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EU and Russia (EUC Report)

My Lords, that is some of the better news that I have heard for a long time. I am enormously grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lea, for his intervention and am very glad I gave way. How sad that he left the committee before he could vote on my amendment. An argument against Russia being in the EU is that it is too big. The land mass of Russia is enormous, but the economy is not that big, even despite the massive oil wealth, and with oil and gas prices coming down, that economy will shrink. I suspect that, in a few years, Turkey, whose population is growing at a massive rate, will probably overtake Russia, whose population is going down. We will not see the population of Russia as that overwhelming. Nobody is pretending that Russia is a suitable candidate to be in the EU in the near future, but things change. If Yeltsin had survived, if he had not been a drunken, corrupt incompetent who did everything he could to make a complete mess of the Russian economy and if the ideal view of what Russia might have been when Yeltsin took over had happened and it now had a thriving democracy, Russia would be asking to become a member of the EU, and we would be entertaining that idea. Russia needs a friendly gesture. At the moment, Russia constantly goes on about being surrounded, which actually means having neighbours that it does not control, but that is an absurd concept to go along with. Switzerland is surrounded by two international organisations of which it is not a member—NATO and the European Union—but I do not hear the Swiss complaining that they are surrounded. That is because the Swiss have nothing to fear from the countries around them, and it is irrational for the Russians to go down that road. Before I die, I sincerely hope to see Russia as a member of NATO and the European Union. I shall finish on what has been happening to European unity. When it comes to dealings with Russia, the Germans have made up their mind that they have national interests that do not concur with those of other members of the EU. That is because they are tremendously dependent on supplies of Russian gas. Therefore, they want to have their own relationship, and have not condemned the Russians as heavily as other members. I wonder what the value of our report is when we are trying to appeal to European unity on relationships with Russia when there is none. Indeed, there is no European unity when it comes to bailing out banks. We are now seeing a fragmentation of the European Union, and it makes me wonder whether the integration policy can go on any further or whether it should be reversed. I think it should be. As time goes on, we might be better employed sitting on a committee to decide what the UK’s relationship with Russia should be and taking the same independent view that Germany is taking towards Russia. As it is, we spend all our time bowing at the court of some concept of European unity, which, in many cases, when the chips are down and things really matter, is not there. It is not adhered to by even senior and founding members of the European Union, such as Germany. We should strike a more independent note, look after our interests and realise that there are many cases where the EU cannot satisfy them.