Foreign Affairs

Lord Marlesford Excerpts

Tuesday 5th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Marlesford (Con)]

My Lords, I apologise to the House for missing my earlier slot. I am grateful for being allowed a few words in the gap.

In his Downing Street address on extremism last week, the Prime Minister gave us a much-needed warning. I believe that the greatest threat to world peace and security today is the resurrection of fascism. The Prime Minister did not say “fascism”, but he described it very well: it seeks

“to advance a divisive, hateful ideological agenda”,

combined with

“Threats of violence and intimidation”


to win power. We all know that this is followed with increasingly cruel and brutal repression to obtain power.

There are two obvious areas where all this is happening. The first and most obvious is Putin’s far-right rule in Russia, which ticks every box for qualification as fascist, from Ukraine to Navalny. He has recently engaged the Wagner Group as his own private instrument of despotism, particularly in Africa. The second, and in some ways more formidably, is political Islam, whose distorted jihadist ideology was created by hijacking the religion of Islam, as peacefully practised by hundreds of millions throughout the world.

Israel cannot fully escape criticism. There are echoes that can be seen by some as fascistic. Netanyahu is certainly risking turning what could have been an ethical military victory into a major global defeat. However, as the Prime Minister put it:

“Islamist extremists and the far right feed off and embolden each other”.