Autocrats, Kleptocrats and Populists

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Thursday 3rd February 2022 Grand Committee

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[Lord Browne of Ladyton]

That the Grand Committee takes note of the impact on global democratic norms and values from autocrats, kleptocrats and populists and the case for a coordinated response by the United Kingdom and her allies.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, I am conscious that we are having this debate on the day that Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are, as the Times has reported,

“cementing an alliance to make the world safe for autocrats.”

I am also conscious that we are debating this on the day we hear that the First Minister of Northern Ireland is intent on resigning and possibly paralysing the Government of Northern Ireland, which definitely defeats the democratic intentions of the people of Northern Ireland. But I am confident that by the end of this debate we will be in a position, because of your Lordships’ contributions, to allay the fears of the people of the world in respect of this global alliance, and of the people of Northern Ireland as to how their democracy is not under threat either.

Democracy is in retreat and authoritarianism is on the rise. According to the University of Gothenburg’s V-Dem Institute, non-democratic countries outnumber democracies for the first time in 20 years, and 2021 was the fifth consecutive year in which more nations moved towards authoritarianism than democracy. In December, President Biden convened a virtual summit for democracy around an agenda that challenged authoritarianism and sought to fight corruption and kleptocracy and promote human rights. He said that

“we stand at an inflection point”,

with the future of democracy facing

“sustained and alarming challenges”.

In fact, the V-Dem Democracy Report 2021, which reflects analyses based on an assessment of nearly 30 million data points and aspects of democracy such as the freedom and independence of legislatures, judiciaries, the media and civil society, and human rights, shows the continuing global decline of liberal democracy. Electoral autocracies are still the most common regime type and, along with closed autocracies—ones in which the people are denied elections—they are home to 68% of the world’s population.

The data shows a drift of democratic backsliding engulfing 25 nations, or one-third of the world’s population. G20 nations such as Brazil, India, Turkey and the USA are part of that drift. Poland wins the shameful title of the country which declined the most during the past decade. I am confounded by that, given the history of Poland.

The process of decline follows a predictable pattern. Once elected—fairly or, more likely, after some manipulation of the electoral process—autocrats tend, if possible, to quickly remove the time limits on their term of office. They maintain power through centralised control of information and resources; political opposition is either forbidden or strongly curtailed; and individual freedom is limited by the state. First, they attack and repress the media and civil society and polarise societies by disrespecting opponents and spreading false information. Then, they undermine elections.

Dominant party authoritarian regimes exploit Western legal and financial systems against Western media where it is critical of their regimes. They sue the media, or they buy it. Russian companies have acquired large ownership stakes in foreign media companies and influenced their operations. They have engaged in disinformation campaigns that exploit weakness in our freedom of speech protections.

It is now common knowledge that Russian-controlled agencies and businesses played a strategically vital role in interference in the US 2016 presidential election, showing that it is possible to interfere destructively in the most powerful Western democracy. The ISC Russia report found credible open-source commentary suggesting that Russia undertook influence campaigns during the Scottish independence referendum. Although accepting that the evidence about the EU referendum campaign was less clear-cut, the committee recommended that the UK intelligence community produce and publish an assessment of possible Russian interference in the EU referendum to reassure the public that our democratic processes are safe. I should like to see that reassurance.

Rule by thieves arises when a country’s elite begins systematically to steal from public funds on a vast scale. Undermining democracy and the legal system, it gains control over vital economic assets and amasses substantial wealth. No longer is kleptocracy a corrupt political system in a few poor nations. It is a global network, with members including world leaders and powerful businesspeople. Assisted by corrupt professionals with the expertise to launder their wealth through a maze of shell companies, they secure it in luxury assets in the West or in our banks. According to the IMF, as much of 5% of the world’s GDP is laundered money and only 1% of it is ever spotted.

Collectively, developing countries have lost $16.3 trillion to elicit leakages since 1980. Their people struggle, they starve, they die, while their Governments export the country’s wealth and become net creditors to the world’s economy. Some of the money is hidden right here. Prime UK properties provide an attractive conduit for securing and legitimising the laundered funds. Despite much rhetoric, progress on paper and repeated parliamentary calls for change, the UK remains a haven for dirty money, a great deal of which comes from Russia and Eurasia.

It is not just money that is laundered but reputations as well. Family and key friends and allies of the thieves merge into our UK society at the very highest level. Some acquire British citizenship following receipt of a “golden visa”. Settled here, they donate to charities, threaten journalists with legal actions and make political connections and political donations. The Government have failed adequately to address this problem and, in the meantime, the provision of services by British professionals to kleptocrats corrupts our world-leading financial services and corrupts and undermines the famous efficiency of our legal system. Worse, it degrades our international reputation as a beacon of democracy and honesty.

The Government placed combating serious organised crime at the centre of their foreign policy but seem not to recognise the intimate connections that UK society and institutions have with kleptocratic states and their elites, who continue to find a welcome in London. The number of times that parliamentarians have drawn attention to this issue in reports, debates and Questions are too numerous to list. Yesterday, the Treasury Select Committee published but the latest example. In its report Economic Crime, one paragraph says it all. I refer to paragraph 230, which I will read short in the interests of time:

“Reform of Companies House is essential if UK companies are no longer to be used to launder money and conduct economic crime.”


It says that there is change:

“However, the pace of change is slow. The problems with UK company structures were identified by the Government in 2014 in the UK Anti-Corruption Plan. While there have been welcome innovations, such as the People with Significant Control register, on current plans it will have taken over 10 years to improve matters, during which time a large number of UK companies may have been put to criminal use by a wide range of criminals.”


I qualify that, on my part but not on behalf of the committee, by saying that companies have been used in a criminal way by a wide range of criminals, including kleptocrats.

In Europe alone, populist politicians have recently risen to power in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland and have gained momentum in France, Spain, here and elsewhere. In Hungary and Poland, this has been accompanied by an erosion of the rule of law, democratic backsliding, greater authoritarianism and an increase in the persecution of minorities. In the words of Jan Kubik from UCL, contrary to Viktor Orbán’s rhetoric, there is no such thing as an illiberal democracy.

Populist parties and politicians divide societies into “the people versus the corrupt elite” and argue that politics should express the general will of the people. By “the people” they mean their people. They erode the informal norms of democracy, question the loyalty of the opposition and decry criticism as fake news. As winners of democratic elections, they fail to constrain themselves and instead hollow out and politicise formal institutions of that democracy. They undermine formal institutions such as the courts, legislatures and regulatory agencies as creations of a “corrupt elite”. Rather than tolerating a free press and political opposition, instead they try to undermine their legitimacy and, most insidiously, they redefine “the people” by excluding vulnerable ethnic or religious minorities, immigrants and marginalised economic groups. The result is majority rule without minority rights. Mainstream political parties, the backbone of representative democracy, have so far largely failed to address these threats and some centre-right parties have become populist instead.

In his remarks at the Biden summit, Boris Johnson announced that we in the UK

“are working with our friends to ensure that”

we are using

“emerging technologies … designed to safeguard our shared values”,

helping

“developing countries to build clean and green infrastructure with transparent projects, that are open to scrutiny”

and deploying new

“national sanctions to target those responsible for … human rights violations.”

Further, he promised in the “Year of Action” to

“take even stronger measures against the illicit finance that undermines democracy everywhere, strengthening our … powers to go after the criminals who”

exploit our lax corporate structures, bringing

“openness to the purchase of properties in the UK”

and taking forward

“new laws to safeguard our democratic processes and institutions from those who would do us harm.”

As the RUSI report makes clear,

“2022 has the potential to be an impressive year of action for the UK. But it requires the prime minister to acknowledge the UK’s global illicit finance responsibilities and reverse his current irresponsible disinterest in a topic that—as it does the US—threatens the UK’s national security interests.”

It also requires our Prime Minister candidly to accept that, if democracy is to begin at home, this requires more self-awareness than hitherto he has been capable of. If he genuinely wishes to be seen as a global leader for democracy, he needs to be clear that he and his Government are learning lessons too.

During his time in office, our Prime Minister has progressively degraded norms and standards, such as with the unlawful Prorogation of Parliament and the failure to dismiss the Home Secretary for bullying, to name but two examples. It seems that this Government are still on course to assault our democracy. We need look no further than our present and upcoming parliamentary business: an election Bill that affronts the right to vote, a policing Bill that sought to criminalise protests and a Nationality and Borders Bill that has been described as stripping British citizenship with the stroke of a pen.

What is more, this Government appear set on limiting the courts’ power to hold public bodies to account through judicial review and intent on tearing up the Human Rights Act and placing legal constraints on whistleblowing and journalism—and all this against a background where the Government whipped their vote through Parliament to support a Motion that ripped up parliamentary standards in a doomed attempt to save the disgraced MP Owen Paterson, who had lobbied for companies that paid him hundreds of thousands of pounds. The reality is that our Prime Minister has presided over a culture of corruption and clientelism. What other words are there to describe a politics in which political donors are given privileged access to a VIP lane for lucrative Covid contracts? I have but one question for the Minister, whom I admire greatly, as I know do many of your Lordships: what is the plan of action for the year of action? I cannot find one anywhere in government documents.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, we have had an excellent debate and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, for characteristically, carefully, generously and respectfully responding to the debate. I thank all noble Lords for their valuable contributions. We have had a wide-ranging and informed debate—informed by significant awareness and self-awareness. I shall come back to that point.

I do not intend to respond individually to any or all contributions and would not be able to do that in the time left to me, in any event—I would not have the ability to respond to quality of the contributions and the points made. All that I can say is that every speech was an adornment to the debate, and I am extremely grateful for them.

I want to make just two points; it is really one point with two halves. I should make it clear that I come away from this debate conscious that we all have a shared responsibility for the defence of democracy. I say specifically to the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, that we all have a shared responsibility for the history that has got us into this difficulty in the first place. I think that we all recognise that. There is a great deal of self-awareness, and that was obvious in this debate.

The phrase, “to see ourselves as others see us” has been used. That is interesting, because we are nine days away from 25 January, the day on which the people of Scotland celebrate the birth of Robert Burns, the poet. My noble friend Lord Foulkes of Cumnock had the pleasure and honour to represent a part of Ayrshire where every word that anyone remembers that Robert Burns wrote was written. When my noble friend retired, the boundaries were rearranged and I inherited the very town where those words were written, Mauchline in Ayrshire. I represented it for a period, and Burns was a significant part of certainly my late winter life as a Member of Parliament. I have been to more Burns suppers than I ever want to go to again, I have to say!

For those noble Lords who do not know where that phrase comes from, it is from a poem that contains a moral lesson for mankind. The poem was, characteristically for Burns, written about a scene that he observed in a kirk, in the congregation of a church—a church that still exists. There was a preening young woman in that church because she was attracting gazes from everybody. The fact of the matter was that the other members of the congregation were not looking at her but at the insect on her bonnet. Burns wrote this moral lesson with the words that you should pray for the gift,

“To see oursels as others see us!

It wad frae monie a blunder free us”.

I am not going to take that any further because the name of the poem is, “To a Louse”. Given the context in which that was made, I would perhaps be being a bit too party political. We should remember that poem.

In the seconds left to me, I will do what I should have done when I first spoke. I apologise for not doing so. I beg to move.

Motion agreed.