NATO

Mary Creagh Excerpts

Wednesday 20th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Stewart Malcolm McDonald]

I want to make a bit of progress.

I want to address one other issue that I am sure will be on the lips of many at the upcoming summit, and that is Nord Stream 2. I had the pleasure recently of visiting Ukraine, and I had a series of meetings with politicians, senior civil servants, journalists, and civil society and anti-corruption activists. I would like to pay a generous tribute to the UK personnel working from the embassy out there, led by the ambassador, Judith Gough, who is doing an outstanding job.

Ukraine is, of course, not a NATO state. It is on the frontline of a military and an ideological war—and we should understand that, for Ukraine, it is indeed a war. In just about every one of those meetings, the issue of Nord Stream 2 came up. People want to know why Ukraine’s allies are allowing such a project—which would deliver enormous financial and political capital and leverage right into the hands of the Kremlin—to go ahead without much protest.

This is where the Americans have got it right. In so far as I can understand it—I am willing and hoping to be proven wrong by the Government—the UK Government position appears to be that this is a matter entirely for the Germans, the Danes and the Russians. Why are the Government feigning such impotence? Do they really believe that the establishment of Nord Stream 2 has no repercussions beyond those three states? Can they really not see the potential security threat that it so obviously represents to the United Kingdom and the alliance? I implore the Secretary of State, with the support of those on these Benches, to start some robust and frank dialogue with our allies and not to allow this white elephant to turn into a potentially dangerous snake.

[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

I passionately agree with the hon. Gentleman. The Ukrainian Prime Minister has described Nord Stream 2 as a new form of hybrid warfare, and he has said that Nord Stream 1 allowed Russia to renew its military and to finance the invasion of Ukraine. The UK Government cannot remain neutral on this issue.

[Stewart Malcolm McDonald]

The Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee is absolutely correct. Do we really believe that the cash from Nord Stream 2 will not go into the financing of far-right political parties all across Europe, even here in the UK? Do we really believe it will not be funding lies and propaganda—we call it fake news—across the EU? Of course it will be.

I want to mention the Chair of the Defence Committee’s “Beyond 2 per cent” report, which is a most welcome document. It is clear from that document that the Ministry of Defence is struggling to create a long-term defence plan, partly due to the black hole of up to £20 billion in its equipment plan resulting from a culture of chaos and clumsy procurement decisions that have not been properly funded: a Royal Navy at historically low numbers and recruitment for the Army that is missing targets every single year. It is of paramount importance that that clumsiness does not impact on sufficient burden-sharing for the alliance. Direct contributions should be upheld in the UK, just as they are in any other member state, but indirect contributions should also be provided as a symbol of this country’s commitment to a safer and more secure world.

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[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of visiting St Helen’s Church in Wakefield for the unveiling of Wakefield Civic Society’s plaque to the Grenadier Guards, who were evacuated from Dunkirk and then had the good fortune to be billeted up to Wakefield, where they were fed, watered and patched up, only to be sent back out to fight valiantly in north Africa and at Monte Cassino. It commemorated the moment when a young boy with his dad, walking his dog, listened to the roll call of the people who had been left behind—killed, injured or missing—in Dunkirk. It was a very powerful ceremony.

We also had the unveiling at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park last week of “The Coffin Jump”, a new sculptural work of art by Katrina Palmer, in which she celebrates the creation of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. These brave women went out on to the battlefields of world war one on horses to bring back the injured men and to offer them medical assistance. Inscribed on the sculpture is a line of heroic modesty: “nothing special happened”.

It is important in this centenary year to remember why NATO exists. It exists to meet new challenges. We know that the new wars will not look like the old wars. I have the pleasure of serving with many Members present in the Chamber on NATO’s Parliamentary Assembly, and I serve on the Committee on the Civil Dimension of Security. Civilian protection is not a central task of NATO, but since the 1950s the Civil Emergency Planning Committee has existed, and that is what I want to talk about today.

The operations that NATO is engaged in are to meet the new challenges of mass migration, climate change in the high north and Arctic, cyber-security and cyber warfare, and resource stress, with the water, food and energy nexus becoming ever more acute. Tackling disasters, whether natural or human made—clearing up after the disaster of Hurricane Katrina or the earthquake in Kashmir in 2006, providing humanitarian assistance in Kosovo in the late 1990s—is an important part of NATO’s soft power that is not talked about or recognised and given the attention it deserves.

One new threat we face is the rise in populism, nationalism and anti-Semitism across Europe along with Russian interference in our democratic processes. Russia is active on the eastern flank, as right hon. and hon. Members have said, and through the annexation of Crimea; we have seen 9,000 deaths in a proxy war in the eastern Ukraine; the UK has had to send 700 troops to Estonia and Poland to protect Europe’s eastern flank from Russian aggression; and finally—after several years—we have had the joint investigation team’s report into the downing of Malaysian flight MH17 by a Russian anti-aircraft missile fired from the Russian Federation, in which 298 innocent people, 80 of them children, were murdered. Russia must play her part in ensuring that those responsible face justice.

On the eastern flank, we also have Russian aggression with the placing of Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad. We have an arc of threat, with Russia active in Syria, on our south-eastern border, supporting the indiscriminate bombardment of civilians and chemical weapons attacks in that country, and in the high north, where it is also active. After the cold war, Russia shut its 64 bases, but it is now reopening them, creating all-weather landing strips, and we know that 20% of Russia’s GDP depends on the Arctic, which I know is something the right hon. Member for Newbury (Richard Benyon) has done a great deal of work on. We in this country have seen this hybrid threat from Russia, in the poisoning of Litvinenko in 2006 and in the attack on the Skripals in Salisbury—more state-sponsored terrorism by Russia and the first use of chemical weapons in western Europe since the end of world war two.

We need to think long and hard about our civilian security in this country. The threat permeates our news channels as well. Disinformation campaigns, fake news, cyberbots on social media, even embassies and ambassadors, are being used to create confusion and alternative narratives to those in the mainstream media. In the new information war, tweets are cheaper than tanks. The cold war had rules, but the hybrid war has no rules, no norms, no regulations. It is a dangerous new era for NATO. Cyber-attacks are becoming more destructive and complex, and we know that President Putin wants to go back to the days of large nation states with spheres of influence deciding what smaller nations do. That is not NATO’s vision as set out in the partnership for peace announced by Bill Clinton back in the early ’90s; its vision is of individual sovereign states making their own decisions.

I want to conclude with the heartbreaking pictures we have seen of little children in camps and the news today that three tender age camps for infants under five have been opened in Texas. At the moment, there is no system for family reunification in those camps. We are seeing a human tragedy of catastrophic proportions unfolding in the nation that is our closest ally, and we have a duty and a responsibility to speak out when we see traumatised children being scarred for life in such conditions.

Europe and our country will not take lessons on immigration from a man who separates children from their parents and by whom they are locked up, weeping; a man who dehumanises those children and their parents as “an infestation”, using language redolent of the Hutu génocidaires in Rwanda, and who treats their parents as criminals, as if they have broken the law, when they have committed, at most, a civil infraction. He is taking the United States out of the United Nations Human Rights Council, because he only wants human rights for some people some of the time, not for all the people all of the time.

The real danger, however, is that President Trump is a man who does not like multilateralism. We have seen that with the Paris accords, the Iran deal and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and we know that it is a risk for NATO. We must come through that, and the summit must send those messages to President Trump in a clear and unequivocal way.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

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[Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)]

It is wonderful to see how many right hon. and hon. Members have turned up for this debate, and I want to use the brief time available to me to consider the political threats. We have talked a lot about the military threats to the alliance, but we need to address a particular political threat, and I am not just talking about the rise of populist politicians and political parties that is straining the trust between NATO members and the accepted common values and aspirations across the alliance, which is a real threat. We must remember that we live in democracies, and democracies sometimes throw up leaders with whom we perhaps do not agree and whom we sometimes strongly oppose, but the point of a democracy is that, within the establishment of a Parliament, there is an opportunity for likeminded people to come together to discuss, debate and demonstrate a different way forward. That is what the NATO Parliamentary Assembly gives to us all.

The hon. Member for South Dorset (Richard Drax) talked about the European Union. In this place, we often mistakenly say that the European Union and NATO are separate entities, but they are becoming increasingly close. That closer alignment is being complicated by political decisions within the individual members of the alliance, by Brexit, by the refugee and migrant crisis and by different domestic political priorities and coalition tensions. We must not forget that.

More importantly, however, we must address the disaffection of our own population. Canada did a poll recently with Ipsos MORI and found that only 40% of the population understood what NATO was, that 71% of women had no understanding of the NATO mission and that 71% of millennials were unaware of what NATO is. I am a member of a NATO working group that wrote to member states to ask how, and in what subjects, the role of NATO in the defence and security of the Atlantic alliance is taught in schools. Only 18 countries replied, and the UK was not one of them. The UK could not spell out how we do it. We are writing again, and I hope the Minister will join me in making sure that the Department for Education responds and looks at the issue.

We found that there is definitely an east-west divide. In the western part of the alliance, there is a lower understanding of NATO, which is taught as if it is a history lesson only about the cold war. Estonia, in contrast, teaches global security and NATO in an elective course on national defence and has a new course on cyber-defence in its schools. Latvia includes security matters in social sciences, and it distributes information packages to schools and libraries explaining the myths about NATO. The Lithuanian Ministry of Defence has an education programme on national security and defence devoted to NATO. And in Poland, core curricula at primary and secondary schools teach issues related to security and defence.

[Mary Creagh]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend’s brilliant leadership in the NATO Parliamentary Assembly and to the work she does there. Does she agree that a brief history of NATO would be a more useful addition to the GCSE history curriculum than the current subjects: crime and punishment and the history of Britain’s great houses?

[Mrs Moon]

I hope that people in the Department for Education are listening to my hon. Friend, because it is essential that we reawaken the British public’s understanding of the nature of the threats we face. We have taken our security for granted, and too many of our citizens no longer see the risks and, indeed, no longer trust their Government to accurately portray the risks to them. That has been fertile ground for Russian disinformation campaigns and cyber-attacks. In fact, in some respects, the most horrific thing about the attack in Salisbury is how many people have said to me, “Oh, it was MI6.” They actually believe we carried out an attack on our own soil, on ourselves. We have to wake up to that and we have to deal with it.

The alliance is very good at addressing military weaknesses, but we are not very good at looking at how we ensure we take our populations with us. The disaffection of our public, their lack of recognition of the infiltration of our social media and cyber, and the attacks on our values, our politics and our alliance must be dealt with. We cannot carry on like this. We are like the frog in the water, and there is a risk we are not noticing that the heat is rising.

In relation to Brexit, our priority must be for the UK to reassure our allies not only of our total commitment but of our enhanced commitment to the NATO alliance, and that we will remain a strong, effective and committed partner. Finally—