Russia: Threats to Individuals in the UK

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 8th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

In relation to BuzzFeed’s stories—that is precisely what they are, media stories—I cannot answer the noble Lord; I do not know the answer to that question, but I will find out and let him know. If people have concerns around the BuzzFeed story, they should put those concerns to the police, because they are dealing with this.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, in the last few years, a number of Conservative Ministers have insisted that the greatest threats to British sovereignty came from Brussels, Paris and Berlin. In the light of the consistent Russian incursions into British sovereignty, does the Minister not agree that Russia provides a much greater threat to Britain’s sovereignty, and that it might make sense to co-operate rather more closely over the long period with Brussels, Paris and Berlin in order to combat that?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I repeat my assertion that this Question is about the death of two individuals. No conclusions have been reached by the police as yet. Clearly we are treating it very seriously indeed, but I cannot comment in the early stages of this investigation.

Business: Exports

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 6th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, given the statements by a number of ambassadors from the United Arab Emirates that they may be asking their trading partners to choose whether they wish to trade with Qatar or with the rest of the GCC, do the British Government yet have a position on whether they will focus on future trade with Qatar, from which we take a third of our liquid gas imports, or with the rest of the GCC, with which we have, happily, a very substantial trade surplus?

[Lord Bates]

We do not recognise that we will be in a position where we will have to choose. We recognise that these are very important trading partners. The Secretary of State for International Trade was in the Gulf recently and announced an increase in the export finance available for companies exporting into that region. Again, we recognise that that needs to be built on peace and stability, and we very much hope that the situation will be resolved as soon as possible.

East Jerusalem: Access to Emergency Care

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 28th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

In situations like this Palestinian, Israeli and international non-governmental organisations play a very important role. Is DfID satisfied that the Israeli Government make life sufficiently easy for non-governmental organisations to play a role in assisting Palestinian healthcare and other areas like that?

[Lord Bates]

We would like to see more. We do not think that the NGO Bill which is currently before the Knesset goes down that route. We think we need to do more.

Syrian Refugees

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 29th October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I was a little puzzled by the introduction from the noble Lord, Lord Truscott, to a debate on the strategy for tackling the refugee crisis, in the light of the current violence in Aleppo. It seemed to me that he focused on the Russian narrative of how the conflict began and how we had to accept the Russian terms for resolving the conflict.

[Lord Truscott]

I hate to intervene, but my point was that, in analysing the situation, we really should be looking at dealing with the causes rather than the symptoms.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

We will leave that to one side. I simply say that I do not accept his interpretation of the origins of the conflict.

On the immediate crisis, we see that Aleppo, the largest city, is now being substantially destroyed by barrel bombs dropped by the Syrian Government in Russian-made helicopters and by Russian planes that are bombing rebel forces in Aleppo and not ISIL. We know that that is going to lead to a further surge of refugees leaving the country. The weather is now turning worse—I am told that the temperature in Damascus and Aleppo goes down to minus 10 degrees or lower in winter—and there is no heating. They will try to get to Europe, and many more will die on the way because it will be cold, and next summer, we will face a very large surge. That is the immediate issue and concern for us. As some of us were saying to the Russian ambassador last week, “We have interests in what you do in this conflict, because the refugees will not try to get to the Crimea; they will try to get to Europe”.

That is where our immediate concerns have to be and we have to deal multilaterally with all the other actors in the conflict: supporting the Lebanese and the Jordanians; encouraging the Turks—whatever is happening in Turkish politics—to maintain their assistance; and saying to the Saudis and the Gulf states that they also have to accept their share of the responsibility and their contribution to a multilateral solution.

The violence that the Syrian state has conducted against its citizens is horrifying. When I saw pictures of Yarmouk, a part of Damascus that I visited seven years ago, and how appallingly it now has been almost completely destroyed, I was horrified that a state could do that to its own citizens.

The question is: how do we begin to work towards a situation in which we resolve this conflict, before Syria becomes a country in which only a very small minority of its 22 million people feel it is safe to live? It of course has to be by a multilateral approach, and certainly we need to include the Iranians, the Saudis, the other Gulf states and the Russians. As a country, we need to approach it in the way that we approached our negotiations with Iran—as the E3. That was very effective, with William Hague, his French and German counterparts, and the European Union special representative working multilaterally.

This morning, I heard Kate Hoey on the “Today” programme say that the one thing in which we do not want anything to do with our western European partners is foreign policy co-operation. Frankly, without foreign policy co-operation, we will not get anywhere. In the Middle East we have to work with our neighbours and our partners and say to them that they should be contributing more financially to the immediate effort for the refugees, but we have to work with them also in trying to build a multinational coalition.

An immediate concern has to be the refugees. We have to anticipate that it will get worse next spring and summer. We have to attempt to persuade the Russians that what they are doing—assisting the Syrian state to destroy those parts of Syria that have not yet been destroyed—is absolutely wrong-headed. Let us remember that ISIL now controls the most thinly inhabited parts of Syria. The areas that are being fought over by the other non-ISIL rebels and the state are the heavily inhabited parts. Beyond that, we have to attempt to negotiate with the major Middle East states, as well as with the Turks, the Russians and the others, to find a solution that will not be easy to reach.

Charities Act 2006 (Principal Regulators of Exempt Charities) Regulations 2011

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 5th July 2011 Grand Committee

The second of these instruments—the one dealing with the definition of exempt charities—makes clear in a way that is rarely visible the fact that there was a cock-up. Is one allowed to use that term in Parliament?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I think so.

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

There was a cock-up in prior legislation that led to the need for the second of these statutory instruments to confirm that sixth-form college corporations should have exempt status re-conferred on them. There is no question or doubt that their exempt status was removed from them unintentionally. I commend whoever wrote the helpful Explanatory Memorandum on the delicate language employed therein. It explains:

“Sixth form colleges which are charities had their exempt status removed by the ASCL Act. It is unclear whether this was intentional”.

Wonderfully clear it was not. I make this point not to make fun of those who were party to the error. The parties most responsible for it were in this place, because it is we who churn out, day in and day out, tidal waves of primary and secondary legislation. It is we who fail to scrutinise adequately that tidal wave, and it is we, therefore, who did not see when the ASCL Bill was introduced that by an unintentional side wind these sixth-form college corporations were deprived of their valuable exempt status. It seems as though they have been in a sort of ghostly limbo until now, but at least we are putting them out of their misery.

I wanted to raise this issue because it is not often that such a blatant example of the weight of interlocking legislation is clearly shown to be false in its outcomes. I put it to the Committee that charity law has become barbaric. Happily, when I started practising law, nine times out of 10, such matters would never darken the doors of a lawyer’s office, but those days are long gone. We are, even in these instruments, creating another web in which to catch the unwary, forcing the prudential into seeking expensive advice and generally making the voluntary sector a victim of our excessive endeavours.