Ceasefire in Gaza
Debate between Nigel Evans and Mark Logan(2 months, 1 week ago)
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Mark Logan
I agree 100% with the right hon. Member. Members on my side of the House have talked about the motion being merely symbolic or virtue signalling, but at the end of the day we are MPs not to fix potholes or to follow up on whether a hedge is growing into next-door’s garden; we are here to protect lives. We have the opportunity today to call for an immediate ceasefire. Yes, that may just be signalling to an extent, but that signal must be given today to Israel, one of our close allies in the region. Twenty years back, with the United States in Iraq, we thought we were being the good friend by going along with them. No. The better friend says, “No, this must stop now; this must stop today.” A ceasefire must happen now.
No longer in good conscience can I continue to back in public the line that Government Members have taken, regrettably. Even from a geostrategic perspective, I do not see what favours that does for Israel in the long term. Israel has had a difficult time in the region that it is sat in, but this will not create any more friends for Israel. I come from Northern Ireland—I see the hon. Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley), a villager from the same neck of the woods as me—where, in the last 30 to 40 years, 3,500 people died in the troubles, and I know the trauma that has caused. But in five months, 30,000 people have died—how will people ever get over that? In our experience, Hamas are bad people, and they have to be called out. The people behind them have to be obliterated. We do not want to work with Hamas.
The SNP motion could have gone further to call out Hamas. We in Northern Ireland have dealt with those troubles, when very bad people hid behind political leadership. The ceasefire must happen. That is also in the interests of Israel in the long term. Now is the time for the United Kingdom to step up and take a leadership position with other middle powers, not wait for the next United States election.
In my own good conscience, I cannot acquiesce to the Government’s position on Gaza anymore, and neither can the people of Bolton. Although you sit diagonal to me today, you are not diametrically opposed to me—
Relationship with Russia and China
Debate between Nigel Evans and Mark Logan(2 years, 2 months ago)
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Mark Logan (Bolton North East) (Con)
It is a great privilege to follow my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown). As he was talking, I was thinking about 1215, King John and his advisers and the necessity to curtail power. President Putin needs to be put back in his box. We need to support our Government in everything that they are doing in the weeks and months ahead. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) for securing the debate in the Chamber today, even though it is a sober one. My thoughts are very much with my Ukrainian community in Bolton, where I have a Ukrainian social club and cultural centre, led by Yaroslaw, in the heart of my constituency.
Essentially, I will say three things to three different groups of people. I will make a first point to the Minister, a second to those with slightly more hawkish tendencies and a third to China—although I do not think it necessarily watches our debates that often. [Interruption.] Via the embassy, perhaps.
To the Minister, I say do not push China and Russia closer together. To speak to the motion, that should be the case if the Government are seeking to align their policy and strategy when it comes to Russia and China.
To those who are more sceptical and see the threats in the world at the moment, I say that we should choose strategy over ideology, because ideology on its own is not a strategy. As has been mentioned throughout the debate, one of our great advantages in this country is the alliances that we have built over many years and decades. We should be proud of them.
To China, I say that it has a chance to show leadership during this crisis and to show that it can be more sophisticated on the international stage. It is often the case that Chinese friends or contacts of mine will say that they ai heping—love peace. When they refer to Russia on social media, they will often refer to Russians as a zhandou minzu—more of a fighting people. My call to the Chinese in the midst of the biggest crisis that we have had in Europe is that China does not play the game that Russia is playing. It has a fantastic opportunity to show leadership.
On diplomacy and strategy, this week is 50 years since Nixon’s detente with Mao Zedong. It is awfully striking that we see the tectonic plates suddenly shifting again. My right hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox) spoke articulately about a changing world order. I do not fear the world order changing, because the only constant is change, but how it is happening is completely wrong. How Russia acted in 2014 over Crimea, and how it is acting in Ukraine today, is completely wrong. There should be processes involved—a democratic process—and that has not happened. That is why, in this country, we have to stand by our values in the face of that regime.
To continue thinking about western policy with Nixon, that week was all about Kissinger’s foreign policy. Over the last few years, the United States has had a reverse Kissinger approach to develop the relationship with Russia as opposed to with China, but that has failed, as my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin) alluded to earlier. Who will be the British Kissinger? Who will be the honest broker who brings China on side?
The United Kingdom has a fantastic opportunity. We were a superpower not that long ago and people in our society still remember that time. We had a very peaceful transition of power to the United States. We also have one of the most historical bilateral relationships with China, which predates the United States’ relationship and goes back to the Macartney mission in 1793 and touches on Lord Palmerston during the opium wars, which was a sombre time in that relationship. The Chinese respect the United Kingdom. They have a huge admiration for our culture and civilisation. The British Council’s statistics on the perception of the United Kingdom show that we are always among the most favoured nations in the world.
I have only a minute left to speak, but I note that we should be careful about conflating the issue of Taiwan with that of Ukraine. It was mentioned earlier that the Chinese are savvy when it comes to strategy. Indeed, Sunzi bingfa talks about shang bin fa mo, or buzhan ersheng—to win without fighting—as referred to by my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight earlier.
In our Government, our country and our society, we need to be careful about the short-termism that has come over us. Six months ago, when we invited the Ukrainian ambassador to speak to the all-party parliamentary group on Ukraine, three MPs turned up, but we could see it coming down the line. Everything is too last-minute and we are spending too much time in this Chamber and in other parts of this place talking about things that are not as important as the issue that is at hand now.
Those are the three messages. In closing, I say to the Minister that she should not allow China and Russia to become too close—
Beijing Winter Olympics and Chinese Government Sanctions
Debate between Nigel Evans and Mark Logan(2 years, 9 months ago)
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Mark Logan (Bolton North East) (Con) [V]
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) for securing this debate, and I am pleased to have the opportunity to follow a fellow Greater Manchester MP, the hon. Member for Stockport (Navendu Mishra).
When people say “Olympics”, there’s me thinking about jumping hurdles, hitting archery targets, Usain Bolt breaking records and our wonderful Team GB cycling team, but then I realised it is not Tokyo that we are on about today, but rather the Beijing and Hubei 2022 winter Olympics. You know what? I know absolutely nothing about the winter Olympics, yet here I am today speaking in a debate about them, though I am confident in observing that the absence of a background in something does not necessarily deter anyone from waxing lyrical in the Chamber.
I have to declare an interest in China, and that is that I know a wee bit about the country. I worked and lived there for over a decade, and I spent around 14,000 hours learning Mandarin Chinese—Putonghua—along with the Shanghainese dialect. I also hold two master’s degrees on China, as well as currently reading for a PhD in China-related studies. Unfortunately, over the last year, nearly all the debate on China has been extremely one-sided. It is not multifaceted, it fails to see much of the nuance that exists, and ultimately it does not depict the country that I came to know, although it does have many problems.
I know even less about the Olympics. I worked at the embassy during the Beijing 2008 Olympic games as the Olympic and Paralympic attaché, and helped to promote our wonderful country to the Chinese during the London 2012 Olympiad, when I was based at the British consulate in Shanghai. From these experiences, my view is that we should not be boycotting the upcoming 2022 winter Olympics, because it is now more important than ever for us to push for as many people-to-people and governmental exchanges as we possibly can. I am a firm believer in the UK being open to the world, as that is the only true way to maintain influence and project the interests of our people. The alternative is an introverted stance in international politics that, quite frankly, reeks of a seeping of confidence in our ability to influence and attract on the ice rink of international affairs.
I saw this at first hand in 2012 when Mr Wu Chengzhang wrote to me when I was at the British consulate two months before the London 2012 games. He really wanted to go to London to see the Olympics, because he had been there for the 1948 Olympiad playing basketball for the Chinese team. He even played against the British team. Through working with different partners, we were able to get him on a plane—he was 88 years old at the time—to go to London, where he met the man who had been his arch-nemesis at the time, Mr Lionel Price from the British team, who has sadly subsequently passed away. They spent the day together in London, where they went to the London Eye, among other things. This created so much good will between the peoples of the UK and China, and it was widely hailed as a bilateral success.
A British Chambers of Commerce report presented this week to the all-party parliamentary China group made the point that—I paraphrase—the resumption of travel and openness can help to create opportunities to build common ground and enhance intercultural understanding. This is exactly why we should be in attendance, come February 2022.
Today’s debates also makes me think about why, covid faff aside, there is no real opposition to Tokyo hosting the summer Olympics this month. When we think back, there was much anxiety in the 1980s about the economic rise of Japan, especially from the United States. Then we think of the last 30 years. Japan not only has maintained its position as one of the top three largest economies, but has a soft power capability that is truly astonishing. Along with the UK and the USA, it can boast one of the most influential youth cultures on the planet. I cannot help but feel that China can definitely take inspiration from its neighbour across the east China sea. It has done so before in its economic model, sometimes known as the developmental model for economics.
Certain developments obviously have not been helpful of late, including a tilt to a more aggressive tone in diplomatic engagement, sometimes referred to as wolf warrior diplomacy, and the sanctioning of my colleagues in the House. The sooner we can move away from such tools and tone of diplomacy the better. I welcome the arrival of Ambassador Zheng Zeguang to the UK, and hope that, if he happens to see today’s debate, he can work with our Government to ensure an easing in tensions. There is a long way to go in how China presents and communicates itself with the rest of the world. We must, however, ask ourselves what a boycott would achieve. In the case of the 2022 Olympics, many experts say that a boycott likely will not work and could make it even harder to gain concessions from China.
Experts found that boycotting the 1936 Berlin summer games and the 1980 Moscow summer games did not change the direction of state policy. I do not believe that a boycott will lead to China changing its policy on ethnic relations, particularly with the Uyghurs in the Xinjiang autonomous region, or zìzìhqū. If anything, the Government may dig in further. The only thing that it will achieve is potentially some loss of face on the organisers’ behalf, and those boycotting may feel virtuous for a few moments.
The Olympics should not be politicised, but obviously they have always been a medium through which to see the ebbs and flows of international relations. However, if we cannot engage in healthy competition on the slalom or in the bobsleigh, then what—
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
No, we have to move on. Sorry, Mark; you have had seven minutes.
We now go to Christine Jardine, by video link. We are having a bit of a glitch with the clock, as you may notice, so hopefully you have another device there. If not, just give your wonderful speech, and I will stop you after seven minutes or so.