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Address in Reply to Her Majesty’s Most   Gracious Speech

My Lords, I, too, commend my noble friend Lord Drayson on an excellent opening speech and also welcome my noble friend Lord Triesman to his new role in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. I also welcome the Government’s stated intention in the gracious Speech to strengthen commitment to the continued effectiveness of NATO and to establish a single system of service law for the Armed Forces. In July, Her Majesty’s Government will take over the presidency of the European Union and have pledged to,"““work to build an increasingly prosperous and secure Europe””." I believe that the UK and the EU have an abiding geo-political strategic interest in current developments in the Russian Federation and the republics of the former Soviet Union. We cannot have an increasingly prosperous and secure Europe whilst ignoring the problems on our extended eastern border. The EU now stretches from the Baltic to the Black Sea, encompassing much of the USSR’s old ““near abroad”” and Russia itself. For better or worse, the challenges of the countries of the former Soviet Union, including central Asia, are now our challenges. In a globalised and shrinking world, there is nowhere for the EU to hide. This is not simply because your Lordships should be concerned about the spread or retreat of democracy for its own sake, but also due to a range of issues where Europe and Eurasia’s interests coincide. These include environmental matters, energy supplies, nuclear non-proliferation, the war against terror, the development of open market economies, dismantling protectionism and eradicating poverty and disease. Allied with these are combating organised crime, corruption, money-laundering and drug and people trafficking. The recent fifteenth EU-Russia summit took place in Moscow on 10 May, a day after the commemoration of the USSR’s victory over the Nazis 60 years ago. Building on the 2003 St Petersburg summit, the EU and Russia set out a ““road map”” to realise the four common spaces: a common economic space, a common space of freedom, security and justice, a space of co-operation in the field of external security and a space of research and education, which include cultural aspects. But in reality, progress on all of those areas has been   slow. The Moscow summit set out ambitions for co-operation, rather than establishing a concrete agreement. Plans were made to step-up co-ordination in international diplomacy and to make visa rules simpler for travel between the EU and Russia. President Putin’s support for the EU’s stance towards negotiating with Iran over its nuclear ambitions, and Russia’s role in backing a Syrian withdrawal from the Lebanon, are to be welcomed. Elsewhere, results have been disappointing. Some commentators point to EU-Russian relations being at a post-Soviet low, and the reason is not surprising. Internally, Russia is backsliding on the limited democratic gains made since the collapse of the USSR, recently referred to by President Putin as ““the greatest geo-political catastrophe”” of the 20th century. With all national television channels in government hands, and a largely supine opposition and media, the Kremlin’s centralising and authoritarian tendencies continue to grow. From Moscow’s viewpoint, the recently relatively peaceful revolutions in Kyrgyzstan, the Ukraine and Georgia are a geo-political setback in its own backyard and sphere of influence. The expansion of EU and NATO, including the Baltic states, is seen more as a threat than an opportunity. President Vladimir Putin’s moves to appoint governors and scrap independent MPs’ mandates is seen as another heavy-handed attempt to assert authority from the centre, to impose the power ““vertikal””. And of course the bloodshed in Chechnya continues without respite. The trial of Mikhail Khordorkovsky—it is still ongoing and we await the announcement of the verdict—and the dismemberment of the Yukos oil company, previously the country’s most successful and westernised energy company, is another example of political expediency triumphing over economic logic. The result has been a reversal of the previous positive capital inflows and a decline in growth and investment. The Kremlin has torpedoed its own goal of doubling GDP by 2010. What started as a move to rein in an over-mighty and presumptions oligarch, one of a select group to benefit from the dubious privatisations of the 1990s, has descended into a free-for-all to divide the spoils among Kremlin insiders. In these circumstances, only the truly hardy will invest in Russia. Moscow’s trump card remains its energy resources. Russia is the world’s second-largest oil exporter and the largest exporter of natural gas. The EU is Russia’s largest trading partner, while the Russian Federation supplies more than 40 per cent of Germany’s natural gas and one third of Europe’s oil and gas in total. There is a danger that western energy companies and governments will overlook Russia’s internal problems in order to extract its natural resources. Those who do invest, as BP-TNK has recently discovered after facing a billion-dollar tax demand, need iron nerves and a long-term perspective. Germany, France and Italy should avoid courting Moscow at the expense of a coherent EU-wide strategy towards Russia and the former Soviet Union. Nowhere is the dilemma of the West’s relationship with Russia and the republics of the former Soviet Union as painfully apparent as in Uzbekistan. Reports indicate that more than 700 Uzbeks were killed by their own security forces in the east of the country in recent days. The war against terror notwithstanding, the EU and the United States should remain united in condemning human rights abuses perpetrated by President Islam Karimov’s regime and his government in Tashkent. The UK and the EU should also support calls by the UN for an independent investigation into the alleged massacre of citizens in Andijan. Russia takes a different view. Even so, democracy, freedom and the right to life itself are universal rights which should be upheld even where it may prove uncomfortable to do so.