Geneva Conventions and United Nations Personnel (Protocols) Bill [Lords]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend and neighbour for his comments. He was a fine Minister in the Foreign Office, and there are fond memories of him skulking around the corridors—it was not him skulking around the corridors, it is the memories. My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. There will not be different organisations, and the structure will still be the same. It would be wholly wrong for people to swap armbands every afternoon or every second day according to who they were visiting. In the vast majority of cases, they will stick with the symbols that are already known—the red cross and the red crescent. However, there may be circumstances in which a national organisation, working only within its own territory, wants to incorporate within the crystal its own symbol, for instance the red star of David. That could happen only in national circumstances, which seems sensible. Likewise, if British defence medical agencies and services overseas judged in a particular conflict that using the red crystal rather than the red cross would afford them greater protection and bring greater understanding among the public, they would be free to do so. That choice has to be made on a pragmatic basis, but it should not change and flip-flop all the time, because that would itself undermine clarity. For the most part, I suspect that they will not need to take that step, but in some circumstances they will.