Sergei Magnitsky

Debate between Chris Bryant and Denis MacShane

Wednesday 7th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab) on securing the debate. It is important that it is on a motion because the Government must decide what they will do. They must decide whether to support it, and thus take the action that it demands of them.

Several attempts have been made to try to ensure that the debate never came to pass. The Russian ambassador in London attempted to repress a previous debate, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Mr MacShane), a former Minister for Europe, led. I know that the Russian ambassador also tried to ensure that you, Mr Speaker, stopped today’s debate happening. That shows a complete misunderstanding of the political process in this country and the need for democratic and open debate. No ambassador should write to the Speaker of this House to try to prevent a debate. It is perfectly legitimate for us to debate what we choose to debate.

[Mr Denis MacShane (Rotherham) (Lab)]

This is extremely important. I have already had to intervene on this with Mr Speaker after the Russian embassy put on its website a statement attacking me as a parliamentarian for raising the Magnitsky case. Someone has to talk to this Russian ambassador and tell him crudely to butt out of House of Commons business.

[Chris Bryant]

I had already made that point, but I wholeheartedly agree with my right hon. Friend that we will discuss what we want. I very much hope that nothing is put in the way of the all-party group when we go to Russia so that we can meet not only members of the Government, but members of the opposition.

There are two basic problems in Russia at the moment, the first of which is the impunity that attends so much criminality. Hon. Members have referred to Anna Politkovskaya, but many other journalists have been murdered. Had journalists been murdered in this country, everybody around the world would have been howling and demanding justice. Similarly, we are unable to get justice for the murder of Mr Litvinenko, because Russia maintains that no extradition is allowed for any Russian citizen. That prevents justice and means impunity for those in Russia.

The second problem is the regular, systemic state abuse of the criminal justice system in Russia, which has meant that Mikhail Khodorkovsky has been imprisoned on spurious charges—Amnesty International has declared him and Platon Lebedev as prisoners of conscience. It is right that we pursue such issues to try to ensure that there is a proper criminal justice system in Russia, and one that does not depend on torture.

I must confess that the Government’s response tonight is very disappointing. For a start, I did not know that our foreign policy was to wait for the United States of America to make up its mind in its Senate and Congress on what it will do about immigration before we decide what we will do. We should be free to make our own decision, particularly because the one thing many significant Russians in the Putin regime value above all else is the ability to travel to London. London is the place where they like to do their banking and shopping, and where their families like to go for their education, and so on. Ensuring that the people involved in the murder of Sergei Magnitsky and the corruption he unveiled are unable to come to this country is a vital part of ramming home to the Russian Government that we want better relations with them and that we want to do more business with them, but that we can do so only when human rights are respected and corruption weeded out.

European Council

Debate between Chris Bryant and Denis MacShane

Thursday 26th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

Thank you very much, Mr Deputy Speaker. I thought you were about to call somebody more senior.

I agree with the hon. Members who said it is a shame that the debate has had to rely on the kindness of the Backbench Business Committee. When I was Minister for Europe it was an important part of our mandate that before we went to a European Council we had to turn up in the House, in Government time, to answer a debate, even if it meant inconvenience for Ministers. It is a terrible shame that the Foreign Secretary is not here. I respect enormously the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, the hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt), and I saw him assert that he is pro-European, which is great, but it is wrong that the Foreign Secretary is not with us.

I want to raise two issues that are not on the Council agenda but should be. The first is Cyprus. For far too long, the European Union has had within it a divided country, with a divided capital city. It affects many people in the UK; there are strong Cypriot communities in Cardiff and elsewhere in the country. The real problems faced by the Cypriot economy could be resolved easily if one were to overcome the political problems, because Turkey is the fastest growing economy on the borders of Europe. I hope that the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister will make it clear that we want progress in Cyprus, and this is no bad time for it, when Greece is trying to resolve some of its own economic problems.

The other foreign policy issue that should be on the agenda is Russia. The elections just before Christmas were a complete and utter farce. In a vast majority of areas, they were corrupt, as every organisation sent to monitor the elections made clear. Absolutely nothing has been done. There have been many warm words from Mr Putin and Mr Medvedev, yet there has been no action. We still have no resolution of the cases of Mr Khodorkovsky and Mr Platon Lebedev, both of whom are purely prisoners of conscience, and not tax evaders. There is also the case of Sergei Magnitsky who worked for a British company.

The British Government should make it absolutely clear that Europe will manage to improve its business with Russia only when corruption is rooted out in Russia. That will not happen if country after country tries to make its own sordid little deals; it will only happen if the whole of the European Union acts in concert and in union to make it clear that Russia has to clean up its act.

I believe in more Europe rather than less Europe. I say that unambiguously. I said to the hon. Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins) that enforced audit would have meant that we did not get into the hole we are in, and there are other areas. The United Kingdom was wrong when we decided to go our own way, with Ireland, saying that there were to be no transitional arrangements with regard to people from the new member states working in the UK. One of the reasons why so many people came here was that every other country in the EU was going down a different route. It would have made far more sense if there had been a single European decision on that policy area.

[Mr MacShane]

At a conference last week, the German film-maker, Volker Schlöndorff said how much he wished that 1 million-plus Poles had gone to Germany and learned German and then gone home imbued with German ideas, language and contacts to build a closer relationship between Poland and Germany. We have made 1 million-plus Polish friends because of our policy; it has been good for Poland and good for us.

[Chris Bryant]

I hope we have made a lot of Polish friends. When I was a curate in High Wycombe, we had a long-standing Polish community there, many of whom fled German ideas about Polish people from the 1930s and 1940s. But I still think it would have been better for us if there had been a whole-European decision. We underestimated the number of Polish people who would come to the United Kingdom and that was a mistake for our economy.

Anyone from Brazil, China, Russia or India—or, for that matter, Mexico or Turkey—would say that they are all interested in trying to do business with one set of rules in Europe, not 27, on the size of plugs, on electricity, and on many other elements. I believe it is in our interests that we should strive ever more for the extension of the single market, so that we can do better out of the growing economies of the world; otherwise, our future will be on the sidelines, not at the heart, of the world’s history.

I have anxieties about the Government’s attitude on these issues. I know the Prime Minister tries to show a little bit of leg to Conservative Back Benchers and then to his European allies. There is a little bit of leg being shown here, there and everywhere. But the truth is that we need British businesses to be far more courageous about doing business in Europe; they should not just sally forth and speak louder—shout in more grammatically incorrect English than they would to their children—in the belief that they will get a contract. We must have more ambition when it comes to Europe.

I would say to those who said earlier that they praised the Prime Minister before Christmas that—leaving aside my opinion that it is giving the Prime Minister that dangerous element of messianism, which is always worrying for a Prime Minister—the child who has stormed off to his bedroom is rarely the person in the family who wins the argument.

Sergei Magnitsky

Debate between Chris Bryant and Denis MacShane

Wednesday 11th January 2012 Westminster Hall

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

rose—

[Mr MacShane]

I give way first to my hon. Friend.

[Chris Bryant]

The hon. Gentleman and I are probably about to say exactly the same thing. Does my right hon. Friend agree that there is not much point in just banning these people secretly behind closed doors? It is important that we say publicly that they are not welcome in this country.

Equality and Diversity (Reform) Bill

Debate between Chris Bryant and Denis MacShane

Friday 21st October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

There seem to be an awful lot of Ruperts and Jessicas and Chloes in the hon. Gentleman’s life. I think that the only Rupert who has ever crossed the border into the Rhondda constituency was Rupert Bear.

One of my experiences was as a curate in High Wycombe, a community that has a strong ethnic mix. A large community from St Vincent has been there since just after the second world war, and a large community from Kashmir and a large Polish community arrived in the middle of the second world war. I found that, all too often, in an unequal society the people who know how to shout the loudest get the best resources from national and local government. One of my problems with the educational system in this country, and for that matter with the national health service, is that all too often money has not followed need but has followed the loudest speeches. That is why I believe that we need equality legislation, and why I supported the legislation that the deputy leader of the Labour party brought forward in government.

[Mr MacShane]

I am following my hon. Friend’s speech with great interest, and I hope that it is only in its initial stages, because the Bill that follows really is a ghastly assault on privilege and fair play.

Is it not a paradox that, even with equality legislation, every single person currently in the Chamber is white, middle-aged and male? That is not the case with those slightly outside the Chamber in the civil servants’ box or the Serjeant at Arms’ seat, but it is—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. This is not relevant. We are dealing with the Bill, and Members should be speaking to the Bill. I am sure the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) does not want to get led all over the place. We have already seen that coming from the Government side, and I certainly do not want to see it coming from the Opposition side.

Voting by Prisoners

Debate between Chris Bryant and Denis MacShane

Thursday 10th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

It does help me, and I think that it helps the House as well. What Britain was seeking to do was enshrine throughout the rest of Europe the freedoms that we had enjoyed for centuries in this country from the Bill of Rights onwards. That was Churchill’s vision.

Even in Britain, rights have been won thanks to the Court. The Attorney-General cited a couple of instances in which he agreed with the Court and disagreed with the previous Labour Government. Successive Governments, for instance, held out against allowing gays in the military in this country. It was the European Court that insisted in 1999, and today I am not aware of a single Member of Parliament who thinks that someone should be sacked from the Army, the Navy or the RAF solely by virtue of his or her sexuality. Likewise, it was as a result of the Court’s judgment in the case brought by Denise Matthews against the Labour Government that Gibraltarians were granted the right to vote in elections to the European Parliament in 2004. So Labour supports the European Court, but as a critical friend.

We have heard several criticisms of the Court’s operation today. Let me add a couple. The court has a backlog of many thousands of cases, which would take 47 years to complete. Its members are not all equally qualified. It has no effective triage system to filter out vexatious claims of little or no merit. There is no requirement for an appellant to seek leave to appeal to the Court from a national court in the first place, which is something that we might want to consider. Most important, some of its members believe that they are, or should be, a supreme court for all the contracting parties—to which I simply say that they are wrong.

Every high or supreme court in Europe has a democratic safety valve which allows its duly elected Assembly or Parliament to overrule the courts in certain circumstances. In the UK, that is our parliamentary sovereignty. We firmly contend that the 1688 Bill of Rights was right to assert that proceedings in Parliament cannot be

“impeached or questioned in any Court or Place”.

[Mr MacShane]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Chris Bryant]

I hate the fact that there was a pause there. I give way to my right hon. Friend.

[Mr MacShane]

Would my hon. Friend advance the same argument in respect of the European Court of Justice?

[Chris Bryant]

To be honest, I think that that is a debate for another day. I am keen not to conflate discussions about the European Court with discussions about the European Union, and I think that in that respect my right hon. Friend would agree with me.

European Union Bill

Debate between Chris Bryant and Denis MacShane

Tuesday 25th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr MacShane]

That is a good crack, but I think that the right hon. Gentleman will find that Spanish power messed up the continent for another 100 years until we won again. If the House of Commons only exists to express the sentiment of the football fan that “We won, and they have to lose”, Britain will never advance.

[Chris Bryant]

If the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood) is correct that we won in 1604, why did we spend the next 20 years trying to marry off the heir to the British throne to a Spanish infanta?

[Mr MacShane]

I am glad that we are now marrying off one of our royals to someone who has the attributes of a very normal, pretty Englishwoman. We wish William and “Caterina” every success.

To return to the Bill and the clause, I campaigned for many years in this House, on an all-party basis, for laws and measures to combat human trafficking. That cannot be done on the basis of a single decision of this House alone. In the last Parliament, it took a great deal of work by hon. Members on both sides of the House to persuade the then Prime Minister to first sign and then ratify the Council of Europe’s convention on trafficking. The Home Office’s view was that it did not want to be told by anyone—and this was the Council of Europe, not the European Union—what to do or to accept any obligations. Ministers and officials came up with argument after argument about why the Council of Europe convention should not be signed. I am glad to say that parliamentary pressure from both sides wore them down and the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, signed and ratified it. It was an important step forward. As ever, it was not the final solution to that dark and wretched side of globalisation, but it was a step forward.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr MacShane]

That takes us into a slightly broader aspect of the debate, where there are differences between us. I started my political life campaigning in pubs and elsewhere against the demand, which was very prevalent after my student days, that there should be a referendum on capital punishment. Again and again, the cry is for a referendum, and we heard it in health questions today, when it was asked whether we could have a referendum on NHS reforms. I do not think that any hon. Member on the Government Benches would give a fleeting thought to that proposition, but if a referendum on a public prosecutor’s office is good, why is a referendum on something that will impact far more directly on the British people—namely the Government’s proposals to change significantly the way that our health service is delivered—not good?

[Chris Bryant]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr MacShane]

Again, this shows a failure to understand that if we do not like a treaty, there is an alternative. I have been told over the 16 years in which I have sat in the House that almost any change would undermine Britain. Indeed, the right hon. Gentleman famously said that the Amsterdam treaty would mean the abolition of the United Kingdom. Can anybody in the Committee tell me a single thing that was in the Amsterdam treaty?

[Chris Bryant]

The protocol on broadcasting. [Laughter.]

[Mr MacShane]

There we are: when we need an anorak, there is always one from Rhondda. I am grateful to my hon. Friend.

I respect the Member for Europe, for whom there is a great deal of affection among those of us in the House who are first-class Euro-bores. The Member for Europe—[Hon. Members: “Member for Europe?”] I apologise: the Minister for Europe is a sincere and serious chap. I have recently been much involved in the issue of Kosovo. One of our great problems there is that whereas the United Kingdom recognises Kosovo, along with 21 other member states, led by Britain—there is, I hope, not a cigarette paper of difference between those on our Front Bench and those on the Government’s on the importance of helping Kosovo find its way to a future—five EU member states do not recognise Kosovo. As a result, we are utterly stymied in so much that we could and should do to help Kosovo find its way towards some stability, and because Kosovo has no stability or sense of security, that is contagious in other countries in the Balkans. There are times when this Government would, if anything, like to exercise a little more authority in Europe, in order to achieve key foreign policy goals.