Oral Answers to Questions

Bob Seely Excerpts

Tuesday 26th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Alistair Burt]

No, I will not. There is plenty to do in relation to this without me setting out any red lines that may or may not be extant.

[Mr Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)]

9. What progress his Department has made on the global Britain agenda.

[The Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Boris Johnson)]

Global Britain is about being open, outward-looking and engaged with the world so as to maximise our influence, and I give the House the clearest recent example of that: the 28 countries that joined us in sympathetically expelling 153 Russian spies.

[Mr Seely]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that this is the perfect opportunity for us to fundamentally rethink our foreign policy post-Brexit, and that more work could be done on the idea of global Britain to ensure that we have a foreign policy fit for the 21st century?

[Boris Johnson]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and that is why we have responded to the challenges that the world presents us with today by increasing our diplomatic staff by another 250 diplomats, in addition to the 100 that we added to our European strength, and we are opening 10 new sovereign posts in the Caribbean and the Pacific, with more to come in Africa.

Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Bill [Lords]

Bob Seely Excerpts

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Tuesday 1st May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Dame Margaret Hodge]

I simply draw the attention of the hon. and learned Gentleman to what his Government stated in 2012 in the White Paper. In that White Paper, they set out the fact that they were jealously guarding their right to legislate as and when that became appropriate. That is what his Government said in 2012.

[Mr Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)]

On a point of record, I believe that that was in our previous two manifestos, so I am not quite sure why we, on the Government Benches, are arguing on this point.

[Dame Margaret Hodge]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention.

For the sake of clarity, let me just say that, in the past, Conservatives have used this power when they legislated to ensure that capital punishment was abolished in all our overseas territories. A Labour Government used the power to ensure that we brought to an end discrimination on the grounds of sexuality in our overseas territories. One of us—I never remember which—used the power to intervene in the Turks and Caicos when there were problems with the administration of governance.

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[Sir Henry Bellingham]

My right hon. and learned Friend the Father of the House is, as ever, very wise. I want to proceed on a pragmatic, staged basis, and I think we could have come together on the Government’s compromise, had it been tabled in good time.

[Mr Seely]

Would not just waiting until everyone else moves show a lack of leadership on our part?

[Sir Henry Bellingham]

That is a fair point, and those of us who have been supporting the Government loyally on this and working with them accept that it is a weakness in the argument. If we set an example, we hope that other people will follow. I hope that when the Minister winds up he will say how we will try to influence other countries and jurisdictions to follow this example.

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[Catherine West]

Indeed. And I hope that the challenge will be met to reduce inequality in housing in Scotland, because I know that a very small number of people own rather a lot of properties.

On the role of other facilitators of tax evasion and avoidance and the big four accountancy firms, many Members feel it is time that they were brought to book. My right hon. Friend the Member for Barking has done a lot of work on that. The next stage is to try to clean up the City of London more effectively and to see the closure of certain poor practices, such as Mossack Fonseca and others. Yes, it was a one hit wonder, but we did see the closure of a number of underperforming legal practices. The next step of this campaign is how to allow the pin-striped enforcers of tax evasion and avoidance to have a more honest and equal way of practising their profession.

That is all I want to say. It is so good to see consensus in the House today.

[Mr Seely]

It is a privilege to follow the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Catherine West).

I believe that the fight to improve the integrity of our financial system and to do what we can to reduce money laundering is critical in the fight against not only corruption but the malign influence of authoritarian states. I very much welcome the work done by my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) and the right hon. Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge). I felt very proud to agree to rebel against the Government— I am quite glad I did not have to—but nevertheless, I thank them for that amendment.

On the point about corruption and the malign influence of others, the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne), the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant), the right hon. Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw), my hon. Friend the Member for Gravesham (Adam Holloway) and I have been shown documents that we believe relate to our national security and money laundering. They originate from Monaco’s Sûreté Publique, the police department that manages security and foreign residents in that area. They are based on the Sûreté Publique’s own information and on information provided by the French Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire—the DST—which at the time, was the French equivalent of MI5.

These documents are brief, terse, factual files, listing activities, associations and judicial actions. They have been authenticated by senior French intelligence sources and by British and American counterparts familiar with their contents. The documents link a noted individual in this country with Russian intelligence. These files are dated from 2005 and cover the period from the mid-1990s. The documents concern Christopher Chandler and his brother—Christopher Chandler is a public figure, owing to the Legatum Institute. In citing this evidence, I note the words of the right hon. Member for Exeter, who in November 2017 called for the House’s Intelligence and Security Committee to examine Mr Chandler.

According to the French security services, as recorded by their colleagues in Monaco—and clearly, I am confident that these documents are genuine—Mr Chandler is described as having been

“an object of interest to the DST since 2002 on suspicion of…working for the Russian intelligence services.”

I repeat:

“an object of interest to the DST since 2002 on suspicion of…working for the Russian intelligence services.”

[Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)]

As the hon. Gentleman rightly said, I first raised concerns about Legatum and Mr Chandler back in November. Does he agree that the information that he has just put in the public domain, combined with the growing concern about corruption, money laundering and the sale of passports in Malta, where Chandler has just acquired citizenship, demands urgent investigation by the UK authorities now?

[Mr Seely]

I am most grateful for that intervention. I am aware that the right hon. Gentleman has seen these documents and that he shares my concerns. I believe that the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill, should he have the privilege of being called to speak, will talk further on that point and make reference to these files.

Christopher Chandler’s personal file is marked “File code S”, a DST marker indicating, if I understand correctly, a high or higher level of threat to France. In France, the letter “S” is now used to designate radical Islam. In Monaco then, it was used to designate counter-espionage. As I have said, Mr Speaker, I believe that other Members, if you wish to call them, may cite further details—the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill, the hon. Member for Rhondda, the right hon. Member for Exeter or my hon. Friend the Member for Gravesham.

I wish to state explicitly that I make no criticism of the staff at Legatum, nor those people who have engaged with its charitable work, nor members of the public, nor, clearly, Members of this House who have dealt with this institution. I have thought long and hard before making this statement, but I have done so because I believe, and the five of us believe, that it is in the national interest to do so. If people like Mr Chandler are vulnerable to malign influence—maybe he is an innocent party in this, who knows?—especially if the information on them is covert, that matters to our democracy.

In November 2017, the Prime Minister highlighted the danger from Russia of subversion. I take my lead from her when she said that the Russian regime was trying to “undermine free societies”. I also read the excellent piece in The Sunday Times this weekend looking at how Russian bots may have manipulated elections. One of the problems in elections is that if they are manipulated successfully, the winning side does not want to know and the losers plead sour grapes, so the answer is to do what we can to strengthen our electoral system before it is too late.

[Chris Bryant]

I commend the hon. Gentleman for what he has said and fully concur with what he has argued—I have seen the papers as well and I have come to the same conclusion as him. Does he think that the Magnitsky clause will make a significant difference in our being able to tackle this kind of hidden pervasive influence in British society and British politics?

[Mr Seely]

Anything that helps us is important because we need to keep our society free of covert and malign influence. I was in the States last week, as the hon. Gentleman knows, and I am working with Congressmen there and in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, so that we can combine best practice. That is important because a counter-propaganda Bill is going through the United States Congress—do we need that here, etc.?

If I see information of this kind, I have a choice: I can disregard it and become complicit or, if it is genuine, I can put it in the public domain. It might be that Committees will wish to have access to this information, and I suspect that those who have it will provide it to any of the six Committees investigating Russia, if they wish to do so. It might be that Mr Chandler can provide a satisfactory explanation or argue that these relationships, if they existed, are now historical or have been misrepresented in the documents. I do not use privilege lightly, Mr Speaker. He might wish to offer evidence, written or oral, to any of those six Committees, whose work I am supporting, in a modest way, as secretary to the Russia steering group. I look forward to his response— I am quite sure there will be one.

I will be writing to the Prime Minister in the coming weeks to suggest further measures to strengthen our democracy and electoral system. The struggle of our generation is how we deal with authoritarian states and their actors, official or proxy, who use free and open societies to damage those free and open societies. We need to do something about it. Increasingly, Members now see that covert malign influence from authoritarian states, most commonly our friends in the Kremlin but also elsewhere, is a real and present danger to our nation, to our financial system—hence this debate—and to the transparency of our democracy and electoral system, not to mention the Kremlin’s ability to conduct acts of violence and murder on our soil. We have a duty to speak up and to use this House for the public good. That is what I am doing now.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

Syria: De-escalation Zones

Bob Seely Excerpts

Monday 26th February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Boris Johnson]

Unfortunately, I am afraid that I cannot tell the hon. Lady about any contact between this Government and President Putin over the past few days. I certainly have not had any myself, but as I told the House, the Russian ambassador has been invited to come, and contact has certainly been made with Sergei Lavrov—[Interruption.] I will just make this point to the hon. Lady. In the end, there must be a political solution to this crisis, and it is up to the Russians to deliver their client. That is the best way forward.

[Mr Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)]

I thank the hon. Member for Barrow and Furness (John Woodcock) for bringing this urgent question to the House. As far back as 2017, the United Nations said that the Syrian regime had used chemical weapons on more than two dozen occasions. Would my right hon. Friend now concede that, sadly, due to their regular use over the past few years, chemical munitions are now an accepted weapon of war in the modern era?

[Boris Johnson]

No, I do not think that anybody in this House would want to concede that. We do not concede that chemical weapons are an acceptable weapon of war, and we want those who use them to be held properly to account.

Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Bill [Lords]

Bob Seely Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Tuesday 20th February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Alex Norris), who spoke so eloquently. I welcome the Bill, but like so many other Members who have spoken this evening, I think we should be doing more.

It is not in our interests to have lax standards. It is in our interests to have the highest standards, which I know the Foreign Secretary and others are trying to achieve. The Bill is not just about finance; it is about power. Our finance system—the western finance system—is a source of power. Russian and Chinese oligarchs, and especially the Russians, use our finance system. That gives us influence over them. This is not just about terrorists, dodgy individuals or drug dealers. This is about changing and influencing state behaviour. I very much hope that Ministers will see it in that guise. With new forms of conflict in the world that we inhabit, financial power is a hard bit of soft power. The power to make rich people poor by freezing their assets should not be underestimated because it is a significant source of our influence.

Other Members, such as my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), have spoken eloquently about the lack of Magnitsky elements in the Bill, which concerns me. There are no visa bans in the Finance Bill amendments, and there is no presumption of action. I remind Members that Magnitsky was a Russian lawyer who worked for Bill Browder. He was tortured for several months and murdered, and his dead body was put on trial. That is remarkable, even by Russian standards. It would be nice if the Government had more ambition when it came to the Magnitsky elements of either the Finance Bill or this Bill.

The idea that weak or lax standards help the UK to compete in international money markets and international economies is deeply misguided. We are in danger of wagging our fingers at people like the Russians while allowing their state officials, people close to their regime and those on sanctions lists a free light to live here and use the western system.

EN+ was floated recently in the City. It has been reported that US security officials were concerned about the float and raised issues about it, as it may have been used to pay off loans to VTB, a Russian state-owned bank that is subject to sanctions. If that is the case, I would love Ministers to explain to me why it is a wise move effectively to turn a blind eye while the Russians play the sanctions process that we have put on them.

I will touch briefly on the offshore problem. I congratulate Private Eye on the work it has done in recent years to highlight the effects and the extent of offshore vehicles in the UK. When even in a place such as the Isle of Wight we have property owned by companies based in the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Jersey, Guernsey, Luxembourg or Gibraltar, the system is flawed. Lax standards are corrupting for our country and our financial system and it is short-sighted to see it otherwise; I am sure Ministers will agree. When houses in Belgravia and Hampstead are used as glorified Rolexes for the international kleptocracy, we are getting something wrong.

I very much hope that the Minister will pledge to continue to make aspects of the Bill tighter, consider what can be done about the missing Magnitsky elements and make a commitment to having the highest standards in the Bill, rather than following others.

Ukraine

Bob Seely Excerpts

Wednesday 20th December 2017 Westminster Hall

[Mr Whittingdale]

The military hospital we visited is one of the main ones in Dnipro, and it is under tremendous stress. The people living in occupied east Ukraine are struggling to survive, in terms of both basic necessities like healthcare, which the hon. Gentleman mentioned, and things such as pension payments. The Ukrainian Government are attempting still to provide support to those people, but in terribly difficult circumstances, which is contributing to the humanitarian crisis.

The UK gives support to Ukraine; I understand it is in the order of £42 million, from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Department for International Development, but to be honest it is not enough. I hope that we look again at increasing our financial aid, particularly for humanitarian purposes.

We also need to step up the diplomatic effort; the Foreign Secretary is going to Moscow this weekend, and I know that my right hon. Friend the Minister has only recently returned from Moscow. We first need to urge Russia to abide by the terms of the Minsk II agreement; I very much echo what my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (John Howell) said about that. We need to allow proper monitoring by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe and the removal of all foreign-armed formations, military equipment and mercenaries, as set out in Minsk II.

In particular, I hope my right hon. Friend the Minister will condemn Russia’s recent decision to withdraw from the Joint Centre for Control and Coordination, which is a direct violation of Minsk II and will also increase the risk to the OSCE monitors there. I hope my right hon. Friend will raise that, or will ask the Foreign Secretary to raise it during his visit. As I said, I believe that Ukraine deserves our support, but that support has to be accompanied by further reform. It is a sad truth that, as in most post-Soviet countries, corruption is still endemic in Ukraine, although I recognise that Ukraine is only a 25-year-old state.

[Mr Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend is right to say that corruption in Ukraine is endemic. However, to give that some context, it is also true that corruption has been a deliberate policy of the Russian state, in order to hollow out the Ukrainian state and to undermine and subvert Ukrainian statehood. Does he agree that that is an important point to understand?

[Mr Whittingdale]

That is a very important point and I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. He is more knowledgeable than I on Russian hybrid warfare, and this is undoubtedly a component. I am sure he will say a little more about that in his contribution.

While there are still big problems, we should recognise that progress has been made. In the last three or four years, the Ukrainian Government have set up three institutions to tackle corruption—the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office and the National Agency for Prevention of Corruption—which have brought something like 319 proceedings.

The Ukrainian Government have also brought in an advanced electronic system for the disclosure of assets, income and expenditure of public officials and politicians, which has led to 910,000 declarations from top officials. I have to say that I have seen the declaration requirements on Ukrainian MPs, and they go considerably further than the declaration requirements on Members of this House. There have also been reforms to public procurement.

However, while progress is being made, there are worrying signs that it is now stalling. While proceedings have been brought against public officials, none have really come to a conclusion; indeed, most are stuck somewhere in the judicial system. An anti-corruption court, which is an essential part of the reform package, has yet to be put in place. We heard on our visit to a non-governmental organisation, Reanimation Package of Reforms, that something like 25% of the recent appointments to the Supreme Court, which has been newly established with a fresh set of judges, failed the integrity test.

There is huge frustration among the people of Ukraine that no one has really been brought to justice, either for the crimes committed during the Maidan or for the massive theft of public assets that has been going on for many years. Most recently, and perhaps most worryingly, Reanimation Package of Reforms has identified the fact that the National Anti-Corruption Bureau has been attacked in Parliament, with attempts to curtail its operation through legislation. Its operations have also been disrupted by the Ukrainian security services, which are probably acting on behalf of the Government.

Those are worrying signs, and we must press the Ukrainian Government to continue with their reform package. That is essential if the Government are to re-establish confidence in Ukraine, which will unlock the investment that will give it an economically viable future.

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[Mr Seely]

Is my hon. Friend aware that the pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine have more tanks than the British and French armies, and has he any idea where they may have got those tanks from?

[Mr Djanogly]

I was aware, but that fact needs to be well publicised; it is not known widely enough.

We must also be welcoming here to Ukrainians. The Schengen area has just awarded visa liberalisation to Ukraine. I accept that that is unlikely in the UK until we know where we stand post Brexit, but the bitter complaints that I heard from Ukrainians about the lack of efficiency in the existing process demand a review now.

The other key issue that came up during our visit related to the development of Ukrainian civil society. At this point, let me recognise that that is a different society from our own. Ukraine suffered greatly under communism; and, with its early-stage capitalist, oligarch-controlled economy, it is prone to corruption and political stagnation, in a way that can be unnerving and sometimes shocking to many of us in the west.

Reforms are being made, not least to liberalise and regulate the economy, and that has sometimes led to hardship for people—for instance, in relation to energy prices. However, it was made clear to us by many whom we met that although the Ukrainian Government keep saying that change must be gradual, large numbers of Ukrainians are getting impatient with the slow state of reform. I did not get the feeling that that will result in another Maidan-scale revolt at the current time, but it will be important that we do what we can to encourage accelerated reform.

By the way, I was very impressed by our embassy’s resolve and action to do exactly that. Let me recognise also that there are a number of excellent, reform-minded new and younger Ukrainian MPs, who see a better future for their country and are determined to fight for that future. We also saw some very impressive reforms, not least the local government and police permit one-stop shops, where permits can be applied for under one roof: because the issuing department does not directly interface with the applicant, corruption is largely stopped. So credit where credit is due.

It does sometimes seem, however, that it is one step forward and then one step back. The appointment of new Supreme Court judges was for the most part seen by civil society activists whom we met as a win against corruption, but reports came through a few days ago concerning the attempted suppression of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine and its head Artem Sytnyk, which points badly. Given the problems with corruption, I would say that establishing a system of anti-corruption courts and ensuring clean judges for them should be a priority for Ukraine next year. Those concerns are shared by the EU, the US, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. If we are to help Ukraine, we must also insist that Ukraine help itself. Of one thing I am convinced, however: this is our continent, and Ukraine’s battles are our battles and part of the UK’s future. We should not be neglecting them.

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[Mr Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)]

I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale) for calling this debate. To give a bit of background, I lived in the former Soviet Union and then Ukraine from 1990 to 1994. I have been conducting academic research into Russian warfare on and off since, and in the last couple of years I have made four or five trips to Kiev and to the east of the country to interview academics, soldiers and other people involved in the current conflict.

My right hon. Friend is correct to ask why we should care about Ukraine. It has had only a modest impact on our imagination and for much of the modern era it has been part of the Russian empire, although Ukrainians point to earlier periods in their history as proof of historic statehood, such as Kievan Rus’ and the republican, egalitarian Zaporizhian Cossack Host, the Hetmanate.

I think we should care about Ukraine for the following reasons. The creation of an independent Ukrainian state was probably the single most important thing that happened after—or accompanied—the collapse of the USSR. It removed from the Russian state a population of approximately 50 million people, its main agricultural base and one of its industrial and defence heartlands. It completed the journey towards statehood begun by the Ukrainians in the 19th century.

More broadly, in the east Slavic world there are three states: Russia, Belorussia and Ukraine. Russia is now an authoritarian state and its population is fed a daily diet of illiberal and anti-western propaganda. Belorussia, sadly, is an external colony of Russia and Russia’s recent troop movements into that state are likely to reinforce that. Then we have Ukraine. Out of the three, only Ukraine makes any real pretence at being anything approaching a functioning democracy. Ukraine is the only country in the east Slavic world that seeks a role as a European state within a European fraternity of nations. Ukraine is the only country in the east Slavic states with a civic society that is neither being actively oppressed nor co-opted by the state. In my mind, much depends on the future of that civic society.

There are undoubtedly problems. Post-Soviet corruption has been as endemic there as anywhere else. We under- estimate the appalling impact of socialist totalitarianism on the destruction of human societies; my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire (Mrs Latham) spoke about holodomor, the genocide of the Ukrainian peasantry, which is only one example.

However, it is worth pointing out that corruption has been fostered, in part, as a means of Russian subversion and control. The purpose and the intent of Russian activity in Ukraine, sadly, is to undermine Ukrainian statehood, and, indeed, a Ukrainian identity that exists separately from Russia. For many people in senior positions in the Kremlin, Ukrainian statehood and a Ukrainian identity separate from Russia is the cause of something approaching apoplexy, and touches significant raw nerves within the Russian psyche.

We see some of that Russian subversion in our own state, and I suspect we will be discussing it tomorrow, but in Ukraine—as various speakers have pointed out, including my hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon (Mr Djanogly), who spoke with great eloquence on this—they are subjected to a much greater degree of that pressure. That includes the compromising of individuals and classes, and the diet of media control and messaging, which is not just up-market PR, but a kind of violence against the mind, designed to demoralise and disorientate.

In Soviet days, such disinformation, espionage, sabotage and occasional assassination were known as “active measures.” We are still reaching for a new name; some of us are calling it “full-spectrum effects”. It is the combining of these active measures, which used to be run by the KGB and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, with other forms of violence, including conventional military work. Under President Yanukovych, for example, NATO assistance programs were halted, and the Ukrainian defence establishment hollowed out, which explains why the Ukrainians did so badly at the beginning of the war. Attempts were made to rewrite Ukrainian identity in new historical textbooks. Oil and gas were used as a means of control and bribery. Russian businesses were used to exert indirect control over the Ukrainian state.

On top of that, in the past few years since the Maidan revolution, we have had direct violence via proxies, some of which were local, but many of which have been controlled by the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation and the Glavnoye razvedyvatel’noye upravleniye—the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate. Pro-Russian demonstrators as well as violent thugs, the so-called Titushky, were used or bused in.

It is worth remembering that Russia’s plans at the time were ambitious and it was co-ordinating a series of uprisings in almost all the Russian speaking countries: Odessa, Nikolayev, Dnipro, Kharkiv and Zaporizhia. In many of these places the uprisings failed and were put down by the Ukrainians—not always particularly well, but they were. One should remember that outside Donetsk and Luhansk, the Russian attempts to subvert and undermine Ukrainian statehood largely failed. Crimea was clearly an exception to that as well.

There are some people who say, “Let’s understand Russia,” which I think is too often a code for appeasing Russia. I think one should always understand Russia, talk to Russians as much possible and engage with them, but I do think it is important to stand up to them and not appease them. If we appease them and effectively give them a sphere of influence within eastern Europe, there will be years and decades of instability, which will threaten us and cost us a great deal in time, effort and money. The peoples of countries such as Georgia and Ukraine, as my hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon pointed out, are not just pliable entities. They do not aspire to be under the thumb of the Russians. There is a direct link between democratising and the desire to move out of Russia’s orbit, to be part of the west, to be part of a global society, to be wealthy and to be free.

Russia’s response is too often to blame the west, fascism or the CIA, which runs the internet, blah, blah, blah; it is never to examine the reason why people would want to be out of the Russian yoke or to move away from what has historically been seen as brutal and somewhat arbitrary control. Russia’s response to this, as we have seen in Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine, is to increase the levels of destabilisation and violence to force countries back to accepting Russian suzerainty. However, there is hope. Many Ukrainians now see their future in the west. Vladimir Putin’s greatest achievement in the east Slavic world may be the creation of a single, Ukrainian political identity.

There is a grand bargain here. I very much encourage the Minister to consider it, although I suspect that the Government will not make it. That grand bargain is as follows. We spend vast sums in war zones and they have produced little; I have lost count of the number of ridiculous and failed DFID projects that I have patrolled past in Afghanistan and Iraq, which stand like monuments to the vanity liberal imperialism. There is an opportunity as part of this Marshall plan to offer significant funding and support for a country that is near us and the stability and prosperity which would yield not some generalised warm and fuzzy feeling, but significant geostrategic dividends in terms of peace, locking in the post-cold-war world and extending the EU’s influence.

I am a Brexiteer, but I accept that many people in eastern Europe look to Britain and the EU as models—I do not doubt that at all. We spend billions on Africa and ridiculous sums on the EU. Can we please spend some bilateral aid to do something that will significantly encourage stability in eastern Europe and specifically in Ukraine?

I will wind up in the next minute or two, as I am aware that others wish to speak. The quicker that Ukraine reforms, and it has been pitifully slow, the stronger it and its people will be, and the better able to resist Russian active measures Ukraine and eastern Europe will be. The Ukrainians need to help themselves, but I believe that as part of a grand bargain with that important strategic country there is much more that we could be doing.

I recommend greater involvement, including greater DFID involvement, and working with the EU, the US and our Canadian allies, who are very influential in Ukraine because of the Ukrainian diaspora—it is not only in Derby, but in many parts of the Canadian plains—to increase our leverage and to offer a grand bargain to the Ukrainians as part of a significant geopolitical victory in eastern Europe.