UK Defence Forces

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho Excerpts

Thursday 23rd November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Soley, for initiating the debate, especially as I have just had the honour of joining the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy. As part of that, I have been invited to dinner this evening on HMS “Victory” in Portsmouth, to hear more about the Navy’s capacity. In preparation, I have been reading about Nelson. This quote struck me as very significant:

“Never break the neutrality of a port or place, but never consider as neutral any place from whence an attack is allowed to be made”.


How would Nelson think about our world now, when decisions about what constitutes neutrality are so much more complex?

The internet is the most complex of places. It would be absurd to talk about our defence resources without recognising the role of the internet in global peace. It is an enormous challenge. When it comes to resourcing and defending the UK, and maintaining our role in global peace, we must recognise that threats have changed forever. Our resourcing must reflect that. I believe that we in the UK do not yet understand the full power of the internet.

We must look at that issue through the lens of countries that, arguably, understand the internet’s power. I agree with the thesis of the academic John Naughton that those countries are Russia, China and, to a lesser degree, North Korea. Surprising choices—but consider their strategies.

Russia was quick to refine its military doctrine to incorporate information operations, which lays out a new theory of modern warfare—one that, according to Naughton, looks more like hacking an enemy’s society than attacking it head-on. As the news site, Politico, wrote:

“The approach is guerrilla, and waged on all fronts with a range of actors and tools … hackers, media, businessmen, leaks … fake news … conventional and asymmetric military means”.


I am sure I do not need to remind colleagues of the role that played in the US elections. I am equally sure that this is the tip of the iceberg. As has been admitted, we were caught off-guard.

China is clearly very different but as threatening. It is highly technocratic but has decided to have the internet without its liberal tendencies. As Naughton writes,

“China now has a very large and vibrant Internet, huge online industries and formidable technical and hacking capabilities. They have invented what the scholar Rebecca Mackinnon calls networked authoritarianism”.

I call it a parallel internet.

North Korean prowess in cyber operations is steadily mounting. In 2016, North Korean hackers stole nearly $1 billion from the New York Federal Reserve. They were stopped only by a spelling mistake: a bogus misspelled “fandation”, rather than “foundation”. They still got away with over $80 million. Two years earlier, they led the devastating attack on Sony Pictures. Kim Jong-un’s regime understands how digital technology can overcome its industrial and economic weakness and turn it into a strength.

So, we have three regimes using the internet in different, but terrifying, ways—ways which I believe we are neither resourced nor, equally importantly, structured to fight. However, that is not my only concern. We will never make the right decisions about how to have a sufficient level of resources if politicians and policymakers fail to understand the internet and, worse than that, make it a kind of scapegoat.

As I have said here before, after the hideous attacks in the UK over the past year, politicians and commentators used inflammatory language that was knee-jerk and unhelpful, leading the public to believe that if the internet could be shut down, we would all be safe. As RUSI recently wrote,

“Scapegoating tech companies for online radicalisation is not only misguided – it detracts attention away from the crucial responsibility that society must bear in fighting the spread of violent extremism where it matters most: in the real world”.


As a director of Twitter, I declare an interest; I have seen first-hand how it wrestles with these issues. However, as RUSI argues,

“how would social media companies go about designing a tool that could automatically detect and block ‘extremist content’? What constitutes ‘evil material’? And who determines what these are? As Brian Lord, former deputy director for Intelligence and Cyber Operations at GCHQ, pointed out … content that is seen to be ‘free speech’ in one country might be seen as incitement to violence in another”.

Welcome initiatives, such as the National Cyber Security Centre, are building our cyber resilience, but they are a drop in the ocean and relatively insignificant. We do not have time to waste. This is one of the gravest moments in my lifetime. We need a dramatic rethink, not only about overall levels of funding, but, crucially, about how we structure ourselves to collaborate across disciplines and deploy diverse skills.

What boldness in long-term thinking can the Minister reassure us that the Government are working on? To end again with Nelson:

“Time is everything; five minutes make the difference between victory and defeat”.


Imagine: that was in 1800. Thank goodness the world has slowed down.