I shall be brief, and I shall not take interventions, because others wish to speak. It is disappointing that these orders do not have this week’s date on them. We have let the public down once over leaving the EU on 29 March, and we should be leaving this week. I am grateful that planning is still going on for us to leave, and the sooner the better.
I want us to have a more ambitious foreign policy once we are an independent country again. There is a huge opportunity here for us to do good in the world by promoting the right kind of sanctions policy. I agree with all those colleagues who say that sanctions are more effective if we get more countries to buy into them. There are a number of areas, most notably Iran, where our US ally is very much at variance with our European allies, and that is surely where the United Kingdom—by adopting a distinctive approach and perhaps working more directly through the United Nations, freed of the constraint of belonging to one side in the two-sided row—could make a direct contribution, influence the world for the better and create a more united sanctions regime.
There are those who are very worried about sanctions targeting the wrong people. Of course it is best to target the guilty men and women at the top of evil regimes, but we need to recognise that they need access to hard currency. It is often by exploiting commodities or other hard currency generators in their economies that they perpetuate their evil and buy the things we do not want to sell them from others around the world who will. It is not easy to target just a limited number of people, so we have to find our way through.
I hope we can do that with Venezuela, where we need to back all the initiatives to try to get food and other aid in and to support the forces for democracy. Above all, we need to work with the opposition in Venezuela to show how they could restore their economy with the colossal oil wealth that is there beneath their feet but is deliberately not exploited by the evil incompetents of the regime. Let us have our own policy, and let us get on with it.
3.29 pm