EU and Russia (EUC Report)

Debate between Lord Davies of Stamford and Baroness Coussins

Tuesday 24th March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Coussins (CB)]

My Lords, I had the privilege to serve on Sub-Committee C of the EU Select Committee. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, for steering us so skilfully through this complex inquiry, which was so topical that the landscape seemed to change virtually from meeting to meeting. I endorse his thanks to the clerk, the policy analyst and the special adviser for their magnificent policy and technical support.

I will confine my remarks to the two very different points in this report to do with language and language skills. First, one of the report’s conclusions was:

“There has been a decline in Member States’ analytical capacity on Russia. This has weakened their ability to read the political shifts and to offer an authoritative response. Member States need to rebuild their former skills”.

The same deficit was found in our own Foreign Office as in the member states as a whole, and was thought to have occurred over some time in relation to Russia and the region. Sir Tony Brenton, a former British ambassador to Russia, told us that UK diplomacy has,

“suffered because of a loss of language skills, particularly in the Foreign Office”.

This point is all the stronger for echoing one of the conclusions of another Select Committee report, on soft power, which was debated in your Lordships’ House only two weeks ago.

Language skills and the cultural knowledge and understanding that go with them are a very important part of the analytical capacity that we found wanting. The report recommends that the FCO should review how its diplomats and other officials can regain this expertise. The new FCO language school is a first-class resource that is already making a contribution towards equipping some of the right people with Russian language skills prior to postings. About 10% of the 800 or so civil servants who had been on courses at the language school up to last November were studying Russian. If the recommendation on regaining linguistic and cultural skills is to be implemented on a solid, long-term basis, we need to see some changes much further back in the pipeline and not have to wait until people are already part of the Foreign Office or the Diplomatic Service for access to an intensive Russian course.

As a nation, we need to see a sea-change in our attitude towards language learning and a dramatic improvement in the take-up of languages at school and university. On Russian, I can give the House a very up-to-date picture of what is going on in schools from data published only last week in the 13th annual Language Trends survey. The curious thing about Russian is that at A-level take-up has nearly tripled over the past 20 years to nearly 1,200 in 2014. However, before anyone gets too excited about this apparent progress, it seems that the increase is largely due to increased numbers of native Russian-speaking non-UK nationals, mainly at independent schools. By contrast, a tiny proportion of state schools offer Russian—between 1% and 2%.

At university level, over the last 10 years there has been a 51% decline in the number of entrants to Russian and east European studies degree courses. Only 14 of our universities now offer Russian as a single honours degree and only 17 offer degrees in which Russian is a significant component. No universities in either Wales or Northern Ireland offer Russian, and only three in Scotland do—down from six quite recently. Slavonic languages other than Russian have fared very much worse still. I hope that the Minister will agree that the languages pipeline needs urgent attention and that the problems with Russian in particular, in the light of this report, cannot be solved simply by leaving it to the Foreign Office language school. Indeed, even with the benefit of the language school, only 27% of posts in the Diplomatic Service associated with a level of proficiency in Russian are actually filled by someone who meets the required standards.

The second language-related issue that appears in this report concerns not UK nationals but Russian nationals and ethnic Russians whose language rights may have been threatened or undermined by an EU member state. The report observes that the treatment of Russian speakers was one key theme in Russia’s actions in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. A proposal in the Ukrainian Parliament to repeal the 2012 language law allowing Ukraine regions to have Russian as a second official language was seen by many Russian-speaking Ukrainians as an alarming threat, even though it was subsequently withdrawn.

More pertinent still as far as the EU is concerned is that in Estonia and Latvia, two member states, Russian does not have the status of an official language, and in both countries citizenship rights, including the right to vote in national elections, are dependent on a language test in the official language. The result is that ethnic Russians, mainly older people, are denied citizenship and are unable to participate in the political process.

President Putin has, in various public statements, made much of this discrimination against Russian speakers living in EU countries and has accused the EU of double standards. Some of our witnesses thought that the plight of ethnic Russians was simply being used by Putin as a convenient pretext, that their social isolation was perhaps exaggerated, and that in any case in strictly legalistic terms Estonia and Latvia were violating no specific EU standards. Nevertheless, it is more than uncomfortable that any EU member state should make citizenship conditional on these terms and thereby hand Putin a card to play that suggests that the EU does not practise what it preaches.

[Lord Davies of Stamford (Lab)]

I am one of those people who believe that it is perfectly reasonable to state that English would be a requirement for British citizenship, and I have no problem in principle about what happens in Estonia and Latvia. However, does the Baroness not agree that Putin has stated that Latvian and Estonian citizens who take the language test and then apply for and receive local nationality will no longer be allowed into Russia without a visa? He is preventing contact between the Russians living in those two countries and Russia, which he is then complaining about.

[Baroness Coussins]

The report acknowledges that point about visas. My point is that it is short-sighted to hand Putin a card to play that enables him to accuse the EU of double standards. The report concluded that there is a prima facie case requiring this historical grievance by ethnic Russians in Estonia and Latvia to be investigated. That is as far as we went. I hope that the UK Government will press for this investigation to be pursued by the EU so that any excuse for any level of Russian interference in these states on these particular grounds can be effectively neutralised and removed.

I look forward to the Minister’s response on this and to my earlier points about language skills.