Integrated Review Refresh

James Gray Excerpts

Monday 13th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[James Cleverly]

I can assure my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) and the hon. Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock) that we are looking at how China interacts with the British state, both at a Government level and in other areas, including the commercial world, the public sector and education. That is not to say that we should never, or must never, have Chinese investment in the UK, which would be unrealistic and counterproductive, but it must mean that we go into whatever relationship we have with China with our eyes open. We have to properly assess the opportunities, risks and threats, and that needs to be done across Government. I can reassure the hon. Gentleman and other Members that this is exactly how we will approach our relationship with China.

[James Gray (North Wiltshire) (Con)]

I welcome the document’s strength and robustness with regards to Russia’s threat elsewhere than Ukraine but, following my quick reading, I am a little disappointed by how little it says about the Arctic. More than half of Russia’s navy and all its nuclear defence is in the Arctic, on which it has a 25,000-mile coastline, and most of Russia’s economic wealth also comes from the Arctic, yet only one paragraph is devoted to it. Frankly, I think the threat is quite substantial, so I am disappointed by the oft-repeated hope

“for the Arctic to return to being a region of high cooperation and low tension.”

Am I right in thinking that is more of a hope than a belief that it will actually happen?

[James Cleverly]

I have had conversations with my Scandinavian, Baltic and Canadian counterparts on the risk to the Arctic and the high north. Obviously, in a document that we are trying to make modest in page number but wide in aspiration, we have to be disciplined in how much we put across. I can assure my hon. Friend that we are very conscious of that risk. The joint expeditionary force and my conversations with my Nordic, Baltic and Canadian counterparts are testament to that.