Cluster Munitions (Prohibition) Bill [HL]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Dubs on introducing the Bill. This is an appropriate day on which to debate it—buried among a lot of other news is news that the Government have instructed the Serious Fraud Office to stop inquiring into sleaze in the arms industry. Cluster bombs are part of that. One reads of the huge sighs of relief from these people and that the decision has apparently been made in the national interest. I frequently hear that we need arms to defend ourselves, and I do not disagree, but that if we can sell as many of them as possible to other people as well, the unit cost comes down and that is more efficient, so we should export them. We seem to do this, often with allegedly massive bribes, which might have come out in the SFO inquiry if it had continued, on the basis that everybody else does it and we have to keep up with them or lose jobs. The key is not to get found out, hence the panic in much of the world over the SFO inquiry. This has been going on for years. The Conservative Party did it when it was in Government. We should give our Government credit for starting the SFO inquiry—I am rather sad that they have not been able to keep it going. In today’s world, few of these arms are for defending the UK, and I include cluster bombs in that remark. They seem to be more frequently used for attacking others such as expeditionary forces around the world and, as the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, suggested, for other things as well. So it is good that landmines are already banned, as my noble friend Lord Dubs said; that has been confirmed by Hilary Benn. Cluster bombs are not any different in their effect from landmines; they are just a different means of delivery, which I am sure some of our colleagues will say is more efficient. As many noble Lords have said, these things stay around for years and kill many innocent people. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Coventry talked about collateral damage. Probably more than 100,000 people have died in Iraq but we do not seem to be able to count them. If al-Qaeda or anybody else managed to set off some of these bombs in our suburban gardens, covering large parts of the UK with mines that hung around for years, killing our children, of course we would want to stop it and I hope that we would. But, as the right reverend Prelate said, would we really call it collateral damage? Would we not think it much better if not only was there a worldwide ban on cluster munitions but we had taken a full and proactive lead in achieving it, as the noble Lord, Lord Jay, said? The real difference is that cluster bombs survive for many years after the military have left; all the evidence I have read suggests that that is true. I suggest that we return to the ethical foreign policy that the Government started nearly 10 years ago. My party had one—the Tories never did, to my knowledge. If the Government supported the Bill, it would be an excellent way of restarting that policy.