My Lords, we have heard many powerful speeches today. If I may say so, the speech by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, is one of the most powerful I have ever heard in the House. He made an utterly compelling case for sending this issue back to the House of Commons. Purely as a matter of parliamentary protocol, we should do so, and not only because, as the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, rightly said, the opportunity for the Government to honour their own commitment to seek a compromise can arise only if this matter goes back to the Commons, but because the current amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Alton, has addressed
the points made in the Commons speech last week by Greg Hands, the Minister for International Trade, about why we should not agree to the earlier Alton amendment.
Greg Hands said in the House of Commons last Tuesday:
“Nobody denies the importance and seriousness of the situation in Xinjiang … or that human rights cannot and should not be traded away in a trade agreement or anything like it.”
He went on to say that the Government are clear
“that doing more trade does not have to come at the expense of human rights. In fact, as I am sure my hon. and right hon. Friends will agree, there is a strong positive correlation between countries that trade freely and human rights”.
However, he said that the House of Commons should not agree to the then amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Alton, because it
“would, in effect, take out of the hands of Government their prerogative powers to conduct international relations with regard to trade”.—[Official Report, Commons, 19/1/21; cols. 796-97.]
The current Alton amendment meets that point entirely. It does not take prerogative powers out of the hands of the Government; rather, it enables Parliament and government to be better informed. They could not be better informed than by the advice and judgment of the High Court, and other courts in the land, on the specific issue of whether genocide is being committed. It does not even matter whether the Government intend to come back with further proposals. The noble Lord, Lord Alton, has already met the test which Greg Hands set last week.
On the wider question, where I have some sympathy with the Minister, there are wider issues involved here —of course there are. When I was a Minister, I visited China and had substantial dealings with them. Those who of us who have been engaged in these events for many years are aware that we have a growing China problem, which is not just about the Uighurs and potential genocide. It is also about Taiwan, Hong Kong and China’s belt and road initiative. What we have in Xi Jinping is essentially a leader who is not so new now—his leadership is 10 or 11 years old—but who is increasingly Stalinist. It was reasonable to think in the decades after Deng—although, of course, Tiananmen Square was a wake-up call—that China might be on a more liberal path and that we should move accordingly. It turns out that that was a mistake. We all make mistakes, and there has been a significant change in circumstance. The Xi Jinping decision to essentially abolish what passes for the Chinese constitution at the end of his original 10-year term was clearly a massive wake-up call. Many of the worst atrocities being reported now, which the noble Lord, Lord Alton, referred to, have flowed from the radicalisation of his regime, and we have to respond accordingly.
We have been here before. I said that the regime was increasingly Stalinist. The noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, in a powerful speech, did not exhibit himself to be a great fan of the Foreign Office. He used certain epithets about it, which might indicate its weakness or pusillanimity, and so on. I have spent a large part of the last two years researching and writing about Ernest Bevin who, I can assure the noble Lord, was in no way weak as Foreign Secretary. He stood up to Stalin with determination, well before that was fashionable either in this country or, crucially, the United States, where
the early years of the Truman Administration sought to appease Stalin. Bevin stood up with a relentlessness for which we should all be grateful; maybe our freedom depends upon it. Great departures such as NATO certainly depended upon his actions.
However—and this goes straight to the point of the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Alton—although two situations are never alike and there are differences between the situation with China today and with the Soviet Union in the 1940s and 1950s, one hugely important commonality is that there was then a distinct absence of knowledge about, and much controversy about, what was actually going on in Russia. Many people, predominantly but not exclusively on the left in politics, I am ashamed to say, thought that Soviet Russia was “a new civilisation”—to use the phrase in the famous book by the Webbs. They thought that it had found a new pathway to success and prosperity which we should honour. What goes straight to the point of this amendment is that they constantly poured cold water on reports coming out of Russia that there were massive abuses of human rights which verged on genocide, and which we now know were genocide.
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On the point from the immensely powerful speech of my noble friend Lady Kennedy, the same was true of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Many people, including reputable people—mainly on the right, as it happens—such as Foreign Secretaries and distinguished leaders of society and business, constantly poured cold water on the atrocities which we now know were taking place in Germany and paved the way for genocide. It would have been better if we had had these provisions in place so we could have had open and transparent debate and some legal, formal process of testing evidence. It would have made it easier for Governments—who are, as the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, said, subject to public opinion—to shape that public opinion and respond to it. That is precisely what the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Alton, does. It makes the business of establishing facts transparent and open so that we can have a wider debate. The courts are quite good at eliciting and elucidating facts.
I agree with the Minister that these issues are difficult. We have had his different opinions recycled in the last few days. At one and the same time, he thinks we should be cracking down hard on a regime that abuses human rights while continuing to trade with it more. I do not wish to make a party-political point; that dual mentality is precisely the dual mentality of the West at the moment. It is not just Britain; it is the European Union, which has just done another trade agreement with China, and it is also the United States. This is the situation we have got ourselves into over the last 30 years, and we must seek to resolve it.
I do not come to the House with great ideas of how we resolve this. I am not much in favour of slashing our trade with China—I hope that we can establish a basis for improvements in the Chinese regime so that that is not necessary. But the crucial point, on which I so strongly support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Alton, is that we must have an open, factual debate based on what is actually happening and not sweep anything under the carpet.
Ernie Bevin was making these arguments about Russia in the 1930s, because, as a trade unionist, he saw what Soviet Communists were up to in the trade union movement. That is what turned him strongly against dealing with Russia. The biggest problem he had was getting agreement on what was actually happening in, first, Nazi Germany, then Russia. When I was searching in his papers, I came across correspondence between him and Charlie Chaplin. Charlie Chaplin produced a great film, “The Great Dictator”, which exposed and ridiculed Hitler and Nazi Germany and had a huge impact on opinion across Europe and the United States. However, the film was nearly not made, because the financial backers of Charlie Chaplin in Hollywood were worried it would be banned in Britain. We should support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Alton.