National Security (State Threats) Bill

Baroness Doocey Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 23rd June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Doocey (LD)]

My Lords, the Liberal Democrats support the principles of the Bill. We have been clear that we also want this legislation on the statute book and we will not seek to hold it up. We fully recognise the unprecedented security challenges that we face, confronting more serious and less predictable threats than at any time since the Cold War. In 2025 alone, MI5 reported a 35% increase in state threat activity on the previous year, including more than 20 Iran-backed plots to kidnap or kill on British soil. We are in accord with the Government. This activity must be stopped.

However, while we will not obstruct the Bill, our support is not a blank cheque for lawmaking. The Bill was introduced just 13 days ago and was rushed through the other place in less than six hours. That begs the question: why did it take 14 months to act on recommendations from Jonathan Hall KC, which were accepted in full in May 2025? To ask this House to deliver a watertight defence in a single afternoon is a tall order and risks the Bill being seen as a rapid answer rather than a complete answer. Such accelerated progress risks important areas not being properly covered or provisions having unintended consequences.

Good legislation also involves scrutiny and input from outside Parliament. The media and experts from a wide range of professional fields are normally critical in improving a Bill. However, the speed of this Bill’s passage runs a real risk that much-needed external scrutiny will be missed.

The Bill addresses a critical gap. Looking to existing terrorism laws to deal with state organs was, in the words of the independent reviewer,

“shopping in the wrong department”.

By creating a power to designate bodies involved in “foreign power threat activity”, the Bill creates the right tool to penalise the proxies and hired guns that foreign powers use to carry out sabotage on UK soil.

The litmus test for the Bill will be the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—the IRGC. My noble friend Lord Marks has constantly argued that if the IRGC was not in power in Tehran, it would be universally recognised as a terrorist organisation. Yet, as drafted, this Bill is gentler on the IRGC than our laws are on the terrorists it funds.

We must also ensure that these powers have teeth in the global financial system. My noble friend Lord Purvis noted on 11 June that these groups operate through complex commercial, financial and now digital trade routes. We must use this Bill to trigger robust investigations by Companies House and the Financial Reporting Council to unmask front companies and starve designated organisations of UK-origin funds. However, I remain a bit concerned by the Minister’s comment that a UK connection of some sort is required for designation. In an era of digital interference, when state-backed proxies can target our citizens and sabotage our interests from behind a screen thousands of miles away, we must ensure that this requirement does not become a loophole. We need an assurance that this Bill is equipped for the era of digital interference, ensuring that hostile actors cannot evade designation simply by operating entirely from abroad via digital means.

We must also listen to the International Committee of the Red Cross and the International Development Committee. They warn that new Section 17B is so broad that it could unintentionally criminalise impartial humanitarian aid. Ministerial “intent” is not a legal safeguard. We need an express exemption on the face of the Bill for impartial humanitarian organisations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, acting in accordance with international humanitarian law. Anything less leaves our aid workers at the mercy of a 14-year prison sentence for simply delivering life-saving medicine.

The Joint Committee on Human Rights has identified another trap. Clause 1 currently allows for designation without even establishing a link to a foreign power for certain acts, such as those under Section 4 of the 2023 Act. That is both too weak against our enemies and too broad for a free society.

On future-proofing, the director-general of MI5 has rightly warned of the next frontier: autonomous AI systems that may evade effective human control. The Government’s own AI Scenarios 2030 report admits that such systems could cause “existential harms” without intervention. I will be moving a specific amendment in committee to ensure that “foreign power threat activity” captures the development of super-intelligent AI capabilities by a foreign power.

Finally, because this is a fast-track Bill, we must have a 12-month statutory review of its adequacy. We also need the safeguard that any removal of a designation must be approved by votes in both Houses. Parliamentary oversight must exist at the end of a designation, not just the beginning.

As I said, we will not hold this Bill up, but we will seek to amend it. We are talking about individuals who actively assist hostile states in sabotaging our nation. We owe the citizens and residents who are being specifically targeted by these lethal plots more than just sincere intentions; we owe them a law that holds up in the courtroom and at the border. We look forward to a rigorous, if brief, Committee stage.

National Security (State Threats) Bill

Baroness Doocey Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 30th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Garnier (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, for what they said. They both spoke in very measured terms and I wish to support broadly everything that they have said, for two reasons: first, because I agree with them, and, secondly, because I was too late to co-sign their amendments. The only point of difference I have with the noble Lord, Lord Alton, is some thoughts about SLAPPs legislation—I confess that, yes, I am a member of the defamation Bar and I have various views about the questions that lie behind the excitement around the need to introduce SLAPPs legislation, but that is not for today. I broadly agree with the noble Lord and the noble Baroness and give them the encouragement that, simply because a Conservative Member of this House has not signed their amendments, that does not mean that a Conservative does not agree with them.

There is a danger that we can become naive, thinking that because there are, say, 2 billion buyers of toothbrushes in the People’s Republic of China it would be wrong of us to criticise the Chinese Government when they do things, either through their own agencies or through their proxy agencies, to damage the well-being of this country. As the noble Lord, Lord Alton, calmly pointed out, not everything is always as it seems. Therefore, although neither the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, nor the noble Lord, Lord Alton, has threatened a vote on their amendments, I urge my noble friend the Minister—and he is my friend—to bear carefully in mind that when we are dealing with China we are dealing with an underwater crocodile. We can be naive and keep feeding it, and allow it to build bigger and bigger embassies and to spy, either formally or informally, upon the activities of our citizens, and indeed of the expatriate citizens of Hong Kong in this country, and we can allow it to carry on behaving appallingly towards United Kingdom citizens, such as Jimmy Lai, who “live” in Hong Kong, but, if we let another week or month or year pass in which we live in this fog of confusion, we are, I suspect, misleading ourselves and not doing our own citizens or the citizens of other countries any good.

China is not anything other than something that we need to be very careful about. Yes, we can sell 2 billion toothbrushes and we can sell glass, IT or whatever it may be, but I urge the Government to please not allow themselves to think that, when you feed a crocodile, it will wag its tail and say, “Thanks very much”. It will not. It will say, “Thanks for your leg—I’ll have the other leg, and then I’ll have your arm, your other arm and your head”. Meanwhile, people such as Jimmy Lai, who stand up for freedom of expression, are left incarcerated in terrible conditions in Hong Kong.

Let us wake up and realise that we are dealing with adversaries, not with people who wish to do us a favour. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, and the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, who has yet to speak, for their amendments, because they are seriously worth considering.

[Baroness Doocey (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 5, in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames, and the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool. This amendment seeks to ensure that our national security framework is not only addressing the threats of today but is prepared for what the director-general of MI5 has described as “the next frontier”—the potential risks posed by non-human autonomous AI systems. While our current debate focuses largely on human adversaries and their proxies who seek to undermine our national security, we must now also grapple with the emergence of systems capable of evading human oversight and control.

We are drawing a distinction between the AI tools we use today and what experts term artificial superintelligence, or ASI. The amendment defines ASI as a system

“capable of adapting its behaviour, in response to … its … environment, in ways not fully specified in advance by its developers”.

As Lord Browne of Ladyton, a former Secretary of State and expert on non-proliferation, has explained previously, the key distinction is that ASI would be an agent rather than an instrument. While a nuclear weapon cannot improve or replicate itself, or resist being shut down, a superintelligent AI system could, in principle, do all three. We are therefore contemplating a technology that could out-think experts and potentially subvert even our most capable national security apparatus.

This is not science fiction. We have recently seen a leading AI company restrict its latest, most capable model to a small group of major technology infrastructure firms, precisely so that they could use it to identify and close security loopholes that it was able to uncover in the core software and system. Officials are now warning that, in the wrong hands, the same kind of system could dramatically speed up cyber attacks against individual companies and, potentially, the critical infrastructure on which the country depends. That is where we are already today. The next level may be artificial superintelligence, where these systems become much more powerful and the risks in the hands of hostile states or state-sponsored actors are correspondingly greater.

The implications of that decision go further still. The United States Government have now imposed export controls on Mythos, prohibiting its use outside American jurisdiction. That is a remarkable step. A foreign Government have, in effect, decided that a single AI system is too powerful, too consequential and too potentially dangerous to allow unrestricted international deployment. That tells us that at least one major power has concluded that frontier AI capability is now a matter of national security, not only for the country that hosts it but for every country that might seek access to it. If the United States Government are drawing that line, it would be quite extraordinary if we in Parliament are not asking what our own response should be.

The AI Security Institute has warned that our current trajectory risks an irrevocable loss of control over systems that are becoming deeply embedded in our national infrastructure, economy and defence. Yet the AI Security Institute lacks the statutory authority to require disclosure, compel compliance or impose any binding obligations on the companies developing these systems. We have a body that can see the risks but cannot act upon them.

More importantly, the Government’s own AI Scenarios 2030 report, published earlier this month, acknowledges that highly capable AI could give rise to

“serious, potentially even existential harms”,

and, in the absence of effective intervention, highlights autonomous risks in which advanced systems may develop objectives that “resist human control”. My amendment would bring the development of such systems by a foreign power within the definition of “foreign power threat activity” under the National Security Act 2023. It is directed at systems capable of neutralising or subverting our relevant human authorities, which I have defined as our Armed Forces, intelligence services, police and the Government themselves.