Corporate Transparency and Economic Crime

Debate between Kwasi Kwarteng and Julian Lewis

Monday 28th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her points. Clearly, on the time that this has taken, she will remember that in the 2017 to 2019 Parliament, a huge amount of our time was taken up by members of the Labour party and the Opposition parties frustrating Brexit. They absorbed a huge amount of parliamentary time and I am afraid that that was one of the reasons we could not expedite this sort of legislation.

There will be criminal liability for failure to update the register annually and for giving misleading or inaccurate information. We are working with the Crown dependencies to update their transparency; by next year, they will have to have much greater transparency requirements. The hon. Lady will be pleased to know that my Government colleagues and I speak to our counterparts in the devolved Administrations on a very regular basis.

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

I welcome the statement, as far as it goes. As a matter of principle, does my right hon. Friend agree that cleansing British public life of dirty Russian money is not quintessentially difficult?

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

As my right hon. Friend appreciates, this legislation is timely. We are grateful that it seems to have elicited huge support across the House, and we are pleased to be able to expedite it.

UK Gas Market

Debate between Kwasi Kwarteng and Julian Lewis

Monday 20th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

I am working very closely with my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. We have spoken to the Treasury, and we are keen to push forward plans very soon to make sure there is a consistent and regular supply of CO₂.

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

As Russia completes its sinister Nord Stream 2 pipeline and tightens its stranglehold on gas supplies to Europe, why are we not fully exploiting Rolls-Royce modular nuclear reactors to decrease our indirect dependence on Russian gas and our direct dependence on French and Chinese nuclear technology?

European Council: Article 50 Extension

Debate between Kwasi Kwarteng and Julian Lewis

Friday 22nd March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

I can reassure the hon. Lady that I am not cross at all. [Interruption.] Well, I am not; I am perfectly happy to take questions and to engage with the House. If we lose the meaningful vote, we will proceed to face the question the EU has set out in terms of 12 April, as the Prime Minister and Donald Tusk made very clear yesterday.

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

If indicative votes take place, whether whipped or free, and if they contradict the outcome of the referendum of 2016, which will the Government feel obliged to obey?

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

As my right hon. Friend knows, the Government have always been committed to honouring the result of the referendum, and we fully intend to leave the EU in an orderly manner, which is why at this late stage I continue to urge Members to back the deal.

Egypt

Debate between Kwasi Kwarteng and Julian Lewis

Wednesday 29th January 2014 Westminster Hall

[Dr Julian Lewis]

I pay tribute to both previous speakers and, despite the friendly sedentary intervention of my friend, the hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), I intend to follow in their footsteps. I congratulate in particular my hon. Friend the Member for Spelthorne (Kwasi Kwarteng) on introducing such an important subject. I am pleased that people have not gone automatically into a mode of suggesting that all the good is on one side and all the evil on the other. In Egypt, we are confronted with a choice of which is the lesser evil. I agree with the hon. Member for Inverclyde (Mr McKenzie) that the correct course to follow is not to rush to endorse what has happened in Egypt. We should ensure that we maintain pressure on whatever Administration or regime emerges to follow a path back to constitutional democracy at the earliest opportunity.

It sometimes bothers me that people think that when a dramatic development occurs, it is automatically to be interpreted in the context of what we have experienced in recent European history. I felt the very coinage of the term “Arab spring” to be inappropriate. I did not feel that the spate of revolutions that took place in one middle eastern country after another should be compared to the attempt by central and eastern European countries, which had been well set on the path to constitutional democracy before they were hijacked by the Soviet empire, to go back to the democratic path. There was no direct comparison between those European countries asserting their right to return to democracy and what was happening in at least some of the middle eastern countries.

In 1941, Churchill was famously teased by one of his left-wing opponents when he spoke up for Russia after it was invaded by the Nazis. After all, Churchill was the architect of British intervention in the Russian civil war, and he famously wanted to “strangle Bolshevism at birth”. He had the right answer to his critic: he said that if Hitler invaded hell, he would at least have a good word to say for the devil in the House of Commons. In other words, he recognised that it was a choice between evils.

It is often thought that when a totalitarian regime emerges, based on a totalitarian ideology, it does so in a coup, with no popular support at all. That is not necessarily the case; in fact, I would say that it is not usually the case. There was certainly popular support for the Nazis, as well as for the communists in many cases where they succeeded in coming to power. The paradox in trying to deal with such situations was that there was a degree of democratic legitimacy to the initial taking over of the country, but once that had happened, the regimes proceeded to dismantle the very framework of democracy—however great or limited it was at the time—that had enabled them to come to power on the basis of some form of popular support. Such popular support was often allied to a specific type of devious perversion of political language when the regime was consolidating its grip on power.

The question that must be faced by democracies looking on as such situations develop is what we do when a group of people come to power, initially with a greater or lesser degree of democratic legitimacy, and proceed to subvert the system so that they will never again have to submit themselves to democratic elections. I suggest that what was happening in Egypt was a movement in that sort of direction. The country was faced with the choice of whether it wished to see Islamism take control, as it has done following what I prefer to call the Arab uprisings, to the disappointment of many of us who were hoping to see constitutional democracies emerge in other middle eastern countries. The issue is what we do about that. Do we simply rush to condemn the fact that Islamists have been ejected from power in Egypt, or do we recognise the real difficulty of the choice that Egyptians have had to make between one extreme situation and another?

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

The situation in Egypt was even more extreme than that, in terms of the groundwork laid for political Islam. In the parliamentary elections, 50% of the seats were won by the Muslim Brotherhood and 25% by Salafis, so 75% of the seats were won by parties that openly supported political Islam. There was no room for an alternative in that system.

[Dr Lewis]

That is absolutely correct. My hon. Friend will put me right if I am mistaken, but I recall that part of the deal at the outset was that the Muslim Brotherhood undertook not to run for the presidency—I think that I am right in saying that. That promise was very promptly broken.

In my time trying to comment as best I can on defence and security-related subjects in Parliament, not too many months—certainly not too many years—go by when I do not have recourse to mentioning one of my favourite political quotations from the late, great, Sir Karl Popper in his famous book, “The Open Society and Its Enemies”. I have quoted it before and I suspect that circumstances will require me to quote it again. The paradox of tolerance is that in a free society, people must tolerate all but the intolerant, because if you tolerate the intolerant, the conditions for toleration disappear and the tolerant go with them. I am sure that this is what the people who ousted the Islamists in Egypt would argue was their justification. Although I said earlier that one must not make simplistic comparisons, I am now probably about to do just that. Those people would probably point to the situation in Germany in the 1930s and say, “Wouldn’t it have been better if the army had thrown the Nazis out, once it became clear that they were going to rip up the constitution and remove any chance of a democratic future, and when it saw what the Hitlerites were trying to do to the German system—which had more or less democratically elected them to power in the first place—using the techniques that we are so familiar with in totalitarian takeovers, to get an iron and irreversible grip on the society?” How would we feel now if the army had stepped in then?

I worry when I hear people use phrases such as moderate Islamism. The description of Islamism is the description of an extreme, intolerant ideology; there is no moderate Islamism, any more than there is moderate totalitarianism or moderate extremism. The reality is that there was a choice in Egypt between an Islamist takeover and the ejection of a group of people bent on destroying any sort of emergent democracy in that country and making a terrible mess of running it in the process.