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It is quite wilful to suggest that the threat is not caused or increased by the foreign policy of this country. But it is not only foreign policy that has to be addressed. Your Lordships will forgive me if I move into my more familiar home affairs territory, as I shall not be here on Monday for the appropriate debate. The fairness with which members of minority communities in this country are dealt with is crucial. Alienation from mainstream British society can be exacerbated by injustice.
This Government have nurtured a new and dangerous offspring in the criminal justice system.
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However, the goalposts of the criminal justice system are being moved, so that the emphasis of new criminal legislation brought forward by this Government is not to detect and punish a crime that has been committed but to prevent it. They use the criminal law as a tool to try to manage risk. I am reminded of Brutus’s soliloquy in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”, where he suspects that Caesar if crowned may turn into a tyrant. He says:
Then, lest he may, prevent. And, since the quarrel Will bear no colour for the thing he is, Fashion it thus; that what he is, augmented, Would run to these and these extremities: And therefore think him as the serpent’s eggWhich hatch’d, would, as his kind, grow mischievous, And kill him in the shell”.That was precisely the rationale for Mr Blunkett’s favouring of detention without trial. No criminal offence could be proved by those subjected to Belmarsh prison, so he favoured locking up the alien serpent’s egg in Belmarsh in case it grew mischievous. Locking people up in a police station without charge is simply a continuation of the same policy. Twenty-eight days’ detention is too long, as we have always argued, and a further extension of detention will be an intolerable burden, leading to further radicalisation of potential terrorists.
In parallel, we have seen the steady advance of civil orders, obtained without due criminal process—for example, the ASBO, which is obtained with a lesser burden of proof, sometimes by a council official simply quoting anonymous sources, and which criminalises conduct that is a nuisance but not an offence. Then the Government brought forward control orders, which are civil orders with similar use of hearsay evidence, hitherto concealed from the defendant. The control orders may contain restrictions, including house arrest and bans on internet access and unauthorised visitors. Fortunately, the Law Lords have in the past two weeks overturned the ruling that allows intelligence-based evidence to be withheld from suspects and their lawyers. We recently saw introduced the serious crime order, a civil order that again gives rise to criminal sanctions and imprisonment. The Criminal Justice Bill referred to in the gracious Speech will continue the process by the imposition of violent offender orders, which are to be imposed if the offender has acted in such a way as to give reasonable cause to believe that it is necessary to protect the public. Again, the order may contain such prohibitions, restrictions or conditions as the court thinks necessary.
The common thread of these developments is that each person who is subjected to an ASBO, serious crime order, control order or the new violent offender order is put in a bubble; they have their own criminal
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8.06 pm
Lord Crisp: My Lords, I welcome the continuing commitment shown in the gracious Speech to tackling global poverty and to the millennium development goals. I welcome also the way in which the Government have given effect to that commitment through increases in DfID’s budget.
Relatively little has been said on international development in this debate—no doubt because there is no legislation—but, like other issues, it is difficult and complex, and contains many risks and opportunities for us all. As with those other issues, I know that there is great knowledge of and support for international development in all parts of this House. I hope that, during this Parliament, there will be many opportunities to debate the issue to create a better understanding of it and its relevance to us all.
Perhaps I may illustrate that with a single example, which is the critical shortage of health workers in many developing countries. Last year, the World Health Organisation published a report in which it assessed that there was a shortage of 4.3 million health workers in the world. One can question the assumptions, but whatever the answer—whether the figure is 3 million or 5 million—it is a substantial number.
The WHO said also that 57 countries were in crisis, most of them in Africa, but some in other parts of the world. What it did not say, and what is becoming evident, is that this is truly a global, and not an African, problem. An insufficient number of health workers will have a major impact on our ability to deliver on the millennium development goals. Norway has recently published a study of the numbers of health and social workers that it will need in 2030, with an ageing population, and has estimated that it will need double the number of health workers that it has now. This problem is coming to the developed world, as well as being a present and immediate problem in the developing world.
The shortage of health workers in the developing world is a classic, important and complex public issue and there are many reasons for it. Some are related to migration to the west or the north; some, sadly, are related to death and injury in the dangerous profession of providing healthcare in developing countries. A great deal of internal migration and circular migration between countries takes place. In a number of countries in Africa, there are unemployed health workers, because the resources to employ them do not exist. In addition, a number of the so-called “vertical” funds, which deal with single issues or single diseases, often scoop from the pool of local employment, perhaps by paying higher wages, and
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I know that the Government have made impressive steps in working with Malawi to try to retain health workers there and increase their numbers, but much more can be done. When I talk about health workers, I do not mean specifically doctors and nurses, although one needs them. If I understand the Ethiopian Government correctly, they say that 70 per cent of the burden of disease in their rural community can be tackled by what they call community health workers; that is, people with a relatively low level of training. As they have a relatively low level of training, they can be trained quickly and much less expensively, and they are much more likely to stay in the country.
I shall illustrate that further and declare an interest, in that I am shortly to become chair of Sight Savers International, a major international charity concerned with blindness and the rehabilitation of blind people. The charity has an impressive record in Africa in particular of training what we call mid-level workers. Those are people who have, perhaps, been nurses and who have then been trained through Sight Savers’ work to become cataract surgeons, for example—and very good at it they have proved to be. There are other examples, but I take that one as a matter of personal preference, as noble Lords will understand.
Evidence has already been gathered about the impact and effect of community health workers. I know that people listening to or reading this debate will say that previous experiments in having large numbers of community health workers have failed. To some extent, that is true, but the reasons are well understood: they have not been supported. You need people to supervise and support the community health workers but, to put it in terribly simple words, the triangle of the health professions in somewhere like Ethiopia is very different from how it is in England. There is a very broad base of community health workers, with some mid-level workers, some nurses and a few doctors, as opposed to the approach that we have in this country.
So there are some things that we can clearly do. You also need a different education approach, based on primary care, prevention and training people locally, and you need subsequently to employ people. As we have seen in Malawi, the Government have been willing to step in and support local employment of people within the country.
What is the UK going to do on a greater scale in its leadership role, as one of the major global developers in the world, but also as a major global employer? We all understand that there are many people in this country in our health services who have come from overseas. What more will the UK do to tackle this critical shortage in health workers?
Let me move on to congratulate the Government once again on a new initiative announced in September, an excellent approach called the international health partnerships, in which the UK, together with the World Bank, the WHO and a number of other countries,
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Do the Government see the international health partnerships as one way in which to work together to tackle these complex problems of getting an adequate health workforce in developing countries? That is a truly wicked problem. Secondly and more generally, how will they measure the success of the international health partnerships? A lot of people have supported the initiative, but it will be interesting to see how success can be measured.
Finally, I return from developing countries to global health issues. While this arises in developing countries, it is deeply relevant to developing countries. Earlier this year, the Chief Medical Officer published a report on global health issues as a draft strategy for government. It would be useful to know when the Government will address that and publish their response.
While I have not addressed any legislation in my few remarks, these issues will, I hope, come back to the House in the next year in various different ways. They are big public policy issues, which I believe are very much worthy of discussion here.
8.14 pm
The Earl of Sandwich: My Lords, I, too, welcome the noble Baroness to the Front Bench and her renewed commitment in the Queen’s Speech on her Government’s behalf to Afghanistan. Our foreign policy in Afghanistan cannot succeed if it clings to its post-2001 objectives. The mightiest military alliance will never remove the Taliban, and the largest aid programme ever will never make Afghan poverty history. That is not a pessimistic assessment. The author Khaled Hosseini wrote last week that Afghanistan was failing because we were not doing enough. Five million refugees had returned to abject poverty and we were neglecting them and 2 million more are due from Iran and Pakistan. He said that,
He is right—it would be. But it is a dire prediction, and novelists are rarely useful policy makers.
I do not think that Afghanistan is a failed state and during a recent visit I witnessed many positive changes that had taken place in Kabul and elsewhere since I was previously there. However, I believe that, as the UK, we have to revise radically our optimism
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The question has to be asked, five years on: why are we in Afghanistan? Why are our soldiers in Afghanistan? Is it a NATO co-ordination exercise? Is it to defend our country against terrorism or to help the Afghans? Surely it is quite unreasonable to expect British troops to risk their lives in Beau Geste-type operations unless the people can see not only military success but other diplomatic, aid and development activities working effectively. The Afghan population does not need our NATO battalions to behave like giant vacuum cleaners hoovering the Helmand valleys and suffering appalling casualties unless they themselves are actually benefiting from our presence. And was it wise to move our provincial reconstruction team and much of our development effort to Helmand?
The different issue of blurring the lines between aid and soldiering came up in the defence debate in another place on 16 October. During that debate, the Defence Secretary said that he wanted to give NGOs the confidence to work in an environment where they do not become targets. That surely means that the MoD cannot mix war and peace; it cannot dress up what the Minister calls a dirty, difficult and dangerous war in Helmand as an environment of peace and development. My contention today is that we are not protecting the Afghan people so much as protecting ourselves and the rest of the world against terrorism. We are driving rapidly about in armoured vehicles and not doing enough to demonstrate our friendship with those we have come to help. We are in danger of losing the battle for hearts and minds. Can the Minister confirm from his own experience that we may seriously be missing the UN millennium development goals, as well?
We shall have to move quickly as there will not always be the same appetite among aid donors for helping Afghanistan. Much has been achieved, but we tend to hear the same figures from Ministers—about the 5 million children—and read too little about genuine poverty eradication, as I shall mention later. After spending a week in Kabul and Balkh province, I am concerned, as is the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, about the proportion of aid coming in that goes to ministries in central government and is never seen by the people. The in-phrase is “capacity building”; this can often be a disguise, not only for the usual excessive administration and corruption that we find in a poor country but on buying in too much external technical assistance, which last year absorbed an estimated 25 per cent of the total aid.
The NGOs have been concerned about this for some time and have lobbied hard for more investment in projects which directly involve local people. It is true that internal revenue also has to make up for any future slack in aid, when the world’s attention inevitably moves on. Three-quarters of our DfID funding comes through central government. In this context, I have already asked the Government in a Written Question
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The FCO and DfID also need to work harder on their image with the Afghan and other media. They need to emphasise success, perhaps through the national solidarity programme which is a fruitful partnership between government and NGO projects. The expanded UK embassy is, I know, addressing the problem of hearts and minds and as part of that it must identify itself more closely with the reduction of acute poverty in Afghanistan. That is the primary objective. The more that acute needs are recognised and addressed by local people, the faster the country will move towards the millennium development goals. This will take what the Minister described in the debate on 23 October—which I missed—as “an enhanced political effort”, which uses all the levers, as the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, said. It is a wonderful country with an exciting history—most of it about the greed and pillage of foreign invaders.
In Bactria, close to Mazar-e-Sharif, my wife and I met French and Afghan archaeologists and saw relics of Archaemenid and Greek empires and of ancient walls of cities destroyed by Gengis Khan and Timur. We saw some of the oldest Islamic mosques in the world, the Timurid madrassas of Balkh and Mazar, the haunting valley of Bamyan—still largely intact—and the garden shrine of the Emperor Babur in Kabul, which is testimony enough of the survival of a world-class culture in Afghanistan.
The Afghan people are proud of their country. They would like outsiders not to invade or occupy it but to come and support them in rebuilding it. Whatever the inadequacies of their Government now and in the past, the vast majority are now committed to development and reconstruction and to a future in which their country may again hold up its head in the family of nations.
8.23 pm
Lord Addington: My Lords, this is the first time that I have spoken on defence in your Lordships' Chamber in the 21 years-plus that I have been here. I
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The main point about the Armed Forces is that we are asking them to do an awful lot. We are asking them to take part in our wars of choice; that is, wars that we do not have to fight to defend ourselves. Certain of these wars perhaps should be fought. Indeed, the destruction of the Taliban, or the driving from power of a regime that supported Al’Qaeda, which attacked ourselves and our neighbours, is something that one finds considerable difficulty disagreeing with. However, as regards other forms of military adventurism that we have experienced over the last few years, I felt very comfortable sitting on these Benches when the relevant decisions were made. But the fact of the matter is that we are asking our Armed Forces to do a great deal. In Afghanistan, particularly at the moment, we are asking them to fight a very hot war on a small scale. As regards the level of casualties, the noble Lord, Lord King of Bridgwater, described what happened to one of the battalions of the Parachute Regiment. If my memory serves me right, I believe that it is the Third Battalion. It took something like 10 per cent casualties during a tour of duty. If I remember what limited military theory I have picked up, a 20 per cent casualty rate means that a unit is unsustainable. It is taking heavy casualties. Even for a crack battalion in a very professional army like ours this is worrying. Many units are coming back and reporting that they have lost five, dead. It is only now that the media are realising that 30 or 40 people have been hospitalised. Many of them will never be fit enough to return to service. This degree of commitment and the ongoing number of troops involved in the front line are leading to real overstretch.
I should like to concentrate on what we are doing to support those troops going through this. As regards the planning and the time in service, it is clear that the time spent resting and regrouping—I forget the exact military terms—is being exceeded. Virtually everyone with a lapel here is wearing a poppy today. The Royal British Legion has pointed out to everybody in its recent appeals that it has a whole new list of clients under 35. These people are experiencing combat stress and need medical treatment and support. That group of people and that organisation consider that the
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