Russia’s Grand Strategy

Debate between Chris Bryant and Alec Shelbrooke

Thursday 19th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Sir Chris Bryant]

Yes. I do not do this very often but I was saying “Hear, hear” earlier in agreement with a point the right hon. Gentleman made. I am reluctant to be too down on the Germans, however, for the simple reason that they have had to make a very dramatic and sudden about-turn in their whole understanding of their defence policy, but they do have to get over this hurdle. Many other countries in Europe want them to and are eagerly pressing them to, and the time is long past for them to do so. Perhaps we need a European security treaty to deal with some of these issues and get that materiel to where it is most needed and in a way that it can be readily used.

I want to talk about something slightly different: how we can help Ukraine rebuild. So far, along with many other countries in Europe, we have frozen but not seized assets. On 9 September 2022 a joint statement by the World Bank, the European Commission and the Government of Ukraine estimated that the current cost of reconstruction and recovery in Ukraine was $349 billion. That is now a four-month-old estimate and the sum will grow exponentially as the war continues. We have all seen the pictures of what has happened in Dnipro; we know of the railways, roads and bridges that will have to be reconstructed, let alone the schools, the housing and the rest. Ukraine is going to need a very substantial amount of money.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

The NATO Parliamentary Assembly was in Washington in the first week of December, and at that time 42% of residential properties in the whole of Ukraine—not just on the frontline—were uninhabitable. That serves to put some flesh on the hon. Gentleman’s point.

[Sir Chris Bryant]

That is very helpful and when the Foreign Affairs Committee was in Ukraine last February, just before the second round of the invasion, we were visiting villages which were being reconstructed, and we were wondering whether that was a wise policy, but of course people need homes. So there is a very significant need: Ukraine estimates Russia has caused $1 trillion-worth of damage since the start of the full-scale invasion last February and that is not allowing for the costs in Crimea and parts of Donetsk and Luhansk.

Under international law Russia will owe Ukraine reparations at the end of this war—I hope the Minister will be able to confirm that—as was recognised by a United Nations General Assembly resolution passed on 14 November. About $350 billion-worth of Russian central bank reserves have been frozen by democratic countries around the world, and £26 billion of that is frozen in the United Kingdom. Those figures come from the central bank annual report. Based on the estimates of the World Bank, the European Commission and the Government of Ukraine, the amount that will be owed to Ukraine by Russia as reparations at the end of the war—we could argue it is already owed now—is likely to be several times greater than the central bank reserves theoretically belonging to the Russian state presently frozen worldwide. So it is safe to assume that the central bank reserves we have frozen in the UK are already owed to Ukraine under international law. I would argue that it is a question of when, not if, they will be spent on and in Ukraine. On 30 November 2022 the European Commission President confirmed plans to use €300 billion of frozen Russian central bank reserves as well as more than €19 billion of Russian oligarchs’ funds for the reconstruction of Ukraine, and I applaud that decision.

The UK has so far provided £3.8 billion in aid to Ukraine in the first eight months since the second invasion, but the central bank reserves we are holding in the UK are six times that amount. It is time that the UK Government passed legislation to repurpose frozen Russian state assets so they can be used to aid Ukraine during and after the war; if the Government do not do that, perhaps some Back-Bench MP will bring forward a ten-minute rule Bill on 7 February to do it.

On the whole I do not like Governments seizing other people’s assets; on the whole it is a bad idea, but there are situations in which we choose to do it, such as when the assets are clearly unexplained wealth that has almost certainly come from corruption. In essence, the UK can find money from three places to support Ukraine. It can come from taxpayers, but taxpayers have funded £3.8 billion already so there is not much spare cash in the bank so far as I can see. Secondly, it can come from frozen oligarch funds. There is a difficulty with that as those are the assets of private individuals and seizing them is likely to be a costly and drawn-out process. The legislation necessary to seize such private assets would necessarily involve a court supervision—because we believe in the rule of law—in order to protect the oligarchs’ rights to their property under the European convention on human rights, or for that matter under normal British law. I am sure these cases will also be defended by some of the richest, most legally savvy and deep-pocketed people on the planet, and the resources available to the Government agencies tasked with confiscating those assets would inevitably be very modest. So I think both those routes are pretty much exhausted at present.

On the other hand, seizing state assets of the Russian Federation will be quick. It is a political decision and there will be no lengthy lawsuits. Unlike oligarch assets, these are state assets, specifically the £26 billion of central bank reserves clearly belonging to Russia, a nation deemed an aggressor by the United Nations, that has been ordered by the UN General Assembly and separately by the International Court of Justice to withdraw its troops from Ukraine, and which has failed to do so and continues its aggression against Ukraine. These funds could be made immediately available to Ukraine should we adopt the legislation to do so. Canada already has similar legislation in place.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alec Shelbrooke]

We were having those debates, not least in the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. There was a Rose-Roth seminar of the Parliamentary Assembly in Kyiv in June 2016. The Ukrainians could not have been clearer to the allies who were there about what the invasion of Crimea meant, and it was brushed aside because there were too many vested interests in the way energy policy was going at the time and, quite frankly, because there was disbelief that anything like this would happen.

[Sir Chris Bryant]

As I understand it, when Foreign Office officials made that point to the then Foreign Secretary, who subsequently became Prime Minister, he pooh-poohed the idea of arming Ukraine.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

We can find examples from across Government over that period of time. When the invasion happened just under a year ago, many conversations took place, and still take place to this day, along the lines of, “Well, Putin is terminally ill.” “Look at Putin’s face, he has a terminal disease.” “This is the act of a dying man.” People were trying to make excuses for him to understand why he did it. They should just accept that the man is a fascist dictator who is trying to expand the Russian empire. There is the answer; it is as simple as that. But still our natural instinct says that this is so far beyond what anybody would expect that there must be another reason behind it.

The hon. Member for Rhondda is correct that people, whoever they were—in this case, it was the then Foreign Secretary—simply did not believe that this would happen. That was true among many of our European allies, but given what we now know, we must be aware that it will go beyond Ukraine. There is no point in saying that Putin would not dare to move into NATO territory. If he wins in Ukraine, then, yes, he will. It is not just Putin, but the Russian set-up—the Russian leadership. There are people beneath Putin who will carry on this war if he were to go. This involves not just one person, but a regime.

Ukraine

Debate between Chris Bryant and Alec Shelbrooke

Tuesday 11th October 2022 Commons Chamber

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend and, yes, I agree with what he has said. Indeed, last Tuesday I visited Ukrainians being trained by our forces in north Yorkshire, and I managed to speak to some who were on day one of their training. What struck me was their determination, no matter their age, to make sure that their country, their sovereign land, their families and their lives will be returned to normal, and they will fight back against this enemy, so I completely agree with what my right hon. Friend said.

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

I warmly congratulate the Minister. He looks very comfortable at the Dispatch Box, although obviously we do not want him to feel too comfortable there. He is right to say that Putin’s targets yesterday were either deliberate or deliberately indiscriminate, and either way that amounts to a war crime.

May I ask him about Elon Musk, who seems to be playing a double game at the moment, and whose tweet earlier this week was profoundly unhelpful? There are also questions about why there have been outages of the Starlink system, which may have made bigger difficulties for Ukraine. Is there a moment at which we might have to consider sanctioning Elon Musk?

[Alec Shelbrooke]

Sanctions remain under review at all times, and everything will be taken into consideration in the round. We must always ensure that we are well aware of all the facts rather than just reacting to social media, and then those things can be looked at, including whether any sanctions would be appropriate.

Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill

Debate between Chris Bryant and Alec Shelbrooke

Committee stage & 3rd reading
Monday 13th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I will not debate the points of politics with the hon. Lady. On her comments about using Parliament for Dissolution, we have had all of that. There are probably few Members of the public watching us in the Chamber tonight, but they certainly watched what happened in 2019. Surely when we have a Chamber in stalemate, the Government should be able to resign. She will recall how her then leader stood on Parliament Square to say that the Government should resign but then came in here and stopped them from resigning, which was incredible. Surely when Parliament is deadlocked, as it was then, the Government should be able to resign and that should just happen, not be stopped by Parliament.

[Chris Bryant]

They should do it today.

Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill

Debate between Chris Bryant and Alec Shelbrooke

2nd reading
Tuesday 6th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)]

It is a real privilege to follow the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant). I want to expand on his closing remarks, because I think we need to strip back to why we are doing this, and I will start by talking about faith in democracy.

The reality is that in the last six months of 2019, and certainly in the autumn of 2019, the public did not have faith in this place. That is a simple fact—we had only to look at our inboxes and at the comments being made. We were not doing anything, we were not getting anywhere and we had a Speaker who, quite frankly, acted disgracefully on many an occasion, going way beyond the remit within which he should have operated. All that that did, from the public’s point of view, was make them say, “You are pointless. We have given you an instruction in a referendum and in a general election, but two years after the 2017 general election, you have still achieved nothing.”

The reason we did not achieve anything was that we were gridlocked. The hon. Member for Edinburgh West (Christine Jardine) made a comment today that was used so many times in that period: she said that people were looking for us to come to this place and solve the issues. I heard that phrase used throughout the argument, but what it actually meant was “People are looking for you to agree with me, to do what I say and to ignore what you want to say.” It was a 50-50 Parliament, really: it kept hitting gridlock and we did not get anywhere.

As I said in my intervention on the hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Cat Smith), for whom I have a great deal of respect—I am looking forward to debates with her in Committee—the games that were played at the time did no favours to this place. The fact that 24 hours before we finally dissolved the last Parliament we had failed to dissolve it under the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, but then a one-line Bill got the two-thirds majority and got the Government to choose the date of the election, added to the sense of “What are you all playing at?”

[Chris Bryant]

I am sorry to do this, but I just want to push back against the words “game playing”. There were very passionately held views on both sides of the argument on every single constitutional matter that was going on. I do not think that anybody was playing a game. Everybody was in deadly earnest—we just disagreed.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I accept the hon. Gentleman’s intervention about the choice of language, and I will change it. His observation is well made and he makes it earnestly.

What I will therefore say is that what happened almost showed that we should have dissolved the last Parliament much earlier. It was going nowhere. We created a situation in which passions were high about the constitutional issues, but we just never made any progress—yet for all the calls from people outside saying “Resign!”, we could not. The ultimate act of resignation is for a Government to call a general election: they do not know whether they will be re-appointed. The Government literally could not resign.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

Parliament failed, and it failed day in and day out, week in and week out. It does not matter, to go back over these arguments, whether people should have shifted to my position or gone to another position. The now Leader of the Opposition spent hours and hours in No. 10 Downing Street, and every time we thought a deal had been made, he scuppered it and moved the goalposts.

Parliament did not work. It is all very well to say that we should have taken particular positions, but the history books show that it failed at every attempt. The way out of that situation is to go back to the people and to lay it on the table. That happened far too late, and in this place we undermined several attempts along the way.

I honestly believe that we have to be very careful at the moment. It is getting better now, but we have been through a period in which the value of the democratic processes in many democracies has been questioned. We have just seen a narcissistic, arrogant now ex-President of the United States with, quite frankly, low political intellectual ability, undermine the entire system to the point he literally caused five people to die because he did not accept the result of an election. He used social media and all the other things to stir it up by saying, “I won this election.” He clearly did not, but most polling shows that a whole swathe of voters in America think that he did, which again undermines democracy.

We still have some way to go to make sure we have the ability to dissolve a failing Parliament and go back to the people. It comes back to the point, which I have used in many a speech, of trusting the people. There have been comments today about how a Government could perhaps abuse a Bill, how we might not recall Parliament, how we could choose the date of the election or how we could delay and do all these things. I promise that the public would give us a right kicking if we did that.

One of the reasons the 2017 general election was, frankly, a disaster for my party was that we were looking to cash in. The people thought, “You are just trying to take advantage of the situation. You don’t actually need to have this election,” and we were punished for it. The public are not stupid; they recognise what goes on, and they have their own concerns. Ultimately, they give their verdict on us at the ballot box. Leading up to the December 2019 general election, the public thought that things had to change. It was noticeable that, whether people were remainers or leavers, they just wanted the situation resolved, which is why the result was the way it was.

I do not think what went on over the Prorogation helped the situation in any shape or form. Lord Roskill, in Council of Civil Service Unions v. Minister for the Civil Service 1985, stated that in his view prerogative powers were not susceptible to judicial review, yet that is pretty much exactly what happened, and it was applied retrospectively. There is precedent for longer Prorogations.

Again, it all added to the view—I do not want to use the word “establishment”, and the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) might once again advise me on better language—that the establishment was against the view of the people and was trying to thwart clear instructions that had been given. And we remained powerless in this place to do anything about it, which was the fundamental problem.

I have been in this place long enough to know that, going into Committee, it is unwise to take a fixed position on Second Reading. I am over the moon to see my hon. Friend the Minister back in the House today. She looks in fine health and it is a source of great joy to us all to see her back in her place. I know she will be listening to all the contributions being made, including from the hon. Member for Rhondda. I remember being a new MP, and he and I sparring over the Fixed-term Parliaments Bill and the issue of four years or five years.

[Chris Bryant]

You voted for it.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

The hon. Gentleman is quite right: I did indeed vote for that Bill. I think what has been slightly overlooked in these arguments is that the question of stability at a time when the markets were in disarray over what happened was very important. We had not had to deal with those parliamentary maths, I believe, for nigh on 70 years and something had to take place to calm the markets. So that is why I think it is was worth it at the time. It is worth listening to the hon. Gentleman’s views on years. I still think five years is acceptable and he thinks four years. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Scarborough and Whitby (Mr Goodwill) outlined, we really do need to shorten these elections.

Overall, the Bill is an important healing mechanism and stepping stone to starting to restore faith. If a Parliament in future ends up again in the situation we ended up in, where views were deeply entrenched and would not budge on either side of the argument, then surely, we must easily be able to dissolve that Parliament and go back to the people. We must always trust the people.