It is a real privilege and an honour to follow the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) to help open this debate and to follow on from his arguments.
“Follow the money” is the oldest and wisest advice given to journalists who are pursuing the corrupt, shining lights where they need to be shone and hunting the truth, yet this dictum, which has served us so well since Watergate, is now being smothered, suffocated and strangled in courts by allies, associates and friends of President Putin, who is pursuing a hybrid war against the west and against us. That is the context for the debate that we are holding this afternoon.
Many of us in this House have been warning for some years that it is time for this country to wake up to this new threat. Hybrid war is a novel kind of conflict. Once upon a time, wars were fought on land, in the air and at sea, but no more. Hybrid war is a battle for minds as much as it is for land—for influence and narrative, not simply territory. That means it extends the battlefront to space, to cyber-space and, now, to law space. It is fought with tweets as well as tanks, and now it is being fought with writs as one more weapon in the armoury. Of course, the reason for this is simple: what totalitarians, autocrats and kleptocrats fear most is the truth, so what they are seeking to do is to murder the truth, and we are letting them do it in English courts.