National Security and Investment Bill

Lord Alderdice Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 4th February 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Woodley, on his arrival in the House. He commented powerfully on the failure of privatisation. They are remarks I welcome and to which I will circle back.

Two Greens are speaking in this Second Reading. My noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb will talk about the national security aspect of the Bill and I will speak on the investment part. My noble friend will focus on the major, long-identified threats of the climate emergency and the nature crisis, with its many linked dangers, including that of pandemics. On those and other issues, as the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, noted, it is nonsensical that we are debating this Bill while still awaiting the integrated review. I want to focus mainly on the investment part of the title and on another element of national security—poverty, inequality and how the finance curse contributes to them.

There is increasing academic focus on the importance of giving macroprudential regimes a sense of social purpose, including in respect of national security. Excellent work is being conducted at the University of Sheffield, particularly by its Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute, known as SPERI. We have an oversized, overactive, extractive financial sector. A SPERI report conservatively put the cost of the finance curse between 1995 and 2015 at £4,500 billion. That has to be seen as a threat to our national security. Money that could be strengthening our society is lost, as is control over a commodity as essential to a modern society as water or air. The finance curse is built on a sector that, as we learned in 2008, is as fragile and dangerous as an oversized dictator’s statue teetering on an inadequate, narrow pillar.

The other security threat lies in the extractive processes. There are huge and widely acknowledged issues of corporate culture and priorities, as well as regulatory loopholes and blind spots which allow financial funds and senior corporate management to loot companies and hollow out balance sheets. As a society and as a Parliament, we have lost control.

This issue arises particularly in the context of this Bill, where we are talking about investment by foreign companies in foreign states. We might hope that some pressure could be put on domestic companies to act in socially responsible ways by directing at least some of their funds to things we need to keep society running. They have, after all, to exist in this country, even if they seldom keep their profits here. The same constraints do not apply to foreign investors. While we know that a huge percentage of profits from even UK investment ends up in offshore tax havens, we can be sure that those profits will not help us where there are foreign owners.

I want to focus briefly on the nature of a curse—be it finance or resource. We look around the world at nations often identified as suffering from resource curse, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Venezuela, Iraq and South Sudan. They have huge problems of national—and internal—security. Oil is sucked out of their rocks. Our society is milked for cash. Meta-analyses of the resource curse show there is nothing inevitable about this. The quality of governance, the rule of law and the functioning of democracy are crucial to prevent it. Which is where we come back to this law—and the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Woodley.

In the UK, through continuing decades of privatisation, we have sold off the family silver. We are now down to the rather small teaspoons. When, in 2016, the people showed that they wanted to “take back control”, that reality was hidden, but the Government no longer have flamboyantly presented fictions about Brussels to hide behind. When they champion “Singapore-upon-Thames”, they will be held responsible for the consequences. Noble Lords working on this Bill, but particularly the Government, might want to focus on that.

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Alderdice) (LD)]

The noble Lord, Lord Clark of Windermere, has withdrawn, so I call the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie of Downpatrick.