Prorogation (Disclosure of Communications)

Debate between Ben Bradshaw and Dominic Grieve

Monday 9th September 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Grieve]

My hon. Friend is right about our long association. She is also right, of course, having worked in the Treasury Solicitor’s Department, where I am quite sure she maintained at all times the highest standards of integrity. The difficulty, however, is this: 31 October is looming. We are, as a House, about to be prorogued and rendered entirely ineffective until 14 October. This is the choice of the Government. The routes I might have wished to have taken to see this matter properly investigated simply do not match the time available for us to take them. As trust has progressively broken down, I am afraid I have become increasingly concerned that if one were simply to ask polite questions, the Government may not respond in the manner they should.

[Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)]

Will the right hon. and learned Gentleman tell the House whether he intends to put on the record any of the details of the information he says he received? The worry is that if he does not and the Government simply ignore his Humble Address, we will never know its contents. The implication of what he is saying is really very serious—that the Queen was misled by the Prime Minister as to his reasons for wanting a Prorogation.

National Security and Russia

Debate between Ben Bradshaw and Dominic Grieve

Monday 26th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)]

May I start my remarks by repeating the welcome I gave to the Prime Minister earlier for the efforts the Government have undertaken to secure this impressive level of solidarity and support from our European friends and others? I welcome any personal role the Foreign Secretary played in that. This shows that they certainly have no doubt of Kremlin culpability, and I am sure they would have been given access to information that most Members have not had access to, which has helped them arrive at that conclusion, along with the clear evidence from Porton Down and elsewhere.

I warmly welcome the clear statement by my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition that he accepts Russian culpability. I deprecate the barracking he received from some Government Members, most of whom are no longer here, having just popped in to barrack him. They have never been here for debates on Russia before and they did not even listen to what he had to say. That was deplorable behaviour, and I want to put that on the record.

I have been raising my concerns about Russia for many, many years. Indeed, when I first started raising concerns about 18 months ago about Russian interference in our democracy, I was treated as a bit of an eccentric, a crank and a conspiracy theorist. I started raising those concerns because of the evidence of what had happened in the United States presidential election. Having expressed those concerns, I found myself to be the recipient of a great deal of very interesting information, some of which has since come out. I have to tell hon. Members that a great deal more that is very serious is still to come out. I shall confine my remarks to my concerns about Russia’s propaganda and interference in democracy as part of its hybrid war against the west. This is not just about the direct interference in elections or electoral systems; I want the Government to take seriously the attention paid by the Kremlin to political parties, think tanks and our educational establishment.

First, on elections, we know from the US about the extent of Kremlin interference in its presidential election and there is growing evidence here. I have to commend the Chair of the Select Committee on Digital, Culture, Media and Sport for the work he and his Committee are doing to look into what happened here in terms of social media. I hope that when the Intelligence and Security Committee commences its work, it will look into that in even greater detail. I first raised this issue in a question to the Prime Minister in December 2016, and I wonder whether the Foreign Secretary could tell the House what action the Government took in response to my raising those concerns. Did they just leave the matter to the ongoing investigations of the Electoral Commission, or did they make their own inquiries and take up their own responsibilities for ensuring that our electoral systems are safe and secure?

[Mr Dominic Grieve]

I just want to give the right hon. Gentleman the assurance that it was the Committee’s intention to look at the full spectrum of Russian activity.

[Mr Bradshaw]

That is extremely good news, and I very much welcome the fact that the right hon. and learned Gentleman’s Committee is doing that.

I would also like the Foreign Secretary to comment, if he can, on what the Government and their agencies are doing to take down Kremlin operations that seek to influence and infiltrate our political parties. He has a particular responsibility in this area, for example, to have satisfied himself that all those who have donated to his political party and to individual Conservative MPs, including some wealthy Russians here who give the impression of being Putin opponents, are in fact as stated. I hope that the Foreign Secretary and the agencies that serve under him are working very hard to make sure that he can feel confident on that.

I invite the Foreign Secretary to task the agencies to investigate the United Kingdom Independence party—this is much more serious. We already know that there are close political ties here involving Farage, who has been named as a person of interest in the Mueller investigation; that Aaron Banks is also under investigation by the Electoral Commission; and that of course Jim Mellon, the co-founder of Leave.EU, has extensive business background and current investment interests in Russia. So I would be grateful if the Foreign Secretary confirmed that as part of their investigations to counter criminal activities in this country, the Government are looking at some of the allegations that have been made around UKIP. Again, I first raised these concerns months and months ago.

Also, about 10 months ago, I highlighted concerns I had picked up about collusion between the leave campaign and these others bits of the leave campaign, such as BeLeave, to get around our strict electoral spending laws. At the same time, I also raised concerns about the role of Cambridge Analytica, and we have now seen the most extraordinary and shocking revelations this week from The Guardian, The New York Times, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, “Channel 4 News” and others. I hope that the Foreign Secretary will tell us whether the Government took the concerns I raised back then seriously and what they did about them.

Of course the other concerns that many of us have expressed was about the huge donation to the Democratic Unionist party for the leave campaign, whose source we are not allowed to know because, shockingly, the Government did not make the transparency of political donations in Northern Ireland retrospective. I hope that they will think again on that .The Electoral Commission has asked them to make that decision retrospective. It is always open to them to bring another motion to this House, so that we can do that and so that we can know and have confidence in the source of that huge donation. Again, a lot of that was spent on this digital advertising and digital work.

The United States has a powerful judicial investigation into Russian interference, under special counsel Mueller. Compare that with the farce this week of the Information Commissioner trying to get a warrant to search Cambridge Analytica’s office, which she finally managed to do late on Friday evening, having been trying all week. That clearly shows that our Electoral Commission, independent Information Commissioner and Select Committees do not have the powers they need to tackle this problem adequately. I hope that special counsel Mueller’s investigation will come up with more evidence and that the Foreign Secretary can reassure the House that all the various investigations into Russian interference in Britain are getting the full co-operation and support of all the Government’s agencies, because I have been told in the months past that that was not the case. I have since been reassured by Ministers that it is happening now, and would be grateful if the Foreign Secretary assured the House that he, the intelligence services and our other agencies are helping the Electoral Commission, the Information Commissioner and the Select Committees and providing them with anything that they ask for.

I could say a lot more on this subject, and I wanted to say more about the role of educational institutions, so I hope that the Foreign Secretary takes that on board. I have had a frustrating time trying to get some sense out of our universities—for example, those that employed Professor Mifsud, who has disappeared since being exposed in a Mueller indictment.

Let me say one more thing. On the issue of money, Bill Browder gave 12 other countries the dossiers that he has given to the British authorities. Those 12 other countries have prosecuted the people responsible; will the Secretary of State find out why that has not happened here and have a word with his fellow Ministers, to make sure that they act on the evidence with which they are provided?

Injunctions

Debate between Ben Bradshaw and Dominic Grieve

Monday 23rd May 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Attorney-General]

Looking at the matters that have been complained of recently, it seems to me fairly noteworthy that the press appear generally to observe the terms of injunctions against them. Indeed, from that point of view the injunction system appears to be quite effective; it is in other respects, such as the blogosphere and Twitter, that the difficulty emerges. What is absolutely clear is that breaches of court orders should not take place.

[Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)]

Following on from that question, does the Attorney-General agree that members of the Press Complaints Commission are the last people who should be policing this area—an idea that has apparently been floated by the Prime Minister—given their feeble record and complete failure over the phone-hacking scandal?

[The Attorney-General]

The question of what role the Press Complaints Commission may play is clearly another subject that the House may wish to consider. I am not sure that I entirely subscribe to the right hon. Gentleman’s very pessimistic view of the Press Complaints Commission. I have seen examples where, it seems to me, it has operated quite effectively. That is a further reason why that may be a sensible area for debate.