Democratic Institutions: Threats

Lord Moraes Excerpts

Thursday 25th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moraes (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow such excellent speeches. I warmly welcome what the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, has done, which is to have this profound and overlapping debate at the same time that we are dealing with sensitive legislation. I am sure that my noble friend the Minister will make the connections between some of the speeches earlier this week and today’s debate.

This debate is important because we really need to calibrate what is going on. We need to provide that context and there is still some ambiguity about what we are doing and whether we are doing the right thing. I will be talking about the national security part of this overlapping debate.

As the noble Lord, Lord Frost, implored us not to have a moral panic, I inexplicably started to panic. I am not sure why, but I have calmed down now and maybe I can offer this perspective. The noble Lord talked about the Cold War and what the intelligence services have to do. Some years ago, I had the experience of, first, writing the report on the mass surveillance inquiry after Snowden, and then I chaired the debate on Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and political interference. It was an embryonic time, as many of these ideas were being explored.

I am not going to bore your Lordships about European Parliament committees, but will say that we had unprecedented access to serving and retired senior intelligence officers throughout that period, some of whom have kept in touch. What is instructive about those people is that they are not having a moral panic. Their duty and task, whether they are at the DGSE in France, or at GCHQ, SIS or MI6, is to calibrate the threats of foreign interference. What effect is it having on our democracy and do we need to do something about it? There is no fear or favour; they have to represent the current political settlement. I found it fascinating that all these people, across the Five Eyes, DGSE and our own intelligence services, were quite exercised, even then, about what the effect of foreign interference would be.

We have heard eloquent speeches about what the Iranian state is doing to touch on open wounds in this country and antisemitism, and we have heard something of other state actors. I will give the example that they always give, of how the Russian state operates. The common denominator for them is not that the Russian state took a view on National Rally, as it is now, or the Front National, and Brexit. No, their view was that the Russian state was doing exactly what was in the interests of the Russian state, economically and politically. That is exactly what the Iranian state is doing. When they do it, they are targeting us because we are not doing what they want us, as their enemy, to do.

The point is that the people at DGSE, when they were dealing with far-right conspiracies and so on, did not think that the Russian state favoured the Front National, as it was then, or National Rally. If there is a President Bardella and he does not do what the Russian state, the FSB and all their proxies want him to do, they will react. That is the point. They are going for the status quo and gaining advantage economically and politically for their state as a state actor. That is what they are doing.

Why should we believe that? First, there is a kind of uniformity of view across intelligence services, and not just in the European Union space or the European space. Secondly, they make a very clear distinction—and this is what I would say to the noble Lord, Lord Frost. There is a big difference between open and transparent influence activities. You can say what you like from one state to another; the President of the United States had an opinion on the Member for Makerfield this morning. Fine: that is not a problem in the social media world and the world of machine learning. That will happen, minute by minute. That is not the issue. These are open and transparent influence activities, one state to another. What they are concerned about are covert and malign political activities that have an effect. They calibrate them as having an effect; they believe there is an effect of this combined kind of activity.

I will give noble Lords the example of what one of them said. If you take out the different elements of what, say, the Russian state is doing in relation to this country—let us be specific—they will talk about online approaches, financial donations and inducements, cyber compromises and exploiting overseas travel, and exploiting conspiracy theories as fact.

If you take all these things apart, you can dismiss them. You can say, “Well, it happens, intelligence services themselves do bad things”. I was reminded of our beloved and late colleague, Baroness Ramsay, who famously said, “As a young intelligence officer, I often did bad things to bad people for my country”. That is fine—it is what they do—but this has nothing to do with that. This is about bad things happening to states that are just trying to ease along with a liberal democracy and all the imperfections and difficulties that you have in one. Liberal democracies are not perfect: they are full of problems. What our intelligence services believe—and it is the same in France and the Five Eyes—is that this stuff is having an effect. If it is, we need to legislate, regulate and react against it. If it is not and the noble Lord, Lord Frost, is right, it is fine and “fair comment”. “Fair comment” is what the Iranian state is saying—but it is not, is it? What is happening is the perpetration of falsehoods. This is the dividing line. You make stuff up, you create conspiracy theories not based on fact, you perpetrate them and there is an effect.

I am grateful to the Library, which is at last bringing together lots of evidence that there is a causal link between some of the negative things that are happening and the actions of those foreign actors. That is crucial. Without that, it is what the intelligence officers say: “Look, you can dismiss a lot of this, because we do stuff to them and they do stuff to us”. But what we are doing to them—retaliatory measures—is not the core of the problem. The core of the problem is what they did to us when we were not inviting it to be done.

It is the same with the Iranian state. We are not inviting the Iranian state to have a view about the open sores in our communities. People who serve on the front line for us are saying that the common denominator is doing harm to us when it is uninvited. What do we do? Do we stand back and say, “We had the Cold War: it’s fine”. No, it is not fine. This is a serious problem. It deserves serious respect. I look forward to hearing what we are going to do legislatively from the Minister and I apologise for going on too long.