Sanctions — House of Commons, 2022-02-22
Topic: International Affairs
Christopher John Bryant (Labour, Centre-left): I associate myself with everything that the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) has just said; I completely agree with him. Democracy is a very tender flower. We thought it was very robust and it would survive all weathers, but the truth is that it needs watering, care and tenderness. All too often, it is very easy for authoritarian regimes to trample on it and kill it I associate myself, too, with the comments of the hon. Member for Stirling (Alyn Smith). We have no beef with the people of Russia. The people of Russia are fine people with not only a strong culture and history, but many strong democratic traditions and understandings of what it is to be a human being and to work in solidarity with others. Our beef is with the regime; it is with Putin I agree that we have been recklessly naive for far too long in relation to our relationship with Vladimir Putin. It pains me—I understand why Tony Blair was doing it—that we gave him a state visit so early in his time. We wanted to press the reset button, as did Obama, and it gained us absolutely nothing; it just showed us to be weak. We have been pitiful. We have been puny. We have vacillated. We have been spineless. Quite often we have looked craven because we just want Russian money to prop up our banks, pay our lawyers and keep our consultancy firms going Maybe we could forgive the fact that Putin is a thieving kleptocrat—after all, most off the theft is done against his own people. It leaves his own people poorer than they were when he came to power, though. It is maybe just a matter for the Russian people that he has enriched himself beyond the wildest dreams of Imelda Marcos and Muammar al-Gaddafi put together. But three things make him truly dangerous: his territorial ambitions, his excessive use of force, and his lies and misinformation Just look at Beslan, where 334 hostages were killed in the end by Russian state actors, including 176 children. Just look at the Moscow theatre siege, where 130 hostages were killed by Russian state actors. Look at Chechnya—I could go on for ages—and look at Georgia. They compare the situation in Donetsk and Luhansk with the situation in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Of course, it is exactly the same playbook: "Set up a pretext and then move in." Look at the downing of Flight MH17. Look at the murders of Boris Nemtsov, Sasha Litvinenko, Dawn Burgess, Anna Politkovskaya, Sergei Magnitsky and so many others Yes, I am angered by the naivete that I sometimes see in this country. I have seen it often in this Chamber, and I have seen it also from the left. Stop the War said: "We oppose the deployment of British forces to the borders of Russia as a pointless provocation." What utterly stupid naivete. Where on earth is the condemnation of the 190,000 Russian troops on the border, the annexation of Crimea, or the snipers shooting at Ukrainian forces now? This is not just naivete; it is monumental and dangerous stupidity, and we should call it out. I confess that I was absolutely sickened by Putin’s speech last night. The Minister cannot say it, but I can: the man is deranged, unhinged and a danger to his own people, as well as to the people of Ukraine. I said in this House in March 2014: "A Russian friend of mine says that Putin is not yet mad. That may be true, but what will our surrendering and our appeasement do for his sanity?"—[Official Report, 18 March 2014; Vol. 577, c. 679.] We can now see what his madness has done. I am reluctant to use the word "appeasement" too often, but sometimes what has been done has felt like appeasement Putin’s argument about Russians and Ukrainians being one people—again, I understand that the Minister cannot say this, but I can—is the same as Hitler’s about the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia in 1938. Hitler said then that he only wanted to protect the Sudeten Germans. It was a lie. Some people said so in this Chamber in 1938. Some of them laid down their life in the ensuing slaughter, and they have their shields up here. However, Chamberlain bought the lie, and the following spring Hitler took the rest of Czechoslovakia without so much as a by-your-leave. Be in no doubt: this is not a Russian peacekeeping mission; it is an annexation, an invasion and a declaration of war. Putin knows that it will lead to significant bloodshed on a massive scale because the Ukrainians are more determined to fight now than they ever have been. If anything, Putin’s behaviour over these years has reinforced the Ukrainians’ sense of solidarity Putin is not just interested in the parts of Luhansk and Donetsk already in separatists’ hands; of course he is not. He wants Avdiivka, which is metres across the demarcation line, where the Foreign Affairs Committee saw Russian snipers pointing at Ukrainian troops just three weeks ago. He wants Kramatorsk, where we met community leaders, including the local priest. He wants Mariupol, and of course he wants Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv, Odessa—the whole of Ukraine. He wants to reshape the contours of Europe by force because he thinks that that is to be his legacy Of course, I support the statutory instrument and I am glad we are doing this, but today’s sanctions—the ones that have been announced today, which rely on this instrument—are wholly inadequate. I think that is the message from the whole House, and I hope the Government are hearing it loud and clear. They do not match the rhetoric of what the Government are saying, and when actions do not match rhetoric, we undermine that rhetoric and put ourselves in a worse position, not in a better one The banks are the small change of the Russian economy, they really are: they are shrapnel down the back of the sofa. The individuals have already been sanctioned for four years by the Americans. This really is netting in the minnows while letting the basking sharks swim freely. As somebody else said, it is taking a peashooter to a gunfight. Putin, frankly, will beat this feather duster away. He will just laugh at us. In effect, Medvedev was laughing at us yesterday, even before we announced anything, because he said that the Russians will be able to wear whatever we throw at them. It is a beautiful irony, is it not, that one of the people who will be sanctioned, when the Government are able to bring their measure in relation to Members of the Duma, is Andrey Lugavoy, who was one of the murderers of Alexander Litvinenko? Incidentally, can I just say that, if anybody has not met Marina Litvinenko, she is one of the most wonderful people who have ever walked the face of this earth? I think a sanctions regime in this context has to go hand in hand with, first, a proper public register of beneficial ownership of property. I do not understand from the Prime Minister whether it is his intention now to introduce that, because it keeps on being conflated with various other forms. I hope that is the plan, but it has been promised for a long time, so some of us are beginning to get a little bit cynical Secondly, there has to be complete reform of Companies House, so that it actually has some powers to interrogate the information given to it. As the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee has said, at the moment anybody could say that they are Tom Tugendhat, or Mickey Mouse—or Vladimir Putin, no doubt—with impunity Thirdly, there has to be real openness about the review of the tier 1 visa scheme. The Home Secretary has cited "security concerns" about "corrupt elites who threaten our national security and push dirty money around our cities." That is about people who already have tier 1 visas. As I understand it, this review is complete—it was completed some time ago—and it must be published soon. We need to understand what these tier 1 visas did, and where the vulnerabilities are in the British economy. I really hope that the Home Secretary will come to the House to do that very soon We need a foreign agents Act, as has been mentioned, and of course we need to reform the Official Secrets Act. We have no means of tackling spies in this country. It is almost impossible to send somebody to prison for spying in this country for the Russian Government.