Rules-based International Order

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, for initiating the debate. Yesterday, I met her in the lift. She said, “I’d like to thank you for your contribution tomorrow”. I said, “Hang on; wait till you’ve heard it and then you can decide”.

I have spent most of my life in some part of foreign policy. I was in the European Parliament for 25 years. I spent five years in the Council of Europe and 15 doing odd jobs for the European Commission. As such, I have seen quite a lot of the world—some 90 countries in all, some of them more times than I would have liked.

I start by giving an example from the Council of Europe. One of the problems with the international order is that it sometimes gets beyond itself. For three years, I was the chair of the Council of Europe committee for the implementation of judgments of the European Court of Human Rights. Of course, everybody says, “Oh, Russia never carried out any decisions”. That is wrong. The worst offender was Italy and the second worst was Turkey. The Russians were not too bad at carrying out decisions of the court that had no real political consequences. Beyond that, they were not very good at all.

I was on that committee when we debated the court’s decision to enforce prisoners’ votes in Britain, which David Cameron—now the noble Lord, Lord Cameron—said made him sick. I did quite a bit of work on this. One of the things I discovered was that most of the judges who had voted that Britain should give votes to prisoners came from countries that gave no rights to prisoners at all. Secondly, many of those judges did not understand the English prison system. In particular, they did not understand the difference between a remanded and a convicted prisoner. Thirdly, when it came down to it, they were open to negotiation. Thanks to the great skill of David Lidington, we managed to solve the case, get the judgment amended and accepted so that, once again, Britain was a country with no outstanding judgments. I mention this because there has been a lot of mission creep in international jurisdiction, which I do not think has done international law a tremendous amount of good.

The Court of Justice of the European Union and the WTO are unique in being courts committed to a very central, tightly drawn range of circumstances, but some of the other courts—including the International Criminal Court—have a tendency to go well beyond where it is sensible for them to go. I see that some noble Lords object to that. To issue an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu is downright foolish, because it will not be implemented. It undermines the authority of the court. People look at it and say, “What a bunch of jokers. Surely, they don’t expect Netanyahu to get off the plane in London and be banged up by the British coppers”.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

Does the noble Lord know that, when a warrant was issued for Kenyatta, he got on a plane, went to The Hague, submitted himself to the court and said, “I’m here to answer it. I have a defence to this”? It gave him permission to return to his country and to continue to lead it before there were eventually hearings. Why does Mr Netanyahu not do that? You have to remember that the warrant is in relation not to his conduct of the war but his refusal to allow humanitarian aid into the country to feed the population.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

I claim damage for extra time, Mr Whip. I take that point, but I am making the point that the Netanyahu incident did the ICC no good at all.

My second point will also be a bit controversial. I believe that, if we are to redefine the international order, we have to bring the Russians and Chinese on board. It is as simple as that. You cannot do it without having the whole international order represented around the table. The Russians recently had their BRICS conference in Kazan. A number of Commonwealth countries were at that conference instead of in Samoa for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, because they judged it might be in their better interests. One of the problems we have is that the impact of sanctions has pulled Russian foreign trade in a southern direction. Suddenly, India, Pakistan, China and the countries in between are of far more importance to it than western Europe. We need to take that on board.

We also need to look at the way we construct the international order and give it a serious jolt because, finally, we need to look at the perception of Britain by its own citizens. As my noble friend Lord Howell, a good friend, has said in the past, capitalism has failed the young. There is an increasing distaste for democracy. My children know many people who say, “What the hell does it matter? We need someone who can get things done”. That, frankly, is one of the appeals of Nigel Farage. People look at him and think, “He’d soon sort you lot out, wouldn’t he?”

We are in a very dangerous situation. One of the questions that both major parties need to address is how to bring the younger people of Britain back into communion with them. They have fallen out of love with us. Not one of my children voted Conservative at the election —or Labour. They used to vote for both. A lot of the people in their circle have an attitude towards the two major parties—incidentally, not towards the third party—that they are finished, are past it and have nothing to offer them. They cannot offer them a house or a decent job and have frozen their tax thresholds. I think I have had enough of the extra time I claimed. Thank you all for listening.

The Ukraine Effect (European Affairs Committee Report)

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Thursday 21st November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Ricketts, for this report and the noble Lord, Lord Levene, for his valedictory speech. I am sure that he has contributed much to the House and will continue after he leaves us to make a distinguished contribution to public life.

I have reminded this House on many occasions that you can rewrite your history but you cannot do much about your geography. That is part of the problem here. The fact of the matter is that this Parliament on all sides has been very silent about what we are actually doing. We have not said, as we should have said, to the pensioners of Britain, that their winter fuel payment is exactly the same sum of money that we are sending to the Ukraine. We have not levelled with the British population at all.

I went to the Ukraine many times between about 1998 and 2014. I gave up in 2014, because it was evident to me that Ukraine was then going to fall apart. It was never a single country; it was always the country of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which we should remember was added to western Ukraine and confirmed at the Crimea conference as belonging to Ukraine, which was of course seen as part of the Soviet Union.

It pains me to say so but, if you look back in history, you can see that sanctions have never worked. They did not work in Abyssinia, and they have not worked since. I had an email yesterday—many noble Lords may have had it—from a group called Spotlight on Corruption. It was not about the Ukraine, which is pretty corrupt; it was about Britain. It says:

“Weak enforcement has long been the Achilles’ heel of the UK’s fight against economic crime”.


It says that

“the powers available to UK enforcement authorities are stronger”

but court challenges to UK sanctions have so far failed and criminal and civil enforcement has been weak.

I am not surprised, in a way. If people cast their minds away from the dancing in Samoa to the actual conference in Kazan, and the Russian group, they will see that sanctions are not working. I have Russian friends—not people in high places, but people who live in cities in Russia. They will tell you, “We’ve got round the sanctions. Yes, it’s difficult and we’ve had to make substitutions”. As one of them said, “Ikea has gone, but my uncle has managed to take over the factory, and we now have a Russian Ikea in our family”. One advantage, of course, of the collapse of communism is that capitalism has moved in to fill the gap that sanctions have caused.

We have made no attempt to discover what the real, underlying problems are. I was in Crimea before it was taken over. I was in Donetsk, Luhansk and Mariupol, and it was clear that, when the Ukrainian Government decided to outlaw the Russian language as a means of communication in schools they were going to annoy a lot of people, to put it mildly. Of course, one difficulty with Viktor Orbán is that Transcarpathia, which is part of the Ukraine, used to be part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and used to have Hungarian schools there—and they were suddenly told that they could no longer use the Hungarian language. That is just glossed over; it is not reported or looked at. I am not in the least surprised that sanctions have not worked.

A new officer in the Trump Administration, Tulsi Gabbard, has said that the United States provoked the Russians in Ukraine. That is undoubtedly true. There was a lady from the State Department, Victoria Nuland, who spent years doing just that. Of course, Ukraine must be fully represented in any peace negotiations, because we do not want a “stab in the back” philosophy to grow up. Ukraine has to be there and has to accept whatever is negotiated.

From time to time, President Zelensky has demonstrated a willingness to do this, but he has been bullied and pushed around, particularly by the United States and to a lesser extent by us. The Ukraine must be part of the negotiation. It must be at the table and accept the outcome, but I am not sure that outcome is exactly what our foreign policy supremos have been driving at for the last few years. We need another look at this.

Foreign Affairs

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Tuesday 5th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I begin by saying this is the first debate in which I have taken part to which my good friend the Foreign Secretary has been replying. He is a man of great wisdom—he put me into the House of Lords. There can be nothing greater in the wisdom field than that.

Although this is in title a debate on foreign affairs, I want to speak mainly about Russia. Before doing so, since Gaza has come up, I fully associate myself with the speeches of my noble friends Lord Polak and Lady Altmann, who are exactly in the right direction.

My noble friend Lady Eaton treated us to a bit of history earlier, and I would like to treat us to some history as well—that of post-war Britain. Those who are very boring, like me, and watch BBC Four at 10 pm on a Sunday night, may have seen that, last Sunday, they replayed the broadcast that Hugh Gaitskell made after the invasion of Suez. He berated the British Government for breaking international law. I mention that in passing, since of late we have heard a lot about the breaking of international law. I certainly do not condone what Russia did, but I ask that we maybe understand the context in which it happened.

At the end of the Second World War, Stalin was anxious—in fact, more than anxious—that Russia should be surrounded by a cordon sanitaire, and that was the whole purpose of Yalta. We sometimes forget that we went to war for the freedom of Poland, and we ended up agreeing to the borders of Poland agreed in the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact. That was never settled until Willy Brandt was Chancellor of Germany, at which point it was settled along the lines of the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact.

There have been lots of changes in borders, and I ask the House to consider that what we are currently facing are a lot of frozen conflicts around the Russian border of the former Soviet Union. This is where the problem arises—and why, just as the United States gets absolutely paranoid about Cuba, the Russians get rather paranoid about their riparian borders. If we are to avoid a long-term conflict in which issue after issue is brought up, we have to have some sort of new Helsinki. There has got to be a conference in Europe in which we negotiate and come to a new set of agreements.

We know, because it has now been comprehensively leaked, that there was almost an agreement between Ukraine and Moscow about Moscow having neutrality in Ukraine, but the agreement was sunk. What we have now is a hopeless war, and it will go on and on, and the Russians will, almost certainly, not be beaten. It will become another frozen conflict like Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and like what is now rapidly coming up on the rails in Moldova, what could break out in the Suwalki strip between the coast and through Lithuania and what could break out on the borders of Latvia and Estonia with the Russian cities that were created there.

I say to the Foreign Secretary that the long-term consequences of this must be that the shooting will have to stop. It cannot carry on for ever, and, if it is going to stop, we must have a series of new arrangements. This afternoon, just before I came here, I was looking at a German newscast which reported that 65% of Germans believe the shipment of arms to Ukraine is now “excessive”, and 75% oppose the export of Taurus missiles to Ukraine. Do not get this wrong: the fear of many people in Europe is a drift towards war. The job of the Foreign Office—which I served in for a very short time, but I know its mentality—is to encourage peace, not to build up to war.

Ukraine

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Friday 26th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I begin by welcoming my noble friend Lord Camoys to our Benches. I am sure he will make a long and distinguished career in this House, and we will benefit much from his wisdom. I certainly agree with the last few words of the speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Amos, and that is what I want to concentrate on.

First, however, I will just make it clear that I have spent nearly my whole life in foreign policy in one way or another, from a junior position in the Foreign Office in the 1960s, through 25 years in the European Parliament, and then another 15 years doing things for its former Members’ association. Those various jobs took me to all the countries of Europe on many occasions; I was trying to work out how many times I have been to Ukraine—it is probably eight or nine times —and I have also been to Russia a number of times. Having said that, incidentally, I also led the first delegation of the European Parliament to the North Atlantic Assembly, which was quite an interesting event, to put it mildly.

I start by saying, to bowdlerise the words of LP Hartley: “Russia is a foreign country: they do things differently there”. I was in Ukraine several times between the end of the last century and about 2016. During that time, I got to know, first, ex-President Kuchma, who was the last of the old guard, and then of course we had the orange revolution and all that flowed out of it. We have to look at why Russia did what it did, because it was not something that just happened. The fact of the matter is—I saw it through years of being there—that there was massive provocation from the Government in Kyiv. I served for eight years as one of this House’s representatives in the Council of Europe. There I was on its legal affairs committee which dealt with Ukraine, believe it or not, and I was chair for a time of the committee for the enforcement of judgments of the European court.

One of the constant issues was the way in which the Government in Kyiv were trying to outlaw the Russian language. This was a regular and running sore. I remember going to Crimea, where I was surrounded by politicians from the local parliament in Simferopol telling me they did not want to be in Ukraine. We are talking about 2012 or 2014, in the middle of the last decade, not just before the invasion. I got the same message when I went to Donetsk, to Luhansk and to Mariupol. They felt that the Russian language was being outlawed, and that it was ridiculous. I recall talking to one or two families who said to me, “The only language we know at home is Russian. Do you expect us to talk to our children in Ukrainian? Our schools teach in Russian. They’ve taught in Russian throughout history”.

The other group, of course, was the Hungarians. The Hungarian schools were forbidden to teach in Hungarian, and that is one of the reasons we have the problems with Mr Viktor Orbán today. Yes, he is certainly a Putin supporter, but he is also very angry with Ukraine, and this was going on for years.

While I was on the Council of Europe, I was also for a time the vice-president of the Venice Commission, which looks at rule of law issues in Europe. On several occasions we had before the Venice Commission the Ukrainian Government’s desire to outlaw Russian in Ukraine. It was a regular feeling, and it was backed by the West; it was backed by the EU and by everybody in the western embassies in Kyiv. The Russians illegally invaded Ukraine because, basically, they lost their temper. It would not happen in a democracy because there would not be a Putin with quite the power that he had to do what he did.

I think it was the noble Baroness, Lady Suttie, who mentioned talking to Russians just before the invasion and that they all said it could not happen. I had the same experience talking to Russians. I talked to the Russian ambassador in Britain after it happened. He put a brave face on it, but I swear he did not know it was going to happen until the morning that it actually happened, when he got a call from the Foreign Ministry in Moscow telling him what was going to happen. It was a very well concealed secret.

My final point is this. We have to find a way of getting ourselves out of what is effectively a frozen dispute. That is where we are. It is not going to move that far; “General Winter” is not going to be beaten. Our only answer, it appears, as our great Minister for the Armed Forces, James Heappey, said, is an army of

“half a million men and women under arms … Where do we get our second echelon from?”.

No existing policies spell out how the UK could mobilise a force big enough to take on Russia. Frankly, if that is His Majesty’s Government’s aim, I despair.

Ukraine: Reconstruction

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Thursday 25th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

I am aware of the steps that other jurisdictions are taking. I am not going to make policy on the hoof here and suggest that we are now going to impose windfall taxes, et cetera. There could be a general political point I could make towards the Lib Dems on windfall taxes generally and domestically, but I will refrain because of the seriousness of the subject. It is important that actions are co-ordinated and that as other jurisdictions, the US and the EU, take steps we reflect on what they are and see how they can best be reflected in our systems and structures.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, is the Minister aware that one of the messages coming out of this is that this is not a safe place to put money and that countries such as Switzerland and Singapore are probably rubbing their hands with glee? Has he looked at the excellent publication, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, and seen the terrible mess that the Allies got themselves into throughout the 1920s by chasing Germany and the consequences that eventually followed?

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

My Lords, on my noble friend’s second question, financial systems and capital markets have developed very differently and progressively since the era he talks of. On the first question, I disagree with him profoundly. The message, which is clear from this House and this Government, is shared by many in this House and beyond. It is that Russia is conducting an illegal war and that for those who conduct illegal wars there will be consequences, including financial sanctions.

Ukraine: Ceasefire

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Monday 15th May 2023 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Balfe]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to assist the realisation of a ceasefire followed by negotiations in the conflict between the Russian Federation and Ukraine.

[The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon) (Con)]

My Lords, on today’s visit of His Excellency President Zelensky, the UK remains steadfast in its support for Ukraine’s brave defence against Russia’s brutal and unprovoked invasion. Ukraine and its partners seek a just and lasting peace for Ukraine, which affirms its territorial integrity and sovereignty and provides stability for the global community. However, if Russia is serious about advancing the prospects for peace, it must immediately cease attacks against Ukraine, withdraw its forces from the entirety of the country, and commit to meaningful negotiations.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, this war has now been going on for a year, and it is getting worse. We have started to see incidents within the Russian Federation’s borders. Unless someone makes some effort soon to get peace talks going, we are going to head into a tragedy. Is it not the job of His Majesty’s Government, as a member of the P5, to start taking the initiative for peace, instead of constantly fanning war?

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

My Lords, I refute my noble friend’s assertion. We do not fan war. The aggressor is Russia. As my noble friend knows, Russia is also a P5 member. It is about time Russia stood up to its responsibility as a P5 member. We want peace; the Ukrainians want peace. Does Russia want peace? We want the answer.

United Nations World Water Development Report

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Tuesday 28th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

The noble Lord makes the point about ODA cuts on most occasions when we debate. He is absolutely right to and, like him, I would very much like to see a return to the 0.7% spending—but that is something over which I am afraid I have no control. I do not think it is the case that water has been disproportionately cut. It may well be that the noble Lord is not aware of some of the programmes that directly overlap with this agenda but would not necessarily be described as water projects—not least, a whole new range of nature-based solutions that the Government are focusing on.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, does the Minister recognise that the expansion of population has not been marked by an expansion of water availability? One way in which that could be tackled is by putting more money into desalination programmes of the United Nations and other agencies to try to get more water processed from salinated water to drinkable water.

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

My noble friend makes an important point. There are lots of ways in which we can alleviate that problem. I add to his suggestion that the most important focus is to concentrate on the environmental link between water shortage and environmental degradation. To put that in context, the Congo Basin provides around two-thirds of Africa’s rain, so if we allow it to continue to be cut down at the rate it is currently being cut down—half a million hectares a year—one only needs to imagine the humanitarian crisis that would follow.

Georgia: Imprisonment of Mikhail Saakashvili

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Monday 27th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

The noble and right reverend Lord’s earlier comments are absolutely noted in relation to the influence in particular of Bidzina Ivanishvili, to whom I think he was referring. We understand that he is a private citizen. He does not have any formal or legal role in the Government of Georgia, but we are aware of reports of his links to Russia. We have raised that with the Government of Georgia, who have assured us of their determination to adhere to international sanctions against Russia. As everyone must, we will remain vigilant as we collaborate with our Georgian partners and regularly review our sanctions designations.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, when I was a member of the Venice Commission, it was quite clear that the normal courtesies of democracy had broken down in Georgia, so it is no good going around just blaming other people. Can the Minister assure us that the UK Government will put to the Georgian Government the need to conduct their parliamentary affairs in line with what is normally accepted as western democratic standards—in other words, not boycotting Parliament but exchanging power in a civilised manner?

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

My Lords, we will absolutely continue to press for progress on reforms in line with Georgia’s EU and NATO ambitions. I understand that further discussions will take place in the very near future and we continue to encourage all parties within the Georgian system to interact constructively to enact those reforms required to achieve their shared Euro-Atlantic goals and the will of the Georgian people. The Foreign Secretary met the Georgian Foreign Minister on 26 January, raising those same concerns about developments that are clearly damaging Georgia’s international reputation, its reform credentials and its EU and NATO aspirations.

Ukraine: Tactical Nuclear Weapons

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Thursday 1st December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble and right reverend Lord on securing this debate. I will probably disappoint most noble Lords, because I am much nearer to the noble Lords, Lord Skidelsky and Lord Campbell-Savours, than to many of the things that have been said this afternoon. I have not been in Ukraine for some years—six, to be exact—but I was there in the 1990s and the early years of this century. I got to know ex-President Kuchma quite well and had several discussions with him about the evolution of Ukraine.

My first point is this: be careful what you wish for. How on earth have we got into such a position with Russia? It is a tragedy. We are using huge amounts of western military equipment to destroy Ukraine—not Russia. It is all being fired around Ukraine and ruining the country.

Secondly, everybody, including most Russians, accepts that the invasion was a massive misjudgment. The intelligence given to the Russian leadership was seriously defective and the amount of corruption in the Russian military seriously underestimated. The Russians are now facing an impossible situation, because they probably cannot pull back—they cannot leave and cannot stay.

We also need to remember that, as happens in many countries—and indeed happened in Britain in the Second World War—when you get the country on a war footing, people tend to rally behind the Government. My friends in Russia tell me that one of the biggest difficulties they have now is that it is very difficult to criticise the Government internally, because there is a general feeling of patriotism, particularly among the elderly: “We have to back our Government; we are all under attack”.

I think we have difficulties here. We conspired to make the Minsk agreements fail; there is no doubt about that. We did not put the effort in and, if noble Lords look through Hansard, they will see that I have made that point on several occasions over the years.

We talk about taking Russia to court, but who is going to take it there? Russia has a veto in the Security Council. Do noble Lords think that the Security Council is going to set up a body that works? Do they think that the Russians are going to pay if people tell them to? No, they are not. If we confiscate Russian assets in the West, the likely outcome will be a selling-off of US treasuries by countries that will say, “Are we going to be next? Is our money safe?” The answer is no. If they can do this to Russia, they can do it to China. We could actually precipitate a very difficult world financial crisis, and we need to be very careful about that.

Finally, we have somehow to get negotiations going—and only we can do that. While we are prepared to put unlimited amounts of military hardware into Ukraine for the Ukrainians to use against the Russians, they will do so, because it is very difficult also for them to step back. Their population is as much behind Zelensky as the Russian population is, overall, behind Putin. So the only way we are going to move things forward is by having backing from Macron and a decisive peace initiative to try to get both sides to the table—the Russians on the grounds that they cannot win, and the Ukrainians on the grounds that they cannot win without us and we are not willing to support an eternal war.

Russia in Georgia

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Wednesday 16th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

My Lords, first, I recognise the noble and right reverend Lord’s important work in support of Georgia over a number of years, not least since 2008. He raises some important issues of concern, and I will of course take them away. He spoke about sharing them with the important authorities on the ground; we do work very closely with others, including the EU. If there is more detail I can share with him, I will certainly do so.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I served for six years on the Venice Commission, where we had many problems with Georgia. Will the Minister use all his influence to encourage the Georgian parties to work together? Part of the fundamental problem in Georgia has been the inability of the political parties within its Parliament to co-operate on even the most basic things, such as the election of speakers and chairmen of committees.

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

I assure my noble friend that I am all for cross-party co-operation when it comes to good governance in our Parliaments. Despite our different perspectives and challenges, I think your Lordships’ House and the other place reflect that genuine desire to ensure good governance in Parliament. Of course, I take on board what my noble friend said. It is important that all parties work in the common interests of Georgia and ensure that the current occupation and annexation of these breakaway republics is addressed centrally, because this is a violation of its sovereign territory.