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Global Security (Russia)

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr. Caton. I begin by thanking the Foreign Affairs Committee for its excellent report. Informative, thorough and weighty, it deserves to be taken seriously by the Government, the Opposition and those outside the House. It was compiled before the not-unexpected result of the Russian presidential election was known, but it loses none of its force for all that. The report was ably introduced this afternoon, if I may say so, by the Chairman of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Ilford, South (Mike Gapes). He was supported, if that is the word I should use, by a number of other members of the Committee who also participated in what has at times been a lively debate. We had contributions from my right hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Sir John Stanley), the hon. Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay)—his speech was in his characteristic style—and my hon. Friend the Member for Orpington (Mr. Horam). Having listened to all those contributions carefully, I should observe that clearly a lively debate was had in preparing the report. To a degree, that was reflected in this Chamber today. It is a pleasure to be debating opposite the Minister for Europe—it makes a change not to be debating the treaty of Lisbon. I understand that he recently suffered an injury while playing football for his country, in effect, in Bosnia, having organised a match with some Bosnian politicians. Hon. Members may like to know that the injury was not his fault; it was caused by an FCO official who fell on him. I wish that official the best of luck in his new posting, wherever it may be. Seriously, I wish the Minister a speedy recovery. I will also take this opportunity to pay tribute to our retiring ambassador in Moscow, Sir Tony Brenton, who has done a very difficult job very well. There have been a number of tributes in the House to his performance. I would like to add one on behalf of Conservative Members. I also pay tribute to the staff of the British Council, both British and Russian, who have continued to do an important job very well in what have often been extremely trying circumstances. I place on the record our thanks to them. All hon. Members who contributed to the debate have acknowledged that our relationship with Russia is of enormous importance to this country. Russia is again economically powerful. It maintains significant armed forces and is one of the world's most important energy suppliers. As the Committee identified, it is that last factor, at a time of high and growing world energy demand, that underpins Russia's new assessment of its role in the world and its ambitions. As the Committee rightly points out, the key word is ““assertiveness””. There is no doubt that the thrust of Russia's foreign policy in the past few years has been around one message: Russia is back. It is also no secret that Anglo-Russian relations are at something of a low ebb. In part, perhaps, that is because the British and Russian bodies politic think so differently, so it is sometimes easy for us to misunderstand each other, rather than see eye to eye. That point was brought out in particular by my hon. Friend the Member for Spelthorne (Mr. Wilshire), who was arguing for greater dialogue at a number of levels. The Committee was arguing that Russia is something of a hyper-realist while we in Britain believe that our ideals and values must always be taken into account, whether we are conservatives or, like the Foreign Secretary, maintain the previous Prime Minister's penchant for liberal interventionism at the heart of our thinking. We believe that relations between nations should and can be on a win-win basis, but it is apparent from Russia's foreign policy behaviour that the Kremlin believes that zero-sum games are more likely to be the norm. That, in our view, is profoundly mistaken. There are real mutual interests and a potentially strong basis for co-operation. Anglo-Russian trade and bilateral investment is large and growing. Indeed, Britain remains one of the largest foreign investors in Russia—a point emphasised by my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Sussex (Mr. Soames), who spoke knowledgeably about trading and business relationships between our two countries. It is highly regrettable that Russia's unacceptable behaviour in a number of areas harms what should be a friendly and mutually beneficial relationship between our two countries. That behaviour includes the harassment of our ambassador and the intimidation and legal bullying of the British Council. It is particularly strange that the Government of a country in which culture rightly counts for so much in its rich history should want to persecute what is essentially a cultural organisation. There is also the refusal to extradite a man accused of murdering a British citizen in our capital city in a particularly cruel and horrifying manner that placed others in great danger, even though both Britain and Russia are signatories to the European convention on extradition and both signed only some two years ago a memorandum of understanding on legal co-operation, which included an undertaking to"““co-operate in the sphere of extradition and in other issues of mutual legal assistance.””"