Ukraine

Lord King of Bridgwater Excerpts

Friday 25th February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord King of Bridgwater (Con)]

My Lords, I am particularly pleased to follow the noble Lord, Lord Alton, who spoke with passion of his particular interests and involvement in Ukraine. The maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Sedwill, has also brought out very clearly the value of this debate today. He started his career with the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain, at a time when I myself also had some slight involvement. This is not the moment to discuss the organisation or constitution of our country, but the Commons had a very valuable debate that showed a considerable degree of unity at this time, and the value of your Lordships’ House—which we have already heard today and will continue to hear in further speeches to follow—is the quality of experience that can be brought to bear, and the noble Lord, Lord Sedwill, spelled this out admirably. His was a speech that could never have been made by a current Member of Parliament, but it brought real authority to what he had to contribute to this House.

I look back on my own experiences with the Soviet Union during the time of Margaret Thatcher. I remember her describing President Gorbachev as:

“A man I could do business with!”


I do not think that President Biden or President Macron would say the same about the current occupant of that office. He is a man who has now become a completely new dimension of international pariah. I think I am right in saying that the only person who has sent a message of support to Putin for the actions he has taken is Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

The first lesson that I draw out of this is that, after the awfulness of the current situation and invasion, we have had—as the noble Lord, Lord West, said—the clearest possible warning to NATO to wake up and to understand. It has been given an absolute demonstration of what it could face in the Baltic states and others and of the range of an attack that could be developed, not just by conventional military but by the whole new world of cyber, hacking and different threats and disorganisation—which is clearly an important part at the moment of the whole Russian attack.

This is all going on in an incredibly dangerous world. It would have been almost inconceivable at the start of the pandemic for anyone to think that, in the middle of a pandemic, when every country in the world is facing that threat, we would find military action of this kind. The world is facing not just the pandemic. We see the number of failed nation states that there are presently; the mass migration of people; the global scale of the refugee challenge; and—as the noble Lord, Lord Alton, mentioned—famine threatening so many parts of the world. I understand that Yemen, which is threatened with the most severe famine, is in fact a customer of Ukraine corn and is dependent on part of the Ukrainian harvests. All those dimensions together emphasise the importance of the calling of this debate, which your Lordships’ House has illustrated so well.

The challenge that we now face is to ensure that the response, not just from the West but globally, is of total world outrage. I agree very much with what my noble friend Lord Howell referred to: it is not just the West, but the East and Pacific countries as well. Everybody must stand up and make quite clear, not just to President Putin but to many Russian people, who will be horrified—many have already shown their horror at what is happening—that Russia will become an international pariah under his leadership and that this invasion must be stopped. International pressure must be brought in every possible way in every possible country that is able to contribute to ensure that the earliest possible relief can come to the brave people of Ukraine. We must then establish much stronger international support for the forces of democratic defence that we need at this time.