[Mr. Martin Caton in the Chair] — Global Security (Russia)

Part of the debate – in Westminster Hall at 4:07 pm on 3 April 2008.

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Photo of David Wilshire David Wilshire Conservative, Spelthorne 4:07, 3 April 2008

I am coming to exactly that point, but may I finish the point I am making? Russia associates rapid change, which we demand, with chaos, so we must not be surprised if its people are reluctant to have another bit of chaos.

As my hon. Friend says, Yeltsin did not bring only chaos and the oligarchs—I suppose that Chelsea football club should be grateful for that, but I am not sure who else is grateful for some of the things that happened then—but humiliation. It is difficult to imagine how Russians see the situation. The country in which they lived was a world superpower. It might not have been a superpower or political system of which we approved, but it was one of only two superpowers. Not long after, its people were dependent on food aid from the other superpower. They had been brought to utter and total world humiliation. We might disagree, but that is how they saw it. Under those circumstances, it is hardly surprising that we should come up against a country that is trying to manage democracy, change and stability. I am not sure that we necessarily ought to applaud the situation, but we should at least make allowances rather than simply attack the Russians on every occasion.

What President Putin—I am not sure whether he is an ex-President yet—has done above all else is restore Russian self-respect. That is not as I see it, but it is what I hear regularly from Russians. There are some technical issues around energy, but they have power again, and their economy has revived. This time, the money is reaching not just Chelsea football club but, as I have seen, places such as Vladivostok as well. Inevitably, the Government are popular as a result.

The only thing that mystified me about the Russian elections held before and after Christmas is why, as President Putin and his party were likely to win a crushing victory over everybody else, they felt the need to overdo things. That is a mystery that my Russian friends have not been able to explain. They smile and say, "Yes, I think we agree with you." Apart from that, democracy is developing.

May I say something about the need to look forward, instead of backwards? I learned a lesson a long time ago. I was born at the end of the second world war and grew up in a country that demonised Germans in the cinema, on the radio and the budding television service, in books and everywhere. It was not until my son swapped schools with a lad from a German gymnasium—he came to live with us—and I became embarrassed by what he saw on British television that it dawned on me that we ought to look forward. That lad could not be held responsible for the crimes of his parents or grandparents, and it was time to move on.

I hear from parliamentarians from the Council of Europe's 47 nations who understand why parliamentarians from some countries think in a way that is similar to how I used to think about Germany all those years ago. Under the Soviet Union, people in Hungary, Poland and so on suffered dreadfully, and as a result, some people condemn today's Russians, many of whom were not born when those things happened. If we want to keep relations cool and distant, we should carry on like that. I hope that we can persuade more people to learn the lesson that I learned from the German lad: draw a line and move on. The Russian Federation is not the Soviet Union and we cannot put the clock back.

I looked with some care at the names of those who gave evidence in writing or appeared before the Select Committee. No one on my list of offenders appeared on the Committee's list, but I think that we need occasionally to advise people who are trying to get their mind around this problem to beware of some of the so-called experts. I will not name names, but I have in mind a person from an American charitable foundation who passes himself off as an academic expert but forgets to say that he is a Moldovan and has a Transnistrian wife. He ought to be more open about why he loathes the Russians with a passion. All too often, evidence from experts is not expert but chip-on-the-shoulder. We need to keep that in the back of our mind.

We must stop singling out Russia all the time. A couple of Members have mentioned Georgia in NATO, and I do not disagree with that. This winter, I enjoyed two Christmases. I enjoyed one in this country, before Iwent to observe the elections in Georgia and enjoyed another on the Orthodox Christmas day a week or so later. There were problems with the Russian elections, but I have not heard many people say that the Georgian elections were a similar sort of basket case, if that is the right phrase. For some reason, Georgia should be welcomed because it is Georgia and it is useful. If we are going to condemn anybody, let us condemn everybody. If we are going to condemn someone, let us start with ourselves. A little debate is taking place about whether we should detain people for 28 or 42 days without bringing them before a court. That is in contravention of the values and standards of many conventions to which we have signed up. If we are going to lecture people on human rights, let us start by lecturing ourselves.

On the shortcomings of other people's democracies, let us remember the judge's comments about how the postal voting system in this country would disgrace a banana republic. That case involved Labour councillors, but I am not biased: in the past week or so, there was a case of a Conservative councillor doing the same thing. We are all up to it, so before we condemn other people too much for not conforming to this country's democratic standards, for heaven's sake, let us get this country's democratic standards correct.

We need to get people as well as Governments involved. Paragraph 47 of the Government's response suggests that people should get together more often. I say yes to that—that is exactly what we want. It is right to short-circuit some of the involvement of the Government, Ministers and civil servants, and talk to each other as fellow human beings. On parliamentarians, the report rightly refers to protocol 14, but it is tempting to say that the Russian Government are somehow at the bottom of things and absolutely to blame. If I understand correctly Mikhail Margelov and Konstantin Kosachev—two people whom the Government cite as senior Russian MPs who go to their Parliament and say, "Please, please, sign this"—the problem is that the Duma will not give authorisation. It is not a question of whether the Kremlin gives authorisation. We could argue about whether the Kremlin tells the Duma what to do—I pass on that—but, technically, the blockage is ultimately caused by Duma Members not putting their hands up in sufficient numbers. We need to talk to parliamentarians—perhaps we could do something about that.

On the British Council, perhaps I could present Members with an image that they might find hard to believe. Mr. Prescott and I make a little pair within the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, and we have been working with Konstantin Kosachev to see whether we can make a contribution to unsticking the British Council problem. May I suggest a theory that the Minister has perhaps heard from his officials? It may or may not be true but, from my "cock-up not conspiracy" view of the world, it makes a bit of sense to me. It was suggested by somebody who might know what he was talking about that, after Britain threw out a few diplomats, someone in the Kremlin said, "We have to retaliate," and some lowly official was dispatched to find a convenient way to do so. He remembered that a long time ago somebody had spotted that the arrangements for setting up the British Council in the then Soviet Union, now Russian Federation, were somehow not right. The situation had been ignored, because it did not really matter if such things occurred, but the person remembered and the rest followed. When the message got back to the people in the Kremlin who had said, "Go and do something," they were not best pleased, but now the problem involves loss of face. Working with Russian MPs, the right hon. Gentleman and I have been trying to find a way to get back to where we were in the first place without either side having to lose face.