A lot of people want to speak and we have two important debates today. Although I am not setting a time limit to begin with, Members should think about keeping to seven to eight minutes.
That this House calls on the Government to develop separate but aligned cross-Government strategies for both Russia and China; and further calls on the Government to support the international order, working with allies across the globe to develop an approach to Russia and China that, whilst recognising their separate legitimate interests, ensures a robust defence of both UK interests and democratic values.
I will speak for 15 minutes, if I get that far, as I am mindful of others.
As of this morning, offensive war has once again broken out in eastern Europe, as Russian artillery and armour rain down on a peaceful neighbour. We have all seen the reports of columns moving from Crimea, of Kharkiv and Kyiv potentially being under threat and of bridges being blown up in Chernobyl as Ukrainians defend hearth and home.
This is arguably the first conventional war in Europe since 1945. The intentions of Vladimir Putin have long been clear: to control or destroy Ukraine, to shatter western unity, to build a new sphere of influence on the foundations of the USSR and to present the west as a decadent, mortal enemy of the Russian people and Russian identity. It is an agenda that is both febrile and dangerous, but sadly it is also very real. We have needed to understand it for some time, and we urgently need to get our heads around what is happening.
According to polling, the majority of Russians see war—and nuclear war—with the west as now more likely than not, which should be a sobering realisation for all of us. Russian state propaganda has prepared the population for conflict for years. The immediate news is clearly shocking, but I will still try to look more broadly, to talk about tactics rather than strategy and, where possible, to bring in China as much as Russia. People will forgive me if I do not always succeed.
Russia in the west and China in the east present differing but overlapping and increasingly significant threats. However imperfect our current global system, we have avoided major conflict, but that order is now under threat: in Ukraine today; potentially in Taiwan and the South China sea; and potentially in the Baltic and the Black sea in the weeks, months and years to come.
I wish to add to this list, although I share in everything that the hon. Gentleman is saying. He is very intelligent and foresighted on these issues. Should we not also be looking at those who have dual nationality—Russian and UK, or Chinese and UK—reassessing and making them choose a nationality? Secondly, should we not be looking at everyone from China or from Russia who has a tier 1 visa and reassessing whether those should not be withdrawn?
The hon. Gentleman make sensible points. I look forward to working with him on them and I thank him for his intervention.
Both the Russia and China leaderships see themselves as being in conflict or intense competition with the west. That may sound “hawkish”, but it is not designed to be so. It is designed to avoid conflict in the future by being clear about the times we live in. Let us face it: who of us today will claim that deterrence has worked in Europe? Let me remind the House that the best wars are not those that are won, but those that are unfought. Our greatest victory in world war three was that it did not take place, not that we destroyed our civilisation in order to destroy another.
In Russia, the security elites have believed for the past 20 years that they are in conflict with us—in a conflict of values and of information, with spheres of interest. President Putin alludes to a “western plot” that destroyed the Soviet Union and he sees “colour revolutions” in the same light. Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev regularly warns that the west wants to destroy Russia because we fear it and are jealous of it. The Kremlin’s confrontational strategy to change the post-cold war order began with a reassessment of military art in the early 2000s, which was played out somewhat in national publications such as Voennaya Mysl, or Military Thought, and Voenno-promyshlennyi kur’er—or Military-Industrial Courier. The result of that debate was a strategy that has, in effect, aligned Russia’s two ways of war, the conventional and the non-conventional, and seen the west as a psychological, spiritual and physical threat. It is not fundamentally a military doctrine—the Gerasimov doctrine—as some people falsely claim; it is actually a strategic art, not simply a military one. These ideas have formed in Russia’s military and national security doctrines, written by those around Putin, where the west is the existential threat, spiritual and physical. Swedish academic Maria Engström has discovered that at its worst there is a disturbing narrative among Russian ideologues that links Russia’s nuclear arsenal and Russian Orthodoxy, known as “Atomic Orthodoxy”, as the “sword and shield” against the Antichrist—the US and NATO. We are the Antichrist. The sword and the shield are also the symbols of Putin’s old KGB and now the FSB. We made the mistake of dismissing fringe Russian philosophers as neo-fascist nutjobs in the 1990s. Given what has happened since, it is unwise that we do the same again. In China, party document No. 9 lays out quite clearly that the Communist party seeks a dominant position of its socialism over western capitalism. The language of win-win is for an external audience, for us. The language domestically is to win and to dominate, and again we should be under no illusion about that.
Order. I inform the House that we will look to start the wind-ups at around about quarter to 3, with the next debate starting at around 10 past, so will Members please be conscious of the length of their speeches?
I congratulate the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) on securing this important debate. His timing could not have been better.
It is clear from today’s events that we live no longer in an era of change but in a change of era. That has three significant implications for our strategy on Russia and China, which is why the hon. Gentleman’s timing today is so fortunate. The three shifts entail a worldview different from that of UK policy makers, and they require a shift in our defensive strategy and a renaissance in creative diplomatic strategy whereby, quite simply, we in this country need to build a new rules-based order for the new silk road.
Let me start with the new worldview that is going to be needed. I generally try to avoid a Manichean view of the world as divided into black and white, because the world is more complicated than that, but the truth is that, from Kaliningrad through to Kamchatka, we are now witness to the creation of an enormous kleptosphere. Inside the borders of that kleptosphere, the merciless logic is that might is right: in the old phrase, the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. We have to be the guardians of what we might call the “canon-osphere”—the space around the world where there are rules, there is the rule of law and there is justice.
Just as we once rid the world of piracy and slave trading, we now have to be the place that leads the charge against economic crime, no matter where that crime is perpetrated. We have to be the guardians of the new rules-based order for this simple reason: if we think the scale of global corruption today is bad, we must think for a moment about the world that is to come. The World Bank estimates that the value of natural resources in countries with bad corruption scores is $65 trillion. Imagine the world of the future, in which those natural resources are extracted and the profits go to some of the worst people on earth. That is why there is now an urgency for a very different kind of philosophy to guide our foreign policy. We have to be the place, the country, the leader that seeks a world of not simply free trade but clean trade. That must be one of the defining features of our foreign policy for the years to come.
I am very pleased to be here. I pay huge tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) for his prescience and timing in securing this debate. He is absolutely right: this is something that we have needed to discuss for a long time. The fact that he has got the House together to do so today is important.
This is really a debate about the future—a debate that challenges us all to think about the world in which we wish to live. We have already heard cited the kleptocracies that govern so much of our world and the threats to independent sovereign communities, such as Ukraine, that are being so violently and vilely challenged today. We have already heard about the ways in which that affects the very lives that we have here: the price of heating gas going through the roof; the price of petrol going up and up; and now, sadly, the price of wheat and therefore of basic food commodities rising higher and higher, hitting the families, the communities and the homes that we here are so privileged to represent. This is a debate not about a foreign country, not about foreign relations, but, fundamentally, about the British people and how we live our lives.
That is why I want to start by saying very clearly that this is not a time to live in fear. This is not a time to think that arrayed against us are some enormous armies against which we can do nothing, or that we should bow down, scrape and grovel, as I see some people doing today, praising Putin’s intellect, worshipping Xi’s ability to influence others through force. This is not the time, as others say, to compromise and accept the instructions of evil dictators and say, “No! Free people in Ukraine are expendable. They can suffer because they don’t matter.” That is cowardice. Worse than that, it is betrayal. It is betrayal not just of the people who are fighting for their freedom, but of the British people whose security depends fundamentally on freedoms around the world. We should call this what it is; it is treason and it is wrong.
I am grateful to the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) for securing this important debate. The eyes of the world may be focused elsewhere at present, but it is vital that we do not lose sight of other nations where people face abuses. My thoughts and prayers are with the people of Ukraine today as they face aggression. Military aggression in Ukraine is not acceptable, and the House stands in solidarity with the people of Ukraine.
I thank the Office of Tibet, Tibet Action and Free Tibet for their briefings ahead of this debate. I thank, too, the all-party group for Tibet for all the work that it does. I declare an interest as the vice-chair of the said all-party group. I was pleased to have the opportunity to meet the Office of Tibet in London last year at the Labour party conference where I heard about the experiences of the Tibetan people.
Since it was annexed more than 70 years ago, occupied Tibet has been closed off to much of the rest of the world, preventing us from witnessing the repression against the people that live in the region. According to the Free Tibet campaign, the Chinese Government have been orchestrating a deliberate and systematic elimination of Tibet’s distinct and unique cultural, religious and linguistic identity through a sinicization of Tibetan Buddhism, its culture and its language.
Worryingly, those sinicization measures are reported to have increased in intensity over the past decade, reflecting the Chinese Government’s further attempts to subdue the Tibetans, who continue to resist the occupation. This process includes the Chinese Government’s bilingual education policy of replacing the Tibetan language—the common language of all Tibetans—with Mandarin. In the words of the Free Tibet campaign, this
“strikes at the very root of the Tibetan identity”.
It was reported late last year that two teenage Tibetan students were detained for opposing Chinese-only instruction in their school. A Tibetan teacher was also arrested after her Tibetan-language school was forced to close. According to research by the Tibet Action Institute, as many as 900,000 Tibetan children are estimated to have been separated from their families, while the teaching of the Tibetan language has faced further restrictions, with limitations on monasteries that wish to provide language classes.
The world order is at a pivotal point in history. From Moscow to Tehran to Beijing, autocratic rulers are attempting to enforce their undemocratic models not only on their own people, but on those beyond their borders. What we are witnessing in Ukraine today is the starkest example of that frightful and frightening phenomenon.
Almost unbelievably, in the 21st century we are witnessing the invasion of a peaceful European state by an armed aggressor—something we have not seen since the actions of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Yet, in a warped and perverted view of history, Putin last night compared Ukraine to Nazi Germany, painting it as a genocidal state that poses a threat to the Russian people. That can only be true in the deranged analysis of Putin’s mind as he unleashes a tsunami of violence against the people of Ukraine.
How could Ukraine be a threat to Russia? Russia has 4,100 aircraft; Ukraine has 318. Russia has 772 fighters; Ukraine has 69. Russia has 1,543 helicopters; Ukraine has 112. Russia has 12,400 tanks; Ukraine has 2,600. Let us also remember that Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal at the end of the Soviet era on the basis of a guarantee that it would not be invaded by Russia. One wonders whether, if Ukraine had maintained its nuclear deterrent, those tanks would be rolling across Ukrainian territory today.
Make no mistake: Putin will continue to challenge the international order and advance his imperial agenda until he is decisively confronted. He seeks to reverse the democratic result of the 1991 Ukraine referendum and resurrect the Soviet empire. With increased security control in Eurasia over recent years, the Baltic states and Ukraine stand as outliers—those states that have stayed beyond Moscow’s malignant grip.
The implications are clear. We must now increase the NATO presence in the Baltic states, as well as in Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania, which will now be on the frontline. NATO countries must be willing now not only to raise the proportion of their GDP that they give to defence, but to give that money to NATO rather than making paper promises.
The right hon. Gentleman mentions that Russia has 12,400 tanks. He will know that the Prime Minister mentioned that we had sent 2,000 anti-tank missiles to Ukraine. Does he think we are doing enough to provide assets to Ukraine to defend itself?
No, we have not been doing enough. Since we saw the occupation of Crimea in 2014, many of us, including some who are in the House today, have been arguing that the west should be giving Ukraine the proper capabilities to defend itself. It is clear today that we did not do so—something that I will come to in a moment.
Since sanctions were imposed on Russia in 2014, it has paid down state debt, had significant import substitution to make it less dependent on outside producers, and made large investments in European metallurgy, energy and critical infrastructure. In 2020, the inward stock of foreign direct investment in the UK from Russia was £681 million, and the equivalent EU figure was £112 billion. Sanctions must include restrictions on all Russian investment if we are to stop Russia from wriggling out of any new sanctions that are applied because of what it has done today.
To go back to the point made by the hon. Member for Swansea West (Geraint Davies), I hope the House will forgive me for quoting an article I wrote on 22 February 2015, which said that an option would be
“to give the Ukrainians the capabilities they most require in order to defend themselves against the military superiority of the pro-Russian separatists and their Kremlin allies.
Primarily, this would involve properly encrypted communications, UAVs for surveillance and targeting and anti-tank capabilities to deal with the massive deficit which the Ukrainians currently have on this front.
There is increasing scepticism in Washington that any diplomatic solution reached with the Putin government will be as worthless as that achieved in Minsk last September.”
What was true at that time about NATO is true today:
“Everybody wants the insurance policy, but too few want to pay the premiums.
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I lived and worked in Ukraine and the former USSR from 1990 to 1994, and I was fortunate enough to travel through the country for much of that time. I lived in Kyiv, but I well remember many of the places we are talking about now. I went down coal mines in Donbas, I visited Soviet dachas in Sevastopol, and in Moldova and Georgia I witnessed the first of the proxy wars engineered, probably, by the KGB. Many of my formative experiences as a young man were spent there, and I am deeply fond of the place and its people. What is happening pains me, because a KGB placeman will now pit Slavs against other Slavs to fulfil a fantasy about the Soviet Union and the world. The cold war was not a good world. It died 30 years ago and should remain dead. Tens of thousands are likely to die.
I would like to argue the following: the risk of direct conflict with Russia and China is growing and, in some senses, we are already in indirect conflict with both, in different ways—importantly, I am not directly comparing Russia and China. We are midway through a 20-year crisis with Russia that we are woefully ill-prepared for and have done our best to ignore. Frankly, this is now returning with a vengeance. We are at the beginning of a significant and potentially damaging change in our relationship with China—there may be greater opportunity there, but there may also be greater threat. Therefore, for the next 20 years the primary foreign policy goal for this country must be in old-school state relationships and the avoidance of direct conflict, and the establishment of working relationships with both, where we can, that are as productive as possible, while resolutely defending our values and our allies. I do not believe we are there yet by any means; and the coherence and integration of our foreign policy, and our policy in both cases, is not there.
Secondly, we need to understand the new world and the new styles of conflict being practised against us, and the new forms of covert and overt influence. Thirdly, as a result, we need to move to an era of “smart” containment, which is not only geographically based, but is a protection of our values, and of our IT property, our universities and law firms, and our City institutions and others. That includes things such as a national strategy council to complement the National Security Council, because frankly—the more I speak to people, the more I feel this—we need to relearn the arts of strategy and deterrence. We need to relearn how to use power properly—I believe we have forgotten that.
We also need to make provision for laws that we should have put in place years ago: a foreign lobbying Bill—my God, how many more scandals do we have to put up with before we realise we need one?; an updated espionage Bill; an economic crimes Bill; and changes to the libel and data protection rules to protect freedom of speech and to protect journalists from becoming peripheral victims of Russian oligarch intimidation to our freedom of speech.
Whereas Russia is a declining power, China is rising one. They present different but related threats, and both, to a greater or lesser extent, use the tools of hybrid conflict. The principle behind this is not just war plus information ops; it is much more. It is to see state competition as Darwinian, with war as an extension of politics—as set out by von Clausewitz—and politics as an extension of conflict. The latter idea was peddled by German world war General Erich Ludendorff in his book, “The Total War”. China believes in something similar, as readers of “Unrestricted Warfare”, published in the late 1990s, will know. Our opponents are harsh, harsh realists. Their secret police disappear people. They are not liberal internationalists. Although they share legitimate interests, and we need to work on those legitimate interests, their mindset is different from ours.
Putin is a product of the KGB; an organisation involved in some of the greatest crimes in human history, but one that, unlike the SS, has never had to collectively accept responsibility. He is both deeply rational and highly irrational. Russian integrated strategic decision making is years ahead of the west. Its general staff is probably the last Prussian organisation on earth. This war has been planned for years. He knows that EU dependency on energy is worsening and he has built up tens of billions in reserves. I suspect he laughs at the ad hoc tactics of the west, where we ask, “Do we do a no-fly zone? Do we do this? Do we do that?” From him, this is, as Sun Tzu would say, “tactics before strategy”—it is “noise before defeat”.
Putin is also fuelled by a bitter and cold anger at the loss of the USSR—at the loss of Ukraine—which he cannot abide and refuses to accept. This is the third stage of the Ukrainian conflict. The first, between 2004 and 2014, involved economic and political tools. The second stage, between 2014 and 2022, involved those as well as paramilitary violence. In their hybrid tools, both Russia and China seek elite capture in this country. We know about Huawei and about the academics and the universities. Twice in this House I have heard the claim that Huawei is a private company. Anyone who knows anything about one-party states and about communism knows that that is an incredible and bad claim for a Minister, or for an official putting words into a Minister’s mouth, to be saying. Both countries use covert military force. Both use an intimidating conventional military presence. Both use culture. Both use covert control of the media.
So what is our response? First, it is to understand our adversaries and potential enemies, because they spent a great deal of time understanding us. We need to keep reaching out to their leaders, however futile that now is in the case of Russia, and to their people. We also need to have a conversation in our own house about how we clean up our own house—about the Bills we need to bring in, which I have mentioned: the foreign lobbying law; the data protection law; and the laws on economic crimes.
That is just a start. If Confucius Institutes wish to remain in this country, they must stop spying on Chinese students, and be willing to discuss Hong Kong and Tiananmen Square. If not, they should be shut down. Military dual-use work should be banned. Work for Chinese military universities should be banned. Recruiters for the Chinese secret agencies need to be exposed and prosecuted. Front organisations such as the Chinese Students and Scholars Association should be banned. [Interruption.] I am aware of the time, Mr Deputy Speaker. We need to become significantly less strategically dependent on industry and manufacturing from China, not least because of the environmental damage they do to our state. Globalisation has in many ways been a force for good, but we need to have a conversation with ourselves about whether offshoring so much of our industry is a good thing.
The military dividend—the peace dividend—is over. Spending 2% on defence is not acceptable. To put it crudely, we need a bigger Navy and a bigger Air Force. We need to rebuild our alliances throughout the world. If there is one thing unique about British strategic culture—one of the greatest things this country has done in 200 years, arguably more than any other—it is our ability to build alliances throughout the world. We need to be at the heart of the building of new alliances. Potentially, our second carrier should be part of the CANZUK—Canada, Australia, New Zealand and UK—fleet. Potentially, we should put a physical NATO base in the Suwalki gap between Kaliningrad on one side and Belarus on the other.
I could go on but I am mindful of the time, so let me sum up. There are two courses for humanity in the 21st century. The first is the western model of a law-governed society with politicians under the control of the people. It is incredibly imperfect, as we all know, but it is the best hope for mankind. The second is the new militarism of high-tech authoritarianism that is championed by Russia, and a little bit by China. It promises the data-inspired, artificial-intelligence control of populations. We need foresight, strategy and resolve to fight to defend our values and the future of humanity. We should not underestimate the scale of the task nor shy away from it. The defence of human freedom, wherever it is in the world—in Taiwan, Ukraine, the Baltic or the Black sea—is the struggle for our age.
The second dimension is that we obviously need new defences. We in this House have to confront the reality that our strategy of deterrence has failed. Most of us who spoke in the debate on the economic sanctions were profoundly disappointed with the weakness of the package proposed. Frankly, many of us feel that the Prime Minister was a little late to the party. “Too little, too late” will be written on his political gravestone, I fear. None the less, we must now accept that the threat of sanctions has failed and we must now offer President Putin the iron fist. That has to take aim at Russia’s key strategic weakness, which is its 20 km border.
We must now envisage a different security environment along the Russian border. That means that we should have proactive talks with Finland and Sweden about how they partner with NATO; it means further reinforcing our presence in the Baltics; it means new kinds of conversations at the other end of the border, in Georgia; it means thinking about how we take on and equip those fighting the insurgencies in places such as South Ossetia and Transnistria; and it means that we have to take a completely different approach to the Balkans, and step up and accelerate the path towards NATO membership for Bosnia-Herzegovina.
We now have to start to roll NATO forward in strength across the border, so that President Putin’s tactical advance results in what is ultimately a strategic defeat. I am afraid part and parcel of that is that we will have to consider the deployment of intermediate ground-launched cruise missiles in Europe. The truth is that the intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty broke down because President Putin was breaking the rules and deploying SSC-8 missiles, which were prohibited by that treaty. Russia has built very effective anti-access and area-denial systems that safeguard it against air and naval attack. A defence against ground-launched cruise missiles is much more difficult. The Secretary-General of NATO has been right to rule out arming those missiles with nuclear warheads, but we must now think more aggressively about our defence posture, given the security threat President Putin now poses to this great homeland of Europe.
The final point I wish to make clear is that it is time for British grand strategy to go through something of a renaissance. This is not an original point of mine but something that people such as Lord Ricketts have been writing about for some time. If we look back over history, we see so many examples of how, when Russian and Chinese leaders feel strong at home, they advance into the periphery—into the borderland. That was true under Tsar Nicholas and under the Qing empire, and it is true today. That means that a corridor of chaos is potentially going to stretch from the Baltic to Ukraine, down through Syria and Iran, through Kashmir, into Myanmar, into North Korea and into the South China sea.
We have not only to think creatively and imaginatively about how we provide a security environment for that space but to think anew about creating a Marshall plan for that space, just as we did in Europe after world war two. Then, we created the OECD to foster Europe’s economic development; we now need to do the same for the silk road. The passage to India, the Pacific and beyond now needs a British-led institution that looks imaginatively at how we create new infrastructure. China will be spending something like $1.5 trillion on infrastructure across this great border zone. What are we spending? We do not know, but we could be using our skills to identify the infrastructure priorities in places such as Pakistan. We could be thinking imaginatively about how we mobilise infrastructure finance. London has been the home of infrastructure finance since we defeated Napoleon and Nathan Rothschild created the international bond market in London.
We have the wherewithal to mobilise sovereign wealth funds, which are growing radically and quickly in places such as the Gulf, and deploying that money in good strong contracts, with good strong standards, that avoid the kind of mistakes that we saw in the early days of the Qatari world cup stadium-building programme. We could be a force for good in building infrastructure, in financing infrastructure, and in making sure that there are good rules around that.
We could be thinking imaginatively about how we create free trade across this zone. We could be thinking imaginatively about how we settle disputes. We could be thinking imaginatively about the legal services and the consulting services that we offer out of London into this space. The reality is that, by 2050, the economies of the new silk road will be worth two and a half times the value of the economies on the Atlantic seaboard. The economic centre of gravity is moving east. This is possibly where I differ from the hon. Member for Isle of Wight. In my view, we need to think imaginatively about offering the welcoming hand of trade as well as offering a strong shield and a strong sword.
I will finish with a quote from Dean Acheson, the US Secretary of State after world war two, who famously boasted that he was present at the creation. He warned us that
“the future comes one day at a time.”
We now do not have a single day to waste. That is why this debate is so very important.
This country can organise itself. My hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight described it exactly. Collecting alliances, building up partnerships, is exactly what we do. My right hon. Friend the Minister for Asia and the Middle East has been doing a huge amount of work in getting us in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. She has been building up alliances in Asia—with free countries that want to be part of the rule of law, not the rule of force. This country can do it. We can build the infrastructure that keeps us safe, that protects the weak, that ensures that small countries are not just steamrollered by larger ones, and that large countries trade freely and on the basis of equality with each other and do not succumb to the bullying ways of evil tyrants. All this is possible. Not only is it possible, it is exactly what we are doing.
Failure to do that would be a betrayal of the legacy of those heroes who fought, defended and won our freedoms, who landed at Anzio and Normandy, and who fought through Belgium into Germany. It would also be a betrayal of those Soviet armies who, in 1946, handed over criminals to the trials at Nuremberg and charged them with the crime of waging aggressive war. What an irony it is that the last time Kyiv was under attack by a foreign army it was a Nazi force doing it, and the Soviets were there to help and protect. What an irony it is to watch what is happening today.
We have in this place, in this country and with our partners the courage to do this if we choose. We can make the commitment. We can build up the partnerships and the alliances that keep us strong. Today though the question is not just about alliances, but about ourselves. We need to call out the corruption in our own city. We need to evict those who have done so much to undermine the rights and liberties of the British people. We need to seize their assets, freeze their goods and expel them.
What Russia has done today is an act of war. There is no question about it, no equivocation, and no possible excuse. The naked aggression that we have seen—the paratroopers landing, the helicopters launching, the tanks rolling—is the beginning of the first war in Europe that we have seen since 1945. [Interruption.] Yes, the first state-on-state war in Europe perhaps. We have a choice. We can turn a blind eye; we can pretend that incremental sanctions make a difference—they do not. President Medvedev laughed at them three days ago, saying that we know how this play goes: they sanction us, we ignore them and then they come crawling back for business, which, sadly, is true from 2014 and 2008. Alternatively, we can take clear action. Given that a hostile state has launched an act of war, we can act now. We can freeze Russian assets in this country—all of them. We can expel Russian citizens—all of them. We can make a choice to defend our interests, to defend the British people and to defend our international partners, or we can do what, sadly, we have done too often in the past, which is to watch until it is too late and the British people have to pay a much higher price.
Last month, I asked our Government whether they had raised that exact issue, specifically regarding Chinese-run boarding schools in Tibet, with their counterparts in China. I must say that the response to my written parliamentary question was disappointing. Although I am encouraged to hear that measures are being taken to urge the Chinese Government to respect the rights of all its citizens, including those in Tibet, I appeal to the Minister today to push specifically on this issue to ensure that families do not continue to be coerced into sending their children to residential boarding schools.
Nor has religion emerged unscathed from this process, with the Chinese Government imposing a raft of restrictions that are almost certainly designed to make Tibetan Buddhism compatible with President Xi’s vision of “religion with Chinese characteristics”, as he has described it. In reality, that has meant limitations on the influence of Tibetan Buddhism in community life and monasteries repeatedly being placed under Government control and surveillance. In practice, that means all monasteries being forced to fly Chinese flags and hang portraits of political figures on their premises.
The Government are also accused of proactively coercing Tibetans into renouncing any allegiance to His Holiness the Dalai Lama, a process that also extends to outlawing the portraits of His Holiness and arresting Tibetans who carry out seemingly small acts of resistance such as calling for his return to Tibet or singing songs that wish him a happy birthday. In the past three years alone, authorities have ordered Tibetans to place shrines to President Xi and other Government leaders inside their homes in place of religious figures. The Free Tibet campaign also reports that in some counties, authorities have gone to such lengths as physically inspecting households to ensure that that order has been carried out.
Finally, I will focus briefly on Drago county in eastern Tibet. Since last October the county, which is in Sichuan province, has been the site of a series of demolitions of sites of religious and cultural significance, accompanied by arbitrary arrests and alleged torture. One such example is reports of Government officials tearing down a Tibetan Buddhist monastic school that once housed more than 100 young Tibetan students. That was followed soon afterwards by the destruction of two Lord Buddha statues, including one that stood almost 100 feet tall, the construction of which was only completed in 2015 with funds donated by Tibetans and Buddhist disciples.
Further evidence of Government aggression and destruction includes the demolition of several monks’ residences, in addition to monastery prayer flags being removed and burned. It is clear to those who witnessed those incidents that, as well as lacking any free or informed consultation with the locals, the demolitions were carried out very deliberately to cause maximum distress, with members of the community in some cases ordered to assist in tearing down schools and statues, and others forced to watch. I hope the Minister will make a note of those ongoing events, given that the forced inspections continue to take place on an almost daily basis, which has led to the lives of all those involved rapidly deteriorating.
I want to highlight that 10 March is observed annually as Tibet Uprising Day. In 1959, hundreds of thousands of Tibetans banded together to revolt, in defiance of the Chinese invasion a decade earlier. That peaceful protest was violently crushed by the Chinese Government.
In closing, I urge the Minister to heed the concerns of hon. Members on both sides and push the Governments of China and Russia to ensure that all rights are respected, and that a way of life is not imposed on people that leads to the destruction and desecration of everything from the heritage to the culture, language and even the very identity of the Tibetan people. Their voices must continue to be heard.
Western nations are too afraid to reallocate funds from their welfare addicted domestic populations to their national security budget and Russia knows it.”
National security is the first duty of all Governments. Today’s shocking events should be a clear reminder of that to all of us.
The challenge of Ukraine is likely to be faced elsewhere, as despots start to believe that the west is weaker than it has been for many a long year. It will be a challenge to our values, our democratic way of life and our security. All of us in politics, at whatever level, should remember this: politics is essentially binary. Either we shape the world around us, or we will be shaped by the world around us.
I believe that the values we hold and the history and culture that we defend are worth not only protecting for ourselves, but extending to those in the rest of the world who should have a right to enjoy the same freedoms and benefits we have. The gauntlet was picked up by previous generations. The question is whether we will have the courage to do so today.