Ukraine

Lord Robathan Excerpts

Friday 25th February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Robathan (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Campbell. I particularly agree with what he has just said about NATO. It is also a pleasure to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Sedwill, on his excellent and extremely thoughtful speech.

War in Europe is something my parents and grandparents knew. How would they have felt now? We have been a lucky generation: no war—or no war like this, anyway. My son is a 25 year-old in the Army; God willing, he will not have to fight.

Putin banned me in 2015 for saying some disobliging things about him in the Commons—similar to what I shall say today, in fact. I now view that as a badge of honour, although I still want to go to St Petersburg. He and I are the same age, and, in 1968, I was a 17 year-old climbing in Austria when the Soviet Union invaded Austria’s neighbour, Czechoslovakia. I suspect that the lesson he learned was that tanks work; I learned that one needs to carry a big stick to defend oneself. Ten years later, I was one of 55,000 British troops facing east against the Soviet hordes who were threatening western Europe.

In the last two decades, the dictator has been strengthening his position and his forces, and the West has been pusillanimous in the extreme. In 2006, not one mile from here, his agents poisoned Litvinenko with polonium. In 2008, he invaded Georgia—what did the West do when Abkhazia and South Ossetia were taken over? In 2014, he annexed Crimea and, of course, supported separatists in eastern Ukraine, where there has been a war for eight years. In 2014, a Russian Buk missile shot down Malaysia Airlines flight 17, and 298 people were killed—it was probably fired either with or by Russian soldiers. What did the West do? Well, in February of that year, we all attended the Sochi Winter Olympics. In 2018, he used a nerve agent on our streets, in Salisbury, and, since then, he has attempted the murder of Navalny. What did the West do? The tyrant, Stalin’s successor, has tested our resolve and found us wanting.

So what should we do now? I congratulate the Government on the sanctions imposed so far. No one wants World War III with a nuclear-armed state, but we first have to have real personal sanctions. In 1990, personal property hardly existed in communist states, yet 10 years later there were billionaires. I am sure that many of those people made their way with hard work, but a lot of them were gangsters and crooks. So pass emergency, perhaps time-limited, legislation to allow us to freeze all assets. We cannot freeze the yachts in Saint-Tropez or the skiing chalets in the Alps, but we can freeze estates in the Cotswolds, penthouses in Knightsbridge and football clubs. Look into how the money was earned: it was mostly stolen from the Russian people.

The second thing is further, very real, economic sanctions: no buying of oil and gas from Russia and no dodgy shell companies in British Overseas Territories. It will be pain for us and all of our allies; we will feel it all. At the very least, we will have higher energy prices and power cuts. I congratulate Germany on stopping the Nord Stream 2 pipeline—late—but it must go further. It will hurt us, but perhaps it will undermine Putin with his crooked cronies and with the Russian people.

The third thing is rearmament. For decades, we have been enjoying the peace dividend, yet when there are floods or anything like what is happening today, we say, “Send in the troops”. “Which one?” is the answer. We no longer have regiments of tanks and armoured personnel carriers to defend Europe. We no longer have squadrons of fast jets to deter invasion. We recently spent a fortune on protection equipment—PPE—which may or may not have worked. We now need to spend rather more on protecting ourselves against a very real threat. We need to stop the absurd cuts, as has already been mentioned today. I am delighted to say that, yesterday, I spoke to Sir Edward Davey, who said that he had been calling for this for some time—I am surprised but delighted. The dictator laughs at us. We make strong statements and then cut our defences.

As has been mentioned, we made attempts to understand his fears over NATO but it was all nonsense. Like all bullies, he senses our weakness; he laughs his socks off as we gaze at our navels and emote about transgender issues. I read—I do not know whether it is true—that the National Security Adviser, Stephen Lovegrove, the successor of two noble Lords here, issued a document about white privilege and how we must not use the word “strong”.

The dictator senses our weakness and a total lack of confidence in our society, as we do not stand up to the yobbos ripping down statues or idiots gluing themselves to roads. He sees that we have no confidence or belief in our own values, as we pander to Extinction Rebellion. I have been banging on for 10 years about climate change—remind me how the Moscow branch is doing. We need to pass legislation so that our courts and liberal values are not used against us, as has been happening in libel cases here, particularly with Catherine Belton, who wrote Putin’s People.

You can take analogies only so far, but my right honourable friend the Defence Secretary is right. In 1938, Hitler told Chamberlain that his final demand would be the Sudetenland, because there were a lot of German speakers there. Obviously, appeasement brought peace in our time, but actually, it brought war. The Government have shown resolve—too late, after two or three decades since the end of the Cold War—and now we must do more and ignore the siren voices and appeasers. The future of the United Kingdom, Europe and indeed the world is under threat. We need to regain our belief in ourselves and our values. We need to stand up for those values and for the people of Ukraine.