Isle of Wight Conservative MP, Bob Seely, has been kept very busy since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It’s probably due to his vast academic knowledge of Russian warfare, his position on the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, and the MP’s experience living in the former USSR in the early 1990s.
Earlier this week Bob appeared on Iain Dale’s LBC programme, Cross Question, where he joined a panel of others answering questions from LBC listeners (which you can watch in full below).
Refugee crisis: Yes we should be moving faster
Seely was first off the blocks by being asked whether the UK government’s response to the Ukrainian refugee crisis had been appropriate and/or sufficient.
Bob Seely replied,
“At the moment, probably not, but I think it will be very soon, I hope. I am dealing with a couple of Ukrainian refugee issues myself so clearly the quicker we can get a system in place the better. I think we have been a bit slow. I think Priti is doing her best to get up to speed and so is Ben Wallace.
“I would just say to give it a little bit of context, in the past year or two we have had tens of thousands of folks from Hong Kong, we have taken in nearly 20,000 people from Afghanistan, so it is not as if we are not doing our duty as good global citizens, but yes, we should be moving a little bit faster with this, but it is a very quick moving situation. So hopefully we will be getting our act together in very short order.”
Seely: Been warning people for two years
Iain pushed the MP further suggesting that this situation has been on the horizon for many months and adding that the Government were “making it up as they go along”.
Mr Seely said for more than two years he had been “banging on and boring people” about the need for data protection laws and libel law reform, and that he has been trying to warn of what could be happening in Russia.
Calls for Priti Patel to resign
Later in the programme, Seely was asked about his view on the calls for the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, to resign.
He replied,
“I like Priti, I think very highly of her, and I think she’s trying to get a grip with a very large department which is has had structural problems for some time.”
He went on to say in relation to refugees that, “we should be taking more, yes the Home Office has been a bit slow, I have faith in Priti and I respect her ability to try to put some rockets underneath this”.
Seely’s view on a ceasefire
The Isle of Wight MP gave his view on what a ceasefire should look like, he said,
“It’s up to the Ukrainians, but I am quite sympathetic to what you [Iain Dale] say because every day between one and 500 civilians are going to get killed.
“Therefore, if we can get to some kind of ceasefire I think it would be incredibly important for very obvious reasons.”
Seely goes on to say that he believes Ukraine has won and “assuming it survives, it will never again be under Moscow’s thumb”.
He told the panel and listeners that this is what he did his PhD in last year and went on to explain in more detail (22.55 mins in).
Seely: The idea that if Britain spent more on renewables we’d solve all our problems, is just for the birds
Just over half way through the programme, Bob is asked whether he agreed the UK should use coal to escape our reliance on Russian oil and gas.
He replied,
“No, but it’s actually a really good question. I think there is a huge naivety just thinking that renewables are going to solve all our problems.
“Look at Germany, to appease the green lobby Merkel shut down 17 nuclear reactors, the result is that Germany is now burning … 35 per cent of its need is now supplied from coal, and this is brown lignite coal, the dirtiest form of pollution known to humanity.
“It hasn’t produced enough renewables, even Germany, so the idea that if Britain just spent more on renewables we’d solve all our problems is just for the birds.”
Seely: You encourage a dictator
He went on to say,
“If you play to a green lobby, if you shut down your nuclear, you end up as Germany has with an environmental mess because you’re producing huge amounts of coal-fired pollution and as we have now seen, a strategic mess because if Putin thinks, ‘the Germans aren’t going to kick off when I invade Ukraine because I have them over a barrel because I supply their oil, gas and supply a lot of their coal’, then you actually encourage a dictator. And that’s what’s happened here.”
He adds that in the UK,
“We should continue to invest in oil and gas production in the North Sea, not to put Net Zero on hold but during this transition process, and we must be mindful much more than we have been of our energy security need.”
Later (42 minutes in), he shared his view of the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
“Virtue signalling”
At 53 minutes in a listener asked whether the Government should declare a national emergency because events have pushed the cost of living beyond the means of millions of Britons.
Seely said he didn’t think we’d need to declare a national emergency, adding.
“I’m afraid to say the energy mess we are in at the moment is what happens when politicians from New Labour to the coalition, and indeed with the Conservatives, spend their time virtue signalling rather than having the moral honesty to deal with difficult problems, as this is a mess of 20 years making.”
Would you buy a car from Bercow?
The final question posed was whether the panel members would buy a car from the former Speaker of the House, John Bercow.
Seely replied,
“It was wrong for Labour to keep him in his post, I think there was a a cabal of ‘remainers’ who have destroyed his reputation, who kept him there because he was a useful person to have in the Speaker’s Chair, whilst they were trying to overturn a democracy in the Brexit vote.”
