I should like to join my hon. Friends who have congratulated the Government on bringing forward the Bill. It has been clear from all the speeches that we applaud its general purpose and want to do everything possible to facilitate its passage.

I am concerned about strengthening its effectiveness in Committee. I thought that the interesting remarks of my hon. Friend the Member for Newark (Mr. Bishop) illustrated the sort of details with which we shall want to deal in Committee, for most of the work on the Bill will be done in Committee.

I should like to underline some of the observations of my hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd (Mr. John). There are four subjects in particular on which we shall require much fuller information from the Government.

The first concerns penalties for bodies corporate and the nature of the monetary penalties which the Government envisage. The second concerns the need for hon. Members to be clear about the definitions of "biological agents" and "toxins". My hon. Friend made the interesting point that we had seen in the context of the Vietnam war the biological implications of the use of chemical weapons.

Thirdly, there is a need to recognise the blurred dividing line between offensive and defensive work and preparations. I should like to know more of the Government's thinking on this subject.

Related to that is my fourth and most important point. We all recognise that research work is continuing in this country. The Opposition wish to emphasise that if the sincerity of the Government and the nation in this legislation is to be established, it is important that the Government should be as forthcoming as they can be about the nature and scope of the research work. I hope that we shall hear more on those four basic points.

My hon. Friend the Member for Putney (Mr. Hugh Jenkins) made a committed speech. We all appreciate and respect his dedicated work in disarmament. He drew attention to the problem which must always concern us, that if we endorse a partial move towards disarmament, one of the sad aspects of doing so is that we may appear to be giving moral endorsement to those forms of warfare not covered by the partial disarmament. The relevance and effectiveness of this legislation can ultimately be judged only in terms of how far it advances the cause of general and comprehensive disarmament. We particularly want to see measures as soon as possible towards the comprehensive banning of methods of chemical warfare.

I turn now to the interesting observations of the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Mr. David Price). He opened up the whole nature of the problem. It is most important that we should not limit our evaluation of this or any other legislation regarding disarmament simply to our experience of traditional forms of formal warfare encountered in the past. In the past decade there has been a revolution in the techniques of warfare which few of us would have imagined likely even two decades ago. If we are responsible legislators, we cannot sweep the developments under the carpet: we must face them squarely.

The hon. Member for Eastleigh did a great service to the Committee by emphasising that we were now dealing with an age of terrorist and guerrilla warfare techniques. If the situation were not so macabre, it might be almost funny that after two decades or more in which the super Powers have been locked in the nuclear stalemate and have been totally preoccupied with the dimensions of nuclear warfare, should it be unleashed, there has suddenly vaulted over this stalemate the concept of urban terrorist activity which holds the whole community to ransom. We must recognise that in this respect and in nuclear warfare we are finding that the raw materials from which crude weapons could be made and used by terrorists are all too readily available.

We cannot ignore the fact that the more we concentrate on civil nuclear energy, the more we create the raw materials from which nuclear weapons can be manufactured. In an age of large-scale international crime syndicates, let alone international political organisations, we cannot turn our backs on the dangers involved. That applies equally to biological warfare.

As we prepare for the detailed Standing Committee work, we should bear in mind that if any of us have been tempted in the past to think of disarmament matters as pipe dreams, not in the realm of immediate political priorities, we must change our attitude quickly. As defence spokesman for the Opposition, I can say that we firmly believe that disarmament should be in the front line of a relevant defence policy. We are therefore disappointed that there is not present a Ministry of Defence Minister to speak for the Government on this matter.

We suspect that within the Government's ranks there remains a tendency to see disarmament as a low priority, for the disarmament section of the Foreign Office to be regarded as a group of people doing specialist research in the back rooms, rather than a group who should be in the shop window of what we regard as the national priorities in defence. That situation must be rectified.

We support the Government in general and we assure them that our work in Committee will be constructive. We congratulate them on bringing this legislation forward. I emphasise that the Opposition are encouraged by the limited prospects presented by the Bill because we see it not simply as an isolated and negative piece of legislation connected with one form of warfare, but as a constructive step towards what can in the end be the only relevant form of defence policy for the nation.