Ukraine

Debate between Bob Seely and Stewart Malcolm McDonald

Tuesday 26th April 2022 Commons Chamber

[Stewart Malcolm McDonald (Glasgow South) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for East Surrey (Claire Coutinho). Much of what she said was, of course, right. There were parts of it with which I did not agree, and we may return to those later, but what she said about the generosity of the public was entirely correct. That is reflected from Surrey to the south side of Glasgow, as Members would expect and, indeed, as my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss)—who is sitting beside me—knows.

Let me start with where I think the Government have got it right. I think they have got it especially right in terms of military support. We hear from President Zelensky that “weapons, weapons, weapons” are what will help him and his people to win this war, and Ukraine winning the war is actually what matters. It is fair to say that the Government have been leading on that front, and the hon. Member for East Surrey can indeed take some pride in the fact that that is recognised by the President and the Government of Ukraine. The official Opposition—together with me, as my party’s defence spokesperson, my hon. Friend the Member for Stirling (Alyn Smith) as our foreign affairs spokesperson, and indeed the First Minister of Scotland—have been on the same page, along with our leader here at Westminster, my right hon. Friend the Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford). Weapons, weapons, weapons are what will help Ukraine to defeat Russia on its territory.

There is a growing mood in Ukraine, a wish not just to push back against the aggression that we have seen from the current wave of the conflict. I have noticed a couple of references to the war having started in February this year, but of course it did not; it started in 2014.

[Bob Seely]

The hon. Gentleman is making a good case about when the war started, but there is another good case for suggesting—given the hybrid, integrated approach to warfare that Russia has in its doctrine—that it started in about 2004 or 2005, after the orange revolution, although the violent and paramilitary aspects became more visible after 2014.

[Stewart Malcolm McDonald]

My fellow member of the Foreign Affairs Committee is most learned in these affairs, and I completely agree with everything that he has just said. What we will see, not just in Ukraine but around the western world, is an intensification of those other elements of the Russian warfare doctrine, such as cyber disinformation and the use of private military contractors.

Afghanistan

Debate between Bob Seely and Stewart Malcolm McDonald

Wednesday 18th August 2021 Commons Chamber

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

This is a difficult and upsetting debate, and I am not quite sure why. It may be because some of the people I knew are now dead and because I do not think that some of the things that are being said are true. I want to set the record straight and, in the short time I have, correct some of the false assumptions that are being made and also make a few observations. I pay tribute to the many hon. Members who have made excellent speeches, especially the Chairman of Foreign Affairs Committee and the Chairman of the Defence Committee, whose speeches were incredibly good.

What has happened is an appalling and unnecessary self-inflicted wound. We are being presented with a choice: invest more blood and treasure or walk away. No: we had a steady state, give or take, in Afghanistan for the last few years, and the mission was a train, equip and mentor one. It was large, but for between 5,000 and 20,000 troops, contractors, special forces and so on who were there, it was smaller than many NATO/US bases and missions around the world. We have chosen to withdraw politically; we have not been forced to do so on security grounds. I think we will regret that decision for many years.

The collapse happened because a truly dreadful US President, Donald Trump, who was probably in hock to the Russians, dealt with the Taliban behind the Afghan Government’s back—a shocking betrayal. Joe Biden, who admires Kennedy—we had some great quotes from Kennedy earlier—could have changed things. He has chosen not to and has opened the United States, Europe, India and many allies throughout the world to considerable terrorist risks from the 2,500 to 4,000 jihadi nut jobs—pardon my French—who are currently being released from Bagram, Kandahar and Kabul. When they have stopped slaughtering our friends and beheading a few key women journalists, they will turn their attention to us. We have walked away from a successful anti-terrorist operation after 20 years. Sooner or later, we will reap the rewards.

Many people have said that the Afghans did not fight. I was in Afghanistan four times over seven months, not on long tours—four months, two months and a few weeks. In my experience, many Afghans fought very hard. At first, yes, there was an uneven flow of recruits to the police, but I had the privilege of patrolling in Nad-e-Ali north with a small team. Those people were remarkable. When we went into a village, they would tell us from where the Taliban were watching us—which haystack, which bund line. They would tell us that the motor cycle repair man had to work for the Taliban because his wife and children were under threat. They also told us that they would happily take their daughters to school, but asked why they should when there was not enough security to prevent them from being raped and abducted on the way home. Sometimes it was difficult to give them an answer that reassured.

In many ways, those people were a model of courageous integrity. They were effective and efficient, they loved their country and they knew right from wrong. They are probably dead. If they were not killed a year ago, they will be finished off as we speak, and I find that upsetting.

[Stewart Malcolm McDonald (Glasgow South) (SNP)]

My hon. Friend from the Foreign Affairs Committee makes an excellent point, which has been made by a few others. He always looks at these things with a keen eye. Given what he has just said, is it not offensive that those people’s contribution has been swept away, particularly by the President in the past few days?

Global Britain

Debate between Bob Seely and Stewart Malcolm McDonald

Thursday 30th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Bob Seely]

Absolutely. In my very brief time at Sandhurst, I saw people who were there from foreign powers. That is a very important form of soft influence, along with our universities and higher colleges. In Shrivenham, there are many international students, especially in the higher courses. I thank my hon. Friend for making that point.

I want to add one thing to the debate about the necessity for strategy. Despite having a wealth of think-tanks that study strategy, I am not sure we have done it well enough in the past few decades. We have been too tied to the United States for its concept of strategic hard power, much of which we might agree with, and too tied to the European Union for our definition of soft power, through trade and so on. A global Britain would give us the chance to develop our own idea of how to combine hard and soft power when it comes to trade negotiations, the export of values, about which my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester spoke, and many other elements.

Many Members have spoken about the rules-based order, including my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) and the hon. Member for Putney (Fleur Anderson). There are now considerable threats to the rules-based order, not only from the rise of Russian authoritarianism but potentially from the rise of China under the leadership of the Chinese Communist party. I may well differ with my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester on some of these matters. I think he see many opportunities and some threats. I see many opportunities, but also many threats. We have to understand much better not only how we ourselves can project an integrated power, but how others are projecting an integrated power to us.

[Stewart Malcolm McDonald]

Is not one key element in this discussion, which does not get much political oversight, how China operates in different universities and the academic sector, not just here in the United Kingdom but throughout the western world? Could that not do with a bit more—oversight is maybe the wrong word—political and Government attention?

[Bob Seely]

I very much agree, and I thank the hon. Gentleman for that point. The Foreign Affairs Committee covered China’s role in universities in this country, but we need an understanding of how we use integrated strategy and how people use that strategy against us. For example, I suggested in the “Global Britain” study that we should think about rolling the Department for International Development and the Department for International Trade, as agencies, into the Foreign Office. People who prioritise DFID think that that cannot possibly be done, but we can still have the 0.7% and a significant aim for aid, while having those Departments as agencies within the Foreign Office to have greater integration between the different elements of power that one has at one’s disposal. That is just a suggestion. I am not saying that one should do it, but I think we need to think freely about the options we have. One would not want to copy Russian power, because it is very often used unethically and immorally, but its notion of integration is very important.

I want to say a few words about Huawei. I know I have, with my role as a Parliamentary Private Secretary in the Ministry of Defence, bent the rules slightly. I am very grateful to the Whips for their generosity in allowing me to talk about this issue in the past week or so. It falls under the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, but I have been talking to them extensively to make sure they are not too disappointed in my actions.

Huawei is probably the major strategic goal of China in the UK and Europe over the next five to 10 years. By that, what I mean is that China’s strategic goal, with its Made in China 2025 and Digital Belt and Road initiatives, is to become dominant in the cyber space. That presents potential opportunities, but also very significant threats. I am concerned that in the past 15 years, Huawei, which is an arm of the Chinese state—let us be under no illusion about that—has built up a potentially dominant position in many countries. That presents significant problems and threats to us, and I would just like to rehearse some of the arguments. I do so in part because this will come back and be a focus of discussion here, certainly for the next month or six weeks as the Government seek to put through secondary, and potentially primary, legislation.

First, there is a claim that Huawei is a private firm. In no meaningful sense is that correct, as we would understand it. The company is 99% owned by a Chinese trade union, and Chinese trade unions are part of the one-party state. To follow up on what the hon. Member for Glasgow South (Stewart Malcolm McDonald) said, I think we need a better understanding of non-democratic systems. We tend to assume that the rest of the world is a little bit like us in different ways. I lived in a one-party state, the Soviet Union, before its collapse, and I am glad I did. One-party states are functionally different. For us, the rule of law is given the highest rank. In one-party states, the rule of the party is given the highest rank, and the rule of law is ranked somewhat lower. So party comes before law in such countries, in a way that it simply does not in democratic states. That goes to the heart of the question of being a non-trusted vendor and a high-risk vendor. I will develop that argument in a minute, if I may, although I will be conscious and respectful of Members’ time.

Huawei is not a private firm; it is 99% owned by a trade union, and trade unions are part of the Chinese state. Considering that previous Secretaries of State have described Huawei as a private company, is the UK Government’s position that they believe Huawei to be a private firm, or do they accept that it is part and parcel of the Chinese state? I will probably write a letter to the various Secretaries of State to follow that up, because I think it is important.

My second point is about the idea that we can limit Huawei to the periphery of the network. That is key to Government plans, and I think it is highly questionable. The Government say that there is a way of managing the risk through network design, but many other countries say that that cannot be done. Mike Burgess, the director general of Australia’s version of GCHQ, said that

“the distinction between core and edge collapses in 5G networks. That means that a potential threat anywhere in the network will be a threat to the whole network”.

I will quote some other experts whom I have talked to. One told me:

“Basic cybersecurity principles tell you that one vulnerability or weakness in the system threatens the entirety of the system.”

I would like to know whether the Government think we can build out threat in our network design.

As regards the core versus edge arguments, many experts argue that proposed solutions based on segmentation between functions are

“yesterday’s perspective on tomorrow’s problem.”

Such experts argue that it is not possible to segment 5G as we could with 3G and 4G, because some of the core functions will be pushed to the edge. As the architecture moves on, those core functions will be stretched across the network via virtualisation and intensification of active features of radio access network equipment. Another expert said:

“Many…core functions have to move close to the edge in order for 5G to offer the benefits it does”—

that is, latency and speed.

I was reading an article in The Strategist, a magazine put together by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. The article was written by one of the magazine’s cyber experts who formerly worked at Australia’s version of GCHQ, and who said:

“I was part of the team in the Australian Signals Directorate that tried to design a suite of cybersecurity controls that would give the government confidence that hostile intelligence services could not leverage their national vendors”—

Huawei—

“to gain access to our 5G networks. We developed pages of cybersecurity mitigation measures to see if it was possible to prevent a sophisticated state actor from accessing our networks through a vendor. But we failed.”

--- Later in debate ---

[Bob Seely]

I look forward to debating this fully, especially when I am no longer a PPS. I think there are justifiable questions, and we need collectively to think very carefully about this decision.

[Stewart Malcolm McDonald]

I cannot believe that I am agreeing with the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone), but his assessment is right. What the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) has just described is the Government willingly bringing us a digital Dunkirk.

[Bob Seely]

Let me be fair to this Government. They have not been in power for long and we have had 15 years of Huawei effectively coming into our country by subterfuge. I think there is a role for foreign lobbying, but it is doing damage and we need a foreign lobbying Act, which I hope to work on. To be fair to this and the previous Government, their telecoms review at least tries to bring order to something that has been driven by a price-dumping strategy. I will come on to that later. I want to make progress so that I do not talk for any more than another five minutes.