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Global Security (Russia)

Thank you for calling me, Mr. Caton. It is a pleasure to be speaking in the Chamber, rather than sitting in your chair in this particular room. It is also a great pleasure to meet up again with some old friends who were on the Foreign Affairs Committee when I was a member. I was on the Committee until seven years ago, they still serve on it, and it is a pleasure to be in the Chamber with them today. I listened with great care to the hon. Member for Ilford, South (Mike Gapes)—I am tempted to call him my hon. Friend if that does not wreck his future career—and I agreed with everything that he said, apart from his comment that that his prophecy had not resulted in his becoming a Minister in the Government. I am sorry to tell him—and I hope that this does not hurt his feelings—but I am rather glad that he did not become a Minister, because the first thing that the Government would do is gag him. The one thing that we do not want is that voice of sanity and that willingness to challenge to be quietened. The only other problem that I have with what he said this afternoon is the fact that he pinched most of what I was about to say in my speech, so I shall be briefer than I originally thought. I would like to explain to the House why somebody whose constituency is next door to Heathrow airport should suddenly turn up to take part in a debate on Russia, as that is not what some people would expect. The reason is as follows; I lead the Conservative members of the delegation to the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly. I promise that I am not about to make a Conservative party political speech, but the significance of being a Conservative is that we belong to our own separate group, rather than the European People's Party, or EPP. Before you call me to order, Mr. Caton, I am not going to enter the European Union debate that the Conservatives love to have. I would simply like to say that the European Democrat Group, or EDG, has 27 MPs from Russia, all of them members of the United Russia party, including the leader of the Russian delegation, Konstantin Kosachev, who was mentioned to in paragraph 24 of the report. He is Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Duma and someone I know well. For my sins, I have ended up as the deputy leader of the EDG in the Parliamentary Assembly and my boss, the leader of the group, is the other person mentioned in paragraph 24, Mikhail Margelov. I therefore report to a Russian, which is quite curious and very challenging. I was an election observer in the Duma elections just before Christmas, when I led a small, international team of MPs in far-off Vladivostok, of all places. I reflected on the fact that it was a closed military city until fairly recently, whereas now there is no problem in getting there. Well, there is a problem, because it is in a remote part of the world, but once one is there, there are no problems at all. Indeed, a Pullman train now takes tourists there on the trans-Siberian express. Those who say that Russia has not changed should reflect on what has happened in Vladivostok. There have been criticisms of the elections—we have someone in the Chamber from the OSCE who is far more expert than I: the right hon. Member for Walsall, South (Mr. George)—but no restrictions or problems of any sort came my way during the inspection of electoral mechanics. Indeed, they were quite good, and have become a great deal better. Given that there were hundreds of thousands of polling stations across the federation, it is hardly surprising that there was the odd hiccup. We get the odd hiccup in the UK with about 40,000 polling stations, so we should be careful about criticising the Russians for that. I am a not infrequent visitor to Russia, and from time to time, Russian MPs come to see me in the UK, and we talk about things from our perspective. I hope that does not make me sound like an apologist for Russia and Russians; it gives me an insight, and I thought that it might be helpful to share that insight with the Chamber in this debate. I should like to use the insight that I have gained in the past few years to ask a couple of questions. First, how should we as MPs interact with Russians? Secondly, how do things look when seen through Russian eyes, rather than British eyes? Those questions lead me to make three suggestions. First, the time has come to ensure that we look forward, rather than forever looking back and thinking about what went wrong in the past. We need to engage with Russians as well as Russia. All too often in these debates, we talk about Russia and the United Kingdom, but I would rather talk about Brits and Russians getting to know each other, because that is one way forward. We should work with parliamentarians as well as Ministers, diplomats and civil servants. There is a role for parliamentarians in future relationships with the Russian Federation. On the first question of interaction, I meet a lot of Russians and Russian MPs, and the message that I receive is that they want to engage more fully in the world community. They know that that is important and that they are not there yet, and they accept that it will require change. They also accept, on a one-to-one basis, that they need help. When I talk to Russian MPs individually, they are willing to say that they have much to learn, and they are keen to get help. That is why MPs from the United Russia party come here to talk to people such as me—some might say foolishly—because the British Conservative party can help them to develop their democracy. I am sure that other members of the Russian delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly for the Council of Europe do just the same and come here to talk to the Labour party, as they want that help. When we talk about democracy, human rights and the rule of law, I tell myself that the Russians have not been at all this for long. We cannot quite count the years on the fingers of two hands—but we are not far off. We must look at what we enjoy in this country and in Parliament. One could go back a thousand years, but let us settle for 1688 and the Glorious Revolution, which was neither glorious nor a revolution. What we now how can be traced back at least that far, so we have had 300 years to get into the mess that we are in. Should we be surprised that Russia is in a mess when it has not had 300 years to get its democracy sorted out? We have to put things into perspective. As I said to the hon. Member for Ilford, South, in an intervention, we need to distinguish between values and standards. We sign up to universal values, and so do the Russians. I know of no dissent within Russia about the values to which the planet subscribes. However, it is a little arrogant for a country, whether it is an important country like ours or a less important country, to lecture another sovereign state along the lines of, ““The only standards that you can get away with are those that we lay down for you.”” That is arrogant. There ways of running a sovereign state other than the way in which we run ours, and there are alternative ways of living up to the values to which a state subscribes. There is much more work to be done in that area. I have learned—and I am happy that I did not hear otherwise this afternoon—from talking to the Russians, that if we want to get them to change, we should encourage them, talk to them and make suggestions; I am sure that that is other people's experience, too. If we want to make matters worse or to sterilise the status quo, we should condemn them and criticise them openly. That applies to all of us, and I worry that we overdo the condemnation. Secondly, we should consider how things look through Russian eyes. For reasons that I cannot quite work out, I spent my first 10 years in the House being drawn into Northern Ireland politics. Someone once advised me, ““If you ever want to understand the IRA, you must think like a member of the IRA and see things as they see them,”” and I have done that ever since. When I meet Russians, I try to say to myself, ““I wonder how they look at the world,”” rather than trying to tell them how I think they should look at the world. My favourite comment from a Russian with whom I had that conversation was: ““The one thing you have to understand about us is that inside every Russian is a little Tsar trying to get out.”” I thought about it, and I realised that every Russian whom I have come across is perfectly used to being told who the next leader of his country will be. That is normal, and has been going on for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, so what is strange about what has just happened there, although we might not like it? The Russians are also used to the idea of having elections with only one candidate for whom they are allowed to vote, so if something similar happens, what is different? They think, ““This is how things have been; we have had Tsars and imitation Tsars.”” We all tend to think like that, looking at things through our own history. The Russians have absolutely no history of anything remotely like democracy as we recognise it. They are starting from scratch. These matters are far easier in Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland because there was something there before. When one talks to Russians and listens to what they say about the 20th century, and when one studies what Putin has done, one finds that Russians talk about stability and strength. The way I see it, the Russian view of the 20th century is that change means chaos. The Bolshevik revolution was chaotic and gave Russians communism. The Yeltsin revolution was chaotic and gave them oligarchs. Is it any surprise that someone should comes along and say, ““If I stop all this chaos, I'll be popular””?