East-West Relations

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 6:46 pm on 22 February 1990.

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Photo of Mr Kenneth Warren Mr Kenneth Warren , Hastings and Rye 6:46, 22 February 1990

You force me, Madam Deputy Speaker, to speak faster than usual.

First I should like to praise my right hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Mr. Heath) and the right hon. Member for Leeds, East (Mr. Healey) on their remarkable speeches. However, I am afraid that they omitted to mention the way in which the leaderships of eastern Europe perceive our Prime Minister. They believe that my right hon. Friend is a good Prime Minister, they respect her and they want her to play a leading role in the negotiations that will take place between the West and eastern Europe.

This debate is jolly dangerous to everyone in the House in the sense that no one predicted the events of 1989, but here we are trying to predict those of 1990. When the Select Committee on Trade and Industry, of which I have the honour to be Chairman, went to eastern Europe, we visited three Karl Marx institutes—in Budapest, Bucharest and Sofia—and in each one they were preaching the free-market economy and Thatcherism. Such small rumblings should not have gone unnoticed by those in the West who call themselves experts in this subject.

Without doubt we all give generous and warm acclaim to the self-liberation and birth of new democracies in eastern European countries. Now we must go beyond congratulations and act with alacrity and vision. One eastern European ambassador in London said to me only today that eastern Europe needs deeds now, not words, if it is to survive to achieve democracy.

In the work in which I have been engaged in the Select Committee and in which I participate on behalf of the British-Soviet parliamentary group, it has become apparent that it is easy to generalise and to miss the essential fact that each eastern European country is different. Certain problems, however, are common to all those countries, and the West, particularly the United Kingdom, should help quickly to overcome them.

The easiest problems to solve are, unfortunately, long-term and not immediate ones, such as helping with management training, improving distribution methods to get goods to the shops from the farms and the revision of COCOM. That organisation is irrelevant, but in Paris it is still grinding on with a four-year revision of its work. All the eastern European countries demonstrate their need for convertible currencies and we also need to help to provide some solution for the terrible debt problems faced by countries such as Poland and Hungary. It is awful to observe that the one country without any debt problem is the one that had the bloodiest revolution—Romania.

The West can give help to overcome the short-term problems, but we must act fast. The West Germans have set the pace and I believe that we should give instant credit to countries such as the Soviet Union to enable them to buy food from us. A story has gone round to suggest that the Foreign Office has said that we cannot do that without the permision of the European Community. That is nonsense. I hope that the Minister will kill that story when he replies and make it clear that we will be only too willing to help the Soviet Union to get the food that it urgently needs.

We could also help in an instant by ensuring that visas for east European business men are granted without delay. The only espionage in which such people will indulge now will be industrial and it is up to the host company to deal with that—it is not a job for the Foreign Office or the Home Office to investigate such people's reputations.

We could also encourage industry to give manufacturing licences for the basic commodities needed in the Soviet Union. Electric kettles are needed more than anything else. There must be British companies which could dump electric kettles on the Soviet Union and get plant started up now. It is extremely galling to hear from the Soviet ambassador that the South Koreans have found their way into a redundant defence company in Uzbekistan and are now licensing that company to make video and cassette recorders. The development of such manufacturing would not only help the Soviet Union to get into business quickly by translating its defence industry into consumer products, but help to soak up the surplus money sloshing around all the east European economies.

The prime problem faced by eastern Europe, which must be solved with similar alacrity to that adopted by the West, is bureaucracy. If anything will defeat Mr. Gorbachev the pragmatist, it is the bureaucracy of the Soviet Union, much of which is unwilling to do anything to change or to remove old privileges. That bureacracy is also unable to take on management tasks in the economy; since the advent of Communism in 1917, the Soviet Union has had a command economy in which management was not required.

It took us a long time to appreciate that Mr. Gorbachev is a man who says what he means and means what he says. On the two occasions when I have had the privilege to meet him, it has taken a long time to get used to the fact that he is a man who tells one the truth. Some people outside the House may say that that is one politician's judgment of another and that I may not be the best judge, but I believe that we must listen to him carefully. When he says that he is under threat, we must remember our alliance with him and that he is the man who has done most, on either side of the iron curtain, to damp down the fires of the cold war and to remove the Berlin wall.

I accept, however, that he has been extremely cunning in dumping all the problems of the economies of eastern Europe on to the West. We now have the responsibility to try to straighten them out. Mr. Gorbachev, however, still faces the eternal problem of his army—the 400,000 elite of the Red Army now stranded on a political island in East Germany. I do not know how he will get them out, but the economic problem of defence is the fundamental feature which beat him when he tried to preserve Communism.

There is a lot of work going on in the EC, but Britain should be more actively engaged in helping. My Committee returned from Brussels today and we are aware of three parallel policies in the EC—negotiations with the European Free Trade Association, the 1992 process and the aid programmes to the East. In 1989, the EC gave£200 million and it is now mapping out plans to give£600 million. Without being cynical, that aid presents many opportunities for British business as we attempt to solve the short-term and medium-term problems of eastern Europe.

Undoubtedly, with the implosion of imperialism in the Soviet Union, other types of alliance will form. Finland is already looking across the Baltic to Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia as a possible new trading area—one which would also encompass the northern area of Poland. Without doubt, we must accept that anything is possible but that deeds count more strongly than words.

I am not the least bit scared by German reunification. I remember, as a young boy, the horrors of the war, but there is no need to look back—we must look forward to helping Germany unite. I appreciate the problems associated with a neutral Germany—it must participate in all our European affairs. We must remember that, in 1989, West Germany took in 864,000 refugees. That is a social burden on West Germany and it is not right or proper for us to say that, so long as the British taxpayer does not have to pay for reunification, it does not matter.

We stand on the frontier of a new life of freedom which, for the first time in our lives, will be shared right across Europe. It is unexpected and therefore all the more wonderful. Above all, we in this country have a duty to help all those people in the east of the continent who have won their freedom, often with the blood of their brothers and sisters, after 50 years of terror.