Situation in Russia

Debate between Stewart Malcolm McDonald and James Cleverly

Monday 26th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[James Cleverly]

My hon. and gallant Friend will know how important the moral component is in the success of a military operation. Those Russian troops and Wagner mercenaries will now be less confident about their logistics supply to the frontline, the integrity of their military leaders and the strength of their military planning. That will inevitably make them less effective as a fighting force. However, we should recognise that wars are inherently unpredictable. The Ukrainians have always had the stronger morale, their willingness to endure is legendary, and Putin’s expectation that the west or the Ukrainians would run out of resolve first has been shown to be a fundamentally flawed hypothesis. We are seeing the cracks emerging within the Russian system rather than in the west.

[Stewart Malcolm McDonald (Glasgow South) (SNP)]

The global evil that is the Wagner Group has finally come home to cause problems for the President in the Kremlin. The Foreign Secretary is absolutely correct that we should not speculate on regime change, which would not be helpful. With that in mind, we should focus on what he can do. As has been mentioned a number of times, the Wagner Group has been an evil in Syria and Ukraine, and right across the continent of Africa. Will he outline how he intends to formulate a plan, along with other allied countries, to start degrading the Wagner Group’s capabilities—its logistics and finances? Will he also give consideration to the Foreign Office funding the collection of evidence of Wagner war crimes across the world, which many universities in this country alone would be well placed to help with?

[James Cleverly]

The hon. Gentleman makes an important and valid point. We have worked closely with our international partners on the collection of evidence of war crimes in Ukraine. He makes a very good point, and I will need to look at the logistical and practical implications of doing that on a wider scale. A big part of the Wagner Group’s sales pitch to the vulnerable countries that employ it, in lieu of having credible armed forces, is the idea of its invulnerability and inevitable success, which has been massively undermined by its own actions. We will continue to highlight the inappropriateness of Wagner’s activity around the world, including in Africa. We will continue to impose and enforce sanctions to undermine the evil that that organisation does around the world.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Stewart Malcolm McDonald and James Cleverly

Tuesday 13th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Stewart Malcolm McDonald (Glasgow South) (SNP)]

14. What recent discussions he has had with his Ukrainian counterpart on the war in Ukraine.

[The Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs (James Cleverly)]

I had the pleasure of meeting the Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba in Kyiv last week. I reassured him that the UK support for Ukraine and its territorial integrity is unwavering. The Ukrainian Government and people can count on our continued support both in their work on the battlefield and diplomatically, and, through the Ukraine recovery conference, our support in the rebuilding of their country once this war is over.

[Stewart Malcolm McDonald]

The Secretary of State will know from his many visits and discussions that Iranian drones continue to terrorise the Ukrainian people, not least in the capital city of Kyiv, so it was worrying last week to learn from the US National Security Council that Iran is helping Russia build a drone facility just outside Moscow that could be operational as early as next year. How is the Secretary of State working here in London but also with partners to suffocate that capability as quickly as possible?

[James Cleverly]

The hon. Gentleman makes a very important point. When we first received credible reports of Iranian support to Russia in its drone attacks on Ukraine we investigated them and subsequently sanctioned entities and individuals involved in that. We are aware of the report he mentioned, and that will of course form part of our thinking on what other action we should take. It is important to remember that the action we have taken thus far is not the limit of our work, and we will continue to choke off the financial supply both to Russia itself and those seeking to arm it in that brutal war against the Ukrainian people.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Stewart Malcolm McDonald and James Cleverly

Tuesday 14th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Stewart Malcolm McDonald (Glasgow South) (SNP)]

AerCap is the largest provider of commercial aircraft in the world and, after the imposition of sanctions, it required a number of leased aircraft in Russia to be returned. That has not happened; instead, those aircraft have been re-registered in Russia, and continue to fly and operate. I know that there is a court case on the issue of loss with the insurance industry, but do the Government consider that to be an example of sanctions evasion?

[James Cleverly]

It is very difficult for me to come to an assessment based just on the points made in the hon. Gentleman’s question. I am more than happy to look at the matter in more detail, if he will write to me about it or catch me privately. As I say, with regard to the legal action, he will understand that the Government cannot comment while that is ongoing.

Integrated Review Refresh

Debate between Stewart Malcolm McDonald and James Cleverly

Monday 13th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[James Cleverly]

I suspect that my right hon. Friend, my near neighbour in Essex, knows that he is pushing at the most open of open doors on that. I do not particularly like the phrase “soft power”, because it sometimes implies a subordinate relationship to hard power. He is right to say that the UK’s projection of soft power—I have to use the phrase as I have not thought of anything better yet—is incredibly powerful and cost-effective. He made the point about Chevening, Marshall and other scholarships. All those things, along with football, arts, theatre and so on, are incredibly powerful and absolutely at the heart of UK foreign policy.

[Stewart Malcolm McDonald (Glasgow South) (SNP)]

William Gladstone’s third Midlothian speech said that good foreign policy started with “good government at home”. We can see that in the US with President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS Act, and even in the European Union being jolted into responding with similar initiatives. But the somewhat vague promises in the document published today of a protective security authority, an economic deterrence initiative, a critical minerals strategy and a UK semiconductor strategy leave me somewhat wanting more. Can the Foreign Secretary expand on those things? If he does not and there is no meat on the bone, we will fail to have met the moment that the White House and the Commission in Brussels have given us.

[James Cleverly]

There is a phrase, “Always leave them wanting more.” Is that not what they say? [Interruption.] Politics is show business for ugly people. I can assure the hon. Gentleman that it will remain, as I said in my statement, absolutely at the heart of the UK’s foreign policy to work in partnership and with partners. We need to make sure that we maintain our tradition as an open, free-trading nation, working closely with those countries that share our values and protect our interests, as we do theirs. He referred to further iterations which I have highlighted, including semiconductors and our critical minerals strategy. More details will be forthcoming, and he will see that those things are interwoven, not just through the UK foreign policy structure, but in close co-operation with our friends and allies internationally.

Sanctions

Debate between Stewart Malcolm McDonald and James Cleverly

Tuesday 22nd February 2022 Commons Chamber

[James Cleverly]

As my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister said, we have brought forward measures that go further than the recommendations of that report. I will impose discipline on myself, even if the House is not going to impose discipline on itself, to stay focused on the statutory instrument.

[Stewart Malcolm McDonald (Glasgow South) (SNP)]

rose—

[James Cleverly]

At this rate of interventions, I do not think we will get there—

[James Cleverly]

I will give way first to the hon. Member for Glasgow South (Stewart Malcolm McDonald).

[Stewart Malcolm McDonald]

I am sure that what the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) would say is entirely agreeable, but can I ask the Minister specifically about what he just said about the statutory instrument? I am slightly concerned that the disinformation networks that Russia relies on—they are of strategic importance to it—including media outlets in this country, are not part of the package. Earlier the Prime Minister said, and admittedly it was correct, that whether RT can continue to broadcast is up to Ofcom, but surely we are all agreed that RT is not a normal news agency in any sense of the words as people understand them. How can we have a sanctions package that allows disinformation networks that are crucial to Russia to be dismantled in the UK?

[James Cleverly]

I share the hon. Member’s frustration about the level of disinformation put out through Russia Today. However, we should be very careful before we advocate that a Government should close down news channels that they disagree with. We have a well established and effective regulator, and I think the right thing to do is to rely on that regulator to do the job for which it was designed.

Afghanistan: Inquiry

Debate between Stewart Malcolm McDonald and James Cleverly

Thursday 4th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for the Middle East and North Africa (James Cleverly)]

I am grateful to my right hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) for securing the debate, and I pay tribute to his long-standing commitment to Afghanistan, including what he has done in his current role as Chair of the Defence Committee. I am also grateful for the thoughtful contributions from other Members, including the hon. Members for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone) and for Glasgow South (Stewart Malcolm McDonald) and, indeed, the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock). It is my pleasure to respond on behalf of the Government.

Before I do so, however, I want to record my thanks to all British service personnel who were deployed to Afghanistan over the course of our commitment there, and also to the countless diplomats, development experts and others who served there out of uniform. I want to thank our allies, and I very much want to thank the brave Afghans who worked shoulder to shoulder with us all over the last 20 years.

As a result of our collective efforts and those of our international and Afghan allies—as the hon. Member for Aberavon pointed out—no major terrorist attacks against the UK or, indeed, any NATO country have emanated from Afghanistan over the last 20 years, and that is something for which we should rightly be grateful. As a result of our efforts and those of our allies, secondary school enrolment rose from 13% of children to almost 60%. Over 8 million more children, including 3.6 million girls, were attending school than in 2001. Basic health services reached 85% of the population, and the proportion of people with access to clean water and sanitation doubled. As a result of our efforts and those of our allies, life expectancy rose by an incredible eight years. Over those 20 years, maternal mortality nearly halved, and infant mortality decreased faster than in any other low-income country. In short, our efforts over 20 years made the UK safer, and gave Afghans health, education and a degree of hope. Those achievements should be a matter of great pride to us all, and our focus now is on protecting them.

My right hon. and gallant Friend focused very much on the NATO mission. NATO allies went into Afghanistan together, and they left together. The 11 September attacks were the only occasion in NATO’s history on which it has invoked article 5, its collective “self-defence clause”. The UK played an active role in NATO collective decision making throughout the mission, and that includes the collective NATO ministerial decision on 14 April this year that NATO troops could not stay without American forces.

Since mid-August, we face a new situation, but we have enduring interests, and a continuing commitment to the Afghan people. Today, we have four major objectives. They are, first, to preserve the counter-terrorism gains that we have achieved, and ensure that Afghanistan does not again become a source of threats to the region or beyond, including here in the UK; secondly, to provide humanitarian support for the Afghan people, who are facing extreme hardship—42% of the population, more than 18 million people, are suffering crisis or emergency levels of severe acute malnutrition; thirdly, to press for inclusive politics and respect for human rights, especially the full and equal rights of girls to go to school and women to go to work; and finally, to ensure that the events in Afghanistan do not destabilise the region, for example, through uncontrolled outflows of refugees or the export of narcotics.

Through our presidency of the G7, our role in the Security Council and the G20, and our partnerships with countries in the region, we have helped to build global support for those four goals, and—just as important—we will continue to assist British nationals and eligible Afghans who are trying to relocate from that country. To pursue those goals, we need to have pragmatic engagement with the Taliban. Officials have had a number of meetings with the Taliban leadership since August, for instance, during a visit to Kabul by Sir Simon Gass, the Prime Minister’s High Representative, and meetings with the Taliban hosted in Doha. Thanks to those exchanges, the Taliban are clear about the fact that the eyes of the world are upon them and we are watching their actions closely. They know what they must do if we are to co-operate. That includes allowing girls to go back to secondary school and women to go back to their jobs, and preventing the movement of foreign terrorist fighters.

We are also offering practical support to Afghans, without benefiting the Taliban. The Prime Minister has said that we will double humanitarian and development assistance for Afghanistan this year, to £286 million. On 31 October, he announced the allocation of £50 million of that to fund emergency humanitarian support. The money will help to provide 2.5 million people with life-saving healthcare, food security, and shelter. We are working with other donors and the World Bank to continue the provision of basic services for the Afghan people, through non-state-run channels. Strong primary healthcare is vital if we are to protect Afghan women and children.

My right hon. and gallant Friend has argued that we must learn lessons from the NATO mission, from our broader campaign and from the way that it ended. He is, of course, right. We must, and we will. Our main focus right now is on ensuring safe passage for anyone remaining in Afghanistan who needs to leave, supporting the thousands of new arrivals in the UK, and continuing to provide assistance for the Afghan people who remain in Afghanistan—but, of course, we are always learning lessons: learning lessons from Afghanistan has been a continuous process. That is why, after the conclusion of Operation Herrick in 2014, the Army conducted a thorough internal review. We also incorporated lessons from that in the integrated review that we published earlier this year. Departments are undertaking their own Afghanistan lessons learnt exercises in their areas of expertise and contributing to NATO’s lessons learnt exercise, all of which will inform our defence strategy and future UK military operations.

In addition, the Government welcome the inquiries of this House’s Foreign Affairs Committee and of my right hon. Friend’s own Defence Committee. We welcome the debates in the House and the interest of the Intelligence Security Committee, the International Development Committee, the Home Affairs Committee and the Joint Committee on National Security Strategy, among others.

[Stewart Malcolm McDonald]

As a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, I can tell the House that we are proceeding with our inquiry on this. However, I submitted a number of written questions to the Minister’s Department when the previous Foreign Secretary was still in post. I do not want this to come across as personalised, but it is important for Parliament to understand what Ministers were and were not doing during the month of August. There has been a lot of public debate, particularly about the Foreign Secretary’s movements and actions. I submitted a whole series of questions asking for ministerial engagements on each of the days on which the Taliban were advancing across more and more of the country. The Foreign Office will not give me answers to those questions, so how is Parliament supposed to have any confidence that the Government take Parliament’s inquiry seriously when we cannot even get basic things such as call logs to tell us who Ministers were talking to as the Taliban were getting Kabul ever closer in their sights?

[James Cleverly]

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office takes very seriously the inquiries from Members from every part of the House, and we seek to answer them in a way that informs Members without compromising security or, sometimes, the discreet work that the Department has to do.

The simple fact is that multiple inquiries are being conducted by the Committees of the House into the functions of the Government. Indeed, my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East is leading the inquiry by the Defence Committee that will cover what happened after the US agreement with the Taliban in February 2020—the exact period of time that the hon. Member for Glasgow South mentions. It will also cover the planning and execution of the withdrawal of UK forces and the evacuation of UK nationals and Afghanistan nationals who worked with the British armed forces.

The Government’s view is that these initiatives offer ample scope to address the most important questions. The hon. Member for Aberavon, who knows that I have a huge degree of respect for him, has suggested a more limited inquiry—one that would be limited to a timescale that would prevent it from looking at the role his party might have played when it was in government. While the final stages of the deployment are important, if his proposal were to be taken forward, I think that people might see it as partisan and cynical. As the Prime Minister told the House on 8 July, we do not think an inquiry in addition to those multiple other inquiries is the right way forward.

Withdrawal from Afghanistan: Joint Committee

Debate between Stewart Malcolm McDonald and James Cleverly

Wednesday 15th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[James Cleverly]

I thank my right hon. Friend and I will come on to that point shortly.

As we work through this process, those MPs who have particularly complex cases will ultimately be contacted directly by the ministerial team—they will be phoned by a member of the ministerial team—to update them on the progress of those cases and, where necessary, to establish further information to allow us to process them.

A crisis of this magnitude demands a wider strategic response from the international community, as my right hon. Friend said. The UK is very much leading in that response. We are galvanising actions around four key priorities: first, preventing Afghanistan from ever again becoming a haven for global terrorism; secondly, preventing humanitarian disaster and supporting refugees; thirdly, preserving wider regional stability; and fourthly, holding the Taliban to account for their conduct, including their record on human rights. We will be at the UN General Assembly next week to take forward those priorities with our international partners. Working with the international community, we must set credible tests to hold the Taliban to the undertakings that they have made.

Turning to the motion before the House, I note that there is already a comprehensive range of scrutiny of the Government on the issue. The Select Committees on Foreign Affairs and on Defence have already launched inquiries on Afghanistan; further scrutiny will no doubt come from the House of Lords Select Committee on International Relations and Defence, and possibly from other Committees of this House or the other place. It is not clear what additional value a Joint Committee of both Houses would add.

The motion states that the proposed Joint Committee would

“consider…Government policy on Afghanistan from…February 2020 to…August 2021”.

In fact, the Government’s policy on Afghanistan during that period has been clear and there have been many opportunities to question Ministers and the Government on their approach.

[Stewart Malcolm McDonald (Glasgow South) (SNP)]

Will the Minister give way?

[James Cleverly]

No, I will conclude, because otherwise I would steal time from hon. Members who wished to contribute to the debate.

The motion proposes that the new Committee

“consider…intelligence assessments made of the…situation in Afghanistan”.

The Intelligence and Security Committee already has statutory responsibility for oversight in that area; it is the proper vehicle for such scrutiny.

The motion then stipulates that the Joint Committee would scrutinise eligibility for the ARAP scheme, but the eligibility criteria have been known to every Member of this House for months and there is no need for a Joint Committee to debate them now or in future. Of course, the overriding challenge that we have faced has not been eligibility per se, but the difficulty of implementing a scheme in the rapidly changing and deteriorating security situation that we have observed in Afghanistan.

Thanks to our brave servicemen and women, no terrorist attack has been successfully launched from Afghanistan against this country in the past 20 years; I am grateful that the hon. Member for Wigan recognised that point. It is painful to watch what has gone on in Afghanistan, but we should remember that 10 million more children have been educated and 8 million landmines have been cleared because of our intervention. In the new reality that we face in Afghanistan today, it will be challenging to preserve those gains—of course it will—but we must do all we can with a concerted new international approach.

The Labour party supported the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. As yet, we have not seen the Opposition putting forward a credible alternative set of policies or strategic approach to this incredibly challenging issue.

As I said, the relevant Select Committees are already looking into the recent events in Afghanistan and providing scrutiny, as they should. The motion would therefore create an unnecessary process and would inevitably duplicate the work of those Committees and divert the Government’s resources from what should be our priority: addressing the needs of those people currently in Afghanistan whom we need to help. I therefore urge hon. Members on both sides of the House to reject the motion.

Cyber-attack: Microsoft

Debate between Stewart Malcolm McDonald and James Cleverly

Tuesday 20th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Stewart Malcolm McDonald (Glasgow South) (SNP)]

The Minister is right in one sense, because attribution is important, but actions also matter, so while we congratulate him on the statement of 39 signatories—that is a positive step—when he looks at sanctions, should he not look at the very least for an audit of the role of Confucius institutes in institutions up and down the United Kingdom? Moreover, the current patchwork of international norms benefits authoritarian states over democratic ones. Is it not time for us to heed the advice of the Microsoft president, Brad Smith, in calling for a digital Geneva convention?

[James Cleverly]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his thoughtful contribution. Internationally, we will have to look at how we deal with this new sphere of human activity. It is moving quickly and there is not an established framework to which the international community subscribes in the way there is for armed conflict, for example. That is an incredibly important point.

I also thank the hon. Gentleman for recognising the significance of having a range of international partners and multinational institutions on the statement that we made yesterday. As I have said a number of times, it is an important but necessary precursor to other actions that we might take. It highlights to China that we can see what action it is taking and also that its actions contradict commitments that it has made. We are not trying to hold China to our standards; we are trying to hold it to standards that it has put forward itself. That is an important part of trying to establish a global acceptable framework on behaviour in cyber-space.