Autocrats, Kleptocrats and Populists

Motion to Take Note

Moved by

That the Grand Committee takes note of the impact on global democratic norms and values from autocrats, kleptocrats and populists and the case for a coordinated response by the United Kingdom and her allies.

My Lords, I am conscious that we are having this debate on the day that Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are, as the Times has reported,

“cementing an alliance to make the world safe for autocrats.”

I am also conscious that we are debating this on the day we hear that the First Minister of Northern Ireland is intent on resigning and possibly paralysing the Government of Northern Ireland, which definitely defeats the democratic intentions of the people of Northern Ireland. But I am confident that by the end of this debate we will be in a position, because of your Lordships’ contributions, to allay the fears of the people of the world in respect of this global alliance, and of the people of Northern Ireland as to how their democracy is not under threat either.

Democracy is in retreat and authoritarianism is on the rise. According to the University of Gothenburg’s V-Dem Institute, non-democratic countries outnumber democracies for the first time in 20 years, and 2021 was the fifth consecutive year in which more nations moved towards authoritarianism than democracy. In December, President Biden convened a virtual summit for democracy around an agenda that challenged authoritarianism and sought to fight corruption and kleptocracy and promote human rights. He said that

“we stand at an inflection point”,

with the future of democracy facing

“sustained and alarming challenges”.

In fact, the V-Dem Democracy Report 2021, which reflects analyses based on an assessment of nearly 30 million data points and aspects of democracy such as the freedom and independence of legislatures, judiciaries, the media and civil society, and human rights, shows the continuing global decline of liberal democracy. Electoral autocracies are still the most common regime type and, along with closed autocracies—ones in which the people are denied elections—they are home to 68% of the world’s population.

The data shows a drift of democratic backsliding engulfing 25 nations, or one-third of the world’s population. G20 nations such as Brazil, India, Turkey and the USA are part of that drift. Poland wins the shameful title of the country which declined the most during the past decade. I am confounded by that, given the history of Poland.

The process of decline follows a predictable pattern. Once elected—fairly or, more likely, after some manipulation of the electoral process—autocrats tend, if possible, to quickly remove the time limits on their term of office. They maintain power through centralised control of information and resources; political opposition is either forbidden or strongly curtailed; and individual freedom is limited by the state. First, they attack and repress the media and civil society and polarise societies by disrespecting opponents and spreading false information. Then, they undermine elections.

My Lords, I hope that we are not going to deteriorate into a sort of two-party or three-party squabble, because the Question that the noble Lord has put on the agenda is a fundamental one in European and wider terms. In 1979, Jim Callaghan noted that the age of post-war consensus politics was coming to an end. He probably did not realise how true the words that he spoke were. Today we have not only a very unsatisfactory democracy for those of us who grew up in the immediate post-war world but one that is largely underwritten by the population. This is something quite new.

I spent most of my active political career travelling around the world in many different guises and visiting other countries with many different forms of democracy. When I started in 1979, most of them at least subscribed to the idea that they were doing the best for their people. But by the end of that era, where we are now, we have not only a situation that is quite unsatisfactory but, I put it to your Lordships, a system that has far more support from the grass roots than we should be happy with.

I spent 20 years in the European Parliament as its rapporteur on Turkey. I saw it from the rule of General Evren and the colonels right through to the present President, Mr Erdoğan, who was Prime Minister when I finished. We may not like it, but we have to accept that Erdoğan has won all the elections that he has stood in. They have all been observed by Council of Europe and OSCE delegations and been passed as, on balance, acceptable. The people of Turkey have consistently voted for the policies that their President has wished on them, even though most of those policies are a big abnegation of anything that we could call democracy.

The same can be seen in other countries. My son studied in Moscow. I visited Moscow around the time of the Crimea incident, among other times. It was clear that the Russian population were overwhelmingly behind Putin, and they still are. He still has a roughly 60% positive rating, which is something that Keir Starmer or Johnson can only dream about.

My point is that it is fine for us to feel unhappy about the decline in democracy, and I indeed do. I share a lot of the reservations the noble Lord, Lord Browne, mentioned but I also think that we need to look beyond where we are and see why it has come about. I think one of the reasons is the genuine collapse in confidence of ordinary people that politicians can make a difference to their lives. That is probably the thing we need to direct our attention to.

My Lords, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, that we have to say something about the UK’s standing as a democracy because that affects our ability to respond to the current situation. We all agree that we face a global push-back against democracy and the rule of law. It is led by China and Russia, supported by the central Asian states that emerged from the USSR, and now also by Turkey, with governing parties in two EU members, Hungary and Poland, drifting into that camp.

I want to stress the role that Middle East autocracies are actively playing in this development. We have seen the wealthy Governments of the UAE and Saudi Arabia actively working to suppress the democratic efforts of the Arab spring, supporting the military coup in Egypt, funding anti-democratic forces in Libya, helping to undermine democracy in Tunisia and contributing almost as much as Iran and Israel to the destabilisation of Lebanon. Their elites also penetrate open democracies such as the UK, employing PR companies and buying football clubs to bolster their reputations. They buy mansions and country estates and gain acceptance within our political and social elites. The current rise in energy prices will increase their ability to extend their influence through societies like ours.

The global reputation of democratic government has been shaken by recent events in the United States and Britain. The American Republican Party, which some in our Conservative Party still see as a model they wish to follow, is engaged in voter suppression and election-fixing. Here, we have a Prime Minister who has broken the Ministerial Code on numerous occasions and stretched the boundaries of reasoned debate, respect for opposition and the rule of law.

The Lords will shortly be scrutinising the Elections Bill—it was originally entitled the election integrity Bill but has now dropped the claim to integrity—which has been designed to tilt our democracy further in favour of the Conservative Party. That will be followed by the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill, an almost direct copy of Republican efforts within the United States, which is intended to extend state influence over university teaching and appointments.

We were due to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Hacking, but he is not here. Perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, would now like to speak.

My Lords, the last century, the one in which many Members of your Lordships’ House spent most of their lives, opened with a world dominated by empires and autocracies, and with true democracies very much in a minority. The century closed with democracies in the ascendant, the empires largely gone and something close to a rules-based international order having emerged from the ashes of two world wars and one long Cold War. Any complacency that that progress might have engendered has long since dissipated, with several autocracies or quasi-autocracies prominent, and with the rules-based order under threat, from within as well as from outside, as supporters of unfettered national sovereignty espouse policies that are inconsistent with their countries’ obligations under international law. So, today’s debate is timely and I warmly welcome the initiative of the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton, in securing it, and his excellent introductory speech.

What needs to be done to check the trends of the last few years and to secure what was once described as

“a world safe for democracy”?

First, we need to ensure that our own democracies are in good working order and that they are promoting, in practice as well as in rhetoric, policies that strengthen other democracies worldwide and further respect for human rights, as laid out in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. We also need to ensure that our democracies encourage effective international co-operation to address the great challenges of our time: climate change, pandemics, the risks of nuclear proliferation and war, and trade protectionism. That will not be the work of one year or of one Government. It will require concerted effort over decades, and it is not happening—yet, at least.

Should this effort involve a more or less formal grouping of democracies? I rather doubt whether that is the right direction in which we or others should be moving. Such a grouping would raise plenty of problems—first, what is described as the “sheep and goats” problem. How do you decide, and who decides, which countries are truly democratic sheep and which are undemocratic goats? It is not easy, and certain to lead to many difficulties over borderline cases. Moreover, while such a grouping can apply policies and make rules for its own members, it cannot hope to make such policies and rules binding on others. Where globally applicable rules are needed, as with the global challenges that I mentioned earlier, this grouping will simply not be able to deliver the goods.

In following the noble Lord, I very much agree with him that we should refer ourselves back to the creation of the United Nations, the World Bank, the IMF and the other institutions. Indeed, the Motion refers to co-ordination, which is a very important point.

I move on to sub-Saharan Africa, where there is a quarter of the world’s poorest countries. It seems a very good example of the struggles to arrive at a proper understanding of the norms and values of democracy. It has been said, and I think it is right, that the best thing about democracy is that it enables you to change your Government without violence. In sub-Saharan Africa, that is by no means universally the case. Another thing that one could say is that some countries that have been mentioned today, including our own, have arrived at an understanding of the norms and values of democracy and are now being accused of backsliding—what you might call the Capitol syndrome. But many other countries have never got there. It is important that we think differently about the countries that have never got to the point where they had regimes that respected the norms and values of democracy.

When one thinks about sub-Saharan Africa, one is looking for something positive—that is to say, what are we going to do about it? Do we have any responsibility to do anything? If so, what will we do? Of course, that takes one back to the international organisations. In reading about the World Bank’s operations in sub-Saharan Africa, I get the impression that it is rather tired. It is not the World Bank I remember from 20 or 30 years ago.

The positives we need to find are headed by economic development. We know that if you want to have a reasonable regime, it is important to be able to collect some taxes and to have some public expenditure. If your economy simply does not support that approach, you are not very far along the road to having an acceptable regime. In thinking about acceptable regimes, it is risky to assume that the default position is our understanding of democracy. All the evidence shows that this is not the case and that there may be many other ways in which people will continue to think about their politics and their regime that do not conform to our understanding of the norms and values of democracy. We have to approach all this rather cautiously.

My Lords, the speaking time for Back-Benchers is five minutes. If we go over that, we will cut into the time that the Minister has to respond, so can we please keep an eye on the clock?

My Lords, Bain & Company presents itself as a reputable global consultancy operating across the world, with an office in London and recent contracts worth £55 million with the Cabinet Office alone. Yet in South Africa, Bain brazenly assisted former President Jacob Zuma to organise his decade of shameless looting and corruption, with the company earning fat fees estimated at £100 million—or 2 billion rand—from state institutions.

South Africa’s State Capture Commission, a judicial inquiry headed by Deputy Chief Justice Zondo, indicted Bain’s work with the South African Revenue Service as “unlawful” and recommended that all its South African public sector contracts be re-examined with a view to prosecution. At the time, Bain South Africa’s work was endorsed by both its London office and its US headquarters in Boston. Bain has also been disgracefully smearing Mr Athol Williams, a key whistle-blower praised by the Zondo commission who recently had to flee to the UK for his safety.

Given the scandalous collusion of Bain UK and Bain USA. I am asking that the UK Government and the US Government immediately suspend all government contracts with Bain. I wrote three weeks ago to the Prime Minister requesting this, and he has just replied stating that the Cabinet Office will

“look into this matter with urgency”

and the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster wrote to me yesterday saying that the Government will be contacting Bain. I hope that those contracts will be suspended and that that is the case for all public sector contracts in the UK.

However, Bain’s shamefully shady behaviour is just the tip of the iceberg. The prodigious looting, corruption and money laundering under former President Zuma would not have been possible without the complicity of Bain, KPMG, McKinsey, SAP, Hogan Lovells and the banks HSBC, Standard Chartered and Bank of Baroda. Those fee-clutching global corporates and turn-a-blind-eye Governments from London and Washington to Dubai, Delhi and Beijing helped to rob South African taxpayers, contributing to a catastrophic loss of South Africa’s GDP of around one-fifth. Economists estimate the full cost of the Zuma state capture to be a monumental £750 million or 1.5 trillion rand. The Government’s total annual expenditure is just 2 trillion rand annually. These global corporates all obtained sweetheart state contracts, which helped Zuma’s business associates, the Gupta brothers, to loot the state. Global banks such as HSBC, Standard Chartered and Baroda transferred this looted money through their digital pipelines to less regulated jurisdictions such as Dubai and Hong Kong, or British Overseas Territories in the Caribbean, to then clean the money by mingling it with other funds, disguising its origins and enabling it to be more easily spent.

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Browne, on mounting this debate. He has been absolutely tireless in promoting more international co-operation and co-ordination on all the really existential issues threatening the world in an extremely dangerous time for us all. This debate is a marvellous further step in that direction.

I also agree with my noble friend Lord Balfe that we need to start on this question of defeating the autocracies by looking at and repairing our own weaknesses in democracy. I agree with most of what the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, said on the same theme. I think I was a bit naive in agreeing with my noble friend Lord Balfe that there was going to be a non-partisan approach to these totally new issues, but I am afraid that was soon disabused. Maybe my naivety will have to be put aside.

We have to know what the weaknesses in the democratic pattern are in this digital age. About a year ago, the Cambridge Centre for the Future of Democracy produced an extensive and extremely alarming report examining the views of millennials and Generation X—the people born after 1990—who, by a large majority, delivered the view that they were losing faith in democracy. I think it was rather a general question. They did not really mean that they were against democracy; what they meant was that the systems of democracy that are around are not delivering for these people in the way that perhaps they did for my generation and those in between.

I therefore think we have to be ready to move outside the old western camp view of thinking and maybe search into Asia where, frankly, all the great growth, all the booming economies and possibly all the biggest dangers will be over the next 10 or 20 years, and see what additional lessons we can learn in a world that is no longer ideological in the old Cold War language, with neat ideological divides between the systems and so on. I do not think the world is at all like the sort of thing that George Soros was wrongly stating the other day, with two economic systems lined up against each other. The reality is that the economic, social and therefore political mixtures ahead, in all continents, will turn out to conform neither to the isms of the past nor to the clichés of 20th-century European political discourse.

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Browne and begin with a Polish question. What is the difference between an optimist and a pessimist? A pessimist says things cannot get any worse and an optimist says, oh yes they can. We can surely apply that to the position of democracy today. There is certainly a recession, a backsliding.

Consider the position perhaps 30 years ago. We had the end of the Berlin Wall, which led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Empire—

“Bliss was it in that dawn”—

and the end of apartheid in South Africa and, indeed, Namibia. It was the end of a chapter of colonialism. We had the time when the United States was the only hegemon and was not challenged by an authoritarian China.

A little later, there was the pent-up anger against autocrats which led to the Arab spring. Now, what is left of the Arab spring? Some may say, Tunisia, but the jury is out on Tunisia, and everywhere else where there was the Arab spring there has been a deterioration. The situation has changed very much indeed.

Secretary Blinken on his visit to Africa last year spoke of a “democratic recession”. There has been a series of military coups. There has been a series of civil conflicts in Sudan, Somalia and Ethiopia, and generally, as the Library notes show, reports from a series of well-respected international organisations illustrate that recession.

Even in Europe, there is a fragility in our democracies. In France, the 25 January edition of Le Figaro showed the disillusion with democracy there. Some 39% of the 11,000 French people polled would welcome an elected strong man, but more than 50% would welcome a government by experts, not by elected people. The majority thought that, on the whole, the political elite was corrupt. Perhaps the position in this country is less fragile—we do not have the Bonapartist tradition—but look elsewhere around Europe and see the position of illiberal democracy in Hungary and the position in Poland.

My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Browne, set out so powerfully and as others of your Lordships have reinforced, the situation today is an extremely distressing and depressing one. Countries such as India, which once rightly took pride in its democracy, have shown increasing disregard for basic human rights. Countries such as Turkey, which once stood on the very threshold of the European Union, have similarly regressed. One could go on. However, I want to do something different. There is no point in working for a co-ordinated response to defend democratic norms and values unless we have confidence in those norms and values in the first place. Whereas their abiding validity would once have been seen as obvious and taken for granted, it is now in different ways being subtly undermined. There are several reasons for this.

First, there is the widespread relativism of our times: the view that one stance on life is as good as another, that truth in any serious sense is unobtainable and we cannot and should not make judgments about how other societies operate.

Secondly, there is the widespread feeling that attempts to bolster or create democratic regimes in other parts of the world have been failures leading to massive loss of life, and that we should no longer intervene elsewhere on the assumption that they need democracy.

Those two tendencies have come together in some minds to conclude that different societies just do things differently from ourselves and we should simply accept that. We should put aside the arrogance of liberal progressivism and not assume that other countries would be better off if they had what we have.

The salutary point in this critique is that we should put aside any sense of arrogance and acknowledge that our democracy is deeply flawed. We should also acknowledge that if we are simply talking about the way of life of another culture, whether it is Chinese, Arab or indigenous, of course we should acknowledge that people choose differently and that they do so all adds to the variety and richness of human existence. But when it comes to democratic norms, we are talking about something different. At its heart is the most fundamental value of all: the equal dignity and worth of every human being, whatever their gender, religion, race or sexuality. This belief, rooted in the Christian faith and built on by secular rationalism, is indeed foundational for Western culture but is, I believe—somewhat unfashionably today in some quarters—a universal truth. That is why we have the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the range of other covenants and conventions that flow from it. That is the first point.

My Lords, which keeps us awake at night—the prospect of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan or the prospect of a Russian invasion of Ukraine? Consider the disquieting possibility that both may happen on the same day by prearrangement. The noble Lord, Lord Browne, in introducing this excellent debate, spoke about the coming together of the two great illiberal powers. It is a very real coming together: the largest military exercise that the Chinese have been involved in with another country was conducted last year with Russian troops in north-western China, where J-20 stealth bombers were used. A signal went out that the two countries that have the most to gain from overturning the current world order and from a revanchist and autocratic alternative are working together. That same message has been heard on every continent and in every archipelago.

I spent part of last month in Pakistan. It was my first visit—it is a very beautiful country—but everywhere you see the spore of China, of the Chinese military and of Chinese society. Of course, Pakistan is a special case: its alliance with China goes back a long way, and it has always seen it as a counterweight to India. None the less, I was struck when I heard the Prime Minister of Pakistan, a man of very British sensibilities and education, saying that perhaps multiparty western democracy, which had been held out as the only alternative, was inferior to the more meritocratic Chinese alternative. I do not think we would have heard that 10 years ago, and certainly not 20 years ago. We would not have seen ambitious politicians learning Mandarin rather than English, or ambitious young army cadets studying at the People’s Liberation Army university rather than aspiring to come to Sandhurst.

Around the world, people hear the melancholy long withdrawing roar of western influence. We can sanction Lukashenko—it does not stop him kidnapping and murdering opponents or massing troops on the Ukrainian border. We can sanction Ortega—it does not stop him stealing the election in Nicaragua. The same has happened in Nigeria, in Burma and all over. The only part of the otherwise excellent speech by the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, that I would question is when he said that the jury was still out on whether Tunisia is a democracy. When I see troops in the streets and Parliament dissolved, I do not think that the jury is still out. The last country that could still have been held to be a success 10 years after the Arab spring has joined the rush to autocracy.

My noble friend Lord Browne of Ladyton has chosen an excellent Motion to table because democracy around the world is under threat and needs urgent action to protect it.

Never forget that modern kleptocracies rely on some of us here in the West to help them launder money. Lobbyists, lawyers and accountants in democracies keep kleptocrats in power, often by hiding their money in offshore tax havens, and get rich as a result. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reports that the prevalence of these tax havens, many of them our dependent territories, and a general trend towards financial deregulation have made it increasingly difficult to identify and sanction criminal assets.

That brings me to a report from Chatham House—not a party-political organisation, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Balfe—which said that Boris Johnson’s Conservative parliamentary party

“may be open to influence from wealthy donors who originate from post-Soviet kleptocracies, and who may retain fealty to these regimes.”

The Conservative Party received £3.5 million from naturalised British citizens of Russian and Eurasian backgrounds between 2010 and 2019, and the volume of donations has increased.

Kleptocrats are cementing their power in the United Kingdom by cleverly forging ties with political and business leaders, creating charitable foundations, seeking the support of think tanks and elite universities, and buying prestigious commodities such as football clubs, as the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, rightly said. Access to these points of entry must be tightened. Sadly, Putin will not take our threats seriously if we allow this to continue. There is a growing need for action nationally and internationally.

For example, the US sanctioned Latvia’s ABLV Bank in 2018, which eventually led to the collapse of the firm, cutting off at least one source of funding for the North Korean Government. Europe also needs to follow the money. Restricting the flows of illicit finance that run through our markets and institutions, public and private, is key to tackling the threats posed by Russian electoral interference, Chinese competition and democratic backsliding in central Europe. We cannot tackle these challenges alone. The Inter-Parliamentary Alliance against Kleptocracy is an excellent example of how democracies are joining forces to make real progress against a rising tide of corruption, but much more needs to be done.

My Lords, the crisis in Ukraine has finally put on the front pages an inconvenient truth largely, if not deliberately, ignored by the Government. The safe haven and money laundering which the UK provides to kleptocrats and oligarchs sustains, enables and rewards pretty much any and every corrupt and autocratic regime on the globe. In 2016, the UK Government estimated that the amount of corrupt money flowing into the UK had reached £100 billion a year.

The Government introduced legislation, particularly the Proceeds of Crime Act, to tackle some aspects of economic crime transacted by what I might call traditional organised crime, but they have notably avoided the key pieces of legislation necessary to stem the laundering of money from oligarchs and kleptocrats. Their money is laundered particularly through UK property. Transparency International has identified at least £1 billion in property bought with suspect money from Russia alone. That will never be stemmed until we have legislation to require not just a register but a public register of the beneficial owners of property in the UK, enabling civic society and activists across the globe to aid our woefully understaffed and fragmented enforcement bodies and regulators, described by Chatham House as "weak and under-resourced”. That legislation was fully drafted weeks—possibly months—ago but, for some reason, the Government have chosen to halt it. Perhaps the Minister would tell us why. We also need proper verification of the Companies House public register of the beneficial ownership of companies. Will the Government tell us when we can expect its introduction—we have been waiting for months—and the other reforms of Companies House regulations?

Other gaping loopholes exist in some of our overseas territories and crown dependencies which do not yet have public registers of the beneficial owners of companies or property. We in the Lords thought that we had, in recent Financial Services Acts, fixed this problem, but the Government have used every strategy they can muster not to force changes. Will the Minister now update us? While UK property is at the heart of what is now known globally as the London laundromat, the other locations which make up the British financial family are almost as important to the kleptocrats.

My Lords, we are all indebted to the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton, for initiating this important debate. It is a reflection on our times that it has become commonplace to compare the current geopolitical situation to the 1930s—a decade when autocrats and populists manipulated public opinion, preying on insecurity rather than hope, and drew their personal power from the fears, cynicism and prejudices that divide people, rather than the qualities of compassion and generosity that can unite humanity. It is equally commonplace—we have rightly heard it during our debate today—to call for politicians to take a more co-ordinated response, especially when nations disregard international laws and conventions. Ministers regularly assure us that the Government consult our partners when international norms are violated yet, in practice, global Britain too often speaks alone.

By contrast, Beijing’s increasingly effective tactics are to single out and punish those nations which dare to contradict the Chinese Communist Party’s increasingly paranoid narrative—banning exports from Australia, incarcerating innocent Canadian citizens without due process, or intimidating Lithuania—without even talking about what has happened in Hong Kong, Xinjiang or Tibet, or its subversion of international institutions, from the United Nations Human Rights Council to the WHO.

So what might we do when institutions are subverted? By way of example, might the United Kingdom lead by suggesting to its partners that we join an informal and temporary coalition of countries to simultaneously recognise on the same day the sovereignty of Taiwan—a vibrant and brave democracy which has been referred to during this debate, where the rule of law is upheld and diversity and difference are respected? Does the Minister agree that there would be relative safety in numbers if 40 or 50 nations found the courage to make a joint announcement recognising the sovereignty of Taiwan, thereby with one diplomatic gesture turning the tables on the CCP’s bullying posturing, or does our fear of losing diplomatic face immobilise us in the face of tyranny? I hope the Minister will commit to exploring a much more robust approach with our partners.

My Lords, we are indeed grateful to my noble friend Lord Browne for giving us this opportunity to discuss these important matters. I hope that he and other noble Lords will forgive me for starting in a different place from others, for I lived for 10 years in an autocracy, a kleptocracy with populism pretty much reigning on all hands. It was the 1970s; it was François Duvalier, followed by his son Jean-Claude. I met Papa Doc twice—he died shortly afterwards, but I do not think there was a causal link. Kleptocracy was certainly something I was more than familiar with. The school I was deputy head of had educated Jean-Claude Duvalier. We knew all his inside helpers. I taught members of the Tonton Macoute and of the diplomatic corps, as well as people with no money whose fees were paid by those who had stolen it from somebody else.

In the time available I must speak in headlines, for the democratic world has reduced Haiti to the frazzled rump it is now. From the time of Haiti’s independence, France took it ill and imposed an indemnity that independent Haiti went on paying back until relatively recently—just 20 or 30 years ago. The Americans have played a pretty bad hand in Haiti. I can assure your Lordships that an occupying force of redneck southern marines policing the first black republic in the world left its mark. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, rewrote the Haitian constitution and set up a rigged plebiscite in order that foreigners, previously not allowed to own land, could. American corporations rushed in. Sisal and sugar were exploited, as were minerals and other things. The Haitian national debt was taken from the Bourse in Paris and sunk in Wall Street, and used to leverage loans for a railway system that Haitians did not want but the sugar industry run by American corporations certainly did.

Denmark, Spain and, I am afraid, the United Kingdom played their own bit parts—cameo parts—in the reduction of Haiti to its present state. In particular, a book by a British ambassador in the 1870s vilified Haiti and fed the voyeuristic tendencies of a British readership for a cannibalistic, voodoo-dominated state, which Haiti certainly is not and never has been. I have briefed five consecutive British diplomats who have gone on to serve on the island of which Haiti is a part, and they need to know the full story of exploitation, rape and violation. That is an important aspect of what we are considering now.

My Lords, strategic litigation against public participation, known as SLAPPS, is abusive lawsuits pursued with the purpose of shutting down freedom of speech. They have been used against journalists, media outlets, whistleblowers, activists, academics and NGOs that speak out on matters of public interest.

The UK has become a global hub for financial crime and corruption. As the Prime Minister would say, we are world leading. My noble friend Lady Kramer referred to £100 billion a year. Along with that, our courts possess the tools to shut down reporting on such matters—cases for libel taken not for their legal merit but for the effect of silencing a critic by locking them into a long legal struggle. We have developed a class of lawyers who call themselves reputation managers.

Chatham House reported on the Abramovich action against the journalist Catherine Belton and her publisher HarperCollins. She had lived and worked in Russia for many years and had claimed in her book Putin’s People that Abramovich had purchased Chelsea Football Club at the behest of the Russian president Vladimir Putin. A statement from the firm Harbottle & Lewis, solicitors representing Abramovich, claimed that Belton’s book, “falsely alleges that” Abramovich “acted corruptly” —a claim that was struck out in the early part of those proceedings. However, a further three Russian billionaires and the Russian state oil company Rosneft followed Abramovich in filing civil claims against HarperCollins, Belton’s publishers. It is much to their credit that they stood by their author and the claims were apparently settled satisfactorily.

The chilling effect of this type of litigation is most visible in the threat of action rather than action itself. Karen Dawisha, the author of the 2014 book,Putin’s Kleptocracy, was forced to change publishers due to legal concerns in the UK. Her publisher, Cambridge University Press, dropped her on the grounds that those implicated would sue and that the disruption and expense would be more than it could afford. The book was published in the US. There are numerous examples. The Maltese journalist Daphne Galizia, who was murdered by a car bomb, was facing 47 libel actions brought by Maltese politicians and others for her unbending and brave journalism exposing corruption. After her death, her family accused Mishcon de Reya, a British firm of solicitors, of “hounding” their mother.

My Lords, while in preparation for this debate, for reasons I cannot explain, my phone decided to throw up some old pictures that I had kept in archive. A particular photograph came from 1975, of Idi Amin forcing white diplomats to bow down to him to give him subservience and obedience and take an oath of allegiance to his Government. We easily wrote him off then as a tyrant, an autocrat and a man who was intent on showering shame on those he despised and manipulating and destroying their lives.

Well, here we are many decades on, and we have recorded information this week that the former recent President of the United States spent the last weekend in Texas, assuring those who bowed down to him a year ago that he will pardon them when he returns to office and release them of the charges for which they were accused for leaping up on Capitol Hill to destroy the stable democracy of the United States, and that he spent weekends while in the White House destroying and ripping up official papers which members of his Government, in Civil Service terms, literally sellotaped together to provide to the inquiry in Washington.

We so easily used to point at African leaders as despotic and despairing and we now have them in abundance in the West. We have to learn to take account of what is clearly a major failure in our ability to display democracy to the rest of the world when we cannot see it in the places we once revered or even consider home.

I have reflected strongly on this issue, largely because I have felt a deep sense of despair at the state of our own country’s affairs. Before I leave them, I remind noble Lords who are followers of American political writing of a quote that appeared in the Baltimore Evening Sun on 26 July 1920—100 years ago—written by the leading political author HL Mencken:

“As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and a complete narcissistic moron.”

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, began this debate by saying that he hoped that it would not become party political. I would agree with him, in that although the geography of this place divides us into two sides, there are more than two sides in British politics. I will say that this problem is much broader than one side of government, although I very much agree with what the noble Lord, Lord Hastings, just said: things have got much worse in the past decade.

None the less, we have spoken a great deal about golden visas, and I would point out that they were introduced in 2008. There was what is known as the blind faith period, when checks on applicants and the source of their wealth were done neither by the banks nor by the British Government, and more than 3,000 people came in that period between 2008 and 2015. We have to say that responsibility for that sits on both sides, if we divide the House that way in your Lordships’ House. This is not a two-party issue but a systems issue; we have a broken system here and around the world.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Browne, for introducing this debate so powerfully and for giving us the chance for such an interesting discussion. In his introduction, he focused on the financial sector, a haven for dirty money where reputations are laundered and political donations accepted. I am really pleased to see the turnout today, and I contrast it to the kind of turnout that we saw in debates during the passage of the Financial Services Act, when frequently we were debating controls on the financial sector, controlling legislation, and we were lucky if half the number of people who are in this Room today were involved in those debates. I note that at Second Reading of that Act, the noble Lord, Lord Agnew of Oulton, said:

“We need to show to the rest of the world that this will be a soundly regulated environment.”—[Official Report, 28/1/2021; col. 1877.]

We know how the noble Lord thought that went along.

The noble Lord, Lord Howell, talked about two economic systems lined up against each other. Of course, the world has only one economic system now: capitalism. I am not a Marxist—I do not believe that the superstructure is determined by the base, and that is very clear in that we have a base of capitalism and the structure around the world that we have now. If we look at that not philosophically but practically, the Russian model was developed on the basis of advice from US and UK advisers—the kleptocratic model. The Chinese adopted the capitalist market system underneath their own political frame. So where we are today is not a degradation but a continuation. The incredibly powerful speech of the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, spelled that out so beautifully.

My Lords, as we have heard this afternoon, there is little doubt that democracy has been on the slide: the recent report from Freedom House pointing to 15 consecutive years of declining freedom and democracy makes a depressing read. I wish to focus on the decline in democracy rather than the rise of autocrats and kleptocrats, specifically during the last two years of the global pandemic, when the ability—or, should I say, appetite—of the so-called leading democracies to collaborate and work together for the greater global good has largely evaporated.

As the noble Lord, Lord Hastings, so eloquently stated, the rise of populism and nationalism among major democracies was evident in the years running up to the pandemic. The election of Donald Trump in the US heralded four years of division—aided and abetted by social media—and a combative approach to the UN, NATO and many other multilateral organisations. Here in the UK, a deeply polarising Brexit referendum, where quality of debate, trust and objectivity took a back seat, has been followed by two to three years of an equally divisive Johnson Government, where—to put it very mildly—domestic issues have pushed critical global issues into the sidings. Sadly, there has been little sign that other countries in the G7 or indeed the G20 have stepped up.

I shall briefly compare and contrast the world’s response in 2008 to the global financial crisis to the current response to the global pandemic. Facing a pyramid of toxic debt from European and American banks, the G20 stepped up—with our Prime Minister at the time, Gordon Brown, to the fore—to assemble a $1.2 trillion-rescue bailout to avert the impending collapse of the world’s financial system. Some 14 years on, and we are in the midst of a far more serious world crisis. The IMF estimates that the damage to the global economy wreaked by Covid-19 will reach $12.5 trillion by 2024. It could be considerably more than that. In humanitarian terms, the pandemic numbers are even more chilling: nearly 6 million deaths so far, 160 million people dropping below the poverty line, hundreds of millions of children missing out on education, and tens of millions more added to ever-lengthening waiting lists for critical—and in many cases life-dependent—operations.

My Lords, I hope the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, will accept a cup of tea to serve as an apology for my jumping up before time, as I do to all noble Lords for speaking in the gap, but will speak for no more than two minutes.

Democracy stands for accountability to the people, expressed by popular mandate. The noble Lord, Lord Browne, drew attention to the upcoming meeting between Presidents Xi and Putin: a joint security statement will be forthcoming. I suspect that it will be a statement of non-interference in each other’s internal affairs. While both aspire to a different form of communism, an alliance between the two will attract others into an axis—Iran is the most likely candidate—driving a wedge between two forms of governance: democracy over autocracy.

Leading on from that, we have just witnessed events in Kazakhstan. During the time of his presidency, it was said that President Nazarbyev commanded great popular support. Fast forward and, with the recent mayhem, it is abundantly clear that that support was entirely artificial. Autocrats do not have the support of the people, which is why an exit route must be found whereby they should be encouraged to leave, otherwise they will surely stay. A way must be found for free and fair elections as the only solution in everyone’s best interest.

My Lords, I declare an interest as chair of the UK board of a global peace-building charity, Search for Common Ground, and am an associate with Global Partners Governance, a UK-based not-for-profit focusing on supporting representative politics. During the February recess, I shall be in Baghdad and then Beirut, working with those wishing to strengthen their Parliaments. The Minister knows of my declared interest in Sudan and the retrograde step of moving away from the transition to democracy there. In all those three countries, brave young people and, primarily, women have been in the vanguard of supporting the basic and fundamental democratic norms that we are debating today. I commend the noble Lord, Lord Browne, for bringing this vital debate to us today. Far too many people this year alone, as well as last year, have lost their life fighting for a cause which we here take for granted.

The noble Lord, Lord Hannan, referenced Tunisia. Literally just before this debate, I was on a call with our ambassador in Tunisia through the Inter-Parliamentary Union. We discussed the retrograde step of military courts being used against civilians, the displacement of opportunities for many people and the move away from a parliamentary system. That is just one example of global goal 16—supporting institutions and building the rule of law—now under assault.

The debate seems to be broken down into three broad areas: the global counter-democracy movement towards absolute rulers, theocrats and autocrats; the lack of a coherent and credible UK approach to counter it; and the urgent need to clear our Augean stables here at home. A reliable indicator, the democracy index, states that only 8.4% of the world’s population live in a full democracy, with more than a third under authoritarian rule. My noble friend Lord Wallace highlighted the sweep of those who wish to maintain degrees of authoritarianism and absolute rule.

The UK’s trade with China, to give one example, has doubled over the last decade. We now have a trade deficit with China of £40 billion—unprecedented in history—and are seeking ever-increasing foreign direct investment from the Gulf states into the UK. What leverage do we have in reality against those we seek to build a “network of liberty” against? These are hollow words when we are dependent on many of them. As my noble friend said, the silence on democratic norms in the Gulf is matched only by the volume of the arms we sell there.

My Lords, I, too, thank my noble friend Lord Browne for his excellent introduction to a wide-ranging debate. I also thank all noble Lords for raising such important issues.

As we have just heard, the UK has had a pivotal role in promoting globally the rule of law and democratic values through multilateral institutions, as a permanent member of the Security Council, as a significant player in NATO and, as the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, reminded us, as a principal contributor to the World Bank and IMF. We should also not forget our leading role in promoting globally the UN target of spending 0.7% on ODA, and the leadership role we played in initiating the UN’s global goals, which established a reputation for the United Kingdom as a trusted partner across the world.

Our influence is not restricted to relationships with Governments. As the noble Lord, Lord Alton, said, our renowned institutions such as the BBC World Service, our universities, as well as the export of music and other cultural assets have given us huge soft power that we should not underestimate. However, I should say to the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, that the ingredients of a thriving democracy are not limited to Parliaments and parliamentarians. Civil society organisations such as women’s organisations, charities, faith groups, trade unions and other organised communities have all demonstrated their role in defending democracy and human rights.

When nations fail in their most important task of providing safety, security and freedom for their people, it is always civil society that leaps first to their defence. As the noble Lord, Lord Howell, highlighted, the Foreign Secretary said in her Chatham House speech that efforts to build a “network of liberty” must be firmly anchored in human rights and civic freedoms.

We must strengthen our ties with civil society, too. Unfortunately, there was little of substance on this in the Integrated Review, a situation that I hope will be corrected in the development strategy due in March. Clearly, in promoting our values we should work with our democratic allies bilaterally and multilaterally through the UN and other institutions. However, as my noble friend Lord Browne said, we do so against a backdrop of a series of states falling backwards into autocracy, kleptocracy and populism, and led away from the principles that have defined us as a country. As the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, highlighted, it is vital—I repeat, vital—that our words match our actions both at home and abroad.

My Lords, I first thank all noble Lords for their participation in what has been an excellent and, as ever, informed debate on a subject which—as I said to the noble Lord, Lord Browne—was all-encompassing and quite broad. Equally, noble Lords have drawn attention to some consistent themes. I wish to put on record my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Browne, for tabling this very important debate and for getting the insights from across your Lordships’ House. As the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, pointed out, the attendance today demonstrates both the insights and experience on this important issue, even though we may have different perspectives on the issues that have been discussed.

I will address a couple of issues right from the outset. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Hastings. It has been the greatest honour of my professional and political career to represent my country on the world stage. It is important that we reflect on who we are, what we are and what we stand for. It is also important to lead from the front and to look towards our own backyard and demonstrate that we stand up for the values that we all believe in. On this, the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, was spot on. As someone with a particular heritage who is proud of my faith, I value the fact that my country allows me to celebrate both. Equally, I am proud of my country, the United Kingdom, which allows me to do that.

But these values are not unique to the UK. As the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, pointed out, they are embedded in the common humanity that we all share. Equally, as we take the messages of strengthening democracy, we need to reflect on our own history, both recent and past, to ensure that, when we talk of human rights, we talk not by pointing a finger but through sharing experience, and when we talk about sharing and strengthening democracy and the rights of women, we do not say, “Look at us today”. We should reflect on our past and the hard struggle for democratic rights within our country.

My Lords, we have had an excellent debate and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, for characteristically, carefully, generously and respectfully responding to the debate. I thank all noble Lords for their valuable contributions. We have had a wide-ranging and informed debate—informed by significant awareness and self-awareness. I shall come back to that point.

I do not intend to respond individually to any or all contributions and would not be able to do that in the time left to me, in any event—I would not have the ability to respond to quality of the contributions and the points made. All that I can say is that every speech was an adornment to the debate, and I am extremely grateful for them.

I want to make just two points; it is really one point with two halves. I should make it clear that I come away from this debate conscious that we all have a shared responsibility for the defence of democracy. I say specifically to the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, that we all have a shared responsibility for the history that has got us into this difficulty in the first place. I think that we all recognise that. There is a great deal of self-awareness, and that was obvious in this debate.

The phrase, “to see ourselves as others see us” has been used. That is interesting, because we are nine days away from 25 January, the day on which the people of Scotland celebrate the birth of Robert Burns, the poet. My noble friend Lord Foulkes of Cumnock had the pleasure and honour to represent a part of Ayrshire where every word that anyone remembers that Robert Burns wrote was written. When my noble friend retired, the boundaries were rearranged and I inherited the very town where those words were written, Mauchline in Ayrshire. I represented it for a period, and Burns was a significant part of certainly my late winter life as a Member of Parliament. I have been to more Burns suppers than I ever want to go to again, I have to say!

For those noble Lords who do not know where that phrase comes from, it is from a poem that contains a moral lesson for mankind. The poem was, characteristically for Burns, written about a scene that he observed in a kirk, in the congregation of a church—a church that still exists. There was a preening young woman in that church because she was attracting gazes from everybody. The fact of the matter was that the other members of the congregation were not looking at her but at the insect on her bonnet. Burns wrote this moral lesson with the words that you should pray for the gift,

Motion agreed.

Committee adjourned at 5.30 pm.