National Security and Russia

Chris Bryant Excerpts

Monday 26th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

As I am sure my hon. Friend will know, the question whether there are certain media outlets such as broadcasters operating here in the UK, and the licence under which they operate, is a matter for Ofcom as an independent body.

We are also cracking down on illicit and corrupt finance, bringing all the capabilities of UK law enforcement to bear against serious criminals and corrupt elites, neither of whom have any place in our country.

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

The Prime Minister clearly knew that I was going to intervene the moment she mentioned finance. May I suggest two things that she could do which I think would make a dramatic difference and that so far the Government have been reluctant to do? The first of those is a full review of the tier 1 investor visa whereby £2 million has merely to be handed over and is not necessarily checked to get residency rights in the UK. The second is making sure that the register of beneficial ownership of trusts, which many Russians use to hide their finances in this country, is public.

[The Prime Minister]

As I indicated in the previous debate on the statement, my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary is looking at the question of the tier 1 investor visa and its operation. The hon. Gentleman refers to some of the specific work that we have been doing. As he will know, we have already taken, and are taking, some steps that are world-leading in relation to some of the registers and their transparency, particularly in relation to property. Of course, we continue to look at any further steps we can take in this area.

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[Jeremy Corbyn]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.

We hope that that will make it easier for the Government to strengthen the resolve of our allies around the world to strengthen the co-ordinated response. To that end, I wonder if the Prime Minister could tell us later when she expects—[Interruption.] Well, then the Foreign Secretary will be in a position to reply to us, with his normal due diligence and care, about the results of the OPCW tests being undertaken at the moment. If he could give us the answer later on this evening, after my right hon. Friend the Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) has spoken, I would be very grateful. Does he agree that this attack serves as a stark reminder of how important it is to properly enforce the chemical weapons convention and to ensure that the OPCW has all the resources it needs, both political and financial, to do its job effectively?

[Chris Bryant]

I commend the Leader of the Opposition for what he said earlier today. One of the horrible ironies of the way that the Russians have done their business over recent years is that they have sought the soft underbelly of British society—the strengths of fair play, the rule of law and all the rest—to try to target the way we do our business in this country. I met Marina Litvinenko last week, and she said, “One of the most sensible things you could do if you can’t get a proper trial,” which is what we would all want, “is some kind of judicial inquiry into the events in Salisbury.” Does my right hon. Friend support that?

[Jeremy Corbyn]

That is a very helpful suggestion. Again, my hon. Friend has taken a long-term and serious interest in human rights issues in Russia and the large sums of Russian money that have turned up, particularly in London.

My question to the Foreign Secretary is: what are the Government doing through the United Nations to make sure that the OPCW has the resources and support that it needs?

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[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

I warmly commend everything that the right hon. Member for Sevenoaks (Sir Michael Fallon) has just said, not least his final point that Russia only respects strength. In all honesty, I think that that could be made a bit more personal: I think that President Putin only respects strength. Indeed, when President Obama tried to press the reset button with Russia, he got absolutely nothing out of it, because President Putin simply took everything that he had and gave nothing back. Now we see that President Putin seems to be committed to some kind of arms race with the west as well. Indeed, he announced that just before what he calls a general election, although it is not really a general election in the sense that any of us would understand.

I think that we need to set this whole debate in the context of everything else that is true about Putin’s Russia now. The human rights abuses are endless. I find the murder of so many journalists in particular deeply offensive, especially when there have been absolutely no attempts to pursue those responsible. The most famous name is Anna Politkovskaya, but there are many others as well. There is also the repeated use of excessive force, whether it is in response to the Beslan siege in the school or the Moscow theatre siege, or in response to other abuses and political dissidents in Chechnya. Putin’s immediate response is excessive violence, and I think that that is what we saw on the streets of Salisbury as well. There are also the rigged elections.

[Alex Chalk]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that there is not just excessive violence, but excessive dishonesty? The instinctive response of the Russian regime was to lie about the invasion of Ukraine, just as it lied about MH17, and that is of particular concern.

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[Chris Bryant]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. In relation to Ukraine, however, what angered me more than anything else, in a sense, was the fact that the whole point of the Budapest accord was that all who signed up to it, including Russia and the United Kingdom, were guaranteeing the territorial integrity of Ukraine so that it would surrender its nuclear weapons. I suspect that if that had not happened, Putin would not subsequently have gone into Ukraine.

That is precisely the sort of long-term, deliberate pattern of lying and territorial ambition that I think is characteristic of the man—let alone the murder of political opponents such as Boris Nemtsov, and the trials that, in so many instances, do not even attempt to pretend to be fair. I went to Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s second trial, which was clearly being run by a martinet of a judge who was simply taking orders directly from the Kremlin. Most extraordinarily, the criminal justice system is now being used in Russia to prosecute Sergei Magnitsky after his death. I sometimes think that those in the Putin regime want to believe that they are in a satire, because that is a way of cocking a snook at the rest of the world just to point out how much centralised power the regime has.

But even more disturbing in a sense for those who care about Russia and her people is the state of the economy: there have been dramatic cuts to the salaries and pensions of public sector workers in recent years; the average wage has fallen; and as for the death rate, people are dying younger now than they used to, which is an extraordinary phenomenon in a modern economy. The Russian economy was proclaimed some 10 years ago as one of the BRIC economies that was going to be the future of the world, growing and all the rest of it, but it is now stagnating, because it is to all intents and purposes a “monogorod”, an economy based on a single industry: petrocarbons. Russia’s economic growth rate is languishing at 1.2%. We might be having growth of only 1.2%, but an economy at its level in the world needs to be on 5%, 6%, 7% and 8% if it is not going to completely stagnate as a country and gross inequalities are not going to get worse.

What the Russians should have done for the last 10 years was build on their phenomenal human capital, because Russia is one of the most educated countries in the world, and tackle the corruption. Unfortunately, they have instead built on the corruption and tackled the education, so there is now a massive brain-drain of clever Russians leaving for elsewhere, and Russia has fallen further down the transparency list, as one of countries around the world with increasing corruption.

I personally find one of the most bizarre elements of the whole Putin charade his personal and his regime’s utter obsession with homosexuality. For a man who seems to like taking his shirt off more than any other political leader, that strikes me as phenomenally bizarre. [Interruption.] I gather he also likes Abba; what can I say?

What should the British response be both to this present situation and also to everything we have seen over recent years, as this is part of a pattern and should be seen as such? Some say we should tackle the Russian money that is swashing around in Britain, much of which might be dirty, and some say we should adopt a more robust political and defence posture. I think we need to do both. I know some are reluctant to tackle the financial issues and some are reluctant to tackle the defence issues, but we must do the two in harmony, which is in essence what the right hon. Member for Sevenoaks was saying.

[Stewart Malcolm McDonald]

On the defence side of what can be done, will the hon. Gentleman back the calls of myself and my hon. Friend the Member for West Dunbartonshire (Martin Docherty-Hughes) that we should ask our allies to stop allowing the Russian fleet to refuel in their ports?

[Chris Bryant]

Yes, and, indeed, one of the first things I did when I knew about the incident in Salisbury was check with the Spanish ambassador whether Spain is maintaining its posture of refusing to allow Russian boats to refuel in Ceuta, and indeed it is; it has been very strong on this and is absolutely resolute with us, as it has been for the last 10 years.

Turning to some of the financial aspects, earlier in the debate I asked the Prime Minister about the tier 1 investor visa. This has to all intents and purposes acted as a magnet for some Russians who want to place their money, beyond the grasping hands of others in Russia or in other domains, in the UK, and hardly any questions have been asked. I hope the Government will now do a full review of the tier 1 investor visa.

Secondly, trusts in this country and in the dependent territories are used as a means of obscuring from public view the real owners of major assets including land and property. That needs to end. I am happy for the trust system to remain, because in many ways it is a strong element of our financial system, but it must be fully transparent because otherwise it is far too easy for Russians to hide their money. I hope the Government will review this matter. They have been asked time and again whether they will consider making the beneficial ownership of trusts a public register, rather than one that is only available to the authorities. That would be valuable, because the public and journalists in this country have done a phenomenal job in recent years of managing to winkle out additional financial information that others might not choose to bother looking at.

We also need to bring in full financial transparency in the overseas territories. I know that the Minister who is going to be closing the debate agrees with this policy, and I hope this might be an opportunity to twist their arms a little further up their backs, because otherwise it is too easy for someone like Mr Deripaska to buy a property in London, only not really buy it but buy it via a trust based in the British Virgin Islands and have it completely obscured from view. Some of us were taken on the kleptocracy tour last week, including my hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman), who is sitting on the Labour Front Bench, and one of the interesting facts is that quite often Russians are now buying houses in the UK deliberately for grossly inflated prices as a means of laundering their money via a third party. I hope the authorities are investigating that.

Turning to the more defence-related elements that we need to address, we must have properly sceptical investigation by the police and all the authorities—if necessary, the counter-terrorism authorities as well—of the 14 deaths of Russians in the last few years which have been suspicious, and not just those in the last couple of weeks. It seems unlikely that anybody would choose not to investigate, but it still seems possible that that might have happened. We also need full-spectrum readiness—more counter-intelligence, and more cyber-security—and we must also stand very strong with our NATO allies and, as the right hon. Member for Sevenoaks said, we need to devote more than 2% of our national income to defence.

We can see this through, but we will only do so by being robust and firm and steady—rather than by flip-flopping.

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[Dan Carden (Liverpool, Walton) (Lab)]

I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak in the debate. I am from a generation that was born as the cold war ended. I am also from a generation that does not want another to begin.

Let me be clear: it is an outrage that nerve agents have been used on the streets of a British city, in clear contravention of international law. It is appalling that people have been left fighting for their lives, including a policeman, Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey. I am sure that the whole House is relieved by the recent news that he has been discharged from hospital and was able to return to his family. We are lucky that other members of the public, who could also have been killed or injured, were not. If the evidence is clear and incontrovertible that the Russian state organised the attack, the measures that the Government have taken are commensurate with what any Government should do in such circumstances.

We need to send a clear message that banned nerve agents cannot be unleashed in this or any other country without robust consequences. However, the often hysterical, ill-informed and plain infantile attacks on my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition for calling on the Government to follow due diligence, and particularly the guidelines that the Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons set out, are not only disgraceful but have not helped our case in the court of international opinion. I note that the Government quietly heeded my right hon. Friend’s advice.

To call for due diligence makes absolute sense. My generation is old enough to remember the so-called dodgy dossier that was used to take us into what many believe was an illegal war in Iraq. Politicising intelligence and turning it into propaganda is not the sort of activity that a democracy such as ours can ever be comfortable with. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition was right then, just as he was right on apartheid, Chile, Afghanistan and Libya. One would think that some Members of this House, who have been far less prescient, would have learned to show a little more humility towards someone who so often found himself on the right side of history.

My question today is: what sort of future relationship will Britain and indeed, Europe have with Russia in the longer term? If it is to be one of ever-growing suspicion and hostility, where could that lead? What sort of relationship does President Putin truly want with our country and with Germany, France and the other European countries that are important for future trade, development and peace?

[Chris Bryant]

I have been thinking about what my hon. Friend says about due diligence and due process, and of course he is right. However, President Putin presumes that we will do everything we can to ensure that there is proper process, a fair trial and so on in this country, but that would not be available to anybody in Russia. We have to face that. Having gone through the whole Litvinenko process when I was a Minister, I know that the worse thing for Marina Litvinenko was that it was impossible to have a proper trial because the Russians simply would not co-operate. We very slowly ended up with a judicial review and inquiry. We may end up having to do exactly the same thing this time, but we need to walk into this with our eyes wide open.

[Dan Carden]

I do not disagree with anything my hon. Friend says. The UK’s role as a beacon and a light of hope in international law is as important as any other role we play.

At some point soon, it will be important to have a grown-up debate, beginning with some of Russia’s closest neighbours, which have the most to lose and gain from all this. At that point, we may also ask whether the Defence Secretary, who told Vladimir Putin to “shut up and go away”, has matured enough to take part in it. The policies that were played out in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union ultimately failed, and have helped contribute to where we are now. Russia has seldom helped itself either, even as some close to the Conservative party were helping themselves to some of its oligarchs’ rotten roubles, not least to help fund the Conservative party.

At some point soon, we will all have to step back from the brink and reset relations with Russia. This House can take pride in the work that this country has undertaken historically with the United Nations and others of destroying chemical and nerve weapon stocks, and bringing about international agreements designed to ensure that they are never used again. The world has been rightly appalled when chemical weapons have been used against civilians in Syria, and that is why the world is at one with Britain now over the use of nerve agents here.

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[Boris Johnson]

At this stage of the debate, all of us on both sides of the House will welcome as much unanimity and accord on this matter as we can find. We do not seek to make windows into men’s souls and to try to establish exactly how or why the Opposition decided to change their mind, but we welcome it. I listened very carefully not only to what the Leader of the Opposition had to say, but also to the explanation from the right hon. Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw). I welcome what the Leader of the Opposition said.

[Chris Bryant]

The most important thing in all this process is for us to be able to establish a unity of purpose not only in this country, but across all our alliances in NATO and in the European Union—and in the Commonwealth. I noticed that only one Commonwealth country, I think, was mentioned in the Foreign Secretary’s list, and I wonder whether he hopes that more will be signing up at the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting.