Sir Iain Duncan Smith
MP for Chingford and Woodford Green · Conservative · United Kingdom
“I raise the cases of Ryan Cornelius and Jimmy Lai—both United Kingdom citizens—to the attention of the Foreign Secretary, who I welcome to his position. Ryan Cornelius has been incarcerated for 19 years—trumped-up charges by a corrupt regime that is supporting a war in Sudan at the moment.”
“Has the Secretary of State been made aware of the case of Joshua Wong, a Hong Kong resident who is being prosecuted by the Administration in Hong Kong using the national security law?”
“A particular memory is that during the Maastricht debates, when, I have to confess, I and one or two others here were deeply rebellious, Ann lectured me from the Dispatch Box—she was in government—about how I should support the Maastricht treaty and the European Union, which rather worried me.”
“It was phenomenal, because she was so certain about the way that she was. Ann embodied something else: the passion that is necessary for us in this Chamber to make our arguments without the fear of any other person doing something to us.”
“We need to reiterate, and the Government and the Home Secretary need to specify, to all the social media companies that they must do something to close down the visceral, violent language that some people use in attacking others personally, as they did over Ann’s murder, which shocked me.”
“Friday was a funny day. I heard the news very early in the morning that Ann had died, and I was utterly surprised about that because she had seemed perfectly fit the last time I saw her, so I gave my condolences and spoke about it on the radio.”
The complete record
Every one of 4,453 lines we hold for Sir Iain Duncan Smith, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 25 of 90.
“I am beginning to feel that I am making a collective speech, because the right hon. Lady’s point is down here in my notes. It is better made by her than me, but I fully agree with her as a result. We could have got ahead of this—that is the point, as the example of Abramovich shows. Many others have drifted off, so the right hon. Lady is absolutely right: we needed to be quicker and more determined. Now, we have to sustain our determination to flush all this out while we have the opportunity. I always sense a little resistance. When we call it out, the Government say, “Ooh, we don’t know. We’ve got lots on our plate and we are doing lots of things,” but this is the time to act.”
“Under such a mechanism, an enforcement authority such as the National Crime Agency could bring proceedings in a UK court to have property belonging to a sanctioned person involved in a gross violation of international human rights law or international humanitarian law confiscated without compensation, so that the frozen property can be used to fund reparations. That is the key.”
“I must say, the hon. Lady’s debate was fascinating. She demonstrated that by our failure to follow this course, a UK company is essentially sanctioned because it is unable to get payment. The measures bounce back at us and honest, decent companies find themselves trapped by the failure to square the circle of the process and get everyone all along the chain. It was a brilliant debate, and I congratulate her on raising the subject on behalf of her constituents. The Government should introduce new legislation to allow the seizure of already-frozen assets that are linked to criminality. The Russian Government have a huge amount of money of course, but many oligarchs are guilty of benefiting financially from war crimes and atrocities in Ukraine, so we should activate new legislation.”
“Members with this simple thought: as we come together across the House, let us also try to work out how we can bring all the other western Governments together in this action. To do it by ourselves will, I recognise, be a slight problem, but if we could get the US Congress, the Canadian Parliament and the European Union to engage on this, then we would have something that would frighten the Russians completely and give us the tools to finish this particular job.”
“We may yet have to give more money, and so may America, but let us start where the bill lands first: with those who are responsible for this brutal invasion of Ukraine. The Ukrainians are a peaceful and decent people whose lives have been turned upside down. Families have been destroyed or have had to flee, and many young men and women are now having to go to the frontline for the first time as soldiers and put their lives on the line, standing for the freedom of their country. We must seize those assets wherever appropriate and ensure that Russia is held to account. As I said earlier, there is much to say “Well done” to the Government for, but there is also much more that needs to be done. I will leave hon.”
“Yevgeny Prigozhin, the boss of the Wagner Group, is deeply involved in another current row about aircraft leased by western companies to Russia that were seized after sanctions were imposed. The Russians are refusing to pay reparations or hand the aircraft back. Huge amounts of money are available to these people. I have a list, but will not go through all the names, because I realise that many others want to speak. Putin’s brutal invasion has now entered its second year. The Government must amplify their efforts. They have done a great deal, and I congratulate them on much of it, but much more is needed. The Government need to get right down into this issue and make sure that we have a plan for reparation and rebuilding of Ukraine. Let us start with the dirty money—that is the key.”
“The hon. Gentleman is right, and I obviously completely agree. If we did this, we could have tougher sanctions. A recent example involved Eugene Tenenbaum, a close associate of Roman Abramovich—I am told that “Abram-oh-vich” is the correct pronunciation—and former Chelsea football club director, who was given permission by the Treasury to sell his Surrey mansion for £16 million a month after the Government designated him for UK sanctions and froze all his assets. How did that happen? Why did that happen? Who is not talking to someone else to tell them what they are doing? We are letting stuff slip through because we are not being serious about implementing measures properly. I could give plenty of other examples.”
“It will be over when the reparations have been paid, when Ukraine is rebuilt and restructured, and when the Ukrainians have their freedom again. Slava Ukraini, heroyam slava! Question put and agreed to. Resolved, That this House calls on the Government to lay before Parliament proposals for the seizure of Russian state assets with the purpose of using such assets to provide support for Ukraine, including the rectifying and rebuilding of war damage brought about by the Russian invasion of that country, and to facilitate the prosecution of war crimes and atrocities; and further calls on the Government to provide progress reports on this policy to the House every six months.”
“I am grateful to all who took part in the debate. What we have shown here, including to all our Ukrainian friends, is the unity across the House on this issue, and that we will remain united until the invasion is over and Ukraine has received the money it needs. A summary of what Members have said today, for my right hon. Friend the Minister, is this: we have to do more. We have to do more to implement existing sanctions, and then we have to do more to start the process of enabling ourselves to seize those assets—first Government assets, then private assets—and work in concert with our friends. I end with a simple message to our friends in Ukraine and those who are here today—it is a huge privilege for us to have them here. We will stay with them until this is over.”
“Now, however, I understand that “systemic challenge” has moved on to “epoch-defining challenge”. The document that the Prime Minister has produced today does refer to that “epoch-defining challenge”, but then goes on to use the words “in the face of that threat”. Does that now mean that China is a threat, or an epoch-defining challenge, or a challenging Government epoch, or even none of that?”
“I welcome some of the report, but I want to return to the issue of China, in which, as someone who has been sanctioned, I take a particular interest. I have to say that I am somewhat confused about what the Government’s position actually is. It was the Prime Minister who, when standing for election, said: “China…poses a systemic threat” —there was then a backdown to “systemic challenge”— which we would meet with “robust pragmatism”. That “robust pragmatism” means that we have sanctioned no one in Hong Kong while America has sanctioned 10; that we have sanctioned three low-level officials in Xinjiang while America has sanctioned 11, including Chen Quanguo, the architect of that terrible atrocity; and that we did not kick out the Chinese officials who beat people up on the streets of the UK.”
“Friend the Minister that we need to look carefully at what we are saying in the Bill. How will my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State be able to make a judgment about whether somebody has come illegally or has come illegally and is trafficked, if the national referral mechanism is not to be used for that purpose? If we can get that down to 30 days, most people could be processed without having to take an arbitrary decision. I want my Government to succeed in this matter, but I beg them to be very careful about the modern-day slavery legislation and to protect it.”
“We are dealing with those who are trafficked, not people smuggling; there is a big difference between the two things. Some 60% of the claims on modern-day slavery are domestic claims, here within the UK, by people who have been trafficked into brothels or who are working in chain gangs. Those are the sort of people we really do want to stand up for, and I recognise that there is a big difference. The people who my Government—my right hon. Friends, with their legislation—want to seek to stop are those who are coming across illegally, using smugglers. By the way, the single group that gives us the greatest credibility and likelihood of prosecuting those people smugglers, are those who have been trafficked and who then give evidence. I simply want to say to my right hon.”
“I say gently to the Minister for Immigration, my right hon. Friend the Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick), and others on the Front Bench, that I do not understand why the Bill makes such a big deal of modern-day slavery when that represents a tiny proportion of people who come over using that route. Let me give a few figures: 6% of small boat arrivals in 2022 claimed modern-day slavery. It reality, the total number is even smaller. When the Government say 73% of people “detained for return after arriving on a small boat…then referred to the NRM”, that amounts to 294 people. We are talking about small numbers. I suggest to my right hon. Friend the Minister that we genuinely need to recognise that we have to be careful when treading on this.”
“I rise to make a simple point, because in the time available that is all we can do. I will draw a little bit of light rather than heat into the issue. I want the Government to succeed in restricting the boats coming across, and in getting rid of them eventually, because of the danger for all those who try to take that route. It is incredibly dangerous and people have died, particularly children. I want to make a point about one specific area. The Centre for Social Justice brought through the original paper on modern-day slavery. I was enormously proud of it and I was enormously proud that my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May)—the Home Secretary, as she was then—was able to bring that into legislation. We were the first country to adopt that. It is not perfect but there are things that can be changed.”
“I will not follow my right hon. Friend down the centre-forward path, as Tottenham did not succeed yesterday, but may I draw her attention to something in The Daily Telegraph today? Although the Government did not announce it at the Dispatch Box, we now understand, finally, that their position on the Wuhan lab leaks and on China’s involvement is that the location of the outbreak was “coincidental”. That Government policy has never been stated publicly, so will she make time for a Government statement, or preferably a debate, on whether the Government believe that China poses a threat and that the leaks from the labs may well have been the reason why millions died?”
“On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. I apologise to my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives (Derek Thomas) and to the House for intervening on this very important debate—like others, I am fascinated by what is being said—but may I ask whether the Government have notified the Speaker’s Office that they intend to make a statement about the semi-briefings being made to the media that they have decided to pause or stop whole elements of HS2? Surely that would be best done through a statement to the House, rather than through elements of the media. I would be grateful for your guidance as to whether a statement should be made, and whether the Speaker’s Office has received any notification that the Government are inclined to do so.”
“I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing this debate. I am the co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Magnitsky sanctions, and we recently looked carefully at the implementation—the reality, as opposed to the Government’s rhetoric. We are discovering that there are big holes in what is actually happening, with far too little consideration given to the detailed implementation. We also sanction far fewer people who are guilty of transgressing our rules than the US does. The hon. Lady is on the right track, and I congratulate her on that, but perhaps she would like to press the Government further to increase the number of people and businesses they sanction and to make sure they do it properly.”
“I understand where the Minister is now, but is not the problem that there seems to be no exchange between Departments as to exactly how this works? It seems illogical to me that different countries now sanction different groups and industries in different ways. Surely, the key here—this relates to the measure that I raised earlier—is that we now sanction far fewer individuals than the United States does. On industrial sanctions, we seem to have no common purpose. With respect to the Minister, and I am a big supporter of his, he should surely go back to his Department and set out that it is not good enough to say there are different regimes. We know how involved Belarus is with Russia, and we know what the links are. We should treat them both exactly the same and get on with it.”
“I welcome my right hon. and learned Friend’s statement. Once we strip away the rhetoric, of course, the key to all this is how we save the lives of the people who are dying while trying to get across the channel and are abused by the traffickers. I listened very carefully to her statement, and I understand all the other features—although we may have a debate about the numbers that she quotes on modern-day slavery problems—but could she expand a little on the issue that stopped the migrants being taken to Rwanda last time, which was the intervention of the European Court of Human Rights? I did not really hear anything in the statement to suggest that anything has changed on that matter.”
“One phrase says that it can be used only if there is “significant impact specific to everyday life”. Who makes that decision as to what is significant? Secondly, can the EU demand countermeasures if the brake is deployed?”
“May I associate myself with my right hon. Friend’s comments on Betty Boothroyd, who was my first Speaker when I arrived here—she will be greatly missed—and also his comments on the brutal attack on DCI Caldwell? I commend my right hon. Friend and his team for their diligence and hard work in pursuing this matter regardless of the obstacles that lie in their way, including the reluctance of the EU to admit anything about the problems that have been taking place. For me, having served in Northern Ireland and lost friends who never came back from Northern Ireland, the restoration of the Good Friday agreement is, at the end of the day, the No.1 item. However, when I was looking through the details, I noticed that the Stormont brake is not quite as defined as it might be. I wonder whether my right hon. Friend could clear this up.”
“(Urgent Question) : To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs if he will make a statement on the planned visit to the UK of the Governor of Xinjiang.”
“The US has introduced 107 punitive sanctions, five new laws, 11 specific investment bans and 10 sanctions on individuals, including Chen Quanguo and Erkin Tuniyaz. I call on the UK Government to rescind this invitation and sanction Erkin Tuniyaz and Chen Quanguo for their role in this crime against humanity and genocide. The place to deal with these individuals is in a tribunal or court of law, not in the quiet office of a Foreign Office official.”
“Whether or not the Foreign Office is tough, this is a propaganda coup for the Chinese Government. Governor Tuniyaz has defended the use of mass detention centres and doubled down and expanded their use. During his tenure, more than 1 million Uyghurs and other people from predominantly Muslim minorities have been detained in Xinjiang. A man who declares that nothing is going on is hardly likely to be bothered by a Foreign Office official telling him, “Now, now, you’ve got to stop this.” I remind my hon. Friend the Minister that in 2021, the House of Commons in this United Kingdom declared for the first time that genocide is taking place against the Uyghurs and other minorities in the Xinjiang region of China. Let us compare our response with that of the United States. The UK has sanctioned only three rather junior people.”
“Testimony from camp survivors—who are absolutely appalled to hear that a Foreign Office official will meet this individual—and leaked official Chinese Government documents, satellite images and drone footage indicate that the camps are sites of severe mass arbitrary detention and severe human rights abuses, including systematic sexual violence against women, torture and the forced sterilisation of many women. Reports of cultural and religious oppression, mass digital in-person surveillance, forced labour, mass sterilisations and abortions and a system of mass criminalisation and arbitrary detention are also completely documented. The weak response from the Foreign Office hides something. It is not that it has invited him here, but it has made it clear that when he comes, he will be welcome to see officials.”
“I find that response from my hon. Friend, for whom I have the highest respect, to be a very weak turn from the Foreign Office. The Uyghur region in north-west China has been the site of severe human rights violations, crimes against humanity and genocide for more than six years. In 2017, satellite imagery confirmed that a network of internment camps had been set up throughout the region. Throughout this time, Erkin Tuniyaz has been responsible for the murderous and repressive policy, alongside its architect, Chen Quango.”
“On a point of order, Mr Speaker. May I seek through you a correction by the Minister of something he said earlier? He said that the Foreign Office had invited those who have fled Xinjiang and are here in the UK to meet this murderous man, but in fact they were never invited; they were only invited to submit their thoughts about this to the Foreign Office, or perhaps to meet one of the officials.”
“I commend my right hon. Friend for coming so swiftly to the House and for the action that he and the Department have already taken. This would have been a terrible enough set of circumstances on their own, but to be overlaid by a brutal civil war in the same area and a very terrible winter makes it worse beyond almost imagination. Like many Members of the House, I have many Turkish and Turkish-Cypriot constituents who are very worried about their families and are finding it difficult to get proper information. I know that my right hon. Friend has set up a hotline. I am being contacted, as I am sure are colleagues across the House, so may I suggest that it might be helpful to have a specific MPs’ hotline, so that we can help our constituents to find out as much information as possible and put their worries at ease?”
“Where do people go when they cannot get redress and are spending money without getting the sort of place or standards that they expected?”
“I congratulate the hon. Member on securing this debate and am grateful to him for doing so, because I share his concerns. L&Q runs the development on the old dog track in my constituency of Chingford. The service charges are astronomical; they are higher than the costs faced by people who have managed to get the capital together for a mortgage. This is a good illustration of what the hon. Gentleman is saying. The housing association took three years to acknowledge people’s complaints about the terrible problems, including windows that did not fit the building and issues with heating, so they feel that they are not being represented. Councillor Catherine Saumarez has been raising this issue with me and the authorities for some time.”
“That sounds good, but the truth is that it does not happen. Instead, landlords are relentless in putting up service charges without much explanation, while tenants are concerned because their windows do not fit, or, if there is a unitary boiler, it does not work properly, or they have mould in their rooms. It takes forever to get that done, but if they miss their service charge date, the landlord is on to them like a shot. This needs to be connected somehow so that landlords do not impose service charges if service does not happen.”
“This is a remarkable report, and the hon. Lady should be commended for her leadership in this matter. I wonder whether we should be pressing the Government to do more in critical areas. I am a co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Magnitsky sanctions, and we are dragging our feet on sanctioning the architects and perpetrators of abuse in many parts of the world, particularly China. We have sanctioned fewer people in China than most countries have, certainly far fewer than the USA has, and we still do not recognise that there is a genocide taking place in Xinjiang, where rape is used as a weapon of that genocide. Would she like to comment on that?”
“To drag together that point with something my hon. Friend said earlier, surely such timidity also follows failure to have the capability to be more assertive. In other words, now that their defence budgets have been stripped out, western Governments are worried that any attempt to try to show that they are more belligerent, shall we say, exposes the very fact that most of them are simply incapable of delivering any of that belligerence at all.”
“Our inability to call a genocide is not just limited to Serbia. Our biggest problem is that we simply will not and cannot call any action a genocide, even when it demonstrable, until it goes through the United Nations, yet other countries such as America have declared genocides in China; we sit silent.”
“If only Britain could lead the west in providing people who can educate and train paramedics for us urgently, that would save more lives.” Thirdly, they said, “The problem now is that so many of our soldiers are committing suicide because they cannot cope with the total devastation and the mental breakdown that comes from combat stress. The UK and America are the two countries that probably know the most about this, because of Afghanistan and Iraq. We desperately need some help from the UK to educate and train our mental health specialists in how to deal with this. It’s a huge problem.” It is a huge problem in America and here in the UK, and I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex has helped us get in touch with Combat Stress.”
“When it gets hit, the people who work there carry on, despite the explosions around them, with what they are doing. Interestingly, they said to me, “Please can you go back and tell your Government that we need armoured ambulances desperately, because we cannot get the wounded to the hospitals quickly enough? We need that more than almost anything else.” Secondly, they said, “We desperately need help in terms of paramedics, to stabilise people before they get into the ambulances. You cannot understand the difference it makes to whether or not we save their lives. We just don’t have enough.”
“When you look at our villages that are devastated, you see pretty low-standard villages, but what has happened is that the Russians have moved all the troops they have from the east of Russia, where the living standards are even lower by a long way. For them, this is Manhattan. They rob every single house and everything that’s in it, and that which they can’t rob, they rape. They use rape as a tool of war and a tool of suppression. That is why we evacuated so many of our women and children from these villages—because we knew what was going to happen to them if and when the Russians came.” As the hon. Member for Bradford South said, we went on to visit the military hospital in Kharkiv, which was very sobering. The hospital gets rocketed at least two or three times a week.”
“It means seeing the destroyed buildings, blocks of flats that had people living in them when the rockets hit; it means being with the soldiers when they have to clear up the dead bodies in villages that have been shelled and rocketed; it means never being able to come off a single-track path because the Russians have strewn anti-personnel mines all over the fields and houses in the hope that people will enter them. That is what it really means. It means that this barbaric, dictatorial, fascist crook called Putin has wrought devastation and damage on ordinary people whose lives were pretty poor in the first instance. One of the Ukrainian guides said to us, “The thing you don’t understand is that we don’t have and have never had the kind of support and money that you have.”
“The Ukrainians did not know they had a kilt until Siobhan’s Trust arrived in Ukraine, but now they have a national kilt, and I hope it will become something that is worn on the fashion catwalks of Europe to celebrate— [ Interruption. ] I know I am not a fashion icon, but nevertheless I would be prepared to wear it. The beauty of this is all the work the charity does. We sometimes forget about this when we get into the grand strategy, but when we were over there, as my hon. Friend said, we realised what it really means when we talk about grand strategy.”
“They now go to places as close as maybe a mile or so from the Russian border—in fact, quite recently they went into Kherson, just after it was liberated, and fed people there. That was where they came under shellfire, and I suspect that was because the Russians knew they were there and what they were doing. As my hon. Friend said, the charity feeds 4,000 people who are dispossessed, living in freezing conditions, often with no heating or hot water, sometimes with no water at all and certainly with no electricity. The one high spot of their day will be the arrival of the trucks from Siobhan’s Trust, led by wonderfully eccentric British people dressed in Ukrainian kilts.”
“Interestingly, although we are not supposed to say this, the man who set up and runs the charity, David Fox-Pitt, is sitting in the Gallery right now. He is the epitome of what is very best about this United Kingdom. When all the refugees were pouring across the border and lost in the middle of Ukraine, having been struck, the team upped sticks from where they were in Scotland, with their trucks, and headed straight for the border to try to provide food and sustenance to those people. Siobhan’s Trust got there weeks ahead of Oxfam and all the rest, and crossed the border because the team realised there were more refugees in Ukraine than were coming out. They raised the money themselves, got support from companies such as Dr. Oetker from Germany and Italian pizza companies, and got trucks with pizza ovens on.”
“I will take your guidance, Mr Deputy Speaker, because most of it has already been said—although that has never stopped us from repeating it in this place. It is a real privilege to speak in this debate and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin) on obtaining it. I always feel slightly worried when the word “grand” is used of anything, because if we are not careful it covers a whole lot of more tactical aspects that we forget about. However, he is right that this is a debate about the grand strategy of what was once the Soviet Union, has since been broken up, and is now Russia. To begin with, I want to dwell on a remarkable charity named Siobhan’s Trust that my hon. Friend—I call her my hon. Friend—the Member for Bradford South (Judith Cummins) and I visited and worked with.”
“The thing that haunts me now more than anything else from that visit is the one phrase they use, which is, “Please don’t forget us.” They say, “We are fighting for our freedom and our lives, and we are worried that you are getting bored of what is going on over here. Please do not forget us.” All I simply say in the House today is that we must not forget them. We must be with them. This is our war; we must win it. Slava Ukraini, heroyam slava.”
“How in heaven’s name did they allow Germany to bully them into believing it was none of their business? All of us—every country—takes a share of that. It should never have been allowed to be built, and I do not exclude my own country in that regard. It showed a sign to Russia that as addicted as we were, we would never do anything against Russia. That was as important as supplying them with weapons, because Russia then saw us and said, “You know what? They put money first and energy second, and that energy is from us. They will never come and stop us.” In reality, this is our war—we cannot forget that. It is as much as if we were standing on the frontline with the Ukrainians. We have to be there with them in spirit, and we have to give them the weapons, because they must win this war.”
“I beg the Government to talk to their counterparts in Ukraine and find a way to get the rest of western Europe to supply the things that Ukraine requires that do not have a gun on them but will save many, many lives if they are provided. I completely agree that Russia’s grand strategy is to expand. It has never got over losing the land that it held in the Soviet Union, and it wants it back; it has been absolutely clear about that. Strangely enough, countries in the west—Germany is a good example—have failed to recognise the real threat of becoming addicted to something that is supplied by a country as volatile and ill led as this. I come back to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. How in heaven’s name did the rest of Europe allow that to happen?”
“There is a huge amount that can be provided from what are essentially wealthy nations. We are wealthy nations, and when we compare ourselves with where Ukraine is, we are very wealthy. It is just the determination of what we want to do. In Ukraine, they desperately need arms; they need supplies of ammunition and weapons. There is no question about that, but they also need—and this is about humanity—help to survive in all these areas. The brave men and women who are fighting on the front deserve all the support they can get, but the bit that is missing when we debate this issue is the people behind who have been devastated and shelled and have no homes. We need to find a way to help them as well.”
“First, they desperately need more armoured ambulances because they say that the experience of getting the wounded quickly to the hospitals is terrible. Secondly, they have a great shortage of paramedics; they need those very much, too. Thirdly—this is shocking—the number of Ukrainian military committing suicide as a result of battlefield stress is astonishing and help is desperately needed. They said that the US and the UK, who have experience in Afghanistan, Iraq and so on, could really help by sending some people over to help train in those mental health practices.”
“I welcome the statement from my right hon. Friend. Along with the hon. Member for Bradford South (Judith Cummins), I had the privilege just before Christmas of working south of Kharkiv with a British charity, Siobhan’s Trust, feeding thousands of dispossessed Ukrainians. While there, I was able to talk to a lot of the Ukrainian military. I want to congratulate my right hon. Friend, because the one thing they were saying was that they were very disappointed by Germany’s failure to give permission for the Leopard tanks to be sent to them as originally arranged. They now believe that this decision by His Majesty’s Government will help unlock that. I visited the military hospital in Kharkiv, which is shelled two or three times a week—the devastation is appalling—and people there asked me for some things that are not offensive things.”
“Let me congratulate my hon. Friend on his leadership in this matter in the past few years and on his having obtained this debate. On proscription—I am co-chair of the all-party group on Magnitsky sanctions—the United States and many other countries have already proscribed and sanctioned the republican guard in Iran, so why are the UK Government dragging their feet over what is clearly a required action, given that the republican guard is so heavily involved in the brutality and murder of people? Will my hon. Friend encourage the Government to move finally on this and do what they are supposed to?”