Ukraine: NATO Membership

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Thursday 24th February 2022 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Balfe]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking, if any, (1) to encourage Ukraine to apply for membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and (2) to build support among other members of NATO for any such application.

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

My Lords, the United Kingdom strongly condemns the appalling, unprovoked attack that President Putin has launched on the people of Ukraine. President Putin has chosen a path of bloodshed and destruction by launching this unprovoked attack on Ukraine. The United Kingdom remains firmly committed to Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity within its internationally recognised borders. We fully support the partnership relationship between NATO and Ukraine, and we remain committed to the 2008 Bucharest Summit Declaration in which all NATO allies agreed that Ukraine will become a member of the alliance. In 2020, NATO welcomed Ukraine as an enhanced opportunity partner as a means of enhancing its interoperability and co-operation with the alliance in order to support Ukraine’s continuing programme of internal reform.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, those of us who have tried to help Russia through the Council of Europe, the Russia APPG et cetera, are bitterly disappointed that the categorical denials of any intention to invade Ukraine have been torn up, and we were not told the truth. I support the work of the Minister and ask whether, as a first step, he would consider recalling our ambassador in Moscow for consultations and suggesting that the Russian ambassador in London might also return to Moscow to find out why he was ordered to lie to us.

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for his remarks, and I can share that, as I was coming to your Lordships’ House, the Foreign Secretary announced that she will summon the Russian ambassador to the Court of St James today. These are fast-moving events. I cannot comment on the specifics of what my noble friend raises, but we are working with key partners in NATO and our colleagues in the European Union. I have just this morning returned from the United Nations, and I think I speak for every single member of your Lordships’ House when I say that we unequivocally condemn the actions of the Russian state and of President Putin. Even at this juncture, it is time for him to withdraw. Peace over war is always a better option.

Europe: Foreign Policy and Defence Co-operation

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Monday 21st February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

The UK will continue to work with the EU and other international partners to tackle this shared global challenge. For example, on 2 December, alongside the US, Canada and the EU, the UK imposed fresh sanctions on eight Belarussian individuals responsible for repression and human rights violations. Our departure from the EU has meant that we are able to move more quickly than we could through multilateral channels, where it is in our interests to do so. Only a week ago, the UK Government laid legislation in Parliament to toughen and expand the UK sanctions regime, specifically in response to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. These powers will go further than ever before.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, does the Minister accept that getting behind France and Germany, particularly on the issue of NATO expansion, would be a positive contribution towards building a European position on this matter?

Autocrats, Kleptocrats and Populists

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Thursday 3rd February 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I hope that we are not going to deteriorate into a sort of two-party or three-party squabble, because the Question that the noble Lord has put on the agenda is a fundamental one in European and wider terms. In 1979, Jim Callaghan noted that the age of post-war consensus politics was coming to an end. He probably did not realise how true the words that he spoke were. Today we have not only a very unsatisfactory democracy for those of us who grew up in the immediate post-war world but one that is largely underwritten by the population. This is something quite new.

I spent most of my active political career travelling around the world in many different guises and visiting other countries with many different forms of democracy. When I started in 1979, most of them at least subscribed to the idea that they were doing the best for their people. But by the end of that era, where we are now, we have not only a situation that is quite unsatisfactory but, I put it to your Lordships, a system that has far more support from the grass roots than we should be happy with.

I spent 20 years in the European Parliament as its rapporteur on Turkey. I saw it from the rule of General Evren and the colonels right through to the present President, Mr Erdoğan, who was Prime Minister when I finished. We may not like it, but we have to accept that Erdoğan has won all the elections that he has stood in. They have all been observed by Council of Europe and OSCE delegations and been passed as, on balance, acceptable. The people of Turkey have consistently voted for the policies that their President has wished on them, even though most of those policies are a big abnegation of anything that we could call democracy.

The same can be seen in other countries. My son studied in Moscow. I visited Moscow around the time of the Crimea incident, among other times. It was clear that the Russian population were overwhelmingly behind Putin, and they still are. He still has a roughly 60% positive rating, which is something that Keir Starmer or Johnson can only dream about.

My point is that it is fine for us to feel unhappy about the decline in democracy, and I indeed do. I share a lot of the reservations the noble Lord, Lord Browne, mentioned but I also think that we need to look beyond where we are and see why it has come about. I think one of the reasons is the genuine collapse in confidence of ordinary people that politicians can make a difference to their lives. That is probably the thing we need to direct our attention to.

Politics has become far too professional. I remember when I came into politics in the 60s—this was after 1966—they used to say we have 300 members of the parliamentary Labour Party, 100 of them are totally unfit for office, another 100 do not want office so that gives us 100 people from whom to fill 80 ministerial posts. If you look back, Ministers lasted a long time. Now, virtually everybody in Parliament is capable of being a Minister, but I am not sure that they are capable of relating to the people who elect them to this building.

There is a fundamental challenge. I do not think it is a clash between two parties; it is a challenge for us to get our act together and start building democracy back and promoting the values on which it is based.

Ukraine: Minsk II Protocol

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Wednesday 26th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

My Lords, on the noble Baroness’s second point, the FCDO has established language skills training for diplomats, and we engage directly, through those language skills, with countries around the world. Of course, there is always room to do more. I will follow up the matter that she raises about the BBC and see whether more can be done, but, of course, that is directly a decision for the BBC.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, does the Minister not accept that the Minsk II agreement has not been implemented on either side, and that what we need is to get negotiations going on an open basis between Russia and Ukraine, with the help of the French and the Germans, so that we can dial down the tensions and not keep on inching towards conflict, which is going to do no good to anyone and end up with body bags being sent back to Britain?

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

My Lords, no one wants to see body bags. But it is for Russia—Russia is the aggressor here. A key point is Crimea: Russia is occupying, under international law, sovereign territory of another country. We should not lose sight of that. We are seeking to work with our alliances, including NATO. We are working with key partners, and I have assured noble Lords that we continue to engage directly with the Russians as well.

Afghanistan (International Relations and Defence Committee Report)

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Monday 24th January 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I join everyone in welcoming the report and thanking our chairman for producing it. I also echo the problem that we have with it being more than a year old. This is not a government problem. This is a problem because the House of Lords cannot manage to organise its business. We really need to send a message to the leadership of this self-governing House, as we are called, that when effort is put in to producing reports of the stature, elegance and erudition of this one, we expect the House authorities to table a debate in reasonably short time, certainly not after a year, and a year in which there have been momentous developments. I hope that message will be carried to the leadership of this House.

We have to look at the lessons for the future and the lack of strategy. The most relevant matter is in one of the briefings I received that quotes Professor Michael Clarke, former director-general of RUSI, who identified

“only one overall strategic driver, dated 2001: to support the US, regardless of whether its strategy was sound or not.”

I cannot disagree with that. A barrister called Frank Ledwidge was also quoted as saying:

“I have asked eight Defence Secretaries what our strategy was … I have not been able to identify a national strategy.”


I am afraid that equates with my own view of where we have gone wrong. Part of our problem, which was classically demonstrated in Afghanistan, is that we are bit players, not major players. The moment the Americans decided to leave, Joe Biden put down the phone, put a tea cosy over it, did not call anyone and said, “We’re off”. At that point, all the rest of the NATO group had to leave. There was no way in which we as NATO without the United States could mount any mission whatever. We were out behind it. I think we did a reasonable job in getting out our supporters and the people who had assisted us, but let there be no doubt that out was the only destination we had, because one of the biggest lessons we have to learn is that we have repeated the same mistake in Afghanistan for 150 years. We never learn, and it is about time that we did.

The second thing I would like us to learn is that you cannot have a policy based on bombing people into submission and then sending aid to rebuild the place. This is not a strategy. We may have to face the fact that in some parts of this great world of ours there are people who do not share our values, and we cannot force them to share our values. What Afghanistan has demonstrated is how quickly the castle can disappear into the sea because it is just a sandcastle. We have many people from Afghanistan now in Britain and in other western countries, but we had to pull them out because we had not built any structures that would survive for even a very short time.

I received, among other things, a rather good briefing from the BBC. It has got most of its people out. It has clearly done a good job there. We need to continue to support the BBC. But I find it bizarre that the funding for the World Service comes out of exactly the same pool as “Would I Lie to You?”, which is a programme on the BBC—it is not Prime Minister’s Question Time, incidentally. I really think that we need to see the World Service as a protected species; in other words, we need to make sure that it is protected, because it is the one body that is universally respected. I have travelled all over the world in my career and it is the one body that is always mentioned to me as something that people are very proud of and listen to and trust. We need to somehow pull the BBC World Service out of this mélange of BBC funding. It needs to be looked after.

What are the lessons for the future? Some 20 years ago, when this was just starting, I accompanied a Russian general around a museum of the Afghan war. In that museum there were letters from soldiers—their last letters—and various artefacts that had been in Afghanistan, and I always remember something he said to me: “You won’t win either and your enemy is much better armed than ours was in the beginning because your enemy has been armed by the Americans. They’ve armed the Taliban and it’s their arms that are now going to be used against you.” We need to look at things and say: “What can we actually do?”

A little closer to home, at the moment we are getting ourselves in a complete mess in Ukraine. Germany is refusing to let Estonia hand over its weapons. We cannot get overflight of Germany. But we need to reflect, as the German foreign office does, that we cannot do anything militarily in eastern Europe. If you talk to people at the German foreign ministry, that is what they will tell you. They will say that all you are doing is stoking up trouble. No one has ever won a war against the Russians. We are not going to be starting it. But we need a much sounder policy when we look at the lessons to be learned from Afghanistan. I think the lessons are that we can export western values through an aid and support programme and through helping with education and women’s rights—all the good things that we do—but we can do that only when we have fertile ground in which to sow our seeds. Self-evidently in Afghanistan we did not.

My conclusion on this excellent report is that we should use it as a series of signposts as to what we should not do again. That is the most important thing that comes out of it. I read it and at various points thought, “Hmm, maybe not. Better be careful there.” If we can get one good thing out of it, it should be realism in British foreign policy.

Diplomatic Influence Post Brexit

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Wednesday 12th January 2022 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Balfe]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the change in the United Kingdom’s diplomatic influence since it ceased to be a participant in the political cooperation meetings of the European Union.

[The Minister of State, Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park) (Con)]

My Lords, we continue to work closely with all our allies, including the EU and European states, to build a network of liberty and tackle shared foreign policy challenges and threats. We do not need to attend formal EU meetings in order to do so effectively. Our recent achievements, including our presidencies of the G7 and COP 26, have shown that we retain significant diplomatic influence, supported by the best diplomats in the world.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

I thank the Minister for his reply, in which he did not actually deal with the Question: whether we have lost diplomatic influence since we ceased to be a participant in the political co-operation meetings of the European Union. At lunchtime today, the members are meeting in Paris to talk about migration. This evening, the EU Defence Ministers are meeting in Brest. We will be missing from both those meetings. Are we not losing influence?

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

My Lords, I think the opposite is the case, as we have shown over the last couple of years. The UK has exerted extraordinary influence around the world through various fora. At the G7, which we hosted, the UK led the way in underlining members’ unwavering commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, for example. Last year, the Prime Minister and President Biden signed a new UK-US Atlantic Charter. We established the AUKUS defence partnership and agreed new free trade agreements with both Australia and New Zealand. There are many examples from last year alone where the UK performed globally in a way that I think is almost unprecedented.

Russia

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Monday 10th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

My Lords, first of all, I agree with the noble Lord. That statement, which was made at the start of this year by the five countries concerned, was important and welcome and of course in itself represents a step forward.

The underlying purpose of such statements, and the discussions that are currently taking place on de-escalation, is the importance and the central pivot of diplomacy. We cannot at any time stop discussions, even with our greatest foes, if I can put it that way. Discussion is important. Whether it is done through the meetings that are taking place this week or on other challenges and disagreements that we have, including those with Russia, we must continue to engage directly and bilaterally. On the broader point, the UK has of course been at the centre of this. Indeed, on Ukraine specifically, my right honourable is certainly seeking to visit Kiev in the very near future.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, perhaps I might start by pointing out that it is often a good idea to understand what your opponent actually wants. Last week, it was stated in the other place that recently declassified documents from the US made it clear that, in February 1990, Secretary of State James Baker gave President Gorbachev a categoric assurance that NATO would not, and had no plans to, move east. I do not want to disaggregate that statement, but the fact of the matter is that the Russians feel very aggrieved.

The country of Finland has lived next to Russia for many years without needing to join NATO. Recently, just before Christmas, a man called Jack Matlock, who was the US Ambassador to Russia, published a document about Ukraine in which he pointed out that the Minsk agreements have never been ratified by the Verkhovna Rada. So I say to the Minister: please also recognise that, when we are threatening them with sanctions, there are still things that they could ramp up to cause us damage. The net effect is: please try to cool this thing down and negotiate in good faith to try to get an easing of tension rather than following the line of always ramping things up.

International Development Strategy

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Thursday 16th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I shall begin with two points that I do not think anyone will disagree with. First, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, on obtaining this debate and, secondly, I reaffirm my support, which I think is widely reflected in the House, for 0.7% of GNI to be used as overseas aid. That is probably where I end the consensus.

I know this debate is about the Government announcing a new international development strategy. I hope that the word “new” will be kept to the fore, because I have thought for quite a long time that there are many things in our development strategy that could be bettered. One of them is that, as the brief says, we need a globally focused UK to maintain its commitment to Africa while increasing development efforts in the Indo-Pacific—but I think we have to look at what we spend the money on.

I have made many visits to aid projects. Some aid projects funded and excellently run by British NGOs are doing little more than running perpetual food banks. We should have the Trussell Trust out there. I recall one project I visited in India which was teaching women how to cook. I thought it was a very good thing that a number of mainly English people—I think there was one Scottish person—were teaching Indian women how to cook rice. Of course, they were doing something more serious and were looking at nutrition, babies and the like, but they were only scratching surfaces. They were not really dealing with problems. I often reflect on the statement that we had years ago on aid agency posters: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for life.” We need to do far more to help people to develop.

If we are to integrate aid and have an international development strategy, it would not be a bad idea to have a closer look at arms sales. Look at the amount of destruction in the world—which aid is often there to try to get around—that is being caused by arms, often from British factories and very often from western factories. We go in, we bomb the place to bits and then we have an aid programme to build it up, presumably to get into shape for the next bombing. Forty years ago, I was involved with Ethiopia. We really thought that we were curing the problems of Ethiopia and that Band Aid, Geldof and all the initiatives that were run, principally in the 1980s and early 1990s, were going to rebuild a new Ethiopia, but it is back to where it was, and that must surely in part be caused by a failure of our aid projects.

I suggest that we should have two principal approaches in our aid projects. First, we need to look very carefully at the Chinese belt and road initiative with a view to us having set initiatives where we put money into projects that are good for the development of the country but that we see through as projects. Forty years ago, I worked for the Crown Agents; it was quite close to here. It used to set up projects in what were then the colonies to help get them ready for independence. Clearly, we are a long way on from there, but the principle of us looking at a project, sending the engineers, costing the project and either finding or lending the money was quite sound, and many of the institutions, such as the Nigerian railway system, which was built by the Crown Agents, have stood the test of time extremely well. We need to look at our own belt and road initiative.

Secondly, there is soft power. I very much take the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, about the BBC. The BBC World Service is one of the great triumphs of British soft power. I am told that it is listened to by around 456 million people in the world. Its Arabic audience alone is more than 40 million people. This is an area where we can get over our values and get them over in a way that is acceptable, because the World Service is probably one of the finest neutral broadcasters in the world. By neutral, I mean that you do not turn it on and say, “We are going to find out what the Brits want today”. It is a genuine news service. I also say to the Minister: stop cutting the FCO budget. To move the FCO into increasingly grim surroundings is not a good idea. I ask the Minister to look at maintaining and, indeed, increasing the FCO budget. Those are a couple of points to think about.

Ukraine and Russia: Military Developments

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Wednesday 8th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

My Lords, the answer to the noble Lord’s second question is: yes, we are very closely engaged with Ukraine, as we are today, on the issue of its NATO membership and, indeed, our support. The support we have given militarily is very much defensive and based on technical support as well.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords—

[Lord King of Bridgwater (Con)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Fall (Con)]

My Lords—

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, there have been a lot of difficulties in Ukraine, partly with the non-implementation of the agreement made in Minsk, the need for talks about the future of eastern Ukraine, and a follow-up of the initiative of the Finnish President to de-escalate the situation and have a peace conference in Europe to look at the outstanding issues that have arisen following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Should not we put our efforts behind those of the Finnish President to get a discussion going?

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

My Lords, we are supportive of all peaceful efforts, and in particular we are focused on the Minsk agreements, which Russia has also signed—and we ask it to uphold that agreement.

Russia: Gas Supplies

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Wednesday 10th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, does the Minister not remember that part of the problem with the Nord Stream gas pipeline was interference by the Ukrainian authorities with the Russian pipeline that was running through Ukraine? Would it not be best to start by getting an agreement with the German Government on the best approach and way forward?

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

My Lords, obviously the German Government will present their own position. We note the US and German collaboration to mitigate the negative energy impacts of the pipeline, but it is equally important that we stand firm in support of Ukraine, which continues to be challenged, and not just by insecurity when it comes to energy; let us not forget the situation in the Donbass and the continuing pursuance of the annexation of Crimea, which is right on our continent. It is Russian aggression that needs to recede.