OFCOM (Duty regarding Prevention of Serious Self-harm and Suicide) Bill [HL]

Lord Balfe Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 3rd February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I intervene to give my strong support to this Bill, which is a good step forward. I hope, in view of the debate we had the other night about the Online Safety Bill, that we will be able to meld these difficulties together into one Bill, but if we cannot, this is a good step forward.

I have come into this area only tangentially in that, when I was a member of the Council of Europe, I was involved in an assessment of AI and the uses to which it could be put. This ties in very much with the latter part of the noble Baroness’s speech, because what comes out of the box has to be put into the box. We were studying sentencing and whether you could use AI to sentence prisoners. Believe it or not, that has been tried in the State of Florida. Analysis afterwards showed quite clearly that the people who were inputting the information had a bias which they were not necessarily aware of but which was making the sentencing unbalanced. In fact, it was making it more likely that black people in Florida would be sentenced to longer prison terms, and more likely that they would be found guilty and sentenced than white people. However, when the researchers we employed went back to dig out the data, they did not find any bias in the people who were inputting it. In other words, there was no deliberate attempt to bias the data; it had all come about because of the unconscious bias which we probably all have buried within us. Therefore, we need to be very careful in this area.

It is a good step forward for Ofcom to set up a group to look at suicide and what it can do to address it—I am pleased to see that. However, I disagree marginally with the noble Baroness. It is not just about profit. One of the problems with the internet is the mental health issues of the people posting the information. We saw this the other day when I referred to the showing of the images given to the unfortunate little girl who took her own life. No one was actually making any money out of it, but they were undoubtedly getting psychological thrills from causing deep pain and harm. This is one of the things we have to address: it is not just about money, and in many cases, this is what happens on the web.

I am no expert on the web—in fact, at home I am a bit of a joke because of my lack of knowledge of how to navigate it—but what I have seen shows me that serious steps need to be taken. As I said in my speech the other night, we have to tackle vigorously the concept of anonymity on the web. There should be a way of tracing what is being posted and who is posting it, so that regulators and, if necessary, the police, can quickly get to the source. I made the point the other night—I will make it again—that the more anonymous a posting can be, the more unacceptable the sentiments in it often are. We are going to have to tackle this question of anonymity.

In my lifetime, I have known three people who ended their lives by committing suicide. None of them were children. For two of the three, it was completely un-expected. The only thing that could be said afterwards —of course, all the inquiry and debate comes afterwards— is that they had felt very isolated in facing up to the problems of their lives. It brought to mind the case, for those noble Lords who remember, of Dr David Kelly, who killed himself. His case was undoubtedly affected by his familial relations and the fact that he did not feel he had the level of support he needed.

The third person I knew who committed suicide suffered from deep mental depression. She was an Oxford graduate so she was not someone at the margin of life. She had a good degree and held a good job but she went into a spiral of depression to a point where, as one of my friends said, “She just won’t be helped, will she?” It was very sad but no one knew what to do. Other than locking her up in a secure room and keeping a watch on her, we probably could not have prevented her suicide. It was something that, I am afraid, a number of us expected to happen but were helpless in trying to prevent—although a number of us did try to prevent it by getting social services and mental health services involved. One of the lessons we must learn is that, for some people, the mental state into which they get is very difficult to help with. It is no good blaming the National Health Service for it. The health service is terribly overstretched and there is a limit to what it can do.

That has been a bit of a diversion on this excellent Bill. My final point concerns the words

“sent or posted with malicious intent”.

It is going to be very difficult to prove that. The definition needs to be tightened up and turned into something more like “sent or posted with apparent malicious intent” because other people have to judge it. It is no good some bright little person sitting there and saying, “Oh, I didn’t realise that anyone would kill themselves because of this. I was just playing around.” This offence probably needs to be tightened a little bit; we are going to have to rely on a certain amount of judge-made law to interpret how “malicious intent” is to be registered and understood.

Having said all that, I welcome the Bill. It is an excellent step forward from a most hard-working Member of this House, with whom I have had a lot to do over the years. We are very lucky that she is here. I wish her Bill well and I am sure that the Minister will do his best to help.

Online Safety Bill

Lord Balfe Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 1st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, this debate has attracted a lot of attention: some 60 speakers, nearly all of whom have run over their time. I will just make one or two observations. First, it is a long time that we have been waiting for this Bill, so we had better make a good job of it, because I doubt that the Government will let legislation through again for a good five or six years. The second point—I pick up something that my noble friend Lord Inglewood said—is that we need more flexibility in the law. The speed at which the internet has developed is not appropriate for the procedures that we have. It is no good saying that you can have a Henry VIII power, give it to a Minister and then forget it; we need to devise a method of reviewing laws on a regular rolling basis, such as they have in the United States, because the law will be out of date whatever we do.

I am fully behind the amendments of the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, and my noble friend Lord Bethell. I think that they are excellent amendments, and I look forward to us discussing them. We do not need to do that now.

I would add into the procedures that we need to give careful thought to the idea of anonymity on the internet. I am against it, personally. I am a member of the Conservative Home page and I am there as “Richard Balfe”. Some people are there with very odd names, such as “Brussels Hater” and other handles which do not reveal who they are. I notice that the more obscure the name is, the more violent the contribution is. We need to look very carefully at anonymity; the people who need to hide behind anonymity are probably not the sort of people that we, in considering this Bill, would see as the best people to do things.

My next point is about penalties. The penalties look fine—for example, 10% of world turnover—but of course these are not penalties on the firms; they are business expenses, and that is how they will be seen. I am not a great admirer of the American system but I will say one thing that came out of a visit I paid to Washington. I talked to legislators about how they enforced legislation—in this case it was against financial firms—and the Congressman I was speaking to said, “It is very simple: you imprison them”. He said that if a Bill has a possibility of imprisonment, it puts the fear of God into directors in a way that no fine, however big, does, because that is a business expense and can be planned for. We need to look carefully at whether there should a custodial element in the Bill for severe breaches. I think that would help to get it implemented. Otherwise, the danger I see is that we are in competition with lawyers based in Hollywood rather than with people based in London.

I look forward to the Bill passing; I hope we will do it carefully and considerately—I am sure we will—and take onboard the amendments of my noble friend Lord Bethell and the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, and the other improvements which have been mentioned.

Social Media: Deaths of Children

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Thursday 20th January 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I was looking for something original to say in this debate, so I went back to my previous existence as a Member of the European Parliament. One of the things that is still of great regret is that, in leaving Europe, we have left all the structures around it that can be helpful when we face problems like this. In particular, I think of the work of the EU directorate for health. In Europe, most countries face problems similar to ours and are trying to solve them. Overall in Spain, suicide among young people—defined by Spain as those aged 15 to 29, which probably goes a bit further than we would—is the second highest cause of death. Spain has put €100 million into a strategy to combat it, but it is doubtful whether it will do anything because, as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Allan, the key is getting access to the information. Italy is setting up an observatory, although it seems to be taking a long time. Even in Finland, which one thinks of as a very enlightened, Nordic country that deals with such issues, something like 25% of all suicides are in the age group from 15 to 24, so it is a problem that that country is also grappling with.

This is one of the great tragedies of leaving the EU. Although the EU has no formal responsibility, everyone will tell you that there are unofficial meetings of Health Ministers, where anything can be put on the agenda by any member state, so it is possible to exchange information. Have the Government gone to any effort to get information from other countries on how they are dealing with the issue, what their plans are, and whether they will publish that?

I have a couple of points from the briefing that I got. Among other things, it says that in a debate in the House of Commons, Chris Philp

“argued that they could ‘edit their algorithms tomorrow […] they should not be waiting for us to legislate; they should do the right thing today’.

Is there any sign of that right thing being done today? If so, it is certainly not recognised here. The briefing also said that

“Instagram said that it would ban graphic images of self-harm as part of a series of changes.”


Has it? Also, the online harms consultation says that the framework should include provisions to address suicide and self-harm. Has that been done?

Finally, can the Minister confirm in relation to suicide that all platforms and people of all ages will be in the scope of the final Bill when it is presented to the House? That is an important point. We need to go beyond just this group to the wider problem.

Telecommunications (Security) Bill

Lord Balfe Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 29th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, one of the great advantages of speaking late in a debate is that virtually everything has been said. I just want to light on a couple of things that have been said but I think could be said again.

First, I welcome the Bill. It is a useful Bill, but I do not think we should exaggerate where it is going to take us. At most, it covers a few bases. I was very pleased to hear the contribution of my good friend, the noble Lord, Lord Alton, because we do need to start looking much more carefully at the human rights and social practices in the countries we are buying from. The fact that it will take until 2027 for Huawei to be eliminated from our system shows just how interdependent we have become in this very small area, and how inter- dependent the whole world is becoming.

I was recently on a conference call with some people in Taiwan. One of the advantages that Taiwan has in its stand-off with China is Taiwan’s production of chips, just mentioned by the noble Baroness. The interdependence of this technological world is now really quite enormous. My concern, looking at the Bill, is that it is fine for us but it does not actually advance our security outside the United Kingdom.

Some years ago, when I was in a different party from the one I am in now, I was given the job of being defence spokesperson for the Labour Party in the European Parliament. If there were ever a non-job, that was it, because of course the European Parliament had no defence capacity whatever, and at that time the Labour Party thought that anything more advanced than a bow and arrow was not really an acceptable means of defence anyway. John Smith rescued me and I became, for my sins, the first leader of the European Parliament delegation to NATO—or the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, to be exact. One thing we had to look at there was the list of prohibited exports. If we are to safeguard our future, we will have to look again at getting like-minded countries together to look at how we can restrict the export of certain technology. It is going to be even more difficult now because technology is much more a worldwide thing.

There is a tremendous fragmentation of views in Europe. Germany still thinks it should be co-operating with China. It still thinks that the business side is more important than the human rights or the social side, but we have to bring the Germans back on board. We cannot force them; we do not have any levers any more. In fact, now that we are not in a place that is never mentioned any more in this Chamber, we do not even meet them in political co-operation. We do not meet them, and we never really understood how important it was that, on a regular basis, all our Ministers met European Ministers to exchange views, to keep up to date and just to keep knowing each another. We never seemed to grasp that and we have now lost it. Everything we do can move forward only if we can carry other people with us.

I make no excuse whatever for saying, as I have said in this Chamber several times before, that China is going to be the main threat, probably for the next 50 years, and it is going to get worse. We have to get ourselves a foreign policy that actually makes sense. A foreign policy that concentrates on a country with the GDP of Italy and the social organisation of, let us say, southern Italy—namely, Russia—is not the way forward. These people have to somehow be brought on board and that is what I, in my own small way in the Council of Europe, as a delegate, tried to do—to intervene in this huge debate that is going on in Russia: should we look west, should we look east? That is a debate, but at least it is a debate: it is not a debate in China.

If we look at the countries between the two—the “stans”—they are also countries that we have to put some diplomatic effort into. It is no good pretending that we do not know they are there; we have to put some effort into them. That is some way away from the Bill but it is part of what the Bill is about—trying to build a secure world. I would say, in the words of the old film, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.” We have not really had a sustained cyberattack in this country. Our cashpoints have not stopped working yet. The computer system has not crashed completely yet, but the technology is almost there to make it happen, and that has to be part of our challenge.

I have great admiration for the Minister, but I question whether DCMS is the correct department of state to be looking at our future and our preparations to deal with the technological, technical challenges that lie ahead. I have a lot more confidence in looking at the noble Lord, Lord West, and the strategic and security services to lead on this measure than in DCMS, which I think has a very different job and I am not sure, frankly, is the right department to be handling this. Having said that, I look forward to helping my noble friend the Minister get the Bill through the House as a contribution—I think it will turn out to be a very small contribution—to the journey that we have to embark upon.

Telecommunications Infrastructure (Leasehold Property) Bill

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Report stage & Report stage (Hansard) & Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 29th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con) [V]]

My Lords, there is never a best time to do these sorts of things, is there? However, I want to start by agreeing strongly with my noble friend Lord Cormack that this has been a most unsatisfactory way of conducting a debate. We have lost all the spontaneity that we get in the House and it is a very false atmosphere.

Let me move on. Huawei is a commercial company. I have done a lot of reading during this lockdown. One of my recent books has been the last volume of Volker Ullrich’s German account of the life of Hitler—Hitler Downfall 1939-45. It showed that not only Siemens but a vast quantity—virtually all—of German industry was behind the Government, using slave labour and knowing exactly what it was doing. I do not believe that Huawei does not know exactly what it is doing, and if we deal with them, we are complicit.

I noted with pleasure the dissertation on Monnet by the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan. I had 10 years in the European Parliament and was its representative on the board of governors of the Jean Monnet Foundation. I remind the House that the other great notable invention of the late 1940s was Eleanor Roosevelt and the ILO, setting down standards of labour which are blatantly abused by the Chinese Government. The ILO and China do not appear to be on the same paragraph or even on the same page.

This morning, as a member of the legal affairs committee of the Council of Europe, I attended a virtual meeting where one of the matters of report was the charging of Hashim Thaci from Kosovo. He has been indicted by the International Court of Justice in The Hague on charges of organ harvesting, so there is no doubt that not only is that practice disallowed in Europe, it is seen as a war crime. We need to bear in mind all those points.

As they say in the police service, China has form. Years ago, I was the joint chair of the Hong Kong friendship group of the European Parliament. We had constant pressure from China. It did not like us going to Hong Kong or our support for the democratic structures, and it certainly did not like Governor Chris Patten when he was there trying to push a democratic agenda. I also went to Taiwan. An official protest was lodged by the Chinese Government with the European Parliament at the mere fact that I had gone there. So there is a lot of form; many of us will remember that anyone who meets the Dalai Lama very quickly gets the black spot put on them, including our former Prime Minister David Cameron; when he met the Dalai Lama, he was subject to two years of freeze from the Chinese Government.

I think we have to draw the line. At some point, we have to recognise that China is not on our side and we have to re-evaluate. It is not just the case of Huawei, but of getting together our colleagues in the Five Eyes, where we are already on the wrong side, in the European Union and elsewhere in what we always used to call the free world to join together and recognise that the performance, values and behaviour of the people of the Republic of China are anti everything we stand for.

We are supporting this amendment. Perhaps the Minister is right that it is not the most appropriate Bill to tack in on to, but my good colleague, my noble friend Lord Forsyth, is also right that Ministers have to use the best argument they can find. This is the only Bill we have. I must say I am suspicious about what we will get at Third Reading and about whether we will get a proper opportunity. I would rather send this back to the Commons, let the Commons debate it and let the Commons—the elected House—come up with a solution. I hope very much that the noble Lord, Lord Alton, will divide the House because I think the Government would benefit from having the opinion of the Commons much more than a Third Reading debate in this House where it all might still go wrong.

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Non-Afl) [V]]

My Lords, the mover of the amendment has spoken, the Minister has spoken and now I have spoken.

Data Strategy

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Wednesday 24th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran]

The noble Lord is right that digital identity and having clarity on that is critical. The Government have been very open about having had some unavoidable delays, most particularly around the election and now, sadly, with Covid. Part of the work within the strategy will be to identify which areas and datasets to prioritise and focus on.

[Lord Balfe (Con) [V]]

Can the Minister give us an assurance that the Government will not let public data go into private hands and then be kept there in such a way that it cannot be accessed by other people within the public sector? There is a concern that private companies may get hold of public data and that it will then be lost to wider policy-making.

[Baroness Barran]

My noble friend’s last point is spot on, in the sense of the value of good data to public policy-making. I think many of us are looking forward to that. Crucially, part of it must be that we uphold those principles of transparency, accountability, inclusion and, obviously, lawfulness. They will be part of the considerations that we look at.

Armistice Day: Centenary

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Monday 5th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I add my thanks to my noble friend Lord Ashton for his introduction to this most important debate. I declare an interest as someone who has lectured in European history—and by that I mean the history of Europe, not the history of Britain as part of it. Many of us in this House are of an age where what happened in the First World War is much closer to our family history than it is for our children. My family was half from Britain and half from Ireland; they had very different experiences of the First World War. My father, who was living in Dublin at the time, has memories of the first military stirrings against the British. None of our Irish family volunteered to fight in the First World War. They stayed in Ireland, and I do not think the Irish people who went to war in 1914, when they were quite popular, were quite as popular when it got to 1918. As a youngish boy, my father remembered stones being thrown at British soldiers returning from the First World War.

My English family had a very different experience. My grandmother, who lived in Lincoln, was engaged to a young second lieutenant who was killed, and—as often happened in those days—she went on to marry his younger brother. He suffered from having been gassed, and from post-traumatic stress disorder. He never recovered from the First World War, and died in his 50s. The difference in those experiences did impinge on the whole family, because the contribution of the Irish to the First World War has also largely been forgotten. But there was a considerable contribution—from the south, from the Catholic areas—and it needs to be remembered because the First World War was a war we helped to win. Britain did not win the First World War. We have heard about the soldiers from the Commonwealth; the Americans of course joined in; and there was a lot of assistance from outside. We often forget that two Allied soldiers died for every German who died. The Germans had a pretty efficient fighting machine during the First World War—as indeed they did in the second.

I see the Armistice not as ending the First World War but as calling a ceasefire in what was effectively a 30-year war. In the second war, none of our family died—though one or two were injured. What caused it? It was caused by hatreds. Read the recent biography of Charles de Gaulle. Around 1908, during his stay in Germany, he wrote home to his parents, his mother in particular, saying how he hated the Germans, even though he was there learning the language. The build-up to the First World War was almost inevitable, and this is what worries me today.

I take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, that if you keep on emphasising differences between people, you stir up trouble and hatreds. We have to work together—we are a small continent—and de Gaulle grew up wishing to avenge 1870, and with a generation intent on avenging 1870, right through to 1914, we are not going to progress as a peaceful continent if we keep on emphasising our differences. If you look at the other side of the Rhine, you see that the young Adenauer felt very much the same. Adenauer and de Galle came out of the First World War ready to formulate the peace of the 1950s. It is a great shame that our leaders at that time did not join in—and I have to say that Clement Attlee was as bad as Winston Churchill in terms of actually wanting to get involved in Europe.

Another point worth remembering is that Armistice Day is not remembered in the same way all over Europe. In fact, 11 November is Polish independence day: it is a holiday there. The Finns, the Estonians, the Latvians and the Lithuanians all saw their country born out of that war. Some of us who are in the relevant all-party group will have been going to embassies to celebrate 100 years of these different countries, and their birth. So there is quite a different attitude in some countries. The Czech Republic—Czechoslovakia as it then was—was born out of the first war, and modern Turkey would probably not have arisen had Kemal Atatürk been on the side of a victorious Ottoman empire; but he was not.

The conclusion I draw from all this is that we need a certain amount of humility and we need to learn how to build a lasting peace. We need to work out how we in Europe are going to live together. We have to start, somehow or other, talking to the Russians. It is no good the Daily Mail et cetera banging on about how horrible they are: yes, they are horrible, but we will not get anywhere unless we talk to them, and unless we sit them down and get some sense out of them.

The second thing we have to realise is that war is changing. You could not possibly have a repeat of the First World War today, with its slaughter: it would not be acceptable. I put it to noble Lords that you could not have a repeat of the Second World War, either. We are now in an age when war is conducted by drones, launched from my noble friend Lord Cormack’s home county of Lincolnshire and dropping bombs in Iraq. We have a system where, frankly, a cyberwar would probably be much more effective in ending a country’s independence than a military war.

So we have to look to the future, and I say in closing that the future must be based on international co-operation. We have to work together. I share the views of the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, and many others, on the to my mind disastrous decision to leave the European Union. The only way we can go forward is by sitting down and talking to each other, and making sure that at the top of our minds is our recent history and the fact that we must never let it be repeated—and the way to achieve that relies on a lot of understanding, talk and work between us. Yes, it is frustrating. I spent 39 years in Brussels and I am a past master at knowing how frustrating these talks can be, but in the end it is the only way forward.

Online Anonymity

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd October 2018 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Balfe]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they intend to legislate to prevent anonymous social media accounts and anonymous online forum posts.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (Lord Ashton of Hyde) (Con)]

My Lords, online anonymity is an important part of a free and open internet, but being anonymous online does not give anyone the right to abuse others. The Government have made it clear that social media companies should have processes in place to tackle anonymous abuse on their platforms. The joint DCMS/Home Office White Paper will be published in the winter, detailing legislative and non-legislative measures to tackle online harms and setting clear responsibilities for tech companies.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

I thank the Minister for his reply. I am sure that, like me, he is appalled at the way electronic media has been used to send threats of death as well as physical and often sexual violence to people, and disproportionately to women. We know the possibility now exists to track down the senders of such messages. Can the Minister assure me that in the review currently being undertaken, serious consideration will be given to legislation providing for the unmasking and criminal prosecution of those sending hate messages?

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

My Lords, my noble friend raises an important point, and of course we all agree that online abuse is distressing and unacceptable. The issue is where this abuse becomes criminal and unacceptable. There is a balance to be struck. As far as anonymity is concerned, when it becomes criminal behaviour there are means by which people who do this anonymously can be traced. In fact, the vast majority of people who think they are doing these things anonymously are actually traceable. It is only the most devious and malevolent people who use technology to avoid being traced, but they are a very small minority. As far as the online harm review is concerned, we will be looking at a number of online harms, including abuse, and looking at where legislation or other non-legislative measures are necessary.