Starvation as a Weapon of War

Lord Bruce of Bennachie Excerpts

Thursday 16th October 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Bruce of Bennachie (LD)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Brown of Silverton, for this debate and I am grateful for all the powerful speeches that have been made, all from perspectives of people who know, care and are involved in this issue. Each one of them has added a different aspect of the dimension, which we should all appreciate.

As people will know, I spent 10 years as chair of the International Development Committee watching what the UK could and did do in humanitarian aid and I am appalled that we are no longer able to do that. There is a really important point here. Not only did we do stuff, but we were witnesses to what was going on. The plea that has come from every speech about ensuring that consequences flow from imposing starvation as a weapon of war means something. If there is nobody there to see it happening, it is surely much harder to promote successful prosecutions, so the absence of aid workers is an issue. It is probably the reason why so many aid workers are killed by protagonists—325 last year, as the World Food Programme has identified.

Of course, it is odd to have rules for war. War is a terrible thing and terrible things happen, but we have created rules. Many players in the past have attempted to take account of them, but the actors who are playing now are not interested in the rules; they have total disregard for the rules. They are state and non-state players and they think that there is no accountability. That is the problem. The message from everybody seems to be, “What are we going to do about it?”

On Article 8, first, it should be ratified, but, secondly, we need to clarify what the intention is. Nearly all the speeches identified situations where it should not be difficult to prove the intention—that starvation and deprivation of water and food was a deliberate act to intimidate people, put them into a desperate situation and subjugate them. The noble Baroness, Lady Brown, is right that Sudan is the worst situation and is on an almost unprecedented scale. Hopefully, the situation in Gaza is about to become better, but let us not hold our breath. Other places, such as Mali and Haiti, are in pretty desperate straits. There is no doubt at all that hunger is increasing. Not all of it is caused by conflict, but more of it is conflict-related than anything else and more of it is being deliberately perpetrated rather than being just an incidental consequence of the conflict.

I want to make a suggestion that may not be appreciated by everyone. We have a very real concern in this country about migration—desperate migration—but what drives this migration is exactly this. If you are in a situation where you are trapped, then of course you cannot get out, but if you are in a situation where there is no food or water, your family are threatened and you are under attack, what are you going to do? You get as far away as possible if you have half a chance.

A point that many of us made about why the aid cuts were such a mistake is that one of the things that aid did was help to reduce and remove some of the pressures of migration for desperate people. I therefore make no apology for saying that in my view the Government got it badly wrong. They can do it differently, and that is fine. The noble Lord, Lord Browne, said the cuts brought the aid budget down to 0.3% but, when you take out the handling of refugees in the UK and the consequence of that, it is about 0.1%. In other words, it has gone—it hardly exists. I genuinely think that Ministers such as the noble Lord, Lord Collins, and the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, care about this and I regret that they have to perpetrate a government policy about which I am sure they are as appalled privately as I am. I hope that they will use their voices inside to make clear how strongly people feel about this and how it is connected to the domestic agenda.

One of the reasons why it was possible to rip up the aid budget was that the consensus broke down and opportunist politicians started to denigrate its achievement: “Oh, it was just charity. It was a waste of space. It wasn’t effective”. I know how effective it was because I saw it. Most of that was misrepresentation and untruth, but the consequence was that politicians took the view that, “These are faraway places of which we know little and the British public are much more concerned about domestic issues”— of course that is true—“and they’re concerned about migration”. We fail to point out to them that if we do not support these communities and these people in situ, that adds to our problems. It creates a situation in this country that we have to deal with.

I argue that, from a moral point of view, this timely debate is absolutely right. My final plea to the Minister—I know that I am knocking at an open door—is that he will use whatever means he can to ensure that the UK Government take genuine, consistent leadership to condemn this, but also to do everything they can at every opportunity to make it clear to those protagonists that there will be consequences. When people see that there are consequences, that will not stop it but it might reduce it. And please have a rethink about our aid policy, because it is not serving our national interest.