NATO — House of Commons, 2018-06-20
Topic: Defense
Mary Helen Creagh (Labour, Centre-left): 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.