Lord StoddartA "racist" British Government has failed to keep count of Iraq dead because it does not value their lives, Swindon peer Lord Stoddart has claimed.

In an attack on the Iraq war policy, he said that ministers only cared about the lives of troops not the people they were supposedly sent to help.

The peer said that if the Government was really concerned about innocent Iraqi civilians, it would make greater efforts to tally the numbers of people who have died during the conflict.

He said: "The British Government can give us no official figures because they have not bothered to count the dead Iraqis.

"People, especially in the Middle East, can be forgiven for believing that the British and American governments consider Arab lives far less important than those of Westerners.

"That smacks of blatant and disgusting racism of the worst kind."

According to estimates by the group Iraq Body Count and the Red Cross, more than 11,000 Iraqis have been killed during the invasion and its aftermath.

The Government does not keep records of Iraqi dead.

Lord Stoddart also said Tony Blair and US President George Bush had claimed before the invasion that Iraq posed a threat to world peace because it had weapons of mass destruction.

But as none had been found they were now claiming to have "liberated Iraqis from a vicious dictatorial regime," he said.

The comments sparked anger from the Govern-ment. Baroness Symons said she "utterly rejected the appalling accusations" made by the Swindon peer.