Debate on the Address

This has been a fascinating day. The conduct of the debate has convinced me, if ever I needed convincing, that the Opposition can win the next general election. Very few Labour Members were present for the opening speeches. The Whips have managed to muster only about six Labour Members to speak in the debate and those who have spoken have effectively conducted a filibuster. The hon. Member for Middlesbrough (Sir Stuart Bell) spoke for 24 minutes. The hon. Member for Wolverhampton, North-East (Mr. Purchase) and the right hon. Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz) spoke for 17 minutes each. The hon. Member for West Bromwich, West (Mr. Bailey) spoke for 24 minutes. The hon. Member for North Durham (Mr. Jones) spoke for 24 minutes, too. He was so desperate to filibuster that he went around every single bus route in his constituency. The hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Rob Marris) spoke for nearly half an hour. Not one of those Members practically has addressed any of the key issues of Afghanistan, Iraq and criminal justice. As my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Mr. Taylor) said, this is groundhog day. It is a Government party hollowing out. This is going to be a strange parliamentary Session. We are all going to feel like characters in ““Waiting for Gordo””. The Government are in limbo. Ministers are preoccupied with which of them will be the next Deputy Prime Minister. Junior Ministers are fretting as to their futures under the next dispensation, and permanent secretaries and officials are uncertain as to which policies it is worth taking forward, and what is going to be changed at the end of the year, or whenever by a new Prime Minister. All that is against the background of the multiple uncertainties of a comprehensive public spending review. That is no way to run a country. I suspect that normal political life will not start again until the pre-Budget report and the spending review due next year, both of which will be the start of the Brown era. We are about to enter a gap year, a strange parliamentary vacuum, with the Government treading water. That has been clearly demonstrated by the conduct of the debate today. Of course, until the Prime Minister goes, the Government and, more importantly, the Labour party are not able to discover what they are. The Prime Minister is said to have claimed:"““I have taken from my party everything they thought they believed in. I have stripped them of their core beliefs. What keeps it together is success and power””." We still have another year of a governing party not knowing what it believes in, dithering and drift, and that is all the more disconcerting as there are clearly a number of important issues that require immediate attention. On foreign policy, at a meeting of Members of both Houses in another place last week, his royal highness King Abdullah of Jordan observed that, in 2007, he saw the prospect of three civil wars in the middle east: in Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine. I was one of those on the Conservative Benches who voted against the war on Iraq because, as a lawyer, I believed the way in which the war was prosecuted to be contrary to international law. There has been no pleasure in seeing the situation in Iraq persistently deteriorate. According to a report in The Lancet, the death toll in Iraq since the coalition invasion is now over 655,000. That is one in 40 of the Iraqi population. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died at the hands of coalition troops, sectarian death squads and insurgent bombers. Our troops, through no fault of their own, are failing to stop the sectarian killing. Even the head of the British Army, Sir Richard Dannatt, believes that the presence of coalition troops, far from keeping a lid on the fighting, is making the security situation worse. One of the epitaphs of the Government will be the Iraq war, an ill-judged invasion fought on misleading and wrong assumptions that gave way to a chaotic occupation. Little wonder that the Prime Minister does not wish to subject himself, and his Government’s policy on Iraq, to the scrutiny of an independent commission. But it is bizarre that he is willing to share his thoughts on future policy on Iraq with the United States’ Iraq study group, but not willing to submit those ideas to the scrutiny of this House. The doctrine of unripe time prevails here, but seemingly not in the United States. It is all sadly indicative of the fact that the Prime Minister has allowed UK foreign policy to be determined all too often in Washington rather than here. The Foreign Office has been emasculated; ““inaudible, invisible, incompetent”” was how one Foreign Office official described the Foreign Secretary recently. The reality is that Foreign Office Ministers have been reduced to the role of meeters and greeters and that Foreign Office officials are all too often ignored by the Prime Minister. What is required is a reappraisal of policy towards the middle east as a whole. The Prime Minister was right in his Mansion house speech earlier this week to acknowledge that there needs to be a renewed effort to find a solution to the Israeli-Palestine conflict if there is to be any hope for wider peace in the middle east, including Iraq. The Government have also recognised the need to engage with Iran and Syria. The difficulty with treating countries as pariah states is that it simply encourages them to behave as pariah states. We should never disengage from countries in the world and we need to engage constructively with Iran and Syria. The failure in Iraq has ramifications elsewhere. It has undermined the moral authority of our intervention in Afghanistan, which was clearly in support of legitimate UN resolutions and a democratically elected Karzai Government. In September, the Secretary of State for Defence was obliged to acknowledge that the Government grossly underestimated the strength of the Taliban in Afghanistan. All too often our armed forces are being asked to do more whilst given less; tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan, we are unable to intervene elsewhere. The Prime Minister this afternoon talked about Darfur. In Darfur, the scene is set for the first genocide of the 21st century. I weep for Darfur; it is difficult for those of us who have visited Darfur, such as myself and my hon. Friend the Member for Blaby (Mr. Robathan), to describe the miles and miles of pathetic encampments of thousands and thousands of displaced families, women and children. Who doubts that, given the opportunity, the combined forces of the Sudanese army and the Janjaweed militia intend to resume their campaign against villages in Darfur that has left 300,000 dead and 2 million homeless? Innocent people are being terrorised and murdered in Darfur with impunity. There is another dimension to this. The Sudanese Government know that UN motions critical of their conduct are likely to be vetoed by China, which is determined to access Sudanese oil supplies. That reinforces our need to engage more deeply with China. As one of the vice-chairmen of the all-party China group, I am often concerned that we seem to have only two approaches to China; either total criticism, as in Tiananmen, Tibet and human rights, or a sort of sycophancy inspired by a desire to access China’s markets. We must not forget that the Chinese economy is growing so fast that it is responsible for a third of global economic growth. But as comments by EU Commissioner Peter Mandelson the other day underlined, we have to tackle the trade gap with China and there are a host of issues on which we need a much more sophisticated engagement with China. One of those issues, on which we have to engage also with India, is climate change. If Britain ceased all carbon dioxide emissions overnight, the benefits would be wiped out in just over two years by the growth of China. At a recent parliamentarians’ conference organised by Globe International, the vice-chairman of the Environment Protection and Resources Conservation Committee of the National People’s Congress observed that"““though China’s economy grows fast, China is still a developing country. In rural China 200 million people live in absolute poverty, defined as having a per capita income of less than US$1 per day. It is only possible to tackle and resist the challenges caused by the changing of the natural environment by raising its own development levels.””" Therein lies an important conundrum on climate change. Developing countries such as India and China see no reason why their development should be frozen, but if we, globally, do not together tackle climate change, it is the poor and developing countries who will suffer most. If greenhouse gas emissions are not checked, as the Stern report makes clear, temperatures could rise by up to 5° C by 2050, an increase on the same scale as between now and the last ice age. This would lead to droughts, floods, water shortages, rising sea levels and declining crop yields, all of which would hurt the poorest countries most, not least because they have less capacity to mitigate the damage of climate change, as the International Development Committee, which I chaired in the last Parliament, set out in a comprehensive report on climate change and development, which the Stern report clearly reinforces and underlines. Of course Britain must play its full part in tackling climate change and it is very welcome that my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) has committed the Conservative party to supporting a tough regime of annual targets to cut greenhouse gases. The Opposition today have published a Bill that would hand considerable powers to an independent panel of business people and academics. I am glad to see that the Conservative party has set out detailed proposals. The Bill will set out overall targets to cut carbon dioxide emissions by at least 60 per cent by 2050. The draft legislation would set up a climate change commission to set annual targets six years in advance and monitor the Government’s progress in meeting them. Additional targets would be set for 2015, 2020, 2030 and 2040. Ministers would be obliged to set out a strategy to Parliament on which MPs would vote, and would make an annual report to the House. The point of the Opposition draft Bill is to seek to change the mindset of Westminster and Whitehall. By contrast, the Government in the Gracious Speech have not actually published a climate change Bill. They have promised one, but it looks as if it will not be published until next month at the earliest and could well be delayed until early next year, as the Cabinet apparently continues to squabble about how tough the Bill should be.