Security in the UK

Lord King of Bridgwater Excerpts

Monday 10th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord King of Bridgwater (Con)]

My Lords, I start by congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Vere. I think it is the first time she has opened a debate in this House, and I congratulate her on the way in which she has done it on a subject on which I must say your Lordships have already heard enough to realise that there will be some very significant contributions. Indeed, we have already heard from the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, with his huge experience in policing in particular, and, of course, from the noble Baroness, with her unrivalled knowledge in this field. As I am following the right reverend Prelate, I shall say one or two words about the relationship that the Church of England and the other churches can play because at the heart of this is the terrifying abuse of religion, if one looks at it in that way, in which we have a sect that now seems to believe that 98% of the world’s population are legitimate targets in pursuit of its particular objectives, which is an amazing situation.

I bring to this debate my own experiences in Northern Ireland, particularly with regard to terrorism, but I am struck enormously by the totally different situation that we face here. Thank goodness we never had suicide bombers, who introduce a totally different range of possibilities of assault. The noble Lord, Lord Harris, referred to trucks and vehicles in which the drivers themselves accept at the start that they will probably not come out of it. They are lethal and damaging attacks and can be very much worse. I think that one single driver in the lorry in Nice killed 80 people, so terrifying new possibilities exist.

I am also very much struck by something else. Sinn Fein/IRA, as it was then, was sensitive to public opinion to an extent. It did not want to lose morale and tried to enlist more and more support from the nationalist community. I remember particularly the huge damage that was done to it by the attack at Enniskillen—noble Lords will remember the number of people killed at a Remembrance Day service. That was a huge public relations setback for the IRA and Sinn Fein at that time. The terrorists that we face now seem not to mind at all the outrage committed in the cause that they seek to serve.

I went on from Northern Ireland and then defence to be the first chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee—a few noble Lords behind me will remember that with either pleasure or grief. I stopped doing that when I left the House of Commons in 2001. I stopped being an MP then and came to your Lordships’ House. I am struck by the fact that, at that time, as an MP I had not had an email. Members of Parliament now have to cope with 300 or 400 emails a day and the burst of new challenges that now exist in that whole world. It is only 16 years, but we have had since this extraordinary explosion of social media communications, the world of the internet and—which I find very difficult to keep up with—the worlds of WhatsApp, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook and Twitter. They are all virtually brand new in the history of our time, yet they pose enormous challenges.

I strongly support what the noble Baroness just said about the situation that we face going forward. This is not a short-term problem. The situation in the world at the moment is the most disturbed it has ever been. There are 60 million displaced people in the world at present, some internally displaced within their own country and others desperately trying to get to another place that may be rather happier than where they were brought up.

The problems now are linked together: the population explosion; climate change; the number of countries that are failed states, where the best thing that anyone can do for themselves and their families is to get out as quickly as they can and try to move to other countries; and the problems of water supply. The noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, gave me an article about the prospects for Iran, saying that the water prospects there could mean that up to 20 million people will have to emigrate within 30 years’ time. That could be a gross exaggeration, as somebody said, but even if it is, it still means that the potential for disturbance and the problems that could arise from that are massive.

Against that background, we have Islamic extremism. At the moment, although there seem to be military victories—and the latest news from Mosul and what may be happening in Raqqa may be encouraging news in that respect—encouragement has probably been given to the leadership by lone wolf attacks, which offers no great encouragement of any early change.

On the subject of lone wolves and all that, I have been hugely impressed by the skill and ability of ISIS in the whole social media field. Look at the production of videos—I do not know where ISIS does it, and I do not know whether we will be told that the success against Mosul and Raqqa means that suddenly ISIS will find that harder to organise. But it has been extremely impressive in its ability to produce videos. It has done it for operational communications—and I understand that the whole of the explosion of success that ISIS had in its early stages in capturing all those territories was entirely done by communications on WhatsApp. It is far more efficient communication than we ever had in the British Army, in terms of instant communication with thousands of people. That can be illustrated by the way, as noble Lords may have noticed, a substantial force can suddenly turn up somewhere it was not expected—in Palmyra, for example, which ISIS captured when we thought it was on the run.

The use of the social media outlets in that way has been hugely effective. Some of it has been for operational purposes, and some of it has been for poisonous propaganda, which it has used extremely successfully, with incredibly large audiences. It is not just a problem of what is being said in the mosque; if those hate preachers get on to Facebook, Twitter or whatever communication vehicle—and the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, knows much better than I do how they might do this—they can potentially communicate with millions of people. Also, given the opportunity, they can recruit a lot of new people as well.

I was very struck by the article in the Times today, which some may have seen, which says that Germany is taking a substantial initiative to try to get the social media companies to be much more active and prompt in removing unacceptable illegal content, including hate speech, terrorist material and other forms. The article says:

“Videos on social media are known to have influenced Salman Abedi, the Manchester bomber, and Khuram Butt, one of the London Bridge attackers”.


We also know that the Manchester bomber found instructions on YouTube on how to make his bomb. Against that background, Germany has now acted and is setting fines of up to €50 million under a network enforcement law, if companies fail promptly to remove illegal content, including hate speech and terrorist material.

The Prime Minister has already gone on record, in May, I think—as has President Macron of France—to say that we are thinking of doing something along these lines. I hope we can get on with it, because the Germans are already doing it. We certainly know that there is no question of these companies having no money and being unable to afford to take the necessary steps in these directions. They could be much prompter in dealing with some of these abuses and the quite unacceptable and dangerous material which is being allowed on their various channels.

Against the background of all the threats that we face, I strongly endorse what the noble Baroness said. I am hugely impressed by the successes which our intelligence services have had. The fact that they do not catch every single one should not be seen as an abject failure. The volume which the noble Baroness spelt out so well—the number of incidents they are dealing with—is obviously a huge and critical challenge for them, and they deserve our fullest support.

However, as the noble Lord, Lord Harris, said, things are going to go wrong. There is a real risk of further incidents and nasty challenges of one sort or another. Against the threat that we face, it may not be possible to hold them all. When she opened the debate, the noble Baroness drew attention to the seriousness of that threat. In such situations, during my time in Northern Ireland I always felt the resilience of the local population: the world was not coming to an end and they were going to stand together and overcome the challenges they faced. Maintaining public morale in these dangerous situations is hugely important.

And we do that, not as an isolated country, but with the fullest international co-operation. Countries throughout the world are now facing challenges of this kind. It would be no surprise to anyone in this Chamber whichever country it turned up in. It might be in South America, the Far East, in Africa or somewhere in Europe, but we all face it and need to work together with every other Government of good will. We particularly need to maintain our European relationships, including Europol, as actively as possible so that we can do the best possible job of protecting our country against the very serious threats which we face and which we will have to be prepared to resist.