Support for Ukraine and Countering Threats from Russia

Debate between Angus Brendan MacNeil and Tony Lloyd

Wednesday 2nd March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Tony Lloyd (Rochdale) (Lab)]

Can I begin, as others have done, by expressing my admiration for the role that the Ukrainian armed forces—sometimes irregular, sometimes regular—have played? Most of us have been astonished by the resistance they have been able to put up, and I think that that astonishment applies in Moscow as well. Along with that, I want to add my genuine appreciation for the Defence Secretary and the Defence team, who have been exemplary in the way in which they have operated to ensure that we are supporting the capacity of the Ukrainians to defend their own country. That has been absolutely fundamental, and it is a leading example of how we as a nation ought to behave, so well done there. I wish I could be quite as complimentary about the role of our sanctions regime, because we are playing catch-up there. It is a matter of fact that the EU has sanctioned far more individuals than we have, including two who have major UK interests, Alisher Usmanov and Mikhail Fridman. We have not sanctioned those individuals, and it is astonishing that we are seeing the EU sanctioning those with assets here when we do not.

Something else that we now have to look at seriously is the way in which our legal system has been acting to defend the interests of those around Putin and the oligarchs who base their moneys here. An example is the ability to prevent journalists from examining the truth. Inquisitive journalism is fundamental to outing the role of dirty money in the City of London, as we must do. That is a matter of national shame, but we are playing catch-up on that as well. I hope that Ministers will take that message on board, because it is now time now to do this. I think there is consensus that we can do it, but it is not just about the dirty money; it is also about those who protect that dirty money in our society. I think there is consensus around that.

I am also bound to reflect on the potential, even now, for the flow of refugees. We do not know how this situation is going to end. We do not know what will make Mr Putin and those around him pull back from this level of adventurism, and because we do not know that, we have to assume that things will get massively worse and that the flow of refugees will get worse. If the flow of refugees does get worse, and if we are talking about the potential for many millions of refugees, the UK clearly has to be prepared to respond.

[Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)]

Following a point made by the right hon. Member for North Thanet (Sir Roger Gale) about places being unable to cope with the numbers of people coming through and the need to keep them flowing, one of the difficulties is the dog-leg in the UK system that people have to navigate to get visas. I am currently waiting in real time for the Home Office to tell me where a bunch of 12 people can go to get visas. Their travel to Scotland is all arranged, but the difficulty, the bottleneck, is the Home Office. We should not be doing this right now. People can get moving and get going, but they do not know whether to get a bus to Warsaw or where else to go, or where they can get a visa. Hopefully we will know in the next few hours, but the frustration and the angst for their family back in Lewis is huge. I just wanted to put that on record.

[Tony Lloyd]

The hon. Gentleman is right. If we could see the same alacrity from the Home Office that we have seen from the Ministry of Defence, we could make a material difference.

I spoke earlier this week to the ambassador from Moldova. Moldova is a country of something short of 3 million people, yet it has already taken 90,000 refugees, which is proportionately the equivalent of the UK taking in 2 million people. Moldova is a desperately poor country and it cannot accommodate that 90,000. There has to be some process by which the flow of refugees can be moved from the reception countries to those that have greater capacity, but in any case we need to ensure that we are making the necessary humanitarian assistance available to Moldova. The bureaucratic point about the Home Office is inevitably a real one, and it is time for Home Office Ministers to act to ensure that they are part of the solution and not part of the problem.

There is one other point I want to make, and it is a little more wide-ranging. We have to look forward, and we have to do that in two ways. First, we need to make sure that we have a commitment that our role with respect to Ukraine is not just during this period of crisis. We are always excellent at focusing on a crisis before moving on, whether it be Syria or Libya—we can all list them. We have to be here for the long run, because Ukraine is too strategically important both militarily and to the ecosystem of the wider Europe. On that basis, and the time is not now, reconstruction has to be somewhere on the planning agenda of the G7.

My other point will be massively controversial. When the European Coal and Steel Community was created back in the 1950s, the logic was that coal and steel were the key strategic industries of the era of post-war reconstruction. The community worked together to create something a little different. Energy is today’s strategic variable.

Olaf Scholz, the German Chancellor, made an incredible move by saying that he will wean Germany off Russian oil and gas, and we have to begin thinking about how we can play a role in supporting those who depend on that gas. That will be Moldova and Ukraine, and it may well be Germany, too. It will take imagination, but it is the kind of thinking we saw when Ernest Bevin created NATO and when the European Coal and Steel Community was created all those years ago. That may be controversial, but now is the time to do it.