Answering the House of Lords

On the 14th of December the unelected House of Lords (note that the DPRK does not have an unelected body but instead an elected Supreme People’s Assembly which represents the workers , peasants , intellectuals and soldiers ) held a debate titled ‘ Current Threat posed by North Korea “ . Members of the House of Lords receive £332 per day plus expenses to just sit down and talk all day. In this particular case to slander the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

The so-called ‘debate ‘ was wrong from the very start because the House of Lords failed to use the correct title of the country ;the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea  (DPRK ) popularly known as People’s Korea or Socialist Korea or Juche Korea .Moreover the House of Lords has no right to comment on the internal affairs of the DPRK as it was very clear from reading the report of the hearing that rather than discussing the external policy of the DPRK in fact a lot of time was spent discussing what are internal matters for the DPRK and strictly related to the sovereignty of the DPRK . Not far from the House of Lords there are homeless people sleeping rough on the streets but instead of choosing how to solve the issues of homelessness and poverty in the UK ,their lordships and ladyships choose to have a debate about a far away country of which they are profoundly  ignorant of .

The House of Lords did not invite the DPRK Embassy in London to address the hearing nor did it invite the Korean Friendship Association of the UK(KFA) to address the debate .The House of Lords did not bother to ask for evidence from KFA UK  or cite any of any materials . The whole debate was completely one-sided and unfair and dominated by anti-DPRK reactionaries such as Lord Alton of Liverpool. No one sympathetic to the DPRK was allowed to address the debate which was a theatre of anti-DPRK bashing , slander and calumny by the Tories , Lib Dems , Labour and Greens , all of which equally anti-DPRK and have identical policies when it comes to the DPRK .Supposedly we live in a multi-party system but the recent House of Lords debate shows that what are supposedly opposed parties have identical policies.

Opening the hearing Lord Swire , a Conservative , claimed that the DPRK is part of a “unhealthy, unwelcome and, frankly, dangerous anti-Western axis “ .The DPRK has an anti-imperialist and independent foreign policy which opposes domination and interference by the US and other imperialist countries such as the UK . It is a good thing that the  DPRK stands against US imperialism ! Swire claimed that the DPRK “expelled the British embassy from Pyongyang”. This is simply not true , it is nonsense. It was Britain that withdrew the embassy from Pyongyang , the DPRK did not break diplomatic relations with the UK and did not expel the British embassy.

Both Lord Swire and Lord Alton banged on about the usual rubbish about ‘mass starvation ‘ and prison camps’ ,making false accusations about the human rights situation in the DPRK. Statistics from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO ) which is not a friend of the DPRK show that the rice consumption per capita in the DPRK is 99 kg per year and it is actually higher than that of south Korea . This approximates to 271g of rice per day  which would provide 3 very generous meals of rice per day .

In actual fact statistics from inside the DPRK show that citizens are supplied with 300g of rice per day along with tofu , eggs , and beer . During the years of the ‘arduous march ‘ , the DPRK’s population increased rather than decreased proving that the stories of ‘famine ‘ and ‘mass starvation ‘ were not true.

As to the so-called ‘human rights problem ‘ .Such a thing does not exist in the DPRK. People enjoy the right to housing , to education , to free medical care , to work and even have holidays paid for by state expense. Visiting the DPRK many times  our KFA UK Chairman Dr Dermot Hudson did not see 'forced labour camps' and 'concentration camps'  that the imperialists allege exist in the DPRK ? I could not see such a thing  in fact I didn't even see one barbed wire fence in the countryside nor large numbers of police or security personnel. It also should be mentioned that the DPRK countryside was free from crop failure, famine . 

There is also a good level of social equality in the DPRK countryside with no big houses , no big private landed estates (or latifundia ) , no rich farmers or landlords, a genuine people's countryside.

The so-called ‘information ‘ that the House of Lords based its debate on is just lies and falsehoods created by the south Korean puppets , by the US Central Intelligence Agency and by those who betrayed the DPRK for money .

Lastly ,the House of Lords called for the DPRK Supreme leadership to be referred to the International Criminal Court , such a demand is both a grave infringement on the DPRK’s sovereignty as well as a call for the overthrow of the socialist system in the DPRK.

We will publish a longer and expanded version of this article in our journal “People’s Korea Today “