Hong Kong National Security Legislation

Lord Truscott Excerpts

Thursday 2nd July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Truscott (Ind Lab) [V]]

My Lords, will the Minister convey to the Chinese authorities that, while they may unilaterally repudiate the Sino-British joint declaration, which has the force of an international treaty, the result will be that no one will ever take the Chinese at their word again, whether over Huawei or anything else?

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon]

My Lords, I assure the noble Lord that we have reminded China of that obligation. As I said, China has an important role on the world stage and needs to recognise that, if it breaks its word, it may not have the trust of the international community in future treaties, obligations and agreements that have been signed. That is a matter for China to consider very carefully.

Hong Kong: Human Rights

Lord Truscott Excerpts

Thursday 4th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Truscott (Ind Lab)]

My Lords, by its actions over Hong Kong, China is making a mockery of both the Sino-British declaration and the notion of “one country, two systems”. What action have Her Majesty’s Government taken to co-ordinate an international response? I declare an interest, listed in the register, as a visitor to Taiwan last summer. The proposed new national security law ensures that any application of “one country, two systems” to Taiwan is a Peking dead duck now, if it was not already. Does the Minister agree that recent developments in Hong Kong are especially disturbing for the people of Taiwan? Will he reiterate Her Majesty’s Government’s support for Taiwan’s vibrant democracy?

EU and Russia (EUC Report)

Lord Truscott Excerpts

Tuesday 24th March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Truscott (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Earl, Lord Oxford and Asquith, on his excellent maiden speech. According to the Daily Telegraph, he was MI6 station head in Moscow, but I know that he could not possibly comment. I also commend the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, and the committee on the excellent report before your Lordships’ House today. I heartily agree with most of it.

I begin by reflecting on the appalling murder of Boris Nemtsov on 27 February, which has just been mentioned. He was a charming and articulate member of the opposition who I met several times during the 1990s when I was a member of the European Parliament’s delegation for relations with the Russian Federation. Nemtsov’s assassination was one of the worst acts of violence against a leading liberal in Russia since the murder of Duma Deputy Galina Starovoitova outside her St Petersburg apartment in November 1998. Almost 20 years on, history seems to repeat itself in Russia.

The report states:

“The EU’s relationship with Russia has for too long been based on the optimistic premise that Russia has been on a trajectory towards becoming a democratic ‘European’ country”.

It also states that there has been a loss of member states’ analytical capacity on Russia and a loss of specialist Russian expertise in the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Both statements are sadly very true.

When I wrote my book, Russia First: Breaking with the West, in 1997, the clue was in the title: breaking with the West. I argued then that the West effectively lost Russia in the mid-1990s when, humiliated and marginalised by the West, as the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, referred to, Russia decided to pursue its own strategic interests and distinct future Eurasian path. Neither meant that Russia would turn into a western-style democracy with a fully fledged market economy. It was obvious then, and it is even more obvious today.

I think that I have met virtually every British ambassador who has served in Moscow since the late 1980s; standing out head and shoulders above the rest, Sir Rodric Braithwaite and Sir Rod Lyne—real Russian/Soviet experts. I do not believe that the FCO is currently capable of reproducing their expertise, experience or analytical capabilities, which is worrying.

The report is also right to identify two evident policy failures in the run-up to the Ukrainian crisis: first, the failure to be aware of Russian hostility to the association agreement referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Lamont; and, secondly, the crucial importance that Moscow attached to preventing Ukraine from joining NATO. Imagine, if you would, the situation back in 1962, to which the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, referred, if Cuba had said that not only was it going to install Soviet ballistic missiles 90 miles from the USA but it would also join the Warsaw Pact. War would have been inevitable. In 1983, the US invaded Grenada, a Commonwealth country, after a coup by a revolutionary group. Incidentally, the UNGA condemned the invasion as a,

“flagrant violation of international law”,

and the only reason why the resolution did not pass was because the US vetoed it in the UN Security Council.

It is also correct that Moscow misjudged the West over Ukraine. With Transnistria, a European country had already had its territory divided by pro-Russian separatists after a war in the early 1990s with little or no reaction from the West, while Georgia, after the 2008 war, remains divided to this day. Russia was genuinely surprised by the strength of the West’s reaction to its role in the Ukrainian crisis.

That brings us to the question of sanctions. Here I disagree somewhat with the report’s conclusions. It states that sanctions are fine in the short term, although there is no evidence that they have shifted President Putin’s stance on the Crimea or Russia’s perceived vital strategic interests. In the long term, the sanctions are adjudged to be,

“detrimental to the EU’s interests as well as to Russia’s”.

I think that the sanctions, apart from making the West feel virtuous in “punishing” Russia—again, a word used by the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell—will be purely counterproductive, as some witnesses to the committee noted. They play into the hands of the nationalists while achieving virtually nothing politically. Economically, Russia is suffering far more from the fall in the price of a barrel of oil than from sanctions, so in that sense OPEC has far more leverage than the West. The EU has 12 to 14 times more trade with Russia than the US, so if anything, sanctions will damage Europe much more than Washington.

Finally, I agree with the report’s emphasis on a greater EU dialogue and engagement with Russia through, for example, reconvened summits and a focus on issues of shared interest. While I am sure that everyone in your Lordships’ House would welcome a diplomatic solution to the Ukrainian crisis based on Minsk II, I hope we can also agree that, as the report says, it would indeed be,

“a failure of imagination and diplomacy if the crisis in Ukraine were to result in a long-lasting era of colder relations”.

Russia

Lord Truscott Excerpts

Thursday 16th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Truscott (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner of Margravine, on securing this debate. It is focused on international law and democratic principles, and of course your Lordships’ House is united in wanting to see both those fundamental principles upheld in Russia and elsewhere. However, as the noble Lords, Lord Kerr and Lord Moynihan, referred to, it is not clear what the West’s current strategy is and how it is designed to work. I welcome the Minister to her new role and post but should be grateful if, in her summing up, she could explain.

The plan seems to be that sanctions will force President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin into a volte-face, so that they relinquish Crimea and withdraw support for separatists in eastern Ukraine. Yet the sanctions and Western policy are having the opposite effect. The Russian people, the cowed oligarchs and the Kremlin are united as never before behind President Vladimir Putin. The noble Lord, Lord Cormack, mentioned President Putin’s popularity. His opinion poll ratings stand at 86%. He has never been more popular domestically and he is almost guaranteed re-election in 2018. Crimea is Russia’s only access to the Mediterranean, with the Black Sea fleet’s headquarters at Sevastopol, for which Russia fought several wars and lost many thousands of lives over the centuries. Russia is determined never to give up Crimea again, and President Putin knows he will go down in history as the first Russian leader since Catherine the Great to reunite the Crimea with Mother Russia.

One Russian businessman confided in me that the result of sanctions is to make Russia more authoritarian, illiberal and anti-western in outlook. The gains in trade, liberalisation and democracy of the past 23 years since the break-up of the USSR will be lost forever and will lead to a lost generation. Many young Russians have travelled extensively and have even been educated abroad. We are cutting them adrift.

Having studied and followed Russia for the last 36 years, I must admit that I am slightly puzzled by the West’s reaction to the Ukrainian conflict. Even during the Soviet Union and after the invasion of Afghanistan, trade and other links were maintained with the Soviet Union, even despite the boycott of the Moscow Olympics. The era we are embarking on will thus be worse than the Cold War: we will have geopolitical and economic instability together. In picking a fight with Russia over Ukraine I fear we are fighting the wrong war against the wrong enemy at the wrong time. A diplomatic solution to the current crisis was on the table from the beginning and accepted in principle by Moscow and Kiev: greater autonomy for eastern Ukraine’s regions; linguistic rights for ethnic Russian speakers; and maintaining Ukraine’s military neutrality.

Realistically speaking, eastern Ukraine is a political and economic burden Russia would rather do without, and no Russian I know would seriously contemplate invading the EU or a NATO member state, thus starting a third world war. Russians may be many things, but they are not stupid. Even ethnic Russian speakers in the Baltic states believe they are better off in the European Union. As the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, said, it is true that economic sanctions are hitting Russia very hard indeed, but they will also hit us in Europe too, especially since EU-Russian trade is 14 times greater than US-Russian trade. The German economy is already slowing, dragging the eurozone into recession, partly as a result of falling exports to Russia and weakening business confidence as a result.

Is this the time to pick a trade war with Russia, with global economic recovery on a knife edge? Would it not be better to solve the Ukrainian conflict diplomatically and focus on the many areas of mutual interest where Russia and the West need each other, as several noble Lords have referred to, such as trade, energy, space, the real existential fight against Islamist fundamentalism, and international co-operation on Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and North Korea? It may not be a perfect solution, but it is better than the alternative in an imperfect world.