‘We have a shared duty to help rebuild Ukraine’

Remarks to Inter-Parliamentary Conference for the Common Foreign and Security Policy, Prague, 5 September 2022

Chairman, thanks so much for the chance to say a word from the House of Commons but also as chair of the International Parliamentary Network on the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

The hunger for peace has always driven Europe forward. And this moment can be no different. The reconstruction of the Ukraine is not simply a duty. It is a chance, a chance for us to rebuild a prosperous, clean market economy that is good for the people of the Ukraine, but is also a bulwark against the Kleptosphere that is taking shape from Kaliningrad through to Kamchatka.

But this effort will not going to be free. It is going to cost upwards of a trillion dollars. That’s why it’s not just our own resources we need – we need to start using the resources of the Bretton Woods institutions that we created in 1944 to help rebuild the world after World War Two.

Each of us needs to be asking what can we do with the $650 billion and special drawing rights that we each shared-out over the last year. This is a resource that we could mobilise now.

So as chair of the network, I invite you to join. But more important, I urge you to act – act within your own countries

As we say goodbye to Mikhail Gorbachev who was buried last week, we would do well to remember his words in Strasburg in 1989. It was there he said, we have a chance to build a common European home, rooted in the rule of law as a great gift to the world as we go forward.

Now, now is the time not to flinch, not to doubt but to act and make sure it is our ideals that prevail.