Global Britain and the International Rules-based Order

Mike Gapes Excerpts

Thursday 6th September 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to follow my friend the Chairman of our Foreign Affairs Committee. As so often, I find that I agree with every word he said. Our Committee has produced a series of reports, to which he has referred. I have served on that Committee on and off for almost 20 years in this House, and it is very frustrating to serve on that Committee and experience a Foreign Secretary whom we know is not up to the job and is not taking seriously the issues that confront our country. I am referring not to the current Foreign Secretary, whose appointment I have welcomed very much, but to his predecessor, the right hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson).

When I was first elected, in 1992, I served on the FAC in that Parliament, when the then Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, used the phrase that the United Kingdom was going to “punch above its weight”. What we have seen with the last Foreign Secretary was somebody who was flailing around but not hitting any target, and who was counterproductive in so many ways. I therefore believe that this is the time for a reset and a restart. I hope that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office will take seriously today’s motion, which has been signed by all members of the Committee—and we do not all agree on everything—and comes from many different points of view. It comes from members of the Labour, Conservative and Scottish National parties, and from leavers and remainers, who are united in the view that this Government need to take seriously the questions we are raising.

I do not want to speak for too long today. I could easily give a 40-minute speech, because there are so many issues—[Interruption.] I will not do that—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Lindsay Hoyle)]

I know you won’t!

[Mike Gapes]

But I do want to say a few words about Russia. Given the challenges to the global international order that we face and the direct challenges to our country as a result of the criminal murder in our country by the Russian state, this is the worst possible time for our country to be leaving the European Union. We need partners, allies and international co-operation. I asked the Prime Minister about this yesterday and she confirmed how important it is that we continue to have security and defence co-operation with our EU neighbours and friends. That is not guaranteed if we get the no-deal situation and we have no agreement—I will leave that there.

What is also clear is that we need to be serious about not only the crimes in Salisbury, but the 14 other suspicious deaths linked to Russia that have occurred in recent years. There has been a remarkable development this week, with the Chair of the Select Committee on Home Affairs being written to by the Home Secretary in a letter that said:

“I can now formally confirm that the Government’s assurance work around the 14 cases is complete. The Police have confirmed that there is no basis on which to re-open any of the investigations. Clearly, should any new information become available, then the relevant police force will continue to monitor this position and take additional action as necessary”

That letter was written on 23 August. In the light of what we now know and the Prime Minister’s comprehensive and detailed statement yesterday, I call on the Government to revisit this issue, because there have been other murders and other deaths of Russian exiles in this country, over several years. I am not convinced and satisfied that they are not linked to the way the Russian state carried out an attack in our country in Salisbury this year. I therefore ask the Home Office to look again at that issue.

While we are talking about Russia, I wish to say something to my party and to my Front-Bench colleagues. In March, the spokesman for the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Seumas Milne, was quoted as saying to journalists that

“the government has access to information and intelligence on this matter which others don’t; however, also there’s a history in relation to WMD and intelligence which is problematic to put it mildly.”

When pressed on whether he thought that Russia was being framed for the events in Salisbury, he then said that

“if the material was from the Soviet period, the break-up of the Soviet state led to all sorts of military material ending up in random hands.”

Frankly, he was implying that the Russian state was not responsible. In the light of what we now know, we need an unequivocal, unambiguous, clear statement.

In my opinion, Mr Seumas Milne has been dissembling and attempting to divert attention from the real cause and the real culprits: the Putin regime in Moscow. Perhaps that should not come as any surprise, because this is the man who hosted President Putin at the Valdai forum in Sochi. This is the man who said in The Guardian on 4 March 2015, under the headline “The demonisation of Russia risks paving the way for war”, that the events in Ukraine were justifiable from the Russian perspective. He wrote:

“Russian covert military support for the rebels, on the other hand, is denounced as aggression and ‘hybrid warfare’”.

He criticised the fact that Putin was portrayed in the west as a “reckless land-grabber”, and he criticised attempts to challenge this as “interventionism and even neoconservatism”.

Frankly, all that goes against the whole basis of the historic Labour tradition of standing up to the aggression that came from the Soviet Union in the cold war period, our establishment of NATO under Clem Attlee’s Government, and the consistent support for our values and for the defence of our society by successive Labour Governments. I believe very strongly that the Labour party would be in a much better place, and that we would have much greater clarity on foreign affairs matters, if we had people working for our party leadership who actually believed in those Labour values.

[Mr Seely]

I am interested in the fact that the hon. Gentleman quoted from that 2015 article. Is he aware that Seumas Milne wrote at least four articles in 2014 and 2015 that are highly instrumental and manipulative in their device? They all have a very similar message: “You may not like Russia, we all hate the United States, Ukraine is Nazi, but one thing we can all agree on is this central argument about the need for autonomy and federalisation.” That was exactly Russia’s political aim at the time. At best, he is a useful idiot, and at worst, he is something much worse.

[Mike Gapes]

I do not wish to go any further down that route, because I am getting signals from Mr Deputy Speaker about time. The hon. Gentleman can no doubt make his own speech when the time comes.

I want to conclude by focusing on one other area, which is what the United States Administration are doing to the global order. The Chairman of the Select Committee made reference to Senator John McCain. The suggestion has been made that the new NATO headquarters should be named after the senator. I met him when I was previously on the Foreign Affairs Committee and we were always given the greatest courtesy. He took us on a tour to the Statuary Hall to have an informal chat with him as well as a formal meeting. He was an outstanding internationalist—one did not have to agree with him on everything, but he was always polite, friendly, warm, interesting and engaged. What a tragedy it is today that the President of the United States and some of those around him are the opposite of that. They are challenging the international order, which the United States and the Labour Government established in 1945, with Eleanor Roosevelt playing an important role in the United Nations system and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In those days, we had co-operation to build a new peaceful world. Unfortunately, the demagogues, the populists, and the extremists—on the far left and the far right—are undermining that order. It is under serious threat and serious challenge and we in this country and we in my party must fight to defend it.