Russia’s Grand Strategy

Debate between Chris Bryant and Mark Francois

Thursday 19th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Sir Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

I agree with nearly everything the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin) has just said, but I am going to make a very different speech, not to disagree with him, but just to put a different tone to this. I have believed for a long time that it is essential to Russia’s grand strategy that it must expand: we knew that in 2008 and again in 2014, and, frankly, we should all have been thoroughly aware of it long before 24 February 2022 when the second invasion of Ukraine happened. I am absolutely clear that we must make sure that Putin and the Russian Federation loses.

I agree with the hon. Gentleman that we need to get more materiel to our friends and allies in Ukraine. I do not, however, think that is just a matter for the UK and I worry that sometimes the UK provides, let us say, 12 tanks and Spain provides two and France provides three and none of them work together. The time has come for us all to sit down as allies and ask how we are going to ramp up production of perhaps one or two brands of tank so we are deliberately and solely constructing them to get them to Ukraine as fast as possible. People have been arguing for that for at least a year now, so it is a shame we have not got on with it.

[Mr Francois]

The hon. Gentleman is right because logistically that would make it far easier for the Ukrainians. Leopard is the obvious choice because it is used by so many other allied countries, but German export law currently prevents that unless the Germans waive it. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that they should do that to allow the Ukrainians the Leopards they need?

[Sir Chris Bryant]

Yes. I do not do this very often but I was saying “Hear, hear” earlier in agreement with a point the right hon. Gentleman made. I am reluctant to be too down on the Germans, however, for the simple reason that they have had to make a very dramatic and sudden about-turn in their whole understanding of their defence policy, but they do have to get over this hurdle. Many other countries in Europe want them to and are eagerly pressing them to, and the time is long past for them to do so. Perhaps we need a European security treaty to deal with some of these issues and get that materiel to where it is most needed and in a way that it can be readily used.

I want to talk about something slightly different: how we can help Ukraine rebuild. So far, along with many other countries in Europe, we have frozen but not seized assets. On 9 September 2022 a joint statement by the World Bank, the European Commission and the Government of Ukraine estimated that the current cost of reconstruction and recovery in Ukraine was $349 billion. That is now a four-month-old estimate and the sum will grow exponentially as the war continues. We have all seen the pictures of what has happened in Dnipro; we know of the railways, roads and bridges that will have to be reconstructed, let alone the schools, the housing and the rest. Ukraine is going to need a very substantial amount of money.

Code of Conduct: Consultation

Debate between Chris Bryant and Mark Francois

Thursday 2nd December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

Incidentally, I am not right honourable, but my hon. Friend makes an important point. I have a view about that; I am not sure whether it will end up being the settled view of the House. It seems illogical to me that two Members of the House, one of whom is a Minister, could be wined and dined at Wimbledon on a ticket that costs £2,500, then the Minister does not have to register that with the House and never has to register its value, even though they might be the Minister who makes decisions about tennis funding in the UK, whereas the Member who is not a Minister has to register it within 28 days. It seems perverse, and it is difficult for members of the public, who might want to see all the information about an individual MP in one place.

[Mr Mark Francois (Rayleigh and Wickford) (Con)]

May I refer the Chairman to paragraph 58 on page 19 of the report? I take the point he has made very clearly that these are proposals for consultation and could be changed. However, the paragraph says:

“We therefore support the addition to the Code of a rule similar to those adopted by the Welsh Senedd and the Northern Ireland Assembly, making it an investigable breach of the Code for a Member to subject anyone to unreasonable and excessive personal attack in any medium”,

which presumably includes the Chamber and Select Committees. [Interruption.] Well, if we read it literally, that is how we would interpret it.

Let me give the Chairman a quick scenario. In a Select Committee, a Member is pressing a witness, maybe about some Government procurement programme that has gone horribly wrong, and they are reluctant to answer. The member of the Committee, doing their job, presses them harder, and the witness says, “I’m sorry, but I regard your behaviour as an unreasonable and excessive personal attack, and if you continue this line of questioning I’m going to report you to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards.” To take another example—this is important, Madam Deputy Speaker—Member A and Member B have a heated disagreement in the Chamber, and someone watching on television writes to the commissioner and says, “I think A made an excessive personal attack on B, and I want you to investigate it.”

The point is that this paragraph seriously impinges on article 9 of the Bill of Rights, if we take it literally, so here is my consultation submission early on: this is actually dangerous, and it should not appear in the final version.

[Chris Bryant]

I disagree with the right hon. Member’s interpretation of where we are going, not least because I think article IX is perfectly clear that no proceeding in Parliament should be impeached or questioned in a court of law or in any other place.

[Mr Francois]

But it would be by the commissioner.

[Chris Bryant]

No. That has the force of statute law—the Bill of Rights is statute law—and we are not intending to derogate from that in any way at all. The Chair of a Select Committee at the moment could perfectly well say to an hon. Member, if he or she thought that the hon. Member was being excessively or unreasonably rude or personal towards a witness, “Let’s tone that down a little bit, shall we?” I think it would be in the interests of the House and its reputation for the Select Committee Chair to say that, and it is perfectly within their powers now. Indeed, in the work we have been doing in the Privileges Committee, we have been looking at how witnesses should be treated.

It may be that this rule is not perfectly worded as it is now. None the less—and, again, this is me on a personal level—it just seems odd that we would want to argue that we have to continue the right to make unreasonable and excessive personal attacks on others, especially when we are using the reputation of the letters “MP” behind it.