Queen’s Speech

Baroness Manningham-Buller Excerpts

Tuesday 18th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Manningham-Buller (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I swapped my slot with my noble friend Lady Meacher, at her request.

In the gracious Speech, Her Majesty the Queen referred to

“measures to increase the safety and security of … citizens”.

I pick for comment from that broad aspiration the proposed legislation to make it easier to counter threats to this country from other states: the counter-state threats Bill, to which the Minister referred at the beginning of this debate. We do not yet have a Bill, although we can get a reasonable sense of it from the Home Office consultation. The Minister described the aims of the legislation and—for once, despite the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, that Cross-Benchers always disagree with the Government—I wish to reinforce what the Minister said in his opening remarks: modern tools and powers are needed to detect, prevent and respond to threats from states whose aim is to undermine the safety and interests of the UK.

In thinking about what I wanted to say at this very preliminary stage, I reflected that in my dozen or so years in your Lordships’ House I have rarely spoken about hostile state activity, despite many years of experience of trying to counter it, mainly in the Cold War. The fault is mine; my excuse is that successive Governments have not had the appetite to tackle the problem, rather preferring to rely on creaky legislation from the last century designed to deal with German espionage in the run-up to the First World War and Nazi espionage in the run-up to the Second World War. The Government moved to fill some of the legislative gap in the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act 2019, but then recognised that more was needed. I strongly welcome their intention to legislate, and I look forward to seeing what the Bill says.

Why do we need it, and what are we talking about in 2021? I start with what we are not talking about. As a young intelligence officer, I remember interviewing a Russian intelligence officer who was distressed to discover that the papers in his carefully chosen dead letter box—a hollowed-out tree in which his agent was going to stow top-secret documents—had been eaten by squirrels. That is not what we are talking about any more; we are talking about activity at scale—industrial, economic and academic espionage, and cyberattacks to steal our secrets, distort data, spread lies, amplify disinformation, and, as I hope is of particular concern to this House, to interfere with and undermine democratic process.

I look forward to the scrutiny of this overdue legislation. I do not anticipate that it will have an easy passage, as it is a complex subject, but we need a law that is balanced and proportionate, recognising the public interest while allowing us to better defend ourselves against covert attacks, of which the scale and cost of the damage are not well understood.