Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Ben Wallace and John Whittingdale(1 year, 4 months ago)
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Sir John Whittingdale (Maldon) (Con)
Mr Wallace
We are grateful to Sweden. Swedish personnel are here in the UK training Ukrainian ground forces with us in the north of England. Sweden is one of the contributing countries. Whether Sweden wishes to donate aeroplanes is genuinely a matter for the Swedish armed forces, but I understand the need that my right hon. Friend is trying to tap into. We are doing everything we can to solve that.
Ukraine Update
Debate between Ben Wallace and John Whittingdale(1 year, 5 months ago)
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Mr Wallace
That last point is extremely important. The Department of Health and Social Care has already done significant work in securing medical supplies during the conflict, but the hon. Gentleman prompts me to see what we can do in a more international, co-ordinated manner. I will, perhaps, write to him giving the details of that. He is right to say that this is going to be a tough winter, and we need to make sure that the Ukrainians can cope.
I agree with the hon. Gentleman about the calmness of the RAF. Incredibly professional men and women are doing an incredible job, and not only here. Some of those same aircraft, and the P-8s from Lossiemouth, go out to protect us in the very high north from aggression and Russian activity. It is often in Scotland that Russia enters our airspace with its long-range bombers and the patrols that it did not give up after the cold war. The difference that should be noted is that we were in international airspace. However, we try to retain a professional manner with Russia. It is important that we maintain that professional link with the Russian Ministry of Defence, and recognise that we can still have those important engagements at times like this.
Sir John Whittingdale (Maldon) (Con)
Given the extraordinary success of the Ukrainian armed forces in pushing back Russian troops, does my right hon. Friend agree that there is a danger that Putin may consider escalating the conflict? While attention has focused on the potential use of battlefield nuclear weapons, does he agree that any use of chemical or biological weapons equally represents a red line which Putin must not cross?
Mr Wallace
When it comes to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and the chemical weapons convention which all of us, including what are viewed as some of the key anchor countries, have signed up to—when chemical weapons were used in Syria, for instance, military action was taken by countries including ourselves and France—it is extremely important to uphold that convention. Breaking the taboo, or allowing it to be successfully broken, would have severe consequences for all of us. Similarly, the messaging is that the use of nuclear or chemical weapons would lead to severe consequences for the Russian state, and we urge that none of those be resorted to.
As for President Putin’s position, he has obviously made a number of speeches, and he has annexed illegally parts of countries that are still full of Ukrainian forces. His ambitions do not seem to match the realities on the ground. The key message to him is that we are interested in helping Ukraine to succeed in defeating Russia’s illegal invasion. If he understands what that is about, he should be able to calibrate his response so as to leave Ukraine in an orderly manner, and we can start the process of trying to rebuild that amazing country and ensuring that Russia is held accountable for its crimes.
Ukraine Update
Debate between Ben Wallace and John Whittingdale(2 years, 1 month ago)
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Mr John Whittingdale (Maldon) (Con)
Three years ago, I visited Mariupol with my right hon. Friend’s predecessor, Michael Fallon, and we heard the Ukrainian armed forces’ appreciation of the help we were already giving them then through Operation Orbital, so I strongly welcome my right hon. Friend’s announcement today. Does he agree with the Secretary-General of NATO that the sight of bodies lying unburied on the streets in Mariupol is credible evidence that Russia is guilty of war crimes?
Mr Wallace
As I have previously reported, the International Criminal Court has opened an investigation. A number of countries, including Britain, are collecting evidence—Canada is taking quite a strong lead—and it is important that we follow the evidence. The open-source reports of not only civilian bodies but Russian dead abandoned by their own forces show a crime in itself. What a disgrace that the Russian generals have abandoned those young men who have been killed. The leadership of the Russian army deserve to be in court for betraying their own soldiers and, at the same time, for what they are doing to the civilians of Ukraine. They are criminally responsible and I hope they face justice.
Ukraine
Debate between Ben Wallace and John Whittingdale(2 years, 1 month ago)
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Mr Wallace
The right hon. Gentleman raises a point about Minsk. I was clear in my press conference in Moscow and elsewhere that both Russia and Ukraine signed Minsk. As he will know, and as we have found with the Good Friday agreement, treaties are one thing, but the big challenge is in rolling up our sleeves and delivering the sequences in the right way. We all remember that from decommissioning in Northern Ireland, which was easy to write into the Good Friday agreement but hard to deliver, and it is the same for the Minsk agreement. However, we all recognise that the Minsk agreement is one of the ways out, and we should do our best to support its implementation.
On the right hon. Gentleman’s point about pulling back NATO, we did not put 165,000 combat troops on the edge of a sovereign country and hold a gun to the head of a democratically elected Government; Russia did. We have nothing to de-escalate from; Russia does. I hope that he will condemn the Stop the War Coalition, which always seems to paint us as the aggressor. Perhaps he would like to ask the people of Ukraine who they think the aggressor is.
Mr John Whittingdale (Maldon) (Con)
Has increased military action been detected in other Russian-controlled areas, such as Transnistria, as well as in Crimea and Kaliningrad? What assessment has my right hon. Friend made of the possible threat—if not now, then in the future—against other former Soviet states that are outside of NATO, such as Moldova?
Mr Wallace
Russia’s malign activity—we have packaged it up and called it that—has been a long-running challenge that we have seen in the likes of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In all of this, we should not forget that Bosnia and Herzegovina is in a fragile position, because it is in an impoverished state, the minorities are already starting to agitate, and Russia’s influence on some of the separatists could send us all back to the early ’90s. Russia’s malign activity does no good. It challenges not only our European values, but the wealth of those states, seemingly for no reason other than to weaken people who think differently.
Far-right Violence and Online Extremism
Debate between Ben Wallace and John Whittingdale(5 years ago)
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Urgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.
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Mr Wallace
The hon. and learned Lady makes some good points. On her point about Islamophobia, I have publicly spoken out for many years about the fact that Islamophobia exists. It exists across our communities, in all our political parties and in the communities we represent; it exists throughout Europe, not just in the UK, and we have to tackle it.
If you want a good lesson on how to tackle intolerance, Mr Speaker, I should say that one of the early successful policies of the SNP was on dealing with anti-sectarianism. The SNP recognised in Scotland that this starts with sectarianism and it grows into violent extremism. I have to commend the SNP for what it did all those years ago on that, taking strong steps, certainly among the football community, to stamp it out. That is why, in the end, we have to focus upstream. We must focus in the communities and say what is not acceptable. We must embrace policies such as Prevent to make sure that everyone realises that this is ultimately about safeguarding.
On the issue relating to the community trust, the hon. and learned Lady is right. We will direct our funds as the threat changes, and we are completely open to learning every day from the attacks and plots we see, either here or abroad. We shall direct this in that way. My colleagues in government regularly speak to a range of Muslim communities, and many of us in this House will speak to our own communities in our own constituencies.
We will sense the fear that there currently is in some of those communities as a response to the attack in New Zealand and that there was even before that, given the growing rise of Islamophobia, spread through the evils of some of these chatrooms on the internet. We must, all of us, say that that is not acceptable, and neither is intolerance aimed at other people in other discourse around the world, be it in respect of Unionism and nationalism, or Brexit and remain. Intolerance is where this starts as a small seed, and it grows into hate.
Mr John Whittingdale (Maldon) (Con)
I welcome my right hon. Friend’s statement, and I strongly agree that the tech companies need to do more to stop the spread of hate and incitement to violence. However, does he also recognise that the internet is a force for good and that many authoritarian countries—China and, now, particularly Russia—are attempting to impose censorship on it for their own repressive political purposes? Does he therefore agree that any measures we take need to be proportionate and targeted, and must not allow other countries, such as Russia, to claim somehow that they are acting for reasons similar to ours?
Mr Wallace
It is tempting to say that my right hon. Friend is asking the wrong person. As Security Minister, I see daily how paedophiles, organised crime, groomers and terrorist recruiters use the internet as not a force for good. As we speak, the internet is being used to undermine our own democracy.
My right hon. Friend makes a valid point that, in places where there is no democracy and no rule of law, the internet is sometimes people’s only hope to engage with free thought and the outside world. We have to be very careful about how we balance that but, nevertheless, we know these companies can remove extremist content very quickly when they put their minds to it.
There are certain areas on which we all agree. I cannot find anyone in the world who would support allowing child sexual exploitation images to exist on our internet. Violent extremism, beheading videos and bullying online cannot be acceptable in any society. We can all agree that a number of activities should not be allowed or available on the internet without someone taking responsibility for preventing the broadcast or spreading of it. All of us in this House have to try to navigate that fine line, and we will debate it when the online White Paper comes before us.