National Security Bill

Debate between Ben Everitt and Alistair Carmichael

Report stage
Wednesday 16th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Carmichael]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright), who did the House a great service in bringing to us in four minutes what could have been the subject matter of a whole afternoon’s debate in itself, thus highlighting the total inadequacy of today’s proceedings for proper scrutiny of this Bill. I fear it will be filleted when it goes to the other place, and it deserves to be.

I added my name to new clause 8, but it is not available to debate and discuss. So much of what is in the Bill risks offering protection to people who do the wrong thing in the service of our country, while those who seek to expose that wrongdoing are to be left completely unprotected. Others have said it before, and I say it again now: this was the perfect opportunity to provide protection of that sort. If not now, when are going to see it?

It is a matter of significant regret that in an area of public policy where there is a substantial and natural consensus across the political parties, we have come to this stage in the proceedings of the Bill with so much division and disagreement, albeit a disagreement between those on the Treasury Bench and the Government Back Benches, not just between the parties. I do not think anybody in this House would not want to promote the security of our nation, and we all understand the complex and difficult situations in which pursuing that work often places people.

We also know, because it is human nature as much as anything else, that in these difficult and complex situations it is often possible to persuade oneself of just about anything. When that happens, it is necessary that somebody, somewhere, can be held accountable for it, because we are a country that believes, still, in the rule of law, and these things matter. That is why my colleagues on the Liberal Democrat Benches and I are so concerned about the content of clause 27 and clauses 79 to 83.

As I mentioned in my intervention on the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), the cases about which we know and are rightly shocked, we know about only because these matters came into the public domain by mere happenstance. It is eminently possible that the circumstances of Belhaj and Boudchar would not be known to us today but for the fact somebody who happened to be walking around Gaddafi’s palace during the fall of his Government found the papers that revealed the extent to which rights had been deliberately traduced. It is surely wrong that there should be protection for people who behave far outside British standards, notwithstanding Government policy and indeed the law.

The same is true in relation to clauses 79 to 83, which remain the subject of massive controversy. I am certain that they will be revisited, hopefully with more detail and vigour than we have been able to give them today, because they do not belong in a Bill of this sort. I hope that, when the Bill eventually comes back to this House, it comes back without them.

[Ben Everitt (Milton Keynes North) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) and to see so many members of the Bill Committee in the House on Report. It was a very constructive Committee, and I am pleased that we are all still vaguely getting on.

As the Minister said in his opening remarks, a number of clauses in the Bill update espionage legislation that goes back to world war one. Obviously we do not have time to go through all of them, but after putting the Bill into context, I will spend some time talking about clauses 13, 14, 20 and 21. The context is important. In my lifetime, and since the end of the cold war, we have lived through an era of what could be considered unprecedented global peace. In many ways, in the ‘90s, we took our eye off the ball. Once the Berlin wall came down, we took our eye off the ball on state-based threats. When things got hot in 2001, after 9/11, our national security legislation and our activity were focused much more on counter-terrorism, so now is the time to update our espionage legislation to counter state-based threats as well as counter-terrorist threats.

It is clear that state-based threats have not gone away. There are more Russian spies in London now than there ever were at the height of the cold war.