Ukraine

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Tuesday 10th February 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Spicer]

My Lords—

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)]

My Lords—

[The Lord Privy Seal (Baroness Stowell of Beeston) (Con)]

My Lords, we are just about to have a Statement on the same topic when there will be 20 minutes for Back-Bench contributions. It is actually the turn of the Labour Benches.

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

Does the Minister agree that it would play into President Putin’s hands to supply arms to the Ukrainian Government and make his position in Russia and his thesis about Western conspiracy more credible to the Russian people?

[Baroness Anelay of St Johns]

My Lords, that is precisely one of the political judgments that would need to be taken by each and every member of NATO before they took such an action.

Yemen

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Wednesday 21st January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Anelay of St Johns]

My Lords, I will refer to the core issue, which is the safety of British citizens. There are very few British citizens registered with us in Yemen and we have good contact with them. Clearly, if they have not registered, we do not know they are there, and that is a rather different matter. I emphasise again that since early 2011 we have advised against all travel to Yemen. Security of the area is a matter of agreement between the main actors there. My focus has to be, as the noble Lord stressed in his question, the safety of British citizens in Yemen. We are monitoring that on an hour-by-hour—if not minute-by-minute—basis. If they cannot contact the British embassy, they may contact any EU embassy and receive the same service.

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)]

There are problems in the history of this. The bin Laden family, as is well known, had Saudi connections and lived in Yemen. The Wahhabi doctrines pumped out of Riyadh are what inspired the bin Laden campaign. Will the Minister comment on our relations with the Saudi Arabian regime, which are very active, as we understand it? Can it be ascertained whether the Saudis are still facing two ways on the question of the theological doctrines that they are trying to export to the rest of the Arabian peninsula?

[Baroness Anelay of St Johns]

My Lords, the noble Lord will be aware that there are discussions in London tomorrow at which the Saudi Arabian Government will be represented. Those discussions will focus on joint action against the spread of terrorism. I think that it would be wrong of me at this stage to posit what the Saudi Arabian position might be and how it might develop. Tomorrow is a vital meeting. We hope that it will set us on a track that will mean we can then more broadly work with the rest of the countries in the United Nations to ensure that more stability returns to such a strife-riven region.

Raif Badawi

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Tuesday 20th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Anelay of St Johns]

My Lords, one of the priorities of the Foreign Office is that the death penalty should be abolished throughout the world. However, it is clear that Saudi Arabia is not yet in a position where it will consider that. Sharia law is part of the very nature of its operations in the judiciary, and therefore we are not going to move to abolition. However, that does not stop us making strong representations about it. The House can be assured that at every opportunity I make the point that the death penalty does not work—quite simply, it is wrong in itself. The more we can explain that to countries around the world, the more we can improve the kind of result that we had in the United Nations vote before Christmas and the more we can persuade other countries to follow the right route, which is to abolish the death penalty.

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)]

My Lords, do the Saudi Government claim that the autonomy of their penal code is unqualified? If so, they will not accept the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However, if it is qualified, is there not a procedure whereby they can be taken through a process in the international community?

[Baroness Anelay of St Johns]

My Lords, in this respect, as the noble Lord, Lord Bach, hinted, the Saudi Arabian Government have signed up to the convention against torture but they are in breach of that. The United Nations can consider that and take it into account in any action it feels it wishes to take, if any.

EU: UK Membership

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Tuesday 25th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)]

My Lords, I begin with the interesting contribution made by my noble friend Lord Robertson of Port Ellen. Taking the analogy of what we have been watching north of the border, I think that there is a scenario where our leaving the EU would rather strengthen the likelihood that Scotland would be in the EU as an independent country and we would no longer be Great Britain. I do not know where UKIP would be if we no longer had Great Britain, but it would be Little England plus Wales. I do not even know how this would affect Northern Ireland. Certainly the notion that our leaving the EU would have no domestic consequences is a point that my noble friend has provoked in the debate.

There are one or two fallacies in the debate that are not helped by the prism of the Daily Mail, from which a lot of people get their information. We cannot do much about that—at least, there could be things to do about it, but they would not go down well with Thomas Paine or John Stuart Mill, given freedom of the press, although some people would describe that in different terms, as I think William Cobbett would do. The first fallacy is that our great companies are in Europe and—I say this to the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford—it is our great companies in Europe that are exporting to the rest of the world. This dichotomy or antithesis between selling to Europe and selling to the rest of the world is ridiculous.

On Monday of this week, I was part of meeting with senior representatives at Congress House on European works councils. All the great companies of Europe have European works councils. They look at world market share and try to get some minimum standards agreed between them. The idea that Europe is not interested in exporting to Latin America or Africa is a ludicrous fallacy. It is food for thought for those people who are not in day-to-day contact with how industry actually works—they used to be the Conservative Party. I know that the City of London may have its own reasons for making these fallacies the standard belief, but we ought to be clear about the facts.

The second fallacy at the present time is that we are the most successful economy in Europe and therefore we do not need Europe. We have a bigger growth rate at the moment because we dug the biggest hole. I have the latest GDP figures—the actual level of production and output—for the last complete year. Europe equals 100, Britain is 106, Sweden is 127, the Netherlands are 127, Germany is 124 and Denmark is 125. That is the measure of success of an economy, not some propaganda put from Downing Street to the Daily Mail.

The evolution of Labour Party policy was touched on by the Liberal Democrat Peer, the noble Lord, Lord Rodgers, and by the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Newnham—I, too, congratulate her on her maiden speech. It is true that Jim Callaghan said what he said in the earlier period, but I remember an afternoon with Helmut Kohl, Jack Jones and Alan Bullock in Bonn in 1976 when we were on the Bullock committee. Jim Callaghan was clearly seeing the opening for the Labour Party to change its policy, which came to fruition in 1988. The reason why it came to fruition—apropos the weekend’s press, as if the concept of the working class had just been invented by somebody—was that, because Europe was increasing workers’ rights, we got the Labour Party overwhelmingly to change and to become pro-Europe. No historian is going to challenge that. I will have to stop there.

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Tuesday 21st October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)]

My Lords, I tend to follow the line of the Economist last week—not normally my favourite reading—expressed in the following sentences:

“Bosnia works—but badly. The elections held on October 12th will probably not alter that. Yet to dismiss them as just one more round of political musical chairs would be wrong. Some change may now be in the air”.

Included in that is definitely a receding of the demand from Republika Srpska for secession. It seems pretty clear to me that Belgrade is no longer behind anything like that. Its target is joining the European Union, which indeed is the target of the whole of the western Balkans. When I had the privilege of representing the House of Lords in a west Balkans forum in Montenegro, it was very clear that the mood was changing and that people have to prioritise the main goal, and subsidiary goals have to be seen as subsidiary goals.

I was very saddened to hear the story told by my noble friend Lord Griffiths regarding immigration, but I ask whether there was not another reading of it—a bit like Northern Ireland—in that the fact that he could take that exercise as far as he did is perhaps a mark that, right around Bosnia-Herzegovina, people are looking for more co-operation. I travelled around a bit a month ago in Republika Srpska, which is part of Herzegovina, near the border with Montenegro. The talk in the pub that I was in was of jobs, yes, but certainly of Europe and that, “We don’t want to return to any of that conflict in the past”. On both sides of the new bridge in Mostar, which has already been referred to, there was the same sort of conversation. Okay, we can all accuse each other of being naive on some occasions, but there are raisons d’état why my interpretation may be more correct than that of the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown. I do not know what he wants. We cannot speed up the European integration process without going through all the dossiers. After all, there was criticism in this country that Romania and Bulgaria were let in a bit early because they did not have to jump through all these hoops. Yet it all goes back, as has been mentioned, to the economy.

Where will any new economic factor come from? I offer my picture of the economy. It points in three directions in terms of what people call ethnicity, although that is a grossly overused word. When, 600 years ago, some people from Sarajevo went to work for the Grand Vizier in Constantinople, they stayed there for some time. When they retired, they came back to Sarajevo and, lo and behold, they were Muslims. That is nothing to do with ethnicity. We must be careful about how we paint these pictures.

Things have improved for the world’s polarities. I am putting the counterargument, and I do not want to exaggerate it, but the three polarities which fit are: Turkey, vis-à-vis Sarajevo and Bosniaks, in terms of investment; what you might call European Union-plus—NATO, the EU, the United States and so on—and Belgrade, which equals Moscow. In so far as Belgrade equals Moscow, it must be that Moscow has given Belgrade the wink to say, “We do not want to carry on with this secessionist pressure in the Republika Srpska”. This is because Russia has now removed any rhetorical obstacle to the whole of the west Balkans joining the European Union and NATO. I ask the Minister whether I have got that wrong. Is that not where we are?

In Zagreb, Belgrade and elsewhere, this solidarity certainly does not yet represent a magic wand on the ground. Of course not: look at Belfast, with its peace walls. Let us be realistic; these things do not happen overnight. There is no button that we can press which we have not pressed, or which we can hold a Labour, Conservative or any other Government responsible for not having pressed.

We must be cautious in paying lip service to any big attempt to change Dayton or anything like that. People are talking about constitutional changes—I do not know what they are talking about. I know that, of course, as in Northern Ireland, there are too many politicians, but that is part of the price we pay for this elaborate system of peace in two not totally dissimilar circumstances. However, the fact that Bosnia is one of the poorest countries in Europe, alongside Albania, cannot simply be laid at the door of there being too much politics. There is the lack of a modern social market economy and investment. Of course, people in Sarajevo and elsewhere are being very naive in thinking that if they somehow get the politics right the investment will flood in like water coming over a weir. It will not.

The interesting point, confirmed by Mr Erdogan when he changed his hat—he is now President of Turkey—is that Turkey is committed to a considerable increase in investment in the Bosniak area, and more generally in being a partner with all three parts of the country. I would be interested to hear how the Minister assesses the fact that Turkey has an interest in making sure that this all goes in the right direction.

After all, looking ahead, it would be impossible to keep Bosnia out of the European Union on the grounds that it has got Muslims in it, or some such caricature, because Turkey knows that that is what is being said in some parts of western Europe about Turkey. Turkey therefore has some leverage. We think that we have affinity with parts of the former British Empire. People in Turkey have some historical memory of the Ottoman Empire. This is a factor alongside the Moscow factor, vis-à-vis Belgrade, or America and Europe. Let us not forget that each of these three areas of power, pulling strings, have together apparently come to a view that they all want the same things. Is that not a degree of progress?

The point has already been made about these three great religions: Catholicism and the Serbian Orthodox Church on the Christian side, and a generally progressive sort of Islam on the Bosniak side. It is an existential fact that we have a most fascinating jigsaw puzzle here. I am going to look on the bright side; someone has to look on the bright side and say some of these things. The last thing that we should do is say that they do not know where they are going. I would put tuppence on the proposition that in a few years’ time, the way we are going, for Europe it will be “Bosnia in, Britain out”.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

I asked whether the Minister would agree that, in some respects, the third leg of the tripod with the Bosniaks is Turkey, investment-wise and in other ways. It is very interesting in terms of the future of Europe that you have this Islamic link. I am surprised that the Minister has not answered that question.

[Baroness Anelay of St Johns]

Perhaps I may save time and jump ahead to that issue, which was to have been covered later in my speech. I will leap to it immediately.

We certainly believe that it is important for Ankara to play a positive role in encouraging reform. We believe that both Turkey and Bosnia and Herzegovina share a common EU future. When they have met all their requirements for membership, they will, I hope, enter the EU, and I look forward to that day. I hope that that assists the noble Lord. He is right, though, to point to the influence of other countries bordering and near Bosnia and Herzegovina on the development of that whole area and the importance of its security.

I will skip a bit of my speech as I have just one minute left. It was important to hear from noble Lords about the importance of civil society—something to which we will return. It is also vital that we reflect upon the importance of having Operation EUFOR Althea in place for the security of the area. We are proud to be active supporters of that mission, with a company of troops on standby and more than 90 soldiers on the ground.

The noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, referred to the matter of visas. I am aware, of course, that not all members of the group from Srebrenica travelling to the UK were able to secure visas on that occasion. There were problems about the technicalities of this but I specifically welcome the noble Lord’s efforts. I hope that in future we can seek to rearrange that programme. It is not over.

In conclusion, it is clear to me that we have so much to do to make sure that Bosnia can become a prosperous, stable and united country, but there is a path towards that—its path is towards the EU and NATO. We have a job to do, and we will do it with this House’s help.

Ukraine

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Tuesday 18th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)]

My Lords, the State Duma in Moscow has just cancelled a delegation from our All-Party Parliamentary Russia Group a month from now. It so happens that I chaired the previous meeting here. Before we started the agenda, the formidable lady chair of the Duma asked me point blank, “Do you think we are a European country?”. I thought for a second and said, “Well, of course: Chekov, Tolstoy, Pushkin, Shostakovich, Stravinsky”—you know, just to show how cultured I was. However, I wondered whether I should add, “Actually, no, you are not. Why are all eight of you from the United Russia party? You are not a normal European country, because we have multi-party democracy”.

The schizophrenia in Russia is very general. Putin himself wants to be acknowledged on the world stage, such as at the G8—the Olympics is an example par excellence—and not to be a pariah. There are multi- national economic facts of life—energy, whatever—and the huge role of shipping across the northern sea route from the Far East to Europe, et cetera. That internationalism is in sharp antithesis to the other half of his brain, which is demotic nationalism.

We have to try. Somebody mentioned having regard to people’s sensitivities. That is a very wise thing to say. A number of the points of the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, have great validity. Some other key points and perspectives had certainly not been made until the debate got under way. It is time to try to be constructive, as many people have said; it might sound facile. The noble Lord, Lord Anderson, asked, “Why not have guarantees for the Russian minority as part of the solution?”. Yes, but we both made mistakes, did we not? It was only recently that the new Government did exactly the opposite on the question, which was highly provocative.

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, that this is not the time that Russia should be thrown out of the OSCE. The Secretary-General of the United Nations could not chair a meeting at the moment because he is defending the territorial integrity of member states. However, that is highly nuanced in the case of Crimea, and I will add my two pennies on that.

I very much agreed with the noble Baroness, Lady Suttie—I am sorry if I pronounce her name wrong. Yesterday’s proposals by the Russian Foreign Minister were rejected out of hand on the grounds that we would absolutely never accept the idea that Crimea could be either independent or part of Russia, because it must be part of the territorial integrity of Ukraine.

I also very much agreed with the noble Lord, Lord Howell, who made an excellent speech. I will qualify two points from my understanding of it. I very much agreed when he said, “Never use the word ‘never’”, but I will pick up the question of elections. I have now raised three times in the House the unsustainability of the constitution of Ukraine, which it has had for a long time. It is 50:50, a bit like the two sides in Northern Ireland, which I have mentioned. In that situation you cannot have elections in which the winner takes it all—51:49—and you certainly do not then arrest and imprison the leader of the Opposition on charges of treason. We do not want later this month—is it in May?—those sort of elections. The cart is being put before the horse as regards constitution-making.

On the talks in Northern Ireland, I am not saying that Dublin equals Moscow or anything but religion defines the situation. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans spoke about the two types of Orthodox in the east and the west. We can also look at a bit of history. Many noble Lords have mentioned history, but I will add one point. Churchill agreed with Stalin and Roosevelt at Yalta—aptly enough—in 1945 that the Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian SSRs would become members of the United Nations, but that was rather illusory until after Gorbachev, perestroika and the collapse of the USSR. However, what was done in Yalta was to shift Poland to the west, to the Oder-Neisse line, and to shift Ukraine’s western border to the left-hand side—to the west—which has created the exact balance which we now inherit. Galicia—which also had a Roman Catholic element, going back to the Austro-Hungarian empire—became part of Ukraine because of the shift after Yalta in 1945. We therefore have a country which I will not say is slightly artificial, as that would be a very bad thing to say. However, in historical terms, as we have historical memories, it is a relatively recent country. Perhaps that is why people are all so hypersensitive.

Crimea is in a very special position. I remember hiring a car not so long ago in Simferopol, staying in Yalta and going to Balaklava. I got to the esplanade in the middle of Sevastopol and got in a launch. I paid someone some roubles and he showed me around the Russian Black Sea fleet. Only 50 yards away is the Ukrainian Black Sea fleet. You see monuments all around for all the wars that Russia fought—three major ones in defence of Sevastopol. Tolstoy was wounded there, and much of War and Peace, in terms of what it is like to fight, is from Sevastopol in 1855. That novel is based on Sevastopol in that sense; it is almost learnt by heart, although that might be difficult, by every Russian schoolchild. The heroic defence happened not only in the 19th and early 20th century but as recently as 1941 and 1942.

In the centre of Sevastopol by the esplanade is an administrative building with a Russian flag on top of it. That has been true for a long time. As I understand it, the deal implicitly is in the treaty to have the sovereign bases, just as we have in Cyprus—that is, the naval bases in Sevastopol. But that treaty runs out in 2018, and I think that Putin has that in mind. All the Ukrainians whom we met in Kiev said, “Of course they’ll have to hand them back to Ukrainian control—we’re not going to renew that treaty”. Well, I do not need to teach anyone to suck eggs about the problem of access through the Dardanelles. Of course, Russia could build another base further along to the east, but I think that it is very committed to Sevastopol, almost as much as to the memory of Stalingrad in recent times.

Finally, I echo what the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans said, that the Greek Orthodox missionaries first landed in Sevastopol—I think that I am picking up the point correctly—and, incidentally, brought the Cyrillic alphabet. Anyone who goes to Athens and gets the hang of the Cyrillic alphabet does not have too much problem trying to understand the road signs in Crimea, and it is true of the whole of the ex-USSR; everyone understands Cyrillic. So this history is terribly important.

What we have to do now is to put a lot of eggs in the basket of how a new constitution would actually work. We have to find a form of words that does not say “Never” about Ukraine but tries to acknowledge that there have been mistakes on both sides—and I have mentioned a couple of them. We have to find a constitutional formula where there is buy-in from both main parties in the ethnic or religious sense. I do not dissent from everything that the Government and the West are doing at the moment, but my instinctive reaction, for what it is worth—and I would be interested to hear the Minister’s comment on this—is that we have to do what we can to give Putin an excuse not to do something stupid in the Donbas.

We must not be too provocative. Although people may be killed in a very tragic situation—take my analogy with Northern Ireland—it does not change what you then try to do. We must recognise the rights of the two sides to be part of a united Ukraine, even with a question mark over Crimea, and ensure that Russia comes to the table. I think that Putin is now looking for that. I may be wrong but that is my instinct.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Alderdice (LD)]

My Lords, my noble friend the Minister had to leave for a few minutes and just spoke to me. Even in her absence, I want to pay tribute to her opening speech, which was extremely helpful and certainly laid down the approach that the Government are understandably taking.

Many other noble Lords in this debate have pointed out that what the President of Russia is doing is at worst illegal but certainly running roughshod over the wishes of people and the security and stability of the wider region. I would not add very much to the debate if I simply repeated those kinds of sentiments. Instead, I will take a different approach but I want to make very clear in doing so that, while I seek to understand some of the mistakes that we have made in the West and some of the understandings that Mr Putin and his colleagues have in the East, I do it not in any sense to excuse what he is doing but because, if we do not understand it a little better, we may continue to make even worse misjudgments than we have done to date. I rather suspect that some noble Lords will find some of the things I say uncomfortable and maybe even disagreeable, including colleagues on my own Benches.

First, it is extremely important for us to be clear about the difference between tactics and strategy. We are debating the question of Ukraine and the particular situation with Crimea. This is about a tactic of Mr Putin’s, not a strategy. The strategy is a wider issue. I have not heard much being said—except perhaps by the noble Lord, Lord Soley—about the wider approach that Mr Putin is taking and what drives him. I will come back to that in a minute.

On the tactical question of Ukraine and Crimea, we need to be very honest with ourselves. For example, when noble Lords say that it is for the people of Ukraine to decide their future democratically, it is manifestly clear that the people of Ukraine are not of one mind. The problem is that they are absolutely split down the middle, so democracy as we talk about it simply will not work. That is part of the reason we have this problem. It is not going to work, so let us not use phrases like that, which might be very reassuring in this Chamber but are meaningless in the real world outside. One of my noble friends talked about how important it is to be responsible in this Chamber because things that are said here might do damage outside. There might be some element of truth there but, frankly, I do not think many people in Russia listen to this Chamber. It has very little relevance to most of them and the way they see things. The influence it has is modest in our own country and even more modest more widely.

I heard a lot said—very sensibly, rationally and thoughtfully—about the economic issues and the energy drivers. Those are not the things that drive people in situations of conflict—otherwise we would never get into wars. In wars, everybody loses: economically, socially and in every other way. Wars do not come about because of some kind of weighing up of the calculus of economic benefit. When I listened to a number of things said about energy, trade and economic sanctions, my first thought was that that will not make any difference to Mr Putin and his colleagues because they do not make judgments on that basis. They make judgments on the basis that they believe that their great country has been humiliated and set aside by the West for a long period and they are trying—successfully —to fight back against that. That is the driver, not the economy.

The speech by the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, was, as always, excellent. One thing that he pointed out was the interconnectedness of everything. He has often rightly drawn our attention to that. That makes it very difficult to make economic sanctions work, because there are always ways around them, especially if you have an enormous country and other countries, including other members of the Security Council, prepared to play ball with you.

Let us look at the attitude of Mr Putin. It is always important to know your enemy to understand what you are dealing with. When we talk about the war in Afghanistan, we think about our intervention when we were there—at least, the most recent one. Russians think of the previous Afghanistan war, the one in which we backed the mujaheddin, sending huge amounts of weapons and materiel—and backing Osama bin Laden, of course—in order to get them out, one of the last great humiliations at the end of the Cold War. I may be wrong, but I perceive that Mr Putin is riding on the back of a nationalist tiger and saying, “We’re going to put this right in various places”. I could see it in the quartet dealing with the Israel-Palestinian problem when, for all the loud talk coming from the UN, the EU and the United States about who would talk to whom, Russia was happily talking to Hamas and Hezbollah all the way through. They just ignored what the other three said.

When we came to Syria, particularly after the intervention in Libya, it was absolutely clear from the beginning that Mr Putin was saying, “This is my red line. And, by the way, I am going to stick with mine. Now let us see what you do with yours”. What did we do? We drew lines in the sand, which is very convenient because you can always draw more lines in the sand and rub the other one out with your foot. The same mistake has been made with regard to Crimea: saying that this or that will never happen. I do not think it will be much reassurance to say that we stuck to our view in regard to the Baltic states and, three generations later, they got their freedom. That will not be much reassurance either to people in the Baltics now or to anyone else who might reasonably be fearful. Why? Because now we do not make much of a difference.

I come to the European Union. I am a strong supporter of the European Union, but I remember many arguments with some of my Liberal colleagues over the question of widening or deepening the Union. In my view, you could either deepen it and make it a real political Union—at that stage, I was very keen to do that and have a Europe of the regions rather than a Europe of nation states, and I still think that it may well have been possible—or you could widen it and make it in effect a glorified free trade area. My belief was that if you tried to do both, you would make for disaster, and I think that that is what has happened. We will not talk about the economic aspects of it, but the political aspects are that we have allowed the further widening of the European Union and encouraged others to join it because we saw it as a democratisation of the east and of the south of Europe and beyond, but at the same time many of us who supported that were talking about the importance of developing a foreign and security policy and a defence posture. How on earth could that have been seen by Russia as anything other than bringing forward military, foreign and security policy closer and closer to its borders? Was it ever going to be accepted?

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

I am most grateful to the noble Lord for giving way, but if you take the case of Serbia and Kosovo—and it is true of many countries, surely—the Copenhagen criteria and other criteria, including the economic criteria for joining the EU, have been prized and highly sought after. That is not just skin deep; that is strategic—to use the noble Lord’s word—thinking. I ask the noble Lord to reflect on this idea that widening has had no real impact and not been a proper function of the European Union. I disagreed with Jacques Delors on this very point: I believe that widening and deepening have actually gone together.

[Lord Alderdice]

My Lords, that is precisely the problem which I am identifying. If we try to widen it out to states that Russia sees as being within its purview and at the same time insist that what we want is not merely a trading bloc but a political union with a common foreign and security policy, and with defence implications down the line, how could Russia see that other than as more than an economic free-trade and democratic area? It could only be perceived as a threat. We are reaping some of the problems of that approach.

We are at a dangerous place if we become more aggressive and at a dangerous place if we do not. I am reminded a little of the problem that I perceive in the policy that some of my noble friends on these Benches have espoused regarding nuclear weapons. The approach that is recommended by some says, “We won’t actually send out submarines with weapons on them unless there is a threat. We’ll keep them going out and end our continuous at-sea deterrence”. So if we find a situation now where these submarines are supposedly out and there is a threat—in a few months’ time there might be a greater threat, possibly on the Baltics or possibly somewhere else—at what point do we judge that the danger is sufficient to bring them back and put in the weapons? Is it now? Is it in a month’s time? Are we already too late? If you do that, would it not increase the militarisation of a problem that we already believe we should be de-escalating? We are in a serious problem and there is no easy answer to the dilemma that we are in.

However, I am persuaded that we need to look seriously at our strategic defence posture. I do not believe that what we have at the moment, which was largely defined on budgetary issues after the last election, is serving the purpose of seriously understanding how we deal with the chaos in the wider Middle East, across the north of Africa and below it and, increasingly, in eastern Europe. These are questions which this Chamber needs to come back and explore fully and thoughtfully because they are strategic threats, which we can ignore until the time when they come back to haunt us. Some of our friends, brothers and sisters closer to Russia, are already finding the past coming back to haunt them.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

There is considerable evidence that a large number of Russian troops have arrived in Crimea in the past two to three weeks. My clear understanding is that it is not within the agreement. If I am wrong, I will write to the noble Lord. As a matter of interest, a number of troops, including troops from within the North Caucasus, were engaged in—one might put it gently—holding down Chechnya. We recognise that Russia’s rational interests lie in a prosperous and stable Ukraine, as a number of noble Lords have said. We also recognise that international politics is not entirely rational. The First World War would not have broken out if international politics had been entirely rational.

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, that of course the UK will do everything possible to maintain a constructive dialogue but it has to be a dialogue in which both sides listen and search for agreement on shared principles. We cannot accept that Russia has one set of principles but expects us to observe another. The noble Lord, Lord Chidgey, talked of stand-up arguments with Duma deputies. A lot of us have had that. I seem to remember having such an argument when I was leading a delegation that included the noble Lord, Lord Howell. I rather enjoyed the exchanges.

We have to tell the truth to our Russian partners and recognise that those within the elite demand the rest of the world to accept the special character of the Russian state, which we are not prepared to accept. Russian suggestions that we should move towards a federal and loose Ukraine while maintaining a centralised and authoritarian Russia are a good example of how proposals are being made that would be irrational to accept, but it is attempting to impose them.

It is deeply regretful that the current Russian regime appears to need weak and divided neighbours in order to feel secure. One worry is that a weak Crimea will join an occupied South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Transnistria and others as a means of weakening the states around Russia.

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

I am sure that the Minister is not misrepresenting the Russian position. However, equally, many of us have argued that no matter whether it is federal, devo-max or so on, you cannot go on with a unitary state with the sort of election results of 51% and 49%—and then winner takes all and you have arrested the leader of the Opposition. That is why I mentioned Northern Ireland. There is a caricature going on here.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

There are all sorts of questions in the noble Lord's remarks and I could respond in a number of ways, but at this time of night I hesitate to do that.

The noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, suggested that we might have a sort of sale and lease back with the Russians. The Ukrainian constitution makes it clear that any alteration of the territory of Ukraine must be resolved by an all-Ukrainian referendum. Article 134 of the constitution sets out that the autonomous Republic of Crimea is an integral constituent part of Ukraine and can only resolve issues related to the authority within the provisions set out by the Ukrainian constitution.

One could have negotiated this. The Government consider the referendum in Crimea to be illegal because it has been rushed through under the presence of a large number of Russian troops without updating the inaccuracy of the electoral register, with OSCE observers being refused entry. It is therefore not in any way acceptable to international standards.

The UN Security Council resolution was clear and strong on all of this. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, that of course there is a role for the UN Secretary-General and the UN. The Chinese abstention was a silent acknowledgement that some fundamental principles of international law and international sovereignty are at stake in this crisis.

A number of noble Lords suggested that we have to include Russia in all future discussions with Ukraine. Of course we do. We still make every effort we can to maintain a dialogue with Russia. We continue to urge Russia not to take any further action towards annexation of Ukraine. The UK remains supportive of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement and it is now likely that the political and foreign policy aspects of the association agreement will be signed at the meeting of the European Council this week.

Uganda: Treatment of Women

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Thursday 6th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Warsi]

My noble friend makes an important point. One of the potential solutions has been to look at the issue of our aid programme. It is important to note that we do not give budget support to the Ugandan Government: 99% of our aid goes directly to NGOs and civil society organisations. But we must always remain vigilant and look at how we can continue to persuade the Ugandan Government and others to protect LGBT rights.

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)]

My Lords, I am not clear about the Minister’s answer to the penultimate question about the agenda of our dialogue with the Ugandan Government on investment and many other questions. What is the Government’s judgment of how far this matter can be taken forward, or is it the sort of area which it is thought better to exclude for diplomatic reasons?

[Baroness Warsi]

It is not thought of as an area that we would exclude diplomatically. The noble Lord must be aware that the Foreign Secretary has made incredibly frank and open statements about our concerns around LGBT rights in Uganda and I have always taken the view, as the Minister with responsibility for human rights at the FCO, that if we are going to make human rights work, we have to do this properly. That is the vein in which we are working.

Ukraine

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Thursday 27th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Warsi]

I cannot speculate in response to the noble Lord’s question. This comes back to the fact that Ukraine is an independent country. It is a sovereign nation. It is the right of the people of Ukraine to make a decision for the future that best suits them in accordance with the reforms which are in the best interests of the Ukrainian nation. We need to make sure that we conduct ourselves in a way that means that we focus on reconciliation and stability.

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)]

My Lords, may I take the previous question a stage further? People have mentioned the Crimea. Sebastopol is in the Crimea geographically but it is Russian sovereign territory. The Russian military is in Sebastopol, which is quite different from the rest of the Crimea, with the Russian Black Sea fleet being there under treaty until 2018.

[Baroness Warsi]

I am not quite sure what the question is.

Georgia: Islamophobia

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Tuesday 4th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)]

My Lords, when the right reverend Prelate asked his original Question, he referred to a conversation in Batumi and mentioned nationalism in the same breath as Orthodox Christianity versus Islam. How far does the Minister think that we are talking about an aspect of nationalism in one respect? These three Transcaucasian ex-Soviet republics have been independent only since 1989-90. Might this not be looked at as much in terms of nationalism as religion?

[Baroness Warsi]

Yes, my Lords. Unfortunately, Georgia is being presented by many politicians as a Christian country, and the identity and nationality that flow from that are causing some of this underlying tension.

European Union (Referendum) Bill

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Friday 24th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

I have given way already on two or three occasions. I think that I have shown considerable courtesy in giving way several times before speaking. I say with the greatest sincerity that I have nothing but the greatest admiration for the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay. Anybody who knows him knows that he is a man of the greatest integrity, and he was undoubtedly an extremely distinguished Lord Chancellor. But I was really quite shocked by something that he said this morning and I feel that, for once, he has allowed party loyalty to override his general judgment.

He seemed to suggest—I wish I could believe that I had misheard him—that we should allow in this place any kind of rubbish to become the law of the land simply on grounds of political expediency, as a substitute for party manifestos as a declaration of future intent or something of that sort. That seemed to me an extraordinary thing for any Member of this House to say, particularly a former Lord Chancellor.

We have a duty, which it is perhaps not an exaggeration to call a sacred duty, to make sure that anything that goes forward from this place on to the statute book has been thoroughly examined. If we see something coming from the House of Commons which we believe to be anomalous or improper, or not up to the highest standards of a democratic legislature or false in any way, we must do everything possible to modify and improve the text before it leaves this House.

Equally, there is really no doubt that there is something very false about the text of this Bill. There is something very artificial about the language of the question. We all in this House think that we understand the English language. We think that we understand the difference between the verb “to be” and the verb “to remain”. We know perfectly well in any context, be it a newspaper or a novel, that if we changed every use of the verb “to remain” to “to be”, we would fundamentally change the meaning and produce complete chaos and nonsense in many cases.

If I were to say to a friend of mine, “Do you think that I should be a member of a trade union?” or “Do you think that I should be a member of my local rotary?” or “Do you think that I should be a member of the Mormon church?”, and if, subsequent to the conversation he discovered that I was already a member of a trade union or a member of the local rotary or a member of the Mormon church, I think that he could come to only two conclusions. One would be that I was going slightly mad, perhaps showing the advanced symptoms of Alzheimer’s; I can see some noble Lords who have felt for years that I have had that. Alternatively, he would feel, with reason, that I was being very disingenuous and slippery and that he needed in future to be very cautious in his understanding of everything that I had said. That, I am afraid, is the position of the Government, or the position of the Tory party, or the position of the proposers of this Bill. They have subscribed to a use of language which is clearly very slippery and disingenuous, and we have to ask why they have done it.

I have no doubt that they have done it because the spin doctors have said that people confronted with a question will be inclined to vote for the status quo, particularly if it is a matter not of immediate concern to themselves or their families—we know that Europe is not a matter of immediate concern to most people and their families—and particularly if it is a slightly complicated matter. That is the easy option—some people would say the lazy option—so that, if you want to get an answer against membership of the European Union, you imply, although it would be quite false to do it, that our membership of the European Union is something new and is not the status quo. We all know that that is the game that they are playing. The question is whether the Government, or the Tory party more precisely, should be allowed to get away with that or whether the House of Lords should feel it wants the Government of the day to get away with that. That is the question that we have to weigh very carefully, because on that depends the integrity to a very large extent of our processes here.

If it becomes known in the country that the Government of the day can get away in a referendum with posing an obviously slightly bogus and biased question, what does that say for the integrity of our democracy? What does that say for people’s confidence in our political processes? There is already enough cynicism in this country about politics without adding to it in this fashion.

Even if there was no such thing as an Electoral Commission in this country, quite openly and straightforwardly on the basis of the two texts we are comparing this morning, the one put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Armstrong, is undoubtedly the one we should go for. However, there is an Electoral Commission. We have established it as an umpire to deal with precisely these matters, to give better confidence to the British people that politicians cannot get away with dirty tricks. Here, the sponsors and supporters of the Bill propose that we should simply override the views of the Electoral Commission—the umpire. Two things follow from that. First, it would be quite clear that there is no point at all in having an Electoral Commission. Why are we spending public money on an Electoral Commission if the Government of the day—or anybody who can get a majority in the two Houses—can always override its views? There would be complete cynicism about the Electoral Commission. Secondly, there would be even greater cynicism about all our political processes. I have my name to several amendments in this group but I am delighted to support the amendment put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Armstrong.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Warsi]

My Lords, I was not proposing to give the Conservative view on each of the amendments. I was going to make some general points. The Bill’s wording of the question is, I submit, fair and clear. It is the right question to put to the British people.

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

We have been going for more than two hours, as the Minister said, yet in one sentence she has just said that she will not respond to the point about why the question is the wrong one and why the Electoral Commission’s is the right one. How is that, unless there is no answer to the question—in which case she should accept the amendment? What is the justification for not accepting the question put by the Electoral Commission? That has not been answered from those Benches.

[Baroness Warsi]

My Lords, clearly the House wants to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, so in those circumstances I will simply finish by saying that the Electoral Commission’s key finding was that the question in the Bill did not lead voters to favour one answer or the other. Its concern was that some voters who do not know whether we are currently in the EU would be confused. However, we feel that following a full referendum campaign, the number of people this would affect would either be very few or none.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Inglewood]

My Lords, I ask my noble friend a point of clarification. I am not clear about the relationship between the negotiations and the date of any referendum in December 2017. Earlier in the debate, my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay of Clashfern said that there was every likelihood that, if something became problematic it was always open to a successor Parliament to amend the legislation. In the case of the negotiations not being concluded in time for a referendum at the end of 2017, would it be the policy of the Prime Minister to follow the line of action advocated by my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay of Clashfern, or would it be his policy to proceed with the referendum regardless?

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

My Lords, I hope that the noble Lord replies to that because the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, has given the game away. As the noble Lord, Lord Armstrong of Ilminster, said earlier, there is no point to having this date if noble Lords want to have this flexibility. I therefore add a question to the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs. In one minute it is seen as a bilateral negotiation by Britain and in the next minute it is clear, as has been said by many speakers, that it is a multilateral negotiation. It cannot be both at the same time. The first would be narrow, and I do not think it would get very far. If it is the latter, a multilateral poker game, it certainly cannot be time constrained in advance. When he replies, I ask the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs: which is it?

[Lord Higgins (Con)]

My Lords, I make a rather simple point. When we began our proceedings today, there was a widespread view that if any amendment were carried, it might endanger the future of the Bill. There was therefore a great inhibition against voting for any amendment. I do not believe that was wholly true because, as was pointed out in earlier debates, it would be possible for the other place to allow enough time for the Bill to proceed and for the amendments to be considered.

At all events, we are now in a situation where an amendment has been carried; it makes little difference whether one amendment has been carried or a number. It is therefore extremely important, if the Bill is to have a future, as I believe it should, that we make it as good as we can by carrying out our duty of amending it in a sensible way. I find it quite difficult to think of any amendment which has been proposed more sensibly that that of the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, this afternoon.

It seems to me that if we are really in favour of a genuine referendum on the substance of the issue, following a serious negotiation—which I believe is what the Prime Minister intends—then there really is a very strong case for the amendment. Therefore, whatever my noble friend on the Front Bench’s brief may originally have said, I hope that she will consider the point which I have just made and, more particularly, that my noble friend Lord Dobbs would also consider it. It seems quite clear that the Bill would be better it we accepted the amendment.