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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“We must now make sure that there is maximum ambition in the deal that eventually gets settled. I ask the Minister to work with us to ensure that we are able to maximise business rate retention, because that would allow us in the combined authority to contribute hundreds of millions of pounds to ensuring that the tramline is built. It was a privilege for me to go with my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Mrs Hamilton) to visit Water Orton on Friday to see the new tunnel beginning to be built underneath the great Bromford estate and on its way to the new Washwood Heath marshalling yard, which will be in my constituency. HS2 is an expensive engineering project, but it will transform the economic geography of our country.”
“Thanks to the work of the east Birmingham board over the last 10 years, we developed detailed proposals for a levelling-up zone. I am proud to say that that became the centrepiece of the WMCA’s deeper devolution deal announced in March, and that at its very core is a proposal for business rate retention. This is a tax increment finance model that I introduced in the Budget of March 2010 with east Birmingham in mind. I am glad to see that there is agreement from this Government that that is exactly the kind of financing model that would work well in the combined authority area. There is cross-party support for it, and through the partnership of Mayor Andy Street, Birmingham City Council and, I have to say, Solihull Council, that has allowed us to get the deal agreed with the Government.”
“Secondly, I hope the Minister will feel able to agree to meet me, as the chair of the east Birmingham board, and other east Birmingham MPs to discuss how we can put in place the pitch to the Treasury to unlock sufficient funds to agree and commence the Transport and Works Act 1992 order necessary to provide the powers to get on with building this tramline. City region sustainable transport settlement funding was made available to the region recently, but the truth is that it is insufficient to put through the requisite orders to begin work on the east Birmingham tram. The final piece of the puzzle, however, and the way I hope the Minister can support me tonight, is by undertaking to lean in and support Birmingham and the West Midlands Combined Authority’s bid for an ambitious levelling-up zone proposal agreed with Government.”
“I have only three big asks of the Minister this evening. First, I would be grateful if he would give me a statement of principle and policy for his Department that, like me and Mayor Andy Street, it believes that there should be a rapid transit system through east Birmingham connecting up the two brand-new high-speed stations that are soon to open. If the Minister wants to check the cross-party agreement, he need look no further than page 62 of Mayor Andy Street’s manifesto. It said that he plans to begin the construction of the north Solihull to Digbeth line through Chelmsley Wood and east Birmingham by 2024, so there is not long to get on with it.”
“Some money was made available late last year to do new studies to update the strategy that we did seven years ago, but all that was proposed were a few bus priority measures and some money to have a look at whether very light rail could be a possibility by 2026-27. We could have an outline business case for that 10 years on from the original economic study by the GBSLEP. The first east Birmingham tramline was proposed in 1988. Since then, Manchester has gone on to build eight lines, with 99 stops and 64 miles of tramline. I want one sixth of that—a 15-mile line to go through the area of our country with the highest unemployment anywhere, to make sure that we are not an oasis of inequality amidst the great new wealth and jobs that will be created when High Speed 2 opens, I hope, in 2033.”
“The truth is that a garden snail would have crossed that distance three times faster than we built the tram. It was back in 2015 that the Greater Birmingham and Solihull Local Enterprise Partnership endorsed the new route and noted that it would unlock an economic value added of £2.2 billion a year—the equivalent of 26,000 new jobs. However, since that report in 2015, almost nothing has happened. The outline business case concluded in 2017 that there was a good value for money case for building the tramline. In fact, the business cost ratio was something like 2:1. But we have done nothing with it—there has been almost no progress since that outline business case was done. In fact, because we left it on the table, we now have to update all the strategies because the numbers are out of date.”
“So poor is the connectivity in east Birmingham that it is damaging the productivity of Birmingham and, as the Centre for Cities has revealed, it is thereby damaging the productivity of our country. By some technical definitions, Birmingham is not a city during peak-hour traffic because the journey times into the city centre are so slow. Change is essential. That change is the creation of a rapid transit system called a tram, which should go through east Birmingham and connect up the new high-speed stations at Curzon Street and Birmingham International. We are not very quick at building trams in this country. In fact, at one point the tram that was being built down Broad Street in Birmingham went so slowly that I compared its pace to the journey time of a garden snail.”
“Those new jobs could transform the wealth of east Birmingham—a great city that would be almost one of the 20 biggest in the country. But as we have such poor infrastructure, the risk is that those new jobs will be out of reach of the people in east Birmingham. The new jobs that could be created around the NEC, around Curzon Street in the centre of town and around the new hospital we all want to build at Arden Cross could be beyond reach of the residents of east Birmingham, because almost all of east Birmingham is rated either poor or very poor for connectivity. We have very poor rates of car ownership. Over the last decade, 216,000 people have fallen more than one hour’s journey time by bus from the city centre.”
“What immediately struck me at that time was not necessarily the journey times between Euston station and Curzon Street but the fact the High Speed 2 railway line would connect Birmingham International with Crossrail at Old Oak Common and therefore cut the journey time between Birmingham International and Canary Wharf down to about one hour and 10 minutes. That would transform the economic geography of our country, because our cost base is about a third lower than Canary Wharf and the great heart of financial services around it. There is a huge opportunity for a relocation of business and economic opportunity to east Birmingham. Tens of thousands of jobs will be created around Birmingham International and Curzon Street.”
“That is the challenge, but there is an opportunity at hand, which I why I rise to make this speech. That opportunity comes from the simple fact that the economic geography of our country is about to be transformed, for we in east Birmingham are the land between two high-speed stations, with one new station to be built around Birmingham International and the second at Curzon Street. Madam Deputy Speaker, you may remember that when High Speed 2 came to Cabinet in 2009, I was Chief Secretary to the Treasury and had to work with the then Transport Secretary to ensure that there was money available to build High Speed 2.”
“If it were a city in and of itself, it would be almost one of the top 20 cities in our country. It is home to the youngest population in our country—about a third of east Birmingham is under the age of 25—and therefore, over the years to come, there is a demographic dividend to be had by maximising their opportunities. But today, the challenges for east Birmingham are profound. We are the place with the highest unemployment in the country, the highest youth unemployment in the country, the highest rate of poverty in the country and the highest fuel poverty in the country. We account for something like 30% to 40% of unemployment in the West Midlands Combined Authority area. So this great space, which is rich in history and rich in talent but poor in wealth, is of profound importance to Members in all parts of the House.”
“I am grateful for the opportunity to make a few brief remarks and look forward to what I hope will be some warm words of welcome from the Minister, who I know shares the ambition at the heart of my speech in favour of cracking on with the building of an east Birmingham tram. At the outset, let me declare my interest as chair of the east Birmingham board, which brings together 20 wards in east Birmingham. This area is the land that my great friend and partner in this House Jack Dromey, now departed to a better place, used to call a place rich in talent but poor in wealth. East Birmingham has been the home to five generations of my family, who have lived and worked there since the days of Matthew Boulton. In these 20 wards, we now have 300,000 people. East Birmingham is now the size of Swansea, and twice the size of York.”
“I am grateful to the Minister for giving way, because I sense that he is about to conclude. The clear thing that we will need to discuss when we meet is how to ensure that the levelling-up zone maximises the opportunity of the High Speed 2 growth and opportunities plan. Between us, we must make sure that there is joined-up government.”
“I am very grateful to the right hon. and gallant Member for giving way. Today is the 41st anniversary of the liberation of the Falkland Islands, and it is an appropriate moment to celebrate the sacrifice of everybody who gave their lives in that campaign. It is a good moment, however, to reflect on how our country would go about embarking on such a military operation today. What is his assessment of our capability to launch a campaign like the campaign that liberated the Falklands?”
“I am very grateful. I wanted to underline the point the hon. Gentleman is making so eloquently to the House. The risk is even greater than he has set out, because global defence spending is now rising by between $200 billion and $700 billion a year. If we want to keep pace with that, defence spending is going to have to rise.”
“Thirdly, we should think about how we expand education links, whether that is through Chevening scholarships, university-to-university links or technical assistance programmes. Fourthly, we should expand the incredible work of our military attachés. Fifthly, we should get a well-functioning visa service and a Foreign Secretary who is travelling an awful lot more. This has been a welcome debate, but it underlines the point that there is an awful lot more to do if we are to step up to the responsibilities that, across the House, we believe that we share.”
“Finally, I underline the importance of a whole-of-Government approach—as was mentioned by the Chair of the Liaison Committee, the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin)—and that includes transforming our soft power around the world. On the Foreign Affairs Committee, when we talk to ambassadors we tend to hear four or five common themes. First, we should see English as a strategic enabler, stop the cuts to the British Council and expand the provision of English teaching around the world. Secondly, we should think radically about how we expand the BBC World Service. The truth is the best stratcom we have available, so we should stop underfunding it.”
“He could not tell the Committee whether our dependence on China was going up or down, despite the fact that imports from China have doubled to £73.4 billion in the last decade. We have to get a grip on that; we have to think through, strategically and forensically, where we are economically vulnerable and how we can deepen our alliances, particularly with the United States and the EU, to ensure that our critical supply chains are safe from foreign interference. Our allies in Europe and America are spending $1.5 trillion on supply chains, the transition to domestic energy and their respective Chips Acts. We are currently shut out of those dialogues. We simply cannot afford to have that vulnerability in the future.”
“Secondly, we have to ensure that we are prepared for economic warfare. The alliance structure has been transformed over the last two to three years. We now have not just a rules-based order but the hardcore of a rights-based order—AUKUS, NATO, the North American free trade agreement, the EU, the Quad, us, Korea, Switzerland and Israel. Together, those countries make up two thirds of global GDP—$61 trillion—but we do not co-ordinate critical supply chains across that great arc of the globe, and we do not co-ordinate strategies for critical minerals. In fact, we co-ordinate very little. Part of the problem is that we have still to define precisely what a critical supply chain is. I put that question to the Foreign Secretary on Monday. Frankly, he struggled to answer it.”
“We have to do more in Africa, not least because the Wagner Group is now raping Africa, exploiting 14 countries there. We already know that something like $250 million has been extracted from Africa to help fund Prigozhin and his dogs of war. We must bring a sense of focus and priority, and that is why we need a Command Paper. There are also new opportunities to consider, of course. Defence spending is rising: NATO partners are committed to raise defence spending by something like $55 billion, and our allies in Japan are committed to raising theirs by something like $60 billion—that is $100 billion extra in defence spending among our allies. We should have an intelligent conversation about who should be spending what and where. I suspect that one of the conclusions would be that we should focus much more aggressively closer to home.”
“Nobody has said anything today about President Erdoğan’s commentary on keeping Sweden out. That is something that this House should deprecate. We have to strengthen our capabilities in the Arctic. China and Russia’s “no limits” partnership creates the risk of a new polar silk road through the Arctic that will halve China’s journey time for transiting goods around the world. Russia is re-equipping bases in the Kola peninsula, where, of course, it stables its second strike capability. We will need to strengthen our deployment and our weaponry in the Arctic if we are to keep the Arctic safe. We have to bring greater attention to central Asia. We have to ensure that we do everything we can to support the multi-vector foreign policy ambitions of countries such as Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and others along Russia’s southern boundary.”
“I will make three very quick points about focus versus spread, the need to prepare for economic warfare and the importance of expanding our soft power. The beginning of the debate was pretty illuminating. The Minister eloquently set out the stark reduction in our capabilities since 2010. The reason why we need the defence Command Paper was well illustrated. On the one hand, the spread is getting bigger, but on the other, the capability that we have on hand is much reduced. We desperately need to bring a sense of focus to our priorities. For me, that must start with the re-containment of Russia, which has a nasty habit of invading and invading and invading its neighbours. Down the course of history, Russia invades its neighbours over and over again. That is why we have to complete the rebuilding of NATO.”
“Friend the Member for Leeds Central said, it may well be impossible to carry on trading with entities under the regime that the Minister set out, but it may well still be possible to continue trading with proxy directors or the individuals who sit behind those proxy directors. Finally, the Minister might also want to tell us how he is getting on with cracking down on tax abuse and bad behaviour in our overseas territories. I think there was some opposition in some of the overseas territories to the introduction of registers such as this one. If we are to crack down on the absence of beneficial ownership registers here in this country, as he is seeking to do, we want to ensure that our overseas territories are not simply a back door through which bad people can do bad things.”
“The final point, which I would be grateful if the Minister could enlighten us on, is about how the penalty regime that he set out tackles the problem of rogue proxies. Let us say that someone wanted to buy a £24 million house, which is the average cost of a house on Britain’s most expensive street, Phillimore Gardens. Very often, they would buy it through a company, which may well be registered in the British Virgin Islands, and may then be owned by a trust that is held in another tax haven, but it may be controlled by proxy directors who are somewhere else. If the penalty regime that the Minister set out takes aim at the entities, the risk is that the proxy directors get away scot-free. As my right hon.”
“What kind of signal does that send to kleptocrats around the world—that if they want to join the ranks of the thousands of overseas entities that cannot be bothered to comply with laws in this country, they will get off scot-free? The Committee would be sympathetic if the Minister held up his hands and said, “We just do not have the resources to enforce the rules,” and of course that would be true. That is why many of us are continuing to press him to use the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill, which is in the other place, to ensure that there is a registration fee that provides a proper supply of finance to tackle the outrageous level of money laundering and kleptocracy that is centred on the City of London.”
“At the end of January just 19,000 had registered. He told us that that number has now gone up to 27,000. The implication is that there are still 15,000 overseas entities that are not registered. Will he reassure us that that very large number of overseas entities are not all organisations that have dissolved or moved on, and update us on how many overseas entities are still in business and have not met the deadline? The Minister made a second admission. If 19,000 had registered at the end of January and we are now up to 27,000, there are 7,000 or 8,000 that registered late, yet I think he told us that there has not been a single prosecution. That is an extraordinary admission.”
“It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Dame Angela. I wish to add three points to the excellent speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Feltham and Heston. The Minister knows that I am a fan of his work. In many ways, I wish that the Government had seen fit to appoint him as a Minister some years ago. If that had been the case, perhaps we would not be the talk of the world when it comes to money laundering and kleptocracy, but here we are, and the Minister is trying to make progress and we should support him in that endeavour. The Minister said some significant things that I want to probe him on. First, I think he told us that 15% of overseas entities are still not registered. At the end of January, the estimate was that something like 30,000 or 32,000 overseas entities needed to be registered.”
“I am grateful for the clarification. Will the Minister also clarify whether, if the penalty regime stops people trading with an unregistered overseas entity, they could still trade with a beneficial owner who was standing behind an entity based overseas that had not fulfilled its obligations?”
“I declare an interest as chair of the international Parliamentary Network on the World Bank & International Monetary Fund. I also welcome the commitment in paragraph 10 of the G7 communiqué to enhance development finance, tackle the imminent debt crisis, tackle climate change, and advance progress towards the sustainable development goals. Would that be an awful lot easier if the UK stepped up and met the African Development Bank’s calls for hybrid capital, matched Japan’s commitment to share 40% of the new special drawing rights, and used the €3.5 billion that we get back from the European Investment Bank to help build a bigger World Bank? At a stroke, that would help to restore the global leadership and development that we have so needlessly and dangerously squandered.”
“One of the fastest ways we could transform our influence with non-aligned countries is to step up and help to lead the debate about the availability of green and development finance. One thing the Foreign Secretary could do this year is to make the case that if we are to give our multilateral institutions a bigger task, we must give them a bigger balance sheet as well. We could be using the money we get back from the European Investment Bank, all €3.5 billion of it, to help to lead the argument for a bigger World Bank. Is that an argument that the Foreign Secretary is prepared to lead now?”
“When this country said that it would support the establishment of a state of Israel, it came with the words, “it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”. The rights of those communities are being violated every day, and it is time the Government not only called that out, but did something about it.”
“They need to implement a ban on settler goods. They need to ensure there are no trade deals with Israel until it demonstrates a fundamental respect for human rights. They need to ban weapons sales until it is clear that there is a strong regime for supporting human rights. They need to start using UN mechanisms for delivering accountabilities and, as many people in this House have said and have voted for, it is time for immediate recognition of the state of Palestine. Those are practical, determined steps that we can take—and take now. I conclude by reminding the House of what was in the Balfour declaration.”
“It is time for the Government to turn their rhetoric about a rules-based international order into some red lines. We have to ask this: when are the Government going to accept that those red lines have indeed been crossed? When we have a UN rapporteur saying that what is going on is now getting close to the legal definition of apartheid, how much more evidence do the Government need to call out a violation of the red lines? When we have Israeli Cabinet Ministers appearing in Paris before a map of greater Israel that includes the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and when we have members of the Israeli Cabinet leading the protests for the expansion of settler communities, how much more evidence do we need? It is time for the UK Government to act. My constituents are very clear about the five things this Government need to do.”
“The fact that we now have 279 settlements, almost all of them illegal and now home to 700,000 people, must surely draw our attention to the root cause of the problem, and that is the fundamental sin that the Government should be calling out. If the Government are serious—and they might be—about their idea of a rules-based order, then we in this House must insist that those rules also apply in the west bank, in Gaza and in Jerusalem. If the Government do not insist that the rules-based order extends to the places that the Palestinians call home, how can we ever be credible in our arguments for peace and justice for Palestine? How can we avoid the charge of double standards in international affairs, and how can we contribute meaningfully to keeping the dream of a two-state solution alive?”
“We have heard about the brutality at the al-Aqsa mosque, where even UN observers said that there was blatantly excessive and unjustified force, with stun grenades and rifle butts used in a holy place. All of us in this House would stand four-square behind Israel’s right to self-defence. Many of us would associate ourselves with the words of the hon. Member for Henley (John Howell) that we should be proscribing organisations such as the IRGC and taking a tougher line on Iran. Most of us here know that the Palestinian Authority needs radical reform, and most of us would condemn the brutality of Hamas, but all of us also know that this is not a time for whataboutery. This is a time to call out the root cause of the violence today, which is the radical spread of settlers illegally through the west bank.”
“I am afraid that I have to tell the Minister that there are now too many people in this House who see this Government as standing by idle, in silence, when they should be taking the initiative, when they should be acting, and when they should be determined to ensure that there is justice for Palestine. This House today has already heard a catalogue of horror. We have heard about the 98 Palestinians who have lost their lives already this year—far more than in previous years—the Israeli citizens who have been killed, and the children who have been killed with live ammunition. We have also heard about the 1,000 Palestinians in Masafer Yatta who are at imminent risk of forced transfer, which is in complete violation of Geneva conventions.”
“Let me add my thanks to the hon. Member for Dundee West (Chris Law) for securing this debate, and associate myself with every word of the condolences that he offered to those who have lost loved ones. We must send a clear message from this House this afternoon that the spiral of violence has to stop. It has to stop because the dream of Palestine, the dream of justice and the dream of dignity are disappearing before our very eyes. They are being destroyed outrage by outrage, stun grenade by stun grenade, and bullet by bullet. Palestinians today are now losing all hope that there will ever be a future where two people and two nations can co-exist side by side in peace.”
“The Minister has just set out four sets of sins that the UK Government have protested about to the Government of Benjamin Netanyahu. He must therefore accept that our words are failing to deter egregious behaviour. When will he shift from words to deeds, to deter things from getting any worse?”
“We in this House cannot ensure that our sanctions policy is good and sound unless we can see the way that sanctions waiver decisions are taken. What would you advise me to do to ensure that this House is put in full knowledge of how that disgraceful decision was taken?”
“On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I ask for your advice. On a shameful day in 2021, the Treasury issued a sanctions waiver for Yevgeny Prigozhin to hire lawyers from England to sue Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat. In January, the Exchequer Secretary said that that was a civil service decision and nothing to do with Ministers. Civil servants then replied to my freedom of information request to say that the framework was advice to Ministers and could not be released. Now, the Treasury has issued new guidance to me in reply to my freedom of information request. In it, on six of the nine criteria, the decision should have gone to a Minister. The question is, why are Ministers not revealing the original framework by which the decision was taken? What are they trying to hide?”
“Can we have a debate in Government time on the activities of short-selling attack group Viceroy Research and its leader Fraser Perring? I am told that it is working hand in glove with Boatman Capital, which launched the short-selling attack on Babcock International while it was overhauling our nuclear submarines. Mr Perring is a not infrequent visitor to Moscow, and is now targeting Home REIT, which provides homelessness services, including to homeless veterans. We must ensure that short-selling groups are not another weapon in Putin’s arsenal. Where there are links between short-selling attack groups and the Kremlin, we need to know.”
“The global crisis of malnutrition threatens the lives of 200 million people. Will the Development Minister look to support my early-day motion 951, which seeks to welcome the Bridgetown agenda, which will transform the mission, the model and the money in the global finance development architecture? Now is not the time for half measures.”
“The right hon. Gentleman is making an excellent speech. Is he as worried as I am about this new trick that the Treasury is performing called “general licences”? There are now whole categories of spending where the Treasury is basically issuing carte blanche to oligarchs to spend what they like and, worse, it is refusing to reveal that framework to us here in this House.”
“As chair of the parliamentary network on the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, I am delighted that we have just launched the Ukraine chapter of the network. I am also delighted that at our global parliamentary forum, at the beginning of the spring meetings in Washington in April, we will have a special session focused on reconstruction finance for Ukraine. However, $750 billion is a big number. Capitalising those kinds of loans could take $150 billion-worth of equity. That is why seizing, let us say, $300 billion of Russian bank reserves frozen abroad will be incredibly important in helping to supply that money.”
“As many who have been there know, Ukraine has very high inflation and therefore very high interest rates; perhaps one third of businesses have stopped operations, 14 million people have left their homes, 6 million have gone abroad, there has been huge educational disruption for the next generation of Ukrainians and about half the energy infrastructure has been knocked out. This has been a moment where the Bretton Woods institutions have really stepped up. Between the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, something like $27 billion has been supplied this year. Those Bretton Woods institutions offer us one of the most efficient and effective routes for providing what could be, on current estimates, a $750 billion bill to rebuild the great country of Ukraine.”
“I welcome the speech by the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith), which I thought was excellent. I will supply three further thoughts and set the context for the scale of the task of Ukrainian reconstruction. I am glad the Government have offered to host the June conference for reconstruction finance, following on from a member of conferences in Lugano. It is worth setting out for the House the sheer scale of the finance we need to mobilise, which is why the right hon. Gentleman is correct to say that we must start by seizing Russian assets now. Frankly, we will need to provide an enormous amount of money to our Ukrainian colleagues. Ukrainian GDP has been hit by about 45%; the World Bank thinks its budget deficit this year will be something like $38 billion.”
“There are probably three components that we need to shift into place: there needs to be action at the United Nations; there needs to be action to set up the tribunal to prosecute Russia for the crime of aggression; and then we need to implement the ten-minute rule Bill of my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Sir Chris Bryant), which would create the legal framework for action.”
“It is crucial that we do that, and the spring meetings in Washington should provide a springboard, but the most efficient way of surging the necessary money into Ukraine is through the Bretton Woods institutions that we set up in 1944 to finance post-war reconstruction. We did it before—let us try it again. My second point, having set the stage and set out some of the numbers, follows on from the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green. We now have to identify the legal strategy for turning this idea into a reality. All of us in this House are frustrated that the Government—and, indeed, Governments around the world—are, we feel, dragging their feet when it comes to putting in place the necessary laws to move from freezing to seizing.”
“If we have a UN resolution that has begun to revoke the concept of immunity in the case of aggression, and a tribunal that is prosecuting Russia for the crime of aggression, we will have begun to change fundamentally the context of international law.”
“Indeed, many international lawyers would say that seizing those assets is a legitimate countermeasure, but if there is a UN resolution, we have begun to change the concept of what is protected by immunity—such as central bank assets—and what is not. Secondly, we then have to ensure that we do not fall foul of the European convention on human rights, particularly the first protocol, which enshrines the right to the enjoyment of assets. We have to ensure that there is no way that the Russian Government can be considered a victim. The safest way we can do that is to move quickly, as President Zelensky has proposed, to begin prosecuting Russia for the crime of aggression.”