Liam Byrne
MP for Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North · Labour · United Kingdom
“The loss of 4,000 jobs at Jaguar Land Rover is a body blow for workers, families and communities across the west midlands, so I commend Richard Parker, the Mayor of the West Midlands, for moving quickly on Monday to put £500,000 on the table to help ensure that everybody gets back to work.”
“I wholeheartedly welcome this well-rounded statement from the Foreign Secretary, and put on record my thanks to the new Prime Minister for the hard yards that I know he has put in over recent days and weeks.”
“I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way, and I offer my warmest congratulations to her on her appointment to the role; she will be a brilliant Minister.”
“Let me start with a word of thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Chester North and Neston (Samantha Dixon), who is not in her place, who said quite rightly that an awful lot has changed since the Bill was first introduced to this House. Indeed, a lot has been revealed over the course of the summer.”
“The effect of new clause 34 would be to ban off-ramping, ban new forms of digital currency transactions and ban memecoins, which are exactly the kind of measures that Ministers now need to bring forward. If we want to take the crypto system out of political finance, this is what we need to do.”
“No doubt we will learn that Mr Cottrell was in fact on the electoral register when that money was passed. No doubt we will discover that his mother, Fiona Cottrell, declared and did not disguise the fact that the money had ultimately come from her son.”
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“I hope that in his reply the Prime Minister will help clarify that it is we who owe gratitude to Ukraine, not the other way round. Will he update the House on plans not simply to help Ukraine win the war, but to win the peace? The reconstruction of Ukraine will cost at least $400 billion, and Russia should be helping to foot the bill. That means we need new laws to seize, not simply freeze, assets. It means we need action at the United Nations to change the norms around immunity of central banks. Crucially, it means we need to start prosecuting Russia for the crime of aggression. That will require us to mobilise not simply a military NATO, but an economic NATO. Will the Prime Minister update us on the conversations that he has had to make that a reality?”
“That is why we must ensure that our economic system, which we have worked so hard to create, is disrupted and denied to those who wish us ill.”
“Important measures have been brought forward in the other place, too. The Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill would widely extend cost caps beyond simply unexplained wealth orders. Again, it is extremely important that Ministers accept rather than reject those measures. But, taken together, we have now taken, through the work of many people on both sides of the House, some serious measures that will shut down Londongrad, and that will learn the lessons from the way in which Putin was able to cash-flow his violence through exploiting his friends in the City of London and elsewhere. We must accept that, even when Ukraine is triumphant, the Russian threat will simply transform itself once again.”
“That is why we welcomed the sanctions that have been passed by His Majesty’s Government, but, like many people in this House—I suspect that the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) will pursue this point—we are also clear on our Committee that assets should be seized, not simply frozen. We know that it will take some international action at the United Nations to change the norms in international law around immunity for organisations such as central banks. It is also important that we move ahead with the prosecution of Russia for aggression, so that it cannot claim in some way that it is a victim under the terms of the European convention. But, again, what most of us in this House want to see is a Bill on that table that shows how we will seize assets, not simply freeze them.”
“The Government have promised £400 million to fund a three-year programme, but economic crime costs this country £350 billion. In 2019, the head of the National Crime Agency said that the budget needed for the NCA was closer to £3 billion. The Royal United Services Institute says that annual investment of at least a quarter of a billion pounds is needed. We could raise that money if only we took on the argument of setting, say, a £100 fee for setting up new companies, which is, of course, the fee level recommended by the Treasury Committee. That is double what His Majesty’s Government are currently proposing. We need stronger proposals from Ministers to plug the gap where our credibility should be. Finally, enforcement will mean little if we cannot prosecute the criminals once we find them.”
“Crucially, our Committee was unanimous that better protection was needed for journalists under a revised and comprehensive anti-SLAPP set of laws, but also new protections with a whistleblowing Bill. We asked the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office to push for a whistleblowing Bill to offer protection for those who speak out or uncover economic crimes. As yet, we have had no plans from the Government to fulfil that recommendation. The third area, which is possibly the most significant, is the enforcement gap. We know that this is a problem. Organisations such as the Atlantic Council have been so concerned that they have warned that the UK’s effort to tackle kleptocracy is “in severe danger of being shown as a paper tiger”. Obviously, the key is to increase funding for law enforcement.”
“The other place has also introduced amendments creating sanctions for directors failing to prevent money laundering. It has also closed the loophole that allows small and medium-sized enterprises to escape these sorts of obligations. The amendments are sensible. They are supported by both sides of the House. I hope the Minister, when she winds up, will be able to confirm that the Government will not seek to oppose those amendments. Secondly, our Committee reflected on the kind of intelligence that we will need to track down bad people who finance Putin’s regime. We thought it was therefore essential that the Government now fulfil their commitment to publish their review of the tier 1 golden visa scheme. That has been promised repeatedly and it is time that we saw it on the table here in the House.”
“That is a recommendation of the Financial Action Task Force, and the investigations by both the BBC and The Times have underlined just why we need it. They found that Viktor Fedotov, a Russian-born oil executive accused of £143 million-worth of contracting fraud in Russia, owns two properties in the UK via offshore trust structures, administered by the wealth management firm JCC. But owing to the nominee loophole, Mr Fedotov is not named as the beneficial owner of the corporate trustees that hold property in his name. That is the kind of loophole that made Londongrad possible. We should close it and we should close it together. The other place has also supplied amendments that close exemptions for trusts, which would stop trusts in the Register of Overseas Entities being used as an opaque vehicle for illicit finance.”
“That is why our report advised the Government to study the lessons from, for example, the enablers Bill from the United States Congress and the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act. These contain protections that should be aligned with UK law. The Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill makes it easier for the Law Society to impose penalties on bad lawyers, but far more important are Lord Agnew’s amendments to the Bill, which were passed in the other place. I hope the Minister can confirm that the Government will not resist those amendments when that Bill comes to us in the next week or two. These require nominees to declare who they are working for. That will help us to identify who the persons of significant control are. It introduces an offence for nominees who do not declare themselves.”
“Crucially, we need to create a duty on the registrar to verify information, not simply provide a power that enables the registrar to do something. We need to toughen the obligations of corporate criminal liability. In fact, the report cited in the motion says that “reform of outdated and ineffective corporate criminal liability laws which mean that it is difficult to hold large companies to account for economic crimes”— should be reformed. On this front, the Government commissioned a report from the Law Commission some years ago. The options for change have been on the table since the summer of last year. I gently say to Ministers that it is time to move forward on those options. It is not simply directors who need stronger obligations; enablers do, too.”
“Viscount Palmerston said that it would allow Britain’s army of small savers to combine their small pots together to create great firms of the future “for the advantage of the community as a whole.” He told the Commons: “There is nothing that would more tend to the general advantage of the public.” —[ Official Report , 26 July 1855; Vol. 139, c. 1390.] Yet today many are exploiting the licence to create companies, to create firms, that subvert the common good. We should stop them. That is why our Committee underlined the imperative of building a stronger Companies House and creating stronger obligations on directors, their proxies and their enablers. The Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill does offer some progress, but it could be stronger.”
“Not many of us will remember this, but when this House decided to create limited liability laws, back in 1851, the Prime Minister of the day, Viscount Palmerston, confronted quite a contentious debate and a divided House. At one point he had to threaten the House with sitting right the way through to the summer in order to get the legislation on the books. Limited liability partnerships are not found in nature; they are the creation of us as legislators and create significant privileges for those who want to come together and form a company.”
“Together, we have to ensure that we have shut down Londongrad for good. For many years, our country has not simply been a target, but a crime scene. We have been the place where hundreds of billions of roubles, stolen from the Russian people, have been laundered and, in many cases, recycled into Putin’s ceaseless war of violence. In the Foreign Affairs Committee’s report, we set out four basic sets of reforms needed in the fields of prevention, intelligence, enforcement and prosecution. In the realm of prevention, it is obviously vital that we impose upon directors some much tougher obligations and finally ensure that Companies House becomes a regulator, not a library where accounts are filed to gather dust.”
“With Sweden’s admission to NATO, along with Finland, we have now rebuilt NATO’s eastern flank. That task will not be complete, as the Chair of the Liaison Committee said, until Ukraine, and I hope one day Georgia, join NATO. But we have to recognise that there is an awful lot more that we need to do to close down the domains of politics, cyber and economy. The Foreign Affairs Committee report focuses on the economic world. Frankly, it is a shame that it took the invasion of Ukraine to prompt the Government to get serious about bringing forward the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill, which is currently in the other House. At least the Government have made progress. I hope that we can build on what I hope is an emerging consensus in the other place about some of the reforms that will be needed.”
“Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat), who is now the Minister for Security, spent so much time over the past couple of years looking at the question of illicit finance. Russia is at the centre of the debate because we have to learn the simple truth that we have to re-contain Russia. When we look at Russian history, we see one clear lesson: Russia is constantly in the business of invading its neighbours. We have to remember the throttling of Berlin in 1948 and the invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. We in this House have to learn the lesson that a mainstay—a cornerstone—of our security policy has to be a strategy for re-containing Russia. We cannot change the geography of Russia, but we can and must end Russia’s ceaseless choreography of war.”
“We have to recognise that the way we will be attacked will not simply be by states, but by states acting together with others. Those proxy forces will be more dangerous, in many ways. Sometimes it will be organisations such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, acting in concert with the Government of Iran, but at other times it will be private military companies, such as the Wagner Group. Increasingly, these nexus threats will couple with organised crime groups and together they will exploit our vulnerabilities in the economic crime space, to generate the millions needed to cashflow violence. That is why the Foreign Affairs Committee, under the leadership of the then Chair, the right hon.”
“In truth, it is about not simply supporting Ukraine in its fight, but understanding the new theatres of violence where Russia is on the march. As I hope we will see in the defence Command Paper next week, they will require us, as a country, to re-enforce our defences in the Arctic and our alliances in central Asia, and, crucially, transform our presence in Africa, where the Wagner Group is still a threat in some 14 to 15 countries, where it has extracted at least a quarter of a billion pounds to cashflow the wars of President Putin. That takes us to the core of the argument set out in the Foreign Affairs Committee report. The threats that we have to confront now are not simply places on a map, but domains; they are the political, cyber and, crucially, economic worlds.”
“The motion is well drafted and deserves the support of the whole House. I want to complement his excellent speech by sharing some analysis of the report by the Foreign Affairs Committee at the centre of the motion. The truth is that many Members of the House—I can see some of them in the Chamber—have been warning about the need to re-contain Russia since President Putin’s speech to the Munich Security Council back in 2012. Threats always evolve, and today they are evolving faster than ever. There are new spectres abroad, but the most dangerous of those spectres is Russia. At the core of the debate is an argument about how we defend our freedom, by reinventing our security for new times. Because Russia is the principal of those spectres, it is right that we spend most of our time today discussing how we re-contain Russia.”
“My gratitude goes to the Chair of the Liaison Committee, the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin), and the Chair of the Backbench Business Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead (Ian Mearns), for tabling the debate. My gratitude for this timing is matched only by my sadness that members of the Foreign Affairs Committee are travelling in Africa at the moment, in pursuit of their inquiry into counter-terrorism, and so the House will have to put up with me. I am not speaking on behalf of the Committee, but I am at least sharing the Committee’s analysis of what the Government have got right and where they have further to go—in some cases, much further. I associate myself with the support for the motion expressed so eloquently by the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex.”
“The right hon. Gentleman is making an excellent speech. Is he as perplexed as I am about why NATO allies have not sought to bring forward, for example, a motion at the United Nations that could help to crystallise that change in norms? If we are to effect, for example, the interpretation of immunity laws, he is absolutely right that norms need to change. One way to do that is through a vote at the United Nations, which I would have thought we could win.”
“My hon. Friend is making a brilliant speech. On her point about enforcement, one thing the Government could commit to this afternoon is the Prime Minister appointing a new anti-corruption tsar, which would help. Many of us in the House are grateful for the leadership of my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge), who is not in her place. She has written to the Prime Minister asking him to make that appointment. Surely that is something that the Minister could give us some good news about.”
“I am grateful to the Minister for giving way; she is being characteristically generous. Could she tell the House whether that bearing down on economic criminals will include Government acceptance of the excellent amendments tabled by Lord Agnew in the other place, which have widespread support in this House?”
“I am grateful to the Minister, because I do not think the House had had a chance to cross-examine her on that point. Is she saying that sanctions will remain in place until Russia has stumped up the full bill for reconstruction, and if so, what are the expectations of the amount that Russia will need to pay in order to get those sanctions lifted?”
“Girls as young as 11 are sent to get married, and boys are sent to work even younger. Children are not in school because they are hunting for water all day. If we do not step up and solve these challenges, there will be not just an opportunity gap for those children, but an opportunity cost for all of us. That is a price we cannot afford, so I call on His Majesty’s Government to act. Question put and agreed to . Ordered , That Liam Byrne, Sarah Champion, Sir Stephen Timms, Tony Lloyd, Sir George Howarth, Clive Efford, Debbie Abrahams, Mr Virendra Sharma, Mike Amesbury and Patrick Grady present the Bill. Liam Byrne accordingly presented the Bill. Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time on Friday 24 November, and to be printed (Bill 336).”
“Member for Erewash (Maggie Throup), and I want to thank the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, World Vision and the Coalition for Global Prosperity for helping to make that visit possible. This is what he had to say: “I like coming to school because I have many friends who I play with and learn together. My teachers always teach us how to read, write and many other new things. They are good to us.” But he also says: “Sometimes we eat once in a day because there is no food and we don’t have enough water to drink. Despite all these challenges we still come to school to learn.” The children of that school have the same dreams as our children. They want to be lawyers, doctors and teachers, and some—so help them—want to be politicians. Yet such is the drought, such is the poverty, and such is the desperation that many families struggle to survive.”
“If the UK contributed to that kind of increase, our share might be about $1 billion—$200 million a year over five years—but we could step up to that challenge. We will get £3.5 billion back from the European Investment Bank—I suppose some in this House would call that a Brexit dividend—between now and 2030. We should recycle that money into the World Bank to help it radically expand lending to some of the world’s poorest countries. Nobody can be more eloquent in debates such as this than a hungry child, so let me conclude with the words of a 10-year-old boy at a primary school in rural Narok County, Kenya. I had the privilege of meeting him at his school with the hon.”
“I have been asking Foreign Secretaries and Treasury Secretaries for two years why we are not matching the ambition of countries such as Japan and, frankly, I am yet to receive a good and coherent answer. Secondly, we should be using some of those special drawing rights to support the work of the African Development Bank. If we lent £500 million-worth of special drawing rights, the ADB could quadruple it in new concessional lending to countries across Africa. Thirdly, we should be helping to build a bigger World Bank. The World Bank remains the most efficient and effective way of mobilising development finance. A $20 billion increase in its capital base would unlock $200 billion in concessional lending over the course of the decade.”
“Kristalina Georgieva, the head of the IMF, gave us some reassuring news about how we may now be on track to meet the target of sharing $100 billion in special drawing rights. However, there is still a gap in what needs to be accomplished, which is why the UK needs to rediscover the lost art of leading, and that is what this Bill proposes. First, we should be increasing the on-lending of special drawing rights and following Japan’s lead. We have £19 billion-worth of new special drawing rights, and they are sitting there gathering dust in the exchange equalisation account. We have said that we will share 20%, but Japan said it will share 40%. If we match that target, we could supply nearly £4 billion of extra resource to the poorest countries.”
“It is a matter of regret that the Prime Minister found time to enjoy the company of Mr Murdoch in London last week and declined to join President Macron in Paris, with 50 other leaders from around the world. It is a matter of regret that the UK is not leading the debate on green development finance, but lagging behind. Important steps forward were taken last week in Paris. The World Bank, under its brilliant new president, Ajay Banga, committed to an expanded crisis toolkit, replete with new types of insurance to backstop development projects, and crucially, to a pause in debt repayments so that countries can focus on what matters when crisis strikes without worrying about the bill.”
“Her Bridgetown initiative is a pragmatic collection of ideas with radical implications for the World Bank’s mission and model, the resources deployed by the IMF, and the goal that richer countries must step up to and meet. Reforms are under way and the agenda is moving. I am grateful for the Government’s support, such as it is, but our best estimates are that the Bretton Woods institutions must at least triple the finance that they supply. That is why the UK should lead and help to champion this debate internationally. The Bill is needed because it is a matter of regret that the once-proud record of our country—once lauded as a leader in global development—is now much reduced.”
“We cannot go on like this and, as President Macron said in Paris last week, we must not go on like this. If the world fails to act—if we fail to act—all of us may fall prey to those who preach that the rules-based order is not fit for purpose. New institutions outside the World Bank, the IMF, and perhaps even the United Nations, will come forward beyond our influence, so we must change. That is why my Bridgetown Bill calls on the Government to lead, to take the initiative and to help champion the agenda set out with such passion, force and eloquence by Prime Minister Mia Mottley. The whole House should salute her work. She has helped to galvanise the biggest shake-up of global development finance since the World Bank and IMF were created in 1944.”
“Poorer nations have now exhausted their reserves. In fact, debt in developing countries is now the highest it has been for 50 years, and levels are rising. Looming deadly over all of that are the changes in our climate and the chaos of extreme weather. Across half the world and most of Africa, the seasons are simply no longer predictable. The sun which once brought life now brings death because it burns so ferociously. The rains, when they fall, fall with such force that life-giving water floods and destroys the land it once nourished. Against that murderous maelstrom, low and middle-income countries need to mobilise some $6 trillion between now and 2030 to hit their Paris climate targets. Poor countries did not cause climate change, but the world’s poorest are somehow expected to pick up the pieces.”
“In fact, seven giants now stand in the way of progress: want, hunger, disease, lost learning, conflict, debt and climate change. They are a cascading, connected set of challenges with lethal force. Extreme poverty has risen for the first time this century, with 600 million people now forecast to be living on less than $2.15 a day by 2030. Globally, 200 million people now wake up without enough to eat, and 300 million children will need humanitarian assistance this year. On current trends, we will not meet our goal of ending hunger by 2030. That scarcity is fuelling violence. About half of the world’s extreme poor are expected to live in conflict-affected areas by 2030. In turn, those conditions are threatening our ability to make good children’s lost learning during covid, which could cost $21 trillion over the course of their lives.”
“Eight years ago, the world came together to agree an ambitious plan to spread freedom, security and justice to every corner of the planet. The sustainable development goals agreed in New York in September 2015 offered hope, progress and a better life to billions of people. Months later, we came together again, not in New York but in Paris, to agree the climate change agreement that would help us guarantee that there would be a planet left on which to make those goals a reality. However, the truth is that such ambitions are in deep trouble. There are just 10,000 days to go before the Paris climate agreement deadline. A perfect storm is now threatening the world’s potential to deliver on the goals that we agreed just eight years ago.”
“I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to require the Secretary of State to publish proposals for increasing the on-lending of UK Special Drawing Rights via the IMF, for transferring the capital returned to the UK by the European Investment Bank to the World Bank, and for increasing the UK’s support for the African Development Bank, for the purpose of reducing debt burdens and the cost of capital and contributing to the implementation of the Paris Agreement on climate change. I start by declaring an interest as chair of the international Parliamentary Network on the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, which brings together 2,000 parliamentarians from 140 countries to argue for the changes that I will put before the Government today. If anything, this Bill is overdue.”
“My right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge) has provoked me into intervening. Would we not be better served in the House if the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation not only disclosed the full measure of the assets that we have frozen, but came to the House once a month to tell us what sanction waivers it had written that have allowed oligarchs with fortunes in this country to live high on the hog in their well-tended mansions, paid for with money that has been stolen from the Russian people? The Minister himself came close to agreeing with us in the Foreign Affairs Committee that our sanctions regime is in danger of being undermined by the Treasury writing sanctions waivers left, right and centre.”
“Will the Minister clarify the press release issued by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office on 19 May? It said that “consistent with our laws, Russia’s sovereign assets in our jurisdictions will remain immobilised until Russia agrees to pay for the damage it has caused to Ukraine.” Will the Minister confirm whether it is now, in effect, the Government’s strategy to use frozen Russian assets to rebuild Ukraine?”
“I thank the Minister for giving way; he is being characteristically generous. We might as well cut to the nub of the debate. Is it his ambition to bring forward to this House a Bill that fulfils the ambition of the Opposition’s motion?”
“No one forgets the message that they see emblazoned everywhere, on the posters in the squares, on the trains and in the cafés: “Be brave like Ukraine.” That is the message that the House sends to the Ministers on the Treasury Bench today: “Be brave like Ukraine. Strike a blow for freedom, and send the message from this mother of Parliaments that democracy on this continent will never be defeated.””
“Let us move a motion for debate at the UN General Assembly to make it very clear that the majority of states now see the phrase “entitled to immunity” in a different light in different circumstances, now that war has been committed on this scale. To protect ourselves from any attempts to misuse the European convention on human rights, let us immediately begin prosecuting Russia for the crime of aggression, so that it cannot pretend that it is in any way some kind of victim in this illegal invasion. Let me end by saying this. No one in the House forgets their first visit to Kyiv, that glorious city of Europe’s eastern border.”
“The Canadian Government are moving forward; is it not time we moved with them? The President of the European Commission says that the frozen assets of the Russian central bank will be used to pay for reconstruction; is it not time we moved with the EU? Why should we fall behind? Our allies are sending a message to us here in the House—pick up the pace!—and that is the message that we send to the Minister. It is time for us to crack on. First, as the shadow Foreign Secretary says, we need a Bill to be brought to the Dispatch Box within 90 days. Let us make sure that it amends the State Immunity Act 1978, which gives central banks immunity from jurisdiction and from enforcement. Let us empower Ministers with the authority to make seizure and forfeiture orders. Let us change the relevant terms of international law to safeguard that Bill.”
“Why should the gold of the Russian central bank, all £170 billion of it, sit gathering dust in a vault while the Ukrainian people suffer? That is not justice. Justice deferred is justice denied. Every day that we fail to take action is a day that we fail Ukraine, a day that we fail justice, a day when we neglect our duties to stand up against the brutal code of tyrants who think that might makes right and the strong do what they can while the weak suffer what they must. That is why we have to ensure that Russia picks up the bill for Ukraine’s reconstruction today. That is the case for justice. As for the political case, it is pretty straightforward. Our allies are moving forward in not just freezing but seizing assets; is it not time we moved with them? The United States Senate is moving forward; is it not time we moved with it?”
“Is that not the lesson that we should learn from even a casual glance at Russia’s history: the throttling of Berlin in 1948, the invasion of Hungary, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the invasion of Afghanistan, of Georgia, of Moldova, of Ukraine? When are we ever going to learn the necessity of re-containing Russia? We cannot change the geography of Russia, but we can and we must end Russia’s ceaseless choreography of war. This is no time for the sentence to be deferred. Why should the people of Ukraine wait? Why should they suffer in the sight of their enemies luxuriating in riches while their soldiers die and their children shelter in basements? Why should they watch oligarchs who stole from the people of Russia live high on the hog in their well-tended mansions here in London and elsewhere.”
“In the ashes of world war two, we stood together with 10 of our great allies and, on 5 May 1949, founded the Council of Europe, which Churchill declared would hold up “moral concepts…able to win the respect and recognition of mankind”, a council united behind what Churchill called the charter of human rights “guarded by freedom and sustained by law.” That is the charter Russia signed in May 1998 and that is the charter it has breached ever since. If we believe in rules, we believe in punishment for those who break the rules. If we believe the aggressor must pay, then we must punish the aggressor. If there is no sanction, sentence, penalty or punishment for those who break the rules, we can expect those rules to be broken time and time and time again.”
“As we heard, the bill for reconstruction is now enormous: $400 billion and counting, a one-third hit to Ukraine GDP, a fiscal deficit that is through the floor and interest rates that are through the roof. Where on earth will that money come from? We give thanks to the Bretton Woods institutions, which, best case, have mobilised something like $55 billion between them. Notwithstanding the money that was raised, promised, committed and vowed at the reconstruction conference last week, the gap is still enormous. That gap takes us to the question of justice and the requirement on Russia to make good the gap. Ultimately, we on this continent of Europe are not simply a rules-based order; we are a rights-based order.”
“I would like to start with a word of praise for what was a brilliant opening speech by my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), the shadow Foreign Secretary. He gave the House not just a cry of anger or a plea for solidarity, but a demand for justice. Justice is exactly what the people of Ukraine need and they need it now. There are three questions at the core of this debate, which were eloquently set out by the shadow Foreign Secretary: a practical question about who pays for violence; a moral question of who is punished; and a political question of how we in this country stay on track and keep pace with our allies. We should start with the question of who pays, because that was where we ended last week at the Ukraine reconstruction conference.”
“The Minister is one of the House’s experts on the malign influence of foreign money in this country and the creation of Londongrad, so he knows all too well that money from foreign powers is coming into the bank accounts of UK citizens and then moving almost immediately—sometimes even overnight—into the coffers of political parties in this country. That creates a risk to the integrity of our political system. He must surely accept that the drafting of the Bill does not yet provide sufficient safeguards against that risk.”
“I thank the Minister for giving way once again. He is being characteristically generous. We may as well test the argument he is rehearsing against facts that are now known. Mr Mohamed Amersi, for example, has given something like £775,000 to political causes in this country. The Financial Times has reported that a considerable fraction of Mr Amersi’s profits are made from trade in Russia. How does this Bill safeguard against profits made in a country such as Russia finding their way into this country’s political system and infecting it?”
“My hon. Friend is making a brilliant speech. Does she agree that the scale of this potential risk is now unprecedented, not least because in 2019 we saw the most expensive election year in British political history? More than £100 million flowed into British political parties then. Does that not underline the obligation on all of us to make sure that every penny of that money is clean?”
“We have it within our grasp to ensure that the new wealth created by HS2 at the heart of our country, at the heart of Britain, transforms the livelihoods of the youngest population in Britain, who today live in a community that is scarred by the worst poverty in our country. We have not yet made the progress we need to make to get the east Birmingham tramline built, but the prize is obvious: it is the simplest way we can maximise the value of HS2 to one of the poorest parts of the country. I look forward to working with the Minister to turn that great dream into a reality.”