EU and Russia (EUC Report)

Lord Maclennan of Rogart Excerpts

Tuesday 24th March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Maclennan of Rogart (LD)]

I begin by congratulating my colleague and noble friend Lord Oxford and Asquith on a most penetrating speech. It was very helpful that he brought his own experience and knowledge to this debate. I hope that we will hear more from him as these problems develop. I cannot think that they will go away immediately. I also want to express the sense of privilege that I had to serve on Sub-Committee C in preparing this report. I thank the clerk, the policy adviser and, above all, our chairman for his very persistent work in producing what I think is one of the best reports that has emerged from the European Union Select Committee.

The crisis that we face in the deterioration of relations between the EU and Russia has to be acknowledged and acted on. It is not entirely due to Russia. In my opinion it has overreacted to issues that we have given rise to. We heard evidence—it was reported most knowledgeably by Rory Stewart MP—that the Foreign Office has downgraded its capacity in Moscow, and indeed in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office itself. We also heard that that had happened with the EU representatives in Moscow. It seems that we have blundered into this mess through failure to recognise what was happening in Russia.

The breakdown of the Soviet Union was enormously humiliating to the political class in Russia, but also to the citizenry. The citizenry has been appealed to by the political leaders. We have seen the troubles in Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Georgia, Transnistria, and Nagorno-Karabakh and have not reacted strongly enough to them. It is not suitable now to neglect the Crimea as something that has been achieved or set back. My daughter, who is a film-maker, was in Ukraine three months before the balloon went up. She made a film about Ukraine and the Crimea that was, in some sense, a documentary. It demonstrated the great love the Russians have for the Crimea and how, over the generations, they have built up their connections in stone. It was shown at the British Film Institute after the explosion and I think it was very observant.

We do not seem to have had a sufficiently coherent response to what has been going on in Russia. One of the pieces of evidence that we gained when we were in Brussels was how the trade department had not kept the political departments fully aware of the development of the association agreement with Ukraine; the AA took the observers by surprise in Europe. That was a failure of the European Union’s structure. It is also clear that Russia has been very concerned about its security.

It seems to me that we should have been engaging in constant dialogue with Russia about those matters in which we share an interest. The partnership and co-operation agreement has, of course, been suspended now, which is a great misfortune. The involvement of Russia with our interests is clearer. In 2013 the natural gas imports from Russia to the European Union were 39% of its requirements. We should have had more engagement with the setting up of the Eurasian union and we should have got to grips more with the Eastern Partnership and the six countries of the former Soviet Union. We have been too slow to reappraise our relationship and that, I think, is well brought out by the report.

How can we get back into dialogue? I agree with those who say that we cannot abandon sanctions or the pressure that we are putting on Russia so long as it is prepared to split up sovereign nations. However, there are many matters in which we could engage. We can develop a sense that we have a common interest in a security architecture and in resolving the economic problems that are afflicting both the eurozone and Russia. Because of our and its membership of the Council of Europe, we can discuss the European Convention on Human Rights. We can pick up Putin’s assertion in 2010 that he wanted to see an economic space from Lisbon to Vladivostok. I think he actually meant that co-operation was to be thought about. We must also remember that culture, education and science are things that we have in common, and we must appeal to the citizenry of Russia in continuing to cement our dialogue. We do not want Russia to feel drawn increasingly to the East and out of contact with the West. That, it seems to me, is the priority that we have to face now.