Amendment 112

Part of National Security Bill - Committee (5th Day) (Continued) – in the House of Lords am 8:30 pm ar 18 Ionawr 2023.

Danfonwch hysbysiad imi am ddadleuon fel hyn

Photo of Lord Wallace of Saltaire Lord Wallace of Saltaire Liberal Democrat Lords Spokesperson (Cabinet Office) 8:30, 18 Ionawr 2023

My Lords, my name is on Amendment 113, and I commend the intentions of the amendments put down by colleagues on the Labour Benches.

What we are talking about here is how we alert the public to the nature of the threat. The Security Minister in the Commons indeed said that one of his greatest concerns in approaching this Bill was to make the public aware of the threats which we face. In the Minister’s absence, one of his colleagues on the Bench, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Bellamy, said that the overriding purpose of several clauses in the Bill is to convey a message. He said that this is above all a declaratory Bill, rather than a Bill which actually intends to do things, but these amendments are about the Government failing to send a message and, indeed, preferring not to talk about some of the threats which we face. After all, the Bill should alert us not only to the nature of the threats but to where those threats are most likely to come from. I note that the Minister said very little about Russia and not that much about China, North Korea or Iran but did his best to defend the idea that what we regard as friendly foreign powers should be included in our potential concept of threats, as if the message of this Bill should be “Beware of foreigners, particularly those associated with Governments whether democratic or not”. I hope that is not the intention of the Bill, but that is what it looks like at present.

The ISC report states very clearly that there are a number of threats—of course it is concerned with Russia —and that

“it is … the Committee’s view that the UK Intelligence Community should produce an … assessment of potential Russian interference in the EU referendum and that an unclassified summary of it be published”.

The Government have refused to do that, and the only statement in their response about why not is that they have received no evidence of successful interference in British politics, which means that they are aware of a whole range of attempts to interfere in British politics. It might be quite helpful to inform political parties and the public about what those could be.

The Government’s July 2020 response to the ISC’s Russia report is very interesting in a range of ways. It has a section which it entitles

“Defending UK Democracy from Foreign Interference” and flags up the new defending democracy programme, which was established in 2020, about which, so far, Parliament has been told remarkably little. The Security Minister made a speech about it some weeks ago which was not that much more informative, but he assured us that the defending democracy task force had held its first meeting in November last year, two years after July 2020. I think it would be helpful in informing and alerting the public if we were all told a little more about the defending democracy programme and the defending democracy task force.

The Government’s response goes on to state:

The Committee will also be aware that … the Government has concluded that it is almost certain that Russian actors sought to interfere in the 2019 General Election.”

The public were not told about that very much either. We all understand that this is mainly because the interference was towards the Conservative Party and the Conservative Party has many links with Russia, Conservative Friends of Russia and so on, which it prefers not to spell out, which may be partly why we are talking about so many other different countries. We remember Boris Johnson’s attempt as Prime Minister to hobble the Intelligence and Security Committee. Thankfully, that has now passed, but the issue of foreign interference in UK politics and public life is an important part of what we are focusing on and should receive more attention.

I have on a number of occasions in recent years argued for a proper review of the golden visa scheme—the tier 1 investor scheme. The Government finally closed it last year and promised to conduct a review. Instead of publishing that review, we had a Written Statement on 12 January 2023 with which the Minister will be familiar because the Statement to this House is in his name. It has no reference to national security risks under this programme. It talks entirely about illicit finance and criminal effects, and in a short two pages it says really very little about the problem as a whole. It states:

“The route attracted a disproportionate number of applicants from the countries identified in the UK’s National Risk Assessment of money laundering and terrorist financing 2020 as particularly relevant to the cross-border money laundering risks faced and posed by the UK.”

The Statement does not say, as the Wikipedia entry on Ben Elliot says, that Ben Elliot raised £2 million in and around the 2019 general election from Russians resident in Britain who were close to the Putin regime. That is something which ought to concern us and about which the Government certainly ought to have been a great deal more concerned. The ISC Russia report indeed talks about the growth of a community of “enablers” in London to service the Russians who had penetrated British political and public life. Ben Elliot’s company, Quintessentially, was one of the leading aspects of this and declared that it specialised in servicing Russian clients.

I stress this not simply to raise a particular name but, after all, he was co-chairman of the Conservative Party—with James Cleverly, the current Foreign Secretary—for 18 months, so we are getting fairly close in to influence and interference here with someone who was described as the Tories’ main fundraiser. Much of this was informal, of course, but the Bill talks a great deal about informal arrangements.

These amendments ask for proper information to Parliament, a stronger role for the Intelligence and Security Committee—which the last Prime Minister but one attempted so ignobly to cut down—and the publication of the review of the golden visa scheme so that we can understand just how far these people penetrated into British public and political life. I remind the Minister that the ISC Russia report says at one point that the penetration of rich Russians into British society and public life had gone so far that it was difficult to disentangle and that we now had to be concerned to mitigate those risks rather than to remove them.

All that the Government say on illicit finance and money laundering in their response to the ISC Russia report is:

“The Government agrees that the transparency of information about political donations is important.”

They then go on to talk about links to Members of the House of Lords. They say nothing about the duties of political parties to ensure that they know where they are getting donations from. No doubt we will come back to this before and during Report.

There are a number of holes in what needs to be done in the Bill to make sure that we strengthen our national security against foreign interference. I trust that the Minister will have some good answers and will come back to us off the Floor to discuss some of these concerns further.