Cyprus

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Tuesday 15th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Northbrook, for securing this very valuable debate. I make my own declaration of interest, as a member of the All-Party Group for the TRNC and as a fairly regular visitor to the TRNC over the past 30 years. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Maginnis, for his speech, which makes mine seem not quite as controversial as I thought it might be, having heard the earlier contributions.

The first contact I had with the TRNC was with Rauf Denktas, who has already been mentioned—someone who, it behoves us to remember, began his life in the service of the British Crown and who, for all his life, looked to the British Crown to behave a little better than I think it ever really did. The fact of the matter is that the Annan plan, which has often been mentioned, was rejected to an extent because of the European Union. Once the European Union had given way to what was effectively the blackmail of the Greek Government, who said they would sink enlargement if Cyprus was not allowed in, anything that the EU said about only allowing in a united island became null. At that point, the leaders of the Greek community knew that it was very safe to vote no, and of course they immediately went out to encourage the vote against the Annan plan.

I was in Cyprus at the time of the referendum and it was very easy, and I am afraid rather sad, to see what was going on. For the Turkish side of the island, there was a positive gain; for the Greek side, there was no loss. There was nothing to be lost from rejecting the plan. I remember comparing it at the time to an Irish referendum: it is always safe to vote no, because you might get something more. Incidentally, I mean an Irish EU referendum—and a Republic of Ireland EU referendum, just to qualify that. I see the noble Lord, Lord Kilclooney, looking at me quizzically there.

The EU then became damaged goods. I am afraid that, when you look at the possibility of a settlement in Cyprus, the EU is not seen as an honest broker by the Turkish side of the island, probably with extremely good reason. The United States, until recently, has been a very disinterested player on the scene. I welcome the visit of the US Vice-President, because unless the US gets itself involved, there will not be a settlement. The reality of a settlement is an objective called money, which we often overlook. Unless there is a substantial input of aid from the EU and the US to sort out the problems, particularly of property compensation and the land issues, there will not be a settlement. The refugees, I believe, can be dealt with by saying, “This is the Turkish side of the island, and whoever lives there is who they choose”, but there is a need to sort out the other issues, particularly the European Court of Human Rights judgments—many of them are, frankly, completely perverse but, none the less, they stand there and they have to be unravelled as part of this settlement.

My belief is that we need to ramp up the pressure on Cyprus. One thing the Cypriot Government have known is that the TRNC goes unrecognised. There is no reason why it should not be recognised. If there is going to be no real attempt to build a settlement, then these people in this half of the island have a right to international recognition and what goes with it. There is no reason at all why, if intransigence follows intransigence, we should not say that, in the interests of a level playing field, we will recognise the rights of both sides. There is no reason why we should not say: if the Turkish Cypriots are part of the EU, as Greek Cyprus would say, where are the Turkish representatives in the European Parliament? Where are the nominees from the Turkish community for posts within the EU? Where is the consultation with the Turkish community on engagement with the EU? We have more to do with the Welsh Parliament than the Greek Cypriot Administration do in consulting the Turks, who, they say, are part of the EU.

We need to look at something much more positive from the United Kingdom than a selection of warm words which can easily be forgotten. We have been putting warm words forward for year after year for 40 years. I echo what the noble Lord, Lord Maginnis, said: when the Turkish troops went to Cyprus in 1974, they went to rescue the Turkish community. They were not an invading force; they were a protecting force. Any solution to the problem has to recognise the fact that the Turkish community feels deeply insecure. If the Greek part of the island is happy to say that they have only benevolent intentions, then I put it to them that it is quite reasonable to negotiate a Turkish base in north Cyprus with a time-limited guarantee—say, of 20 years.

I recall a Turkish general saying to me that they could do without the Turkish base there because they would be able to get troops across from Turkey into northern Cyprus while the EU Council of Foreign Ministers was still arguing about which city to meet in. Admittedly, that was a rather cynical view, but one has to realise that Cyprus is much closer to Turkey than to Greece. One also has to realise that it has a long Turkish tradition. It is not a Greek island; anyone who has been round it, who has seen the mosques and the Turkish settlement, will realise that those are as much a legitimate part of a Turkish island as of a Greek island.

I hope that we move forward. I recall for the Minister’s edification the words that she used in the previous debate:

“it is difficult to see how we could realise the full potential of energy from the eastern Mediterranean without a Cyprus settlement”.—[Official Report, 17/6/14; col. GC 76.]

In closing, I would say that the need for energy has now come right up the agenda. I hope that we will be able to use our diplomatic weight, but also use a bit of oomph and power, to get a settlement moving this time. Thank you.

European Union: United Kingdom MEPs

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Thursday 26th June 2014 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Balfe]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government, in the light of the recent European Union election results, whether they have any plans to co-operate more closely with United Kingdom MEP representatives.

[The Senior Minister of State, Department for Communities and Local Government & Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Baroness Warsi) (Con)]

My Lords, the Government routinely engage with Members of the European Parliament, particularly with those Members who represent the UK regions. The Government are especially keen to work with those MEPs who recognise the need to respond to voters’ concerns and share our vision of a reformed EU, one that is about openness, competitiveness and fairness.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

I thank the Minister for her reply. Perhaps I may point out that as a substitute member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, when I go to sessions, I am briefed by the ambassador. As a Member of the European Parliament for 25 years, I rarely if ever saw our ambassador. It seems that we pay very little attention to briefing our MEPs in situ on what British interests are. Perhaps I may also point out that MEPs are banned from the House of Commons and are not received in a friendly way here. Indeed, only eight of them have passes. Can we try to build a friendlier relationship between this House and our other elected representatives?

[Baroness Warsi]

My Lords, we keep the Government’s engagement with the European Parliament under constant review and we consider all upcoming events. We engage with our MEPs in a number of ways. That may be by direct engagement with Ministers, through official engagement and, of course, through UKREP. In relation to access to Parliament, the decision not to extend pass access rights to UK MEPs was considered by the Administration Committee during the previous Parliament. As I understand it, the decision was made due to pressures on facilities and the absence of reciprocal arrangements. In March 2011, the Administration Committee decided that as these conditions had not changed, the policy of not extending access rights to MEPs should continue.

Ukraine

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Tuesday 18th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I begin by recording my interest as a three-time election observer in Ukraine, as well as visiting on a number of occasions and heading up a programme run by the European Parliament Former Members Association called EP to Campus, which sends former Members to universities. We have sent quite a few to universities in Ukraine, particularly in Kiev and Donetsk.

The noble Lord, Lord Anderson, is not in his place. I reflected at one point that sometimes pleasant consequences come out of tragic situations. If the Conservative group ended up in the EPP, I would regard that as being an extremely good solution to us not having anywhere to go at the moment, but we will see about that in due course.

As I mentioned, I have visited Ukraine, including Crimea, on many occasions. It has always been very clear to me that there have always been huge tensions within the different communities in Ukraine and Crimea. Seven or eight years ago in Crimea, when I spoke to Crimean parliamentarians in the autonomous parliament, a number of them, even at that time, expressed great regret that they were in Ukraine at all. The idea of joining Russia has not come up in the past few months; it has simmered away ever since, as one parliamentarian put it to me, the unexpected and somewhat cavalier act of Nikita Khrushchev in removing Crimea from Russia.

What we have to look at going forward, without in any way accepting last Sunday’s referendum as being fair, rational or giving proper opportunities for debate, is a way for the people of Ukraine to express a preference for where they want to be. We must also realise that we have our press in this country but my son, who is living in Moscow at the moment, describes it as Russia trying to stir up tensions in order to create a pretext for further involvement in eastern Ukraine, with the Russian media operating as an anti-western, anti-Ukraine propaganda machine. In other words, they are building up the fires. But there has also been some building up of fires in Washington and in places somewhat closer to home.

The referendum was certainly not conducted in a satisfactory way, but I do not think it becomes a Parliament that is about to give an independence vote to Scotland to say that we cannot devise a formula whereby the people of Ukraine can express their preference for where they would wish their Government ultimately to be based. As the noble Lord, Lord Howell, said, there are many possible solutions on offer. Our job is to look forward and to try to be a facilitator of those negotiations, not to be partisan but more to follow the line of recent statements by the former German Chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder. He said that the EU has to take some responsibility for the current situation in Ukraine because we have rather polarised it. It is either an association agreement or a customs agreement with Russia. We have to come to a solution which is somewhere in between those two. Moving forward has to be done in a both-ways scenario, as our colleague Mr Schroeder says.

I counsel us to be cautious in the way that we deal with all our relations with Russia. To the people of Russia, what happened in the 1990s was not exactly the triumph that we see here. Many people in Russia do not look on either Mr Gorbachev or Mr Yeltsin as great figures; many of them look on those two people as being less-than-perfect defenders of what they regarded as their pride and their interests. We need to keep that in mind at all times when dealing with Russia.

We also need to look at money-laundering, which was mentioned by the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich. We cannot be unaware of the huge amount of eastern European money that is in London. When I think of my late mother-in-law in her late 80s trudging down to the bank with her passport to show that she was not money-laundering and I then look at the huge amount of money coming into this country, into flats and property, and basically depriving Londoners of the ability to have somewhere to live, I wonder whether we are concentrating on the wrong end of that particular spectrum. In some people’s view—and it would not be far from mine—we have also aided the plundering of the wealth of eastern Europe, which has come in here, has done marvels for our balance of payments but has impoverished a lot of people in eastern Europe.

One final problem that I want to deal with is that of corruption in Ukraine. As the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, mentioned, it has existed under the past five Governments, and it is sad and endemic. I have a number of people whom I would count as friends in Ukraine. Most of them are in what we could call the middle classes: they are doctors and professionals, many of them working in the public sector. The Ukraine Government know that their public servants cannot live on the wages they are paid. A Russian word which is widely used in Ukraine—I hope the noble Baroness, Lady Suttie, will forgive me, because my pronunciation is probably awful—is blagodarnost, which means a payment in gratitude; in other words, a bribe. One of my friends who is a doctor would say that she could not live on the salary paid to her by the state. She operates a public clinic for one and a half days a week, and for the other three and a half days, with the open connivance of the Ukrainian state under a variety of Governments, she accepts under-the-counter payments for priority. She runs a sort of Nuffield health service in the Ukrainian medical service. This is not unique; it is a problem which the Ukrainian authorities have got to overcome, because until they do so there will not be investment. While a judge can be bribed to deliver a corrupt decision that will take all your investment away—and there are plenty of examples of people’s investments being corruptly confiscated by court decisions—and until you can get a rule of law that guarantees the sanctity of investment, people will not invest. This is a major problem that Ukraine has to tackle, and it is a problem that goes right back to the Kuchma Government. We can say that the President just out of office, Yanukovych, was corrupt, but he was only following a long pattern. After all, Mrs Tymoshenko was known locally as the “gas queen”. This problem has to be tackled.

That is why we must have a certain amount of humility. One of the things about this debate has been the number of times that the European Union has been mentioned. If anyone believes there would be any future for Britain outside the European Union in influencing Europe, let them read through this debate. I do not think that a single noble Lord even intimated that we would have the same amount of influence outside the European Union. Let us join with our EU partners in trying to mediate between the legitimate interests of a lot of disparate players. We have a role to play as part of a wider European polity. I hope the noble Lord who replies to the debate will be able to assure us that we will fulfil that role.

European Union: Turkish Accession

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Wednesday 5th March 2014 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Balfe]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to encourage the unblocking of all chapters of the negotiations on Turkish accession to the European Union, and in particular Chapter 31 on foreign, security and defence policy.

[The Senior Minister of State, Department for Communities and Local Government & Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Baroness Warsi) (Con)]

My Lords, the UK is clear that the EU accession process remains the most effective mechanism for continuing reform in Turkey and we remain fully committed to it and supportive of it. The UK will continue to work closely with EU member states and with European institutions to advance Turkey’s progress across all chapters of the acquis, including Chapter 31.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her reply. As a long-standing advocate of Turkey’s accession, may I say that many in Turkey are now beginning to doubt the sincerity of the European Union, which seems to drag out negotiations for a long time? Turkey has been a loyal partner in common, foreign and security policy issues. I hope that the Minister can assure me that the Government will put pressure on other member states, many of which are using specious arguments for keeping Turkey from completing its negotiations, when the truth of the matter is that they do not want Turkey in at all.

[Baroness Warsi]

My noble friend makes some important points. I reiterate that the UK remains the strongest supporter of Turkey’s EU membership bid. Turkey itself has repeatedly reaffirmed its strategic goal of joining the European Union, most recently in February of this year. It has the sixth largest economy in Europe and is a key NATO ally. Therefore, we will do all we can to progress its membership.

European Union (Referendum) Bill

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Friday 10th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I support the Bill and look forward to it passing. However, I also look forward to campaigning for a yes vote in the inevitable referendum. Although some people have said, “This isn’t the right Bill”, there is an undercurrent that there should be a referendum, and there is, again, a need to get the will of the British people expressed. That, of course, is one of the inconveniences of living in a democracy—from time to time you just have to let the people say what they want to do. This Bill is a vehicle for that.

I spent 25 years in the European Parliament and the overwhelming impression I got was the failure to understand and to engage between both sides. As an MEP I constantly felt—having, of course, the joy of serving in both parties—that neither party knew what to do with its MEPs. They felt that they were a bit of a nuisance and a bit of an irrelevance. However, seriously, if you look at other European member states you find a much better level of integration between what is going on in Brussels and what is going on in the member state than you do in the United Kingdom. We have consistently failed to engage, and that comes down to very petty things. When do you ever see an MEP wandering around this House? I see the former leader of the Opposition, who will know the Danish Parliament well, and if you go to the Danish Parliament you will often find MEPs wandering around it because there is a structure for them to relate to it and be there. Therefore we need to settle quite a lot of things.

We also need to look at what would happen if people vote no. The question will be, “Do you want to be in the European Union?”. That would start a long process of disengagement, which would be messy. On this side of the House our Conservative Party is not best served by not being in the European People’s Party, which contains a lot of people who have influence. We need to be in a position of influence, because if we were on the path to withdrawal—and I sincerely hope that we are not—the European Parliament plays a very central role in the settlement that is reached, because there will be a huge number of financial overhangs.

I still serve as president of the European Parliament Pension Fund. If you look at the liabilities towards European public servants, they are considerable and would have to be met. Other liabilities that would have to be untangled are also considerable—and, with all of them, the European Parliament would have budgetary authority. My noble friend Lord Tomlinson is much more of an expert than I am on that matter, and he will know that the European Parliament would have a considerable say in what happens.

I draw attention to the role of European civil servants. We sometimes bemoan the fact that British nationals are not getting their fair share in Europe. But what are we offering them in terms of a career? We are saying to the brightest and best of our graduates, “Well, yes, if you go to Europe we might help you and we might not—or we might withdraw tomorrow”. Is that how you get people to the top? There was a time when we held the general secretaryship of the European Commission; indeed, the noble Lord who held that is a Member of this House. We held the general secretaryship of the European Parliament, with the distinguished Sir Julian Priestley, for many years. We have held the general secretaryship of the European Economic and Social Committee. Today we hold no senior positions in any European institutions that would be worthy of the weight of this country; we are slipping behind.

We are always talking about numbers, but this goes beyond numbers. Britain has a moral duty in Europe to lead and to join. There is a long queue of people wanting to join; there is only a small queue—and then not a representative one—of people who want to leave. Our job and our duty is at the heart of Europe, campaigning and helping the emerging democracies in the European Union, setting an example, bringing them forward and welcoming them into the family of European nations. We should not be going on in the xenophobic way that the British press has been so fond of recently, which frankly I feel ashamed to be associated with, when I read it. We need to pass this Bill, we need a positive yes vote, and we need a full and thorough engagement with the European Union.