Ukraine

Lord Purvis of Tweed Excerpts

Friday 25th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Government for bringing this debate to the House and the Minister for his clear opening remarks, on which there is consensus across the House. He knows of the support of these Benches, which my noble friend Lady Smith indicated. I join others in welcoming the noble Lord, Lord Spellar, to his place and look forward to the valuable contributions he will make as a Member of this House.

My noble friend said at the start that we are debating a war in Europe, but the conflict has global ramifications. We have just heard reference to the competing international fora of the Commonwealth of Nations and BRICS summits, with perhaps jarring narratives and, as some have said, competing political relevancies. BRICS has become political rather than a trading co-operative body because of Moscow. As I will return to in a moment, redoubling our efforts in that regard will be important.

We have supported the Government’s actions, most recently the £2.25 billion facility of interest. As my noble friend said, we had pressed the previous Government on this, and we are delighted to see action. I hope the Minister will give a bit more detail on what practical impact that will have and when because, as we know, the timing is imperative.

We on these Benches have been pleased to play our part in the cross-party consensus that it is in the UK’s interests for Ukraine to prevail in its defensive struggle. That is also in our wider interests for global development, as the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, said. Last week, we discussed the SDGs in his debate, as well as the tensions in modern Ethiopia. Next week, we will have a debate on the wider Horn of Africa. Across all those areas, we see Russia’s malign work to destabilise, to misinform and to support terror activities from Yemen to Sudan and the Sahel. As the noble Baroness, Lady Helic, said, we see that closer to home in the western Balkans. The reach of the conflict, therefore, shows the 21st-century nature of hybrid warfare, with the many commercial interests that feed into it. As the Minister alluded to, this is both modern and medieval: in Ukraine, there is hand-to-hand combat in freezing mud trenches, while above in the skies there are drones controlled hundreds of kilometres away, with social media covering it instantly.

Support in the form of equipment and military materiel is vital, as the noble Lords, Lord Stevens and Lord Spellar, said. However, we need to do more with our allies on reconstruction in Ukraine, such as providing technical support for restarting air services at Lviv Airport, an area the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, spoke so movingly about. One of the ways we can show that Russia will fail is if the reconstruction following its damage occurs almost as quickly it happens. The resilience of the Ukrainian people must be the resilience of their economy and industry, and the UK can play an important part in that.

We also need to do more on having a greater impact on the Russian war economy. There are headwinds resulting from those willing to continue to trade with, and circumvent sanctions on, Russia. This is where my noble friend’s reference to the BRICS summit is of great importance: we need to deploy greater diplomatic activity with trading partners such as India and the UAE—the latter has not been mentioned in the debate, but it is part of the BRICS fora, alongside Iran—to exact pressure on Russia. We also need to be willing to review our trading preferences and liabilities. We are allies and friends, but we need to ensure that there is pressure on Russia. We also have our standards: if countries have trading preferences with us, they must be based on what we consider to be global norms.

We need to be cognisant that, with some justification, some see double standards in the UK and the West’s position on Ukraine compared to that on Gaza, in our funding of international development assistance, and in our funding for Ukrainians here in the UK but not for those in Sudan. As the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, said, all that may be true, but it is no justification for the aggression of Russia and the Putin regime.

Some—I am one of them—have seen the Russian chairing of BRICS as stretching credulity. In the official literature of the Kazan summit, the Russian Government are now trumpeting what they want to see as a development of interparliamentary relations and ties. This is a country with a travesty of a Parliament, systematically seeking to destroy the continuing functioning of a democratic Verkhovna Rada in Kyiv. It has no moral basis to argue that there should be parliamentary strengthening. The Commonwealth of Nations and the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association need to have their support redoubled, especially when we debate this in our functioning Parliament. We should remind ourselves that Members of our Parliament, including some of those taking part in this debate, have been sanctioned by the Russian Government.

Another thread of the debate that I support strongly is working with our partners in the European Union. My noble friend Lady Smith and I spoke in a debate the week before last, calling for closer security co-operation with European allies. Ukraine shows how important that is. With the coming to an end of Hungary’s presidency of the EU, which is to be taken over by Poland, there is a good opportunity for the UK to take advantage of that—to have closer, structured, treaty-based security relationships, moving away from the blocking role played by Budapest.

Finally, something that has been touched on, but not fundamentally, is the human impact of this, primarily on younger people. If my noble friend Lady Tyler of Enfield were here, she would have raised the issue of the need for psychosocial support for children as a result of this conflict. This is often underreported, but I believe it is vital that we do more, and not only in this conflict. UNICEF has said that 2.2 million children in Ukraine are in need of psychosocial support but, in the Sudan conflict, 10 times as many as that, 20 million children, are out of school and are the principal victims of the conflict. In Gaza, 600,000 children are out of school, impacted by the conflict as the IDF has damaged or destroyed 90% of schools.

I have previously said in debates that, if the UK has an offer, the offer should be defending education in conflict and its quick restoration if there is some cessation of violence, because immediate trauma support when there is a cessation of conflict will be an investment that is in our interests for the future. Why is it vital? We know that, in this hybrid warfare environment, where misinformation and disinformation are militarised and used as a tool, they thrive when there is no education. A whole new generation of conflict-scarred children in our continent, in the Middle East and in Africa, terrifies me for the next generation.

Therefore, I am very pleased to be an ambassador for an organisation called Do Not Look Away, which is focusing on young people and violence. It published its first video just this week and it includes Yaryna, an 11 year-old Ukrainian artist whose work, as some noble Lords may recall, was put on the side of the Ariane 5 rocket and blasted into space. She and her family believe that Ukraine’s destiny is as part of the European continent, with safety. In the video, her mother said something that struck me. As a Ukrainian who left and sought refuge, she said that she did not want to be called a refugee, because it was not her fault or her desire to leave Ukraine. She said she was just a temporary traveller who wants to go home. We and our allies have provided shelter in a storm for many people, but we now know that our imperative is to make sure that there is a home for her and her family to return to. For the children affected by conflict, we need to play a much bigger role.

Relations with Europe

Lord Purvis of Tweed Excerpts

Thursday 10th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, particularly because I agree with him. The speaking order at the close of this debate is like the old days, with the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, following straight after me. However, this is the kind of debate in which I will ask him questions rather than generally agreeing with him, as in many of the debates that we have had. I look forward to, I hope, a characteristically positive reply from him to this debate.

I join others in welcoming the noble Baroness, Lady Hodge, to this House, and her moving maiden speech. It had powerful messages, and gave an indication of the issues she will raise with characteristic determination in this House. She is now in a parliamentary Chamber with many colleagues who were senior civil servants that she skewered on the committee, so I am looking forward to seeing the peace offerings of cups of tea in the tearoom.

My noble friend Lady Smith ensured the breadth of the topic of this debate. War in the east of the European continent, the conflict in the near neighbourhood of the eastern Mediterranean, the climate emergency, a terrible humanitarian crisis in Africa that might automatically lead to migration challenges in our continent—all these aspects are worthy of debate. It has also been recognised throughout the debate that the European Union is the key political body in the continent that is tasked with the policy responses to many of those challenges.

The underlying aspect is whether the UK is better out than it would have been if we had stayed in. Some argued during the process that the UK leaving the bloc would automatically mean that the bloc would be weakened. Some almost saw that as an ambition. However, we have not seen that—in many respects the bloc has been strengthened. Indeed, Putin’s calculation that his actions would see a fundamental undermining of the European Union has not come about, notwithstanding the challenges among some of its members. Therefore, from these Benches, we want the Government to be successful in their reset, but we also want to reconnect in many areas. The Minister will not be surprised to hear us wanting the Government to go further.

On Monday, a Minister—the noble Baroness, Lady Twycross—told the House:

“This Government want to and will make Brexit work”.—[Official Report, 7/10/24; col. 1818.]


That presupposes that by “work” they mean that the UK can be better off across business, people-to-people relations, energy, sustainability, security and culture outside the European Union—inevitably influenced by it, but not part of shaping it. We respectfully disagree. Making Brexit work is a bit like getting Brexit done: two falsehoods do not make a truth.

From the Opposition, the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, eschewed dogma and heralded pragmatism. All those debates dominated by that dogma must seem so many long years ago, but the very dogma that was at the fore handed us the hardest of exits. So the debate today is significant, especially since we now know that getting Brexit done is almost an impossibility and making it work is incredibly difficult. We have seen UK border checks with the European Union delayed again under this new Government, and the Windsor Framework is not yet operable.

We have seen, as we heard in this debate from the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, the impact on trade in goods. UK goods exports to the EU have not recovered to pre-Brexit levels. We were told that this would not happen, that it would be a boon for exports of goods, and that if there were any reductions, they would be more than offset by the riches of non-EU exports facilitated by new trade agreements. Goods exports to non-EU countries also remain below pre-Brexit levels, because the damaging impact of our harder trade with the European Union is that we have made it harder to trade with non-European Union countries as well.

Goods imports from the European Union have fallen, but they have been offset by imports from China, contributing to the UK having the biggest trade deficit in our history with only one country and the biggest deficit with one country of any advanced economy, making us strategically vulnerable. For our geopolitical security, making Brexit work will risk the UK being less resilient and secure, and more dependent on China. In opposition, Labour called for a strategic audit of our relationship with China. I will be interested in whether that is on the agenda when the Foreign Secretary visits Beijing. However, the Chancellor has called for more trade with China—that is, more imports from China.

As we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Jay, and the noble Baroness, Lady Helic, in a very powerful message, we now enjoy a less deep relationship with our colleagues in the European Union on security status and military involvement than Canada and Norway. That cannot be in our strategic interests, given what Russia is seeking to do in the western Balkans. If we are to be pragmatic, as the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, asked us to be, then it is in our interests to dust off the draft text of the security agreement, use that as a starting point and have it as the basis of many of the talks because clearly, some work had previously been done and we should start from that basis. Indeed, we should make it as cross-party as possible. Let us have some pragmatism here.

Where we need pragmatism most now is for young people. Therefore, it was disappointing that the Government said that free movement for young people was a red line, somehow claiming that the European Commission had argued that it would be equating free movement with mobility. Mobility is not free movement: a mobility agreement is not a free movement agreement. That is why a European Commission spokesperson replied to the Prime Minister’s statement:

“A red line is as if the EU was asking for something. We are not asking for anything”.


As the EU put it,

“the youth mobility proposal on the table is a ‘reaction to the UK request to some of our member states’”.

It is welcome that the Government are seeking bilateral agreements on mobility with member states, but let us ensure that the talks with the Commission progress well for an overall mobility agreement—that is vital. As part of it, we should have regard to student participation. Applicants from the EU to UK universities have dropped by 43%, according to UCAS. That compares with 29,000 applications from China, a number that has more than doubled. What is the Government’s strategic aim when it comes to European students learning in the UK?

We also heard in the debate that red tape on the UK-EU border has prevented children taking part in overseas educational trips, resulting in a 30% reduction. The noble Baroness, Lady Twycross, said this week that any consideration of school trips facilitation would have to be seen in the context of the immigration system. It is as though 13 year-olds will somehow be so enamoured by seeing Buckingham Palace that they will seek to overstay their time in the youth hostels. Surely we can get school trips agreed; I look forward to the Minister’s positive reply on that.

My noble friend Lady Bonham-Carter spoke with real passion about the benefit of supporting culture for culture’s sake but also about the need to support the UK as a superpower for the creative industries and the economy. It is in our economic interest—for not just London but Cardiff, Belfast, Edinburgh and the north-western regions of England. Listening to the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, I felt as though I would not be able to respond to him properly and eloquently, so I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, did so, and so well. If I may paraphrase his words, I think his message to the Government was: it is just not good enough to change the mood music in our relationship if it is difficult to get the musicians to travel to play the music in the first place.

To conclude, my noble friends Lord Bruce and Lord Wallace asked us not to look back but to look ahead for the young people who will have to face the challenges of an increasingly complex world and will have to live with Brexit. Just over 2,000 children were born on 23 June 2016, and at the end of this Government’s term they will be 13 year-olds. They will be living with the consequences of Brexit, but they will have to face the challenges of this difficult world. We need to ensure that they face fewer barriers and burdens and more opportunities. That must be our task, and I hope that the Government see that as their task, too.

King’s Speech

Lord Purvis of Tweed Excerpts

Thursday 25th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

My Lords, as this debate concludes, I am delighted to join others who have given very warm congratulations to the new Government Front Bench. The noble Lord, Lord Coaker, who will be winding this debate for the Government commands high respect in this Chamber, and I wish him and his colleagues the best for the role ahead of them. I also wish to add, as others have, my appreciation for the noble Lords, Lord Ahmad and Lord Benyon, for how they carried out their roles in the previous Administration. They were always approachable, sincere and acted with propriety and integrity, and I am very grateful for their work.

My noble friend Lady Smith spoke extensively on defence issues, as well as my noble friend Lady Suttie, and others, including the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup. I am sure that the debates on defence will be significant going forward, and the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, will be a busy Minister in this House in particular. As my noble friend Lady Suttie indicated with regards to Ukraine, I know one of the challenges ahead for the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, will be how we ensure with our allies that our response to Russia is targeting its war economy—over one third of all Russian spending is on defence. That puts into context the discussions we have been having around 2.5% or 3%. The scale is enormous, and there will be cross-party consensus on supporting the Government for that. For much of the debate, I was looking across at the Government Privy Council Bench and I saw the noble Lords, Lord Robertson, Lord Reid and Lord West—Robertson, Reid and West would be a great name for a smart tailoring outfit—who are three significant parliamentarians who will be scrutinising and supporting the work of the Government.

As the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, indicated, this was a general election campaign in which foreign affairs received scant mention, but the Government have major and profound decisions to make on defence, security, development and diplomacy. These Benches will seek to work collaboratively with them, but we will also perhaps, on occasions, be constructive challengers and questioners. We hope that the Government will use their considerable mandate well.

As the election began, I was with Sudanese civilians in exile at their Taqaddum conference. They were calling for what we benefit from: peaceful, open, fair, democratic elections to decide who governs us and a transfer of power that is smooth and peaceful. This is denied the people of Sudan, who are enduring, as my noble friend Lord Teverson indicated, the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, with 7.3 million people displaced, 2 million who have already fled across neighbouring borders and 25 million people—half the population of the country—now at crisis levels of hunger. The Minister opening the debate mentioned the name of the country but said nothing yet about how the Government will respond. I very much hope that we can have a humanitarian Statement, when we return in the autumn, about the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

On the wider Africa, we are looking forward to the Government’s positive announcement that we will have an Africa strategy—one that I hope is published and debated in the House. This is a continent of challenges but also of enormous opportunity for the United Kingdom.

In many ways, the dichotomy of the world’s pressing challenges and areas of opportunity is the political choice of our age, for many around the world. The choice, rather than being between left and right, is increasingly between liberal tolerance and extremism. This is the dividing line. We see the growth of reactionary forces, as has been raised in many noble Lords’ contributions, but these Benches might take a little pride that in Europe—in the UK, France and Germany—there is the highest number of liberal parliamentarians since the Second World War.

Our sister liberal parties governing Ukraine and Taiwan are literally on the front line in defending a liberal rules-based order. The Ukrainian Government and Parliament seek to preserve parliamentary proceedings against continuing aggression from Putin’s regime. The Taiwanese Government are conducting their first ever real-time live-fire military exercises, as the belligerence of the Government of mainland China continues. Those countries are also seeking to develop and implement the force of law, not the law of force, in the eloquent words of my noble friend Lord Alderdice.

On the front line of this are individuals such as Vladimir Kara-Murza. I welcomed the Foreign Secretary’s Statement but would be grateful if, in due course, the Government would update us on our activities on and what actions they will be taking. It is about not only individuals but organisations, such as the BBC World Service. I hope the Government consider reversing the decisions of their predecessor Administration on its funding.

Inevitably, much of this debate has been a response to the ongoing diplomatic and political situation in Israel and Gaza, including—as my noble friend Lord Hussain indicated in his powerful contribution—the humanitarian impact. Since this new Government were elected, 1,500 Palestinians have been killed and the Israeli Government continue unnecessarily to restrict life-sustaining aid into Gaza. On a daily basis, little more than 10% of the food and medicine that should be is being brought into Gaza and there is insufficient distribution, both as a result of internal Hamas criminality and as a result of restrictive Israeli practices. That means that the humanitarian catastrophe continues. During this period, Hamas has continued to breach international law egregiously in holding hostages.

The leader of our Israeli sister party, Yair Lapid, described Benjamin Netanyahu’s congressional speech yesterday as “a disgrace”. He said that an agreement should have been accepted that would allow the hostages back home. So what are our Government doing not just to comment but to act with our friends in the Israeli Government? The intentions of new Administrations, by necessity, will need to be replaced by hard choices.

These Benches believe that actions should include expanding settler sanctions, reflecting the recent ICJ ruling, and recognising that the settler and outpost expansions are systematic and being done with impunity. We also believe that sanctioning Israeli Government Ministers who actively fund and facilitate this illegal activity, contravening UK sanctions, should be considered by the new Government. Proportionality should be considered when it comes to arms licences, and we believe that these should be suspended, as we did in 2014. The Government should state publicly that, if arrest warrants are issued by the ICC, the UK will act on them.

We also believe that the UK needs to be clear—and I would be grateful if the Minister was clear, in winding up—what the current position is on the amicus curiae brief on the ICC, and whether the clock will run out tomorrow under the policy of the previous Government. Clarity on that would be welcome today. For the longer term, in due course we would like to know the Government’s proposition for support of the enormous reconstruction effort, including, depressingly, thousands of tonnes of rubble that needs to be cleared.

Fundamentally, we also believe profoundly in a two-state solution, and we believe in immediate recognition, not at the end of a process but now. In fact, we have held that view on these Benches since 1980.

What is the Minister’s view on the agreement reached this week between Hamas and Fatah, which recognises the right of Israel to exist in the 1967 borders? This is a significant event, but an agreement made in China. This speaks to the point by the noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, with regard to what our strategic position on China will be. In opposition, the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, was eloquent in calling for a strategic review of our relationship. We will await this from the new Government, and we will work with them on what that review will look like. Already we see a situation where the Prime Minister makes a statement that we will be more robust with China, but the Chancellor is saying that we want more trade with China when we currently have the highest trade deficit with China of any country in the world.

On development, we have raised concerns over recent years about the whiplash-inducing policy-making and the changes to many of the policies, but the reduction in our reputation around the world, particularly in the global South—as the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, indicated, and which my noble friends Lord Oates and Lord Teverson spoke to—has had strategic consequences. If the Government’s intention is that we will have a foreign policy that will be more reliable, dependable and predictable, we will support that; in fact, we will work with them to bring that about. At the heart of this must be the immediate restoration of our 0.7% legal commitment for ODA, including a 15% share of that on education, and a restoration of funding for women and girls and for water and sanitary health. We should return to the all-party consensus of meeting 0.7% and enshrine it in the legislation, not just a Labour-Conservative consensus of reaching it only when fiscal circumstances allow. Surely the United Kingdom, as one of the richest countries in the world, should not be a country whose response to some of the worst famines in Africa for 30 years is that we will restore our support for famine relief when our fiscal circumstances allow. This is a political choice, not a fiscal one.

I agree with the valedictory contribution of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Worcester. Never again should this country, as it did last year, spend more overseas aid in the UK on a failed immigration policy than abroad in combating and preventing migration in the first place.

To conclude, we need to restore our reputation, and I wish the Government well for it. There are a couple of practical things that we could do. The first, which was not mentioned in the Minister’s opening speech, is to give full-hearted support for the delivery of the sustainable development goals. This Government will preside over the 10th anniversary of the SDGs; ensuring that they are as on track as possible will send the best signal possible. We should also return to an independent development department and have clear structures when it comes to delivering development. Much of this debate has been about the means of conduct in warfare in the 21st century, but we all know that it is not solely on the battlefield. It is also in the digital cloud, in misinformation and disinformation, and, yes, in the integrity of those who say they believe in rules. As my noble friend Lord Oates said, we must adhere to them ourselves.

The world is in transition on climate and poverty and in conflict. If we are to be a partner of choice, which I hope the Government will seek to be, we will work with them and will wish them well on that endeavour.