Sir Bernard Jenkin
MP for Harwich and North Essex · Conservative · United Kingdom
“Despite long and historic disagreements between successive UK Governments and Israel, it has remained a steadfast ally in counter-terrorist efforts to keep our people safe in this country. We are now embarked, it seems, on a full diplomatic dispute with Israel and tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats.”
“I would very much have liked to have discussed the medical devices questions arising from the Bill. The Minister made an incredibly short speech about that important matter. It is quite clear that these provisions are part of the covert dynamic alignment with the EU and the covert rejoin agenda being pursued by the Government.”
“I am as keen as anybody to get on with discussing the Health Bill, but this topic is too serious an opportunity to miss, given that the hon. Member for Leeds Central and Headingley (Alex Sobel) has raised such important issues. I really commend his speech and his initiative. Everybody should read it.”
“The Minister shakes her head, but she is yet to give a good reason as to why this measure is in the Bill. When we had an Adjournment debate in July with the then Minister for patient safety, the hon.”
“The chief executive of the CQC is wantonly conflicted in terms of looking after the safe space, so he cannot be the one left in charge of that function. The real point here is that we are missing the opportunity to save so much money. Governments keep having public inquiries.”
“I asked the Minister, in a letter I sent her after the debate in July, to give us the information on how much the transfer of all this would cost. Nothing has arrived. I never had a reply to the letter. Of course, the Government have changed the Minister and the new Minister for patient safety, the right hon.”
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“We should be clear that Russia’s development of hypersonic weapons is already a unilateral escalation in a new arms race which is outside any existing arms limitation agreements. The Russian editorialist Vladimir Mozhegov commented: “The Zircon simply does its job: it methodically shoots huge, clumsy aircraft carriers like a gun at cans.” An article in the digital newspaper Svpressa was eloquently titled “Putin’s ultimatum: Russia, if you will, will bury all of Europe and two-thirds of the United States in 30 minutes”. How have we reached this crisis, with the west in general, and NATO in particular, so ill prepared to face down such provocation, when Putin’s malign intent has been evident in his actions for a decade and a half?”
“Either they take seriously what is put on the table, or they face a military-technical alternative.” After the publication of the draft treaty, the possibility of a pre-emptive strike against NATO targets—similar to those that Israel inflicted on Iran—was confirmed by the Deputy Minister of Defence, Andrei Kartapolov. He said: “Our partners must understand that the longer they drag out the examination of our proposals and the adoption of real measures to create these guarantees, the greater the likelihood that they will suffer a pre-emptive strike.” Apparently to make things clear, Russia fired a “salvo” of Zircon hypersonic missiles on 24 December, after which Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, commented: “Well, I hope that the notes”— of 17 December— “will be more convincing”.”
“I will not comment on that particular suggestion, but I will be coming to the question of gas. This ultimatum is, in fact, Russian blackmail, directed at both the Americans and the Europeans. If the west does to accept the Russian ultimatum, they will have to face what Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko calls “a military and technical alternative”. What does he mean by that? Let me quote him further: “The Europeans must also think about whether they want to avoid making their continent the scene of a military confrontation. They have a choice.”
“Meanwhile, the UK has expressed no intention of getting involved.”
“They continue to develop whole new ranges of military equipment, including tanks with intelligent armour, fleets of ice breakers, new generations of submarines, including a new class of ballistic missile submarine, and the first hypersonic missiles. They have carried out targeted assassinations and attempted assassinations in NATO countries using illegal chemical weapons, provoked a migration crisis in Belarus to destabilise Ukraine, and brought Armenia back under Russian control, snuffing out the democratic movement there. They have claimed sovereignty over 1.2 million square miles of Arctic seabed, including the north pole, which together contain huge oil and gas and mineral reserves. This followed the reopening of the northern sea route, with Chinese co-operation and support from France and Germany, which also hope to benefit.”
“Indeed, and I will be explaining how these apparently disparate events are integrated in Russia’s grand strategy. Beneath the cloak of this military noise and aggressive disinformation, in recent months—Kazakhstan is another example—Russia has been testing the west’s response with a succession of lower-level provocations, and I am afraid that we have signally failed to convince the Russians that we mind very much or are going to do very much about them. They have rigged the elections in Belarus, continued cyber-attacks on NATO allies, particularly in the Baltic states, and demonstrated the ability to destroy a satellite in orbit with a missile, bringing space into the arms race.”
“Moreover, as gas supplies to Germany through Ukraine seem less reliable, so Germany continues to support Nord Stream 2, the pipeline that will bypass Ukraine, strengthening Russia’s hold over both countries immeasurably. At least we have the option of re-exploiting our gas reserves in the North sea. For as long as we require gas in our energy mix, we should be generating our own, not relying on imported gas from Europe.”
“Closer to home, look at how Gazprom has gradually and quietly reduced the gas supply to Europe, running down Europe’s gas reserves and causing prices to spike, leading to quadrupling gas and electricity prices in the UK. If Putin now chokes off the supply, it would take time and investment to put in place the necessary alternatives, which the Russians will seek to frustrate, as they already have in Algeria. Algeria was in a position to increase its supply of gas to EU, depending on the existing pipeline being upgraded, but a successful Russian influence campaign aimed at Germany and France prevented that from happening. Gazprom is enjoying its best ever year, so Putin can not only threaten western Europe’s energy supplies, but get the west to fund his war against the west.”
“Russia uses its diaspora of super-rich Russian kleptocrats to influence western leaders and exploit centres such as the City of London to launder vast wealth for its expatriate clients. Following the shaming chairmanship of Gazprom assumed by the former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, so Russia has now recruited former French Prime Minister François Fillon to become a board director of the massive Russian petrochemicals company Sibur, with its headquarters in Moscow. The Russians must have contempt for us for being so gullible and corruptible. Our unilateral withdrawal from Kabul also vindicates their narrative that the west is weak, pointing out that we failed to stand by our moral principles or our friends.”
“My right hon. Friend is completely right. They are ruthless about pursuing what they regard as their own interests and disregard any other risk. Indeed, they are very far from being risk-averse, and the west has been far too risk-averse to compete with that. I will come to that later, but I thank my right hon. Friend for reminding us about the Poseidon torpedo, which is a nuclear-tipped torpedo—another escalation in the arms race. Russia has also been rearming the Serbs in the western Balkans, including the Serb armed forces and the police in the Serb enclave of Bosnia, with the intention of destabilising the fragile peace that NATO achieved 30 years ago. Russia has stepped up its activity and influence in north and central Africa and has even started giving support to Catalan separatists in Spain.”
“All I can say is, do not start me on the lamentable incoherence of 20 years of UK energy policy, because it is a disgrace, and something that we could have done so much better and that this Government are starting to repair, but it will take some time.”
“We cannot abdicate our own national strategy to NATO or the US. It means creating our own machinery of government and a culture in our Government that can match the capability and determination of our adversaries in every field of activity.”
“Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) speaking from the Opposition Front Bench earlier said we want dialogue, but it should not be to discuss the Russian agenda. Being forced to the table to negotiate that way would be appeasement. It would be rewarding threats of aggression, which is no different from giving way to aggression itself. What further concessions can the west offer without looking like appeasers? The Geneva meetings have to signal a dramatic shift in the west’s attitude and resolve, or they will be hailed as a Russian victory. Some are now comparing the present decade to the 1930s prelude to world war two, where we eventually found we were very alone. If we want to avoid that, the UK needs to rediscover what in the past it has done so well, but it means an end to muddling through and hoping for the best.”
“We must acknowledge that while the United States of America is still the greatest superpower, it has become something of an absentee landlord in NATO, tending to regard European security issues as regional, rather than a direct threat to US interests. Part of UK national strategy must be to re-engage the US fully, but that will be hard post-Trump. He has left terrible scars on US politics, and the Biden Administration are frozen by a hostile Congress, leading to bitter political paralysis. Nevertheless, the priority must be to reunite NATO. Having initially refused to have a summit, President Biden has now provisionally agreed to a meeting with Putin on 9 and 10 January—this weekend—to negotiate what? We all want dialogue, and the right hon.”
“We have no coherent body of skills and knowledge to give us analogous capacity to compete with Russian grand strategy. Our heads are in the sand. So much of domestic politics is about distracting trivia, while Russia and others, such as China, are crumbling the foundations of our global security. Why does this matter? It matters because our interests, the global trading system on which our prosperity depends and the rules-based international order which underpins our peace and security are at stake. We are outside the EU. We can dispense with the illusion that an EU common defence and security policy could ever have substituted for our own vigilance and commitment.”
“To enable that, what the Russians call the hybrid warfare battlefield is, as they describe it, “instrumented.” It is monitored constantly by military and civilian analysts in Russia and abroad, by embassy staff, journalists, intelligence officers and other collaborators, all of whom feed their observations and contributions to those implementing the hybrid warfare operations. Meanwhile, western Governments such as ours still operate on the basis that we face no warlike challenges or campaigns. We entirely lack the capacity or even the will to carry out strategic analysis, assessment and adequate foresight on the necessary scale. We lack the strategic imagination that would offer us opportunities to pre-empt or disrupt the Russian strategy.”
“It is primarily a measure-countermeasure activity; a research-based operation, based on real empiricism; an organically evolving struggle; a continual experiment, where the weapons are refined and even created during the battle; and where stratagems and tactics must be constantly adapted; and plans constantly rewritten to take account of our actions and reactions, ideally pre-empting or manipulating them. It is also highly opportunistic, which means that they are thinking constantly about creating and exploiting new opportunities. To guide such constant and rapid adaptation, the strategy process must include feedback loops and learning processes.”
“It is crucial to understand that Russia’s hybrid campaign is conducted like a war, with a warlike strategic headquarters at the National Defence Management Centre at the old army staff HQ, where all the elements of the Russian state are represented in a permanent warlike council, re-analysing, reassessing and revising plans and tactics. The whole concept of strategy, as understood and practised by Putin and his colleagues, is as something completely interactive with what their opponents are doing. It is not a detailed blueprint to be followed.”
“We are free peoples, who are vastly more prosperous than most Russians, liberal in outlook, relatively uncorrupted and democratic. The Russian narrative is nothing but a mixture of regime insecurity and self-induced paranoia. Putin feels that Ukraine becoming visibly and irrevocably part of the western liberal democratic family would show the Russian population that that path was also open to Russia as an alternative to Putinism. Let us remind ourselves that Russia’s war against Ukraine in 2014 was provoked not by Ukraine attempting to join NATO, but by its proposed association agreement with the EU.”
“I have already given way to my hon. Friend, so I hope he will forgive me if I do not take up more time. The constantly high level of Russian military activity in and around Ukraine and the attention being drawn to it have enabled the Kremlin to mount a huge disinformation campaign, designed to persuade the Russian people and the west that NATO is Russia’s major concern, that somehow NATO is a needless provocation—I am looking at my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), because I cannot believe how wrong he is on this—and that Russian activity is just a response to a supposed threat from NATO. That is complete rubbish. The only reason the west is a threat to the regime in Russia is who we are and what we represent.”
“I have no doubt that Russia and China are not allies, but they know how to help each other, and I think my right hon. Friend’s warning is very timely. As I said earlier, how we deal with Ukraine will reflect how Russia regards Taiwan and, I suppose, vice versa. I was talking about the need to create our machinery of government and our culture in Government that can match the kind of strategic decision making that takes place in Moscow. I can assure the House that there are people inside and outside Whitehall who are seized of this challenge, and Members will be hearing more from us in the months ahead.”
“I want very briefly to relay two conversations that I have had about strategic thinking in Government. One was with a person who is now the former Prime Minister, who said, “Oh, Bernard thinks we should have a strategy, but I think we should remain flexible,” completely misunderstanding what strategy is. The second was with a Minister who is now serving in a very senior capacity in this Government, and who said, “What is our strategy? We think we have to work with NATO.” In this country, we are so far behind understanding what strategy is that we have a very great task in front of us.”
“Given my right hon. Friend’s experience of working in both Departments, what meetings does he think are taking place daily in Government on a cross-departmental basis in response to the crisis and generally to monitor what Russia does?”
“One thing I did not have time to mention is that the intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty, which was concluded by Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev, has fallen into disrepair because Putin has deployed a new missile—an intermediate nuclear missile, which NATO calls the Screwdriver and which we believe is stationed in a position to threaten western European powers in breach of that treaty. The Russians are now calling for us to remove all nuclear weapons from European soil. They have breached the INF treaty, and now they accuse us of doing so by refusing to withdraw nuclear weapons that do not breach it. That shows the inequality of the analysis that Russia presents in its propaganda.”
“The correct way for this to have proceeded is for Crimea to have held a referendum about its status in or out of Russia before the transfer of a territory back to Russia, but that did not happen. It was like the Sudeten Germans being polled about rejoining Germany and being annexed out of Czechoslovakia by Hitler. It was exactly the same as that. I think that for my right hon. Friend somehow to excuse what happened on the basis of historical populations really provides spurious credibility to a dictator.”
“May I briefly remind my right hon. Friend of what happened with the invasion of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in 2008? President Bush moved the sixth fleet into the Black sea, ready to confront Russian aggression, and the invasion stopped. We are going to need that kind of response now; of course, the two treaties and the hypersonic weapons are intended to pre-empt any possibility of that kind of response.”
“I am sorry, but there are too many other brilliant contributions to mention, except one. Many colleagues have said that we have no quarrel with the Russian people. I should have called this debate “Putin’s grand strategy”, because I do not believe the Russian people are committed to sending their young men into military action to lose their lives in futile—”
“No consequences are serious enough unless they deter, and there is evidence that we are failing to deter. If there is one objective that we must try to achieve in these Geneva meetings, it is to reunite NATO and make this a step change in the behaviour of the west towards Russia—something that it has not seen for the past decade and a half—so that the Russians begin to understand that the penalty for what they are threatening to do in Ukraine and elsewhere is too high, and they will back off. Some of my colleagues have said we are in a new cold war—yes, we are. We should welcome the fact that we have the capacity to mount a cold war. Like the last cold war, it will end when Russia ends its aggression, and that has to be the message we take to our allies and tothe Russians themselves.”
“I thank the Minister for his reply to this debate; was a privilege for me to open it. I have been humbled by the quality of the contributions and struck by the 100% unanimity of the condemnation of President Putin, at least, even though there are other disagreements. Those are disagreements between friends and democrats, however; we all disagree with the actions of the dictator. I say to my hon. Friend the Minister that everything the Government are now doing is commendable, but diplomacy, expelling diplomats, diplomatic language and even economic sanctions are not enough. We have to develop military capacity to deter. Unless the penalty of military action, or threatening military action, is sufficiently painful for our adversary, they will take that action.”
“It is the centre that has to value that if our diplomatic service is to produce value for money.”
“Can we just remind ourselves that the UK diplomatic service is in fact part of our vital capability to maintain the competitive stance of this country around the world? The cost of the diplomatic service is a minute pinprick in the overall scheme of public expenditure, well within the margin for error of many other Government Departments’ expenditures. Why would we want to squeeze this capability when it is so vital for our global future? Can we also think about what the diplomatic service is for? We value real subject knowledge and expertise, and country knowledge and the ability to speak the local languages more than perhaps we have recently. We value our history and understanding of our place in the world and the intelligence that those in the service gather and feed back to the centre.”
“May I, in passing, thank the Backbench Business Committee for allocating the debate on Russia’s grand strategy? A proper debate on the subject is long overdue, along with a fuller understanding as we respond to the Ukraine crisis and the other crises that the Russians are provoking. May I issue a plea not for more or fewer restrictions in the House, but for the Leader of the House and the House of Commons Commission to use as their lodestar the question of consistency? Public confidence in whatever measures the Government are recommending rests on consistency between what people see their leaders doing and what they are being asked to do. If we have to introduce further measures—whether or not Parliament is recalled—we should ensure that our practices here are consistent with what we are asking other people to do.”
“As we see Russian forces massing on the Ukrainian border, can we be reminded that Russia is also continuing to carry out cyber-attacks, to attempt assassinations, to use gas as a political weapon, to illegally hold territory in Crimea and Georgia, to intimidate the west and to attempt to interfere in western elections? How much do the Government understand that President Putin is conducting a hybrid war against the west, and how are they responding?”
“My right hon. Friend will be aware that the Government’s legal representatives are now telling the courts that the Northern Ireland protocol represents a temporary suspension of parts of the Act of Union. When will this temporary suspension come to an end?”
“My right hon. Friend obviously understands that these measures will try the patience of the British people. Will he look at the other measures that can suppress the virus, particularly the booster rate? Does he agree that the rate of booster vaccinations is constrained not by supply or demand, but by the capacity of the health service to deliver the vaccines? Will he also, therefore, support integrated care systems that call on military assistance or local authority assistance and want to reopen the mass vaccine sites to accelerate the vaccine programme?”
“I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) on being granted this urgent question, but may I express my disappointment that this matter has had to be raised in an urgent question and that the Government have not volunteered a statement? There was a NATO Foreign Ministers’ meeting last week. We have a crisis in the Balkans. We have Russia spiking our gas supplies. We have Russia creating the migration crisis in Belarus, and we have Russia on aggressive military manoeuvres around Europe with its massively renewed military hardware. When will the Government take on board the fact that we are in a hybrid war against Russia now and that there needs to be a comprehensive and united western response, because, at the moment, NATO is weak and divided?”
“I thank my hon. Friend for his statement. Can he confirm that it is the Government’s policy to encourage the reopening of mass vaccination centres to get through the bulge of booster jabs that we need? In that regard, will he congratulate the South Suffolk & North East Essex integrated care system, which has once again secured facilities at Harwich international port, and will he thank the port for offering those facilities again? We are hoping for a mass vaccination session on 19 and 20 December, and further sessions in January. Is that not the way to take the pressure off GPs?”
“Or, by adding more, are we perhaps being drawn dangerously into a zero-sum game, where rules beget rules and more rules beget more rules in an effort to try to clarify, and in fact making it more complicated? I particularly draw attention to section 8 of the report, on “Training, advice and promotion”. That is nothing to do with the enforcement of the code but is about promoting understanding of the purpose of the code and how we can more easily comply with the spirit of the code and avoid falling foul of the rules. What does he think we should do next to pursue that part of our thinking?”
“I thank the hon. Gentleman for his statement, for his calm chairmanship of the Committee through a particularly difficult period, and for the consensual way that he chairs the Committee. Does he agree that it is really now time for some calm deliberation? Although this was a unanimously agreed report, by no means are all the proposals in it unanimously supported by all the members of the Committee. They are proposals for consultation, and he is right to invite evidence. Will he join me in drawing attention to the very useful summary of issues that is on the Committee’s website? Perhaps we should circulate that as a link to all Members. Does the hon. Gentleman recall that we set out to try to simplify the code of conduct? Does he think we are succeeding in simplifying?”
“I have no brief for Trump, but at least Trump managed to get us all to spend more money; Biden looks completely disinterested in foreign wars. He has to become interested. Just as Clinton started from that position—”
“It is stoking the ethnic tensions and encouraging the separatists and the break-up of the state, because I imagine Putin regards it as in his national interest to see 1.8 million Bosnian refugees flooding into Europe when western Europe is already facing a refugee crisis. He would love that, and the Chinese are helping, too. What are we going to do? Are we just going to carry on pussyfooting around? The solution is for EUFOR, which is a small European Union force, to be reinforced very substantially, now. I differ from the hon. Member for Rochdale on this point: I think that if the Bosnian Government requested that, NATO would have to respond. However, that would require persuading the United States’ Mr President Biden, who has become far more isolationist and unhelpful to NATO.”
“The French have always had a stronger relationship with the Serbs than with any other part of the Balkans. The United States now, as it did then, feels that this was a post-cold war European security problem that it should not get involved with. And then there was some precipitate action by an external actor, Germany—the recognition of Croatia, I think in 1990—that triggered the whole Balkan crisis. It took years before it was understood what we had to do—we tried an air campaign, which did not succeed, and we had to put troops on the ground to stop the fighting—but at least when we got in there and did it, we got an agreement. We got the agreement with tacit Russian co-operation—Russia did not prevent it. This time, Russia is a player in the conflict.”
“I happened to make a visit, I think with the armed forces parliamentary scheme, to NATO, and I heard the then Supreme Allied Commander of NATO describe this as the biggest security failure in the European continent since the second world war. We began to wake up to the fact that something terrible was happening. What had gone wrong? My hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Melton said that we are repeating the same mistakes as we did in the early 1990s. Oh yes we are. First, there is complacency. Secondly, there are different voices. We talk about the European Union, but the European Union has different voices. Different countries have different approaches. I am afraid that the German Government are pretty ambivalent at the moment about whether the Bosnian state should be secured permanently.”
“I think there are only three Members here this afternoon who sat through the 1992 to 1997 Parliament. We heard Paddy Ashdown every week at Prime Minister’s Question Time—it was twice a week then—asking questions on what we were going to do about the Balkans crisis. I have to say, I am one of the guilty ones who sat on the Government Benches and thought that he had become obsessed with something that we could not do anything about or should not get involved with. But he was right. It was only when the bread queues in Sarajevo were being shelled by the Serbians that we began to realise that something terrible was happening in our own continent.”
“I very much welcome the points made by the hon. Member for Rochdale (Tony Lloyd), and I wholeheartedly agree with them, except for one: I think it is NATO’s job not to interfere in the internal affairs of a state but, if invited to secure the security of that state—and we feel we can do that—to make an offer to it to save it from conflagration. I will come back to that. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Melton (Alicia Kearns) on securing this debate, on the very knowledgeable way in which she introduced the topic and on the passionate way that she spoke. I have wonderful words in my prepared speech, Madam Deputy Speaker, but in the interests of brevity, I shall cast aside my beautiful turns of phrase and say what I think needs to be said.”
“The UN resolutions are still in force under which we can act—and we should act. What if Russia objects? That is the question that I want to deal with.”
“My hon. Friend is quite right. I was going to go on to the point that it was Madeleine Albright, bless her, who persuaded President Clinton that the Americans had to be involved. President Clinton nicknamed it Madeleine’s war, but this time it has to be Secretary of State Blinken’s peace. My hon. Friend is completely right. The point is that we can pre-empt war if we get in there with sufficient deterrent force to deter those who are arming the separatists and encouraging their withdrawal from the Bosnian state institutions. The October mandate that Dodik issued that Republika Srpska elements should cease to operate as part of the Bosnian armed forces is an act of revolution, and it must be stopped. It is contrary to international agreements and it is contrary to the UN resolutions.”
“There must be much wider international agreement. The United Kingdom must support EU action and NATO action to do this together.”
“We could. I do not know whether we should do that in order to help to secure international agreement and consensus, or whether we should do it after we have secured international agreement and consensus, but if securing agreement takes too long, that may be something that we should do. Brave nations need to act to prevent another conflagration on our continent—it need not be inevitable. These are my final questions to the Minister. What happened at the Riga NATO summit? What was discussed? When will we have a statement from the Government about what has been decided and how we, as NATO, will proceed on the matter? I am quite certain that the EU cannot do it on its own. One of the myths created by the EU is that there is something called European defence and security, or a European army, or whatever it is. It cannot act.”
“I emphasise the hon. Lady’s point about the role of women and the empowerment of women in conflict prevention, which has also been raised by my hon. Friends the Members for Rutland and Melton (Alicia Kearns) and for Meon Valley (Mrs Drummond). The women’s peace movement in Northern Ireland was instrumental in helping to end that conflict, and men should be supporting women’s peace movements.”