National Security and Investment Bill

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 4th February 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP) [V]]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Bennett for flagging up that I will be speaking about our environmental crisis. I very much enjoyed her speech, particularly the bit about offshore tax havens: that is something that the Government really ought to mop up very fast, because we lose so much money through them.

Several noble Lords have mentioned that it is odd that a Bill titled the National Security and Investment Bill does not even attempt to define or provide any example of what is meant by “national security”. I think the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, was the first to mention that, right at the beginning. Business types might say that not having a definition might be bad for business, because it makes things uncertain. My concern is that it could also be applied far too narrowly, so that the Government do not take the important actions needed when problematic takeovers and mergers are proposed.

We are in a climate and ecological emergency. Parliament has declared this already. Some will try to argue that the Bill should not stray into other issues, such as nature, biodiversity and the environment, but that would be to completely misunderstand the threats we face. The climate and ecological emergency will affect our national security, and global security, for this century and beyond. The Dasgupta review, for example, has warned that humanity must:

“Ensure that our demands on Nature do not exceed its supply”—


its sustainable supply, that is. Greens talk about that quite a lot, but somehow the message does not get through. Dasgupta also says that we should adopt different metrics for economic success. That is obvious, because if we are destroying nature, we have to take that into our calculations. Lastly, it says we must:

“Transform our institutions and systems”.


A changing climate will affect everything and put us at war with nature. Rising sea levels will capture large tracts of territory all across the world. Drought will starve populations and spread wildfires. Habitat loss will inflict genocides on millions of species that can never be recovered—and, of course, uncertainty, resource scarcity and hoarding will cause stresses and create mass migrations and military conflict. This shows us how important climate and nature is to our survival.

If we faced this existential threat from any human or country, it would be blindingly obvious that was a national security issue. But I worry that because it is seen as more esoteric and ethereal—perhaps a bit fluffy—the Government will not use their power to ensure that business and investment is controlled to protect against the huge risks we face. These are not soft issues; they are the hardest and most significant challenges facing our nation and humanity as a whole. The Government must start understanding their role in interfering with ecologically damaging business ventures. We cannot worry about Huawei’s risks to the world wide web when we give a free pass to the thousands of businesses that threaten the world’s web of life.

Undoubtedly, this needs global co-ordination beyond the UK Government. I would be overjoyed if the Minister would give us some plans to address this—for example, by leveraging our presidency of the G7 and COP 26. It would be absolutely incredible and wonderful if we could go into COP 26 with a plan for how to deal with this and get other countries to sign up to it, and understand the danger that we all face.

However, we do not need to wait for global agreement. Our Government should be acting unilaterally as well as bilaterally. The security of our earth impacts the security of all its nations and we have to stop the ecocide. I have two questions for the Minister. First, will he please define national security? Secondly, how does the climate emergency come into that?