My Lords, I rise briefly. I take comfort from what my noble friend the Minister has said and pay tribute to the resolve being shown by the Prime Minister and the Government—but they need to do more, as the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, has said.
This is not new. Litvinenko was poisoned in 2006 not a mile from here; Salisbury, Skripal, et cetera, took place in 2018; the invasion of Georgia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, took place in 2008, and Crimea in 2014. We must understand the pattern here. As the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, and I think my noble friend the Minister agree, we must take action now and it must be really dramatic.
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I refer my noble friend to a debate that took place in the other place led by my right honourable friend David Davis about lawfare, and how people living in London took Catherine Belton to court for libel for having the temerity to suggest that various oligarchs were in league with Putin. The book is called Putin’s People, and her costs were £1.5 million. I hope that all the lawyers who were working for the oligarchs hang their heads in shame. I do not notice many lawyers here today. Of course we want the rule of law, but we do not want our liberal values used against us, and that is what has been happening.
I also refer my noble friend and the House to—I am sure people watched it—a television programme called “McMafia”, with James Norton. Of course, it was fiction—we all understand that—but it was fiction based on fact. We need to wake up in this country. Putin has been running rings around us and around the West; he has been testing our resolve and has found it wanting. Now is the time to seize the initiative. The noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, is absolutely right: a lot of this high-end property, both in London and elsewhere, was bought with looted money. We need to seize it, freeze it and then get the lawyers to work and see where the money came from. We might need legislation to do that, but we cannot sit back and say this is business as usual. There is a war in Europe in our lifetime. We must act now.