Lord Alderdice (LD)

My Lords, I have listened with great interest to the various contributions to this debate on the threat to the UK from Hezbollah. My concern for a peaceful outcome to the tragedy of the Middle East goes back many years. After the negotiation of the Belfast/Good Friday agreement in 1998 and the IRA’s decision in 2005 to decommission its weapons, I explored similar possibilities elsewhere. I met with Hezbollah in Beirut in July 2005, and it asked me to prepare a paper on the decommissioning of weapons. After it received and studied the paper, it asked me to return and discuss with it the possibilities for a process, and I did that. Sadly, the 2006 south Lebanon war destroyed the prospects for that initiative: of course, groups do not give up weapons if they think they might need them. Since then, as the noble Lord, Lord Bew, said, the situation has deteriorated, and we face a very different world now. Every community has the right to defend itself, including ourselves in the United Kingdom. Tonight we focus on the defence of the United Kingdom. My concern, however, is that, while it is appropriate, and indeed vital, for the security services to do all they can to protect us and for the Government to take this seriously—we will listen with interest to what the Minister says—it is important for us not to focus all our thoughts on the escalation of rhetoric and force. That is happening globally and is leading us to an existential crisis that could envelop the whole of that region—and much more widely—in a terrible war, going beyond even that which there has been. For that reason I particularly welcome the intervention by the noble Lord, Lord Carlile of Berriew, talking about trying to engage with those constructive people in the Middle East and more widely. Of course it is true that this may not work, but we must be careful not to focus all the time on force as the way to address it. This is why I called in the SDR debate for us not only to build up our forces and our matériel but to focus on the stratagems for de-escalation. In all the wars we are currently facing, the situation is getting worse; people are increasingly tossing around the possibilities of the nuclear option in almost all these conflicts. It is said so easily—it drops so easily from the tongue—and I think that people have forgotten the consequences of any kind of nuclear intervention: they are utterly catastrophic. So in all that we say and do, while we take care to defend and to oppose those who do and say what is wrong, we must try to de-escalate rather than add fuel to the fire.