King’s Speech

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Monday 18th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I want to focus on dilemmas around national security at home. I fear that relevant Bills in the gracious Speech betray some confusion about who the enemy is, and this disorientation can mean laws and policy that punish the wrong people. This was brought home by the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, many hours ago now, in relation to the shocking tale of the Nova exhibition in London. I remind noble Lords that this is a commemoration of the massacre of young Jewish festival-goers, yet how morally muddled we are that the police put the onus on the organisers to hide their location and signage to stay safe. It also begs the question, safe from who?

The national security Bill identifies, “escalating threats such as Islamist and extreme right-wing terrorism”, but I must say that I cringe when I hear this overused couplet, for one reason: the Government seem far more at ease proactively taking on the extreme right as the enemy than being tough on the far greater and more serious threat of Islamism. We had a vivid example over the weekend, with the tale of two protests. It is telling that, within days of Labour’s unprecedented electoral defeat, the Prime Minister’s reset speech chose to assert his authority by targeting far-right agitators as enemy number one. He even became tough on border control, block-banning undesirable foreigners—or, rather, 11 international speakers, including European parliamentarians—from speaking at Tommy Robinson’s Unite The Kingdom gathering. We might agree that the views of those banned speakers are deeply unpleasant, and many are, but do we agree that opinions dubbed far-right are now deemed a security risk? How does treating a foundational value of western democracy, free speech, as an enemy make anyone safer?

Last week there was further No. 10 hyperactivity: ministerial denunciations of just one protest and a melodramatic filmed appeal to the nation. The Prime Minister posited that citizens’ attitudes to Robinson’s shindig were

“a fight for the soul of this country”.

This gave organisers far more credibility and free PR than merited. But targeting far-right threats in this one-sided way has backfired. Many decent people took it personally, not because they planned to go to the rally or were fans of Robinson, and certainly not because they are far right—many, to be honest, were working-class Labour voters until recently—but because they resented that their worries about mass migration, Islamist sectarianism, grooming gangs, et cetera, were being scapegoated as “dividing the nation”. Many furiously asked why there was no special broadcast denouncing the other protest, protest number two, down the road on the same day.

That pro-Palestinian hate fest even gained a new moral authority. Taking its cue from the Government, it rebranded itself as “Nakba for Palestine, against the far right”. They even wrote new chants to add to their antisemitic repertoire. To quote one:

“What do we do with Tommy’s crew? … Shoot them in the neck like Charlie Kirk.”


Hearing that bellowed out by a large baying mob should force us to ask, who is the threat or enemy here?

Finally, the national security Bill is also a response to the horrific murders in Southport. Unlike other noble Lords, I am disappointed that the Bill disproportionately falls back on targeting that old favourite enemy, online content: cue more censorship. I worry too that it will be a distraction from tackling offline, preventable violence by the likes of Axel Rudakubana or indeed Valdo Calocane. When we scrutinise this Bill, we must look closely at the evidence of the Nottingham inquiry. Calocane did not butcher Barnaby, Grace or Ian because he spent too much time on TikTok or X. Instead, at least partly, state agencies, from psychiatrists to the police, seem to have interpreted the Mental Health Act that we passed here as a signal to treat dangerous perpetrators as vulnerable and to avoid any action that can be labelled discriminatory or racist. The laws we pass have consequences. We should think of that seriously.