Salisbury Incident

Leo Docherty Excerpts

Wednesday 12th September 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Wallace]

I will get to my response later on, but the right hon. Gentleman makes the point that we have to deal with Russian state aggression across a wide front. We have said that we will use all legal powers within the rule of law to push back the malign action of the Russian state. The Criminal Finances Act 2017, which had cross-party support, gives us tools to deal with illicit finance. It is a fact that some of the two biggest flows of illicit finance into this country come from Russia and China. Therefore, it is obvious that we will be looking in those areas and making sure that we deal with such illicit activity, but we also look elsewhere. I cannot comment on individual investigations, but where we see a break in the law, whether it be illicit finance or any other type of malign activity, we will act using those powers and push it back.

[Leo Docherty (Aldershot) (Con)]

The Minister is making a very eloquent statement. Will he confirm that some of the most important lessons learned are now being incorporated in the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Bill that is currently going through the House of Commons?

[Mr Wallace]

The Bill went through only yesterday with a large majority. I was disappointed that not all parties could support it. Labour supported it, and I enjoyed our going through the Lobby together. I urge the Liberal Democrats to think again and not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Clearly, there were issues that not everyone agrees with. I do not think that voting entirely against the Bill would have helped our security or indeed the businesses that could have been compensated by Pool Re for loss of trade as a result of terrorism. Nevertheless, it is why, in that Bill, we have the measures against a hostile state. We wanted to mirror what we have in schedule 3 as what we have in schedule 7 to the Terrorism Act 2000 and give our police and ports that power to examine individuals.

--- Later in debate ---

[Leo Docherty (Aldershot) (Con)]

It is a great honour to speak in this debate and to follow the hon. Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock), who has just given a superb example of the knowledge, experience and eloquence for which he has become renowned in this House. In my brief remarks, I will pick up on some of the themes he mentioned in relation to our broader security response.

What was so shocking about the appalling outrage in Salisbury, apart from its intrusive nature and the way it undermined our norms of behaviour and our sovereignty, was the extent to which it was an entirely brazen act. However, we must keep it in the context of a long list of brazen international acts by the Russian state that have violated the post-cold war security settlement in Europe and have sought to undermine the international norms that civilised states should observe in their interactions with one another. Some of that interference has been conventional, some of it has involved the use of cyber-warfare, and some has been a mixture of both—a classic form of hybrid warfare. We will all be aware of the long list of instances, starting in 2008 with the invasion of Georgia and moving through to the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014, leading on to the downing of MH17 and the outrage in Salisbury.

Those events are well known, but less well known is the impact of Russian state activities in the cyber-sphere. In the Minister’s superb opening remarks, he mentioned the NotPetya virus, the most virulent that the world has ever encountered, which caused some $10 billion-worth of damage worldwide and had a significant impact in this country. I am delighted that the Government are enhancing our national counter-cyber-attack capability, and I commend the Minister for announcing £1.9 billion of extra funding until 2021 to turbocharge the tremendous work of GCHQ in countering the cyber-security threat that our country faces every day. I also commend the Minister for bringing forward improvements to our border security and defences. The proposals, which are going through Parliament in the form of the Counter-terrorism and Border Security Bill, will give our security forces, emergency services and Border Force the capacity to deal with state hostile activity on the same basis as they may deal with terrorist activity.

Winston Churchill famously declared that Russia was an impenetrable state, with motives that are hard to decipher. He said:

“I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”.

Churchill was speaking in 1939, but today, ironically, the reverse is true. The Russian state’s agenda on the world stage is very clear. It wants to dominate its neighbourhood, by force if necessary, and to undermine and overturn the international order, particularly the security order that we have enjoyed for a long time in post-cold war Europe. How do we guard against that? My simple belief, picking up on some of the themes discussed by the hon. Member for Aberavon, is that we and our allies need to achieve peace through strength. We must meet Russian threats with total resolve. The Prime Minister, in her response to the outrage in Salisbury, was a model of swift and resolute action, and the diplomatic coup that she managed to achieve—our expulsion of 23 diplomats followed by similar action by some 27 allied countries—was a remarkable triumph that sent a clear signal to the Russian state.

[Eddie Hughes (Walsall North) (Con)]

To return to what the hon. Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock) said—“You can leave Russia, but it will never leave you”—it is 18 years since I visited Russia; I travelled from Moscow down to St Petersburg. We should remember that our argument is with the Russian state—with Putin—not with the Russian people, whom I found on my visit to be incredibly warm and welcoming.

[Leo Docherty]

I am very grateful for my hon. Friend’s contribution. Like him, I have enjoyed travelling in Russia—in Moscow, St Petersburg and many other cities—and I have always been very touched by the Russian people’s hospitality and tremendous sense of pride in the magnificent Russian heritage and culture, which we should all enjoy. He is right that our argument is with the Russian state, not the Russian people.

As I have said, our Prime Minister achieved a tremendous diplomatic coup, but our resolve and response must also be in the conventional sphere. I am very pleased, therefore, that we now contribute some 800 soldiers to the enhanced forward presence—a combined NATO presence in Estonia and other Baltic states and eastern countries. That is a very clear signal that we will commit conventional forces to deter Russian aggression on NATO’s borders.

We must also be aware that our deployment to Estonia and our contribution to the enhanced forward presence contains a lesson, which is that we urgently need to relearn our ability to exercise, deploy and sustain military force at scale. We have not done that since the end of the cold war. We must take note of the fact that, this week, the Russian military is conducting a large-scale military exercise—the Vostok manoeuvres—involving some 300,000 soldiers in eastern Siberia. Our NATO equivalent, which also takes place this month, will involve 40,000 soldiers. We need to relearn those lessons urgently, and I hope they will be incorporated into the modernising defence programme. Simply put, the British Army needs two fully manned, fully equipped divisions that can be deployed at reach and sustained for as long as we need them to complete those sorts of operations.

[Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)]

I very much support everything my hon. Friend is saying. Does he agree that, in retrospect, it was perhaps a bit premature to abolish, as part of the strategic defence and security review in 2010, the joint chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear regiment, which was created in 1999? He will have noticed members of our armed forces on the streets of Salisbury recently, and if there were incidents of that sort in the future, possibly involving biological or nuclear devices as an alternative to the chemical one that was deployed on this occasion, we might need the kind of expertise that we thought we were growing from the Royal Tank Regiment and the Royal Air Force regiment in 1999.

[Leo Docherty]

I agree entirely. We need to maintain the ability to react to chemical, biological and nuclear warfare, and I hope that lesson will be contained in the findings of the modernising defence programme, which should be announced towards the end of the year.

The approach of achieving peace through strength is something we learned in our historical dealings with Russia; it is not new. Indeed, in 1858, our Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, declared:

“The policy and practice of the Russian Government has always been to push forward its encroachments as far and as fast as the apathy or want of firmness of other Governments will allow them to go, and always to stop and retire whenever it was met by decided resistance.”

Lord Palmerston knew what he was talking about, because at that point he had just concluded, in victorious fashion, the Crimean war with Russia.

I will finish by saying that this decided resistance—this resolve—has been exemplified in a superb fashion by our Prime Minister and our emergency services. I hope and am confident that this resolve throughout our Government, our armed forces and our emergency services will be maintained in our dealings with Russia long into the future.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I have now to announce the result of today’s deferred Division on the EU-Singapore free trade agreement. The Ayes were 331 and the Noes were 145, so the Ayes have it.

[The Division list is published at the end of today’s debates.]