Lords Sitting of 6 February 1991

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

European Commission: Consumer Interests
Baroness Burton of Coventry Baroness Burton of Coventry asked Her Majesty's Government:
Whether they have yet received a communication to the Council of Consumer Ministers from the Consumer Policy Service of the European Commission on ways in which consumer interests might be taken into account in other common EC policies.
Viscount Astor: My Lords, I am disappointed to say that since the first report in 1987 no further communication has yet been received from the European Commission on the subject of the integration of consumer interests into other common EC policies. I understand that the Commission is now planning to submit a report in June this year.
Baroness Burton of Coventry: My Lords, I am glad that the noble Viscount is disappointed. I think that the Answer that he has had to give today is quite disgraceful. Ever since 1987 the European Commission has made no effort to give consumer interests their due place in the Community. I know that this is not his subject but following 1987 Commissioner Van Miert has said that he would produce a set of proposals by the end of 1990. Is the Minister in a position to say why there has been this delay? Is it the antagonism of other commissioners or has Mr. Van Miert lost interest?
Viscount Astor: My Lords, I can only say again that we are very disappointed by the lack of progress made by the Commission since the first council resolution. We have taken every available opportunity to press the Commission to progress this issue and produce a report.
Baroness Ewart-Biggs: My Lords, I congratulate the Government on the pressure that they are putting on the European Commission. Nevertheless, does the noble Viscount agree that a wide range of consumer interests might well be advantaged if each member state nominated a consumer representative to the Economic and Social Committee? Can he tell the House whether Her Majesty's Government made such a nomination in 1990?
Viscount Astor: My Lords, that point is certainly worth considering. I shall pass it on to the Secretary of State.
Lord Mackie of Benshie: My Lords, will the noble Viscount tell the House how much the consumers are suffering—though perhaps one has only to look at the
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Front Bench? My figures, produced by the OECD, clearly show that consumers need to work for far less time—in fact, many fewer minutes—to buy their food than they did 10 years ago.
Viscount Astor: My Lords, that may be the case. It is difficult to establish.
Lord Williams of Elvel: My Lords, will the noble Viscount be good enough to answer the second question put by my noble friend Lady Ewart-Biggs? Did Her Majesty's Government make any nomination to that committee in 1990?
Viscount Astor: My Lords, I am afraid that I do not know the answer to that question. I shall write to the noble Lord.
Lord Elton: My Lords, does the inability of Her Majesty's Government to produce movement in the Commission, or any part of it, have any lessons for Her Majesty's Government with regard to the answerability of members of the Commission or any part of it? Should such lessons be incorporated in any review of the way in which the Community is run?
Viscount Astor: My Lords, my noble friend makes an important point which we all take on board.
Lord Tordoff: My Lords, does the noble Viscount agree that it would be a good idea if the European Parliament were strengthened in order that those people could be made more responsible?
Viscount Astor: My Lords, that is a problem for the European Commission and the council rather than the European Parliament.
Baroness Burton of Coventry: My Lords, may we hope anyway that our Minister will make strong representations on this matter? We just go on and on. Does the noble Viscount feel that there is the slightest point in our asking what it is proposed to do in June when we have not been able to achieve anything over the past two years?
Viscount Astor: My Lords, we shall go on and on and on pressurising the Commission.

Shetland Sand Eel Fishery
2.41 p.m.
Baroness Strange Baroness Strange asked Her Majesty's Government:
Whether the Shetland sand eel fishery will be closed for a period sufficient to give the bird populations which are dependent on sand eels time to recover.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Scottish Office (Lord Strathclyde): My Lords, the Shetland sand eel fishery has been closed since June 1990. It is proposed to keep it closed in the whole of 1991 and interested parties are currently being consulted about this. The lack of availability of sand eels as food for birds is a result not of fishing effort but of poor recruitment arising from natural factors outwith our control.
Baroness Strange: My Lords, I thank my noble friend the Minister for his encouraging reply. I believe that the lack of sand eels is mainly due to fishing. Will he consider keeping the ban for over two years in view of the fact that the life cycle of the sand eel is two years? If the ban continues for more than two years, there may be a chance for stocks to begin to recover.
Lord Strathclyde: My Lords, as I said, there is a government proposal, which is currently up for consultation, to decide whether or not to keep the sand eel fishery closed. My noble friend said that fishing has depleted the stocks. There does not seem to be any real evidence of that.
Baroness Seear: My Lords, does the Minister consider that the interested parties would include the sand eels and the birds?
Lord Strathclyde: My Lords, part of the democratic process is not to consult those who do not have a vote.
Viscount Mills: My Lords, can my noble friend confirm that it is not intended to continue monitoring the Shetland sand eel stock using the same methods and at the same present level? If so, how will one know when the sand eel stock has recovered to a level sufficient for the fishery to be reopened?
Lord Strathclyde: My Lords, a considerable amount of research is being carried out by my department, the Department of the Environment and the Nature Conservancy Council in order to decide how to count the numbers using samples and, therefore, to reach a figure. Previous methods have been adequate but the situation is continually under review.
Lord Carmichael of Kelvingrove: My Lords, is the Minister aware that between 1985 and 1989 there was a catastrophic reduction in the catch of more than 30 per cent., from 35,000 tonnes to 24,000 tonnes? It is difficult to say whether that was caused by lack of reproduction or by overfishing. However, has the Minister received representations from the Shetland fishermen—few boats are involved—about compensation as a result of the closure of the fishery this year and perhaps next year?
Lord Strathclyde: My Lords, last year only two fishing boats were directly involved in fishing for sand eels. However, they fish for other species and therefore at present there is no question of paying compensation.
Lord Grimond: My Lords, the Minister referred to the lack of evidence as regards the extent of the damage done by sand eel fisheries. He also said that research is still being carried out. Did any other factors come to light during the course of that research? Many of the birds that are affected are not entirely dependent on sand eels. There must be evidence of other factors, although the lack of sand eels must have had an effect.
Lord Strathclyde: My Lords, the noble Lord is correct. The problem does not lie with the sand eel or its eggs, but with the larval stage in between. That suffering could be caused by other predators; for instance, herrings, seals and other fish. Other birdlife
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and environmental factors such as the changing pattern of sea currents in the area may also be involved. All those issues are being investigated carefully. When we have decided what the problem is we can ascertain whether there is anything that we can do about it.

Iraq: Sanctions
2.45 p.m.
Lord Hatch of Lusby Lord Hatch of Lusby asked Her Majesty's Government:
What approaches have been made to the United Nations Sanctions Committee to determine the effectiveness of sanctions against Iraq; and what evidence it supplied.
The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (The Earl of Caithness): My Lords, the remit of the UN Sanctions Committee was established by the Security Council. It has not been tasked with assessing the effectiveness of sanctions.
Lord Hatch of Lusby: My Lords, is it not the case that, following the passing of Resolution 678 on 29th November and the setting of the deadline of 15th January, the decision to go to war was taken on the basis that sanctions were not working and would not work? If that is the case, from where did the evidence for that conclusion come? Why has it not been published so that Parliament and the people can judge the reasons for the United Kingdom and the United States taking such action?
The Earl of Caithness: My Lords, the noble Lord asks a supplementary question which is not related to the Question on the Order Paper.
Lord Mowbray and Stourton: My Lords, in view of the supplementary question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Hatch, is it not fatuous that the Question should exist? Having regard to the punishment being taken by the poor, wretched Iraqi people and the lack of feeling for that by their leadership, how could sanctions have worked given that strong leadership?
The Earl of Caithness: My Lords, my noble friend has made a valid point which was covered extensively during our debates on the subject.
Lord Cledwyn of Penrhos: My Lords, are sanctions being violated by any country? Is the Minister aware of reports that German companies have been selling important material to Iraq and that the matter is being investigated by the German Government? Is that true? Have the Government received any reports from the German Government following their investigation?
The Earl of Caithness: My Lords, I have seen the reports referred to by the noble Lord the Leader of the Opposition. We are in touch with the German Government about the matter and are awaiting details. My noble friend the Leader of the House and I have both said in our debates that sanctions were almost universally applied. The point is that they were not going to succeed in getting Saddam Hussein to abide by Security Council resolutions.
Lord Mellish: My Lords, is it not a fact that the occupation of Kuwait occurred in early August, and from that time sanctions were applied? The United Nations then gave notice to Saddam Hussein—which extended for weeks and weeks—that the deadline was 15th January. It was not until after that date that the first shot was fired by our side. Is it not about time that we stopped all this manoeuvring and messing about and made it perfectly clear where the trouble lies—that at no time has Saddam Hussein been prepared to consider the effects on Iraq of sanctions or military action?
The Earl of Caithness: My Lords, the noble Lord is right. That is the almost unanimous view of this House.
Lord Jenkins of Putney: My Lords, is it not correct that there was strong evidence that sanctions were beginning to work and that given another few months they would have been effective in bringing down Saddam Hussein? Is it not the case that an outside attack on a country solidifies the people in favour of the government and, consequently, that the support now being enjoyed by Saddam Hussein is much greater than it was when his country was subject to sanctions?
The Earl of Caithness: My Lords, the noble Lord refers to evidence. I have not seen that evidence.
Lord Elton: My Lords, is it not a mistake for us to embark on yet another debate during Question Time on a subject which we have debated three or four times in your Lordships' House?
The Earl of Caithness: My Lords, I have already covered all of the points which have been raised today.
Lord Molloy: My Lords, the sanctions came from the United Nations, as did Resolution No. 678. Should we not pay tribute to the gallantry and wonderful endeavours being made in the desert by the alliance troops? Will the Government be prepared to consider that point?
The Earl of Caithness: My Lords, I am sure that all noble Lords wish to pay tribute to our men and women in the Gulf.
Lord Kennet: My Lords, if I heard the noble Earl correctly, he said that it is not the task of the UN Sanctions Committee to assess the effect of sanctions. If that is so, can he tell us what is the task of the committee, when it last reported and what it said?
The Earl of Caithness: My Lords, the task of the committee was set up under Security Council Resolutions Nos. 661, 666 and 670. Those cover: the seeking of information from states and examining reports on national implementation—Resolution No. 661; determining on the basis of information from UN and other humanitarian agencies whether humanitarian circumstances have arisen to warrant the provision of foodstuffs to Iraq and Kuwait—Resolution No. 666; and authorisation of flights to or from Iraq and Kuwait carrying people, medicine or food in recognised humanitarian circumstances—Resolution No. 670.
Lord Hatch of Lusby: My Lords, far from wishing to continue a debate in Question Time, I asked a specific Question on a specific issue. If it is the case, as the noble Earl said, that the UN Sanctions Committee does not have the responsibility for determining the effectiveness of sanctions, who does? Who supplied the information on which the decision was taken that sanctions were not working sufficiently and what was that evidence?
The Earl of Caithness: My Lords, the noble Lord is right to repeat that I said that the UN Sanctions Committee does not have the task of assessing the effectiveness of sanctions. That was done by individual member states. Resolution No. 678, to which the noble Lord referred, was decided by the United Nations.
Lord Hatch of Lusby: My Lords, I know that Resolution No. 678 was decided by the United Nations, but I am asking Her Majesty's Government for the evidence on which they made their judgment. Will that be published and if not, why not?
The Earl of Caithness: My Lords, I am surprised that the noble Lord does not know by now that the proceedings of the UN Sanctions Committee are confidential.

Disability Living Allowance
2.52 p.m.
Lord Stallard Lord Stallard asked Her Majesty's Government:
Whether they will introduce a benefit to cover the whole range of extra costs incurred by people with disabilities.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Social Security (Lord Henley): My Lords, our strategy is to build further on the existing system of benefits designed to help with the extra costs of disability. The Disability Living Allowance and Disability Working Allowance Bill, which will shortly be before this House, will give ample opportunity to discuss our proposals to build on our record in this area.
Lord Stallard: My Lords, is it not a fact that the new disability living allowance is merely an amalgamation of the mobility and attendance allowances, and that people who qualify for the new allowance will not receive help towards the extra costs of disability; namely, special diet, heating, special laundry arrangements, telephone rental, and so on? In effect, the new allowance will do nothing to alleviate the hardships which have been caused since the abolition of the single payment system in 1988 under the 1986 Act. Would it not be more constructive at this stage to engage in further discussions with RADAR, the RNIB and other such organisations, to try to reach agreement on a single benefit which would cover all the costs incurred by people with disabilities?
Lord Henley: My Lords, the noble Lord quite rightly says that the new disability allowance is an amalgamation of two existing benefits. It is also an

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extension of those two existing benefits. The two components of the new disability allowance—care and mobility—will provide access as gateways to claimants suffering from clusters of disabilities. Regarding consultation with RADAR and other such groups, as I have said on many occasions, I am always prepared to meet representatives from such groups.
Lord Carter: My Lords, is the Minister aware that where severe disability results from an accident and a compensation claim is successfully pursued through the courts, very large awards are made which quantify the substantial extra costs resulting from the disability? That can be hundreds of pounds per week. On the other hand, a person born with the same or even worse disability than the accident victim has to manage on the totally inadequate level of social security benefits mentioned by my noble friend Lord Stallard. Does the Minister agree that our system for compensating the extra costs of disability is both arbitrary and unfair and should be replaced by a comprehensive and non-means tested disability cost allowance?
Lord Henley: My Lords, I do not accept the points made by the noble Lord. I point to our record. There has been a doubling in expenditure on the long-term sick and disabled—some £8.8 billion over the past 10 years. That is double what was spent on the long-term sick and disabled by the noble Lord's party when it was in government some 11 years ago.
Lord Carter: My Lords, that is not the point which I am making. I am referring to the arbitrariness and unfairness of a system in which a person with a severe disability resulting from an accident receives a very substantial award through the courts which quantifies the extra costs of the disability, whereas a person born with the same disability must manage on social security benefits.
Lord Henley: My Lords, we are living in the real world. I understand that the noble Lord's party has put forward proposals in its document As of Right and I understand that those proposals will cost some extra £4.4 billion per year. Judging by experience of earlier Labour Governments, it is extremely unlikely that any future Labour Government will be able to afford that.
Lord Stallard: My Lords, in reply to my original Question, the noble Lord said that he is always prepared to consult on the new allowance or any other aspects. Does he mean that if representatives of those organisations make a joint request to meet the Minister to discuss this new benefit, he will be prepared to meet them?
Lord Henley: My Lords, yes. I gave that assurance.

Business
Lord Denham: My Lords, with the leave of the House, I should like to say a word about the two short debates standing in the names of my noble friends Lord Campbell of Croy and Lord Stanley of Alderley. As the mover is allowed 15 minutes, and the Minister should rise to reply not less than 20 minutes before the
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scheduled end of the debate, in the case of the Short Debate in the name of my noble friend Lord Campbell of Croy, all other speeches should be limited to a maximum of 10 minutes and, in that of my noble friend Lord Stanley of Alderley, eight minutes.

UN Charter: Collective Security
2.57 p.m.
Lord Campbell of Croy Lord Campbell of Croy rose to call attention to the terms and the application of Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter on action with respect to threats to the peace, breaches of the peace and acts of aggression; and to move for Papers.
The noble Lord said: My Lords, I beg to leave to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper.
My object is to raise for debate the subject of collective security made topical by the actions of Saddam Hussein but looking to the future after the Gulf war has ended.
Six months ago a flagrant and unprovoked act of aggression was committed against Kuwait. For the first time since the founding of the United Nations 45 years ago, the five permanent members of the Security Council and a large majority of members united to oppose and undo the misdeed. The principle of collective security has been upheld more widely than ever before in modern history. That is welcome and gratifying although it means that we are engaged in a war and on a scale which we would not have wished.
Since 2nd August, the structure of the United Nations and the Charter have been used correctly, quickly and decisively in the resolutions adopted by the Security Council, especially Resolution No. 660 on 2nd August, and Resolution No. 661 four days later calling for economic sanctions.
I can easily visualise those meetings in New York because I was part of the small United Kingdom permanent mission to the United Nations there 41 years ago. I was at the emergency meeting of the Security Council on a Sunday morning in June 1950, the day after North Korea attacked South Korea and at the subsequent meetings. Our chief, Sir Alexander Cadogan, was not with us at the Sunday meeting; he was on retirement leave. A few days later my noble kinsman Lord Gladwyn, who had already been designated his successor, took over. I am delighted to see that he is to speak in this debate because he was also the first acting Secretary-General of the United Nations before Mr. Trygve Lie was appointed.
Immediate action by the United Nations was possible in 1950 because the Soviet Union was absent—deliberately absent —for several weeks as a protest that the Chinese representative had not been replaced by a representative of the new communist government. The necessary resolutions were adopted without Soviet opposition or veto. That there would have been Soviet opposition became clear from the speeches of the Soviet representative, Mr. Malik, after the Soviet delegation returned to the council five weeks later when it was the Soviet turn to take the chair. In the cases of Korea and the Gulf the Security Council

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resolutions were put into effect with strength because the United States sent substantial armed forces with speed.
In 1950 American forces were nearby in Japan. Other countries sent small detachments, as soon as they could, under the UN flag. We contributed a Commonwealth brigade which eventually became a division. In both cases, Korea and the Gulf, Chapter VII was invoked in the resolutions. I do not intend to discuss current military operations in the Gulf, which are best left to the commanders in the field. I agree with what the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Carver, said in the debate on 21st January in that regard. However, I take the opportunity to say—and I am sure that I speak for the whole House—that we are acutely conscious of the key role of the British forces in the Gulf. We admire their dedication, professionalism and fortitude in a dangerous task of crucial importance for the future. Our thoughts and hopes are with them and their allies in the coalition forces.
My purpose today is to examine the structure of the United Nations and the terms of the Charter, virtually unchanged since 1946. They form the basis of international action to deter aggression and to deal with it if it happens. In the years 1948 to 1952, when I was a member of the United Kingdom mission in New York, we were involved in the application of the Charter for the first time. I found that I knew the wording of Chapter VII by heart. I do not suggest that noble Lords will need copies of the Charter with them today; my intention is to recall the essentials.
At that time the ideals of the United Nations received warm support from the public in the United States and the United Kingdom. We were trying to create a system which would prevent anything like Hitler's war, through which we had just passed, recurring. Chapter VII is the heart of the Charter. In dealing with aggression it prescribes progressive steps towards restoring peace and undoing the wrongs perpetrated. The first stage consists of provisional measures—Article 40. The second stage consists of measures not involving armed force—Article 41. Then comes Article 42 which provides that if previous measures are not adequate, action by armed forces may be taken.
That article has made clear over the years that the use of armed forces is the resort agreed upon for world security when necessary. I am sure that it has acted as a deterrent to potential aggressors with covetous eyes on their neighbours' territory. In that respect it has had a beneficial negative effect. However, although it is there', stark and clear in its terms, it has not been invoked directly. In the cases of Korea, and now the Gulf, it is the last article of Chapter VII—Article 51 —which has been directly quoted in the resolutions.
Article 51 provides for self-defence and has been regarded as a catch-all clause. One of the main reasons why Article 42 has not been referred to, despite the powerful influence which its existence exerts, is that it leads into Articles 43 to 47, which have not yet fully been put into effect. Those articles provide for a Military Staff Committee and for its role in directing
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specified armed forces allocated to the United Nations by member states in accordance with agreements to be negotiated.
The MSC was established when the United Nations was formed, consisting of military representatives of the five permanent members and co-option of other members as appropriate. However, nothing has been done in the intervening years in regard to earmarking forces or concluding agreements with members. That has not mattered. It has not reduced the effectiveness of the action of the United Nations authorised by the Security Council in Korea and the Gulf. We can feel relieved and reassured by that.
However, it has meant that Articles 43 to 47 contain references to pieces of the mechanism intended in 1945 which are missing. How did that happen? The Soviet Government agreed to the text of Chapter VII in 1945, but clearly changed their mind a few months later. They deliberately blocked any progress in the MSC. For years the MSC had its required regular meetings and did little more than adopt the agenda and arrange the date for the next meeting. It is significant that President Gorbachev stated a few months ago that he thought that progress might now be made on that point. That appears to me to be a change of heart.
The terms of the Charter were agreed by the nations which then existed as independent states and had won the war. Initial membership, around 50, was less than one-third of the present figure—159 at the latest count. Two of the largest and most influential countries in the world—Germany and Japan—did not join until some years later because they were ex-enemy states. In the same situation were Italy, Austria and some other European countries. Small changes only have been made to the Charter; in particular, increasing the size of the Security Council and the majority needed in voting there. The five permanent members of the Security Council remain the same regardless of size and influence in the world of today. The five can use the veto, which was always an essential part of the system. It was designed to avoid a situation where one of the great powers was at odds with most of the rest of the world; that might have produced the clash of arms which it was the intention of the United Nations to prevent.
It was hoped that Chapter VII would replace the functions of the pre-war League of Nations, the weakness and failure of which had been manifested in 1935 after Mussolini's attack on Abyssinia. When Saddam's folly is penalised and reversed by the armed forces of the United Nations—as I am sure it will be—collective security will be immensely strengthened in the world. We need be haunted no longer by the pale ghost of the League of Nations which will have been exorcised forever.
Before examining ways in which the community of nations can then consolidate, I should mention two additions to the mechanisms of the United Nations developed after the Charter was agreed. First, at the annual session of the General Assembly—that is, the plenary gathering of all members—in 1950 after the aggression in Korea, the United States introduced the "United for Peace" resolution, which was duly passed.

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The intention was to enable the General Assembly to agree upon action if the Security Council was blocked by the veto. The General Assembly can only make recommendations to members. This was, therefore, a second best and reserve arrangement designed to avoid inaction if the Security Council was paralysed. It has not detracted from the authority of the Security Council, enshrined in the Charter, to take the necessary decisions in times of world crisis.
The second innovation has been the introduction of peace-keeping forces, which again can be recommended by the General Assembly if necessary. That has been a valuable addition. These forces have served as a kind of military police, keeping antagonists apart or patrolling contested territory. They are of course very different from a punitive force, used under Chapter VII, with all necessary modern arms at sea, in the air as well as on the land.
We must also take into account two significant changes. Small and medium-sized countries can become possessors of nuclear weapons despite the non-proliferation treaty. A country's leader may be a fanatic or megalomaniac. We must not forget Idi Amin.
The other change, assisting in the opposite direction, is that troops and equipment can now be transported in large quantities by air, as was most effectively demonstrated by the United States in August. After this war, when Saddam has been subdued, the world should be safer but the UN should not relax. Conditions will be favourable for improvements in the UN's contingency planning. Flexibility should be paramount but member states should be more prepared and ready in future to contribute forces or financial and material help. The whole question of economic sanctions needs more consideration. It is clear that, even with the whole world united against an aggressor, a fanatic like Saddam could resist that pressure for months or years. It is all the more important to have armed forces clearly in immediate readiness as a deterrent in the hope that they will not have to be used.
The time factor must be taken into account in the early stages. The leader of the offending nation may have no respect for human life or care about the hardships of his people. As time passes he will be compounding his aggression by pillage, destruction and annexation, doing everything he can to make it irreversible. That has been foreseen in Chapter VII, which empowers the Security Council to decide when peaceful measures are or would be inadequate. That is in Article 42, which spells out the intention and procedure but which has not been directly invoked for reasons which we know.
The Security Council has that task and it is a very difficult judgment to make. If pressure from economic sanctions or other peaceful measures is likely to succeed within a reasonable period, the necessary time must be allowed. When such pressure is clearly not being effective and when the aggressor is strengthening
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his hold and the victim country is crying out for help from the rest of the world, the Security Council has to choose the moment to move to the use of armed force.
As regards forces at the disposal of the United Nations in the foreseeable future, the United States will be the only country which can field a large force speedily. Depending on the area of the world involved and other factors, it should be possible for other countries to provide support of various kinds without delay. That is the clear intention of the Charter.
On the question of the kind of help that can be given, I believe that in the cases of Germany and Japan, for example, which have made very large contributions, it need not have taken five or six months before they were forthcoming if such matters had been gone into beforehand.
In opening this debate, if I have seemed dissatisfied at times it is because I see opportunities for improving the United Nations' state of readiness and so more firmly maintaining peace after the Gulf war. I feel strongly that those opportunities should be pursued. I trust that the House realises that my remarks have been inspired and overshadowed by the momentous event that the Security Council has acted with almost complete agreement in a major case of aggression in the way originally intended by the founders of the United Nations. My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.
3.15 p.m.
Lord Hatch of Lusby: My Lords, I am sure that I am expressing the views of the whole House when I say that we are grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Croy, for introducing this subject, particularly at this very topical moment. The present conflict is being characterised, at least by the press and the governments involved, as a United Nations' operation. I do not believe that it is. I believe that this scepticism is shared by the majority of people outside this country and the United States. As we see the effects of the conflict spreading from America across to the Maghreb, the Middle East, Pakistan, and the Philippines, we are surely witnessing a conflict which is affecting the vast majority of the world and which may affect many more nations outside this country and its media.
How is the present conflict and the decision to participate in military activity seen? It does not need me to outline the feeling of most of the population of the world that those who have pursued this military conflict are acting as hypocrites. One has only to recall Afghanistan, Grenada, Panama, Nicaragua, Namibia, South Africa and many other countries to recognise that when this conflict is looked at from outside the participating countries, it appears that the permanent members of the Security Council, who are the larger powers in the world, pick and choose as to how they are going to use the powers that they have within the United Nations.
I refer in specific terms to the Question that I raised in this House yesterday afternoon concerning Indonesia and East Timor. Surely that is a clinching example of hypocrisy. After the cold war there is no excuse for saying that this or that cannot be done because of the cold war. Britain and America are

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supporting the Indonesian Government and providing arms for them. Yet as long ago as 1975 the Security Council unanimously passed a resolution declaring Indonesia to be an aggressor, condemning that aggression and the occupation of East Timor, and calling on Indonesia to vacate the territory of East Timor. What has been done by the Security Council since 1975? Why is the issue of Indonesia and East Timor different from that of Iraq and Kuwait?
During the ensuing years, according to the British Government's figures, between 60,000 and 100,000 East Timorese have lost their lives as a result of that aggression. What has been done by Her Majesty's Government and the Security Council? I will not argue, as some of my colleagues have done, that because we have not done anything in Indonesia, Namibia, Grenada or Afghanistan, we should not support the responsibility of the United Nations in Kuwait. That is a line which I have never taken and I do not take it now. I simply point out that to the rest of the world it appears that the permanent members of the Security Council discriminate as to when and in what circumstances they will apply the power of the United Nations, and also when it does not seem to be in their interests to do so. That attitude is contemporary; it is being applied in Indonesia now while military activity is taking place in the Gulf.
I am not arguing that United Nations' responsibility should not have been taken in the Gulf. I believe that it should. I also believe that the United Nations has been sabotaged in its efforts in the Gulf. It has been sabotaged because right from the start it was discovered that at long last the international organisation had a weapon which was non-military and which at least stood a good chance of reversing that aggression and persuading or compelling the Iraqis to leave Kuwait. I know that this cannot be proved —nor can it be proved that military means were needed—but that weapon was there. It was discovered and supported unanimously within the Security Council and by the United Nations. According to the testimony of James Schlesinger, when sanctions were first imposed last summer the United States Administration believed that it would take 12 months for those sanctions to work adequately. It was the director of the CIA, William Webster, who only a few weeks ago gave testimony to the effect that sanctions were already damaging the military machine of the Iraqis, that by April that military machine would be seriously damaged and that within 12 to 18 months there was a good chance that by the use of sanctions the United Nations could implement Resolution 660.
That effort, that great promise for the future of having found a means of peacefully solving international conflict, was thrown away in November when the United States President doubled the number of United States forces in the Gulf and put them on the offensive. Until then they had been on the defensive, it having been stated that they were there not to attack Iraq or Kuwait but to defend Saudi
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Arabia. When that decision was made it sabotaged the great promise that had come to the United Nations out of the use of sanctions.
If I go back half an hour, I recall that the noble Earl who is to reply to this debate was unable to give the House any details—nor has anyone else—as to the evidence on which that decision was taken. I have repeated that there was evidence—I have given him the evidence: the evidence of James Schlesinger and the evidence of the director of the CIA—that sanctions were working and should be given time.
As to the relevance of this picture to Chapter VII, I emphasise the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Croy, in his opening statement. Article 42, which provides for the use of military force, depends on Article 41 because Article 42 starts by saying:
"Should the Security Council consider that measures provided for in Article 41 [that is non-military measures] would be inadequate or have proved to be inadequate"—
we have had no proof—then it may take action. But that depends on Article 41 having been put into effect first and given a chance to work. If one goes on from Article 42 to the succeeding articles, as the noble Lord, Lord Campbell, pointed out, there is then provision for the setting up of a military staff committee.
I ask the noble Earl who is to reply whether the military staff committee of the United Nations has been consulted. Has it been given the authority to organise a United Nations peace keeping force in this instance? We know it has not. But I should like the noble Earl to address himself to that point. If he intends to rest his case on Article 51 then I would point out to him that Article 51, while giving the right of self-defence, also includes the following words:
"Until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to obtain international peace and security"—
self-defence until the security council has acted—
"measures taken by members in the exercise of the right of self-defence shall be immediately reported to the Security Council"—
and this is the important point—
"and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present charter to take at any time such action that it deems necessary".
My contention is that the members of the United Nations have not gone through the exercise laid down in Articles 41 and 42 of Chapter VII, nor have they followed what is laid down in succeeding articles, leading to the setting up of a defence committee. They have not followed the articles preceding Article 51. They have not done so because they have been using the United Nations as an umbrella for their own decision, a decision taken by President Bush in November, which, I repeat, has sabotaged the most constructive and far seeing developments which came with the imposition of sanctions against Saddam Hussein. By sabotaging that effort they have very seriously damaged the ability of the United Nations to carry out its responsibilities after the war is over.
3.26 p.m.
The Lord Bishop of Manchester: My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Hatch, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Croy, for giving us an opportunity to discuss the role of the United Nations as it relates to Chapter VII, not only in this present tragic war, but in the years that lie ahead. It reminds us that the moral basis for present action in the Gulf conflict depends on the United Nations and its role. I wish I could share the optimism of the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Croy, that the world will be a safer place at the end of this war than it was at the beginning. I am afraid that I rather doubt it. One reason for my doubt is that in the eyes of millions of people in the world today this does not look like a genuinely United Nations operation.
I have no doubt at all that there is overwhelming support in this country as expressed through your Lordships' House and the other place for the action which is now being taken. There is not the slightest doubt about that and public opinion polls will stress it. A minority of people in this country are doubtful about the moral basis for the present action as concerns military force. Where I think there is universal agreement is when we look back to the time of the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein, the rape of that small country and the terrible things that took place. There was then complete unanimity about the actions of the United Nations, the resolution of the Security Council and how this gave us a new hope for the world. There was hope in regard to that case in particular but also in regard to nations standing together in collective security. It was a real sign of hope. In particular, the adoption of sanctions and the way in which they were enforced as a peaceful yet powerful method of bringing pressure in order to achieve an evacuation of Kuwait was widely supported universally from some quite surprising places. For example, Jordan was prepared to go along with the sanctions resolution.
It is worth mentioning that many people have been doubtful —but doubtful unnecessarily—about the way in which sanctions through the United Nations have worked in years gone by. There is ample evidence of the effectiveness of sanctions in certain situations. We think especially of Southern Africa. It is very doubtful whether South Africa would have withdrawn from Angola and Namibia but for the steady cumulative effect of sanctions over those years. The remarkable changes we are seeing in South Africa at the present time surely owe something to the operation of international sanctions. It is a matter of shame that the British Government have been so lukewarm, and even opposed, to the imposition of effective sanctions on South Africa.
There is now a great sign of hope for our world. The United Nations, through the Security Council, representing nations of different cultures and colours both rich and poor, has been able to bring such countries together and condemn such an act of aggression. Much Arab public opinion was behind that move.
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In my view the Christian faith has within it a powerful basis for a vision of a world community. It seems to me to be natural that Christians should be deeply sympathetic to any measure which supports a world order and which helps to enforce such an order against aggression. The Christian faith is realistic about the evil and wickedness to be found in the world. I refer not simply to the evil in one man—that is, in one brutal dictator—but the wickedness which has deep ramifications and which has contributed to the present tensions in the Middle East.
When we look at the United Nations Charter and we see how in a case such as this nations have been able to come together through their representatives in order to support resistance to aggression, there is, as I said, hope for us all. However, Resolution 678 was issued on 29th November. It was undoubtedly based on the UN Charter and it authorised the use of force. The Security Council, should it consider that measures provided for in Article 41 (which governs sanctions) are inadequate, or have proved to be inadequate, may take such action by air, sea or land forces as may be necessary to maintain or restore international peace and security.
War is a different matter and it widens differences of opinion in our community. In this country we had a responsible, agonised debate about military action before it took place on 16th January. For example, in this House we heard the case for pacifism expounded as powerfully and movingly as it could be by the noble Lord, Lord Soper, who is sitting on the Benches opposite. He takes an attitude which many of us cannot share. However, his stance was greatly respected in this Chamber. I, too, cannot share that pacifist stance. I welcome the fact that there is a provision within the charter for resort to force in certain circumstances through the United Nations.
However, what is deeply worrying is the way in which such action was taken. It is significant to note that many of those who care most deeply for the United Nations in this country and beyond are disturbed and agonised by what has taken place. I shall quote from a resolution of the United Nations Association Executive in this country dated 27th October. It reads:
"We urge adequate time to assess whether sanctions are working and rejection of pressures for premature military action".
The feeling expressed there was that if military action was resorted to, it may bring the United Nations into discredit and may prove to be counter-productive in all that it was supposed to do.
I have no more means of telling than the noble Lord, Lord Hatch, or anyone else, whether sanctions would finally have forced Saddam Hussein to leave Kuwait; indeed, the indications are to the contrary. However, having said that, the balance of military action had to be weighed against the possible consequences which would follow. Such consequences are not irrelevant now as we try to look to the future. The noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Croy, is right to urge us to consider the future and not concentrate solely on the Gulf situation. The way in which we view

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what is happening now affects the urgency of our search for peace and an early cessation of military operations. It also affects how we see the United Nations operating in the years ahead. It must not appear simply to be hijacked by major powers with enormous military might at their disposal. That is how the situation looks to many people in the world today.
I have no doubt that there is right and justice on the side of the coalition forces in the Gulf. But that does not make it a just war in the way that is being claimed at present; neither does it make it necessarily a wise or right decision to have resorted to military action under the terms of the charter which we are considering today. Some of us think that it was not. What I have said is not simply water under the bridge; it affects our attitude towards the future.
In my view it is a shame when people in this country are criticised for raising questions about the rightness of the present operations as if to do so means that they are somehow being disloyal to our Armed Forces in the field. I support everything that has been said by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Croy, about their courage and sense of duty. We pray for them, for their success and for their safety. We realise that they are doing their duty backed by an overwhelming parliamentary majority and a decision properly made in this country.
However, wars must be judged by other criteria, apart from the justice of the cause. It is important to consider under whose auspices the war is being fought. Part of the tragedy of today's situation is that the United Nations has not been more fully involved in the conduct of operations and the way in which things have been carried out. That is why what is taking place does not seem to many people to be a United Nations operation. Further, are the means being used proportionate? Is it possible to have faith in the United Nations if it authorises, for example, the bombing of water supplies of a great city such as Baghdad? One can argue that electricity supplies are part of the means of maintaining the military potential of such a country; but what questions are being raised about the importance of water for such cities in the Middle East when we know about the danger of disease? While I agree to some extent that military operations are best left to those in the field, I believe that it is incumbent upon the rest of us to raise such crucial questions.
So far as concerns other likely consequences of the present operations, it is distressing to hear some people say, "There you are, the consequences prophesied by people like Mr. Edward Heath have not in fact taken place". How do we know that that is true? Indeed, some have taken place and some have not. I should like to point out that in the famine situation in East Africa at present, relief agencies are reporting that thousands of people are dying as an indirect result of the operations in the Gulf. That is because the world's attention is being concentrated on that area. A fraction of the money being spent on the crisis could be used to save lives in East Africa at present.
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I return now to Chapter VII. The noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Croy, is right to draw our attention to other sections of the Charter in order to point out that we must consider them in respect of the kind of world which lies ahead. We must not assume complacently that this world will be a safer place at the end of the Gulf War.
3.38 p.m.
Lord Wilberforce: My Lords, we are grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Croy, for raising this subject today and for analysing so brilliantly Chapter VII of the Charter. It is a very remarkable and central chapter. As noble Lords will appreciate, it gives wide discretionary powers to the Security Council either to operate under Article 41 (without using any force) or, if it considers that such measures are likely to be inadequate, to invoke other articles including, but not limited to, Article 42. We know that the Security Council has acted under Article 41 by imposing sanctions in August and, under succeeding articles, by authorising the use of force in November.
In the time available to me I do not intend to discuss whether, while sanctions were operating under SCR 661, the Security Council was wise to pass Resolution 678 on 29th November or whether, in doing so, the United Nations has been sabotaged or something of that nature. Of course, I should like to do so, but time does not permit.
I shall confine myself to considering one point; namely, the operation of Article 41, the sanctions article, in a modern context. I believe that it is valuable to do so for three reasons. First, I do not believe that anyone would doubt that it is preferable, if possible, to use the weapon of sanctions under Article 41 than it is to use force.
Secondly, having been shown for the first time that the permanent members of the Security Council can agree, we may hope that that will not be the only time and that they will be able to do so again in future cases. Thirdly, I suggest that it is important for the future of peace-keeping to understand whether sanctions under Article 41 can work or whether they cannot. That question may still be relevant to the present situation. Those articles are still operating; and sanctions are still operating. The question whether they are, or have been, effective has not been addressed.
Let us look at Article 41 for a moment. In 1945, when it was framed in rather simple language, Lord Jowitt said of it that it did not bear the hallmarks of having emanated from Lincoln's Inn—something with which I think we all agree. It is drafted in simplistic language, and speaks in terms of the interruption of economic relations and of communications —simple and uncomplicated stuff. We may note with interest that even matters such as demonstrations and blockades are not dealt with under that article, but under Article 42. Since then, the picture has changed enormously. We now have over 150 independent states as members of the United Nations. Trade and commerce have become global in character. Financial relations have become global in character. Communications are not just a matter of sending a

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telegraph from one place to another. Communications, by which one means the transfer of information—the lifeblood of finance and commerce—have become vital to states' existence and depend upon internationally available technology of a most elaborate kind.
Because all those matters have become global in character, it must follow that international action, if achievable, must be effective against such organisations. Let us have in mind that we are not concerned in the case of the Gulf only with an invasion of a small state, or even only with the seizure of important oil fields—vital though those matters and issues are—but with the takeover of a vast financial empire—that of Kuwait—which is in the world league as such matters go, and which has ramifications in all sections of the world economy.
One has to ask how Article 41—that simple article—can be fitted into that picture. Putting it briefly, each member state is asked, at short notice, to introduce measures which will not just stop physical trade by sea, air or computer, but which will prevent the aggressor from receiving the benefit of all Kuwait's assets, whether tangible or intangible, wherever they may be; and to do that probably without any experience of the kind of action which it is practical and legal to take in such circumstances and without having any of the legal infrastructure necessary.
We are aware of course that the United States has available a powerful panoply of executive orders, well tried in other situations, which can be instantly issued. It has issued such orders in this case. The United Kingdom has available a machinery under emergency Acts, and under the United Nations Act 1946, which can be, and has been, used. That can even be extended to territories such as Hong Kong or the Caribbean tax havens. The French have quickly operated similar techniques. The European Community made an order in August, but one relating to physical trade only.
It is remarkable then to note that, without any of those procedures, over 100 states have done something to carry out the Security Council resolution. I have a list of the main ones that have done that and of the instruments that they have used. I should like to pay tribute to Mr. Jeremy Carver, an eminent City solicitor, who has researched and is researching into what has been done on his own account with the assistance of his firm.
However—and this is the only point that I want to make—all of that raises great problems. We can see that from our experience and that of the Americans. The Bank of England, which is charged with implementing the restrictions, and which has extraordinary skill and expertise in such matters, is flooded with inquiries and conundra which both in quantity and quality have put enormous pressures upon it. How then, one must ask, can other states—even those in Europe, not to mention those outside—unused to taking that kind of action, manage to be effective? Many will have no infrastructure. They will have to devise and pass primary legislation. How are they to translate United Nations requirements into
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national law—let us think of Islamic law and the elaborate constitutions of some countries which inhibit legislation—at short notice? Many will have no enforcement machinery, and many will not have the lawyers, accountants or experts without which restraints will not work. Most of them will not have the resources to monitor and see to what extent the controls are being effective.
Two things are necessary. The first is information. The United Nations is endeavouring to deal with it. I was disappointed that the noble Earl was defensive on the subject. It may be true that the United Nations Sanctions Committee is not responsible for ensuring that measures are effective. The United Nations sent out a questionnaire which was responded to by over 100 states. It asked for information as to what those states had done. Our lawyers —again Mr. Jeremy Carver—and a number of United States lawyers have their own data and are collecting them. I hope that those measures will be assisted. There is no need for secrecy. The United Nations Sanctions Committee may be confidential, but why be secret about it? Everyone should know what is being done and to what extent the measures taken are effective or ineffective?
I come to the second requirement. If the system is not to be a one-off one—I hope that it will not be—and not be the only case in which the permanent members agree, we and the United States, should make available to other countries, through the United Nations, the European Community or otherwise, in a systematic way, full knowledge of the measures and techniques required in those cases. They should be collected in a permanent form which can be brought out and used next time.
We must be optimistic. We must hope that this is not the last time, as it has been the first time, that the Security Council has been able to obtain agreement on sanctions. If any lesson is to be drawn from the present situation, it is not certain to be in favour of the use of force. The armoury of Article 41, which is a valuable one, must be kept alive and in usable form. I remain grateful to the noble Lord for initiating the debate.
3.48 p.m.
Lord Beloff: My Lords, I wish that I could find it possible to follow the command of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wilberforce, and be optimistic, because optimism was also the keynote of the speech of my noble friend Lord Campbell of Croy when introducing the debate. For once noble Lords may be surprised to hear that I find myself in some sympathy with the noble Lord, Lord Hatch of Lusby; not in his belief in a conspiracy theory of recent history but in calling attention to the fact that nations behave as they have always behaved, and probably always will behave—so long as there are independent nation states—in the light of their own interests as they perceive them to be at the time.
My noble friend Lord Campbell of Croy gave a clue to the problem when he mentioned two facts about the United Nations: first, that the composition of the Security Council reflected the immediate situation in 1945.

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Anyone now debating who should be permanent members of the Security Council, for instance, would find it difficult to come up with the same five. More important and perhaps even more relevant is the fact that the last occasion on which the authority of the United Nations was powerfully exercised —the Korean war—was made possible only by the accidental absence of the Soviet Union. That country could not have been fully informed as to what was likely to happen in the absence of its representative.
I feel that again we now have or had in the Security Council a concatenation of accidental circumstances which have made these resolutions possible without a veto. That is because the wishes, intentions, and desires of the five permanent members are not identical; nor is their forward view always similar. In the case of the Soviet Union in particular there is no doubt that there has been considerable pressure on the Soviet Government to choose between their recent desire, for economic reasons, to stand well with the major Western powers and their own perception of what might happen if one of their client states in the Middle East were to be largely destroyed, perhaps as a result of economic action but, more particularly now, by military action.
I do not propose to enlarge upon the position of the Soviet Union because I wish to take advantage of the Unstarred Question of the noble Baroness, Lady Cox, to explain later why I think it unlikely that we can look forward to a similar alignment of Soviet and American policy in other circumstances.
Perhaps even more surprising is the non-exercise of the veto by China. Undoubtedly China was trying to edge back into some kind of respectability after the massacre of its dissidents and thought that nothing much would be gained by again antagonising the United States over a matter to which the American Government attached such importance. There is no reason to believe that the view of the world held by the Chinese Government is identical to that likely to be held by any major Western government.
With regard to the non-permanent members of the Security Council, no doubt there are different reasons why each of them should have been willing to go along with the, others—some of them part of the way and most of them, hitherto, all the way; but only in some cases. I believe that the right reverend Prelate was perfectly correct in saying that it was only in some cases and that they risked internal political problems by taking up a cause about which their peoples had doubts.
Therefore, in considering, as we should, how the world is to be made more secure and stable after the war is over, I share the right reverend Prelate's doubts in that respect, although the war was inevitable, necessary and right. In considering that, we should not think of the United Nations Charter, as it now stands, as a possible foundation for action. It seems to me that we must reconcile ourselves to the fact that we live in a world divided into regional cultures and different sets of ideologies. It is important to find methods by
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which the regions can be reconciled and, where they are not reconciled, they can find regional answers to at least some of their problems.
The powers of the United Nations are enormous, as we have seen on this occasion. They are also vulnerable. Noble Lords have mentioned sanctions. I agree with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wilberforce, that with sanctions we need to know how they are operating and we need to plan the technical side. However, sanctions are a weapon which cannot normally be relied upon for a simple reason with which I am afraid I have bored your Lordships on previous occasions, but I must do so again. Using sanctions as a peaceful method of settling disputes presupposes that both parties to the dispute have a similar wish to remain at peace. I found that difficult to believe in the case of Iraq. It always seemed to me that if the period were prolonged, as the noble Lord, Lord Hatch of Lusby, wished, Saddam Hussein would have seized some appropriate moment when we were off our guard to initiate military conflict rather than to suffer the humiliation of seeing his army immobilised by a total lack of fuel.
The example to which the right reverend Prelate referred with approval—sanctions against South Africa—is quite different. The South African Government have shown that in the last resort they do not want their people to suffer economically. They have taken the view, rightly, that the only way of getting back into the world economy is to make major internal changes. If Saddam Hussein were like President de Klerk, the scenario would look different. However, we are likely to find more Saddam Husseins than President de Klerks and we must therefore look with hope, but not optimism, at what must be done to construct a safer world order when the war is over.
3.57 p.m.
Lord Gladwyn: My Lords, we must all be grateful to my noble kinsman, Lord Campbell of Croy, for raising the vexed question of the correct application of Chapter VII of the Charter. I am also grateful to him for his kind remarks about myself. Perhaps I may add that I was not only the Acting Secretary General of the United Nations in 1945 but also took part in the negotiations and the actual drafting of the Charter at Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco. Therefore, the terms of Chapter VII of the Charter are graven as much on my mind as on his!
On one point I think we can all agree: as the noble Lord, Lord Beloff, has just said, the situation is very different now from what it was in 1945 when the Charter was agreed and duly came into force. Then the United Kingdom and France, though much weakened by the war, were still world powers, along with the United States of America and the Soviet Union; China was at best the most populous state. India was not independent. No other state had the slightest claim to be a world power. It was clear therefore that these five powers should be given prime responsibility in the Security Council for the preservation of world peace. That was generally agreed in 1945.

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What was not generally agreed then was that each of these powers should have the power of veto. Yet I was myself convinced at that time, and remained convinced thereafter, that without the power of veto there would have been no United Nations at all. The Russians always insisted on that. At the beginning of the negotiations the Americans appeared to resist it, but they would certainly not, in the event, have accepted majority voting in the Security Council. If they had done so, the whole Charter would not have been ratified by the Senate and the United States might have gone into isolation, as it did in 1919.
The veto—slightly modified by the Yalta voting formula for which I can claim a certain responsibility—remained, and after 46 years has still remained a prominent feature of the landscape. It was never in itself of course the reason why the United Nations has, up until recently, failed to function as the authors of the Charter intended. That reason was the apparent belief of Stalin that the United States was solely intent on using the United Nations for its own purposes and, more certainly, that the United States alone stood in the way of his own efforts to promote pro-Soviet governments throughout the world.
Fortunately the cold war has now, for the time being at any rate, apparently ended. We have succeeded to a large extent in using the United Nations for the main purpose for which it was originally designed; namely, successful and general resistance to obvious and unprovoked aggression. Why then do we not leave it as it is, confident in its future ability to fulfil this role in the probable event of some future crisis, whether in the Middle East or elsewhere? Unfortunately there are many reasons why we should be rash to bank on anything of the kind.
In the first place, the veto-wielding members of the Security Council now consist of one genuine super power, one former super power, two medium sized powers and an enormous state which seems to be chiefly preoccupied with its own interests. If and when the war in the Gulf is won by the application of immense American force with, for the most part, British assistance, the Security Council is thus likely to be regarded in the world as a whole—and certainly in the Middle East—not as a body, the decisions of which must be respected and obeyed, but rather as a manifestation of Anglo-Saxon dominance in world affairs.
Further, although the United Nations has, with great difficulty, effectively authorised the use of force against Iraq, this is not—this has already been pointed out by many speakers—strictly speaking, a United Nations war under Article 42 of the Charter. Theoretically such a war should be conducted under the auspices of the Military Staff Committee composed of the Chiefs of Staff of the five permanent members of the Security Council, or their representatives. However, regrettably, the Military Staff Committee does not in practice exist, and although we must all hope that it will be revived one day, there is seemingly no intention and no likelihood of reviving it. A United Nations force might nevertheless be formed—as in Korea—with a supreme commander
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nominated by the Security Council. However, this has not been done and, in spite of the hopes of the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Croy, there seems little chance of that being done in the future.
Still, if the projected conference on the Middle East, which is due to follow on the cessation of hostilities, is to have any success, it should surely be organised under the auspices of a Security Council which is both powerful and generally respected. This, on the face of it, would seem to require a certain change in the operation of the Security Council. Sir Anthony Parsons has had a creditable shot at how this might be done in an article in today's edition of The Times. However, it is not entirely clear how his "new kind of force", which he states should be at the disposal of the existing Security Council, would in practice be organised.
I myself, before venturing any definite opinion on this very difficult and contentious matter, would like to ponder over the collective wisdom of your Lordships as expressed in the debate this afternoon.
4.7 p.m.
Earl Attlee: My Lords, when I put my name down last week to speak in this debate, it appeared to me that I must be one of the few speakers who had never even heard of Chapter VII. However, thanks to the ever helpful staff in the Printed Paper Office, I obtained a little book which I have read diligently.
I wish to congratulate two speakers who obviously are very knowledgeable about this subject. I admit that I am not so knowledgeable about the subject. I did not realise before this debate that the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Croy, had taken such an active part in the matter we are discussing. I am impressed by that.
I read the book that I was given very carefully. It states that the aims of the charter are to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.
That sentence rang a bell with me. This morning I found a similar passage in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address of 19th November 1863. That address contains some of the most beautiful words that have ever been written on this subject. It states:
"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure".
That address may be better written than the preamble to the United Nations Charter, but the passages are similar. I find it interesting that way back then people conceived the idea that if you want freedom for all people you have to fight for it. As a child, I remember the League of Nations and what a pathetic organisation that was. It was a laughing stock. Whatever one wants to say about the present war in the Gulf, it shows that the United Nations can fight back. In saying that, many brave men are losing their lives. I recall being in Vancouver, Canada, and going

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ashore from my ship. They have, as most towns have, a war memorial and all it said on that war memorial was,
"They gave their todays for our tomorrows."
That again stands true today.
There has been talk not only in this House but in other places about sanctions; that if we had allowed more time the sanctions would ultimately have worked. I do not believe that sanctions have ever worked, nor do I believe that they ever will work. They did not work in Rhodesia and they did not work in South Africa.
To take the case of Rhodesia, who were the main sanctions busters? If sanctions were imposed on behalf of the black countries surrounding Rhodesia, it was they who broke those sanctions by feeding through their countries the goods and supplies that Rhodesia required. Why, my Lords? It was because they were making money out of it. That is a simple fact.
Sanctions are like blockades. They never work either. In two world wars, the might of Germany was unable to run a successful blockade of this country, which is a small island. Blockades do not work and sanctions will never work.
The right reverend Prelate was shocked by the fact that the allied forces had bombed water reservoirs in Baghdad. He said that particularly on humanitarian grounds. Yet the Iraqis have set forth tens of millions of gallons of oil which will despoil the whole of the sea coast there, probably for generations to come. A simple reservoir can be rebuilt, but there is a danger that the oil in the Gulf now will foul up all the machinery which produces fresh water for the whole of Saudi Arabia. I ask your Lordships to compare that alone, leaving out the millions of animals and seabirds which have been slaughtered or are suffering a terrible lingering death, with the bombing of one reservoir. The bombing then seems a very small thing.
I shall now turn to the subject matter in hand which is Chapter VII. I should like to make one point with regard to Article 51. I read it only last week and I marked the beginning which states:
"Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a member of the United Nations."
I take that to mean that we have a pact with Kuwait and that that pact states, "If you attack Kuwait, we will defend it. If someone attacks us, Kuwait will defend us." If, as some people claim, the United Nations have no right to do what they are doing now, I say that we in this country have every right. We are fulfilling our treaty obligations.
Many noble Lords here will remember that at the time of the Second World War we did not go to the defence of small countries when we should have done, and we all know the result. Someone has attacked a country with which we have a treaty. We are reacting. Thankfully the major power in the world, the United States of America, is helping to lead that attack. If Saddam Hussein thinks that he can rape the Middle East, he has been shown that it is a very dangerous thing to do.
Lord Hatch of Lusby: My Lords, before the noble Earl sits down, surely he recognises that he has cast a gross calumny on the black neighbours of Rhodesia. Was it not the South Africans who were supplying the bulk of materials to Rhodesia? Did we not leave Zambia 13 months after independence totally linked economically to Rhodesia? Were not this country and the United States themselves responsible for breaking sanctions? Has the noble Earl read the Bingham Report?
Earl Attlee: My Lords, all I know is that there was trade passing through the black countries. But if we are on that subject, perhaps I may make one point? For whose benefit were the sanctions against Rhodesia and South Africa? Basically they were for the benefit of the black people. But if you cut off the raw materials, how do the black people earn their living? They cannot do so. It is ridiculous. If you want to save the black people, you want to invest in South Africa. You do not want to take investment out of South Africa. That is cutting the throats of the blacks.
Lord Hatch of Lusby: My Lords, what is happening now?
4.17 p.m.
The Earl of Winchilsea and Nottingham: My Lords, I rise to speak in this valuable and timely short debate because I have had considerable personal experience of the plight of a people ignored by the world, even though they and their case have been the subject of numerous United Nations motions and resolutions. Several noble Lords will know the people to whom I am referring. But first imagine, if you will, that my home country has been brutally invaded by overwhelming military force and captured by the foreign power next door which is a full member of the UN.
I have been forced to flee into the open desert leaving all my possessions behind. I have been pursued by enemy planes and bombed and strafed. Thousands of my countrymen, women and children have been killed outright with many more dying later of wounds or lack of medical attention, food or water. Relatives were left behind who have been imprisoned and tortured. My country has been looted, raped and pillaged.
Am I a Kuwaiti? No, my Lords, I am not. I am a Saharawi from the western Sahara at the other end of the Arab world from the Gulf and I do not have the benefit of being oil rich; so I am not ensured that the free world is arrayed against the invader, my conquering neighbour. It is precisely that kind of situation which has given the UN such a bad name among those who are victims of invasion and oppression by countries that are members of the UN, sworn to uphold its basic underpinning principle of respect for other people's national boundaries and their basic human right of living unmolested in their own country.
Morocco invaded the western Sahara 16 years ago. Why was no task force sent out to repel the invader? Why was there not an immediate outcry at the UN

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against the invader? It was because the western Sahara had nothing that the rest of the world wanted and Morocco was of strategic importance to NATO.
Are we really prepared only to defend freedom and basic human rights when we are offered an economic return for our support? Do we put a price tag on those commodities as we would do for weaponry? Are we really prepared to continue to turn our collective blind eyes to all the millions of people who are the victims of other peoples' aggression? Double standards are very much in evidence and they make the United Nations a bitter pill for helpless people to swallow.
I do not for one second deny the agonies of Kuwait and its people, and I know that most of us support their struggle. My heart cries out to those who have been cast into the desert, because I have been there and I know what they are experiencing. But I should like your Lordships to weigh what the world is doing for the Kuwaitis against what it has failed to do for the Saharawi, the Timorese, the Palestinians, the Nicaraguans, the Hungarians in 1956 and the Czechs in 1968. We stand accused by most of the under-developed world of having double standards, and they are right—we do.
It is time we changed that. Freedom must not be for sale to the highest bidder. Perhaps one good thing that could come out of the Gulf war is that freedom, democracy and basic human rights will not have to pay a price to be upheld and enforced. I quote Ian McEwan from the Observer last Sunday, 3rd February. He wrote:
"A moral principle has no validity if it is applied selectively and self-servingly. Saddam's genocidal use of poison gas against the Kurdish nation did not lead to his ostracism from the community of nations, nor did it deter western governments from continuing to sell him arms. He was needed at that time to do battle against Iran"—
a battle which he started—
"Now the need is for low-priced oil".
It is a great pity that President Bush's outrage over the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was not mindful of United States actions over Nicaragua, Grenada and Vietnam, to name but a few. It would sound a lot more convincing if it were. Can we please abandon these outrageous practices of selecting those areas of conflict in the world where we will actively seek a solution based on what is in it for us and start applying the rules laid down in the United Nations Charter with impartiality for all?
However, I fail to see how the poor United Nations can ever hope to succeed in fulfilling the role for which it was created when the developed nations of the world persist in selling the under-developed nations assorted armaments and weaponry which are then, inevitably, used aggressively either on neighbouring countries or on those citizens of its own country who are opposed to the current regime; and, in the case of Iraq, on us the people who supplied them. That might have something to do with the fact that there are hardly any democracies in the underdeveloped world, and none
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whatever in the Arab world from the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf. Yesterday's Question and the answers concerning East Timor were timely and revealing.
4.23 p.m.
Baroness Elles: My Lords, the House owes a debt of gratitude to my noble friend Lord Campbell of Croy, not only for introducing this subject for debate today but also for his own personal, helpful and historical contribution.
I felt it was regrettable that this particular debate should have been confined to 2½ hours in view of the number of your Lordships who have served long years in the United Nations and who have great experience from which we could all benefit, especially because of the many complex and difficult issues that are raised: for example, the question of sanctions, which was so ably addressed by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wilberforce; the question of blockade by land, sea and air forces; the question of the right to self-defence and the right to resort to all measures necessary to restore peace in the region. What does that mean in legal and political terms?
Then there is the need for humanitarian aid to the thousands of refugees who have suffered in the past few months. Whatever the publicly expressed views of the Jordanian people may be—which may not be in conformity with our feelings in this House and in this country—towards the British forces in the Gulf, to whom we all pay warm tribute, tribute should be paid to all those Jordanians who are helping to relieve the sufferings and anxieties of the thousands of refugees who have poured into that poor and small country.
The adoption of the United Nations Charter in 1945 brought a new legal and political perspective to international relations and in particular, through its Chapter VII, to the settlement of disputes between nations. Lord McNair said in 1925:
"It is an illusion that law has a monopoly in the settlement of international disputes".
That is still partly true today; but certain parameters have been laid down within which armed force may be used legitimately against aggression. In the current situation in the Gulf, this is aggression which includes massive destruction, torture, murder and the expulsion of thousands of Kuwaitis from their homeland. It is relevant here to consider sanctions. I take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Hatch of Lusby, that it has not been economically proved whether sanctions have yet worked against Iraq. One has to consider that while sanctions were applied, for instance, to Rhodesia and South Africa, neither of those countries was in a state of war. They did not have their troops in other countries where people were daily being killed, tortured, massacred and expelled from their country. We have to look at sanctions in a very different light in the case of Iraq. We know what was going on in Kuwait and that was not going on in Rhodesia and South Africa. I do not say whether they were right or wrong, but I certainly think we must discriminate between cases where sanctions are applied—
The Lord Bishop of Manchester: My Lords, would the noble Baroness forgive me? Concerning sanctions in Southern Africa, she would appreciate—would she not?—that there was a war raging in Namibia under colonial occupation, and that many people were suffering.
Baroness Elles: My Lords, it is true that there was a war in Namibia; but I would not compare it with the position in Kuwait, especially considering the timescale that was bearing upon Kuwait with the rest of the world standing by, watching them being eliminated. That could have been considered a form of genocide, which is a crime against humanity far greater than any other crime mentioned in the United Nations Charter.
The role of the Security Council has been and is central to any action that may be taken. For the first time, as many of your Lordships have said, the five permanent members have been able to exert together the primary responsibility which is conferred upon the Security Council by all members of the United Nations in Article 24 of the Charter. That includes the provision that in agreeing to carry out its duties under this responsibility, the Security Council acts on their behalf. We should remind ourselves that all members of the United Nations take responsibility for the decisions of the Security Council when they are taken, as in this present case.
Further, and remarkably, the Security Council has shown that it can act speedily. Those of us who have served from time to time at the United Nations will often have deplored the long time lag between talking, decision and action. But in this case the Security Council condemned on the same day, in Resolution 660, on 2nd August the act of aggression committed by Iraq. Within four days, on 6th August, an economic embargo was imposed on Iraq, applicable to all member states of the United Nations.
This resolution and successive resolutions up to Resolution 678 all fall within the provisions of Chapter VII, culminating in the imposition of the deadline on 15th January. In this connection, we recall the enormous efforts to negotiate a peaceful settlement. I am sure that many of us will recall the picture of the Secretary-General, Perez de Cuellar, after his return from Baghdad, having made a final effort for peace which, alas, failed.
The United States, with the sacrifice of the lives of its people and its vast financial contribution, supported fully by the United Kingdom, deserves support in helping the international community as a whole in its efforts to restore Kuwait to its people. It could have been more comprehensible to the world public in general—if there is such a thing—if the armed forces had been sent under the United Nations flag.
My noble friend Lord Campbell of Croy reminded us that in the case of Korea, a similar situation, the United Nations forces went to Korea under the United Nations flag but with the decision of the Security Council to hand over military decisions to the United States. If this had happened in this case it
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would have given a much better understanding—I do not say impression, because that would be the wrong word—of the role of the allied forces in the Gulf today if they had come under the United Nations flag and not primarily under the United States.
Further on this question of who is taking part in this fight, we are very much at the mercy of news presentation. We see night after night American bombers and our own troops engaged in fighting. This is quite right and proper, and the world should be informed. However, it gives an uneven picture and an inevitable imbalance of what is happening. We are not reminded daily of what the Iraqis have done and are doing in Kuwait, or what they are doing to their own people, or to the dangers to which they are submitting their own people and troops. Therefore, we are imbued with this news the whole time of the might of the American forces without always taking into account the reasons why they are so necessary, and taking into account the work that they are doing and which they intend to complete.
At the conclusion of hostilities, whoever is in control of Iraq at the time, with the elimination of troops from Iraq there will be pressing considerations deserving and needing international support to restore peace in the region, as well as the settlement of long-standing problems without which there will never be, and could not be, peace in the region. For instance, the territorial borders of the Arab states, including Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, and of course Israel must be respected and ensured so that Christian, Jew and Moslem can live in peace in the region without the threat of force or oppression from any one particular country.
The problem of vast numbers of refugees returning to their homelands, the restoration of massive material destruction that has taken place, will be major tasks not only for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees but for the world community as a whole. Is it conceivable that all these tasks, and indeed many others, could be undertaken under Chapter VII of the charter? I was thinking in particular of Article 45 concerning agreements regarding contingency forces of member states being available for the maintenance of peace. In this connection, I would think of the emphasis on Arab states contributing.
Are state members being requested at the conclusion of this conflict to provide troops—and again I say particularly from the Arab states—for a police-keeping force in the region, with greater powers than were hitherto generally available to the United Nations peace-keeping forces? Can these provisions of Article 45 referring to combined international enforcement action apply in terms of peace as well as during an armed conflict?
In Resolution 665 of 25th August, reference is made to the Military Staff Committee. Here I ask a question of which I have given notice to my noble friend. Can the Minister tell the House what role, if any, this committee has so far played during the current situation, and is it envisaged to have a role at the end of the conflict not only to supervise and monitor any

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police peace-keeping force that may be established but also to assist in the regulation of possible disarmament as provided in Article 47(1) of the charter?
The United Nations, with its failings and its obvious weaknesses, perhaps with continued co-operation between the five permanent members of the Security Council, will be supported by the hopes of people who wish to see peace in the world. It is only the United Nations, so far as I can see, that has the combined task on behalf of the world community of peacemaking, peace-keeping, peace enforcing and peace building, and we wish them every success. If one cannot be an optimist, at least one can hope.
4.35 p.m.
Lord Greenhill of Harrow: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Croy, has proposed a very timely debate. He has done so eloquently, drawing on his long and relevant experience, and the debate has already produced an important and interesting statement by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wilberforce, on the problems of sanctions in the modern world. It has also given us an opportunity to pay tribute once again to the noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, for the part that he played in the creation of the United Nations. I was always impressed, reading the Charter, by the wisdom of those people who had that initial task.
Discussion of Chapter VII cannot, I believe, be undertaken in isolation. The United Nations Charter is a mature document. It is in fact older than the noble Earl on the government Front Bench, who will wind up for the Foreign Office. It is surprising that it has not been amended in any significant way. But can it continue unchanged much longer? In the past there have been suggestions for reform of the Charter, which would of course have included Chapter VII.
I was, on more than one occasion, with the noble Lord, Lord Stewart of Fulham—and I think that the noble Lord, Lord Bridges, was there also—when he suggested to Gromyko that some amendments to the Charter might be discussed between us. We were at that time looking for some new means for the peaceful settlement of disputes and improvement of Chapter VI. But Gromyko's response was always the same. It was the famous Soviet, "nyet". However, he gave what seemed to me a good reason. He spoke to Lord Stewart in a rather fatherly way on the following lines, "If you had known how terribly difficult it was to agree the existing text, you would not be suggesting that we start discussing it all over again".
Chapter VII, and particularly Articles 41 and 42, were designed to be the teeth of the Charter; the means by which the organisation disciplined those who wished to break the peace, and the discipline which could be imposed by the use of force. The authors of course envisaged a postwar world which never came about. As might have been expected the Charter reflected—and particularly in Chapter VII—the way in which the allies had successfully conducted World
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War II, and they assumed their harmony and the immense power of the new weapons would continue unchallenged and in their control.
It involved a military committee in New York, which would act like a combined chiefs of staff committee. In the event, this committee never had a chance of planning or running a United Nations war. It was not equipped to do so, and could not do so now. But times have changed. It looks very much as though the Security Council can, for the time being, act in unison, but it is by no means certain that this unity will continue.
A new and ugly factor is that many countries now possess sophisticated weaponry and cannot be intimidated into abandoning aggressive policies. The non-proliferation treaty is not universally accepted and could always be evaded. The plain fact is that Chapter VII is out of date and will, in the long term, need modernisation. What changes can usefully be made will depend upon the outcome of the present war, and for the time being we must carry on as best we can.
Reference has been made to Sir Anthony Parsons' perceptive article, which the noble Lord will have seen, in today's Times. No one is more qualified than he to speak because of his involvement in the Falklands war and the time he spent in New York. He underlines the inadequacy of the present system and explains where it has failed in the past.
However, once a revision of the Charter becomes a matter of international discussion, it is not only Chapter VII that will be called into question. Pandora's Box will be opened and there will be calls for changes from large numbers of the membership. First and foremost will surely be a call for a change in the composition of the Security Council, and British interests will be very much involved. Some people already speak of a single European seat. What role will Japan wish to play? There are other countries with populations of well over 100 million in Africa and South America which will wish to play a much bigger part than they have done hitherto. Gromyko's warnings come again to mind and will be seen to have some justification.
History will show the Gulf war to have been worth while only if eventually it leads to a redesigned United Nations which will have to show how world order can be assured and how a revised Chapter VII will be made to play its part.
4.40 p.m.
Lord Thomson of Monifieth: My Lords, I join with all noble Lords in expressing gratitude to the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Croy, who has performed a very timely service in initiating this debate on the future of the United Nations operations under Chapter VII of its Charter.
There has been a great deal of criticism of the United Nations during the course of this debate. The United Nations simply reflects the kind of world that we live in; a world of conflicting national interests, commercial rivalries and competing alliances. But it is the task of mankind to fulfil what I believe is the spirit

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that lies behind the Motion of the noble Lord, Lord Campbell; namely, to seek ways of creating a more civilised international order. That is a justification for the points that he put before your Lordships' House this afternoon.
Despite the many imperfections of the United Nations, it is important to remember that during its 50 years of existence it has provided a permanent and at times important forum for international debate and discussion in times of danger. One must remember that it has quietly gone on with its own technical assistance programme which has been very valuable to the countries of the third world. But, as a number of noble Lords have said, it is absolutely true that the United Nations has not been able to fulfil the high hopes with which it was born in terms of creating an effective international peace-keeping force. It was not able to develop the potential for peace-keeping in the various articles of Chapter VII, as described by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell. As this debate has made clear, the reason was that the birth of the United Nations at Dumbarton Oaks in San Francisco took place only a short time before the beginning of the cold war, which deeply divided the permanent members of the Security Council with their powers of veto.
The noble Lord, Lord Campbell, gave a vivid first-hand account of the only major collective United Nations' action for peace which took place in the face of North Korean aggression in 1950. But now momentous changes within the Soviet empire have created a new situation. It is a situation with many risks and dangers as well as hopes, but with new possibilities of enabling the United Nations to pursue its original purpose as an effective world peace-keeping force. For the first time in United Nations' history both economic sanctions and collective military action against aggression are taking place with the full authority of the United Nations set out in a series of Security Council resolutions.
I do not think that the noble Lord, Lord Campbell, intended this to be a debate on the Gulf war and I shall not talk, about that other than to say that there is no doubt that once Saddam Hussein is forced to withdraw from Kuwait, as undoubtedly he will be as a result of this collective security action, there will be an unrepeatable period of opportunity to build on that outcome. I welcome the words of the Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, at the weekend to the effect that we must begin to prepare to use peace wisely. If the United Nations has had the authority to undertake the war in the Gulf, we should seek a United Nations responsibility for the peace that follows.
One immediate task will be to tackle the wider problem of establishing peace and security throughout the Middle East. I do not for a moment underestimate the difficulties involved and I do not intend to go into them in this debate. This debate relates to an even wider aim which goes beyond the Security Council resolutions relating to Kuwait and the Middle East in order to seek to make more of a reality of the peace-keeping articles of Chapter VII.
I agree with what has been said by the noble Lord, Lord Greenhill; namely, that Chapter VII is now more
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than 50 years old and relates to a world that has changed tremendously. As Sir Anthony Parsons argues in the article just cited, it is no longer realistic to consider implementing some of the provisions of Chapter VII in the way that was thought possible at the time that the chapter was drafted. Either the chapter must be modernised with all the formidable difficulties that lie along that path, as the noble Lord, Lord Greenhill, indicated, or, as has been done so often with the United Nations, we must modernise and adapt our international practice of diplomacy within the Charter. It was in that spirit that I think we all listened with very great interest to the ideas of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wilberforce, that after Kuwait we must seek to make very much more effective the international pooling of information and techniques relating to sanctions through the United Nations. Again, there is a very real role for much more contingency planning for the future in these matters. There is a need to look again at Chapter VI of the charter with regard to steps in relation to the peaceful settlement of disputes.
These matters are urgent. They are practical issues. We are in a very new world situation. Since the start of the cold war, the safeguard against a major world conflict has not been the United Nations but the balance of nuclear terror between the two superpowers and the military alliances. That balance has been costly and frightening but for 40 years it has acted as a deterrent to a third world war. Now that the Cold War is ending there is a much less stable situation and an urgent need to create an effective form of world order. The only way to do that is through the United Nations. In any case, as we all know, the balance of nuclear power had its limits. Around it smaller and often bloody conflicts have taken place, sometimes fed by cold war rivalries. At times the blue berets of the United Nations have been called in to police the partial settlements with varying degrees of success, as noble Lords have said. Sir Anthony Parsons has some interesting ideas on how one might move forward to a more effective form of United Nations forces.
Again, the military technology and commercial rivalries of the international arms trade have made it possible for medium-sized and even small countries to acquire weapons of terror: chemical, biological and, ultimately, even nuclear. The United Nations has the particular responsibility of trying to bring about the regulation and limitation of the international arms trade. Countries, however poor and small, have a right to the means of conventional self-defence, but the weapons of modern terror are another matter. They demand urgent international regulation.
All those issues can be dealt with inside the present United Nations Charter but it needs adapting in fundamental ways. All noble Lords were fascinated to hear the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, who helped to draft the original Charter. His years have not dimmed his constructive zeal for progress in international order, nor the fertility of his mind in seeking practical reforms in the United Nations machinery.

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The speech of the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, reminded me that a companion of the noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, at the San Francisco conference was the then Deputy Prime Minister, Mr. Attlee. I read that he went to the conference as an idealist but not a starry-eyed idealist. He remarked that any hope for the United Nations depended upon the agreement of the great powers. That is now a cliché but perhaps not then so obvious.
For the first time since the foundation of the United Nations we have that agreement among the great powers, however temporary it may be. We all hope that it will last much longer. There has been a fateful act of will to go to collective war in the interests of peace. Surely it cannot be starry-eyed to urge that the sacrifices of life by both sides in the Gulf war should give us a powerful reason to seek to make the United Nations charter more effective in order to prevent any repetition of the kind of aggression through which Saddam Hussein has plunged his people, and many others, into such suffering.
4.52 p.m.
Lord Richard: My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Croy, for introducing the debate today. No one can disagree with the fact that it is timely. It is extremely helpful and useful to discuss at this time the role of the United Nations. The discussion is not confined to the Gulf war but extends to the lessons that can be drawn from the way in which the UN has behaved in relation to it which will serve us well in the future.
The United Nations, analysed as it has been by many noble Lords during the past six months, has come in for considerable criticism. As always I enjoyed the eloquent pessimism of the noble Lord, Lord Beloff. Again he told the House that nations are moved by their perceptions of national interest. Of course they are; no one questions that for an instant. However, I am sure he will agree that perceptions of national interest are not static; they change. It may be that a number of countries now perceive their national interests to lie in having an effective and efficient mechanism at an international level for settling international disputes. I am conscious of the fact that the Soviet Union now clearly perceives the United Nations as being a body which it is in its national interests to support. I do not say that that view will be permanent, that it will be written in tablets of stone in the Kremlin wall, and that hereafter the Soviet Union will always behave with the degree of rationality that we in the West hope for. However, I am saying that for the first time since 1945 perceptions of national interests held by the world's major countries appear to be converging.
I have always understood that one of the UN's objectives is to provide an international institution for settling situations where perceptions of national interest differ. One must have some way of resolving a dispute between countries which may feel equally deeply about their national interests. If there is no way of settling such disputes by peaceful means, the outlook for the world is sad.
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I wish to make a general point. My noble friend Lord Hutch of Lusby, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester and other noble Lords castigated what the United Nations has done and is doing in the Gulf. The right reverend Prelate said that it does not look like a genuine UN operation; rather that the UN appears to have been hijacked. I wish to make a small plea. If we have a situation in which the Security Council agrees with the United States we must not assume that the Security Council has gone wrong. If one looks at the history of the resolutions dating back to 2nd August it is instructive to consider the wealth of experience of the various countries which are members of the Security Council. The council does not consist only of the five permanent members; there are 10 non-permanent members. Most of the resolutions that were passed relating to the Gulf episode received the conscious approval of all the non-permanent countries.
Which countries have been hijacked by the United States and the United Kingdom during the past few months? I shall name them, and your Lordships can draw your own conclusions. Three are African countries; Zaire, Ethiopia and the Ivory Coast. That is a fair spread of African opinion and it is interesting to note that there is not one Anglophone country among them. There are two Western countries, Canada and Finland, and one Eastern European country, Romania. There are two Asian countries; Malaysia and the Yemen, and, finally, a Caribbean and a South American country, Cuba and Colombia. If one adds to those countries the five permanent members one has a fair spread of international opinion that will be difficult to emulate and almost impossible to surpass.
What happened when the issue came before the Security Council? It is extraordinary that the original resolutions —even going back to Resolutions 660 and 661—were expressed to be under Chapter VII of the Charter. When I was in New York I was vigorously instructed that no language that even hinted at action under Chapter VII would be acceptable to Her Majesty's Government. That appeared to be a recurrent instruction sent to all UN ambassadors. However, I must confess—and I do not do so with pride—to having cast three vetoes in one morning. I and two other Western ambassadors cast a total of nine vetoes in 12 minutes. All related to southern African resolutions not because they fell under Chapter VII but because they merely hinted at action under that Chapter.
We have now reached the stage when the world community as a whole, faced with an act of aggression, can almost immediately move international action under the enforcement provisions of Chapter VII of the Charter. That is extraordinarily encouraging—
The Lord Bishop of Manchester: My Lords, I made clear in my remarks the fact that I too found most encouraging the initial coming together of all those nations in the Security Council. However, I made the

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point that the military operation did not look like a United Nations operation because of the strength of the American involvement.
Lord Richard: My Lords, with respect, I regard that as being about a point and a half down the road this afternoon.
I wish to make a further comment about the way in which co-operation appears to be developing in the United Nations. I hesitate to say that it is a case of cause and effect but the situation has improved enormously since I left. The degree of co-operation, discussion and co-ordination that is now taking place among the five permanent members of the Security Council is extraordinary. One has reached a stage where there is almost a rotating chairmanship of one of the five permanent members. There are regular meetings; I believe that there is even a rudimentary secretariat. One has reached a situation in which the spirit of the Charter is being implemented by the five so-called most powerful countries on earth although it is possible to argue whether Britain and France should still be included in that category. I accept that argument. I accept also that if one looks at amendments to the Charter, one is opening a Pandora's Box and that, as Ernest Bevin once said, "Who knows what Trojan horses will come out of it?" The fact is that at present the Charter is beginning to operate in the way envisaged.
Perhaps I may deal with a point raised by the right reverend Prelate. If one looks at the enforcement provisions of the Charter, it is clear that prima facie the direction of action must lie with the Security Council. It is clear also that there are a number of articles in the Charter and a number of hoops through which one must go before one reaches a stage of a UN war. I share the view of the noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, that this is not a UN war under Article 42 of the Charter. If it were, the Military Staff Committee of the Security Council would be playing a much more active part. The words of Article 47 are:
"The Military Staff Committee shall be responsible under the Security Council for the strategic direction of any armed forces placed at the disposal of the Security Council. Questions relating to the command of such forces shall be worked Out subesquently".
Therefore, if it is an enforcement provision under Article 42, then prima facie the Military Staff Committee must be involved in that way.
I must say to your Lordships that I do not believe that that is possible at present. Whether one believes it to be desirable as an intellectual exercise that a war should be run by a Military Staff Committee consisting of the five chiefs of staff of the five permanent members is one question. However, the technology of warfare has outstripped the decision-making process as envisaged in the treaty. Matters are progressing too quickly on a technological level on the battlefield for a Military Staff Committee as at present constituted to be able to exercise the control which the Charter seems to envisage.
I come to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Greenhill. If out of the Gulf war there emerges a general feeling that the Charter needs to be looked at again so that those enforcement provisions and the difficulties of grafting the Charter's provisions on to
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the technology of modern warfare can he overcome, then some good will come out of the war not only in relation to Kuwait but more generally.
I conclude by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Croy, for raising the issue. There is a club of people who at some stage have worked for the United Nations. I believe that we should have a tie so that we are all recognisable. However, in the time honoured phrase, very few of us who have worked there have failed to go native. One goes native because the UN is a unique organisation in which one sees a genuine attempt to create an international consensus at the highest possible level. I found my work there inspiriting. It was occasionally depressing but—if I may say this to the noble Lord, Lord Beloff—I was more optimistic about the organisation when I came out than when I went in.
5.3 p.m.
The Earl of Caithness: My Lords, I too am grateful to my noble friend Lord Campbell of Croy with his great experience for initiating this debate and indeed to those of your Lordships who have taken part in it. It is timely because Chapter VII of the UN Charter has never been invoked as much as in the past six months. Through the handling of the Gulf crisis, parts of the UN Charter regarded by many commentators as a dead letter have been shown to possess unexpected life and potential.
The preamble of the UN Charter begins by noting the determination of the people of the United Nations:
"to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war".
The question of how to do this is the specific subject of the 13 articles of Chapter VII. They therefore form a cornerstone of the Charter as a whole.
As the Motion states, Chapter VII deals with:
"action with respect to threats to the peace, breaches of the peace, and acts of aggression".
Together with Chapter VI, dealing with the "Pacific Settlement of Disputes", it sets out the special powers accorded to the Security Council so that the council may exercise the:
"primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security"
conferred on it by the members of the United Nations under Article 24 of the Charter.
The provisions of Chapter VII reflect the concerns of the drafters of the Charter, at the San Francisco conference in 1945, to set up a system for the maintenance of international peace and security which would be more effective than that of the League of Nations. The League's provisions in this area had shown themselves to be inadequate. Under the League's covenant, each member state had been allowed to reserve the right to determine for itself whether the hostile actions of another state amounted to a breach of the covenant, and whether or not to comply with the League's recommendations—for they were no more than that on how to respond. The events of the 1930s had demonstrated all too clearly the fatal shortcomings of such a system.

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With the drafting of Chapter VII of the UN Charter, these shortcomings were tackled by explicitly concentrating the power to take decisive action on the Security Council. The council was given the power to determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace or act of aggression and what should be done about it. Moreover, under Article 25 of the Charter, all members of the United Nations are bound to accept and carry out the council's decisions. Under Article 103, obligations arising under the Charter prevail over a member's obligations under other international agreements.
Action may only be taken by the Security Council under Chapter VII where there is a threat to the peace, a breach of the peace or an act of aggression. All decisions of the Security Council on non-procedural matters require the concurring votes of the five permanent members. It is chiefly for this reason that the council has so rarely determined that such a situation exists. Through the long decades of the cold war, occasions when the five permanent members—in particular the United States and the Soviet Union—took a common view were rare. Before the present crisis in the Gulf erupted on 2nd August last year, the council had only done so explicitly in six cases: Palestine in 1948, Korea in 1950 (in the absence of the Soviet Union), Southern Rhodesia in the late 1960s and 1970s; South Africa in 1977; the Falklands in 1982; and the Iran/Iraq war in 1987.
Where a threat to the peace, a breach of the peace or an act of aggression exists, the Security Council has the choice of either making recommendations for action or deciding on mandatory measures. These mandatory measures can be ordered under Article 41, which covers measures not involving the use of armed force, such as complete or partial interruption of economic, transport and communication links, and the breaking of diplomatic relations. The economic sanctions against Rhodesia and the arms embargo against South Africa are examples of this.
If non-forcible measures are insufficient, Article 42 provides for the Security Council to take such action by air, sea or land forces as may be necessary to maintain or restore international peace and security. However, the five permanent members have never been able to agree which forces should be put at the council's disposal and what they should do. Articles 43 to 45, relating to agreements between member states and the Security Council for the provision of forces and other assistance, have never been implemented.
Perhaps it may be opportune to pause and consider a quotation from the then Sir Gladwyn Jebb, now the noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, one of the founding fathers of the Charter, which he made in the Security Council on 7th July 1950 in connection with the Korean war. He said:
"Had the Charter come fully into force and had the agreement provided for in Article 43 of the Charter been concluded, we should, of course, have proceeded differently, and the action to be taken by the Security Council would no doubt have been founded on Article 42. As it is, however, the
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Council can naturally act only under Article 39, which enables the Security Council to recommend what measures should be taken to restore international peace and security".
Subsequent articles of Chapter VII also remain unfulfilled. Articles 46 and 47 deal with the Military Staff Committee, consisting of the chiefs of staff of the permanent five members or their representatives, and tasked according to Article 47 with:
"advising and assisting the Security Council on all questions relating to the Security Council's military requirements for the maintenance of international peace and security, the employment and command of forces placed at its disposal, the regulation of armaments, and possible disarmament".
The Military Staff Committee was duly established in 1945, and has continued to this day to meet roughly twice a month. However, in the absence of any forces placed at the council's disposal on the basis of the special agreements referred to in these articles, it has never exercised the responsibilities orginally envisaged for it.
Perhaps my noble friend Lord Campbell of Croy, as a military man, would agree that it is difficult to believe that the five members of the Military Staff Committee could have undertaken the strategic direction of armed forces placed at the disposal of the Security Council with anything like the speed and efficiency of the coalition commanders.
Articles 48 and 49 concern implementation of Security Council decisions by the members of the United Nations. Article 50 deals with the question of assistance to states which find themselves confronted with special economic problems arising from the carrying out of measures taken by the Security Council. This article was invoked by various front line states when sanctions were placed on Rhodesia. Finally, Article 51, the chapter's concluding article, records the important principle that the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence remains unimpaired by the other provisions of the Charter, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.
I turn now to the present. The application of Chapter VII during the Gulf crisis has shown that it has sufficient versatility to cope with circumstances that might not have been directly anticipated by its drafters in 1945.
The present crisis in the Gulf represents the seventh occasion when the Security Council has made an explicit formal determination that there exists a breach of international peace and security under Article 39 of the Charter. It was undoubtedly right to do so. A more unequivocal breach of the Charter than Saddam Hussein's aggression against Kuwait is hard to imagine. It is also the third occasion when the Council has proceeded to call for mandatory measures under Chapter VII, imposing comprehensive economic sanctions on Iraq and occupied Kuwait under Security Council Resolution 661. These were subsequently reinforced by maritime enforcement measures under Resolution 665 and an air embargo under Resolution 670. Resolution 665 also provided for the use of mechanisms of the Military Staff Committee. On five occasions in the second half of

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1990 ad hoc meetings of the Military Staff Committee provided a forum for the exchange of information on the measures taken by maritime forces to enforce the embargo.
Other articles of Chapter VII have also been invoked as part of the council's response to the Iraqi invasion. Resolution 669 led to the establishment of a special working group of the council's Sanctions Committee, to consider requests for economic assistance under Article 50, from states suffering economic disruption as a result of applying sanctions. The working group dealt with applications from 19 countries in the last quarter of the year.
Article 51 of Chapter VII was invoked in Resolution 661, affirming the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence in response to Iraq's armed attack on Kuwait. This inherent right provided a firm legal basis for the government of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states to request the assistance of the armed forces of other states following the Iraqi invasion.
The comprehensive economic sanctions imposed by Resolution 661 represent only one form of the mandatory measures under Chapter VII called for by the council in response to the Gulf crisis. Since 15th January the member states co-operating with Kuwait have been authorised to use all necessary means to that end in the face of persistent Iraqi intransigence. They have resorted to military force in order to see the council's resolutions implemented and upheld.
The council has not invoked Article 42 explicitly and the command and control arrangements of the forces continue to be handled by host nations and contributing countries for reasons of military efficacy. Nevertheless—and the noble Lord, Lord Richard, made the point to the right reverend Prelate better than I can—it is because of Resolution 678 that the forces are operating just as much on the basis of UN authority as if they were under UN command.
I have no doubt that when the present crisis is over much thought will be given to its lessons and the issues raised in this debate will be much discussed. One theme will be the lessons learnt from the implementation of sanctions. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Wilberforce, majored on this in a most interesting and apposite speech. He drew attention to the importance of Article 41 in the scheme of Chapter VII and the considerable practical and legal difficulties of imposing economic sanctions.
Sanctions have been, quite rightly, a central pillar of the international community's response to the Iraqi invasion. The operation of the embargo represents a comprehensive indictment of Iraqi aggression. Sanctions have been almost universally enforced. Iraq has suffered considerable economic dislocation. Its oil exports have been effectively stopped; its imports reduced to a trickle, and its access to foreign exchange drastically cut back. But, as my noble friend Lord Beloff reminded the House, the key test of their effectiveness would have been whether sanctions forced Saddam Hussein to change his policies and to comply with the Security Council's resolutions. This
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they did not do. Nor was there any evidence that sanctions alone would do so. There are many who would agree with the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, that they would never do so. Iraq has taken steps to increase its domestic food production. Key military industries, supplying one of the world's largest armies, have been insulated from the effects of the embargo. And meanwhile the ordeal of the Kuwaiti people continued.
Sanctions were, and remain, a significant element in the international pressure on Iraq to withdraw its forces from Kuwait. In terms of their effectiveness, they mark the most thorough and comprehensive application of sanctions ever. And yet even they were not conclusive. Economic pressure alone was an inadequate match for military aggression. In these circumstances, and with the UN's authority, it was right to resort to the use of force.
Nevertheless the noble Lord, Lord Hatch of Lusby, claimed that he had given me evidence that sanctions would work. He has not. He has now summarised on three occasions what Judge Webster said to the House Armed Services Committee on 5th December, and each time he has changed the wording of what was said. In contrast to the inaccurate generalisations that he has made let me quote from Judge Webster's statement. He said:
"Our judgment has been and continues to be that there is no assurance or guarantee that economic hardships will compel Saddam to change his policies".
It is impossible to predict at this stage how the Security Council will respond to future crises. But we must be realistic. There is no immediate prospect of the conclusion of the special agreements on the provision of forces and other assistance referred to in Articles 43 to 45. Consequently—as will be deduced by my noble friend Lady Elles from what I have said—the full activation of the Military Staff Committee or the establishment of a standby UN deterrent force is not on the short-term agenda either.
Lord Hatch of Lusby: My Lords, with the leave of the House, perhaps I can ask whether the noble Earl intends to take just that small section of the quotation from Judge Webster.
The Earl of Caithness: My Lords, I quoted exactly from Judge Webster's statement. I did not make a generalisation, as did the noble Lord.
Lord Hatch of Lusby: My Lords, that is being selective.
The Earl of Caithness: My Lords, it would be wrong to conclude from this that Chapter VII has been in some sense deficient. The noble Lord, Lord Greenhill of Harrow, described it as out of date. I would submit that the council's handling of the Gulf crisis suggests the opposite. To the noble Lord, Lord Thomson of Monifieth, I would quote one great expert on the Charter, Sydney Bailey, who said:
"The challenge is not to draft a better Charter: it is to make better use of the Charter we have".
I take issue with those noble Lords who argued that Chapter VII is out of date in the sense that it needs revision. The Charter is a flexible instrument and has

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proved its worth on this occasion. It would be very dangerous to open the Pandora's Box, to which some noble Lords have already referred. The noble Lord, Lord Richard, with his profound experience of the UN, reminded us that response has been unprecedented, and of the hope that that offered.
A series of 12 powerful resolutions have been adopted under Chapter VII, all unanimously or with overwhelming majorities. There has been the closest co-operation between the council's five permanent members. Ad hoc mechanisms of the Military Staff Committee have proved their worth for the exchange of information on naval deployments and the maritime embargo. Resolution 678 has shown that there are ways of giving a multi-national force the authority of the United Nations under Chapter VII of the Charter, while retaining the military advantages of leaving responsibility for command and control arrangements with the nations involved.
In his speech the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, drew attention to the preamble to the Charter and surely its most poetic part. If we read on we come to these words, which I believe are particularly relevant to what the noble Earl, Lord Winchilsea and Nottingham, said:
"To live together in peace with one another as good neighbours and to unite their strength to maintain international peace and security."
I do not follow the noble Earl down the path which he wanted to go in comparing cases. They are all different. The United Nations itself as an institution certainly cannot be blamed if it fails to resolve all the disputes in the world. Unfortunately, there has not always been unanimity among the members of the United Nations on past occasions. The world has changed radically since the Charter was drafted and will no doubt go on doing so. I agree with my noble friend Lord Campbell of Croy that the important matter is that the Charter is sufficiently flexible to tackle specific situations quickly and effectively. The Security Council has shown in the past six months that this is indubitably so. It is no exaggeration to say that it is at last acting with the vigour, determination and authority which its drafters envisaged.
5.21 p.m.
Lord Campbell of Croy: My Lords, I would like to thank all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate. I have a few minutes left in this limited-time debate, but it is difficult to say as much as one would wish. I wish to reply to two or three points raised about my opening speech. I pointed to the fact that the Military Staff Committee, although formed, had never operated with agreement as intended. I would like to make it clear that I do not suggest that it should do that. I think that the time for formal agreements, with contingents earmarked, is well past. I agree with what has been said about that. Whether or not more is done in the MSC, there should be a focus for provisional consideration of suitable contributions from members in a crisis. A great deal more work could be done on that in peace-time. That can be done in all kinds of
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fields. I refer, for example, to the financial and medical side, because field hospitals and the like are greatly needed.
That need not affect the command structure. I should like to make it clear again that my interpretation of Article 47, quoted by the noble Lord, Lord Richard, allows for command matters to be worked out subsequently, as stated. To my mind that means separately. What happened both in Korea and in the Gulf is that a commander was appointed outside and not connected with the MSC. That is in line with my interpretation of that part of the Charter.
I am particularly grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Richard, for his contribution to the debate based on the five years of his distinguished career as our ambassador at the United Nations. He spoke of a club of people who had worked there. Perhaps I may give an illustration of that in my own case. After having been a junior Minister in a Conservative Government in another place, I was asked immediately after the election to join, and I served on, the panel of advisers on the United Nations which the Labour Party set up in accordance with its election manifesto.
There has always been a bi-partisan approach within British politics to United Nations' affairs. That is to be welcomed and is most refreshing. I am particularly grateful to my noble friend Lord Caithness for his reply, knowing that he has just come back having spent five days in the Far East. He dealt with most of the important points, if not all of them. As we are now engaged in a war, perhaps I may mention that his father and I were in the same brigade of a Scottish division for two years. We took part in some major military actions which we both had the good luck to survive. I am now delighted that my noble friend is taking a leading part in the world's councils.
I agree with what he said at the end of his remarks. The main and realistic course is to make better use of the Charter as it is. We can see what has not been done and what could be better done. We might redraft it if we had another chance now, as the noble Lord, Lord Greenhill, said in a very thoughtful speech. The most realistic policy is to make it work as best we can. That has been done in the case of the Gulf crisis, but I believe that a great deal of work needs to be done when that crisis is over. Work should be done under the Charter in improving arrangements for any future situation of the same kind. My Lords, I beg leave to withdraw my Motion for Papers.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

Farm Commodities: Over-Production
5.26 p.m.
Lord Stanley of Alderley Lord Stanley of Alderley rose to call attention to the case for controlling over-production of farm commodities in the United Kingdom; and to move for Papers.
The noble Lord said: My Lords, the problems of the United Kingdom cannot be resolved in isolation. We must have regard to the European and indeed worldwide food surpluses. British agriculture is

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virtually bankrupt. One of the main reasons is over-production. I ask your Lordships: what can we do about it? I believe that we must all accept the fact that we are bankrupt. Until we do that we shall make no progress in solving our problem. I say "our problem" because it is not just the Government who are to blame; we all are. We pay too much for our agricultural land; we pay uneconomic rents, and that is partly caused by roll-over relief and a natural human desire to farm. The great difficulty is being able to get out of farming once you are in it.
The high land prices and rents then force farmers to produce more, so adding to the problem. We shall not solve our problem until we recognise our bankrupt state and so force down land prices and rents, thus allowing us to farm less intensively. Governments must also shoulder some blame in encouraging us over past decades to go down that path. My point is that we must accept the situation, stop crying over spilt milk, and try to solve our problem. The first requirement in solving it is to discover the aim of British agriculture. Without a clear objective we shall fail.
In any policy to control surpluses we must insist at the end of the day that the centuries of achievement and work which have made British agriculture, dynamic, resourceful and efficient, must be preserved and indeed encouraged. It is the Government's responsibility to ensure fair trading conditions, so enabling a reasonable livelihood for those remaining in farming. If my noble friend Lady Trumpington does not agree with that objective—and I think she does—I hope that she will say what her alternative is. Certainly the MacSharry proposals, concentrating support on the very small part-time farmer, would do the opposite. Why subsidise inefficient peasant holdings at the expense of the British farmer and farm worker?
I believe that any other objective, particularly the MacSharry proposals, will cause the following problems. First, they will cause higher food prices that will encourage imports and make us lose our markets; secondly, they will lead to an inefficient high-cost, unhygienic and indeed dangerous peasant agriculture; thirdly, they will place an impossible strain on the GATT negotiations and destroy—this is possibly what I mind most—the soul of the farmer. Will any farmer wish to produce half crops or manage livestock inefficiently? Will he have any self-respect left if he has to live off social security payments, as suggested by MacSharry? Fourthly, they will cause more environmental damage because an illiterate, struggling peasant agriculture will not have the ability to keep and improve our countryside. I hope that I have carried your Lordships with me so far. The question is: how do we achieve our objective?
First, as I have said before, we must all recognise that, as we are bankrupt, the do-nothing situation is just not an option. Indeed it would encourage more production, resulting in more bankruptcies. Moreover, time is not on our side. We have dillied and dallied far too long and a decision is essential. I used to think that the way forward was market forces, or
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the devil take the hindmost. This could still work if we had a level field, but sadly this is not possible, or certainly not possible in the short term.
If I may, I will give my usual simple example, which I know always irritates my noble friend on the Front Bench. If I am to have a level field I must be allowed to take out useless hedges, perhaps have all rectangular 100-acre fields and be allowed to burn my straw. The ban on burning will cost me £30 an acre; I am not allowed to burn, and, moreover, I am not compensated for it. So the level field already has a trench in it. Of course these are only small examples.
The market forces philosophy will not work unless the public and the Government are prepared to put up with these level field practices. While we are a rich nation, with full, or perhaps overfull bellies, they will not. From a conservation point of view, certainly in many cases they should not. Therefore the free market philosophy to control our surpluses must be coupled with some other form of medicine. The menu of environmental grants, although helping those few who are rich enough to indulge in such practices anyway, will not help the working farmer. There must be, in the short term at least, some form of production control. For instance, if it is necessary to reduce production of arable crops by, say, 10 per cent. to get into a non-surplus situation, there should be a compulsory—I repeat, compulsory—set-aside in excess of that 10 per cent. figure. I would hope very much that the set-aside payment could be enhanced on environmental grounds to encourage a grass set-aside with restrictions on how it should be extensively farmed.
We ought also to consider redundancy payments to help farmers and farm workers leave the industry for, sadly, we still have too many farmers. It may also be necessary in some commodities to have quotas. But they must be transferable so as to encourage the efficient and to enable the inefficient to get out. This would allow our farms to be farmed efficiently and cost effectively. Once the surplus problem is solved it should be possible to open our gates to imports, perhaps with some form of deficiency payments. I accept that in the first few years my scheme would require more bureaucracy, but not that much more in the United Kingdom where we have relatively large holdings. If other European Community countries prefer a different method, so be it, provided that they do not make the field less level. If they wish to keep their part-time peasant farmers on the land, they should be supported out of national social payments not agricultural ones.
I strongly believe that we should not sacrifice our efficient and progressive British agriculture on the altar of the European Community inefficient and high-cost peasant system. We have tried the carrot of voluntary controls on production and they have not worked, so now it must, sadly, be a question of the stick in the form of compulsory supply management to get our surpluses under control. My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.
5.36 p.m.
Lord Gallacher: My Lords, we are indebted to the noble Lord, Lord Stanley of Alderley, for his choice of subject and for the able manner in which he introduced this important subject to the House this evening. There are in our opinion three aspects which need to be stated at the outset: first, the effects of any GATT settlement on Community agricultural policy; secondly, the recently tabled proposals by Commissioner MacSharry for the future of the CAP; and, thirdly, but no less important, the European Commission's own work programme for 1991 which includes a review of the financing of the European Community, evaluation of the common agricultural policy and re-examination of the common agricultural policy. All these are outwith the direct control of the Ministry of Agriculture. Therefore any production controls in Britain will necessarily mirror settlements reached elsewhere and especially those reached in Brussels.
The United Kingdom is again in a position of having to respond to Community proposals. It has no powers of initiative. This is both a weakness and certainly the price that we pay for the indirect system of democracy which exists in the European Community. The position is aggravated in my opinion by the fact that Britain's nominees to the Commission itself have never held the agricultural portfolio. The last three were Danish, Dutch and Irish in that order. That suits very well the other major agricultural member states such as France, Germany and Italy. All are small farmer nations and current retrenchment policies, as the noble Lord, Lord Stanley, has pointed out, are geared to suit small farmers, especially when social payments to compensate for low guarantee prices are included. This perpetuates the existing small farm structure in Europe and therefore must automatically penalise United Kingdom farmers.
Britain's position under Commissioner MacSharry's proposals looks like being our worst ever. We pay a major part of the cost of the common agricultural policy, yet the policy is now being restructured in a way which we know will penalise British farming. We must ask ourselves whether the Minister of Agriculture is wise to seek merely to change present proposals. Mr. Gummer played a significant part in getting fellow agriculture ministers in the Community to face the reality of the GATT negotiations, but he now appears to believe that he can negotiate a solution to the consequences of any GATT settlement which will not excessively penalise British farmers nor add to costs for British consumers. In our opinion, he cannot.
More radical reforms are necessary than have been mooted so far, including a critical look at the five objectives of the common agricultural policy enshrined in the Treaty of Rome, some of which are now unreal. If amendments are required to the treaty, we should declare for them. After all, we conceded as much if not more in agreeing to the Single European Act which included the extension of majority voting in the Community.
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No one denies the fact that without a common agricultural policy it is unlikely that the European Community would have been formed in the first place. We are however on the verge of forming a Community where most internal trade barriers will have been removed. We must ask ourselves whether present commodity regimes for agricultural products in the Community can be justified after 1992. If fundamental change along those lines is unacceptable to the agriculture ministers at present, then a start should be made by repatriating responsibility for those commodity regimes which are not of major significance in all member states. Tobacco, sheep meat, rice and wine come to mind. Regimes may remain in the Community for those commodities which are basic to member states, such as cereals, milk and beef. Here again, one should add the rider that they must be subject to eventual repatriation.
Such a policy would permit specialised retrenchment in the Community. I believe that most people who have had experience of expansion and retrenchment in business will recognise at once that it is relatively easy to expand, but that it is significantly difficult to retrench. In particular, where entrenchment involves an element of justice such as is now necessary under the common agricultural policy, it becomes infinitely more difficult in our view to retrench justly for 12 member states rather than allow the member states to engage in such retrenchment as is necessary. We believe that Britain, as a paymaster of the common agricultural policy, needs to be less wedded to the concept of an all-embracing CAP after 1992. By merely seeking to reform existing proposals which are unhelpful to us, we run the risk of being outvoted in the process of seeking to change the present proposals.
Plans to curb over-production devised thus far in Brussels will, as the noble Lord, Lord Stanley, said, neither help our farmers nor stifle the complaints of British consumers. Even as a negotiating ploy—such ploys are very important as we well know when dealing with the common agricultural policy—we should now be making strong repatriation noises in Brussels, especially at meetings of finance ministers. I say that because in the final analysis it is the finance ministers who will control agricultural spending and any policies of retrenchment under the common agricultural policy.
In a sense, to engage now in proposals for specific commodities may merely encourage the continuance of present proposals. If we must retrench, then we believe that that can best be done by our own agricultural ministry in England and Wales as well as by the agricultural departments, which are no less important, in Scotland and in Northern Ireland. In our opinion, we ought to be saying that loud and clear. One hopes that one of the consequences of this debate will be that we shall have fresh thinking on the overall problem, without becoming enmeshed in the details of which commodities to produce and in what fashion we propose to produce them.
5.44 p.m.
Lord Harris of High Cross: My Lords, I should like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Stanley of Alderley, for raising this important issue and for opening the debate in such a thoughtful and admirably brief speech. I find myself caught rather unprepared by the brevity of the speeches which we have heard thus far. Nevertheless, I shall do my best to emulate them. I have also been thrown by the sight of the noble Lord, Lord Prior, sitting on the Bishops' Benches. I must tell him that he would for my money, make a most welcome addition to them. Finally, by way of apologia, I must admit that I have not as yet had the opportunity to read the MacSharry Report. However, from what I have heard, it is not all bad.
When I saw the Motion on the Order Paper I was a little suspicious because it refers to "controlling over-production". It aroused my mean economist's suspicions of further devices and dodges such as quotas, licences, set-asides, funny money like the MCAs, and other short-term expedients; but what we want is not so much to control over-production as to put an end to it. The method is not more fancy franchises, but more free trade in world markets, including Eastern Europe, with less subsidised prices, as the USA and the Cairns Group have been urging on the benighted EC. If there were any suspense involved I would spare your Lordships from waiting by saying that, in a nutshell, my argument is that the mischief of over-production is the perverse result of well-intentioned political efforts to control markets by faking the price system. I believe that there are better policies available to match our chosen ends.
A week ago in Moscow with the temperature at 28 degrees below freezing I saw a group of young Russian market economists positively boiling with rage at the effect of artificially low shop prices which create queues and shortages of what passes as foodstuffs, though they are more stuffs than food. Today, with the temperature somewhat warmer, I shall try to keep cool in denouncing the opposite effect of artificially high producer prices which create the surpluses about which the noble Lord complains.
On the return flight from Moscow I read an article in the British Airways Business magazine on the crisis in Europe's agriculture. It confirmed that it is not only the taxpayers and consumers who are suffering under the CAP but also a large part of the farming community for whose benefit the entire game is supposed to be rigged. I stand before your Lordships in the unlikely disguise of a farmer's friend.
Over the years, party men like to talk about keeping the countryside in good heart, with independent yeoman farmers eagerly preparing for the next harvest. It is true that the minority of big farmer-landowners may still be flourishing—although they may deny that fact—but the drift from the land continues, driven by high rents or mortgages and interest rates which absorb the lion's share of more modest incomes. They leave behind many others who are apprehensive of the vagaries of future European politics.
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The article in the British Airways magazine referred to farmers selling off their land for various leisure pursuits and warned that if all the golf courses being planned in the South East were actually built we could before long be facing the equivalent of a golf mountain; though I predict that that will not happen so long as people are using their own money.
Faced by such nightmares, I turned for illumination and hope to a recent IEA Hobart paperback entitled Farming for Farmers? by Richard Howarth of University College, Bangor. He has obligingly written a popular version for the Bruges Group of which I confess to being chairman. You do not have to be a paid-up Bruges-ite to find the whole story both shocking and alarming. With analysis and statistics, Mr. Howarth explains how it is that, despite a family of four paying about £1,000 a year in higher prices and taxes, the majority of small farmers derive little, if any, benefit from this macabre game of pass the parcel. Figures vary, but it appears that the public may be paying £2 for every £1 of theoretical benefit conferred on the farmer. But in a recent year, of total farm subsidies costing two-thirds the EC budget well over half was absorbed in storing surpluses, paying subsidies to export them and administering the whole crazy system. We do not know how much of that goes in fraud, which is estimated to abstract at least 10 per cent. of the total budget under the somewhat complacent control of Monsieur Jacques Delors.
The full tally of wickedness includes what the economists call the "Ricardo" effect of high guaranteed prices and quotas becoming embodied in higher land values, the harm which intensive farming inflicts on the environment, the havoc that surpluses wreak on world markets and the damage subsidised exports impose on farmers in less developed lands.
However, noble Lords will be glad to hear that Mr. Howarth is no doctrinaire. He acknowledges a case for helping small farmers; not by price fixing which he thinks should be phased out but by direct support for low farm incomes and by encouraging the growing trend towards diversification.
We are already seeing the expansion of deer farming, wine production, organic food, and farm shops, as well as catering for leisure pursuits such as nature trails, farmhouse holidays, camping, canoeing, even war games, as well as sports—favoured, I am told, by your Lordships—such as riding, shooting and fishing.
Mr. Howarth foresees the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food being wound up—or wound down—in favour of the Department of the Environment; though not I hope, I hasten to add, during the amiable tenure of the Minister. Such a change could dramatise an extension of existing grants for conservation areas. That need not rule out building developments, including contemporary country houses and balanced modern villages, as well as the tasteful conversion of farm buildings into holiday cottages, restaurants, craft workshops and retirement homes. We can argue how extensive such grants and subsidies should he, but they will be open payments which could be costed and compared with the visible benefits.

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Mr. Howarth believes that there is no reason why we should not continue to have prosperous and flourishing agriculture, different in shape perhaps from that which we now see. Above all, a policy along those lines would replace the damaging paraphernalia of price guarantees and the resultant export subsidies and import levies of which the full costs may be less visible or calculable but which are certainly very much larger.
5.52 p.m.
Lord Middleton: My Lords, it is always most refreshing to hear the noble Lord, Lord Harris. I suppose that a man from Mars would be astonished that we can use the words "over-production of farm commodities" in a hungry world less than one-thirtieth of whose surface is suitable for growing crops and whose population is increasing by 200,000 every day. That is a paradox that could be debated ad infinitum.
My noble friend's Motion refers to overproduction in the United Kingdom, but he has explained that he is looking outside the United Kingdom at the wider picture of European Community over-production and its implications for the European budget and the GATT negotiations. Of course those are not new problems. He will remember, from his work on Sub-Committee D, that the House of Lords Select Committee on the European Community has been looking at them since it was set up about 18 years ago.
My noble friend referred to the need for production control. When the Select Committee reported in 1983, Sub-Committee D had looked at the various options for supply control, including control over support prices, quotas, a mixed price system, acreage diversion schemes, production thresholds, deficiency payments and so on. The committee reported again in 1985 on reform of the CAP; in 1986, on cereal surpluses; and in 1988 on stabilisers.
Every year, the committee examined the Commission's annual farm price proposals. Our conclusions have been consistent. We have been opposed to quotas, which, except for certain products such as milk, are difficult to administer and which under a high pricing system are not beneficial to the consumer and prevent an efficient producer from expanding his market at the expense of the less efficient. We have been unenthusiastic about acreage diversion schemes. We were against the limitation of cereals output through a tax on imports, such as nitrogen fertilisers, which would not be conducive to efficient production and would be difficult to organise and police. In general, until now, we have concluded that the CAP must operate to a greater extent through the price mechanism.
In last year's Select Committee report on rural policies, we recognised the inevitability of a greater exposure of farmers to market forces. Nevertheless, we have consistently said that the complete abandonment of support for agriculture would not be acceptable on economic and social grounds. In view of
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what noble Lords have referred to as the "MacSharry" proposals, which are currently under discussion in Brussels, it is worth recalling the Select Committee's 1985 report Reform of the CAP, in which we said that where farming became economically unviable in certain areas then the problem should be dealt with as a matter of social and regional policy and not through the price system. My noble friend Lord Stanley said that he agreed with that view. That view was restated in our rural policy report, which we debated last November.
What has happened in the past few years is that there has been much tighter control through the price system and by the means of stabilisers; a milk quota has been in force for seven years; and the produce mountains have shrunk, at any rate in the United Kingdom if not in the rest of the European Community; but so have farmers' incomes. Yet the European Community budgetary problems remain as intractable as ever, and the GATT negotiations are bedevilled by the friction caused by subsidies on the export of farm products.
As industry teeters on the edge of recession, the Commission is now calling for a sharp reduction in price support for European farmers. Those proposals are contained in a paper which I read only this morning, as soon as it became available. It is a communication from the Commission to the Council entitled, The Development and Future of the CAP. It is subtitled, A Reflection Paper. It is those proposals that have been discussed in Brussels this week by the agriculture Ministers. Broadly, what the Commission is saying is that it has so far failed to stem the continued increase in Community budgetary expenditure and that therefore more drastic measures are required to limit production.
The Commission proposes severe cuts in support prices. To compensate, payment will be made to farmers conditional upon land being taken out of production. The proposal is that the amount of support would be scaled according to farm size: the larger the farm, the less the support. No figures are included in that version of the proposals.
In the paper, the Commission is calling for discussions on a fundamental reform of the CAP. It is the intention that Sub-Committee D shall inquire into these proposals forthwith and report to your Lordships. We shall need to consider the implications of an open market approach to agriculture policies and a sharply reduced level of CAP support. I suspect that much of the argument will revolve around the question of whether the price mechanism should be used to achieve social objectives. In view of what we said on the subject in our recent rural society report, I have no doubt that we shall look critically at the suggestions for the modulation of price control. I suspect that we shall see the need for expanded special help for producers in disadvantaged areas. I dare say that we shall once again look hard at any proposals for compulsory controls on output; and we shall consider the need to promote rather than inhibit efficient production. I hope that, if any report to the House on the proposals were to be critical, it would

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also be constructive. In that connection, it was interesting to hear what the noble Lord, Lord Gallacher, said, and I shall read his speech with enormous interest.
I am grateful to my noble friend for once again bringing these complex matters to the attention of your Lordships. The views which noble Lords have expressed this evening in the debate will be of great benefit to the Select Committee's forthcoming inquiry.
6 p.m.
Lord Houghton of Sowerby: My Lords, I urge noble Lords to study carefully the MacSharry recommendations on the future of the CAP. I believe it to be the most important substantive document before the Community so far on the subject. Until we study it carefully and understand its purposes and implications, I do not believe that we can carry on an intelligent debate on the future of surpluses in our agricultural industry.
We are dealing, first, with the need to achieve a Community policy and, secondly, with the need to find an intelligent and acceptable policy for agriculture. When the noble Lord, Lord Stanley of Alderley (whom I thank for introducing the debate) asked what was the purpose of agricultural policy, the answer must be in large measure to keep farmers on the land. The land can go to no one else if the environment is to be preserved and the countryside to bear some semblance of care and prosperity, as it has done over the past 30 or 40 years.
Thus we must pay attention to small farmers so long as it is possible to keep them on the land. If we consieer withdrawing support from the larger farms and withholding it gradually from the smaller farms, agriculture will fall into the hands of big agricultural business. My fear is that the pressure on intensive animal husbandry will increase. That is my main interest for my allotted eight minutes.
Until now we have paid insufficient attention to what has been going on in intensive animal production. A letter appeared in The Times this morning which wounded me deeply. I was a member of the Labour Government who were so weak in dealing with the Brambell Report 25 years ago. What an opportunity we had and how we missed it!
Brambell was warning of the conditions in which animals were kept under the intensive system. The report tried to lay down basic conditions for the lives of animals in those circumstances. One demand was that they should be able to turn round; another was that they should be able to lie down on reasonable bedding. Where we failed was in not making more statutory conditions for intensive animal husbandry. We relied too much on the voluntary response of the farming industry to this kind of animal keeping.
The MacSharry Report contemplates pressure for more extensive animal husbandry and curtailing intensive animal husbandry. That is what we ought to do wish the land which may become available for wider use in farming interests. What we have done to pigs in the past 25 years has gone absolutely against the recommendations of the Brambell Report. We ought to be ashamed of ourselves. Who called for
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alleviation of these dreadful conditions? Not the farmers, not even the veterinary surgeons. It was the animal welfare people who are scorned as cissies by a large section of the community. We should never have allowed this to happen.
When we tackle the conditions we find that capital investment in equipment and processes is so heavy that it becomes almost impossible to get rid of it. Farmers want eight years in which to give pigs a decent life. They would prefer 10 years and the Government think it should be five; or do they? I am not sure. It is possible that the Government also think it ought to be eight years. That is eight years of misery for millions of pigs while we get rid of the cruel equipment in the intensive pig industry today and provide a broader and happier life for one of the most intelligent farm animals. I have said before that pigs are probably as intelligent as some Members of Parliament. They should be able to seek a better understanding of their conditions from Parliament than at present.
I plead for animals. Greater competition may put pressure on intensive husbandry, and we must be careful about that. However, as long as the conditions encourage greater production of meat—sheep meat, beef and so on—we must watch what we do with the surplus. The budget for the Common Market has doubled in the past four years. Production has quadrupled in that time. We are up against a rise in production in the Common Market of 2 per cent. per year, with internal consumption rising only 1 per cent. and farm incomes not improving. The numbers employed in agriculture are falling, with the result that there is a surplus in production which we wish to dump on a stagnant economy in neighbouring countries. That causes friction over the CAP and GATT in our relations with other countries, as well as their internal differences.
This problem can be the source of much discord in the Common Market. Since the European Community will undergo considerable additional strains in the near future, possibly as a result of the Gulf conflict, we do not wish to aggravate members. Let us give every consideration to what may provide a consensus in the CAP. If our own department has a better scheme, let it produce it and tell us more about it. Quite clearly, British people must take a greater interest in agricultural production methods and the industry than in the past. One cannot do to the agricultural industry what one can do to manufacturing industry: leave industrial units of production to close down and say goodbye to the workers and the people who run it.
The land is in the hands of the farming industry. It belongs to the people. We are entitled to know how it is used. If it is used intelligently, with compassion for animals, then we shall probably be happier about it than at present.
6.8 p.m.
Lord Palmer: My Lords, how warmly I commend the debate on how to control agricultural surpluses. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Stanley of Alderley, on bringing the subject to the attention of

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the House. However, it seems tragic that, viewed globally, there is no over-production of food. In reality, there is a vast amount of under-consumption, especially if we consider central and eastern Africa, where millions are dying from a lack of food. But perhaps that ought to be the subject of another debate.
It is worth reflecting for a moment on what the so-called surpluses really are. Are the Government aware that just before Christmas the UK had 27 days' supply of butter in stock, 25 of beef and—I am amazed to hear—just one day's worth of wheat? With many nations involved in a dangerous war, I should have thought that these stock levels were surprisingly low.
The Government have always had a strategic and moral responsibility to ensure that the nation is defended and fed. I am sure your Lordships agree that they have done this admirably. However, the partnership between the Government and the agricultural industry is unique. Successive governments from the middle of the last century have fulfilled this responsibility to feed the nation by providing and managing a support system for the means of production of our vital food. Without food, there is no nation.
With indebtedness by UK farmers standing, as the noble Lord, Lord Stanley, said, at an all-time record of nearly £7 billion—a 95 per cent. increase over the previous decade —the Government cannot simply walk away from the problem. The Minister in another place has pledged that British farmers will not be disadvantaged. In your Lordships' House too we have heard much sympathy expressed for farmers and their terrible plight. This sympathy is much appreciated but it does not pacify the bank manager, nor does it stave off bankruptcy. We must not forget how the situation has arisen. Most importantly of all, we must remember that farmers throughout Europe have only done what they were told to do.
One often hears the argument that agriculture is facing the same problems as the coal and steel industries have faced. However, the problem is not the same for farmers, in that they were financially encouraged to produce more. They were told to drain the wetlands and to borrow from the bank to make up the shortfall. Suddenly the brakes are on, but the very nature of farming requires long-term planning. Already 90 per cent. of the 1991 wheat harvest is in the ground and growing. No one can realistically hazard a guess at the tonnage or what the financial yield will be. Are the Government aware that a 10 per cent. reduction in the price of wheat paid to farmers would reduce the price of a 60p loaf by just 1p?
A bad spell of weather at the wrong time could easily reduce incomes by up to £150 per acre. That is why any plans to reduce the so-called surpluses must take the long-term future into consideration. The agricultural industry must be sufficiently prosperous to attract new blood into its ranks and to ensure that UK agriculture is competitive with agriculture elsewhere in the world, and most especially in Europe. At the same time farmers must be able to afford to
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manage the countryside for conservation and recreation purposes in the ways which the public require and deserve.
In the past some people have dismissed farmers for crying wolf. However, there is nothing mythical about the wolf now at the door not only of farmers but also of many thousands of people in the countryside who depend on a healthy rural economy. The Government have a moral commitment in this matter and they must act now before it is too late. I should be grateful if the Minister will assure the House that the Government will resist most strongly the MacSharry proposals. They discriminate most unjustly against UK farmers and will bankrupt many of them. Despite being criticised by the Council of Ministers earlier this week, the proposals seem likely to creep back via the Commission's farm price proposals which are to be announced shortly. Let us hope that that is not the case.
6.14 p.m.
Lord Willoughby de Broke: My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Stanley, has said, any discussion of United Kingdom over-production cannot be divorced from European agriculture and the common agricultural policy. The structure of the CAP gives every incentive for over-production. Radical change is essential both from the point of view of the present unsustainable cost of the CAP and of the effect of dumping onto world markets Euro-surpluses at a fraction of their cost. The CAP has not even succeeded in maintaining the incomes of both arable and livestock farmers. Here I must declare a painful interest as I have a dairy and arable farm in Warwickshire.
With this debate in mind, I have considered some of the methods which other countries use to control their agricultural output. I shall not argue whether it is a matter of controlling or stopping output. New Zealand is perhaps the most radical example. There the system of farm support was viewed by farmers themselves as being unsustainable. Over a short period of time from 1984 to 1989 New Zealand made its farming subsidy free. That was achieved at some cost but not at the catastrophic cost that had been forecast. I am told that some 800 farmers out of a total of 50,000 left the industry with compensation. New Zealand fed this country for a long period, including during the war. That country has legitimate cause for complaint when the EC, in spite of a commitment to the contrary, continues to dump cheese and other dairy products on markets that New Zealand has developed. That course lacks both justice and financial common sense.
Neither Australia nor Argentina subsidise their farmers. The US has a system which approximates to Mr. MacSharry's proposals which seem to have been unceremoniously booted into touch this evening. In the United States a deficiency payment is made to those wheat farmers who agree to take 15 per cent. of their land out of production while a further 15 per cent. of the land has to be diverted to other crops. The American farmer receives about a quarter of his gross

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income through this deficiency payment. I am told that this is a successful programme and that it has an uptake of about 85 per cent.
I am astounded that British taxpayers have not reacted more strongly to the huge cost of farm support in Europe. After all, the taxpayer foots the bill for wheat at £120 a tonne when the world price is now £40 a tonne or even below. The taxpayer foots the bill for the butter sold to Russia at 1,100 dollars a tonne when it costs the EC 4,000 dollars a tonne. That subsidy amounts to well over twice the world price. Every cow in Europe receives a subsidy that is higher than the per capita income of half the world's population. I hope that my noble friend the Minister can tell the House what dairy stocks are currently held in intervention stores.
The cost of CAP expenditure in the UK alone is quite staggering. It amounted to £1,000 million in 1989–90 and it is estimated to increase by a further £600 million in 1991, while the figure for the EC as a whole last year was £12,000 million. We have had poll tax riots but I have yet to hear of CAP riots. Perhaps we have not had such riots because the taxpayer is unaware of what he or she is shelling out. The noble Lord, Lord Harris of High Cross, pointed out that it costs each family of four nearly £1,000 a year, or the equivalent of 7p. off the rate of income tax, to support European farming and its attendant surpluses.
The final insult to the British taxpayer is that the great majority of his unwitting contribution goes not to the British farmer—that would probably be bad enough—but to the many French, German and Italian farmers. For many of those farmers farming is only a part-time job anyway. The taxpayer, having paid his subsidy, then pays a second time by buying back his now high-priced goods through the shops. If the CAP is to be reformed, that could easily be the result of a taxpayers' revolt rather than through political debate.
What methods should we consider to reduce these surpluses and the cost of producing and selling them? This evening we have discussed cuts in support prices. I have not had the opportunity to read the paper to which my noble friend Lord Middleton referred. I hope that any of the cuts would bear equally on all producers. However, that may be politically difficult to achieve.
Voluntary set-aside has demonstrably not worked. Grain output increased during the first two years of set-aside. As my noble friend Lord Stanley has commented, compulsory set-aside would probably work. We must, however, realise that we are talking of a large acreage, probably at least 20 per cent. of the total arable acreage to achieve a 10 per cent. reduction in output. I gather that that would amount to about 3 million acres. One could fit a lot of golf courses into that acreage. But what of the rest of the land? Should we use it for mown weeds or long-term tree planting? My noble friend Lord Stanley helpfully suggested extensive grazing. That might be more attractive than the present alternatives. However, at current prices of £90 to £100 an acre for an unspecified period, the set-aside option could end up looking awfully
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expensive, leaving aside the image of paying farmers to do nothing—a sort of agricultural dock labour scheme.
Could we not discuss some sort of contract between farmer and government to produce less; say, 20 per cent. less over five years? The farmer could reduce his production by any means he liked, probably by reducing nitrogen and herbicide application, but without the necessity for the bureaucracy that would be entailed in nitrogen rationing. He would be compensated for joining the programme, provided that he reached his target year by year. This would, at least, have the advantage of keeping farmland farmed, maybe in a more environmentally acceptable way, without the disruption to the rural economy that large-scale set aside would entail.
I believe that farmers would welcome constructive proposals such as we have heard tonight. Farm incomes are still falling with no relief in sight and we are still over-producing as hard as we can. I am sure that most of us would back a policy which made real sense for the future, which may well be a combination of some of the proposals that we have heard today. The need is urgent, as the noble Lord, Lord Palmer, has said, and I much look forward to hearing from my noble friend the Minister what the Government may have in mind.
6.21 p.m.
The Earl of Carnarvon: My Lords, I, too, am extremely grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Stanley, for introducing this very important debate on farming to your Lordships' House. The European Community's Commission is considering radical revisions of the common agricultural policy, which are designed to control production and reduce surpluses, to protect the environment and to redirect support to some farmers and some regions.
Some of these ideas are extremely worrying for the United Kingdom's medium to large family farms, both livestock and cereal growers, and is leading to a run down of a great industry. It will cause more loss of employment in rural areas and—this is an important point—will compromise the farmer's and landowner's traditional role as managers of the countryside.
I believe that the Community should increase extensification and introduce more appropriate set-aside policies, which could achieve lower levels of production and a more environmentally friendly farming industry. If this is achieved, then local planning authorities must not negate the effect by failing to understand the farmer's predicament, and by putting every possible obstacle in the way of him enjoying his livelihood and maintaining his workforce.
My own workforce at Highclere has decreased from 14 in 1987 to seven today. This not only affects those families very drastically, but also all the non-farming rural industries in villages and small towns which they help to sustain. Only 10 years ago United Kingdom agriculture provided 200,000 full-time jobs. Now there are about 140,000. That points to a severe decline in the economic health of the farming industry which is now at crisis level.

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I do not apologise for being anecdotal. This week I was delighted to hear that our family farm had topped the gross margin league table in the Meat and Livestock Commission's single-suckled lowland herds in the south and south-west area. One should have been thrilled but, allowing for fixed costs, we showed only a small profit. I believe that the runner-up just about paid his way. The other 18 have probably all lost money. I think it fair to say that livestock farmers returning figures to the Meat and Livestock Commission are probably among the most go-ahead in the country.
Nothing gave me more sadness in December last year than to have to make redundant two senior staff, both of whom had been with me for over 20 years, and one of their sons. I know that other industries are in a depressed state as well as farming, but they do not get the same hammering from the media as farming. I hope that this debate will put the record straight as to the very serious position that farming is in today and the overall effect that this may have on our countryside generally.
6.25 p.m.
Viscount Mountgarret: My Lords, I, too, am grateful to my noble friend for bringing this very important matter before your Lordships this evening. But I have to say to him, and to my noble friend on the Front Bench, that I do not have quite the same enthusiasm for the set-aside arrangements that have been made recently in order to try to control the production of our crops.
I said to my noble friend when she was introducing a Bill in an admirable way—the amount of work put into it was tremendous and deserved compliment—as I say now, that it is not the right way to go about matters. When we think of it, the set-aside arrangements are a financial incentive to a farmer not to do anything. It is a reward for sitting back and doing nothing. I do not think that in any walk of life one should be rewarded for sitting back and doing nothing.
One day the set-aside arrangements are bound to come to an end. When that time comes, what will happen to the many farmers who have decided to adopt the scheme, to reduce their manpower, to reduce their livestock and to capitalise thereon? It will be much harder to find money then in order to go back into the business of farming and the production of food. It is a dangerous step for farmers to take, although I understand why it was felt to be necessary.
Quotas do not really work—my noble friend Lord Middleton has touched on this point—but some arrangement like that must be looked at far more seriously. It is no good having a farmer on one side of the fence producing four tonnes of wheat to the acre while a farmer on the other side of the fence is being paid to do nothing. Surely to goodness there is a middle road. Is it not possible to devise some form of quota? Is it not possible, as my noble friend Lord Willoughby mentioned, to achieve some reduction in
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the use of the fertilisers and nitrogen which seem to get into our water systems, causing great concern to many people?
I do not expect to carry everybody with me, and I see a noble Lord shaking his head, but we ought to address ourselves to these points. Why have an enormous input into some areas in order to maximise output when there could be a lower general level? That would benefit the conservation side. Instead of the combine finishing harvesting in August or in July with the plough following close behind and the field being sown again immediately in order to get increased production—earlier sowing, increased production—why not leave the stubble as they used to do and encourage the wildlife? You may encourage your game as well as your wildlife, but that is traditionally the source of part of a farm's income.
One does ask the question whether we may perhaps be going down the wrong route. That is my contribution to this debate. I am concerned about set-aside and I believe there should be a better way, such as encouraging lower production. Yes, indeed, the money might have to be found to subsidise and assist farmers and landowners who may suffer a reduction in income, but it would be a better route to take than actually paying people to do nothing.
As the noble Lord, Lord Houghton of Sowerby, very rightly said, the land is there and something has to be done with it. Farmers exist and we have to look after them. I would go one stage further and say that it is not only the farmer but also the landlord who is involved here. It is a partnership, as the noble Earl, Lord Carnarvon, has said. If the returns from agriculture are such as to prohibit the farmer from gaining a meaningful living and, if he is a tenant farmer, paying a realistic rent to his landlord, then the countryside will be affected. There is no doubt about that.
There exists a popular myth of the landlord with broad acres, worth an awful lot of money and so on; but, realistically speaking, not an enormous amount of return is made out of investment in land and agriculture. I am sure many of your Lordships will know that very well. There are sacrifices to be made by many landlords and indeed farmers, if they own their own farms, for providing the benefits of conservation, such as the planting of trees, the resurrection of hedgerows, the maintenance of stiles and gates along public footpaths, and so on. If the money is not there to carry out these activities the conservation of our countryside will suffer. It is no good handing it over to conservation bodies and so on. It is the people who live and work on the land who actually do it quite well. It can only be done provided proper returns are made, and I come back to where I started: to pay people in any walk of life to sit back and do nothing cannot be the right approach.
Lord Mackie of Benshie: My Lords, before the noble Viscount sits down, would he not agree that it has been highly profitable to hold land and that the capital value has risen enormously, even though the

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return is very small? Would he not agree that this factor has contributed to the rise in costs to the farmer?
Viscount Mountgarret: My Lords, of course it is perfectly true that the capital value of the land is high, but you do not go around with your land stuffed in your pocket in order to pay for this, that and the other. Indeed, if returns continue to fall, the capital value will continue to fall.
6.33 p.m.
Lord Northbourne: My Lords, I should like to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Stanley, on instituting such a lively debate, to which one of the most lively contributions so far has been that made by the noble Lord, Lord Houghton of Sowerby. I agree that there is a major problem of over-production in European agriculture and, still more, there is the ghastly waste resulting from the common agricultural policy. Surpluses, as the noble Lord, Lord Palmer, pointed out in his excellent speech, if not a thing of the past, are not so much with us as they were.
The fundamental problem is technological progress, and in this country technological progress, in crop production at least, has given rise historically to approximately 2 or 3 per cent. increased yield potential year on year. There is no particular reason to suppose that this incremental ability to produce crops will not continue. Therein lies our problem: from the same amount of land, whether we want to or not, we are going to produce more crops; and that is why we must, either physically or through economic sanctions, reduce the incentives to maximise production.
Like many of your Lordships, I must confess to being a large farmer. I have to say that I do not recognise the image of large farmers which we have learnt to expect from the press and which some speakers this evening, like the noble Lord, Lord Harris, have been tempted to follow. I believe that on the whole large farmers in this country are doing an excellent job, producing food efficiently and looking after the countryside. I think most of your Lordships would agree that those of us who live in the countryside, when we do make a bit of money out of farming, are inclined to plough it back into the piece of the countryside we live in and love. There is a warning there: that if the fortunes of agriculture decline too sharply—a point just made by the noble Viscount, Lord Mountgarret—the potential for landowners and farmers to maintain the countryside will be eroded. This applies not simply to ecological considerations but also to the maintenance of many historic buildings in the countryside—not only the great houses but also the historic and beautiful farm buildings which are probably one of the most important features of the English landscape. I suggest that the Government will have to take into account the inability of farmers to maintain these buildings in future and, if they want to preserve the landscape, will have to do something about it.
The noble Viscount, Lord Mountgarret, referred to nitrogen in the water supplies. I had the privilege of being on Sub-Committee D when we were taking evidence on nitrogen pollution. It appears in fact that
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most of the nitrogen flowing into the water supplies now was released some 50 years ago when the grasslands were ploughed out at the beginning of the Second World War. It also appeared from that inquiry that nitrogen fertiliser out of the bag, properly used and with the timing of the application in spring, not in autumn, is probably the most efficient way of ensuring that nitrogen does not percolate into the water supply; and ley farming is the worst culprit, I was sorry to learn. It is a very surprising result. And of course the reason why most of us can no longer have bare stubbles in the autumn for the partridges is because we cannot afford to. As most of your Lordships know, spring corn crops do not pay.
I should like to talk for a moment about small farmers. I absolutely agree that there are reasons for subsidising them, but I think it is important that we should look at why we want to subsidise small farmers. I believe that will lead us to certain conclusions as to how they should be subsidised. Do we want to subsidise them because they are producing better quality food? I would suggest the answer is no, because it is not the case. Do we want to subsidise them because they are less costly producers? I do not think that that is the case. Do we want to subsidise them for social reasons? There I think the answer is probably yes; we want to support them for the benefit of the rural community and sometimes perhaps because they have no alternative employment possibilities. Finally, but not least important, we want to subsidise them for environmental reasons, particularly for the sake of the maintenance of the landscape and of the buildings in the countryside.
If we look at those reasons, it is reasonable to come to the conclusion that the most powerful thing any government could do to encourage small farmers would be at once to repeal the existing landlord and tenant legislation. When I was a boy there were eight farms on the estate where I live in East Kent. Now there is one. The reason is entirely because no landlord in his right mind will sign away to a tenant a farm which he knows is going to drop to half or two-thirds of its value the day he signs that lease. However, perhaps that is a matter for another debate.
I believe that the next most valuable thing we can do to help small farmers in the countryside is to create opportunities for part-time work. That would enable people to go on farming in relatively uneconomic agricultural situations, while retaining their self-respect and achieving a reasonable standard of living. In this context, it is worth noting that in Germany more than 50 per cent. of farmers are now part-time farmers. In Redesdale, where I used to farm, I was talking to one of the old farmers the other day. We were going through a list of farmers up and down the valley and there was not one who did not work on forestry in the winter, take paying guests, or have a caravan site. The movement is already there.
Environmental payments, and particularly environmental payments in conservation areas and less favoured areas, are already established and agreed as being a way of helping farmers, and particularly a way of paying farmers to do something useful in terms of management of the countryside. Finally, and as a last

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resort, there is the possibility of social subsidies, and social subsidies on a regressive basis so as not to patronise people and not to fossilise the society of the countryside. I see that I am running out of time. I should like to finish by saying how much I look forward to the report of that admirable body, Sub-Committee D.
6.41 p.m.
Lord Wade of Chorlton: My Lords, the truth is that a planned industry never works. The more subsidy you put into an industry the poorer everybody seems to get. My family have farmed in Cheshire for many generations. I look back and I see the lifestyle that was enjoyed by my grandfather and great-grandfather. Relative to the size of business we run now and they ran then when there were no subsidies, one sees that we have gained nothing from the vast amount of money that has been poured in. This is mainly because of what has happened to it. Every time we have put money in, we have put it in for the wrong reasons. We have put it in to support the inefficient rather than to improve and benefit the industry.
Noble Lords have emphasised the serious difficulty in which agriculture now finds itself. This cannot be emphasised anything like enough. In many parts of the country we have never seen such numbers of farmers going bankrupt. As a result the businesses that depend on farming locally for their living are also disappearing at a phenomenal rate. Within the CAP the British industry has to pull back, even though it is not over-producing.
In fact we do not produce enough temporal food. We have to import a large quantity of milk products and various other products. That would be unnecessary if we were to use all the opportunities that we have. On the other hand we have to look at the fact that since 1945 we have brought into production much land that was never previously thought capable of cultivation. That is because of advances which have made it possible to drain and improve land, to plough up land and to take down woodland. I can see in Wales land ploughed in the last 20 years which for generations previously no one would have dreamt of going anywhere near with a plough.
We have encouraged a lot of land to come in. Now, in the course of events, we have to encourage a lot of land to go out. Even if we are not over-producing in the United Kingdom we have to see ourselves within the European context. As suggested by certain noble Lords, we have to take out certainly up to 2 million acres of land within the next few years. I believe that the right approach is to take it out of production.
One of the difficulties in the past was the fact that people saw ours as an industry that they could plan and control. The best and easiest way for change to evolve in agriculture is to allow the market, as much as possible, to take its place. We can slowly allow farmers to switch to the activities they should be undertaking. I do not agree with many environmentalists. I would also say to the noble Lord, Lord Houghton, that the cattle and breeding animals of this
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country have never, in the history of time, been so well looked after, so healthy and so fit as they have been over the last 25 or 30 years. They have never suffered less disease. They have never been better cared for by the farmer.
I have travelled round and seen herds of every possible species. They are fitter, better, more effective, and better fed than they have ever been. If I have the misfortune to come back as any other animal, I know that I would prefer the life of an animal in the last 25 years. At any other time in history, I would have sat out in fields up to my neck in mud with nothing to eat. I do not agree with those who say that agriculture, or farming, has had a bad effect on the environment or the animals. The skills and technology to which the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, referred, have never been better.
If we are to solve the problems of the future then I believe that the answer is to take out the land and for farmers to move from what is now a subsidised system to a free market system. It has to be accepted within our industry, and most farmers do accept, that that change has to take place. If we are to survive in the ever closer world in which trade has to take place, then we have to trade at world market prices and we have to restructure our industry so that we can cope with world market prices. We can only do that if we stop using money to support production which is uneconomic.
I do not agree with any of the policies put forward which say that we should use what resources are available in the CAP to support marginal producers and those whose enterprise is not viable. Once that decision is taken and we accept that what has to happen is that people have to go out of the business if they cannot run efficiently on a lowering price, then we have to use our resources to help them to get out, and look for the free market structured industry which will then develop. If we are to do that, it will require a fresh look at what people can do with land and how the rural economy actually operates.
As the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, said, if people are going to leave agriculture then the individual has to have something else to do. What we cannot accept, and what will never work, is a concept that says on the one hand that we have to reduce agriculture and reduce production but on the other hand that we cannot use the land for anything else. Many argue that the ideal world is a world where all the farms and all the greenery around us are looked after and are beautiful. Well, that only happens when there is efficiency. People refer to the buildings. The buildings are beautiful, but they were not built in recent times. There have been complaints during discussion of recent Bills —the Planning and Compensation Bill comes to mind—about the poor condition of farm buildings. That has nothing to do with planning. It is because the farmers do not have any money to build any decent farm buildings.
The farm buildings that people take pride in—the buildings that they like to drive around and look at—were built when the industry was prosperous. If you want a prosperous industry you have to encourage

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those who are efficient. You have to produce on the land that can produce efficiently and take out of production the land that is inefficient.
It should be clear policy—it has now to be a European policy—that within a period of time agriculture will be taken into a free market where people can produce at world market prices. To do that there is a river to cross. We have supported our farmers so strongly for the last 25 to 30 years that we have to help them to cross the river. We have to give them a pair of Wellingtons or a bridge to show them that we can see a way out and that we have a clear definition of the sort of competitive, effective, and efficient industry that can be a powerful and great force for Britain. We will then see the beautiful countryside and the attractive farms because the farmers will be able to create the wealth to make it possible.
6.48 p.m.
Lord Dunleath: My Lords, I join with noble Lords in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Stanley of Alderley, for having introduced this topic, which is one of considerable concern to all of us who are at present involved in agriculture. We are grateful to him for having, raised the subject at this time. As a number of noble Lords have intimated, the common agricultural policy is to a large extent a social policy rather than an agricultural policy.
It is understandable that within the EC there should be the aspiration to keep as many farmers as possible on the land. But I consider it basically wrong—I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Stanley also said this—to penalise the efficient in order to subsidise the inefficient. It is not an exact parallel, but there are similarities with the collapse of communism, when the inefficient were subsidised at the expense of the efficient. I have seen that in Russia and, more recently, in Poland. I do not believe that that is the answer to the EC problem at the moment.
Furthermore, as noble Lords have said, many of the small farmers, about whom Commissioner MacSharry is quite rightly concerned, are part-time farmers. Moreover, quite a number of them do not farm from the land but from concrete, using the by-products of other industries, such as the brewing industry. In my view those people should not be the recipients of subsidy to the detriment of the efficient farmers. After all, that is what the market economy is all about; namely, that the efficient thrive and the industry slim itself down accordingly.
By contrast with the European farmers to whom I have just referred, in that part of the country from which I come, Northern Ireland, farming is the biggest single industry. It employs about 13 per cent. of the population—not just the farmers themselves but those in the service industries ancillary to it. Most of the farmers are family farmers who own their land. They are not tenant farmers. They are entirely dependent on their own efforts to make their living. For the most part they do not have other jobs. The only way in which they can strive to beat increasing overheads and keep themselves efficient is by expansion, acquiring
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either more land or more milk quota. If that opportunity is denied them, people who contribute in a considerable degree to the economy will be put out of business. I am sure that we all agree that it would be disastrous for that to happen in Northern Ireland.
The original purpose of the common agricultural policy was to encourage farmers to produce efficiently what it is possible to produce in their areas. In other words, there is no point trying to grow maize or sugar beet in the northern and western parts of this country where the climate is not suitable for such products. However, in the northern and western parts of the British Isles grass can be grown much better than anywhere else in the European Community. Therefore our grassland-based farming should be encouraged. That is the area to which the Community should be looking for the production of milk, beef and sheep. Let other areas of the Community grow other crops for which they are more suited. If the Community is to be efficient, the original objective of encouraging farmers to do what they can do best should he pursued. That is what the market economy is all about: encouraging people, whether in industry or agriculture, to do what they do best.
There is perhaps also an argument for holding a certain surplus of foodstuffs in the EC. Surpluses are expensive to retain but compared with the possibility of a disaster—perhaps a couple of seasons of bad weather—a surplus probably acts as an insurance policy. If that surplus has to be reduced, as I think it probably does, then contrary to what some noble Lords have said—I believe the noble Lord, Lord Middleton, said that it would reduce efficiency—I respectfully suggest that a restriction on the use of nitrogenous fertilizer is one of the best ways to do it. Not only would such a restriction reduce production, it would also reduce the risk of leaching of nitrates into the water system.
In contrast to certain other noble Lords, I am afraid that I cannot be enthusiastic about the set-aside system. Most farmers are proud of their land and look after it well. They do not want to see it polluted by scutch grass and other weeds which would take a long time to clean up should the set-aside policy be reversed. Therefore bearing in mind that our land and farmers constitute one of our greatest assets, I suggest that efficient and well-managed farming should be encouraged rather than discouraged.
6.57 p.m.
Lord Aldenham: My Lords, I also should like to thank my noble friend Lord Stanley for introducing this debate. I was slightly surprised to note that the wording of the Motion had been slightly changed. I was also surprised to see that it referred to surpluses in the United Kingdom. I was not aware that there were enormous surpluses in UK agriculture, which I think various other noble Lords also suggested.
I should declare my interest. For the past 10 years I have been a landlord, tenant, partner and indeed proprietor in various farm enterprises, all of them extremely small but not by European standards. With impeccable timing I left the City to enjoy the life of the

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open air, in the hope of sharing in the profits of what I thought was a booming industry. I arrived to find a situation which, in retrospect, is not unlike what I believe used to be called the Schleswig-Holstein question: three people understood it; one is dead, one is mad and the other one has forgotten the answer.
Ten years ago the common agricultural policy was basically out of control. Surpluses were rising fast. The public's perception of farmers was not at all that of the dear old Farmer Giles of my youth. I went to a farm very like the one that the noble Lord, Lord Wade, mentioned. It was a London clay farm which was ploughed up as a wartime measure and only survives as mainly an arable farm because of the kindly aid of the common agricultural policy. In my lighter moments I am inclined to say that I am a hobby farmer rather than a professional one because I am certainly not paid to do it. On the other hand, I employ one man full-time and manage to employ two more on a seasonal basis. I am delighted to do so. The same man has been there for 27 years. Like the noble Earl, Lord Carnarvon, I should be most unhappy to sack someone who has lived for so long in the same place and who knows the farm better than I do.
I could opt for set-aside and I am sure that I should do better out of the land. However, I did not leave the City to do that. As many noble Lords have suggested, I prefer to work in the open air and feel that I am doing something that in theory is useful. I also have doubts about my landlords' views on my setting aside land that I rent from them. I am not 100 per cent. convinced that I should enjoy the alternative, probably of liaising with the local council for more public access. I already enjoy sufficient access because I live only 12 miles from Marble Arch.
I do not believe that country management—that is the maintenance of a beautiful countryside—would be an attractive option without the discipline of working on the land. It is like a theatre set rather than what industry unfortunately calls its factory floor.
The debate is about over supply in the UK. I have read the latest figures for agriculture in the UK and I find it difficult to equate them with serious over supply. Last year we produced a total of 22.5 million tonnes of cereals and we used 1,000 tonnes more than we produced. We are net importers of sugar, potatoes, tomatoes and, I am sorry to say, apples and pears. We also import lamb, beef, pigmeat, poultry, butter and cheese. Of all those commodities we produce less than we consume. Wheatstocks in the UK are now about 75,000 tonnes. I estimate that to be about 3½ lbs. of wheat per head; that is about two loaves.
Certainly there is an over supply in the European Community. Since the reunification of Germany the problem has become worse. I understand that this year 1.5 million tonnes of East German wheat have gone into intervention. That amounts to 14½ lbs. of wheat per head of the population in the European Community. That is a great deal for us to be paying for.
I looked at the original aims of the common agricultural policy. I shall summarise them but I expect that most noble Lords already know them. The
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first aim was for efficient production; the second aim was for a fair standard of living with increasing earnings for people on farms; the third aim was to stabilise markets; the fourth aim was to regularise supplies; and the fifth aim was to maintain reasonable prices for the consumer. In addition, it was stated that social structures should be investigated; any necessary adjustments should be gradual; and it should be borne in mind that agriculture is integrated with the whole economy of the Community.
In considering those aims I believe that production is efficient; it appears to be far too efficient. The aim to achieve a fair standard of living is now a failure; the standard of living is dropping fast. The internal markets are stable but destabilised world markets contribute to a considerable degree, as was seen in the recent GATT talks. Supplies are obviously sufficient. As regards reasonable prices, I have read many recent press cuttings which state that consumers are paying too much for their food. The noble Lord, Lord Palmer, pointed out that a change in price of 10 per cent. made only 1p difference on a loaf. However, the farm-gate price has little bearing on the total value of a product when it reaches the consumer.
Many noble Lords have spoken about the MacSharry proposals which, I understand, have been shot down. I believe that there is merit in some of his ideas. Originally price incentives were important in raising production but they are now overused. I have read that the basic world price for wheat would be approximately £85 per tonne if we had a level playing field, as requested by the noble Lord, Lord Stanley. Prices should drop to an open market level as soon as possible to enable efficient producers to continue and to allow the less efficient producers such as myself to drop out. Much as I enjoy farming I must admit that I do not do it at the cheapest price.
If we wish to keep farmers on the land, there must be some form of graduated support in order to help small farmers to counteract the drop in prices that I suggest is necessary to reduce production.
7.6 p.m.
Lord Mackie of Benshie: My Lords, many varied opinions have been expressed in the debate. Indeed, there was a considerable difference in volume and in content between the previous two speakers. I begin by reiterating the necessity for discussing the topic of the debate because the situation is ludicrous. In 1975 the figure for the guaranteed support fund was 4.5 billion ecus. In the same terms it is 11.5 billion ecus for this year and still rising. Therefore, it is obvious that something needs to be done about the situation.
It is extraordinary that since the 1970s the income from farming in this country has halved. The Government say that this year the income has decreased by 14 per cent. but, rightly, the NFU have upped that to 22 per cent. taking into account all the factors. It is extraordinary that, while the income of farmers has been decreasing, there has been an enormous rise in costs in the CAP. Obviously the taxpayers will not tolerate that situation for long; something must be done about it.

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The noble Lord, Lord Stanley, wants compulsory set-aside. He mentioned a figure of about 10 per cent. That is a solution but I do not favour it. One always gets on better in agriculture by bribing farmers rather than shooting them. By that means we can achieve the noble Lord's desired result. I do not believe that MacSharry was on the wrong track in his proposals for set-aside. After all, the tying of guarantees to set-aside has worked in the United States. They have set aside a bigger area than the whole of the cereal area in Europe. If that were cultivated one can imagine that we should be in oil slicks of grain. It is a practical example to follow. If we returned to a fair figure, and old-fashioned acreage payment, paid to people who have set aside, we should leave the competent farmer on good land to farm the whole of his acreage if he wished.
He would have the guarantee of only about 90 ecus as an intervention price. If he wanted to do that and that was better than taking the set-aside payment, which would perhaps not even cover his overheads, he would be entitled to do so. However, a great many people farming land which should not be growing grain—a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Wade of Chorlton—would take the set-aside and thus reduce the acreage of land for growing cereals, and I am talking about cereals.
We must look at what the quota system has done. The dairy farmers have been getting on rather well and the quota system suited them. However, it is a ludicrous position. The quota system is set to leave a surplus as of 14 per cent. That is the most expensive form of support in the whole system. We cannot possibly continue with that. The quota system and the land price have led to farms in the west of Scotland, to which I personally would not go for love nor money, receiving £3,000 to £4,000 per acre. The noble Viscount, Lord Mountgarret, would regard that as a very bad investment. Even with the quota, those farms are in no way worth that sort of money. That is the distortion which occurs with a quota system. If we wish to return to a system of a world price based on a restraint on production which is reasonable and to which efficient farmers can work, we cannot continue with the complications which give rise to the sort of distortions which we have seen.
Consumer associations always talk about how much money the consumer would save if we could buy our food from abroad. However, the world price is ludicrous and is subsidised. Let us consider a price of £40 per tonne. The best figures that I have seen for production for Australia, the United States and the good farms in this country and the North of Germany, demonstrate that the lowest figure at which a competent farmer can produce and make a reasonable, small profit is about £80 per tonne. Therefore, we are dealing with totally false figures.
On social payments, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Gallacher, about repatriation. There is no question other than that should be in the hands of government. However, I am not in favour of giving up the CAP. The urban population of this country is the most anti-farmer that one can find anywhere in the world. For years the people of this country have been
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accustomed to buying their food from the poverty of the Okies in between the wars, written about so eloquently, and from all over the world at prices which starve the farmers. In conditions of surplus I should not like to return to being at the mercy of the electorate of this country. Therefore, we need a European policy which works.
The reason that it has not worked is that the Council of Ministers did not do its job properly. For 20 or 30 years the Commission has tried to point out that surpluses were arising. The Council of Ministers, for purely political ends, kept on increasing prices and exaggerating the price of land and, as I have said before, the price of equipment. Equipment dealers did very well because farmers bought equipment for tax and many other reasons. Therefore, costs were driven up.
If we are to be sensible, we need a set-aside payment which will take out of production the bad land and reduce acreage and surpluses. Furthermore, that would keep land available should we return to the situation where, for example, there is a dangerous drop in the level of world stocks of wheat. There may well be a return to years of drought, as happened in the land of the Pharaohs. Therefore I believe that we should look at the MacSharry plan. I agree that we need to take land out of production. However, I should prefer to do that by bribing the farmers with an acreage support system; and the small farmer, who is not the worst off, should be looked after by the state. The state should make the social payments. The CAP payments should go in a practical manner to those who produce efficiently.
7.17 p.m.
Lord Carter: My Lords, the House will be very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Stanley, for giving us the opportunity to debate this extremely important subject. Although the terms of the Motion refer to the over-production of farm commodities in the United Kingdom, we have obviously had to set that in a European context. This has been a wide-ranging debate with a subtext: how do we deal with the problems of success in agricultural production?
We can all agree that no one in his right mind would now design a system of agricultural support remotely resembling the common agricultural policy. Like the proverbial Irishman, we certainly would not start from here. Unfortunately, there is an Irishman—Mr. MacSharry—who is starting from here. It is clear that, if they were adopted in their present form, his proposals would be disastrous for the British rural economy, a point well made by my noble friend Lord Gallacher. I beg leave to doubt whether a vast system of outdoor relief for the majority of European farmers is the best way to secure adequate supplies of food at a reasonable cost to the European taxpayer and consumer.
At the outset I should like to deal with an idea mentioned in the information memorandum on the communication of the commissioner and also on the proposals in the reflection paper. The information memo states:

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"At the same time the top 10 per cent. or so of larger and more developed farmers will be asked to fend a little more for themselves".
For something over 30 years I have been involved in very detailed farm management accounting on some 60 large farms which are mainly in the South of England. The average working acreage of the farms is about 1,200 acres, just the sort of farms which should be able to fend a little more for themselves. I checked the figures this morning and, in the five years from 1985 to 1989, the average return on those farms on a tenant's capital before any charge for interest on borrowed money was as follows: in 1985, 5.2 per cent; in 1986, 9 per cent; in 1987, 7.5 per cent; in 1988, 7.9 per cent; in 1989, 11.4 per cent. the average over the five years was 8.2 per cent. I am not entirely sure if those are the large farmers who are flourishing according to the noble Lord, Lord Harris of High Cross. Those figures, as I have said, take no account of interest charges on borrowed money.
If one-third of the capital was borrowed, the average return after paying interest would be 3.8 per cent. If half the capital was borrowed, the average return after paying interest would be 1.3 per cent. If the value of the land was included in the calculation, the return on capital would be hardly noticeable.
A number of your Lordships have made the point that both the MacSharry and the free market approach will be disastrous for agricultural employment. Each of the samples of farms which I have described has an average labour bill of just under £100,000 per annum. Their first reaction to severe pressure from MacSharry or for the free market will be to reduce the scale of their operations and to release labour. One can imagine the effect on employment and the knock-on effect on the rural economy if those farms were forced down the MacSharry or the free market road.
However, we can all agree that there is a problem of over-production. So how should that be dealt with? Perhaps I may say a few words about approaching the problem through relying on the free market—an approach which seemed to be favoured by the noble Lords, Lord Harris of High Cross and Lord Wade. It is a point that I have not seen made elsewhere. Suppose we were able to reduce our farm prices to world prices; how do we ensure that that reduction is reflected in the retail price of food to the consumer? The concentration of buying power in this country is greater than in any other member state in the Community. How do we ensure that the reduction in the farm price is not just absorbed in increased margins for the wholesaler, the processor and the retailer?
Many ideas have been expressed in the debate, and all rely on reducing output in one form or another. We know that physical production quotas work best on those products which leave the farm and go to a single buyer—for example, milk and sugar beet—or by restricting the acreage of the crop that can be grown, for example, potatoes or hops. If we restrict the acreage of a crop, what happens to the surplus acreage? As we know it can either be set aside or planted to a crop which is not in surplus, or a crop
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which could be used for non-food purposes. I should say immediately that the latter is a very doubtful prospect. The forthcoming report from Sub-Committee D will bear that out.
With crops, such systems of physical control, either of output or acreage, are feasible but are difficult to operate. With livestock it would be very difficult indeed. There are the problems with intermediate livestock. What happens to the price of store cattle, sheep or pigs? There are problems in counting. Putting the position as delicately as I can, livestock may be moved around to make the counting of them rather difficult; that is not easy to do with crop acreages.
Therefore we must ask what is the alternative to the physical control of output. As we have heard it would be an attempt to reduce output by reducing inputs—the less intensive farming mentioned by a number of noble Lords. I suggest that such proposals should be examined in the UK with some care. In principle they have many attractions. There are the obvious environmental attractions and also the employment attractions. It has been calculated that in every successful scheme for set-aside one job will be lost for every 800 acres set aside. On the sample of large farms I described earlier, a 20 per cent. reduction in output, while maintaining the level of profitability to secure the princely level of 8 per cent. return on a tenant's capital before payment of interest, would, in the absence of any form of grant aid for environmentally friendly systems, require reductions in costs of around £70 to £80 per acre in the running costs of those farms.
An environmental grant—perhaps the "green premium" that the Labour Party are suggesting, or the ideas of the National Farmers' Union, the CLA or the CPRE—used with a form of cross compliance to price support, could, in the UK circumstances resulting from our farm structure, be an attractive idea. There is no time to elaborate on that. It needs a debate in itself. But it is clear that production could be reduced by 20 per cent. if grants to encourage environmentally friendly farming were made sufficiently attractive.
The great attraction of such an approach for UK agriculture is that it must be adopted, if it is to make sense, irrespective of farm size. Indeed, a rational environmental policy intended to reduce surplus production would be particularly generous to the 20 per cent. of farms which produce most of the agricultural output. That thought is touched on in the MacSharry paper, which, in referring to the contribution of an environmentally sustainable form of agricultural production and food quality, suggests:
"This approach would be complemented by more specific measures on the environment to be tailored to the situation in individual Member States".
That is a point which we should be negotiating on the MacSharry paper and bearing very much in mind. I understand that the Government have rejected the MacSharry proposals, at least in principle. It would be unfair to expect a detailed response from the Government at this stage. However, I hope that the Minister will be able to give the House an outline idea of the Government's reaction to the proposals—after all, we have them in front of us and they are proposals for the fundamental reform of the CAP. We hear that

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Mr. Gummer has said that he intends to ensure that British farmers will not be disadvantaged. If the Government reject the MacSharry proposals, as I believe they do, we should be told exactly what is the nature of the Government's alternative.
7.25 p.m.
The Minister of State, Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (Baroness Trumpington): My Lords, I am sure that my right honourable friend the Minister will want to read your Lordships remarks and ideas very carefully. I, too, will want to read the debate. I fear that if I answered all the points now I would take too long and greatly bore your Lordships.
The Motion of my noble friend Lord Stanley of Alderley focuses on over-production in the United Kingdom. In winding up this debate I want to emphasise that what we face is a Community problem and it is only action at a Community level which will bring forward just solutions. Thus, the fact that the European Commission has just produced a discussion paper suggesting the most far-reaching and wide-ranging reforms of the common agricultural policy since its inception over 20 years ago is of the utmost importance to us in the UK. This paper, which sets out the Commission's ideas for CAP reform but does not include any detailed proposals—let alone figures, as my noble friend Lord Middleton reminded us—was discussed by agriculture Ministers at the Council in Brussels earlier this week.
Let us first look at the hard facts. My noble friend Lord Aldenham was quite right in saying that with the exception of cereals the UK is not in surplus in any of the main commodities. Consumption actually exceeds demand in all the other main commodities. For beef, for example, we are only some 90 per cent. self-sufficient compared with an EC figure of 110 per cent. The figures are even more striking for milk. We are only 88 per cent. self-sufficient in butterfat against a Community figure of 114 per cent.; with a figure for the Netherlands of 233 per cent. and for Ireland 317 per cent. This makes the Commission's apparent wish to cut our milk quota by more than any other country's—to which I shall turn in a moment—all the more ironic.
However, whatever the source, we have to look at the matter from an overall EC point of view and surplus production is wrong. It does not make economic sense to produce more than the market needs; keeping supply above the level of demand imposes costs on the consumer, and the storage and disposal of surpluses is expensive for the taxpayer. Furthermore, surplus disposal on world markets creates tension with our world trading partners, as the current GATT negotiations have made clear. That is why—and in this I reject some of the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Palmer—the UK Government have for so many years been leading the fight to reform the CAP; to bring down its costs and to make it more market-orientated.
The noble Lord, Lord Gallacher, said that the Minister could not negotiate a successful GATT deal without damaging agriculture. It is in our interests that there should be a successful outcome to the
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GATT negotiations, and that includes agriculture. Failure would rebound on our farmers as trade retaliation would follow. As I have already said, reform of the CAP is vital, regardless of the GATT.
There is also an overriding reason why changes to the CAP are needed now. It is clear that agriculture expenditure in the Community is again running out of control. Forecasts for this year and next are alarming. If nothing is done the CAP could cost 25 per cent. more in 1991 than in 1990. If expenditure is to be kept within the agricultural guideline, as it is legally required to be, policies will have to be changed. I need hardly remind your Lordships that these increases in expenditure come at a time when farmers' incomes are under severe pressure. To paraphrase the noble Lord, Lord Mackie of Benshie, it seems to work out that more and more money is spent, but less and less is seen by the farmers. That is an intolerable situation.
The Government therefore welcome the fact that the European Commission is considering radical reform of the CAP. We also welcome some of the ideas put forward in its discussion paper. We agree that substantial cuts are needed in support prices and that milk quotas should be reduced. That would encourage consumption, improve competition and help to bring supply into line with demand. We agree that existing environmental measures need to be extended although in our view the Commission's ideas do not go far enough; and in that respect I listened with great interest to the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne.
But although we welcome some of the Commission's ideas we believe that there are fundamental flaws in its basic approach. In particular, we are concerned by the cost of its ideas and by the emphasis that it places on exempting small farmers from the consequences of reform. The result of this obsession with small farmers is that the measures suggested by the Commission would, in our judgment, actually increase the cost of agricultural support in the Community. Believe it, or believe it not, these ideas were brought forward to deal with a budget crisis! Equally, the Commission's paper does little to address the problems of the beef regime where expenditure is rising most rapidly.
Incidentally, beef intervention stocks in the EC in 1989 stood at 123,000 tonnes. In December 1990 they stood at 700,000 tonnes. The figures speak for themselves. My noble friend Lord Willoughby de Broke asked me for the stock figures for EC milk products. In 1989 butter stocks stood at 20,000 tonnes. In December 1990 they stood at 243,000 tonnes. In 1989 stocks of skimmed milk powder were 5,000 tonnes. In December 1990 there were 336,000 tonnes.
The noble Lord, Lord Palmer, said that in December there was one tonne of wheat stocks in the United Kingdom. The figures that he was giving were wrong. In December there were 34,000 tonnes of wheat in the United Kingdom. I am at one with my noble friend Lord Stanley of Alderley on the Commission's ideas. Small farmers would be favoured and larger farmers would be severely disadvantaged.

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For example, small milk producers would be exempt from quota cuts which would fall exclusively on larger producers. Under such a system the largest overall cut in quota would inevitably be suffered by the UK despite the fact that, as I have already said, we are not self-sufficient in milk.
In the cereals sector the Commission is suggesting that farmers should receive direct payments on an area basis provided that they set aside a proportion of their land. But larger producers would receive lower rates of aid and have to set aside higher proportions of their farms. Again, the UK, with its efficient structure and large number of larger farms, would be worst hit.
I must make clear that we cannot support, and are strenuously resisting, this emphasis on protecting the smallest and least viable farmers. It simply does not make economic sense to protect the less efficient at the expense of the most efficient when we are trying to make the CAP more market-orientated and competitive in a world situation. It is simply not fair to discriminate heavily against UK producers who, as I have said, contribute very little to the overall surplus problem in the Community. Why should they pay the price for efficiency twice? That is once by undertaking the cost of modernisation and a second time by paying the price for protecting those farmers who have failed to modernise. We shall therefore continue to argue in the strongest possible terms that the burden of CAP reform must be a shared one and borne equally by all member states.
I turn to some of the specific points raised by your Lordships. My noble friends Lord Stanley of Alderley and Lord Middleton both referred to supply management. One difficulty in dealing with that idea is that it often seems to mean different things to different people. However, if supply management means the widespread use of compulsory measures to reduce production linked to high support prices, I and my colleagues in the Government are against it. The best way to manage supply is to link it with demand. Compulsory set-aside or new production quotas would reduce the ability of producers to respond to changes and it would make farming less able to adapt to the demands of the market. That is the exact opposite of what we wish to achieve. By treating the efficient producer on a par with the inefficient one, such policies would reduce the premium on efficiency.
In the United Kingdom we have some of the most efficient and competitive farmers in Europe. It cannot make sense to handicap them in that way. I know that there are many in the industry who also support that view and lay great store on increasing productivity, competitiveness and not putting the industry in a straitjacket. However, it remains true that in the total pattern of CAP reform quotas may have some part to play. For example, we cannot ignore the contribution that milk quotas have made to halting the growth in milk production. We are certainly ready to consider proposals to make voluntary set-aside more efficient.
I know that a number of your Lordships expressed concern about set-aside, but we continue to believe that voluntary set-aside has a useful role to play as a
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complement to a policy of price restraint. A number of your Lordships also advocated greater use of extensification. That is something which is hinted at in the Commission's paper. We are equally ready to consider any ideas that emerge to encourage extensive farming.
The noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, and the noble Viscount, Lord Mountgarret, touched on nitrogen quotas which have also been suggested as a form of supply management. It is claimed that these could provide a simple means not only of reducing production but also nitrate pollution. That is a simple concept but one which, on closer examination, proves to be both technically and administratively complex. It would be unlikely to achieve the desired result. If noble Lords would like me to expand on that I shall be happy to write to them.
The noble Lord, Lord Houghton of Sowerby, said that we should support the MacSharry ideas because they would discourage intensive animal husbandry. As I said, we do not believe in penalising efficient farmers and rewarding the inefficient. However, I do not accept that efficient farming and high standards of animal welfare are incompatible. Indeed, my right honourable friend the Minister has been actively pressing the EC to introduce uniformly high welfare standards across the Community. I hope that if I quote Churchill I shall not get the same letters that I had when I last spoke about pigs to the noble Lord, Lord Houghton. It was Churchill who said:
"Dogs look up to us, cats look down on us and pigs treat us as equals".
My noble friend Lord Willoughby de Broke spoke about cheese and the situation in regard to New Zealand and the EC. Exports of cheese from the EC attract an export refund in order to bridge the gap between the EC and world market prices. The current rate of refund for Cheddar cheese to Japan is 48p per pound and that has remained unchanged throughout 1990 and 1991.
It is not known whether the Commission consulted New Zealand before this rate was set, though that would not be usual. World trade in dairy products is regularly discussed in meetings of the GATT international dairy arrangement at which both the EC and New Zealand are represented.
The noble Lord, Lord Gallacher, claimed that a successful reform of the CAP was impossible to achieve and that we should seek repatriation of agricultural policy. I found that part of his speech most interesting. My right honourable friend the Minister is well aware of the negotiating realities in Brussels. I am sure the problems of agriculture cannot be dealt with by trying to destroy a common policy for agriculture; but it must be a reformed CAP, which is what we are determined to achieve. We are not alone in seeking reform. All EC agriculture ministers agree that reform is necessary. We are not alone in objecting to Commissioner MacSharry's ideas, so I do not agree that a successful outcome is impossible to achieve.
This debate has given me the chance to underline the importance that the Government attach to reforming the CAP and to ending the unnecessary and

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costly production of surplus foods in the Community. Our aims in considering these reforms are to make EC agriculture more market-orientated and competitive; to reduce the cost of the CAP; to lead to closer integration between agriculture and the environment; and last, but by no means least, to avoid discrimination between farmers in different member states.
7.42 p.m.
Lord Stanley of Alderley: My Lords, I must thank all noble Lords for a most stimulating debate. In particular I thank my noble friend Lady Trumpington for the trouble she has taken in replying. Noble Lords were particularly disciplined in the time they took in making their speeches. If we had the same amount of discipline among the Twelve in the European Community we might better be able to get somewhere.
We had general agreement on a number of points. First, your Lordships agreed that the financial position of British agriculture is far more serious than is generally recognised outside the House, particularly by the media, and perhaps possibly by the noble Lord, Lord Harris. Secondly, the bankrupt state of the industry will cause havoc, not just to farmers but, as your Lordships pointed out, to the environment, to the rural society and to the welfare of stock. We agreed too that British agriculture should not be made inefficient as a result of any policy and that we should aim—I think the word would be right—for a competitive agriculture. But we need some medicine, or as my noble friend said, a bridge, to help us get there. I heard no opposition or alternative to supply management as that medicine or bridge, though I fully accept that some of your Lordships thought erroneously that such a system was paying a farmer to do nothing. It is not. It is far from that, and it is far from the ordinary set-aside that one sees today. It is much more than set-aside. I fail to understand the description of my noble friend Lady Trumpington of supply management. It is not the same as mine, so perhaps if we understood each other a little better there would be a compromise way forward here. My Lords, I beg leave to withdraw the Motion for Papers.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

Baltic States and the Soviet Union
7.44 p.m.
Baroness Cox Baroness Cox rose to ask Her Majesty's Government what is their response to the changing circumstances in the Baltic states and the Soviet Union.
The noble Baroness said: My Lords, I am most grateful that so many of your Lordships have agreed to speak at this relatively late hour. That so many noble Lords have done so is a reflection of widespread and deep concern over recent unhappy events in the Baltic states and in the Soviet Union.
I begin by paying tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, who has persistently brought these events to the attention of the House with his highly relevant Starred Questions, and also to my noble friend Lord
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Caithness for the principled robustness of his responses to those Questions. However, the situation in the Baltic states and the Soviet Union is so serious that it seemed desirable to have a little longer to consider the issues than is possible with a Starred Question.
Recent developments are of the utmost significance politically and in terms of human suffering but they tend to have been eclipsed by the inevitable preoccupation of Western governments and media with the tragic war in the Gulf. Indeed we may surmise that this preoccupation was part of the calculations of those in the Soviet Union who chose 15th and 16th January for an ultimatum to the Baltic states in the full knowledge that all eyes throughout the world would be focused on Saddam Hussein and his response to the United Nations deadline of 15th January. There were here shades of 1956 and the brutal Soviet repression of the Hungarian uprising while most of the rest of the world was preoccupied with Suez.
I shall offer a brief overview of events and issues as a broader context in which your Lordships may wish to develop more specific aspects in greater detail. My starting point is the reaffirmation of the historic truth that the Baltic states were never legitimately a part of the Soviet Union. Their forcible incorporation and brutal repression was a tragic outcome of the notorious Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939. By international law, therefore, they are independent states and deserve recognition as such. Therefore, I suggest, attempts by the Baltic states to realise their independence by peaceful means deserve not only our sympathy but also our support. The brutal repression to which they have been subjected deserves our condemnation. I shall therefore begin by summarising briefly some of the recent repressive measures adopted by the Soviet Union.
I refer, first, to Lithuania. As is well known, on 13th January Soviet troops and tanks attacked an unarmed crowd in Vilnius. The casualties were 14 dead and 346 wounded. The spine-chilling photographs of Soviet tanks crushing unarmed civilians will be indelibly etched on all our memories. Initially the Soviet ministry of defence put out its own version of those events in Lithuania. It was redolent of the worst kind of Soviet disinformation. Four days after the event, it claimed that no one had been killed; that those buried in the mass funeral in Vilnius on 16th January were victims of road accidents; and that the photographs of the man being crushed by a tank were "forged". Army violence has continued in Lithuania. There are reports of harassment and brutality. It is reported that six Lithuanian men seized at a roadblock were beaten up in military barracks. President Landsbergis has likened the Soviet troops to "a mob of bandits" and people are living in an atmosphere of fear.
In Latvia, atrocities have been mainly committed by the OMON black beret storm troops who, on 20th January, attacked the Latvian department of internal affairs in Riga, with four people killed and nine injured, one of whom has tragically just died. Previously, on 16th January, OMON units in armoured personnel carriers attacked vehicles on the

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Brasa bridge in Riga. A minibus with five passengers, including two small girls, caught fire. Although those passengers luckily escaped, another car was hit by automatic fire and its driver, Roberts Munieks, was killed. OMON black beret troops have also been deployed in Estonia and there are reports of harassment there. In all three Baltic states the parliamentary buildings are surrounded by barricades and by civilian volunteers taking a valiant but inevitably token stand in defence of independence—a tragic situation for freely elected parliaments.
These developments in the Baltic states have implications which reach far beyond the immediate human tragedy and political tensions in those countries. They include the exercise of power in the Soviet Union and its strategy vis-à-vis the Baltic states, general political developments in the Soviet Union and the appropriate response of the West in general and of Britain in particular.
I shall deal first with the Soviet Union's response to the developments in the Baltics. In a programme broadcast on the BBC World Service on 28th January, aptly named "Who's calling the shots in Lithuania?", Stephen Dalziel pointed out that,
"it took Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev 36 hours to respond to the news of the seizure of the Lithuanian TV centre in Vilnius, in which 14 people died. But far from expressing regret at what had happened—it was only this week at a short, hastily arranged press conference that he did that—he supported the troops' action, blaming the Lithuanian authorities for starting the trouble. This view was also presented by the Interior Minister, Boris Pugo, and the Defence Minister, Marshal Dmitry Yazov. With no censure of their actions forthcoming from Moscow, the military continued to exert their influence in Lithuania".
Stephen Dalziel went on to suggest that the tone of those speeches made it clear that the Soviet leadership, including Mr. Gorbachev, had decided to adopt a hardline approach to quell moves towards independence in the Baltic states.
Other measures which are causing concern in the Baltic states include Mr. Gorbachev's insistence that an "all union" treaty be signed. That is being resisted, as it would indicate acceptance of Moscow's sovereignty. There is similar opposition in the Baltics to Mr. Gorbachev's demand that independence referenda be held on his terms. There is opposition to that because it is contrary to international law for an occupying power to make such a demand; because pro-independence parliaments have already been elected with free elections; and because those voting in such a referendum are likely to include Soviet troops and their families who are based in the Baltics.
Other more general moves are being made by the Soviet leadership throughout the Soviet Union to tighten its grip and to repress its citizens. For example, from 1st February joint army-police patrols have been on the streets in Soviet cities. That development is viewed with great fear by Soviet citizens because, although the soldiers are supposed to be armed only on public holidays or when demonstrations are expected, local commanders can extend provisions at their own discretion.
Another repressive measure is Mr. Gorbachev's decree which gives the KGB and interior ministry officials the right to enter and search business premises. Although the ostensible justification for this is that it is an attempt to tackle crimes associated with the black market, there is clearly an alternative possibility of harassment of many non-governmental organisations and democratic enterprises. As Stephen Dalziel has pointed out:
"It is difficult to see these latest moves as anything other than a further tightening of the screws on democracy—and two more nails in the coffin of perestroika".
The confidence and ruthlessness with which the Soviets planned their strike against Baltic independence may well have resulted from the West's acquiescence in excluding the Baltic delegates as observers at the CSCE conference in Paris on 19th November. In retrospect, that cruel and unnecessary humiliation of the Baltic peoples may have convinced the Soviet authorities that they could enjoy a free hand.
I suggest that all those developments are particularly ominous, coming as they do in the wake of previous measures which have given Mr. Gorbachev the most complete powers ever held by a Soviet leader. There is now in place both the formal provision and the proven ability to extend the major crackdown against democratic reforms which could return the Soviet Union to the harsh totalitarianism of its recent bloody past.
I do not have time to discuss other recent repressive developments, such as the closure of channels of media communication like Interfax and the takeover of printing works, or the harassment of citizens like the assault on Alexander Podrabinek who is editor of Express Kronika and whom I am deeply privileged to regard as a friend. These are all deeply disturbing developments: they cannot be condoned.
In conclusion, I should like to ask my noble friend the Minister the following questions. First, does my noble friend believe that it is right for the CSCE conference, scheduled for later this year, to be held in Moscow? Will the Government do all in their power to try to change the location, unless or until the Soviet Union demonstrates its commitment to genuine democratic reforms? Secondly, will the Government initiate a debate in the United Nations on the situation in the Baltic states and press for their recognition and participation given that they were full members of the League of Nations and that their forcible incorporation into the Soviet Union was a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and was contrary to international law?
Thirdly, will the Government state that the Soviet Union's actions in the Baltic states are a clear breach of the CSCE Helsinki process, the most recent summit of which was held in Paris last November? Fourthly, will the Government extend some recognition of the freely elected Baltic governments; for example, as a first step at consular level, as has already been done by Scandinavian governments to their great credit? Fifthly, will the Government encourage cultural, sporting and educational contacts with the Baltic

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states; for example, by opening British Council offices in the area? Sixthly, and more generally, will the Government expand links with, and support for, non-governmental democratic organisations within the Soviet Union and the Baltic states to encourage the development of democratic institutions and a free economy?
My seventh question concerns aid. Will the Government reconsider their policy on aid, particularly food aid, to the Soviet Union, bearing in mind the fact that the Soviets had an outstandingly good harvest last year and that the problems of shortages are a result of the malfunctioning of the system? Is my noble friend aware that it is reported that much of the food aid has been used to replenish military stocks and that it has not been made available to citizens who are in most need? It seems ironic that we should be providing generous aid to a nation which is proposing to increase its spending on defence by about 20 per cent. this year when its defence expenditure is already running at about 25 per cent. of its national income.
Finally, if the Soviet Union is moving into a new era of hardline repressive communism, should we not be revising, albeit sadly but as a matter of urgency, our approach to our own defence? Can my noble friend confirm that the Soviet Union is still producing new offensive weapons at an alarming rate—a new submarine every six weeks, together with two aircraft, six tanks and one missile every day? Can he also confirm that armaments removed from Europe are massed, potentially still ready for use, east of the Urals?
I am most grateful for having had the opportunity to raise these issues which are worrying many people who are concerned for the future of democracy in the Baltic states, in the Soviet Union and, indeed, in Europe. There are some who resist a strong response by the West to recent developments in the Soviet Unions because they fear that that will undermine Mr. Gorbachev. But surely our support for President Gorbachev has been based on his initiatives which have appeared to promote democracy and freedom. It is those fundamental principles to which we are committed and which we must continue to support even—and, perhaps, especially—if Mr. Gorvachev jettisons them. I can do no better than to finish with a quotation from Mark Almond's booklet entitled Retreat to Moscow which is published by the Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies. It reappraises Mr. Gorbachev and admonishes us:
"it would be wise to remember Montaigne's dictum that the worst form of servility is to be grateful to rulers who return some part of their subjects' liberty to which they had no right in the first place".
At present, when there is no sign on the horizon of even a return to liberty for the Baltic states or for the Soviet Union, can we condone their humiliation and support a ruler and regime that inflict it?
8 p.m.
Lord Kagan: My Lords, we are indebted to the noble Baroness for introducing this subject. I was born in Lithuania. The dramatic, passionate struggle for freedom is understandable against the background
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of Lithuania's ancient history. Lithuania became a kingdom in 1200 at the time of Magna Charta. By the 15th century, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania under its ruler, Vytautas the Great extended from the Baltic Sea to the Caspian Sea. After the union of Lublin in 1569, when Lithuania joined Poland, it became the largest country in Eastern Europe. Then, of course, Moscow started expanding. By 1795, under Catherine the Great, Lithuania lost its battle and became a province of the Czars. Intense russification followed. Lithuania was a Catholic country. The Catholic Church was forbidden. It was driven underground. The Russian Orthodox Church was imposed.
The Latin alphabet was forbidden in school books, bibles and so on. The cyrillic alphabet was imposed. That brought official education almost to a dead stop because the Lithuanian population would not accept the cyrillic alphabet and could not use the Latin one without risk of being sent to Siberia, even in those days. However, despite repression, the Lithuanian language and culture were kept alive and survived.
Not until the Versailles Treaty in 1918 did Lithuania re-emerge as a nation. It was recognised by the League of Nations as an independent state on 16th February 1919. Lithuania happened to be on the crossroads between the Kaiser's Germany and the Czar's Russia. It was the battlefield. The armies moved over it both ways. The country was destroyed and ravaged to such an extent that my grandfather, who was born in the house, after the war could not identify the spot where his family house had stood. He had to bring surveyors to identify it from the remnants of chimney. From such beginnings, Lithuania started to rebuild its future.
On one side, Lithuania had Stalin's dictatorship. On the other side, for a time, it had the German Weimar Republic, Germany's inflation and total industrial ruin. It subsequently became Hitler's Germany. Lithuania was wedged between two of the most vicious of dictatorships, but it had the courage to set up a democratic government.
From a razed base, between 1919 and 1940 Lithuanian agriculture succeeded in becoming the largest exporter of bacon in Europe—even greater than that of Denmark. Lithuania's currency became the strongest currency in Europe. Eighty per cent. of it was covered by gold; in other words, it was similar to the gold sovereign. Budget after budget was balanced.
Lithuania had various presidents. It was not a command economy. There was a benign, enlightened autocracy. From 1926 to 1940 Antanas Smetona was president. During that time Lithuania's prosperity and peace continued. Despite having Hitler on one side and Stalin on the other, Lithuania had the courage to open its doors—it became a sanctuary for the new refugees from both dictatorships. If Mrs. Thatcher had seen Lithuania she would have praised it as a market economy. It was an incentive economy. Achievement was encouraged.
In 1940 we had the Hitler-Ribbentrop pact. Ten per cent. of the population, especially those with any

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education or achievement, was deported to the gulags and Kazakhstan. The terror was total; overt resistance impossible. Then came Hitler's occupation and Stalin's return in 1944 until 1985 when Gorbachev emerged.
Mr. Gorbachev realised, for his own reasons, that the Soviet economy had to change. In a competitive world, Russia could not afford a command economy. The problem of Russia and Gorbachev was that he could not just introduce reforms by decree. A market economy has to have a culture and a population that is willing and able to use it. It was obvious to him that if he could win over Lithuania it would be the seed bed, the showcase, the part of Russia which would most easily adapt, exploit and use perestroika.
In 1986 perestroika was introduced and in 1987 and 1988 glasnost was introduced. Mr. Gorbachev travelled across the world and was rapturously received in Berlin, Washington and London. I am sure that when he went to Lithuania and told them, "I am the man who let you out of the cage; I am the man who opened the prison doors; I want to give you the opportunity to be the leaders of this new freedom", he assumed that he would be received with the same rapture as in Berlin.
Now perhaps we may look at how it was perceived in Lithuania. Basically, after 70 years of terror in the USSR and 50 years of terror in Lithuania, people were in the same position as a man in a diving bell pushed right down. Suddenly the diving bell is brought up without gradual decompression and there is an explosion. The heady atmosphere did not allow the people to take a reasoned look at the situation.
When Gorbachev approached Lithuania and said, "This is what I want to do, this is your opportunity. After all, the greatest guarantee is our joint common interest", the reply was, "We want independence, we are entitled to it". Nobody in the world could doubt that, but they said, "We want it now, instantly". However, it was not his to give; he would not have survived 48 hours if he had given it.
Gorbachev returned and said, "Look, can we change the agenda and not make it independence and economy but economy and independence? I promise you that". They said, "No, we don't trust any Russian and we don't trust you". Gorbachev then introduced the law of recession to which the noble Baroness referred. He went back to Vilnius in January 1990 and thought he would talk to the newly elected members of the Lithuanian government. However, they were not free to reason with him. They were elected to their parliament with a clear-cut mandate: independence now, nothing less than total independence. The members were not even free to negotiate, and a deadlock resulted.
Thus, Gorbachev introduced the new law of secession on 12th March. On 11th March, the Lithuanian parliament was called together and declared UDI. Right was and is 100 per cent. on the side of Lithuania, but politics is the art of the possible.
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One should never face a person on one's side or the opposite side of the table with a demand which cannot be carried out.
The situation was not due to ill will or deception; it arose because two peoples—Lithuanians and Soviets —started to run democratic lives without having their L plates removed. They went at speed. After all, even in the past 12 months or two years, one has an impression that the Almighty has pressed the fast-forward button on history. Neither the Soviets nor the Lithuanians had a tradition of freedom. They could not handle the heady atmosphere. It is one of the historic tragedies that Lithuania could have been the conduit for the Soviet Union to Europe. It could have had all the benefits which Finland has; it could have been the Switzerland of the Soviet Union. What is more, the latter needed Lithuania badly but because neither could handle the problem they ended in confrontation.
I agree with the noble Baroness regarding the western approach. If the world were as it should be we should simply be able to say, "Look, this, that and the other". However, in the real world we cannot do that. I would not presume to teach Mrs. Margaret Thatcher, Mr. Major or Mr. Bush the right and prudent course regarding Lithuania.
Is it too late? Has the historic opportunity gone? Last Sunday there came on the television screen the teletext announcement that Mr. Landsbergis had agreed to discussions without preconditions; Moscow had agreed to the same. I do not believe that there is a good, realistic alternative. If Mr. Gorbachev is dislodged, who or what is the alternative? I said in this House four years ago that the Soviet Union would end up with a military dictatorship or a Napoleonic solution. It is beginning to look that way.
One aspect that has misled Lithuania is that as soon as the country had its flag there was enthusiasm, as could be expected after 50 years of terror, and the world applauded: but it also applauded Czechoslovakia, the Prague spring, and Hungary! Unless and until we have the will and the means to back up people we should refrain from encouraging them to climb on to the barricades. It is easy to be a spectator patriot, but who foots the bill?
8.18 p.m.
Lord Hylton: My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Kagan. He has given us some fascinating insights into both the history and current affairs of the Baltic states. I am extremely grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Cox, for raising the wider Question tonight. I thank her for her kind personal reference to me.
In view of the war in the Middle East, I thought it necessary by means of Starred and Written Questions to keep the three Baltic states before your Lordships' attention. Tonight's debate enables us to range a little more widely and deeply. In many ways, the history of the Russian empire and that of the British empire in India is remarkably similar. The Russians had suffered greatly from Tartar invasions and raids. From the 1550s onwards, the rulers of Muscovy expanded

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continuously until the late 19th century. In the process, they overran Siberia, they conquered Trans-Caucasia and much of central Asia.
The English, on the other hand, established their first trading post in India in the early 1600s. By 1850 we dominated the whole Indian sub-continent. Both great powers made the mistake of intervening in Afghanistan; both suffered a good deal as a result. From 1900 onwards the British evolved the concepts of dominion status and colonial self-government.
When the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan and renounced worldwide revolution and domination, they seem to have had little idea of what to do with their historical land empire beyond perhaps some vague notions of federalism. The new deal offered by the Communist Party included more open and responsive government; the ending of arbitrary imprisonment and censorship, and greater freedom for the press and media.
There has been much talk of economic reconstruction, but without fully legalising private property and investment and without going wholeheartedly for a market economy or even for a social market. The resulting ferment has let loose nationalist desires which had long been kept firmly suppressed. The problem of the minorities is now acute, just as it was in Europe after the fall of the Prussian and Austrian empires. That problem is still acute to this day in India and Pakistan. We have seen ethnic tension in central Asia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, Moldavia and to a lesser degree in the Baltic states. I wonder what the future trend will be. My intuition tells me that the trend will be towards stronger republics with a gradually weakening centre.
The influence of the party, the KGB and the army will no doubt slow down the movement. But given the apparent bankruptcy of Marxism as a unifying philosophy, it is difficult to see how the reactionary forces will succeed in stopping the trend completely. In the European parts of the USSR one can foresee three or four major republics, depending perhaps on whether the east and west Ukraine manage to hold together. In Transcaucasia there are likely to be at least three units. It remains to be seen whether the Russian republic will succeed in keeping control over Siberia with its strategic oil, gas and minerals. The Moslem areas of central Asia are likely to want to control their own destinies with, no doubt, many local rivalries.
How should Her Majesty's Government respond to this situation? I submit that the USSR is far too vast to be covered by just one embassy in Moscow. In addition the Ukraine and Byelorussia are already theoretical members of the United Nations Organisation. We need to be represented in such places as Kiev, Leningrad, Minsk and perhaps also in Siberia. Other European states that have opened offices in republican capitals have found them rewarding in terms of contracts won. If the objection to this idea is the usual one of cost, surely it should be possible for the European Community as a whole to be represented in these vitally important capitals of the major republics. If this is to be the approach, the
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representatives will have to have major political as well as economic competence. I hope that Her Majesty's Government will be able to comment further this evening on this question of representation.
A second approach lies through the English language which holds the key to so much of the world of computing and high technology generally. Here we have a major product to market. The British Council and British institutes have a definite part to play, as the noble Baroness, Lady Cox, indicated. They could help overcome the obvious problem of our non-acceptance of the Soviet claims to jurisdiction over the three Baltic states.
I was a little disappointed by the Government's reply in Hansard of 31st January to my Question for Written Answer on this matter. Can the noble Earl now assure me that this point will be kept under active review, not only as regards the Baltic states but also more widely within the Soviet Union? Her Majesty's Government also have at their disposal other diplomatic means of action. The USSR and its component republics, as they rejoin the rest of the world economy and the community of nations, will increasingly want to join the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and many other specialised international bodies. I trust that our Government will be absolutely firm in resisting any such requests until they are satisfied that a fair and just relationship has been worked out, and is functioning, between any central Soviet government and its component republics. Can the noble Earl give me any hopeful sign on that?
Soviet applications to join specialised bodies should not just be looked at on their own merits. I suggest that they should be closely related to improvements in human rights throughout the whole of the USSR. Conversely we should be active in sponsoring the Baltic states as members of international bodies.
Trade is another matter that should enable our Government to exercise a positive influence. I believe we still import considerable quantities of Russian timber. We could take Soviet oil, if any is available for export. Oil and possibly refrigerated natural gas from this source could reduce our dependence on the volatile Middle East at a time when our own North Sea supplies may be beginning to diminish. Trade could and should be increased as it would constitute an incentive to civilised behaviour by our suppliers. Similarly the release of credits for Soviet purchases should be closely linked to observance by the USSR of the Helsinki, Paris and CFE agreements.
I turn now to the particular matter of the Baltic states. I am personally grateful to Her Majesty's Government for the firm and resolute line they have taken. I believe this has, in concert with our European partners and others, induced some second thoughts in the Soviet authorities. The positive signs are Mr. Gorbachev's public expression of regret over the unnecessary deaths and woundings; the withdrawal of some at least of the special forces, and the appointment of negotiators to treat with each of the three republics.

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A letter in the Independent newspaper of 31st January signed by Mr. Markov of the Novosti press agency in Moscow was also encouraging. It stated that the events, that is the shootings:
"are being painstakingly investigated, and those to blame will be punished according to law".
Against all this we have to balance Mr. Gorbachev's ruling that the Lithuanian independence poll and the provocations in Latvia associated with Mr. Alexander Nevzorov are illegal. In and around Moscow there has been interference with the relatively free news agency, Interfax, and also with Radio Russia. I am sorry to say that in the past five months three well-known orthodox priests have been murdered—Fathers Men, Solnyshko and Shlykov—in possibly sinister circumstances. It would be interesting to hear how Her Majesty's Government evaluate these conflicting signals.
In the short-term there are several matters on which I hope our Government will continue to press the Soviet Union. They are compensation for the Baltic families of those killed and wounded by Soviet forces; repayment of the money stolen by Soviet forces from Marcus Warren, Brian Killen and Anatol Lieven of the Daily Telegraph, Reuters and The Times respectively; accountability for their actions by the Soviet forces; and the complete withdrawal of ministry of the interior and other special units from the Baltic states. The CSCE Helsinki process may be a suitable means for making progress on these matters.
Like the noble Baroness, Lady Cox, I wish to look at the longer term position. I start from the clear statement made in the House of Commons by Mr. Waldegrave on 5th April 1990 at col. 1361 of Hansard. He said that the secret Molotov-Ribbentrop protocol of 1939, implemented in 1940 by the forcible annexation of the Baltic states, was illegal. The Baltic peoples have a legal right to their independence. The question is therefore how they are to achieve it. The task is delicate, as was indicated by Sir Michael Howard in yesterday's Times. It need not necessarily be a precedent leading to a rapid dissolution of the Soviet Union.
The right honourable gentleman, Mr. David Owen, suggested in today's Daily Telegraph that the International Court of Justice should be invited to rule on the special status of the Baltic republics. I support that suggestion. It may even be in the long-term interest of the USSR that the Baltic states should be treated as a special case.
We should also remember that their total population amounts only to some 8 million. They have shown remarkable restraint and self-discipline in the face of great provocation. Nevertheless we have also to understand the fears of the Soviet military leaders. They look on the Baltic as important to their security. They have access to that sea, both from Leningrad and from Kaliningrad in former East Prussia. There may well be a case for allowing the USSR to have some strategic sovereign bases within the independent republics which otherwise should
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remain as neutral as Finland or Austria. It may be right for NATO to give certain guarantees about spatial limits for the ships and aircraft belonging to the alliance.
The question for the Soviet Union is: does it accept that the Baltic states are a special case? Does it repudiate the crimes of Stalin just as much as those of Hitler? Can it see that neutral neighbours can be a source of strength to it rather than just a weakness? Her Majesty's Government have already made a promising start in their important task of persuading the USSR. I wish them still further success. At this point, perhaps I should add that it is appropriate for us to thank the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, for the stamina he is showing in replying to two debates on the same day.
8.32 p.m.
Lord Thomas of Swynnerton: My Lords, I, too, should like to thank my noble friend Lady Cox for introducing this extremely interesting debate on the issue of the Baltic states. I want to make my speech in relation to what our attitude should be in the light of the history of the Baltic states and of our own part in it.
I do not think I need dwell very much more on the history of these nations, since the noble Lord, Lord Kagan, did that admirably for us earlier on. I would only say that it is perhaps worth while to point out that Lithuania was created at the partition of Poland in the 1790s—I do not think the noble Lord mentioned that—and we are all aware that that is looked upon as one of the most unjust acts of great power policy in history.
As for Lithuania and Estonia, they have been a part of the Russian empire since much earlier times, since the 1720s. But no one in this House would think that the 1720s was a very long time ago, and no one would think that injustice is improved by having continued for a long time. Anyway, such injustices were recognised as being unacceptable in 1920 when Lenin himself accepted by a treaty that these states should be independent. They, of course, became such and were full members of the League of Nations, as my noble friend Lady Cox has pointed out. They were, too, in a rather roundabout manner, absorbed in Russia by another infamous action, which my noble friend Lady Cox has mentioned—the Russo-German pact of 1939.
This is where our own part in the history of our allies becomes suddenly relevant, because, when the Soviet Union absorbed the Baltic states in 1940, our first reaction was naturally that that action was as bad as the invasion of Czechoslovakia or Austria by Germany, and that is indeed what Lord Halifax told the Cabinet when it happened. A similar line was taken by President Roosevelt when he said,
"Independence has only been suspended provisionally. Lithuania will be free again and sooner than you think".
He said that to a group of Lithuanian Americans in 1941.
As we know, that line was not sustained. The then British ambassador in Moscow, Sir Stafford Cripps, was extremely anxious that we should overlook the

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action of absorption in the interests of our long-term friendship with the Soviet Union, which he argued forcefully was essential for winning the war. Stalin stressed the same when he saw Sir Anthony Eden, then Foreign Secretary, in December 1941, arguing, in a way which no Soviet leader had done between the wars, that the Baltic states had been, as it were, snatched from Russia illegally in 1920. This wrong should be undone after the war.
The consequence was that the British government hesitated and, it seems to me, made a mistaken decision, not in recognising the absorption of the Baltic states by the Soviet Union, but in agreeing, in the first and subsequent drafts of the Anglo-Soviet Treaty of 1942, that the frontier of the Soviet Union after the war should indeed be that of June 1941, the day of entry of the Soviet Union into the war, rather than that of 1939.
The United States, being further away and, in those days at least, perhaps more principled, for a time took a stronger position. I found a letter from the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, to Sir Anthony Eden in early 1942 arguing that to accept the Soviet position would be to destroy the meaning of one of the most important clauses of the Atlantic Charter. Nevertheless, that principled decision of the United States government was soon modified.
I came across another reference to policy in, as it were, evolution, when I found President Roosevelt suggesting to his Secretary of State that perhaps a compromise could be reached whereby the territory could be recognised as being Soviet but the population could be allowed to emigrate. This was called by his own Under-Secretary a Baltic Munich, and indeed the idea did not get very far since Mr. Molotov turned it down.
Not long after that we found Under-Secretary of State Sumner Wells stating publicly that the United States had no vital interest in opposing the union of the Baltic States with the Soviet Union, and that concession was fundamentally made at the Tehran Conference in 1943 by both ourselves and the United States. That was the first, but by no means the last, of the major concessions of principle made to Stalin by the two major Western allies during the course of the Second World War.
It may well be argued, as President Roosevelt did at the time, that,
"The fact, surely, is that by the time the war comes to an end the Soviet Union will be occupying the Baltic States anyway, and we will not be able to do anything about it".
Nevertheless there was a concession of principle which must have been of assistance to Stalin in summing up the long-term plans of the Western allies in the subsequent part of the war.
I found another note in one of the briefs made for the Potsdam Conference by a Foreign Office official:
"We hope very much that this question"—
that is, the question of the Baltic states—
"will not be raised".
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And indeed it was not. That attitude, it seems to me, was the position of Her Majesty's Government up till two or three years ago.
I recall that when I first came to this House a friend of mine, the late Lord St. Oswald, told me that he had decided in 1981 to put down a Question in this House, asking what would be Her Majesty's Government's policy at the forthcoming meeting of the United Nations towards the question of the Baltic states. He told me that when he put it down the Foreign Office approached him and said: "Please do not do so. This would rock the boat terribly. We are trying to do something extremely interesting at the moment with the Soviet Union and this will not be helpful". And indeed he withdrew the Question.
Given this past, what should be our current policy towards the Baltic states? I have some suggestions which I do not think have been mentioned so far, although if I am wrong I apologise. I think we should approach the Soviet Union in a very businesslike and "ex-imperial" way, if I can put it like that. We should say that we perfectly understand Mr. Gorbachev's difficulties in dealing with the subject peoples of the nations of which the Soviet Union is composed. We ourselves, as an imperial power, had the same difficulties and experienced similar crises throughout the world towards the end of our declining empire.
We should he resolute and point out that the loss of empire does not necessarily mean the loss of national identity: indeed, far from it, as our own statesmen and also General de Gaulle, in relation to France, have been able to prove very effectively. I think we should say that we are very flattered by the use which some Soviet commentators have made of the concept of the Commonwealth, as something which could play a part in the future evolution of the Soviet Union, although we ourselves have some doubt about what the Commonwealth means. We might well throw that in.
We should certainly insist—I think that history is important here—that we know very well what the history of the Baltic states has been between 1919 and 1945. Any suggestion that these are faraway countries of which we know nothing should be banished from our approaches and discussions with the Soviet Union. We should point out forcefully that bloodshed by an empire in decline practically never delays the inevitable day of judgment and probably only makes martyrs—martyrs whose names may be quite embarrassing for the imperial power, when their representatives travel down the avenues of the capital of the country concerned, since the names will be very clearly indicated on the side of the streets.
We should insist that, in an age of nationalism which is still going on and which is a development in which the Soviet Union has itself played a large part in encouraging—there is no question about that—the long-term goals of the independence movements in these countries are not likely to be stopped by some rather hesitant and inadequate use of force which is afterwards withdrawn. These are quite unnecessary and ineffective methods of indicating policy. After all, Solzhenitsyn himself—and who would deny that he

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was a very great Russian and certainly a very patriotic one?—said that the Baltic states, if they wished, should be allowed to separate from the Soviet Union.
We should say that we have an obligation to see and entertain Baltic leaders who come here, since we are in many ways sympathetic to their ideas. The Soviet leaders may insist that this is a ridiculous posture and that these countries are far too small. I have heard people—not Soviet citizens—who are not sympathetic to these independence movements say "that is a Stalinist suggestion, since Stalin himself was the person who insisted that some small countries give a very great deal of trouble". He was talking about Poland when he said that but obviously it applies to the Baltic states as well. Strategic access to the Baltic was mentioned by my noble friend Lord Hylton, but we might point out that the Soviet Union has access to the Baltic without using the Baltic states.
Finally, when discussing these questions with Soviet leaders, we should argue that there is a difference between these states and most of the other nations of the Soviet Union. These were independent states with different cultures, and were recognised as such for 20 years during the golden age of the Soviet Union between 1920 and 1940, as Lenin himself admitted. If the Baltic states were to achieve some kind of economic and cultural association with the other states which border on the Baltic it might well be that they would give far less trouble to the Soviet Union in future than if they remained within the embrace of the prison house. An approach along these lines should surely inform our policies in discussion them with the Soviet leaders.
8.45 p.m.
Lord Bridges: My Lords, I welcome the very apposite Question which the noble Baroness has put to the Government this evening. I entirely share the feeling of revulsion and dismay which she has so eloquently expressed about recent events in the Baltic states. However, I do not entirely share the conclusions she has drawn from the situation. The points I should like to put to the Government are summarised under four headings, and I hope that the Government may be able to take account of them in their consideration of this very important question.
My first plea would be for care, because the stated views of our Government on this issue, I believe, will be noted with much attention by the Soviet Union. Our power and influence in the world declined very much in the last generation but, for strange reasons, we still loom rather larger than life in the Soviet Union. There are a number of historical reasons for this which I will not go into now, but the stated position of our Government will attract much attention in the Kremlin. We should be aware of that. Policy making "on the hoof" on this subject is best avoided, and I do not think we can act with the freedom of some other governments such as the Scandinavian governments mentioned by the noble Baroness.
Next, I think we need to remind ourselves of the particular constitutional position of this problem in
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the Soviet Union. The USSR is a unique phenomenon in the modern world, as a vast assemblage of peoples and territories spread across two continents: an entity which is polyglot and multi-ethnic. Perhaps the closest parallels in this century have been the Ottoman empire and the Austro-Hungarian empire—not parallels which would appeal very much to the Russians but which I think are just.
Unlike these two empires, the Soviet Union has a written constitution of apparently open character, and it has two very important articles on the right of a member republic to secede. Article 72 specifically includes that right, although Article 73 reserves the determination of state frontiers to the Soviet state. It is clear that, as a state on the periphery of the union cannot secede without altering the state frontiers, it will be difficult to find a legal way to exercise the right to secede without co-operation from the centre. This in fact is what has been going on in the past two years. President Gorbachev has been seeking some way in which the right to secede could be expressed, while safeguarding the vital interests of the Soviet state. I noted with much interest what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Kagan. He seemed to believe that this was the right way for us to hope for progress. That is certainly my own belief."
Thirdly, I think we should reflect most carefully on the effect of what we say in public on the turmoil now prevalent in the Soviet Union. This upheaval involves all the key policy areas in the Soviet state, including the future place of their constituent republics in the Union. The history of the past century in the world at large suggests that in the end the centre must yield. It will not be able to hold this disparate grouping of peoples together indefinitely. But I hope that our Government will agree with me that the most satisfactory outcome will be recognition by all the peoples of the Soviet Union of the need for constitutional change. This will be an enormously difficult task but, if unnecessary bloodshed is to be avoided, a new agreement will have to be reached in the end.
However much we sympathise with their sufferings and aspirations—and clearly all of your Lordships who have spoken tonight feel that way, as I do myself—it would, I believe, be a serious mistake for any of us in the West to seek to play a direct role in what happens except in relation to the agreements to which both we and the Soviet Union are parties, such as the CSCE treaty, the United Nations Charter, and so on.
I recognise that these feelings may be unwelcome to some of your Lordships, but I place much emphasis on this because there are those in the Soviet Union who are already looking for signs of Western interference. Noble Lords will, I expect, have noticed a recent statement to this effect by the head of the KGB. In this country we need to be particularly careful because of our role of military intervention in Russia after the Bolshevik revolution. We may have forgotten about this episode of history here, but the Russians have not. It is in their school history textbooks, and practically every Soviet citizen I have spoken to remembers it.
Next I should like to say a separate word about the Baltic states. It was suggested recently in this House

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that we have never recognised their incorporation into the USSR. But, as the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Swynnerton, has just reminded us in his most interesting historical exposition, that is emphatically not the case. We have recognised the incorporation of the Baltic states into the USSR de facto if not de jure. If I can add one detail to the full and interesting account that the noble Lord gave, the Foreign Secretary, Mr. Anthony Eden, informed Joseph Stalin of this in December 1941 in terms, in the conversation to which he referred, and this has been our position ever since. I am no international lawyer but it would seem to me that, after a lapse of 49 years, the boundary between de facto recognition and de jure recognition must be a pretty thin one.
Thus, I believe that the words of caution that I have spoken about non-interference apply particularly to the question of the Baltic states. Any suggestion that we are trying to detach the Baltic states from the Soviet Union could, I believe, be extremely dangerous in the current situation in the Soviet Union. We cannot tell what this turmoil will lead to, but if we were to give this historical evolution a character directed against the West, it could have far-reaching consequences.
Your Lordships may think that I am a little too cautious on this matter, but I would emphasise that we are dealing with extremely long-term issues here. To illustrate what I mean in relation to the history of that part of Eastern Europe, I should like to refer to two earlier decisions made by Britain, which it may be salutary to remember.
The first concerns a little-known episode during the Crimean War when, in order to open a second front, the British Government sent a naval expedition in two successive years with the object of bombarding the Russian forts on the Aaland islands and at the approaches to Helsinki and St. Petersburg. In order to make this campaign more successful it was intended to invite the Swedish Government to join this expedition, with a promise that Finland would be allotted to Sweden in the event of success, Finland then, of course, being part of the Czarist empire. The expedition failed mainly, it seems, because the King of Sweden declined the terms offered to him. The interesting part of this little episode is the opinion held by scholars in many Nordic countries that if the offer had been taken up and the expedition had been successful, Finland would now be a part of the Soviet Union.
The second illustration, a more recent one, concerns the 1939–40 winter war when the USSR invaded Finland. I expect that many of your Lordships will recall the strong pressure that was exerted on the British Government of that time that we should send aid to Finland, with whom of course public opinion in this country greatly sympathised. But after prolonged and agonised deliberation the government of the day decided that it would be imprudent to engage on a campaign of that nature against the USSR, just because the consequences were so unpredictable. That view was surely as sensible and correct, unheroic though it may have been, as the
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earlier decision to invite the Swedes to engage with us in war against Russia was perhaps imprudent in the last century.
I mention these two historical events as I believe, as I said a little earlier, that the public attitudes expressed by Her Majesty's Government on the issues raised by the noble Baroness are of great long-term importance. It is a sad fact that Russian history has been characterised by an inability to make political changes in a peaceful way. Instead political change in that country has sadly nearly always been accompanied by violence and disruption. My suggestion is that our actions should be carefully calculated to make a peaceful evolution more likely and not less likely. If we can make a contribution in that direction, we will have served our country well.
Lord Hylton: My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, may I put to him two questions? Does he accept overall the Soviet view of the situation of these republics? Secondly, does he think that national self-determination is perhaps rather too dangerous?
Lord Bridges: No, my Lords, I do not take that view. I would certainly agree that a great injustice was done to the Baltic states in 1940, but I think that the injustice is part of history and we have to accept the situation that flowed from it as being a reality with which we have to deal. In other words, we are emotionally engaged but we should not allow our emotions to govern our reason. On the noble Lord's second question, I certainly believe that constitutional change is necessary and I believe that it should come about, but I think it can come about most effectively as a result of what happens inside the Soviet Union rather than external prompting, which can be so readily misinterpreted.
8.58 p.m.
Lord Beloff: My Lords, I join with others in thanking the noble Baroness for raising this subject, which has enabled all of us to improve our knowledge of a difficult and important problem. I should like to begin by reassuring the noble Earl that he need not worry about what I am going to say because I have no suggestions to make to Her Majesty's Government and am prepared, for the time being at any rate, to leave this difficult matter to their discretion, understanding, as I think we all must, the priority that Her Majesty's Government, the government of the United States and other members of the alliance at present engaged in war, place upon keeping the Soviet Union on board. In the light of that overriding priority, it would, I feel, be unreasonable, even if we thought it otherwise reasonable, to expect a major démarche on a subject of this kind.
I think it is difficult—and the noble Lord, Lord Bridges, has helped us there—to start with the Baltic states. The evolution of the Soviet Union over the last few years, and our assessment of what has been happening and where it is going, are surely more important than even the undoubted issues of principle and national self-determination that we consider when we look at the Baltic states.

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According to an insert in this evening's television news, apparently Mr. Gorbachev went on air unexpectedly this afternoon in the Soviet Union to stress the importance that he attached to preserving the national unity—the state unity, if you like—of the Soviet Union. That is a useful reminder because his definition of the Soviet Union would undoubtedly include its present frontiers; that is to say, it would include the Baltic states and all the other republics—Moldavia and the Transcaucasian republics—which, to varying degrees, have stressed their wish for independence.
That means—and it is something which I believe has been characteristic of the Soviet position in the United Nations and elsewhere—that such matters are wholly matters of domestic concern and that any expression of opinion from outside on the internal relations of the Soviet Union is to be regarded as interference. When there is, as there is here, a clear divergence of major principle—what to the Soviet Union is regarded as a wholly internal matter, a local domestic matter, is regarded by much of the rest of the world as of international significance—it is very difficult to see how progress can be made.
It seems to me that, if there is to be any external input into this situation, it can only be as a result of not so much the United Kingdom alone but the Western world generally having a strong bargaining position. One can get results by a bargain. In circumstances where issues of principle are involved one cannot expect to get results by persuasion.
In my view, over the past few years—I have said this in this House before but I repeat it because it is relevant to this evening's discussion—the West has wholly misinterpreted what is happening in the Soviet Union. It was argued that the clear signs that the Soviet Union was withdrawing more and more rapidly from some external positions in Eastern Europe, Afghanistan and overseas denoted a major change in the Soviet perception of itself; that is to say, that the Soviet Union was in the process of re-entering on equal terms and in the same spirit the family of nations. I did not think that that was plausible and the remarks made by the noble Baroness about the Soviet Union's interpretation or misinterpretation of recent arms control treaties would seem to bear me out.
But more significant and very closely connected with that was the belief that the economic changes which appeared to be coming about or planned in the Soviet Union were economic changes in the direction of a market economy and that Mr. Gorbachev was a major reformer with a goal which would bring the Soviet Union into the pattern of world trade, world financial relations and so forth. With that, it was believed—rightly, because the two things cannot be disconnected—that that would also imply a relaxation of single party rule and some kind (not necessarily on the Westminster or Washington model) of what we regard as a liberal democratic internal polity.
I have never been able to understand why people should think that Mr. Gorbachev, coming from where he did and having come up through the bureaucracy
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with close links with the instruments of internal repression, should believe these things; and indeed, to do him credit, he has never professed to do so. If one examines his writings and speeches, one finds that over and over again he has stressed that the Soviet Union must remain socialist, which of course means the repudiation of the market economy, and that the party must not abandon its leading role, which in Soviet terms means single party rule.
Let us consider the steps that appear to have been taken, which will show why I come back to the bargaining factor. It seems to me that the policy of the Soviet Union since Mr. Gorbachev took over has been one of trying to solve its internal economic problems by assistance from the West. The moves that have been made toward an accommodation of the Western outlook have been moves directed toward breaking down the inhibitions on the export of high technology and to securing financial and administrative assistance from Western countries while, as in the 1920s, holding out to Western capitalists the hope that they can find in the Soviet Union a useful field for investment activity.
However, unfortunately for the Soviet Union and its economic prospects, the policy will not work. In order to exploit the advantages of Western technology and management systems one needs a legal regime—for instance, of private property - and a series of institutions which, even if Mr. Gorbachev genuinely wished, it is doubtful whether the Soviet Union is capable of setting on foot.
I speak from the point of view of the ordinary Russian and not specifically about people in the Baltic states, who are slightly better off. For them the Gorbachev era has been marked by a steady fall in the standard of living. That has exacerbated the rivalries between the nationalities and the desire of an increasing number of Soviet republics to be allowed to follow their own path. It is clear that if in the case of the Baltic states and Georgia, and probably in some other cases, they were left on their own and suddenly allowed to become independent they might manage on a smaller scale to introduce the perestroika which has wholly failed in the Soviet Union itself.
Therefore, it has been increasingly necessary—and this is the background to the dismal and deplorable story outlined by the noble Baroness and others—to clamp down on the aspirations of the republics. If one gave them their head it is clear that even the Russian Republic, the heart of the Soviet Union, might strive for an area of economic independence. We have seen various moves towards collaborative arrangements between the governments of the several republics.
That is clear from what at one point was much the most successful and much the most acclaimed aspect of the Gorbachev era from the point of view of the West; namely, glasnost. For the first time since the revolution it was possible to see in the Soviet press, media and book publications many items which had been unavailable for three generations. But that freedom immediately and inevitably became caught up in the political and economic problems. If you allow freedom of speech and permit the media to flourish independently of government you must expect

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the bona fides of government to be challenged. Therefore, there has been a clamp down on publications, presses, television and radio not only in the Baltic states but in the heart of the Soviet Union. Indeed, the noble Baroness gave concrete details.
One would imagine that we are moving towards what Mr. Shevardnadze at his resignation called a dictatorship. It may take a military form, and that is closely related to what may happen in the Gulf. The noble Lord, Lord Kagan, reminded us that some years ago he spoke in this House about Bonapartism. Alternatively, it may take a civilian form or a combination of both. It looks as though we shall have a transitional period during which Soviet power will clamp down once more.
We need to consider what the European Community has been considering and what, no doubt, the United States will consider once its current preoccupations have come to an end; that is, whether anything useful can be done in respect of the co-operation to which the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, referred. As the political and economic problems of the Soviet Union will not be solved by dictatorship, will there be the possibility of entering into relations with the smaller units which may have a greater capacity for making something of the opportunities that have opened up?
These are grave issues. In the long run they are far more important than anything that we could do now by demonstrations, petitions or diplomatic moves on the part of the Baltic states. Therefore, my conclusion is no advice for Her Majesty's Government but some advice for those who look after our study of other countries. It is a concern that the next phase of Soviet development should be assessed more realistically than, I fear, have been the past five years.
9.13 p.m.
Earl Attlee: My Lords, when the noble Baroness, Lady Cox, began her speech I wondered why she had tabled such a Question. After listening to her I realise that she knows what she is talking about. I have never been to the Soviet Union nor to the Baltic states. Anything that I say is the result of what I have seen or feel.
In 1945, when I was in the Merchant Navy, a crewman had been torpedoed and had escaped back to this country via the Soviet Union. I remember him saying that in the Soviet ports he saw US vehicles and so forth entering the country to help in the fight against the Germans. As they came in and were unloaded, labels were stuck on them which said, "Gift to the United States from the Soviet Union." When the crewman got back to England he mentioned that to various people and he was pooh-poohed. It was said that of course that was not being done because the Soviet Union were our allies.
I have met only two Soviet citizens. One was the Soviet ambassador to the Court of St. James. I met him briefly. The other was an absolutely charming man who, I suspect, was the local KGB man. However, he was very pleasant.
When the Berlin wall came down and there was a feeling of euphoria, I did not believe that the Soviet
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Union had suddenly changed. I find it most peculiar that Gorbachev has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. When the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia, we were involved in the Suez crisis. Whenever there is trouble in the world and the eyes of the world are elsewhere, the Soviet Union uses that as an excuse to hold its own invasions. It has taken that action now in Lithuania and the other Baltic states.
I do not believe that I have heard the noble Lord, Lord Kagan, speak before. I know that he was born in Lithuania. It was very moving to hear him speak about his country of birth, its traditions and history, which is not normally taught in this country.
The noble Baroness, Lady Cox, mentioned the amount of money which the Soviet Union is spending. I have read that it is now spending more money on armaments than before the so-called relaxation. The Soviet Union was saying that it would get rid of 200, 300 or 1,000 tanks and that the West should make similar reductions. I said to people at the time that that sounded wonderful but that so many of its tanks were old, worn out and out of date that it was merely ridding itself of the dead wood and would end up with the most up-to-date tanks. I believe that that has happened, not merely as regards tanks but as regards all types of weapons, including tactical nuclear weapons.
I stress that that is my own personal view. I do not believe that the Soviet Union will ever change without violent internal disruption. If you put yourself in the position of the Soviet leaders, would you want to change a system in which you had a dacha and a chauffeur driven car and were able to buy any food you wanted in special shops and have it delivered to your home where you had servants and so on? Why would those Russians who are lucky enough to have that kind of life be willing to give it up? That does not stand to reason. I am a human being like everybody else. If I were in that situation in the Soviet Union, it may be that in my heart I would think it wrong that I was living the life of Riley, while the average Russian had to queue all day in the hope of buying a loaf of bread and an egg. However, would I give up that wonderful fat life? Quite honestly, I do not believe that I would, and I do not believe the Soviet leaders will.
We know that Gorbachev came up through the ranks of the KGB. I should love to know what is the real situation. Is he still running the country or, as is perfectly possible, is he now merely a figurehead with the army and the KGB pulling the strings? Is it a situation where he has no choice, where he wishes to stay where he is and he does as he is told?
We saw the pictures of a Soviet tank running over a Lithuanian. According to the Russians, that was Western propaganda. It was immediately claimed that the unrest in the Baltic states was inspired by the wicked Americans. It is very useful to have something like the United States of America. Whenever there is a shortage, whatever it is, it can be blamed on the "wicked Americans".
I saw recently on television, as perhaps did other noble Lords, that a number of Soviet troops had Asiatic faces. They were dealing in their own

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particular nasty way with the citizens of the Baltic states. I read not too long ago that in the United States of America the Hispanics are becoming the major party and that more people today speak Spanish in the United States of America than speak American. I believe the same could be happening in the Soviet Union. The Russian Russians are slowly becoming a minority who cannot trust their eastern brothers because many of them have a different religion.
I may perhaps be too pessimistic. I believe the outlook in the Soviet Union to be bleak. I regret to say, especially to the noble Lord, Lord Kagan, that it will be many years before the Baltic states can achieve the independence that they once had and which they undoubtedly deserve.
9.20 p.m.
Lord Pearson of Rannoch: My Lords, I too am grateful to my noble friend Lady Cox for this debate. I particularly congratulate her because the question we are debating separates the Baltic states from the Soviet Union. I am sure that that is how it should be.
I suggested on another occasion that events in the Soviet Union and the Baltic states should convince us of one of only two real possibilities. The first is that Mr. Gorbachev never was the reformer the Soviets fooled most people in the West into trusting him to be; the second is that Mr. Gorbachev has become the puppet of the regime that he was trying to overthrow.
Those still suffering from Gorby-mania, despite all the evidence, will claim that there is a third possibility; that Mr. Gorbachev is still the hero they thought he was, but that he is just passing through a rough patch with the KGB and the military, of which, I might add, he is the supreme commander. These naive Gorby-maniacs—if I may so call them—would therefore urge us to continue supporting him and his regime, as we have done in the past. I hope to show some reasons why that might be very foolish.
Perhaps it does not matter much whether the Soviets have been fooling us all along or whether a well-meaning Gorbachev has lost control to the old regime. The KGB is returning to power in the Soviet Union and therefore does it matter how it got back there? I fear it may matter, at least from the perspective of how we should deal with the Soviets in future. It is therefore worth examining the more sinister of the two possibilities, that the Soviets have been fooling us all along.
A good starting point could be a book written in the time of Brezhnev by the high ranking Soviet defector Anatoly Golitsyn. It was called, New Lies for Old. Many people criticised Golitsyn for crediting the KGB with too much visionary cunning, and for believing too much in the alleged Sino-Soviet pact. There may be some accuracy in those criticisms. But Golitsyn certainly knew how the Kremlin was capable of thinking; he had been part of it. He knew how long-range Kremlin thinking could afford to be, partly because its leaders do not suffer re-election every few years.
Some of what Golitsyn wrote in 1982 makes disturbing reading today. He considered how the
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Kremlin might behave if it became convinced that the decrepit Soviet economy could no longer afford to compete in the arms race, and particularly to compete with the United States on the strategic defence initiative. He said that the Kremlin would buy time from the West while it regathered its forces within the Soviet Union. He forecast that,
"Brezhnev's successor may well appear to be a kind of Soviet Dubcek".
He forecast that under this new leader the Soviet Union would withdraw from Afghanistan; would release its Warsaw Pact allies; would tolerate the demolition of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany. He forecast that some form of market economy would appear to be tolerated for quite some time. He even forecast that Sakharov, who had then been exiled in Gorki for two years since 1980, would be invited to join the government. All this was to be part of a liberalisation campaign which would be spectacular and impressive, but which would be aimed solely at deceiving the West. Golitsyn warned that it might be difficult for Nato to survive for long under such apparent liberalisation in the Soviet Union. Finally, he warned that the KGB would merely have remained in the background and would have been able to retake possession of the Soviet Union at any time. Whatever one may think of Golitsyn, the fact is that he got all that right, and so he can no longer be dismissed entirely as an over-excited conspiracy theorist.
Perhaps his forecast which concerns us most in this debate is that the KGB would have been able to repossess the Soviet Union at any time. That is certainly happening now. We have heard examples from my noble friend Lady Cox and from the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, and others, of what is happening in the Soviet Union in that regard at the moment. I do not think that I need trouble noble Lords with repetition. I would like to join my noble friend Lady Cox and others in asking my noble friend the Minister for his views on the fact that the Soviet military machine continues its massive build-up, as indeed it did throughout the glasnost era.
The Gorbymaniacs used to excuse their hero for this fact by saying that he was doing his best, but of course he could not be expected to stop the huge Soviet war machine overnight. Now that the KGB's day has dawned again, his chances must be even slimmer, assuming that he ever intended to take them, which must be doubtful. Soviet deception about their military strategy was in fact nicely confirmed on 16th November 1990 in a published interview with an official Soviet economist, Mr. Victor Belkin. Part of what he said is worth quoting. He said:
"The Soviet military sector has always devoured the strength of our economy. Military expenses in our country absorb one-third of the national income and one-fourth of the gross national product—and if one takes into account the priority given to this sector and the quality of the production, it will be even more. Sixty per cent. of our machine production is taken up by the military sector (as opposed to 5 per cent. for consumer goods). You have to remember that all our good quality resources and all the capital of talent and intelligence which we have are entirely turned over to the military sector. In contradiction with all our pacifist declarations the peak of military spending was in 1989—a full 'perestroika' year. The

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planned cuts of our armed forces and the military industry are very small; there has been much talk about conversion of military industries into civilian ones but this is happening only sporadically and in homeopathic doses, and not a single industry has actually been taken out of the military sector: simply they are ordered to turn over part of their production for civilian needs. It is clear that non-military production is considered second rate and nobody is interested in it".
I repeat that that is what an official Soviet economist said last November.
So it really does seem that Golitsyn may have been right, and that it was only President Reagan's refusal to abandon the strategic defence initiative programme which brought the Soviet Union to its knees economically and which led to the massive deceptions of glasnost and perestroika. One of the odd things, as my noble friend Lord Beloff has pointed out, is that Gorbachev himself has never really denied this. He has always declared himself to be a good Leninist. Perestroika was always about restructuring and improving the existing communist system. Indeed, in GorbLchev's first western interview with Time magazine he quite openly asked the West to cut its arms programme so that the Soviet Union:
"could have a breathing space and catch up".
Everyone in the West assumed that he wanted to catch up with production of the needs of his population which now must seem doubtful. Sakharov himself was always convinced that Gorbachev's main reason for releasing him from Gorki was that he, Sakharov, was genuirnely against the strategic defence initiative, both Soviet and American, and that he would speak against it, as indeed he did when released.
These are all perhaps separate bits of a puzzle, but I am afraid it is not much of a puzzle any more. What if anything should we try to do about it? I have three humble suggestions for Her Majesty's Government. First, we should be very careful about continuing to plan for any military reductions which assume that the cold war is over. It may be starting again. Secondly, we should not send aid of any sort to the Soviet Union as such. We should send it to the separate republics, all of which have set up agencies which make sure that the aid will get where it is intended to go. If it is sent through official Soviet channels it will either replenish the Soviet strategic reserves or it will be highjacked by the KGB and the nomenclatura.
Thirdly, I join my noble friend Lady Cox in suggesting that we should boycott the Helsinki Round of the Human Rights Conference which the Soviets plan to hold in Moscow in September and October this year. I was very shocked to hear from the Foreign Office only this morning that, because of what the Foreign Office calls "the marked improvement in human rights in the Soviet Union", it is more than likely that Britain will attend that conference. The decision will be reviewed in the summer, but at the moment we plan to go.
That cannot be right. If the Government want to support human rights in the Soviet Union I suggest that they support another conference, one which Mrs. Sakharov is attempting to organise to commemorate what would have been her husband's seventieth birthday on 21st May. Mrs. Sakharov hopes that this
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conference will discuss human rights, nuclear energy and the transition by the Soviet totalitarian state to democracy and the rule of law. I believe that if we support Mrs. Sakharov's conference and boycott the official Soviet conference, which can only be a charade of the most cynical kind, we would at least be sending the right message to the devious strategists in the Kremlin.
9.32 p.m.
Baroness Park of Monmouth: My Lords, I have been offered the opportunity before the winding up speeches to say a few words. The important things about this issue have been said, and said admirably by many noble Lords, especially by the noble Baroness, Lady Cox. I am speaking only because there cannot be too many of us speaking as strongly as we can in order to keep what is going on in the Baltic states before the eyes of the world.
I perfectly understand, as I think we all do, that the Government are doing what they can hut, in plain terms, they must think very carefully before jeopardising the delicate balance between us and the Soviet Union on the issue of the Gulf. The Russians could indeed do great damage to the at present solid and united position of the coalition in the United Nations. They know that and we know it. But we must not send wrong signals. Nothing should prevent us in this House from expressing what I believe to be a fairly widely held view in the country that the actions of President Gorbachev and his government in the Baltic states in the past year, and especially in the past five weeks, are a mockery of glasnost and of the whole concept of liberty for which Mr. Gorbachev has purported to stand. Perhaps I may say at this juncture that I entirely agree with the interpretations on this issue of the noble Lords, Lord Beloff and Lord Pearson of Rannoch. We should not allow our own policy to relate to the supposed personality of Mr. Gorbachev alone. We are dealing with a party which has not changed.
I should like to see a concerted move by all those who are at present engaged in whatever degree in sending help and giving support to the USSR—I do not only mean official aid, I mean the universities and the cultural and voluntary organisations—to pause and to distinguish between, for instance, the Baltic states and the central government and to give their support with discrimination. It always struck me as a bitter joke that, as we were told, the KGB would be in charge of the distribution of food aid. One wondered whether they would set aside some of it for their own particular parish in the USSR, the camps which still exist in the Gulag Archipelago. It is not too late—nor is it a waste of time—to say again loudly and clearly that we are deeply concerned and that not even our natural preoccupation with the situation in the Gulf will prevent us from drawing conclusions from Soviet behaviour in the Baltic states, which must have adverse long-term consequences for their international objectives.
Let us not forget that the liberals in the USSR are themselves protesting. They are looking to us, not for irresponsible support and encouragement to take

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action where we cannot help them, but to keep the issue before the eyes of the world and to remember them when we deal with the USSR. The question is whether the Helsinki agreement was a serious Soviet commitment rather than a cosmetic exercise. That does not seem to me to be an unreasonable question to continue to pose. It is right that we should not be silent now and that we should remember that the Russians are, after all, pragmatic. They recognise the fact that they too need us to some extent. However, they must be made to understand that our support in the areas where they need us will not be blind or unconditional.
Finally, perhaps I may say—and not for the first time—that any efforts we make to influence events will be successful only in proportion to our strength. We cannot afford to reduce that strength. As I have indicated on other occasions, the leopard has not changed its spots. However, that does not wholly rule out all hope that we can influence events if we are tough, calm and pragmatic. Where we have bargaining power, we must use it.
9.35 p.m.
Lord Bonham-Carter: My Lords, I should like first to thank the noble Baroness, Lady Cox, for giving us the opportunity to discuss this extremely important and difficult problem. I am especially grateful for what I have learned from listening to the speeches which have been made this evening, especially those of the noble Lords, Lord Thomas of Swynnerton and Lord Bridges.
I truly wish that I was as confident about anything as the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, is about what is happening in the Soviet Union. I found his analysis neat but hardly convincing. I cannot pretend that I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Cox, that the Soviet Union is going back to, "a hardline repressive communism"; nor can I believe that Mr. Gorbachev has complete power. My picture of what is happening in the Soviet Union is rather different: it is one of incoherence and confusion. The changes in the Baltic states and the changes in Soviet policy towards those states seem to me to be examples of both that confusion and that incoherence. There is also the difficulty of discovering who in fact is making policy in the Soviet Union and who is in control.
If there is the danger of a dictatorship in the Soviet Union —which is indeed a possibility that may emerge from the chaos—I believe that it is unlikely to be communist. In my view it may be a military dictatorship or, alternatively, it may be a kind of authoritarian regime; that is, a Christian orthodox regime such as Solzhenitsyn would love and such as I should abhor. It would be a regime dominated by the Easterners within the Soviet Union and the kind of regime which Mr. Sakharov would have found repellent. That is a genuine prospect and it is one at which we should look with some apprehension. I see that the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, wishes to intervene. I am happy for him to do so.
Lord Pearson of Rannoch: My Lords, I feel that I must put a word in here on behalf of Alexander Solzhenitsyn who I happen to know fairly well. I can assure noble Lords that the kind of regime which the noble Lord, Lord Bonham-Carter holds out as being one which would be favoured by Alexander Solzhenitsyn is not at all what he would favour.
Lord Bonham-Carter: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for his intervention. However, I happen to have read Solzhenitsyn's manifesto. I have also published many of his books and read all of them. Moreover, I have read in Mr. Sakharov's memoirs, about the differences between both their political and their ideological beliefs. Therefore, I shall not move from the position I stated.
However, having said that, I turn to the comments which have been made about Mr. Gorbachev. In my view, the prospect of getting anyone much better than him is extremely remote, whereas the prospect of getting someone much worse than him is extremely likely. A person like Yeltsin would be a change very much for the worse. Having recently been talking to the leaders of certain Baltic states and having discussed that possibility with them, I can tell noble Lords that they strongly share that view.
It must be admitted that those who pretend that nothing has happened over the past five years are really talking nonsense. Indeed, a great deal has happened which cannot be reversed. The withdrawal from Central and Eastern Europe is a matter of the utmost significance. The possibility of independence for the Baltic states—even the degree of independence that they have enjoyed during the past few years—would have been inconceivable 10 years ago. The fact that we are discussing it now as we are indicates that something important has happened. Having said that, that is not to deny that Soviet policy and its ambitions are difficult to read.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Cox, pointed out, the Soviet Union's policy swings in one direction then another in a totally unpredictable manner. We have the shootings in Vilnius; then the Baker-Bessmertnykh talks; then a slight softening and 120 troops are withdrawn—that is nothing, given the number of troops there—then there is the promise of delegations to the three states; and then yesterday we had the statement by Mr. Gorbachev that the poll is illegal, and we have his proposal for a referendum which is phrased in a ludicrous way and in which the army in those states can vote.
I do not pretend that all this is not a puzzle. What I am saying is that few of us can read the significance of that puzzle. That is something which we should accept. We should not seek to find in the evidence what we want to find. That seems to me to happen all too frequently when we discuss the Soviet Union and its policies. When we look at this situation, the relevant question is: what, in these confusing, difficult circumstances, can we do that is of any assistance? In that respect, I was interested in the approach suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Swynnerton, as to how we should discuss the matter with the Soviet Union.

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In the light of what the noble Lord, Lord Bridges, said: that we in this country have some standing in the eyes of the Soviet Union, the words that we express, as many noble Lords have said, and the way in which we express them are of significance. In that respect, despite this country's rather shabby record in respect of the status of the Baltic states, it is useful to emphasise to the Soviet Union their special status; the history which sets them apart as semi-autonomous under the old regime; as independent and democratic in the 1920s and 1930s; and as having been absorbed by Stalin in 1940—an event with which, as I said the other day, the only analogy I can think of is the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein. We should say that, because that is a moral position which is of some significance. When we think of how we can help, I believe that we have only two weapons at our disposal. They are, first, discussion and moral persuasion; and, secondly, economic pressure.
The USSR is anxious to be well regarded in the West. It is anxious for economic aid. In both areas we have cards which we can play, cards which we should play and cards which we should not hesitate to play. What is required on both is a common European attitude; but, in developing that attitude, there is one rule by which we should abide rigorously—that is, we should not raise false hopes. The great danger is that we shall raise false hopes that we cannot fulfil. That is the ultimate irresponsibility.
The approach from the European angle is extremely important. Mr. Gorbachev has said that he wants a common European home. If he is to have a common European home, Europe can say what kind of home that must be. I believe that this is a matter of importance. He is anxious for economic aid, trade and knowhow. The European Community is a source of that aid, of trade and of knowhow. If that is what we say to the Soviet Union, we must also say to the Baltic states, "Look, all we can try to do is to get the Soviet Union to the negotiating table. We cannot do more than that under present circumstances. All we say to you is that you must be ready to negotiate". That is how we should use our leverage.
The Foreign Ministers of the European Community met in Brussels on 4th February. During their meeting they discussed the Baltic position at length. I tried to find out what conclusions they came to and the only one I could find yesterday or today was this statement:
"The European Community and its member states welcome the decision to hold a referendum in each of the Baltic States and express the hope that this will favour the opening of a meaningful and constructive dialogue between the central authorities of the USSR and the Baltic States.
"They consider such a decision is in conformity with the spirit of the Paris charter for a new Europe".
I must confess that I regard this as a rather inadequate conclusion to a meeting which, I gather, discussed the matter at considerable length. I hope that in his reply the noble Earl will be able to expand on the statement and tell us what slightly more positive thoughts emerged from the conference.
At the conclusion of the meeting, the Foreign Secretary gave a long and interesting statement to the press about the general tenor of the discussions. In it
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he stressed the need for greater unity within Europe in its response to what he called "the problems". He pointed out that this was particularly important in relation to Central and Eastern Europe, of which the Baltic states are a part. He quite rightly said that in the years to come many problems would arise there. He then proceeded—in my view, rather unfortunately—to pour cold water on developing new machinery to co-ordinate that common response. He was talking about the development of a common security and foreign policy.
I must point out that no one who advocates moves in that direction suggests that such policies should extend to all areas of security. They would only have to cover specific areas. Nor do I think that advocates of that view suggest that disagreements can be abolished by changes of machinery, as the Foreign Secretary suggested.
We say that the machinery for political co-operation within the Community—the procedures—can and should be improved and it is important that they be improved in order to find better means of reaching more promptly the agreements which will be required in the situations which will arise in post-Gulf Europe. That is what we must consider. Europe after the Gulf war will be part of the world, a community which will have crucial importance for this country because there can be no doubt that after the Gulf, the United States will pursue its withdrawal from Europe. Europe will have to assume greater responsibility for its own political and defence postures and, whether it is the Baltic states or something else, the post-Gulf world will demand a European response. The Community will be an important institution, indeed the chief institution through which the policies appropriate for the defence of the interests of this country can be effectively pursued. In discussing the Baltic states I do not believe that we should forget that aspect of our policy.
9.50 p.m.
Lord Richard: My Lords, I believe I can speak relatively briefly. This is a repeat act so to speak on the part of the noble Earl and myself. We played this role earlier today in the presence of the noble Lord, Lord Beloff. I believe I accused the noble Lord earlier of being eloquently pessimistic. Having listened to him in this debate, I should say that rather than being pessimistic he was positively melancholic. Not only was the noble Lord melancholic; his recipe for government activity verged on the comatose. The "when in doubt do nothing" principle may be legitimate on some occasions in one's personal affairs, but it is hardly a guiding rule which a government can pursue in the reactive world in which we live.
I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Cox, for introducing the debate. However, I do not share many of her views on the situation. Nor do I share those of the noble Baroness, Lady Park of Monmouth. I certainly do not share the views of the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch. I found his certainty breathtaking. It verged almost on zealotry. If he can seriously contend that in the past six years what the Soviet Union has done is merely to fool us all the way

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along the line, I can only say that a little more foolery in that respect might do for the Baltic states what that foolery has done for Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany and the other formerly subject peoples of Europe.
It is right that we should have this debate tonight. We cannot but strongly deplore the violent actions of the Soviet authorities and the so-called salvation committees in the Baltic republics. We are all appalled at the shootings and the attacks on unarmed civilian protesters in Lithuania and Latvia. We are also concerned at the threat posed to the continuation of democratically elected parliaments in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, and the more general moves towards greater powers for the military and the KGB throughout the Soviet Union.
I believe that most of us accept that any further use of force would gravely jeopardise both the development of democracy and human rights in the Soviet Union and international relations. It would consequently seriously reduce the prospects for building the common European home which is so often called for by President Gorbachev.
What has emerged in relation to the Baltic states from this debate is that we all seem to be agreed that the only acceptable way forward by which the issue of the relationship between the Baltic states and the Soviet Union can be resolved, and should be resolved, is by returning to dialogue and negotiation. This is a rare debate, as far as I am concerned, for one other reason. It is rare that one sits in a debate where one learns something factual that one did not know before. I, and I am sure others, will emerge from this debate tonight more knowledgeable about the history of Lithuania. For that I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Swynnerton, and particularly to my noble friend Lord Kagan who made a moving, perceptive and thoughtful contribution to our proceedings.
I am also grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Bridges. I did not know about the expedition to St. Petersburg at the time of the Crimean War. That is one of those little vignettes of British history which so often escape us, but which in a sense indicate the real nature of the government at that time.
The break-up of the Soviet empire will cause immense economic, social, political and perhaps even military difficulties. I hope there will be no military difficulties. What we are observing at the moment is an exercise in managing change. In judging whether or not the changes that are taking place can be managed in what we would consider to be a sensible and rational way, we must not forget how recently the Soviet empire was established. People tend sometimes to regard it as a great monolith that has been there for many years. That is not the case. The incorporation of the central Asian republics into Russia, and subsequently into the Soviet Union, took place barely a century ago. The Baltics only go back some 50 years. The transcaucasian republics were only relatively recently incorporated into the Soviet Union. As the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Swynnerton, remarked, the British of all people should be prepared to
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recognise the problems which are caused by the abandonment of the imperial role. I am not sure that I follow the noble Lord in his suggestion that we should tell the Soviet Union how to manage their relaxation and abandonment of the imperial role.
Nevertheless there are certain possible analogies. The first and most obvious one is that the time of greatest danger for any authoritarian rule is when it is in the process of being relaxed. That is the time when all sorts of movements, all sorts of ideas, all sorts of political parties, may emerge from the deprivation that they have been suffering for some time past. I venture to suggest that this is what we are faced with in the Soviet Union at the moment.
How the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, can say that nothing has happened, when what we are observing are the difficulties caused by something that has happened—namely, the relaxation of the regime inside the Soviet Union and the abandonment of the imperial role of the Soviet Union—I find difficult to understand.
Lord Pearson of Rannoch: My Lords, I did not say that nothing had happened. I am fairly close to the events in Poland and Czechoslovakia. What I suggested was that the Soviet Union had released its grip on those Warsaw Pact countries because of the extreme failure of its economic system thanks to the pressure from the United States, particularly on the strategic defence initiative. I would also point out that life in the Soviet Union has not improved all that much, and that what we may be looking at is a return to precisely the dictatorship that we saw before.
Lord Richard: My Lords, I listened very carefully to the noble Lord. What he said, among other things, was that the Soviets have been fooling us all along. If he is talking about illusory change rather than real change, that may fit in with the rest of his speech. But I do not see how anybody, looking at what has happened in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe over the last five or six years, can doubt that the changes have been immense.
Of course, the Soviet Union has to recognise that the nationalities' problem can only be resolved by patience and by negotiation over a long period of time. But we must recognise on our side that Mr. Gorbachev's achievements in his six years in power have been immense and they are continuing. The country, Europe and indeed world politics have been transformed in that time.
I give two or three examples so far as the Soviet Union is concerned. Can one doubt that press and media freedom, the freedom to talk and communicate, is infinitely greater than before Mr. Gorbachev came into power? Can one doubt that there has been a reform of political institutions in the Soviet Union which gives far freer rein to genuine popular feeling and opinion? Can one doubt that there is a reform in the relationship between the centre and the individual republics? Can one conceive that, in the Brezhnev era, Mr. Yeltsin would have been capable of trying to take

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the republic of Russia out of the Soviet Union? Merely to state what has happened in the Soviet Union almost proves the proposition.
I am bound to say, though it may not meet with much favour from the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, that I find Mr. Gorbachev's leadership over the past six years to have been courageous and vigorous. Like the noble Lord, Lord Bonham-Carter, I do not see any real alternative to our continuing to support that leadership and indeed to giving it our backing.
I see two alternatives. The first, is that we continue with Mr. Gorbachev; the second is that we may well be faced with something worse. I am wary of the dangers that lie ahead, particularly the possibility of a right wing backlash inside the Soviet Union. I hope that I have never fallen prey to that illness about which the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, talked so much, namely, Gorby-mania. I have tried to look at the problems inside the Soviet Union and to approach them with as analytical and careful a mind as one can.
If one wants further indication of how much change there has been, there was very recently a debate in the Council of Europe on the issue of the Baltic states. One delegate, Mr. Soell, said that we have no divisions of troops, but we have something which the Soviet leadership permanently lacks—our firm faith in the moral principles. We must approach the events in the Baltic states according to those principles. First, we must resolutely condemn the brutal use of military force against the civilian population. Secondly, we must reinforce our commitment and engagement to the principles of freedom, independence, human rights and the right to self-determination in correlation with the Baltic situation.
Thirdly, we must approach the parties with a view to starting immediate talks and re-establishing the nation al sovereignty of the Baltic states.
That was a delegate speaking at the Council of Europe. If one wishes evidence of the change which has taken place over the last six years in the right direction, I merely tell your Lordships that the speaker was Hungarian.
10 p.m.
The Earl of Caithness: My Lords, the Government welcome today's debate, introduced so ably by my noble friend Lady Cox, and I thank all your Lordships for having taken part. An enormous wealth of experience and knowledge has been expressed and I, for one, have certainly learnt a great deal from tonight's discussion. Recent events in the Baltic states and developments in the Soviet Union more widely have, quite rightly, caused profound concern. The war in the Gulf must not prevent us from taking account also or the importance of what is happening in the Soviet Union and its implications for the future of Europe.
The noble Lord, Lord Richard, reminded the House of some of the events that have happened in the past five or six years. The process of reform initiated by President Gorbachev brought an end to the cold war; led to a new, co-operative spirit in international relations (exemplified by the coalition against the Iraqi
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invasion of Kuwait); gave back to the countries of eastern Europe the independence which they had lost in the 1940s; and opened the way to the Soviet Union becoming a more open and liberal society.
Our welcome for these changes was strong and unequivocal. They were good for Britain and the West; good for eastern Europe; and good for the Soviet people. We believed that, by making the state the servant of the citizen rather than the reverse, it would he possible to exploit fully the enormous human and natural resources of the Soviet Union. Freed from the constraints of a discredited and inefficient system, the Soviet people would begin to enjoy the prosperity which their country had always been capable of providing. Democratic institutions would give people at every level the power to decide their own destiny. In response, we held out the prospect of an increasingly close and productive relationship with the western world: a co-operation agreement with the Community; association with the international financial institutions; a totally new relationship with NATO.
These are all gains which we must seek to protect, in so far as we are able. The West should reiterate, not withdraw, its support for reform in the Soviet Union. We would like to build on the network of co-operation already established; but we shall not be able to extend co-operation with the Soviet authorities if those same authorities are taking the Soviet Union backwards. Co-operation needs the right political climate. The recent tragic events in the Baltic states have affected that climate and cast a cloud over East-West relations.
As this House knows well, the British Government believe the Baltic states to be a special case and have never recognised de jure the forcible incorporation of the Baltic states into the Soviet Union. We have repeatedly underlined the need for the Baltic people to be able freely to decide what their own future should be. Very substantial progress has been made in this direction in the past two years. For the first time since 1940 the Baltic people had democratically elected representatives. They were gradually establishing greater economic independence and political autonomy. They were pursuing their legitimate aims without using threats or force. While important differences with Moscow remained, the divide was not unbridgeable. We looked forward to the day when the Baltic states could take their place beside the other nations of Europe in the CSCE.
Against that background we totally condemn the arbitrary use of force to repress the Baltic peoples. We deplore the tragic loss of life in Lithuania and Latvia. Whatever the exact sequence of events, there can be no question but that ultimate responsibility for what happened must rest with the central authorities.
We have made the strength of our concern crystal clear to the Soviet authorities, most recently when my right honourable friend the Secretary of State saw the Soviet Ambassador on 31st January. I can tell my noble friend Lady Cox that we have underlined the incompatibility of repression in the Baltic states with Soviet CSCE commitments contained in the Helsinki Final Act and the Paris Charter.

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In close consultation with our partners and allies, we have taken a series of measures designed to bring hope to the Soviet leadership—including President Gorbachev personally—that our support for reform is not unconditional; that the rewards of East-West co-operation cannot continue if there is a return to old-style repression.
Perhaps I may identify some of the measures taken. The bulk of the United States 1.6 billion dollar package agreed at the Rome European Council has been suspended; the EC/USSR Joint Commission has been postponed sine die; we have invoked the human dimension mechanism, which gives CSCE states the right to demand an explanation of apparent human rights abuses; we are keeping our bilateral co-operation under close review.
At this point perhaps I should explain a little more fully about the aid programme, because I believe there to be some misunderstanding of the true position. The Community has decided, as I have just said, to suspend implementation of most of the package agreed at the December European Council, with the exception of humanitarian assistance. Food aid will be provided only where there is a clear need and where we are sure it will reach its rightful recipients. There is no British Government-to-government aid. We are keeping the know-how fund under review, but this is designed to assist reform directly and help the move to a market economy, not to prop up existing structures.
The Russians can be in no doubt about the deep disappointment felt in Parliament and more widely in this country. It is essential that the Soviet authorities should, without delay, remove their troops from the streets and begin serious and peaceful negotiations with the democratically elected representatives of the Baltic peoples. The noble Lord, Lord Bridges, should, I hope, be reassured that it is our firm belief that it is only through such negotiations that a lasting settlement, acceptable to all involved, can he achieved. This is our clear and unambiguous message to Moscow and to the Baltic leaders.
There are other causes for anxiety. Market-oriented economic reform is stalled. We have seen the resignation of many leading liberals, most notably Mr. Shevardnadze; the introduction of new joint army-military patrols on 1st February; and the wide-ranging powers given to the KGB to counter so-called economic crimes.
The Soviet Government has said publicly and repeatedly that perestroika is not being abandoned and that it is seeking to resolve its problems by political means, not force. Soviet leaders have appealed for greater Western understanding. Of course we understand President Gorbachev's desire to prevent growing disorder in the Soviet Union. We are under no illusions about the enormous scale of the task that he is undertaking. He is seeking to introduce changes in many ways more revolutionary than those of 1917.
The noble Lord, Lord Kagan, used the analogy of the man in the diving hell. We have always been clear that it would be a matter of decades, not months or years, for these to take root. Our support too has been
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for the long haul. But it is support for reform, for democratisation, for civil and political rights, for self-determination, for the freedom of the individual, and for the principles of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe.
My noble friends Lord Beloff and Lord Pearson of Rannoch, and the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, warned the Government about what they believe are the true motives of the Russian authorities. We believe that it is still too early to draw firm conclusions about the Soviet Union's future direction from recent events. As the noble Lord, Lord Bonham-Carter, said, the evidence is conflicting, and in places confusing. There are, I admit, many worrying signs, but the attempt to supplant the elected authorities in the Baltic states has not—at least as yet—been followed through.
Moscow's decision to send delegations to the three Baltic states is a welcome step in the right direction. Parts of the Soviet media continue to cover events honestly and to criticise the authorities trenchantly. In the republican parliaments genuine debate continues. After five years of gradual liberalisation, it is increasingly difficult to see how the genie can be put back in the bottle. This must provide some grounds for hope that we may be witnessing a serious hiatus in the process of reform, not its total abandonment. We very much hope so. We are not a fair-weather friend. Our commitment to working for mutually beneficial long-term co-operation is unshaken. Fundamental reform in the Soviet Union is in our interest as well as theirs. The benefits of more co-operative East-West relations are apparent in the Middle East, southern Africa and South-East Asia—not just Europe. And, as the barriers of distrust and misunderstanding have been broken down, there has been unprecedented progress on arms control.
At this stage I should like to respond to some of the specific points raised in the debate, although I am clearly conscious that I shall not be able to respond to them all. My noble friend Lady Cox and the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, asked about our representation outside Moscow. We are looking to expand our representation outside Moscow, whether through consulates or British Council offices, but we have no immediate plans to open offices in the Baltic states. However, I reassure my noble friend Lord Thomas of Swynnerton that we are in regular contact with elected Baltic leaders. My right honourable friend the Prime Minister saw the Latvian foreign minister, Mr. Jurkans, on 23rd January. Our embassy in Moscow keeps in close touch with the Baltic representatives there.
In reply to my noble friends Lord Pearson and Lady Cox, who asked specifically about the human rights conference later this year, we shall only attend the planned human rights conference in Moscow this autumn if the Soviet authorities return to the path of reform and consolidate the very considerable progress made in recent years. We urge the Soviet authorities to negotiate peacefully, not to threaten or use force and to stand by their commitments which they accepted at the highest levels in the Paris Charter and other instruments.

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We remain concerned by the continuing level of Soviet military output, as mentioned by some noble Lords this evening. We have consistently urged the Soviet authorities to cut their defence expenditure, both to help reduce tension and to allow resources to he used more productively elsewhere in the economy. Without a major shift from military to civil expenditure we see little prospect of economic reform succeeding.
Let me say to my noble friend Lord Pearson of Rannoch that full Soviet compliance with CFE and other arms control agreements is essential. We have underlined to the Russians our concern on a number of aspects of CFE implementation.
In conclusion, I stress that we are determined to do everything possible to prevent the barriers of the past being rebuilt. We are supporting an upsurge of direct contacts between individuals and institutions. We are actively looking for ways to help not the central Soviet authorities but those who are actively implementing reform on the ground, at republican and lower levels. In the Baltic states alone we have already supported the development of management training programmes, provided advice on the creation of a small farm sector and offered help with port privatisation. We are providing an English language training support project in Estonia, as the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, will be pleased to hear. As long as there are effective ways to help real reform we are in no doubt that Britain should continue to offer carefully targeted assistance.
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However, if it became clear that the Soviet authorities were determined to attempt a return to full-blooded authoritarianism, there might no longer be any reform for us to support. They say that that is not their intention, and it would indeed be a sad day for the West and a tragic one for the Soviet people if it were. There is no doubt that reform must eventually come if the aspirations of the Soviet people are to be met. The only questions are when and how. The right answer is as quickly as possible, through a peaceful and democratic process involving all the people of the Soviet Union. That is the only way to resolve the differences between Moscow and the Baltic states and the only way to build a new Soviet Union based on consent and not coercion.

Statutory Sick Pay Bill
Returned from the Commons on Tuesday, 5th February with one of the Lords amendments disagreed to, with a reason for such disagreement; with another Lords amendment agreed to with amendments; and with the remaining Lords amendments agreed to.

Agricultural Holdings (Scotland) Bill [H.L.]
Reported from the Joint Committee with amendments and recommitted to a Committee of the Whole House.
House adjourned at a quarter past ten o'clock.