{Arms Exports}[17th November 1970]

[Redbook1:184][19701117b]{Arms Exports}[17th November 1970]

Wed 17/11/70 [continued]

            Two things in particular occurred to me during last night's debate.*

            Our chief concern should be not with the politics of mass response, but with individuals as the components of the masses.  These individuals suffer less, physically, under a stable regime than in an unstable situation.  Democracy is perhaps the most stable system we know, if the people will have it so; tyranny is not so stable; but anarchy is by very definition most unstable.  Should we not therefore sell arms to South Africa, arms to be used for internal repression, so as to contribute to the stability of the situation?

            I think it was the Bishop of Stepney who said at that debate that Britain -- we -- should feel bitterly ashamed of causing hundreds of thousands of children to die, by sending arms to Nigeria.  I think this showed a strange lack of perception.  Apart from the obvious (though maybe irrelevant) fact that I didn't elect the Labour Government, there is this to consider: if the Nigerian and British governments had seen the Biafran troubles coming sooner and had stocked up arms earlier, they might well have been able to prevent it happening at all -- hence less loss of life, less suffering (one hopes; maybe).  There is also the point that most of the children who died, died not of violence but of starvation and disease; and I do not know, of those who did die violently, how many died by the knife and the spear rather than the gun.

            I noticed that despite what Stepney said Denis Healey (a member of the previous Labour government] made no reply -- but of course Stepney was stepping out of line, since the debate was on arms to South Africa.  I did feel that Healey’s hope that Stepney would soon have a chance to criticise a Labour government again should have been followed by the words ‘and I hope we have as little need to pay attention to what he says as we did last time’.

*[probably at the Cambridge Union]

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