Queen’s Speech

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Wednesday 18th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, at this stage of the debate, I begin to feel a bit sorry for the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, who has to reply to all these points. I have often said that, in these debates, there will be at least a couple of former Foreign Secretaries attacking you and a rather larger number of Members who always thought they should have been Foreign Secretary. The same has been true tonight.

I will try to confine myself to broad points—first, climate change. The noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, has already spelled out the need for an acceleration in the machinery to deliver what was agreed in Glasgow. The Glasgow agreement was a qualified success, but a success for British diplomacy and for the right honourable Alok Sharma. It now needs to be turned into reality. It hardly features in the gracious Speech or the legislative programme.

Instead, we have a situation where, faced with blackmail from one autocratic regime, in the supply of gas and oil, we have taken the option to go to another autocratic regime that has been bombing and devastating its neighbour for seven years—Saudi Arabia—to try to restore that oil and gas. We ought to take this opportunity to move the world and the economics of energy away from fossil fuels. That requires international effort. I hope that we carry forward the progress we made in Glasgow over the next period.

Secondly and more generally, we will need to review the structure of international organisations over the coming years. It is clear, for example, that the United Nations cannot act when a member of its Security Council is a perpetrator of an offence to international order. It is also true that the World Trade Organization does not guarantee effective trade in a way that increases the diversity and equality of income among the countries of the world and, in some cases, allows a restriction of access to key materials, such as those just referred to by my noble friend Lord Stansgate. That can inhibit us from attaining our objectives on climate change and free trade.

Thirdly, on the humanitarian and human rights front, we will need to establish better international mechanisms, arising from Ukraine, for the prosecution of perpetrators, including those in the Russian Government, responsible for the undoubted war crimes taking place in Ukraine, against Ukrainian civilians, with rape being used as a weapon of war and the torture and killings of prisoners. The present structure and process to bring those people to justice does not exist.

While Ukraine and the Ukrainian people are our immediate concern, we need to think ahead. At some point, this conflict will end. It may end unsatisfactorily for the people of Ukraine, but it will end and we believe it will end with, effectively, the defeat of Russia. We will then need a major international project for the reconstruction of Ukraine—the equivalent of a Marshall plan. Once Ukraine attains some sort of victory and peace, the reality is that not only we will need to rebuild that country’s economy and society, there will be a demoralised and impoverished Russia, as a result partly of sanctions and partly of war. Hence it will be an unpredictable Russia, in which some elements of the country will still have access to nuclear and chemical weapons, and to its cyber capability.

This may seem strange to say at this point, but we will need politicians and statesmen who understand Russia, which includes understanding Russian exceptionalism, Russian paranoia about encirclement and Russian defensiveness. These are features not simply of the Putin regime or of the Soviet inheritance; they are deep-wired and, in some cases, understandable. They have to be appreciated by those who deal with Russia, whatever it looks like once this crisis is over. I believe this country can take a lead on that, but it is important that we act together with others and in particular with our colleagues and allies in Europe. The noble Lord, Lord Hannan, will not be surprised to hear that I disagree with him on the Brexit situation. That has made it more difficult but, unless Britain acts with the EU on these issues, we will not again succeed in bringing peace to Europe.

[Viscount Trenchard (Con)]

My Lords—[Interruption.] Oh, I am sorry. It is not my turn.