for a peaceful solution. Britain has played a leading role in securing the unanimous adoption of the mandatory Security Council Resolution 598 which sets internationally-accepted terms for a settlement.
It is clearly right that we in the international community should devote much care and attention to these difficult areas of conflict. Any efforts to resolve them face serious obstacles. Indeed, some would argue that the obstacles are insurmountable but the very process of negotiation and the attempts to bring the conflicting parties together can help to stem what otherwise might become a steady drift towards greater extremism. Whatever the obstacles, there can be no alternative to our current steady and balanced efforts to help bring conciliation, and, in time, peace and stability to this troubled region. I am grateful to your Lordships for your support in this important endeavour.
5.24 p.m.
Lord Cledwyn of Penrhos: My Lords, we have had a constructive and thoughtful debate on this urgent subject and I am grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part. I felt that the general mood has been one of caution and I believe that that is right and proper. However, alongside that mood of caution one also sensed that the majority of speakers felt that Her Majesty's Government should do all that was possible to help the convening of an international conference.
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I am sure that the House will allow me to say how grateful I am to my noble friend Lord Stewart of Fulham for winding up the debate on this side. We are always glad to hear my noble friend not only because of his great experience but because of the clarity of his speeches; I am personally indebted to him. We are grateful to the Minister of State for responding and for explaining government policy to us and also, most important of all, for his commitment on behalf of the Government to explore every possible channel in bringing pressure to hear for the convening of a conference in support of Mr. George Shultz. I beg leave to withdraw my Motion for Papers.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

Poverty in Africa
5.26 p.m.
Baroness Ewart-Biggs Baroness Ewart-Biggs rose to call attention to the hunger, poverty and debt in much of Africa; and to the case for policies to develop greater international economic justice; and to move for Papers.
The noble Baroness said: My Lords, there have been many occasions in recent years when different aspects of Africa's problems have been debated in this House. We have examined the plight of the African countries from political, economic and humanitarian viewpoints. From this side of the House noble Lords have often condemned the North-South divide and demanded global economic policies to redress the balance between the rich and poor countries. Other voices have argued that many of the problems of the African countries are of their own making, that they should put their houses in order, and that the duty of Western countries should be confined to making emergency food aid available at the time of crisis and, for the rest, gearing their development aid policies to the achievement of their own national trade requirements and in support of their own firms working in third world countries.
Therefore, on the one hand, we have heard hardheaded economic arguments, and, on the other, the voice of compassion crying out for policies which will bring about fairer economic co-operation between the rich and poor countries for the benefit of both. Today I believe that a new theme may emerge. It will come from a report called Financing Africa's Recovery which I should like to draw to the attention of your Lordships.
Last year an advisory group of eminent international financiers under the chairmanship of' Sir Douglas Wass were given the brief to assess Africa's critical financial condition and to make proposals to the UN Secretary General. The report came out in February of this year and one of its characteristics is a combination of hard-headed economics with altruism. Indeed, one of its members made this clear when he said:
"The most striking feature of this report is its authorship. Its conclusions … are not those of charitable institutions. This is not just another in a seemingly unending succession of humanitarian appeals for help for the world's less fortunate. There is indeed a humanitarian dimension to this report's analysis. But its principle thrust is a financial and economic one. Nine of its 13 authors are bankers. The report must therefore, above all, be seen as a pragmatic assessment of minimal African requirements for medium-term economic recovery".

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The authors of the report first traced the various stages which led to Africa's present predicament. They described how further problems were added to the problems created by the chronic shortages of resources available for development in the early 1980s and how much of Africa suffered a serious fall in its trading income as the prices of its export commodities declined. Its burden of debt, already high in relation to its means, increased as it resorted to more borrowing—much of it on market-related terms which it was ill-fitted to service. Private capital flows and trade credit shrank as lenders perceived the risks they ran by further exposure and in 1984 and 1985 a large part of the continent experienced a drought and subsequent food shortage which compounded the problems of poverty and deprivation. Not only did living standards decline but the outlook for long-term improvement in economic performance received a severe setback.
Two sets of proposals to make good the damage were examined by the advisory group. First, measures designed to alleviate the cost of servicing the external debts of African states and, secondly, ways of providing additional financial resources from both public and private sources were considered. Before elaborating on those proposals the advisory council made it abundantly clear that it recognised the benefits that would flow from an increase in world demand for African exports and the dismantling by developed countries of protection measures which inhibit African exports.
From the point of view of African debts, the advisory council stressed that as most of the African debt is to governments and government-owned institutions, debt relief is therefore a matter for political rather than commercial decisions. Here I should like to make the point that Mr. Nigel Lawson has recognised that this is a political matter which should not be left solely to finance Ministers. Therefore, I feel it to be highly appropriate for the British Foreign Secretary to build on this further when he goes to the United States in September to address the United Nations; and that address could be based on African economic recovery.
In outlining ways to alleviate the cost of servicing external debts, the report recommended, first, that official development assistance loans should be converted into grants; secondly, that interest charged on non-concessionary debts rescheduled under the Paris Club should be lowered; and, thirdly, that commerical banks should take special debt relief measures on behalf of sub-Saharan African countries on a case-by-case basis. The savings to African countries brought about by those measures was calculated by the advisory council to be £1 billion.
The council then examined ways of providing additional financial resources and suggested new initiatives to be taken by the World Bank, the IMF and the African Development Bank which would yield about £3 billion. That would leave an annual £1 billion shortfall to the minimum—and the council stressed "minimum"—£5 billion a year additional financial resources that the group estimated Africa needed to cope with its current economic plight. The
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council appealed to bilateral donors to contribute this further £1 billion and concluded:
"Without increased support from donor countries and creditors there is a risk that African governments will be politically unable to persevere with the difficult economic reform programmes on which they have embarked:"
The council gave the onimous warning that:
"The consequence of failure, in both political and economic terms, could be incalculable."
That, therefore, is a very brief résumé of the main features of this important report. But what has given it additional weight is the fact that following immediately on its heels has come another, similar warning from Mr. Herman van der Wyck, of Warburg, at the recent conference on African debt held in London. He insisted that the position of many African countries had deteriorated to the extent that confirmed short-term arrangements could no longer work and might, indeed, even exacerbate the problem. Mr. van der Wyck added that the current situation was so intractable and difficult that a continuation of the stumbling "ad hocery", as he called it, which characterised recent approaches to the crisis were no longer acceptable from the point of view of either debtors or creditors. He commended the African Development Bank's proposals to streamline and regularise the process of debt management while preserving the most beneficial aspects of the current system. Therefore, the messages coming from Warburg and Sir Douglas Wass were identical. It would be wise for the international community to hearken to what they said.
Looking at the situation from the African side, there is little doubt that the austerity policies urged on them by the IMF have had a devastating effect on African populations. It is, of course, they who have had to pay the price. It is that consideration which leads me to my next point which concerns the consequences of adjustment policies on the most vulnerable groups in poor countries and how those consequences can be mitigated. Julius Nyrere, former President of Tanzania, asked: "Must we starve our children to pay our debts?" UNICEF had an answer which it produced in, again, a recent report published this year entitled Adjustment with a Human Face. That report sets out a framework for economic policy designed to protect the poor and prevent young children from being sacrificed for the sake of financial stability. It gives the horrifying statistic that in the past 10 years the number of under-nourished children in sub-Saharan Africa has risen by as much as 25 per cent.
The report made clear that:
"to miss out the human dimension of adjustment is an economic error of the most fundamental sort. Much evidence already exists of the economic returns to investment in human resources. To fail to protect young children at the critical stages of their growth is to wreak lasting damage on a whole generation, the results of which may well have effects on economic development and welfare for decades ahead.".
Those views are now finding favour with others and in June last year the IMF's new managing director made clear that he believed that the more adjustment efforts give proper weight to social realities—especially the implications for the poorest—the more successful they are likely to be. He said that fund

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missions were willing to consider any request by a country to look at alternative approaches,
"with a view in particular to sheltering the poorest".
It is clear, therefore, that at last the World Bank and the IMF are beginning to realise that their former prescriptions were creating nearly as many problems as they were solving.
I give an example. This new policy has been tried in Ghana where, to mitigate social costs of economic adjustments, a large US subsidy has been given to implement a programme of action comprising a public works programme, a credit scheme for small farmers and a rehabilitation and improvement programme for the social and economic infrastructure. A great number of jobs have been created. As many as 45,000 jobs will be created over a two year period. The food-for-work project in the north will provide employment for 4,000 workers. The infrastructure in four urban centres will be maintained and will provide 10,000 jobs over two years. A labour-intensive feeder road project to employ nearly 24,000 people will cost 12·2 million US dollars. In that way Ghana will be saved from the extreme results of economic adjustment.
Finally, in a debate about alleviating hunger and poverty in Africa, it would be wrong not to mention the role of NGO's, for it is without doubt that while the efforts of donor nations and lending institutions towards solving the debt crisis are essential to Africa's recovery, above all else recovery and regeneration depend upon human resources. It is here that voluntary agencies and NGOs play such an important role.
Although bilateral and multilateral institutions are engaged in ceaseless policy dialogue with third world governments, banks and delegations, they do not talk to the vast mass of the population in the rural and urban areas. In the jargon of aid bureaucracies, the needy are the "target group". That impersonal phrase perfectly illustrates the way people are categorised as objects or statistics. In contrast, voluntary agencies are in the front line of the battle against poverty, disease, drought and famine. For voluntary agencies, the statistics actually have names, real lives and real needs.
There are several thousand voluntary agencies working in Africa. Increasingly, more and more are local, grass-roots organisations. Both bilateral and multilateral lenders are beginning to realise that the voluntary sector—which accounts for 10 per cent. of all aid flows—has an influence out of all proportion to its size. Perhaps I may be permitted to give one example. I am president of the British section of SOS Sahel International. That is an association of European and African voluntary agencies working to protect the fragile environment and increase food production in the Sahel region of sub-Saharan Africa. In Sudan we work with rural communities to preserve their farming lands from encroaching desert through community forestry. The response of the villagers, especially women, to the programme shows just how readily communities will work to solve their own acute problems, given a little help, encouragement and technical assistance. Governments can support such programmes, but it is
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most unlikely that they will acquire the flair or flexibility to implement them.
Finally, can we be sure that we in Britain are making a sufficiently high contribution towards Africa's recovery? The present record of the United Kingdom Government is far from admirable. Newly released figures reveal that about half as much of the national wealth is now devoted to overseas aid as at the time the present Government came to power. Last year Britain provided only 0·28 per cent. of its GNP in overseas aid, which is a far cry from the 0·7 per cent. which is a UN target. It contrasts darkly with the 0·52 per cent. inherited from the Labour Government of 1979.
Perhaps I may give a few comparisons. In 1986 the net disbursement of official development assistance to sub-Saharan Africa by the Federal Republic of Germany was 552 billion dollars; by Italy 682 billion dollars; by the Netherlands 322 billion dollars, but by the United Kingdom only 267 billion dollars. Britain was overtaken even by Japan, New Zealand and Switzerland.
I am very grateful to all those who are to speak in this debate, which has not only given an opportunity to focus attention on the gravity of the economic situation of Africa and the suffering of its people but also reveals the fact that finally hard-headed economists have come round to agreeing with the bleeding hearts that the people of Africa can no longer be treated so shabbily by the rich countries. A solution must and can be found to raise the standard of life, prospects and hope of 555 million of the world's population. I look forward to hearing the Minister say what is to be the role of Her Majesty's Government to further these solutions. My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.
5.41 p.m.
Lord Bauer: My Lords, I wish to thank the noble Baroness, Lady Ewart-Biggs, very warmly for this debate and for her moving speech. No one should be indifferent to the mass misery in Africa, some of which I have seen in refugee camps. The misery is particularly distressing after many years and many billions of official aid and heroic efforts by voluntary agencies.
What more can be done to alleviate this misery? I shall focus upon possible reforms of official aid. The reforms I shall list were proposed by Mr. Cranley Onslow and myself many years ago. The most urgent is a reconsideration of the allocation of official aid now based on incomes. To aid rulers on this basis rewards policies of impoverishment.
Western aid has assisted many recipients to pursue destructive policies for years on end. Aid should take cognisance of such policies. People will differ widely in their policy prescriptions. Mr. Onslow and I proposed that donors should favour governments who promote economic progress and the welfare of their peoples through humane leadership, effective administration, enlightened policies and the extension of personal freedom.
Aid should be untied cash grants. Subsidised loans confuse investment with donations and set up tensions between donors who see them as favours and

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the recipients who see them as burdens. Tied aid confuses subsidies to African governments with subsidies to exporters. Bilateral grants arc preferable to multilateral grants by allowing some degree of parliamentary control.
Sudan and Ethiopia show up the need for reform. For many years their governments have received, and still receive, much Western aid, far more than humanitarian relief. From 1983 to 1986, Sudan received some 4·5 billion dollars in aid and Ethiopia 2·25 billion. The external debt of Sudan is now around 10 billion dollars and that of Ethiopia around 3 billion dollars. About three-quarters is owed to official creditors for subsidised loans which are often in effect grants, as are the 50 IDA loans which are interest-free and unindexed. At times earlier loans have been written off.
In both countries hundreds of thousands of refugees live in deplorable conditions, having fled from persecution, civil war and famine. The rulers whose policies have caused them to flee are kept afloat by Western aid. Is this the economic justice referred to by the noble Baroness? The money has been used to pay for large armies, civil wars, show projects, the bizarre and expensive Organisation of African Unity, politically-motivated subsidies and other personal and political purposes. It has done very little for the poorest. Armed civil conflicts exacerbate the misery brought about by mass persecution, the forced uprooting of people, coercive collectivisation, wholesale confiscations, the suppression of trade, the underpayment of farmers. All these policies are pursued in Ethiopia and elsewhere.
Drought does not cause misery if there are reserve stocks and external trading links, as there are if trade is not suppressed or destroyed. External debt would present no difficulty if the loans had been used productively, especially in Africa, as there are no restrictions against major African exports and most of the debt represents heavily subsidised loans, the cost of which has been reduced by inflation, write-offs and deferment.
If governments had not obstructed foreign equity investment, failed projects would have left no debt. Debt service is now regarded as immoral transfer from poor to rich. This ignores the initial transfer; that is, the loans. Is interest on saving certificates or building society deposits improper? And is it immoral to honour contracts? Moreover, debt cancellation, as proposed by the Chancellor, specifically favours the imprudent, incompetent and dishonest and encourages attitudes which are damaging to economic advance.
External market conditions have been distinctly favourable in recent years. In 1985 the terms of trade of sub-Saharan Africa were, according to the latest UN statistics, on average more than 50 per cent. better than in 1960, when already favourable by historical standards. The world demand for major African exports has expanded greatly since the war. But in rising world markets cocoa exports from Ghana have declined, and palm oil exports from Nigeria have disappeared. It is also patronising to imply that African governments should not be
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expected to provide against adversity. Their citizens readily take long views, as witness the millions of acres under crops such as cocoa which take six years to mature.
Unless reformed, official transfers will not help the poorest or promote development. They are likely to obstruct progress by reinforcing the politicisation of life, increasing the stakes in the struggle for power, and thereby promoting civil conflict. The design of reforms would require much thought and care as they would be resisted by powerful vested interests, both in the public and the private sectors. After decades of disappointment, to urge reforms is not indifference to suffering, but the only hope for lasting improvement.
5.50 p.m.
Lord Banks: My Lords, I am sure that the whole House will be grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Ewart-Biggs, for raising this important matter this afternoon. I should like to underline much of what she said and take a stance rather different from that adopted by the noble Lord, Lord Bauer. Before I do that I recall the fact that we are shortly to hear the maiden speech of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Salisbury, and I look forward to that with anticipation.
I want to concentrate on the debt-distressed sub-Saharan African countries, a designation which I think the noble Lord, Lord Bauer, does not recognise. However, I believe there is full justification for that distinction between debt-distressed countries and others. When we look at those countries we are looking at a picture of decline. Twenty-two countries in sub-Saharan Africa are now designated by the World Bank as debt-distressed. In those countries in the period between 1980 and 1986 per capita output has declined, consumption has declined, investment has declined and the export of goods has declined. The export of goods has declined by the significant figure of 30·1 per cent.
Debt service will be more than 30 per cent. of exports in each of those countries in the period 1988–90. In some countries it will be more than 100 per cent. Most if not all of them—and I think it is all—have embarked on the IMF or home-designed structural adjustment programmes. These programmes usually call for increased food prices to pay farmers more to boost production, more scope for market forces in the determination of prices, the reduction of government expenditure, including expenditure on food subsidies, the reduction of government employment and the devaluation of the currency in order to improve exports.
A lesson has been learnt about these schemes in recent years. There is a time-lag and during the time-lag it is not possible to expect that these measures, whatever they may do in the long run, will have produced any favourable effect. During that time there can be suffering and acute political difficulties. Poverty is accentuated by higher prices; unemployment of civil servants creates a discontented element within the community; there is a reduction in real incomes through devaluation; health and education services are cut—sometimes, admittedly, at the expense of military expenditure. During that time-lag period there can be suffering and resentment; and in Zambia it caused riots.

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These programmes need to be less harsh and more flexible in their implementation, more sensitive politically and more caring socially. That point was made forcibly by the noble Baroness. Support funds are required and are being made available, although not, it would seem, on the scale necessary. The noble Baroness, Lady Ewart-Biggs, referred to the committee established by the Secretary General of the United Nations. The committee said that to cope with the fall in commodity prices, the decline in capital inflows and the huge debt burdens, a further 5 billion dollars a year was needed. Some 3 billion dollars had been pledged at that time and I believe that another 1 billion dollars has been pledged. However, there is a gap of 1 billion dollars a year. I should like to ask the Government whether they fully support the report and its recommendations and whether they are prepared to meet the United Kingdom contribution, which I believe will be about £100 million a year.
More than a year ago the Chancellor of the Exchequer launched a three-point programme to deal with debt. First, the conversion of aid loans into grants, as the United Kingdom had done with most of its aid loans. Secondly, the re-scheduling of debt on more generous terms stretching up to 20 years. Thirdly, the reduction of interest payments on debt to perhaps 3 per cent. below commercial rates. The Chancellor has stressed continuously—and all praise to him for that—these three points in his travels around the different financial authorities of the world. He has had a fair amount of success with the first and second points but not with the third. I hope he will continue to press all three points on his colleagues.
Oxfam has produced an interesting suggestion in connection with the third point on debt interest. It suggests that the Government should call on the next European Council of Finance Ministers to endorse the Lawson plan and to apply it immediately to those African countries whose share of export credit debts is overwhelmingly to EC creditors and other creditors prepared to join the scheme. In order to have a scheme designed to reduce interest rates it is necessary to have an interest rate subsidy. Clearly the Government do not want to embark on that if all it will do is help debt service to other countries to be paid more easily. This proposal would avoid that because the United States and Japan—two of the objectors to the proposal—would not be involved. Will the Government consider that proposal?
Finally, what is the Government's view of the Nordic proposal to establish a new window at the World Bank to re-finance loans under easier terms? What is principally required is greater political will, and what we seek this afternoon is a reassurance from the Government that they at least have the political will and the sense of urgency to continue energetically to urge upon their colleagues in the creditors' club the need for early and positive action.
5.58 p.m.
The Lord Bishop of Salisbury: My Lords, I speak today out of concern, and love, for the people of one nation in Africa which has already been mentioned more than once in this debate: The Republic of the
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Sudan. The diocese which I have the honour to serve has for 14 years been linked with the Sudan and with the Churches there. During that time many from the Salisbury diocese, including myself, have visited the Sudan or worked there, and the Sudanese have been to us. We have had friendly and practical relations not only with fellow Christians but with the Sudanese Government in regard to development and welfare problems. I should like today to comment briefly on lessons learnt in two areas—not the area of international finance on which I am not competent to speak, but the areas of health and education, where the lessons are also applicable to other nations in Africa.
The most precious item in the wealth of any nation is its people. This is especially true in Africa where so many countries are underpopulated. The Sudan, at almost 1 million square miles the largest nation in Africa, has at the best estimate not more than 20 million people, one-seventh of the density, say, of Rwanda. Such a country needs to make the most of all its citizens. Unless it can do so, it cannot take advantage of measures to correct the problem of debt or to improve terms of trade, essential though one recognises that those factors are. Enemies such as poor health and lack of education would still prevent the people of the Sudan from realising their potential and so helping to lift their country out of its seemingly hopeless plight. We must not lose sight of the need for continuing practical and precisely targeted aid.
The issue of health, both primary health care and the cure of disease, is vast. However, one theme occurs again and again—that of water. Water-related diseases, notably bilharzia and still to some extent malaria, are enormously destructive because they are so debilitating. When you are permanently devitalised by one of those diseases—or in the South perhaps by both of them—the limits on what you can do close in dramatically.
The water issue arises in yet another way. Much of the southern Sudan is potentially fertile. Ample clean water is not far below the surface. However, because there is no access to that water people cannot irrigate the land and so grow more and better food. The southern Sudan has a magnificent record of hospitality to refugees from conflict in neighbouring nations. However, this has often created new famine areas in a part of the world which, given access to water, could produce enough food for several times its present population.
Happily this is one problem which is yielding to technical aid. Reliable and appropriate technology is now available for local use. Designs of simple pumps, well building and spring capping have improved beyond recognition. Nevertheless, the programmes need to be vastly expanded. How can we educate our children on the need for such development, as is done in the new ODA video "The Water Connection", and not put more from our own affluence into that vital work which could free so many Africans to help themselves?
The other area I mentioned was education. I find that few people in Britain appreciate, for instance, the simple fact that in a country like the Sudan every child has to learn a second language before he can

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begin any formal education. On one estimate there are 99 different African languages in the Nuba mountains alone. In the cathedral at Khartoum—as I know to my confusion—five different numbers are indicated for each hymn which is then sung simultaneously in Bari, Moro, Zande, Dinka and English. I wonder how our children would get on if they had to learn, for example, Polish before they could do anything else at school.
Of course in a desperately poor country resources for education are almost non-existent in many places. The simplest textbooks are something that many children never see, yet the hunger for education is voracious. When the Church set up the first school in the shanty town of Haj Yusuf, in North Khartoum, it was overwhelmed with pupils. What further help might we give to support and improve such deprived educational systems? British educational publishers have developed major markets in Africa. One technically possible and useful form of aid might be to subsidise the provision of more in the way of the books and equipment that they need. Further, could more be done by seconding suitable teachers who are prepared to serve abroad at a time of falling rolls at home?
Noble Lords need no reminding of how close the link is between health and education. I shall give one example and then I shall conclude. It relates to the Gezira, that huge agricultural development between the two Niles which was one of the glories of British Administration in the Sudan. The latest edition of the British Overseas Development Magazine reports a plan to introduce Puerto Rican snails into the Gezira canals to eat the smaller bilharzia-carrying snails. However, the irony is that before independence there was no bilharzia in the system, because the canals were dredged and controlled to keep the water flowing fast enough to prevent the snails from lodging and breeding. Lack of education at the basic grass-roots level meant that people failed to appreciate the importance of what seemed to them to be a pointless chore.
Health and education are the twin pillars of prosperity. We know that well enough from our own history. They have brought us wealth and comfort far beyond anything most Africans now alive can hope for. They are also areas in which aid can be targeted practically and precisely. I believe that there are millions of people in this country who would insist that we can and ought to do more in these ways to help Africa to achieve the blessings that we so richly enjoy.
6.7 p.m.
Lord Walston: My Lords, on behalf of the whole House, as well as my own party, I am most happy to be following the right reverend Prelate and to be able to thank and congratulate him on a truly fine maiden speech. If one looks up his record one sees that he has spent the greater part of his life among the dreaming spires of Oxford and the rather differently dreaming towers of Westminster. Nevertheless, that has not in any way dimmed his warm heart or his understanding of the problems of other people. The picture he has given of the outlying portions of his diocese, or the
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relations to his diocese, is ample proof of that fact. We are indeed grateful to him and I say with complete sincerity that we look forward to hearing from him frequently on these and many other subjects in the future.
I am also thankful to the noble Baroness, Lady Ewart-Biggs, for giving us the chance to discuss such a vitally important subject. The only pity is that the Motion has attracted so many speakers that none of us will have enough time to say even half of the things we should have liked to say.
I shall forbear from passing any comments on the most pressing and immediate problem—that of debt and the debt servicing. That subject has been adequately dealt with by the noble Baroness and I am sure it will also be dealt with by other speakers. However, while it is clearly right for us to spend much time seeing what can be done to alleviate the present problems, we must not close our minds to problems which are being stored up. Such problems relate not only to Africa but to virtually the whole of the southern hemisphere; in other words, the third world. I am speaking of the future fertility, and ability, of the soil to grow yet more food to feed not only the present millions who are undernourished but also the increasing millions who are being born every year and who will need food.
Many of us know that trees and forests have some influence on our climate; for instance, the rainfall in Western Europe and the temperatures in that area. Some of us may even be somewhat nervous about the changes that are taking place. Nevertheless, a few more people accept the fact that deforestation in the third world leads rapidly to soil erosion, to gully formation, to loss of fertility and to a progressive increase of desertification. I know that is a horrible word, but it is the best one to describe what I mean.
We know from our history books how the Sahara has advanced; we know from contemporary knowledge how it is still advancing. Therefore, that is an aspect which is beginning to impinge to some extent upon our consciousness. However, few of us realise the enormous economic importance of trees—quite simply, trees—to the people who live in large parts of Africa, in even greater parts of India and also in South-East Asia. To those people, trees are a source of fuel. Ninety per cent. of the fuel of the people in those areas comes from the trees. With the decline in the number of trees the supply of their fuel has already diminished and is continuing to diminish rapidly. It is as if our own coal and oil reserves were diminishing to the same extent.
According to the statement, from the Bellagio meeting on tropical forests last July, more than half of the world's tropical forests have disappeared during the century; more than 1 billion people are today suffering from a shortage of fuel wood; and every year something over 10 million hectares of forest are being destroyed and not being replaced. So great has been the decline that women, who are the gatherers of fuel and who are responsible for cooking in homes, may have to walk for up to four hours every week to gain enough timber for their fuel requirements. Coupled with that, as I say, desecration of the soil is proceeding at a terrifying pace.

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That is not to mention the 10 billion dollars worth of good timber that is exported every year largely to Japan but also to Northern Europe. We are pre-occupied with the immediate problems of starvation, hunger, malnutrition, disease, ignorance, lack of education and debt burden, all of which must come first in our minds; but I ask your Lordships not to forget the long-term effects of the cutting down of trees and of the failure to replant them. The result of that will make the troubles that are facing the third world today pale into insignificance in the next 50 years unless a massive programme of reafforestation is embarked upon.
The West can help with that programme through know-how and private enterprise. I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Bauer, will agree that private enterprise can come in and make long-term money out of replanting. Unless that replanting is done by some means or another, devastation is inevitable on an even greater scale than we see it today.
6.12 p.m.
The Earl of Listowel: My Lords, as the first speaker from these Benches to follow the right reverend Prelate, I should like to add my words of congratulation to those which have already been expressed to him on his maiden speech; to thank him for the special contributions he made from his knowledge of the part of Africa in which he worked; and to say that we shall very much hope to hear him frequently on future occasions. I should also like to say that I share in the thanks expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Banks, to my noble friend Lady Ewart-Biggs for giving us the opportunity to discuss a subject which touches the conscience of every thinking person.
About 30 years ago I lived for three years in a country in sub-Saharan Africa. Sad to say, I do not believe that its problems are any less now than they were then, or that we in this country have done anything substantial to assist the people living there. That is why I want to make a plea to the Government to do something more and to do something constructive which would help them and also help us in the long run. I hope that there will be a reconsideration of policies relating to third world countries, especially the poorest countries in Africa, because I believe that it is justified both by the increasing wealth of our country—it has outstripped its European neighbours in recent years—and by public demand, as shown by the extraordinary response to humanitarian appeals such as Band Aid and Sports Aid.
Individuals have shown deep concern for those living in destitution in other continents. I trust that the Government will feel that they are justified by public opinion in following suit. The first and most essential change I should like to see is in the main purpose of trade and aid policies towards third world countries. While all such policies benefit us in the long run by creating purchasing power, their immediate and primary purpose should be to relieve the poverty of the poorest countries and to assist them in their own economic developments towards self-sustaining growth.
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The motive of policy should be, at this stage at any rate, the welfare of those countries rather than the narrow view of our own self-interest; but, alas—I have to follow in the footsteps of my noble friend Lady Ewart-Biggs in this matter when we look at the Government's record they appear to regard overseas aid as easily dispensable and have cut it much more severely in relation to other forms of expenditure. The continuous and progressive decline of our annual aid contributions from 0·52 per cent. of our gross national product in 1979 to 0·28 per cent. in the current year surely puts us to shame and leaves us one from the bottom in the league of wealthy countries belonging to the development association committee of the OECD.
It appears that the Scandinavian countries, with Holland and Denmark, can lead the way with contributions of about 1 per cent. of their gross national product every year. I should like to think that one day we shall be able to follow their example. The Government have also decided—this again is a great disappointment—to cut their multilateral aid. I am particularly concerned about the funds of the International Development Association, which is the organ of the World Bank for providing soft loans for poorer countries. The IDA funds are replenished at yearly intervals. At the last replenishment our share was reduced from 10·1 per cent. to 6·5 per cent. of the total, or by nearly half. Perhaps the Minister can tell us whether we intend to improve our performance when the next replenishment is due.
I regret even more the Government's decision to contribute nothing to the special fund for Africa. After the appalling African famine there was international agreement that help must be given to subsistence farmers to increase food production in sub-Saharan Africa, and so in January 1986 a special fund was agreed in principle by the major industrial countries in Western Europe which pledged a payment of nearly 200 million dollars. Britain alone refused to contribute. Perhaps the Minister can explain why that decision was taken.
I hope the Government can give some indication that they share our concern for the plight of those who live in the most poverty stricken parts of the world, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, and that they will produce more positive measures and, above all, more money to discharge our responsibilities towards them.
6.19 p.m.
Viscount Buckmaster: My Lords, I warmly welcome this opportunity to speak about Africa, having spent several years in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania and having visited something like eight or nine other African countries. In the very brief time available to me I intend to deal with four countries, each for a specific reason. First, Uganda, because it is the country I know best; secondly, Mozambique, where famine conditions are appalling and little understood; and finally, Botswana and Kenya, to illustrate ongoing aid projects. The Botswana project has only been partially successful, but Kenya has had a very successful series of programmes which are now continuing.

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Let me deal first with Uganda. I have spoken about this fascinating country three or four times in your Lordships' House. The last time was when I asked a Starred Question and the noble Lord, Lord Glenarthur, told me, as I had expected, that although conditions in the country as a whole had improved under President Museveni, there was still a lot of poverty and fighting in the northern and eastern areas of the country. That is true today and only a couple of days ago I received a letter from a Ugandan friend illustrating this. They are very poor; the cost of living is rising at a phenomenal rate. Education and health services seem very poorly developed. I would be interested to know, can the Minister tell us whether British aid is getting through to this part of Uganda?
I turn now to Mozambique, and the information I have here comes partly from the South African Development Co-ordination Conference, partly from War On Want. The President has indicated that this year Mozambique was producing only 25 per cent. of what was produced in 1973. In human terms this means that something like 5 million Mozambicans have been affected by famine and war, 3·8 million of whom face serious starvation. There are 600,000 Mozambican displaced persons in Angola alone.
In February 1988, Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe estimated that 1 million people had died and 8 million refugees had been displaced since 1980, as a result of South African aggression. The noble Baroness, Lady Ewart-Biggs, probably knows this already but according to UNICEF 8½ million peasants have been displaced and 4½ million threatened with starvation. The relief organisation estimates that from 1983 to 1985 at least 200,000 people have died as a direct result of South African repression. The disruption of the health services—so the War On Want report continues—has caused the death of 120,000 children each year; one death every four minutes. Is that not a terrible statistic?
The trouble, of course, is that Pretoria is able to employ its military might and economic muscle to stifle its neighbours' independent development. In 1985 South Africa's gross domestic product was three times greater than the combined GDP of the SADCC. Its economic power gives the apartheid regime a stranglehold over neighbouring states whose economies have been underdeveloped and distorted in various ways. So much for Mozambique—a terrible situation, with very little known about it. I would be interested in any comments which the noble Baroness may have.
Let me turn now to two case studies of aid projects, the first in Botswana and the second in Kenya. Unfortunately, the first case study has not shown wholly satisfactory results. This project was a rather curious one allowing individual commercial ranchers to fence off tracts of land which had previously been grazed on a communal basis. I should perhaps point out that most of Botswana is semi-arid range land and beef is the country's main agricultural export. But the sad thing about this plan was that the policy decision to allow the rich cattle-owners to enclose what they could had the effect of compressing the
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poorer cattle-herders who still graze the land commonly into an ever-more confined space. Thus by subsidising enclosure on an individual basis without providing adequate safeguards for the poorer communal owners, aid donors had fairly clearly rendered the latter group poorer.
The last country I want to look at—and here I am turning to a very successful project; one must end on a successful note—is Kenya and its rural roads programme. This project was inaugurated in the mid-1970s and it aimed at the construction of some 14,000 kilometres of roads in the rural areas by labour-intensive methods. The programme was supported by technical assistance from various donor countries, including Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, the UK, the USA and the World Bank. By 1980, with poor maintenance of machinery—a major problem in most of Africa—it was decided to use a system of local contractors. These contractors now number some 4,000 and they are all local residents, many of whom had been involved in the construction of roads over the past years.
So we have the rather extraordinary situation where a project has gradually changed from a bulldozer to a crowbar and shovel technology—a remarkable transition, one would have thought, in this day and age. But the fact is that the programme has been very successful and by 1983, under the RARP, some 7,000 kilometres of access road had been constructed and 3,000 had been gravelled.
I can say no more except to ask the Minister one question. In these areas, in connection with nearly all these projects water is of the greatest importance. I wonder whether the Minister could tell us in particular what arrangements are being made for water research in Kenya, Botswana and Mozambique. The Arabs have a lovely saying, "We have created from water every living thing".
6.29 p.m.
The Lord Bishop of Manchester: My Lords, it sometimes helps to put the enormous problems of Africa into a historical context. I have been reading a book recently about the Lancashire cotton famine back in the last century. That may seem a long way from the problems of Africa in the 20th century. I think it is worth a mention because that is one example of the terrible situation that prevailed in Britain during the years when industrial wealth was being created at the time of the Industrial Revolution and when there were various cycles of trade which brought enormous suffering and hardship. Some of the case studies in that book are the kind of things which are very similar to what we have been seeing on our television screens about Africa today.
It is noticeable that the reaction of the dominant classes in Victorian and Edwardian England was very similar to what many people say about the problems of our lopsided world—lopsided in terms of development. It was felt then that one could do nothing about the iron laws of economics; but what one could do of course was to have very generous collections from more affluent people in the South of England. Collections were held in aid of the Lancashire famine victims in London and in other areas. The proceeds were then sent up to that part of

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the world and they did some good at the time. But people of those days were good on charity to some extent but very weak on justice. That thread has run through British society. It was noticeable that when the Jarrow hunger marchers went to London one of the banners stated; "Damn your charity, we want justice!" It seems to me that this is what is now happening on a world scale.
One can transmute the poor of British industrial society in those days to those who are suffering so much in the third world today and especially in Africa which is the subject of our debate. The struggle should really be a struggle not simply to help the poor, but a struggle for greater equality and a greater share in the world's resources. I should like to know how far the Government are committed to that struggle because it is a matter of the deepest urgency. The moral case for such a commitment is overwhelming, not only from individuals but on the part of governments, too.
If we want the religious dimension all of us would go to different source books. But the great tradition of Isaiah and the prophets and the teachings of Jesus would seem to me to contain ample justification. It was Willy Brandt who wrote some years ago in North South—A Programme for Survival that the idea of a community of nations has little meaning if hunger is regarded as a marginal problem which humanity can live with.
I believe therefore that the commitment should be an urgent one towards much greater equality between nations. As we have heard today, Africa is facing an enormous series of crises in varying intensities between different African countries. They are: the food problem; the debt problem; poverty and the environment; and they are all running into each other. Soil which took 100 years to accumulate is now washed away in a day in certain parts of Africa. There is a Swahili proverb which states: do not borrow off the earth for the earth will require its own back with interest. That is something we might remember.
There are some who claim that these enormous problems in the emerging countries of Africa can be dealt with and should be dealt with through greater freedom of the market. I turn now to one or two brief comments on the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Bauer, to which I listened with very great interest and some appreciation. One must listen with respect to some of the things that he was saying as regards policies in certain African countries because they are matters which have given us a great deal of concern recently. And yet I do not find that picture of the working of the market very helpful in relation to African societies. I think that all of us would agree that the market does have a part to play, as does freeing restrictions on the market in certain circumstances.
But it was noticeable in what the noble Lord, Lord Bauer, said about the freedom which African countries have had to trade; that he did not mention, for instance, the enormous fluctuations in commodity prices. If one takes the effect of that on copper in Zambia or on sisal in Tanzania, and what that has meant for the economies of those countries, one can see that in those cases freedom in terms of trade has been devastating.
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Furthermore, I think that policies in African countries can only effectively be criticised by those who have shown themselves the friends of Africa in a very deep sense. This is especially of course related to the terrible situation in Southern Africa with which we have often been concerned and the efforts by South Africa to destabilise certain neighbouring African countries.
Coming back to the question of the freedom of the market and the way ahead in Africa, I have seen this sometimes represented under the figure of the game of Monopoly. Monopoly is fine if those who are playing it start off from a reasonably equal base and have equal opportunities; but this is not so for African countries today with the kind of constraints from which they have suffered. One could mention briefly some of these distorting factors. One such factor is the colonial heritage.
I am not one who believes that one can go on blaming all the evils of Africa on the colonial heritage, but it would be foolish not to recognise the way in which, for example, trade links have run back to former colonial countries and have distorted the internal pattern of the market in Africa. That has been a powerful constraint. There is a need to develop a proper infrastructure of roads and railways. The road example given by the noble Viscount, Lord Buckmaster, was interesting because that is the kind of thing which does not attract private interests and private development in the same way as governmental help.
I should like the Minister to assure us that Britain is watching very carefully that we do not pursue the policy of pushing third world countries into buying expensive arms when in fact they do not necessarily make people safer, but only poorer.
Refugees are a major constraint on the development of African countries. Surely we must pay tribute to the generosity of Africa which harbours half the world's refugee population—5 million people and millions more who are displaced—when we make a great fuss about small numbers of immigrants coming into this country. Another constraint in Africa is the wealthy elite. The distortion of the African economy is something which has very largely stemmed from colonialism and the kind of standard of living which civil servants and others expect to have, resulting in a crisis of unfulfilled expectations by many others in the African population.
I must conclude by asking the Minister to try to give us some effective answer to why Britain's contribution in aid and in helping to change the terms of trade has been so very poor in recent years. Will she also tell us what is being done to help African students coming to this country, and to improve programmes for them? That is surely one of the most important contributions which Britain can make today.
6.36 p.m.
Lord Vernon: My Lords, I propose to concentrate on an aspect of the problem to which the noble Baroness has drawn attention but which is frequently overlooked. It has very largely been overlooked so far

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in the debate this afternoon. It is an aspect which is fundamental to reducing the poverty, hunger and debt which so debilitate Africa today. I refer to the quite extraordinary rate of population growth throughout the continent; a rate which, according to the policy study of the World Bank published in August 1986, is slowing development and sharply reducing the possibility of raising living standards.
If one takes Africa as a whole, the present population of 601 million is increasing at an annual rate of 2·8 per cent. and will double in 24 years. In Kenya, which has the fastest growing population in the world, it will double in 18 years. Even in Ethiopia, where we have witnessed famine and bloodshed on such a horrific scale, it will double in 30 years. I have given those figures (and I could of course give many more) because of the ignorance which seems to exist about what is actually happening in Africa. These new people have to be fed, housed and educated. They have to be provided with health care, and, perhaps most important of all, when they are grown up they have to be employed.
One has to ask oneself some rather brutal questions. Is it not vacuous for the Western nations to go on pouring economic aid into these countries if their governments—they are all independent and have not been subject to the colonial yoke for many a decade—-take no effective action to tackle this cancer of over-fast population growth? It may be argued that the majority of African governments now advocate family planning. Too many of them pay lip service to it. A much more determined drive is required if anything worthwhile is to be achieved.
I am not suggesting that this huge continent cannot in due course absorb a substantially larger population than it has today. The right reverend Prelate gave an example of areas in the Sudan which could hold a much larger population—but not yet. Population cannot go on increasing at the present rate without adversely affecting the economic wellbeing of the people, and especially the wellbeing of the poorer classes of society. It cannot increase without intensifying the deforestation, land erosion and desertification which are already taking place on such an alarming scale. That was a theme developed by my noble friend Lord Walston in his speech, every word of which I agreed with.
I am the chairman of a UK charity called Population Concern. In that capacity I visited Lesotho in Southern Africa, Mauritius and South India last winter. In addition to Lesotho, the charity supports family planning projects in Nigeria, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone and Gambia. It receives much appreciated support from our own ODA and from the EC. Lesotho is a typical example of what I have been speaking about. A huge amount of international aid is pouring in. However, apart from the work being funded by the International Planned Parenthood Federation (the IPPF) very little is being done by the Lesotho Government to encourage birth spacing, which in turn helps to improve mother and child health care and reduce mortality.
On the other hand, Mauritius is a shot in the arm. As a result of a combined initiative by the Government and by the local FPA, the population
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growth rate has been reduced over a few years to near replacement level, with greatly enhanced economic prospects for the whole island. That shows what can be done where there is a will to do it.
I know that the Government take seriously the rate of population growth in Africa. That is evidenced by their recent decision to appoint a special health and population adviser to the development division in Lilongwe, Malawi. However, I believe that more should be done. First, UK economic aid should not, as a general rule, be provided to countries in Africa unless their governments are firmly committed to a policy of reducing fertility. Otherwise, the aid will be largely wasted.
Secondly, the percentage of overall UK overseas aid made available for family planning should be increased from the present miserly 1 per cent. to a more realistic figure. I have made that request before. I do not hesitate to make it again. Thirdly, NGOs such as ours which work with local NGOs can sometimes make more of an impact for a given amount of money than the large agencies. The ODA has been generous in its funding of specific projects. However, administration and supervision from London are expensive and we may be able to achieve more if a contribution can also be made to core funding. I hope that the Minister will say something about those suggestions when she comes to reply.
6.45 p.m.
Lord Hatch of Lusby: My Lords, since my maiden speech 10 years ago I have spoken many times in this House on the issues of hunger, poverty and debt in the third world. I do not propose to repeat technicalities that I have mentioned previously. I am tempted to debate with the noble Lord, Lord Bauer. However, as he and I debated the subject on television last year, I shall leave it at that.
So long as the African economies remain colonial economies (as the right reverend Prelate has pointed out), so long as commodity prices are determined in London and New York, so long as the IMF acts as the master capitalist organisation in the world and so long as such things as the common agricultural policy exist, Africa will remain poor and become yet poorer. It is a disgrace that the aid programme of this Government has sunk to such abysmal depths. It is also a danger.
When the noble Baroness, Lady Hart of South Lanark, was Minister of Overseas Development, her officials proved that employment in this country directly depends on our aid programme. An example was the closing down of the Leyland factory at Bathurst in Scotland. That factory was tooled up to provide lorry kits for Nigeria and it provided 10,000 such kits a year. When Nigeria, as a result of a drop in oil prices, could only buy 2,500 kits a year, British workers were thrown out of work. We have heard the realities of African life eloquently spoken about this evening. However, those are facts which the British people should know. What have the Government done? One of their first actions was to destroy the plan for development education in this country which we had taken two years to work out, to cost and to get approved by every department of government.

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In the short time available to me tonight, I wish to concentrate on man-made disasters in Africa. I wish to speak of the disasters happening now which, it would appear, are endangering lives, prosperity, food production and the whole future of southern Africa. That is based on the supremely powerful position of the Republic of South Africa. The South Africans have two objectives. The first is to preserve white supremacy at all costs. The second is to dominate the whole of the southern region.
The South Africans are guilty of naked aggression in Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Zimbabwe and Zambia. They are guilty of covert aggression in Mozambique. What are our Government doing about that international aggression? South African troops are in Angola today. Bombs have been dropped on all the countries I have mentioned. In Angola, South Africa and the United States support for UNITA has produced 1½ million refugees. In Mozambique, according to the United States State Department, the activities of RENAMO, supported and equipped by South Africa, have caused 100,000 civilians to be assassinated. That is in addition to what the noble Viscount told us so eloquently about the devastation of that country and the tremendous increase in the number of refugees.
The country of Namibia is associated with that most important, vital resolution of the United Nations—Resolution 435. When we read about the talks that are taking place in London and in Brazzaville, let us not fool ourselves—the South Africans have done that before. They have no sincere interest in genuine peace negotiations in South Africa unless they remain in control. They like to talk and their talks postpone the issue of sanctions; but their central objective is to maintain white supremacy and white domination throughout that region, to destroy the African National Congress and to destroy SWAPO in Namibia.
The British Government appear to have left the whole initiative in southern Africa to the United States. The United States is not a monolithic society, as I shall point out in a moment. The United States' present administration has an obsession about communism and about the Cubans. So they are supplying the destructive forces of UNITA through the Kamina base in Zaire along with, unfortunately, the help of the Israelis. As a result, the whole of northern Angola is being devastated. In the so-called peace negotiations there is a danger that Namibian independence will remain unguaranteed if the United States can get the Cubans out of Angola.
Britain has abdicated responsibility, but Britain is still a member of the contact group which was set up to bring independence to Namibia. Yet the present British Government have been most active in opposing the use of sanctions against the illegally occupying force of South Africa. We shall see in the press tomorrow that yet another attempt is being made to use sanctions—this time, the sanction of gold—against the continued aggression of the South African Government.
I said that the United States is not a monolithic society. A debate is going on right now in Congress to tighten and increase sanctions against South Africa. What is the British Government's attitude
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towards those in the United States and in Europe and in the Commonwealth, who are supposed to be their friends, who are today attempting to achieve further disinvestment and tighter sanctions against South Africa? What action are the British Government taking at the United Nations in order to stop the aggression of the South Africans which is devastating the whole of the southern half of the continent?
It has been left to the United States, but the United States is a combatant. It supports UNITA. It supports those who are opposed to the government which is recognised by our Government. I suggest that it is a British responsibility and that the British Government are failing in their responsibility. If hunger and poverty are not to be greatly increased in that area, then it is the British Government that should take the initiative now.
Beyond that, there is one final point. We know that both the South Africans and the Israelis have a nuclear capacity. Just think of the dangers in the whole of southern Africa if the South Africans are driven to the point at which their white supremacy is threatened when, as we know, that nuclear capacity exists.
6.55 p.m.
Lord McFadzean of Kelvinside: My Lords, I am not sure whether at the end of my speech the noble Baroness, Lady Ewart-Biggs, will view me as a hard-headed economist or a hard-hearted businessman. All that I can say in self-justification is that in the 1940s and 1950s I spent several years working in the development of the developing territories. One thing that I learned very quickly was that what are often very complex sociological and economic problems are seldom solved by having money thrown at them. I hope therefore that no Member of the House will claim to have a monopoly of compassion. I think that all Members of the House want to see an alleviation of the poverty and misery in Africa. Our differences are essentially differences as to how we achieve that and not in relation to the objective itself.
Probably due to the fact that so many of the conversations and negotiations on development have taken place in international bodies such as the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank and so forth—all of which are mainly attended by politicians and civil servants—the role of governments in the development process has in my view figured far too largely. The politicisation of power which has followed from that is common throughout most of the underdeveloped countries and is true of Africa.
Bilateral and multilateral aid is channelled through recipient governments while the proceeds of the borrowing—of which a great deal has taken place—also finishes up in official hands. If a substantial part of that inflow of capital had been invested in vital projects producing a return on investment, the question of the servicing of the debt would be of manageable proportions. However that was not so. Much of it went to finance current consumption while national prestige projects tended to take over from more practical investment of the scarce resources at the governments' disposal. The resplendent buildings used to house the Organisation of African Unity which were mentioned by the noble

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Lord, Lord Bauer, were constructed at a time when a large part of the population of Ethiopia was starving. That is only one of many examples of distorted priorities in public expenditure.
Given the manner in which the funds were dispersed it should have been fairly obvious that the servicing of the large-scale borrowing would impose a heavy burden on many of the debtor countries. Yet even commercial banks kept on lending in the apparent belief that a sovereign risk was a low risk, a view which was probably underpinned by the hope that if tragedy struck at least the IMF and the World Bank would come to their rescue.
The noble Lord, Lord Bauer, highlighted the fact that the economic difficulties confronting some of the African states stem from the actions of their own governments only too often having created a climate hostile to private enterprise while successful businesses have been expropriated, sometimes without compensation. The more governments have spread their tentacles over their economies the less effectively have they discharged their prime responsibilities. After years of socialist planning President Nyerere of Tanzania left his successor with one of the world's poorest countries and a debt of over 2 billion dollars. Uganda—which was mentioned earlier—which gained its independence in 1962 as a rich and prosperous country with its coffee, cotton, tea and sugar exports, has been reduced after years of genocidal civil war to what a recent sympathetic commentator called, "a land beyond sorrow".
There is no use in hiding the fact that the results of aid have proved disappointing. Of course, aid has never been a prerequisite of economic development. Except for the period immediately after the last war, all advanced nations in the free world have reached their successive stages of economic development without the assistance of grants from outside sources. Nor is the receipt of substantial aid a guarantee of economic progress. Indeed, those who have received the most have sometimes put up the poorest performance, while aid has played no more than a token part in the advancement of developed economies such as Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong.
It is almost 70 years since Maynard Keynes wrote:
"Wealth is not so much gold or even strategic raw materials. It is hard work, brains, imagination, initiative".
There is no prima facie evidence to suggest that mainstream aid can create these personal characteristics that are the mainspring of economic development. Indeed, externalising the issue can create the impression that failure is not the fault of the country concerned but the responsibility of third parties. Like the cry of exploitation, it can be a convenient alibi.
The Brandt Report, which was mentioned earlier, advocates a substantial increase in both bilateral and multilateral aid and the creation of yet another international institution in a world already overburdened with a surplus of them. The report displays a distrust of private enterprise and, in spite of all the evidence, an implicit faith in the superiority
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of governments in the development process. However, private investment benefits the developing countries not only by the transfer of money, but by the transfer of technology, technical skills, equipment and materials and, above all, managerial skills motivated towards the successful utilisation of the resources through the need to generate an acceptable return on the capital involved. It cannot be too strongly emphasised that economic development by private enterprise is not the zero sum game that many of its detractors hold it out to be. All this is appreciated by those countries that have developed to a high level like those in the Far East that I have mentioned.
There is no doubt that aid will be increased. I think that its influence in the development process has been exaggerated. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Bauer, that future grants should be geared as far as possible to the policies pursued by the recipient countries.
7.3 p.m.
Lord Caradon: My Lords, I do not wish to detain the House. I want merely to congratulate the noble Baroness who led us into the discussion, which has been very valuable. I look forward to reading in Hansard the figures that have been given and the speeches that have been made, in particular that of the right reverend Prelate with his experience of Sudan. I served in Africa for a number of years, mainly in Nigeria, so the problems are close to my knowledge and experience.
It is important to take up the challenge given to us this evening, and we should all be aware of the problems and the dangers. It is unfortunately true that today fewer people from this country serve in Africa than used to be the case, although there are opportunities for individual service. One of my sons works for Save the Children in Somalia. Another son runs a project involving a big aeroplane that travels with skilled staff from one great country to another helping to advise the authorities in the government concerned on the problems of eyesight, a matter that is very important to poor people who are now suffering.
A few of us can make a valuable contribution but we need to spread the message, to read the reports and to know the figures. I warmly congratulate the noble Baroness who introduced the debate and those who have participated in it. Sparsely attended as the Chamber is, I hope that we may fire a new interest in the welfare and suffering of the people of Africa.
7.6 p.m.
Lord Harris of High Cross: My Lords, I join others in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Ewart-Biggs, for the opportunity to discuss this issue again in terms of what I found to be a surprising Motion. The surprise is not the reference to hunger, poverty and debt in Africa, which has become an endemic condition despite decades of so-called "aid"; the surprise in the Motion and in the noble Baroness' speech is the absence of new thinking to replace what I regard as a discredited policy.

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Time is short and I must speak with unaccustomed bluntness. When I hear the noble Baroness talk again of compassion and when I hear socialists generally deploring hunger in Africa I am put in mind of a convention of alcoholics denouncing drunken driving. In my view the prime cause of hunger and poverty is the collectivist policy that has been pursued by African governments sustained in power by subsidies from the West. It will no longer wash to blame periodic famines on acts of God when they are due to the misguided action of politicians, above all in disrupting agricultural production. There was a whiff of that from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester, which I welcomed. Farmers everywhere complain of the weather, yet droughts and floods throughout history have not generally been followed by the starvation and other horrors that we have seen on television.
I wish that the House would face up to a question that I have posed once before in this place. Why does the weather always seem so much worse in socialist countries! There are technical reasons for this. What is it about socialist policies that frustrates the natural tendency throughout history for fluctuating food supplies to serve at least the basic needs of growing populations? The answer in a nutshell is that socialists cannot bear to let markets work their magic in stimulating and spreading output.
Thus by fixing prices too low and taxes too high, governments have discouraged the cultivation of cash crops. By establishing monopoly marketing agencies, they dry up supplies or divert them into the black market. By prosecuting as criminals people they call hoarders, governments prevent the prudent storage of grain against bad times and by persecuting traders as what they call middlemen, they prevent the shifting of supplies from areas of surplus to areas of shortage.
In Ethiopia the Marxist crusade against private ownership of land discourages long-term husbandry, as it must. It has led to casual nomadic cultivation that causes overcropping and similarly overgrazing and the conversion of fertile land into desert, as we have heard from a number of speakers.
The African correspondent of the New York Times Magazine states:
"If properly harnessed, the arable lands of Ethiopia or Sudan alone could feed most of the continent. Africa has an abundance of natural resources. Given opportunity and a little bit of freedom, its people have shown that they can be as capable as those anywhere else".
The lesson is that hunger and poverty in Africa have been perpetrated by much the same socialist policies that have also made Russia dependent on the food surpluses of the West. My complaint is that billions of pounds and dollars have been poured out to prop up incompetent and even corrupt African regimes which have inflicted such sufferings on their own people.
In a debate three years ago on starvation in the third world the noble Lord, Lord Hatch, asked me to study a book called False Start in Africa, published in 1966. I was very glad of the tip. I came across a couple of quotes from his own essay that I should like
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to share with the House. I gave him notice of this. On page 301 he wrote with commendable candour:
"Increased aid alone is not enough. A great deal of aid over the past 10 years has been wasted or has actually impeded progress".
For that I give him 10 out of 10. Then comes a purple passage which goes to the root of the difference between us. On page 302 he positively levitates into outer space with a sentence as follows:
"The social and economic revolution needed to break the stranglehold of African poverty can only come from idealism, self sacrifice and dedication".
The noble Lord, Lord Hatch, implies that the solution is socialism, which I have argued is the chief cause of Africa's suffering. As always in a constructive effort, I wish to bring into the record a point that I have borrowed from a noble Lord who comes from a less revolutionary, or less reactionary, tradition on the Labour Benches. Last year the noble Lord, Lord Oram, with his personal research assistant, Nora Stettner, produced a remarkable study called Changes in China. He documents the co-operative agrarian reforms which the authors describe as the responsibility system and which is wholly consistent with an open market economy.
The authors acknowledge that,
"economic efficiency depends on a system of prices as market signals which can effectively match supplies with demands".
I could not have said it better myself, but they get even better in this splendid book. It states:
"With the development of the responsibility system, profit has been elevated to be the primary criterion of economic efficiency".
The noble Lord rejects the follies of the cultural revolution for what the authors call the failure to understand what motivates ordinary people, and for seeking forcibly to change human nature.
I am deeply in debt to the noble Lord, Lord Oram, for providing me with a peroration and a pointer for future policy. It appears that perestroika came to Chinese agriculture before it was invented by Mr. Gorbachev. My proposal is that all future aid to Africa is made conditional upon the adoption of agricultural reforms acceptable to an all-party commission comprising the noble Lord, Lord Oram, for Labour, the noble Lord, Lord Bauer, for the Tories, the noble Viscount, Lord Falkland, for the Liberal Democrats; and, from the Cross-Benches, I am prepared to volunteer my own services.
7.14 p.m.
The Viscount of Falkland: My Lords, I should like to follow the historic perspective of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester. I congratulate him on what I thought was an excellent speech, and for covering so many points in the time allotted.
Surely the problems with regard to Africa and the attitude of the northern rich industrialised world is that they have become locked into a theory which patently has not worked. It surely has its origins in 19th century idealistic economics—as perhaps I may call them—such as expressed by the 19th century economist, Ricardo. Although it is written in allegedly Victorian style, I should like to quote it:
"It is quite important to the happiness of mankind that our own enjoyment should be increased by the better distribution of labour by each country producing those commodities for which its situation, its

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climate and its natural and artificial advantages is adapted and by their exchanging them for the commodities of other countries".
That is a very laudable piece of writing, and primitive economic theory. I believe that it stands at the base of the misconceptions which were taken up in the 1940s—Bretton Woods and thereafter—with the conventional wisdom that the third world countries should, after they have become a part of the world trade pattern with their commodities, be encouraged to industrialise at all costs. These factors contributed to the extraordinary growth of debt which followed the concentration on making African countries—which were basically agricultural economies like so many of the northern rich countries at one time—ignore their own needs to be self-sufficient in food and hasten on the dangerous path of industrialisation. That industrialisation was financed in a way that they could not afford. It resulted in their having many projects and much technology which was useless to the great majority of their population. It resulted in a great deal of hardships at an early stage.
However, it seemed that the industrialised countries were locked into this conventional wisdom. In Victorian times and in the 1940s we did not have access to the computer programing that we have today. I suggest that many variables were not put into the hypothetical computer. For example, they surely did not see the oil crisis. They surely did not see many of the other disasters of recent times—the escalation of interest rates, and so on—which have all aggravated the situation in the third world.
One asks the question: why do the industrialised rich countries have the attitude that they have towards Africa? Why do they allow this situation to continue? They continue to lend money, albeit with strictures placed on the loans by the International Monetary Fund and other organisations. Why do they seem less moved to act urgently to change the pattern? The answer is that third world black Africa has become marginal in its importance. It accounts for only between 4 per cent. and 5 per cent. of total world trade. It is very difficult to get accurate figures for the total third world debt. It amounts to something in excess of 80 billion dollars. That is only a small proportion of the total third world debt which is about 1 trillion dollars, if we can accept these astonishing figures. Therefore the interest in third world Africa has become marginal.
When the colonial countries went to Africa in search of its riches it was a very exciting area. There were precious gems, metals, exotic foodstuffs and fibres. These were commodities which were exciting earlier in this century. However, many of those commodities nowadays have become uncompetitive in the world market. This can be illustrated with some fairly clear examples. The right reverend Prelate gave a clear example. In Zambia copper has always accounted for something in excess of 90 per cent. of its foreign exchange income. Today, copper fetches a third in real value compared with its price in 1966.
There is no way in which a country such as Zambia can survive. I believe that even to service its debt, which is not very large, Zambia would have to produce a quite extraordinary amount of production
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per capita; 195 per cent. of export earnings, I believe. That figure would be required fully to service the debt in Zambia. It is not a good example to take of an African country whose difficulties are almost impossible to surmount. Zambia owes 600 dollars in debt per capita, and the GNP of that country is just over 400 dollars per capita so the situation is self-evident. I believe that the International Monetary Fund is having talks with President Kaunda and is suggesting the usual formula which the International Monetary Fund applies in these cases: "Increase your revenues; decrease your expenditure", which goes in the form of devaluation, reduction in public expenditure, denationalisation of state enterprises, and so on.
Kenya is another example of a country which has bent over backwards to fall in line with the IMF strictures. There again, the hardship in that country where they can make great efforts with cash crops is sad to see. In Kenya surveys of child nutrition in rural areas have shown that in recent years 28 per cent. of children under five who were examined were stunted by malnutrition. That is in a country widely advertised as being a third world African country which is going along the right lines.
I see that my speech is running over time, but I should like to refer to an important point made by the right reverend Prelate. That is in relation to arms. It is deplorable and I hope that we might have some statement from the Minister on this matter. In all these countries which have become destabilised by the effect of debt it is noticeable that arms have become a very large part of the expenditure. Either arms are given to them or they buy them. Nevertheless, in Ethiopia (which was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Bauer, and has the lowest per capita GNP in the third world today, 110 dollars per capita) 13 dollars, is spent on military expenditure and 7 dollars only per capita is spent on health and education combined. That is something which is common in the whole of third world Africa and is extremely worrying. It shows the kind of political destabilisation which has resulted because of the maintenance of this extraordinary theory. The problem is compounded for countries in Africa having to pay more for servicing their debts than they receive in aid from donor countries.
I hope that the noble Baroness can give some assurance that the Government are considering another method by which they can find a more efficient way of developing third world Africa with justice and so that the great mass of people can benefit from food sufficiency and other items which are so sadly lacking.
7.23 p.m.
Lord Oram: My Lords, this evening we have heard a series of speeches which, taken together, give an effective rounded picture of the problems facing the continent of Africa. The speeches included the welcome maiden speech of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Salisbury who spoke so effectively on the basis of his personal experience in the Sudan. We look forward to hearing from him in the future on these and other subjects.

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The speeches also included three robust attacks on aid from the noble Lords, Lord Bauer, Lord McFadzean of Kelvinside and Lord Harris of High Cross. I cannot let the last speech pass without thanking the noble Lord for advertising the book which I wrote together with Nora Stettner, but I suggest to him that it was, if he gives a full picture of the hook, a warm description of a socialist economy. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Harris, will continue reading socialist books, and derive continued advantage from them.
As my noble friend Lord Caradon suggested, the debate has added to the great deal that has been written and spoken about Africa's problems in recent years. Perhaps the most recent and authoritative and, indeed, the most challenging report was that which my noble friend Lady Ewart-Biggs summarised so effectively, namely, the report of the United Nations Advisory Group on Financial Flows for Africa which was chaired by Sir Douglas Wass. That report concluded that just to get back to where Africa was at the beginning of the decade, will require additional assistance of about 5 billion dollars a year for the next few years. That is the measure of Africa's economic crisis.
Africa is in a state of permanent crisis—not only the immediate crisis of the starving thousands in Ethiopia which is brought to us graphically on the television screens, but the long-term crisis of permanent grinding poverty and under-development throughout most of the continent of Africa. Living standards are far too low, and in many cases they are falling year by year. The infrastructure is grossly inadequate in terms of communications, housing, education and health services wherever one turns. Moreover African countries are the principal victims of unfavourable terms of trade. They have falling prices for the raw materials they export and rising prices for the goods that they need to import.
All this comes together in the formidable problem of indebtedness—so much debt that the service of the debt is impossible for many African countries to bear. As the noble Lord, Lord Banks, pointed out, the Chancellor of the Exchequer about a year or so ago, recognised the seriousness of the debt problem and on all sides we greatly welcomed the initiative which he took in proposing multilateral action to bring down interest rates on loans to third world countries and to change some loans to grants. I believe that the Government have made some unilateral progress in this respect and perhaps the noble Baroness will be able to tell us to what extent that is so.
But irrespective of such progress in the terms of aid, we need constantly to assess the volume of the Overseas Development Administration's aid programme both in absolute terms and, more important, as a proportion of GNP. We are failing to meet our international obligations. We need a much bigger aid programme. I know that anyone who suggests public expenditure to this Government is told that the problem cannot be solved by throwing money at it. But the problem of Africa is patently one which should have money thrown at it. The size of the problem, the nature of the suffering, the
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indebtedness, the disastrous decline in living standards are all problems which need money for their resolution.
In 1986 we provided 267 million dollars to aid the countries south of the Sahara. That may sound a lot but it was less than was provided by Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden and of course the United States of America. We are near the bottom of that league. The dismal nature of our aid record is revealed equally strikingly when we look at the overall aid programme measured as a proportion of the gross national product. A number of speakers in the debate have already made the point; namely my noble friends Lady Ewart-Biggs, Lord Listowel and Lord Hatch. However, it is worth repeating that in 1979 net official development assistance was 0·52 per cent. of GNP and in 1987 it was only approximately half as good—0·28 per cent.
That last figure was the subject of questioning in another place only a couple of weeks ago. The Minister for Overseas Development was reluctant to produce the figure but he produced it later in a Written Answer. He put forward a most extraordinary argument about the volume of aid which was that the low proportion—namely,0·28 per cent.—was a result of the rate of economic growth being higher than the growth in the overseas aid programme. He commented that that is one of the perverse consequences of using the percentages of GNP as a measure.
I recall year after year hearing from the Minister opposite a very different tale. We were told that we could not make progress towards the new United Nations objective because we had economic problems at home and that we should first put our own house in order. Now we are told that we have a thriving economy. All is going well and we are leading in the growth targets. At one time we were told that we could not meet the United Nations' target because we did not have the resources and now we are told that we cannot make progress to it because we are too affluent.
In recent days we have heard a great deal about the improvement of East-West relations. We all welcome that even though the pace is slow and the road ahead is long and hard. But North-South relations—the relations between the developed and under-developed world—should be of almost equal concern if we seek to establish a peaceful world. Rescuing the continent of Africa from its devastation must be a crucial and major element in our efforts. An explosion will surely happen if we do not make that effort and overcome the poverty that affects so much of the world.
The sad truth is that Britain is not playing its proper role in that rescue operation. We know that the Minister will tell us about the many projects that our aid programmes support. Of course she will; we hear it year after year. I know from first-hand experience that the work done by the Overseas Development Administration is admirable when it is looked at item by item. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that when all those admirable projects are added together the sum total is woefully inadequate. It does not begin to match our international

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commitment; it does not match what we can afford; it does not match what Africa needs. As a nation we can afford to do very much more for Africa and we on these Benches declare that we must do so.
7.35 p.m.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Education and Science (Baroness Hooper): My Lords, the noble Baroness' wide-ranging Motion raises several of the most vital issues of international development. She has rightly concentrated on Africa. For while hunger, poverty and debt are by no means confined to that continent, it is in sub-Saharan Africa that they combine to create the most acute problems. As president of the UK Committee for UNICEF the noble Baroness has direct experience of what this can mean, as have so many of your Lordships who contributed to the debate. Among them I must mention in particular the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Salisbury. I should like to add my congratulations to him for his excellent maiden speech.
Speakers in the debate have graphically pointed out the special problems faced by many countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The problems of too many African countries are compounded by the huge economic and human costs of external and internal conflict. In that I agree with the noble Lord, Lord McFadzean of Kelvinside.
It is true that sub-Saharan Africa has suffered prolonged economic decline in the 1980s. The debt obligations of many of these countries, although small in absolute terms, or in comparison with the main Latin American debtors, became unmanageable in relation to export earnings as pointed out by the noble Lord, Lord Banks. The debt burden is now a serious constraint to development in much of Africa. Sub-Saharan African debt totals about 100 billion dollars, mostly owed to official creditors. Debt service takes over 30 per cent. of export earnings in about 30 low-income African countries. Few of these can escape the debt trap or resume economic growth without external assistance on a substantial scale. But this will be of long-term benefit only where it is used to support sound economic policies. In that I agree with my noble friend Lord Bauer—although I do not agree with his further conclusions—and the noble Lord, Lord Harris of High Cross.
We agree that there is no point in pouring in cash where the policies are wrong. Hence our pressure within the European Community to ensure that its aid to Ethiopian agriculture, for example, was not released until the Ethiopian Government had adopted policies more likely to encourage agricultural production. That pressure appears to have had some results.
Most African countries now recognise the need to introduce economic reform programmes. Such programmes typically involve measures to adjust overvalued exchange rates; to liberalise prices; to restore incentives for the farming sector (thus to increase output) and for private sector investment and production; to improve the performance of
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inefficient public sector organisations; and to reduce public expenditure by cutting out waste. Over 20 sub-Saharan countries have now adopted growth-promoting development programmes with support from the IMF, the World Bank and bilateral donors. We should never overlook the political courage needed to sustain them, and the need at the same time to try to protect the poorest people from some of the side effects.
Britain, in common with other bilateral donors and the World Bank, has reoriented its spending plans to give greater priority to Africa. Our overall aid programme is substantial. In 1986, the last year for which we have full figures, it was the sixth largest among Western donors, ahead of, for example, Japan, Switzerland and the United States of America in terms of proportion of GNP.
In 1987, net official development assistance was an estimated £1,151 million. I must respond to noble Lords who have criticised the extent of the United Kingdom contribution. I shall not disappoint the noble Lord, Lord Oram, because I must repeat what my right honourable friend the Minister of State said. As a proportion of GNP our contribution in 1987 was equivalent to 0·28 per cent. The fall in the proportion of GNP reflects the strong growth in the United Kingdom economy last year. The 1979 figures, which have been quoted, are artificially inflated by the deposit of promissory notes. The aid expenditure figure for 1979 was in fact less.
The programme is planned to increase in real terms. The aid budget for this financial year is £70 million higher than that for last year—considerably in excess of the expected rate of inflation. The planned aid budgets for 1989–90 and 1990–91 provide for increases of £ 140 million and £185 million respectively over the budget for last year. Within this total programme, our bilateral aid to sub-Saharan Africa has increased from £181·4 million in 1984 to £232·6 million in 1987. And we have taken steps within this aid to increase the proportion devoted to quick-spending balance of payments aid for poor sub-Saharan African countries undertaking economic adjustment programmes.
In 1987–88 we provided over £80 million in this way, over and above existing allocations for development projects and technical assistance. We have urged other donors to follow suit and have been among the most prominent supporters of the World Bank's special programme of assistance for low-income, debt distressed countries in Africa, launched in December 1987. Indeed, I was somewhat puzzled by the suggestion of the noble Viscount, Lord Buckmaster, that we have not supported this special fund for Africa because we are providing £75 million of untied bilateral aid towards this special facility.
Britain then announced the intention of spending at least £250 million over the next three years in bilateral grants to these countries to support the aims of the special programme. We are now taking forward detailed arrangements with the World Bank for the implementation of this programme. Contributions from all bilateral and multilateral sources are expected to amount to about 6·4 billion US dollars, or £3·4 billion at present exchange rates.

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Another way in which the World Bank group is helping to encourage financial flows is through the establishment of the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency—MIGA—which we recently discussed in your Lordships' House.
Another noteworthy development in 1987 was the agreement to enhance the IMF's structural adjustment facility. This will provide an extra £4·5 billion of concessional loans to poor countries with serious balance of payments problems. Britain is providing the single largest contribution to the interest rate subsidy account, sufficient to subsidise—at current interest and exchange rates—up to £750 million of new lending.
But new money alone is not enough to solve Africa's financial problems. The debt burden itself must be reduced. It is clearly unrealistic to expect the poorest and most heavily indebted countries to repay their debts in full. Hence my right honourable friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer's initiative has been widely welcomed by African countries. It would apply to poor sub-Saharan African countries following agreed adjustment programmes and consists of three parts of which we have heard but which merit amplification.
First, conversion of past aid loans to grants. The UK has already completed this process for the poorest countries, and has written off £263 million of aid loans for 14 African countries. A number of other donors have done likewise. Secondly, longer repayment and grace periods for official debt rescheduled under Paris Club arrangements; ten countries have now negotiated rescheduling periods of 15 to 20 years compared with the more normal 10 years. Thirdly, lower interest rates on rescheduled debt. We have not yet achieved general consensus among creditors on this point, but believe it is crucial and continue to take every opportunity to press other creditors to agree.
We were encouraged by the support given to the Chancellor's initiative by the report of the UN Secretary General's Advisory Group on Financial Flows for Africa, headed by Sir Douglas Wass, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Ewart-Biggs, referred and which was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Oram. We firmly believe that special measures are needed, and soon.
There are a number of ways that developing countries can try to alleviate these problems while still ensuring effective adjustment. We are supporting the efforts of the IMF and World Bank to try out new approaches so that structural adjustment programmes can be designed with their social impact in mind. African countries recognise this need. Perhaps foremost among them is Ghana, which is implementing a programme of action to mitigate the social costs of adjustment. Our substantial programme for that country includes certain poverty focused projects that will complement the aims of this programme of action and we are ready to do more.
In most of sub-Saharan Africa, a strong agricultural sector is the key to sustained growth. The economies of the region are dominated by the
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agricultural sector. It is the largest source of production, of employment and, for many, of foreign exchange. Smallholder agriculture predominates and is generally more efficient than large state farms. British aid policy recognises the important role of smallholders in the drive to increase production. The key to this is incentives. In many African countries policies have in the past favoured the urban sector at the expense of agricultural producers. Overvalued exchange rates have encouraged food imports and discouraged agricultural production, while price controls have placed an implicit tax burden on farmers. A number of countries are now correcting these imbalances and are literally reaping the results in the form of increased harvests.
Perseverance with policy reform in agriculture has proved successful for a number of countries. There has been a marked turn around in the Tanzanian economy since the economic recovery programme was launched by the president, whom we are so pleased to welcome to Britain this week. Particularly notable was the recovery in Tanzania's cotton production. In 1987 Sudan also benefited from a similar increase in cotton production. Favourable responses to produce price increases have also been seen in groundnut production in Senegal and Gambia, and in rice production in Madagascar. I hope that reassures the noble Viscount, Lord Falkland.
Where appropriate policies exist Britain is willing to provide substantial assistance for agricultural development. About 30 per cent. of our bilateral project aid to Africa goes to the agricultural sector. In addition, part of our balance of payments aid is being used to supply essential agricultural inputs such as fertilisers and veterinary drugs. We are helping to reform inefficient agricultural marketing institutions, and supporting research aimed at developing high-yielding varieties of indigenous crops such as cassava, and at controlling pests and diseases which at present lead to substantial crop losses. The expertise of ODA's specialist scientific units has been brought together in a single body, the Overseas Development Natural Resources Institute (ODNRI), which plays a particularly valuable role in this respect.
World-wide, our aid for natural resources development increased by 75 per cent. in the five years to 1986, and we take care to ensure that all our projects respect the environment. For example, and in response to the noble Lord, Lord Walston, who specifically raised this point, our aid for forestry has increased threefold during the same five years. We would like to do more to tackle deforestation and the fuelwood crisis.
At the all-important grass-roots level, development can often be carried out most effectively through non-governmental organisations (NGOs) which are often able to reach the most disadvantaged groups in ways which are not always possible through government to government aid. ODA recognises the special contribution which NGOs can make to development by providing financial support for their activities in three main ways. First, the joint funding scheme whereby ODA contributes half the cost of projects put forward by NGOs. At the moment 800

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projects, undertaken by 50 agencies, are being supported under this scheme. The budget for this type of assistance has been increased this year by 50 per cent. to £9 million. Projects in Africa take the lion's share of these funds.
Secondly, we support voluntary agencies' disaster and emergency relief efforts. ODA through its disaster unit is able to respond quickly and flexibly to their requests for emergency assistance. In 1987, about £15·5 million was committed to 61 relief actions in Africa, of which more than half went through British NGOs.
Thirdly, the ODA provides up to 90 per cent. of the income of the British volunteer recruitment agencies. Our contribution has increased by over 20 per cent. this year to £10·8 million. By the end of this year we expect about 1,600 volunteers in the field, most of them in Africa.
Britain also provides substantial assistance to Africa through our contributions to multilateral aid agencies and the European Development Fund. Under the present third Lomé Convention which runs from 1986 to 1990 we shall be contributing over £850 million of which by far the greater part will go to sub-Saharan Africa. The Lomé Convention also provides substantial trade benefits to the African, Caribbean and Pacific countries. Negotiations on a successor convention begin later this year.
The most direct form of action against hunger is the provision of food. There can be no doubt about the vital role of food aid in famine situations. Both bilaterally and through the European Community we play an important role in providing such aid. For example, the failure of the main 1987 rains in Ethiopia has led to renewed famine, with up to 7 million people at risk of starvation. Britain's response has been generous. Since the beginning of 1987, we have committed relief aid totalling over £45 million through bilateral and European Community channels. Noble Lords may be aware that the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs has been considering the question of famine in the Horn of Africa and will be publishing its report tomorrow. The Government look forward with interest to seeing the report.
The noble Viscount, Lord Falkland, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester referred to aid and the purchase of arms. The figures for expenditure on arms by developing countries are notoriously unreliable. Few developing countries have all that much to spend on arms but our aid programme is clearly aimed at improving the development prospects of developing countries that have demonstrated their willingness to adopt policies which make economic sense for their populations.
The noble Earl, Lord Listowel, and others asked what the Government are doing about water. Many of our aid projects are concerned with water supply. Examples are the Burra irrigation project in Kenya and an underground water project in Botswana.
As a Minister in the Department of Education I felt very much in tune with the comments of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Salisbury on the
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importance of education. Indeed, there are many educational sector bilateral aid projects in sub-Saharan Africa. During 1986 we provided about 861 man years of expertise in the field of education alone and supplied 505 man years of education to students and trainees. In 1986, 11 per cent. of all experts working in sub-Saharan Africa and wholly paid for by the ODA were in the education sector.
The noble Lord, Lord Vernon, referred to population control. In 1986 over £15 million was spent on population-related activities compared with £6·5 million in 1981. We want to do more. In Kenya, where they have given priority to reducing population growth, we have seen a success.
I believe I have responded to most of the points raised but I may have missed some because of the exigencies of time. Perhaps I can conclude by saying that the Government recognise the need for discussion between developed and developing countries on matters of mutual economic concern. Experience has shown us that constructive dialogue on specific issues is more valuable in addressing the real problems of the developing world than the gradiose attempts of the past to establish global frameworks for discussions between North and South. We welcome the increasing trend for developing countries to recognise their responsibility for their own development. For our part, we stand ready to help those who help themselves.
The Lord Bishop of Manchester: My Lords, before the noble Baroness sits down, can she comment on press reports which have indicated that over the past few years not only has the overseas aid programme been slashed four times as hard as government expenditure as a whole, but also that if the programme had continued in the same way and at the same level as in 1979 we would now be spending £1,100 million a year more on overseas aid?
Baroness Hooper: My Lords, because of the time factor perhaps I may write to the right reverend Prelate on that point.
Viscount Buckmaster: My Lords, perhaps the noble Baroness will permit me to say that I did not criticise Her Majesty's Government in the way that she indicated. I think that the report in Hansard will bear that out. My only reference to the Government's activity was in the sphere of water development.
7.55 p.m.
Baroness Ewart-Biggs: My Lords, I believe I have time to thank all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate. I thank also the Minister for answering very fully, and for the tone she used. I congratulate the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Salisbury on his speech, and I am happy that he chose this debate in which to make his maiden speech. I am also delighted that he chose to speak about the Sudan.
I have taken in exactly what was said by the three noble Lords who opposed the very concept of aid. I take issue with the noble Lord, Lord Harris, who accused me of bringing out all the old arguments. In

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fact, I was trying very hard to present a new idea which I think replaces many of the old ideas. Therefore, I beg leave to withdraw the Motion for Papers.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

Protection of Animals (Amendment) Bill
7.57 p.m.
Lord Houghton of Sowerby: My Lords, I beg to move that the House do now resolve itself into Committee on this Bill.
Moved, That the House do now resolve itself into Committee.—(Lord Houghton of Sowerby.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.
House in Committee accordingly.
[The EARL CATHCART in the Chair.]
Clause 1 agreed to.
Clause 2 [Offences relating to animal, fights]:
Lord Houghton of Sowerby Lord Houghton of Sowerby moved Amendment No. 1
Page 1, line 27, at end insert—
("Advertising of animal fights.
5B. If a person who publishes or causes to be published an advertisement for a fight between animals knows that it is such an advertisement he shall be liable on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding level 4 on the standard scale.").
The noble Lord said: In moving this amendment, it will be for the convenience of the Committee if we also deal with Amendment No. 2. The two amendments are linked.
It is with some emotion that I recall that on the day of the Second Reading of the Bill the House was invaded by hordes of noble Lords from the backwoods who had been summoned to impose a poll tax upon the peasantry. It was a day to remember. It was in the supper interval when this large assembly of noble Lords was being fed and watered along the corridor that we gave brief attention to the contents of this Bill.
I thought at one stage that it would not require any amendment; but I have been advised that it is perhaps desirable to tighten up the law regarding advertisements for dog-fighting, which is what we are mainly dealing with. The Bill already covers spectators at dog fights who were previously exempt from prosecution. Earlier legislation covered the organisers and promoters and participants; but it left the spectators to scatter, free of any charge of complicity in the proceedings. Clause 2 makes it clear that those who are spectators at a dog fight are liable to prosecution and the same fine as those who are active participants or organisers of this unlawful affair.
We come to the finer distinctions of the legislation in regard to those who advertise these events. In another place an honourable Member raised the question, "What about the people who advertise dog fights; are they caught in the mesh of the new criminal law?". It seemed to Ministers at the time that as
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regards advertising these events they could be caught under the original Protection of Animals Act 1911. As far as I can tell all that would have caught the advertisers was Section 1(1(c) which made it an offence for persons who,
"shall cause, procure or assist at the fighting or baiting of any animal".
That was probably not literally clear but it might do from the point of view of the construction of a court on the meaning of the word "procure".
There was some doubt as to other forms of advertising. Those who are promoting dog fights do not stick up notices on hoardings or put an advertisement in a local paper that would allow them to be identified as advertising a dog fight. They go about their business surreptitiously. Therefore, it became necessary to tighten the law regarding those who are engaged in giving information to procure people to attend a dog fight whether it is by the written word, poster, leaflet, fly-posting or by oral communication.
How do people get to these dog fights? They do not read about them in the local paper. There is word-of-mouth communication. The two amendments taken together are intended to pursue to the uttermost those who may be engaged in disseminating information with a view to procuring attendance at a dog fight. They will also catch the person who, while not connected with a dog fight, engages in the presentation or publication of an advertisement knowing that it is about a dog fight. This provides another difficulty of construction because dog fights are notified by code, so secretive do such persons have to be in keeping knowledge of their venue away from the police and inspectors of the RSPCA.
After much thought and expert attention, the amendments are intended to close all the loopholes. This is also an indication of how fastidious we are in drafting our legislation in this country. Loose terms and phraseology will not do; the wording has to be clear and specific. Apparently, there are some precedents for making certain kinds of advertisements unlawful. It has always been difficult to ascertain what is an advertisement and what is unlawful if it is an advertisement.
I am advised that the language will not penalise the person who unwittingly publishes or displays an advertisement which, being in coded form, he did not know related to an animal fight. There is the escape clause for those who unwittingly do something when they did not know they were advertising a dog fight. I hope that these two amendments can be added to the Bill making it as watertight as possible. Enforcement is difficult with these kinds of activities. With these amendments we have made as good a job of the Bill as is possible in difficult circumstances. I submit for approval to the Committee Amendment No. 1. I beg to move.
Baroness Ewart-Biggs: I support these two amendments. It seems entirely appropriate and relevant that those who publish, or cause to be published, an advertisement for a fight should be liable in the same way as those who attend it. I only hope that if it is in code it will be detected. I have no

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doubt that my noble friend has thought of some way in which this will be possible. This is an improvement to my noble friend's Bill and I add my support to it.
The Earl of Arran: For their part the Government recognise the strength of support for proposals to make it an offence to encourage attendance at an animal fight. Such encouragement is already an offence under the common law of incitement under which the penalty is the same as for the offence itself. The law of incitement applies whether the encouragement was given orally or in writing. However, given the strength of views expressed in another place and echoed in the Committee this evening in favour of there being a specific offence of advertising animal fights, we shall not demur as regards these amendments.
It is right that the person who unwittingly publishes or displays such advertisements is not penalised and we are satisfied that there are adequate safeguards in this respect. Therefore, the Government are pleased to support these amendments.
On Question, amendment agreed to.
Lord Houghton of Sowerby Lord Houghton of Sowerby moved Amendment No. 2:
Page 2, line 10, at end insert—
("Offence of advertising animal fights.
1B. If a person who publishes or causes to be published an advertisement for a fight between animals knows that it is such an advertisement he shall be guilty of an offence and liable on summary conviction to a penalty not exceeding level 4 on the standard scale.").
The noble Lord said: In moving this amendment perhaps I may apologise for the lateness in putting down the amendments, which led to some confusion on the Marshalled List this morning. I was waiting for the amendments to be cleared by the necessary authorities before I submitted them to the Committee. I beg to move.
On Question, amendment agreed to.
On Question, Whether Clause 2, as amended, shall stand part of the Bill?
Lord Houghton of Sowerby: Perhaps I may refer to a matter which I dealt with for a short time on Second Reading; namely, forfeiture. At Second Reading, the Minister explained that in the view of the government forfeiture of equipment and other apparatus used in connection with dog fights would include if necessary, and if the decison of the court was to that effect, the dogs themselves. Having got spectators, organisers, promoters and advertisers, we have everyone except the dogs.
The dogs are there too; so it seems that they should be forfeited together with the equipment and other apparatus used in connection with dog fights. The point at issue is whether any reference should be made in this Bill to forfeiture of dogs and animals in connection with these offences specifically or whether that matter should be left to the general criminal law. It is believed and pretty well firmly established in all our minds that Clause 68 of the Criminal Justice Bill
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now before another place and which will later come here will deal with forfeiture generally where offences involve the use of equipment and apparatus which can properly be seized as part of the penalty of the delinquents concerned. Therefore I do not think it is necessary to attempt to deal separately in this Bill with the forfeiture of animals except generally in dealing with what forfeiture means. Any doubt can be cleared up when we come to Clause 68 of the Criminal Justice Bill. Therefore, Clause 2 does not need the amendment which in some quarters was thought desirable earlier on.
Clause 2, as amended, agreed to.
Remaining clause and schedule agreed to.
House resumed: Bill reported with amendments.

Horses, Ponies and Donkeys (No. 2) Bill
8.11 p.m.
Lord Houghton of Sowerby: My Lords, I beg to move that the Bill be now read a second time.
My first pleasant duty in moving the Second Reading of the Bill is to congratulate the honourable Member for Basildon, Mr. David Amess, on his great achievement in getting the Bill through all its stages, one after another, on a day in May without a word being said for or against it. That is a very unusual occurrence.
I am glad to report that I had this experience myself years ago on a very different and, I thought then, much more contentious Bill. When another place comes to be televised there will be a good deal of explaining to do as to how some Private Members' Bills seem to be talked on day after day and night after night and then never get through, and other Private Members' Bills—or at least an occasional Private Members' Bill—are not talked on at all and get through. It would be inappropriate for me to delay the House to say what I think about the Private Members' Bill procedure in another place, but, quite clearly, it produces some astonishing results.
I can well understand the ecstasy of the honourable Member for Basildon when he issued a press release on the day his Bill passed through all its stages. All he had to do was to get up every now and again when Mr. Speaker said, "Second Reading, what day?", or "Committee stage, what day?", or "Third Reading, what day?", and say, "Now Sir", "Now Sir", and those were the magic words. In a sense Mr. Amess became a kind of Paul Daniels of parliamentary procedure. By what magic has he been successful in getting this Bill here with so little delay? It did not even go through the ballot procedure. He had a ten-minute Bill. The most frustrating exercise in parliamentary experience is a ten-minute Bill. One only does it for publicity. One does not expect to get one's Bill through, but here we are and one has got through. I am sure that the honourable Member feels that he has made a little history.
What does the Bill do? It is another short Bill and was explained to the House of Commons earlier when the honourable Member was asking leave to introduce it in the first instance. It deals with a matter

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of growing concern among those who observe horses, ponies and donkeys tethered in adverse weather conditions, without adequate food and water and probably with a paucity of grazing, and in other respects being subject to cruel treatment. All this arises from a most disturbing report a year ago by the RSPCA. It conducted a survey of about 3,000 horses, ponies and donkeys all over the country to see in what conditions they were tethered.
In our affluent society there is a growing evil among people who have two amenities which they can afford but do not know where to put. One is the motor car and the other is the horse. This evil is growing because many people have horses for their children—rather than for themselves—but have inadequate facilities for grazing them. There are fears in some quarters that this Bill may adversely affect legitimate tethering of animals by gypsies, by fairground people and by others who have horses on the move which may be tethered for legitimate periods while resting from their normal activities. However, I want to stress the fact that this Bill deals only with cruel tethering. Cruel tethering is distinct from tethering that is not cruel. The courts will distinguish between the two.
Cruel tethering is where the animal is given short rope, probably a rope with which it may strangle itself or in which it may become entangled, leading to serious consequences. In the RSPCA report there is a photograph of a horse that stangled itself. It was tethered by a motor tyre put over its head, and a rope. It kept walking around a tree and eventually strangled itself. Other photographs show horses which became entangled in the tethering rope, were unable to disentangle themselves and could not move. This is what is meant by cruelty in tethering horses. People who take care of their animals and exercise reasonable responsibility in providing for them need have no worries about the terms of the Bill.
This is one of those instances where one has to provide for what is cruel even though it may arise out of something that is not unlawful. People who tether their horses and donkeys must pay some regard to their well-being and welfare. If they fail to do so, they could be guilty of cruelty. It is cruelty that we are after. This short Bill refers to the tethering of animals and adds to the list of offences in the original Act of 1911.
The question arises as to whether the Bill should apply to Scotland. That aspect can be considered before the Committee stage. There seems to be no reason why it should not.
However, there are other small details which need consideration. It is not apparantly necessary to refer to ponies because they are covered by the mention of the word "horses". Another peculiarity is that there is no such animal as a donkey in the law of cruelty; it is an ass. Indeed, the 1911 Act refers to asses and not to donkeys. However, I do not think that we should be troubled by such trivialities, but if we do have to change donkeys to asses, then I do not think there will be any difficulty in so doing.
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Of course there are other matters about the Bill which may require some attention. For example, there is no operative date. As drafted, the Bill would come into effect immediately upon Royal Assent. That is always a nuisance because there may be offences in the pipeline which would fall to be dealt with immediatley under the new law; whereas, if reasonable notice is given, there can be a complete clearance. Therefore in Committee I shall ask that the Act should come into force at the end of a period of two months, beginning on the day on which it passed.
There is yet another small matter I feel I should mention. Noble Lords will see that in Clause 1 at line 7 it says:
"shall tether any horse, pony or donkey under such conditions or in such manner or position as to cause that animal unnecessary suffering".
Doubt has been raised about the use of the word "position". One noble Lord asked me whether this would affect the tethering of a horse or, for example, the tying up of a horse's leg in connection with the breaking-in procedure, should the Bill become enacted. I do not think that there is any possibility that it would; but, nevertheless, the word "position" seems to indicate that it has something to do with the mode of tethering. Therefore in Committee I may ask Members of the Committee to delete that word, so that it will read in general terms:
"in such manner as to cause that animal unnecessary suffering".
It must be said that the words "unnecessary suffering" are the key words all the way through the 1911 Act and through subsequent legislation.
That is about all I have to say. I do not think that anyone has anything to fear if they give normal care and attention to animals that they may tether. However, they should be reminded of the fact that there is a code of conduct—freely issued by the RSPCA—available to all owners of such animals which will guide them on how to deal with any animal that they may wish to tie up. It is necessary to use swivels at both ends of the tether, otherwise horses can become entangled when going around trees, for example, and gradually reduce the area of their grazing.
It must also be realised that a horse grazes in an entirely different way from a cow. Some people who have animals know nothing about them. They think that if they turn the animals out into a field and give them a pail of water that they will be all right; but they are not all right. A cow can go into a field of long grass and tug it up, but on the other hand a horse is a very close grazer. It is no use turning a horse into a hayfield; but some people do not know that. So, together with the guidelines freely offered by the RSPCA to the owners of such animals—caravanners on holiday, or otherwise—and to all those concerned who have the animals on tethers, I think the legislation will make a good job of the work that is now being done on behalf of animals.
If I had a handy scriptural reference I would quote it; but, unfortunately, I have not. Nevertheless, I think that the two Bills, taken together, will be quite a notable advance in the welfare of animals for this Session of Parliament. Indeed, I am most happy and

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proud to have been asked to sponsor both of them in your Lordships' House. I beg to move.
Moved, That the Bill be now read a second time.—(Lord Houghton of Sowerby.)
8.25 p.m.
The Earl of Kinnoull: My Lords, I apologise to the House for not putting my name down to speak in the debate; but I was not sure whether I could be here in time. I must declare an interest because I am the owner of two rather large donkeys. I must say that I think it is most encouraging in this country that there is a very high esteem for donkeys. This has been evidenced by the wide support for the donkey sanctuary charity which does great work by helping maltreated donkeys, or donkeys which have been starved and generally ill-treated. I noted that the noble Lord, Lord Houghton of Sowerby, pointed out that the definition of donkeys according to the 1911 Act is "asses". Therefore, I assume that the title of the Bill will need to be changed. However, perhaps he will comment on that point later on.
I congratulate the noble Lord on moving the Bill, which I very much welcome. As he rightly explained, it received a most warm welcome in another place. He said the honourable Member for Basildon simply said, "Now, Sir". In fact, there is no record of him even saying that in Hansard—but no doubt he did. However, I too congratulate him for introducing the Bill so successfully in another place. I am worried that if amendments are introduced now and the Bill has to go back to another place, there will perhaps not be enough parliamentary time for it to reach the statute book this Session. However, I hope that the necessary time will be granted by the Government.
Tonight we had another example of the diligence and dedication of the noble Lord, Lord Houghton of Sowerby, to the cause of animal welfare, for which I think he is well-known and has been so throughout his long and distinguished parliamentary career. I know that the RSPCA have helped tremendously to promote the Bill and produced a most comprehensive report in so doing, which shows clear evidence of the cruelty of tethering by owners—or dealers—of horses, ponies, donkeys and other animals. Sadly, in this country of animal-lovers there are many ignorant people who allow animals to suffer merely because of their own ignorance.
In conclusion, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Houghton of Sowerby, and the honourable Member for Basildon for introducing the Bill, and I hope that my noble friend will also give a warm welcome to this most worthy amendment to the 1911 Act.
8.28 p.m.
Baroness Ewart-Biggs: My Lords, whenever my noble friend Lord Houghton of Sowerby brings forward proposals regarding animals, I am always confident that it will be to their benefit. Indeed, this small Bill is no exception. I am most grateful to him for his clear introduction to the Bill; and, like the noble Earl, I also hope that the necessary time will be given to it as my noble friend has indicated that there will certainly be one or two amendments.
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I should like to mention the concerns of travellers and gypsies. I understand why they may be concerned. It is perhaps because of the hostility with which many local people regard travellers and gypsies. I have a small cottage in Essex which has a green just outside of it. A traveller tethers his horses there. He tethers them in our field to graze, and there have been examples when local people have complained that he has wrongly tethered them. However, I have never seen any indication of that. Therefore I understand the situation.
I have had a letter passed to me from a person living in Calverton Lane gypsy site. He feels that he might have to be worried. He also hopes that there has been consultation about the Bill. Perhaps my noble friend can confirm for the writer of the letter that there was consultation with the RSPCA before the Bill was presented.
The only thing we can do is to advise travellers and gypsies to have a copy of the RSPCA's excellent report Stray and Tethered Horses and Ponies and a copy of its code on tethering. If they can prove ownership of those documents they may be able to prove that they are looking after their horses correctly.
Except for that concern—I do not think that my noble friend can do anything about it in the Bill—I very much welcome the Bill and once again congratulate my noble friend on putting forward a useful piece of legislation which will protect animals from unnecessary suffering.
8.30 p.m.
The Earl of Arran: My Lords, we pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Houghton, and wish to thank him for taking up the Bill and bringing it forward for the consideration of this House. It is an occasion upon which we welcome the opportunity to express the Government's support.
It is already an offence under the Protection of Animals Act 1911 to cause unnecessary suffering to any domestic or captive animal, the definition of which includes horses, ponies and donkeys. It is also an offence, by virtue of the Abandonment of Animals Act 1960, to abandon an animal in circumstances likely to cause it unnecessary suffering. However, we understand that the RSPCA and others concerned with the welfare of horses consider that the prosecution of offences involving cruel tethering will be assisted by the creation of a specific offence. We have all heard of the appalling and shocking cases of cruelty outlined by the noble Lord and of neglect involving tethered horses and other equines.
The Government are fully committed to the protection of animals and welcome proposals designed to assist in bringing to book those who cause animals unnecessary suffering.
As the noble Lord has indicated, some technical amendments are required to the drafting of the Bill. Subject to that proviso, I am glad to commend the Bill to your Lordships.
8.33 p.m.
Lord Houghton of Sowerby: My Lords, perhaps I may say how grateful I am to the noble Earl, the noble Lord and my noble friend Lady Ewart-Biggs for their reception of the Bill. My noble friend mentioned anxiety, which is bound to be in the minds of a number of people. Let me say that those who care for their animals want to see them properly attended to, fed and watered if they do not have other accommodation for them. Animals may need protection in severe weather. That is another aspect of the problem. Such people must take care to treat their animals well.
If the Bill, and fear of it, will lead people to take that extra care it will have achieved a desirable objective. The Bill is intended to deal with cruelty. No one need fear that they will be hauled before a court for cruelty unless the animal they are supposed to be looking after is in such a condition that some inspector feels that there are strong grounds for a charge of cruelty, when proceedings may be taken in a court.
Those are the cases we want to stop. I know that generally more and more people are vigilant about the condition of animals they see in backyards, fields and elsewhere. I also know that in some areas there is prejudice against travelling people—gypsies, fairground people and so forth. Prejudice may come out in extra vigilance about the conditions in which such people keep their animals. If they take care all the time, they need have no fear.
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Taking care of an animal is surely what people want to do when they take it on. I hope that the Bill will have a speedy passage through your Lordships' House and eventually arrive on the statute book.
On Question, Bill read a second time, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.
House adjourned at twenty-five minutes before nine o'clock.