National Security (State Threats) Bill

Baroness Gill Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 23rd June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Gill (Lab)]

My Lords, we have already heard a lot about how our adversaries are looking at the UK and seeing a permissive environment for causing chaos, as well as recruiting foot soldiers on the same social media platforms they use to manipulate the British people—which, incidentally, they have been doing for years.

This subversion is not new. It has been grinding away at our democracy since well before the Brexit referendum. Some of us remember it vividly. I remember scrolling through my feeds years ago and receiving highly targeted anti-EU questionnaires on social media. Platforms such as Facebook were not just places to connect: they were actively weaponised to push anti-EU propaganda in order to manufacture chaos and systematically shatter public trust in not just the EU but the United Kingdom’s core institutions. What we are seeing today is simply the terrifying escalation of that campaign.

According to the briefing by the House of Lords Library, MI5 has just dropped a metric confirming that investigations into hostile state activity have skyrocketed by 35% in a single year. This is no longer just a quiet war of digital propaganda: the line between foreign espionage and domestic terror has evaporated completely.

First, let us look at how our adversaries have moved from online manipulation to physical violence. It should come as absolutely no surprise that our major political parties, most vital companies and public infrastructure are being targeted relentlessly, but let us discard the illusion that these are ad hoc attacks by random, frustrated individuals. These are highly co-ordinated campaigns by hostile state actors whose focus and objectives are to undermine Britain’s power, credibility and influence on the global stage. Look at what Russia is doing today. It has moved from manipulating algorithms to hiring street criminals. It sits safely behind keyboards, hops on to social media platforms and encrypted apps, and recruits cheap local proxies, such as the six Bulgarian nationals who were convicted in May 2025, paying them in cryptocurrency to carry out dirty operations on British soil.

How far is it willing to go? Look no further than the shocking reports of a steady stream of Russian-commissioned arson attacks targeting the private properties and vehicles of our own Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer. If it is willing to put a torch to the Prime Minister’s personal property in order to spark domestic fear, what will prevent it targeting anyone else? At the same time, Russia continues to deploy massive, automated networks of sponsored bots—expanding the very digital warfare that polluted our social media feeds a decade ago—all of them calibrated to pump out venomous disinformation, trigger panic and actively incite civil unrest in our towns and cities.

Secondly, we have to talk about the direct physical terror being unleashed on British citizens. Many noble Lords have already spoken about how Iran has become so emboldened. In just 12 months, MI5 had to hunt down and stop more than 20 separate, potentially lethal, plots backed by Iran. Following the outbreak of conflict in the Middle East in early 2026, those threats directly hit our streets. We have seen a wave of targeted, terrifying attacks on Iranian dissidents and our Jewish communities. Much has also been said about the IRGC, which, as has been noted, is hiring local thugs as foot soldiers to terrorise Jewish neighbourhoods, in effect dragging foreign conflicts directly on to British soil in order to settle scores.

Thirdly, we are letting our intellectual and economic future be plundered in broad daylight. China is running an incredibly sophisticated “total society” operation against the UK. Through its massive, sweeping cyber breaches and aggressive campaigns to lure away UK academic experts, our cutting-edge technology is being drained away. It is exploiting our supply chains, university partnerships and FDI in order to steal commercial secrets and feed them straight into its own military and economic machines.

Therefore, this Bill—the National Security (State Threats) Bill—should be welcomed by this House. But I want to ask the Minister a couple of questions. First, how exactly do the Government intend to pierce the veil of the encrypted apps, cryptocurrency networks and automated bot networks that Russia is using to build its criminal proxy network? Secondly, when Iran co-ordinates lethal plots against our Jewish communities and China systematically plunders our universities, what is our concrete, immediate diplomatic and economic retaliation?

I say to those who want more time and want to deliberate that, today, the United Kingdom faces an aggressive, relentless surge in covert state threats. These are hostile operations planned by foreign Governments that stop just short of a declaration of war, but their objectives are identical: to sabotage our safety, bleed out our economic prosperity and shatter our democratic freedoms. That is why the Bill is a crucial step, and I support it.