Appointment of Lord Lebedev

Debate between Brendan O'Hara and Stewart Hosie

Tuesday 29th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Brendan O’Hara (Argyll and Bute) (SNP)]

I shall heed the warning about moderation and good temper, which I am sure my SNP colleagues would say is in my DNA and runs through me like the writing in a stock of rock. Should I stray, I am sure that you would bring me back into line, Madam Deputy Speaker.

I was fascinated by the start of the Minister’s speech and I tried to intervene, but he would not take my multiple attempts to do so. When he got to his feet, he began by questioning the appropriateness of the Opposition holding such a debate on this topic. Literally minutes before he questioned how appropriate it was, Lord Lebedev said:

“There’s a war in Europe”—

hon. Members will recognise the phrase—

“Britain is facing the highest cost of living since the 1950s. And you choose to debate me based on no facts and pure innuendo.”

That was precisely the Minister’s opening gambit, which prompts the question: did he write the Minister’s speech or did the Minister write his tweet?

That assertion was absurd, because we have come to learn, often through painful experience in this place, that when this Government and this Prime Minister assure us that there is nothing to see, it is wise to keep looking. That is why we fully support the motion and why, when the House divides, we will vote for the Government to hand over all documents, all minutes of meetings and all electronic communications containing or relating to the advice that they received about the appointment of Evgeny Lebedev to the House of Lords.

I reiterate in the strongest possible terms that today’s debate is absolutely not about being Russophobic, as the Minister would shamefully have us believe. He said that to try to throw up a smokescreen cover for his beleaguered Prime Minister, and it does the Prime Minister and this House no service whatever to try to suggest otherwise. As has been said many, many times in this Chamber, our fight is not with the ordinary Russian citizen, but with Putin, his political leadership in the Kremlin and his friends, including the oligarch billionaires who have plundered Russia’s wealth and resources and shipped them overseas, all too often to the UK and the City of London. Once they were in the UK, those billionaire oligarchs found many people in business and politics who, in return for their slice of the cake, were only too willing to facilitate the kleptocracy by hiding the oligarchs’ plunder for them while providing them with what they desired most: a cloak of respectability.

The UK’s willingness to welcome vast amounts of Russian money with very few questions asked about the source of that wealth means that there are now many Russians with close links to Putin who are very well integrated into the UK and who simply, because of that enormous wealth, have attained significant influence among the UK’s business, social and political elites.

Since this Prime Minister came into office in 2019, £2.3 million of Russian-linked cash has been funnelled directly into the Conservative party. That has happened to such an extent that even the Intelligence and Security Committee raised serious concerns about undue influence being sought and, indeed, gained by friends of President Putin with the UK governing party.

That influence of dirty Russian money has not gone unnoticed abroad. Professor Sadiq Isah Radda, the most senior adviser to Nigeria’s President on all matters of anti-corruption, described London as

“the most notorious safe haven for looted funds in the world today”.

That is where we currently are in the world standings.

In January this year, as Putin prepared to invade Ukraine, the Centre for American Progress warned the City of London that

“uprooting Kremlin-linked oligarchs will be a challenge given the close ties between Russian money and the United Kingdom’s ruling Conservative party, the press, and its real estate and financial industry”.

It was always going to be the case that when Putin finally did unleash his illegal war in Ukraine, the UK would be forced to look at our role and how we have facilitated his gangster regime.

[Stewart Hosie]

My hon. Friend will have noticed that the Minister described the motion as a misuse of powers, implied that it would impede the Prime Minister in his constitutional role and argued that it is about a witch hunt against a single person. Is the truth not that the motion is about allowing us to understand whether or not the process of appointment has been corrupted? As my hon. Friend has mentioned Russian money, can he throw some light on why the Minister has doubled down on those ridiculous arguments?

[Brendan O’Hara]

Perhaps the Minister could reply for himself. I have no idea why he would double down on those ridiculous arguments.

My right hon. Friend is right that this is not about an individual. It is about a corruption of process, and that was always going to lead us to a re-examination of the Prime Minister’s decision to send Evgeny Lebedev to the House of Lords for philanthropy and services to the media, as he put it. As we have heard, Mr Lebedev is a Russian businessman who derives his enormous wealth from his father, Alexander Lebedev, a former London-based KGB spy turned oligarch who still has investments in illegally occupied Crimea. At the start of this month, The New York Times said of Evgeny:

“Nobody is a better example of the cozy ties between Russians and the establishment than Mr. Lebedev.”

Just how cosy that relationship is can be seen from the fact that the British Prime Minister personally campaigned for a peerage to turn plain old Evgeny into Baron Lebedev, of Hampton in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames and of Siberia in the Russian Federation, for the rest of his life.

I could go on about the absurdity of the House of Lords—the absurdity of a so-called democratic Parliament having an unelected upper Chamber into which family chieftains, high-ranking clerics of one denomination, failed and retired politicians and those with deep pockets who are prepared to bankroll a political party are thrust—but I will resist.