National Security Bill

Liam Byrne Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 6th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

I apologise to the Home Secretary, who is not in her place, for missing the first 11 minutes of her opening speech.

As I think the Minister will have spotted, there is wide consensus across the House about many of the provisions in this Bill that is matched only by a level of frustration that the Bill has been an awful long time coming. We have been debating the risks of hybrid warfare, from Russia and from others, in this Chamber for at least four or five years. Therefore, having waited so long and having debated so much, I think we are within our rights to have expected a rather more substantial package from the Government.

In the spirit of consensus, which I see is running large in the House today, I hope that we will be able to add substantially to the provisions in the Bill. I do not want to criticise sins of commission today, but I do want to criticise three sins of omissions: in particular, the lack of security in defence for data; the lack of security for our democracy; and the lack of security for those defenders of freedom and those people such as brave journalists who are prepared to name and, where necessary, shame foreign influencers who are at large in our country.

Let me start with data, because it is impossible to talk about espionage in this day and age without talking about information and intelligence, and therefore about data and the channels that move that data between our country and foreign players—the companies that are on the cutting edge of the technology revolution. I am afraid I think there is a very real risk that this Bill will be out of date by the time our sovereign inks her signature on the parchment.

What is well understood by the Americans and the Chinese, and I have to say by our intelligence services, is that artificial intelligence—not simply intelligence, but artificial intelligence—will be the key to the future of warfare and conflict between states. That is why both China and the United States are seeking to be the world leaders in artificial intelligence by 2030. It is also why the head of MI6 warned last year about the risk of countries around the world falling into data traps, because there is very real alarm that the huge datasets necessary to train the algorithms that power artificial intelligence are being exfiltrated from around the world. These are the datasets that train the algorithms that will be absolutely critical in co-ordinating drone swarms, running global surveillance systems, and creating mass information—through the mountains of contents that it is possible to create with artificial intelligence—to fire at the west a fire hose of falsehood to confuse us or, still worse, to divide us.

[Sir John Hayes]

The right hon. Gentleman is making a compelling point, because there are two implications of what he is describing: the problem of scale and the problem of methodology. The scale of what he is describing will be hard for any single nation to cope with. On methodology, it is hard to conduct covert operations as we have historically against that backdrop.

[Liam Byrne]

The right hon. Member puts his finger on precisely the lesson that we should draw from allies such as the United States. Today, the United States has a battery of eight types of controls and measures that are regulating and controlling the export of—or, frankly, efforts to steal—technology and data to countries such as China.

The Bill says that it will be an offence to engage in

“conduct…that it is reasonably possible may…assist a foreign intelligence service”.

I am afraid that negligence must be part of that conduct. Our American allies now have: provisions for delisting Chinese firms, which they have applied to companies such as Sina Weibo; an investment prohibition list that has now hit 59 Chinese firms; a ban on share trading; export bans and restrictions that have added scores of Chinese entities to the unverified list, which therefore have tougher rules on receiving shipments from US exporters; an export ban; provisions for revocation of trading licences; data controls, which first President Trump and then President Biden ordered; and, of course, targeted sanctions. My question for the Minister is: where is the similar framework for the United Kingdom? We are now in grave jeopardy of a control gap emerging between the United Kingdom and our closest ally.

When I tabled parliamentary questions on those eight different measures to the Government asking where our similar framework was, I got a lot of waffle from the Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Scully). I then asked the Government what controls are in place on nine of the 1,100 key companies now controlled in some way, shape or form in the United States: those such as Huawei, ZTE, Hikvision, Hytera and Alibaba through to China Unicom—I will not go through them all. Despite our adding China to the UK arms embargo list earlier this year, the only one company that the Minister could name that is subject to UK controls was Huawei.

I am afraid that we are now at risk of a control gap, and we are still behaving as if we believe in free movement of weapons-grade intelligence. That is presumably why individuals such as Clive Woodley, funded by the UK university system and the Ministry of Defence, are still wandering around organising conferences on weapons in China. Given the poor job that the National Security Council did on co-ordinating complex operations such as the evacuation from Afghanistan, I am seriously concerned that the Government lack the capacity to co-ordinate the Treasury, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, the Department for International Trade, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and the intelligence agencies in controlling what needs to be controlled. I would like to see a duty on Ministers to report to the House on companies of concern, particularly those operating from countries where we have arms embargoes, with clear measures to control them.

[Bob Seely]

The right hon. Member is, as ever, coming up with some interesting ideas. Are those ideas for this Bill, or would they have been better in the National Security and Investment Act 2021 or potentially be better in the upcoming economic crime Bill II? They may fit more naturally into other laws.

[Liam Byrne]

I leave that to the judgment of the House in the debates that we have, but we must make the framework coherent, because, frankly, it is not coherent today.

My second point is about the defence of our democracy. The Chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee, the right hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis), was absolutely right to flag the fact that we have needed a defence of the integrity of our democracy at the core of our strategy for a long time. I called for it back in 2018, but right now, neither the Electoral Commission, nor the Advertising Standards Authority nor Ofcom has the power to regulate adverts placed on social media. People can therefore get away with ads on social media that could never be placed on television. Facebook, as all of us know, is like a wild west. There are also no constraints on what parties can spend in between elections, which allows people to surge investments in politics between elections, and there is no control to stop unlimited donations to political parties from abroad if they are laundered through the bank account of a British citizen.

[Bob Seely]

Is the right hon. Gentleman aware of the GRU and the Internet Research Agency placing adverts on Facebook and other social media sites for pro-gun and anti-gun rallies, and for anti-Muslim and pro-Muslim rallies, taking place in the same towns on the same day in the United States, designed specifically to incite violence and bloodshed?

[Liam Byrne]

Perhaps no one in this House has done more than the hon. Gentleman to expose the hybrid warfare and divide-and-rule tactics of Russia, but we are wide open to them, not least because a person can give unlimited amounts of money to political parties if they are laundered through the bank account of a UK citizen. Call it, if you will, the Sheleg manoeuvre.

Ehud Sheleg, no doubt an honourable man, has given £3.3 million to the Conservative party, yet The New York Times revealed that a suspicious activity report from Barclays flagged that £2.5 million moved to Mr Sheleg from his father-in-law in Russia wound up in a UK account that then shifted £450,000 to the Conservative party. The New York Times reported that Barclays flagged the SAR with this statement:

“We are able to trace a clear line back from this donation to its ultimate source… Kopytov”—

the father-in-law—

“can be stated with considerable certainty to have been the true source of the donation.”

Along with a number of other hon. and right hon. Members, I flagged this to the National Crime Agency. A day or two later—the NCA did not spend an awful lot of time looking at this—a letter came back from Steve Rodhouse, its director of operations, which stated:

“As you will be aware, provided a donation comes from a permissible source, and was the decision of the donor themselves, it is permitted under PPERA. This remains the case even if the donor’s funds derived from a gift from an overseas individual.”

That is utter nonsense. It is completely ridiculous. No doubt Mr Sheleg is an honourable man, but the Sheleg manoeuvre could be exploited by all kinds of bad actors.

Finally, we in this House have defended a number of extremely brave journalists and former colleagues, such as Catherine Belton, Tom Burgis, Arabella Pike and Charlotte Leslie, who have all risked everything to raise a red flag about bad actors and threats of foreign influence, yet their thanks have been to be hounded in court by oligarchs who seek to rack up hundreds of thousands of pounds in legal bills to deter such people from telling the truth. If we are to defend whistleblowers, and I am pleased to see that provision in the Bill, surely this is the moment for the House to unite in refining, if not legislating for, a defence for people who make arguments that need such a defence.

We are in new times, and the return of great power competition is upon us. We need new defences, and this Bill is a chance to make good some of those defences now.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

On his birthday, last but not least, Steve Baker.

--- Later in debate ---

[Damian Hinds]

My right hon. and learned Friend anticipates my next point to some extent. In instances where an individual has operated in good faith in compliance with domestic and international law and all proper process, they would then not face the risk of liability under the 2007 Act for something they could not have foreseen. In effect, we are adding greater certainty and specificity to an existing defence—the reasonable defence contained within that Act—by detailing scenarios where the offence will not apply, whereas the current defence is untested and imprecise.

The amendment means that, where an individual is working properly on behalf of our intelligence and security services and armed forces with an international partner to protect national security, they do not personally risk criminal liability if their work is later found to have been capable of contributing to unlawful activity in a way they would not have intended. That risk should remain with the Government, the services and the armed forces at corporate level, and that is what this amendment seeks to ensure.

A number of colleagues have raised the question of disinformation. They are correct that information operations are now a firm feature in the set of devices available to hostile states. There is direct disinformation, where talking points are put out on those states, on foreign affairs or on our domestic politics and society, but there is also the terrible technique of indirect disinformation, which is not necessarily intended to make anybody believe a particular line or narrative, but is simply aimed at causing division and discord in our country, to undermine our democracy and the cohesion of our society.

This Bill deals with people who carry out disinformation for a foreign state, but I want to be clear that legislation on the material itself belongs in the Online Safety Bill. We are looking at how to amend that Bill to account for disinformation material where that disinformation amounts to foreign interference, so that it can be treated as illegal material.

[Liam Byrne]

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way, and appreciate the way in which he is stepping through these points. Is an offence created by the provider of a social media platform if it enables someone to spread harmful messages? Does it count as a proxy, in effect?

[Damian Hinds]

The right hon. Gentleman tempts me to open up a very wide debate, somewhat outside the scope of Second Reading. He is absolutely right to identify the significance of disinformation and wider information operations as undertaken by foreign states and the obvious role of social media in that. The American election of 2016 remains the textbook example—there are plenty of others around the world. What I have set out is the way in which the Bill deals with people doing that on behalf of foreign states. As for platforms’ responsibility for what they do with the material and the steps that they must take—he will know about the principles in the Online Safety Bill not only to remove material but to minimise its presence in the first place—that is rightly subject matter for the Online Safety Bill.

Finally, on the foreign influence registration scheme—this has been raised by many colleagues across the House, including my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis), my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely), the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) and others—as the Home Secretary indicated when opening the debate, we are committed to introducing a foreign influence registration scheme through a Government amendment. It is important that we take time to ensure that such a scheme is effective and proportionate in the way in which it counters state-threat activity and protects UK interests. That was a clear message in the public consultation, and we continue to review requirements in the light of Russian attempts to undermine western and European state stability.

If I may say so, my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight illustrated rather well the great complexities of trying to deal with this subject. I absolutely commit to communicating with the Opposition parties and the Intelligence and Security Committee as we introduce this measure. We want to do it as soon as possible, and we absolutely recognise the importance of scrutiny in both Houses. However, I want to make it clear that we cannot commit to doing that for the beginning of the Committee stage; but we want to do it as soon as possible thereafter.

National Security Bill

Liam Byrne Excerpts

Consideration of Lords message
Monday 26th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Tom Tugendhat]

I assure the right hon. Gentleman that I have heard him. I hope that the amendment will now satisfy the ISC with respect to its concerns. I am sure that hon. Members across the House will support Government amendment (a) in lieu.

I turn to Lords amendment 22B, which would require political parties to make an annual return to the Electoral Commission, setting out the details of donations from foreign powers. It would also create a duty on political parties to write an annual policy statement to ensure the identification of donations from foreign powers. I understand the intention behind the amendment, and I share the strength of feeling behind it.

The Government are very much alive to the risk that foreign interference presents. I am pleased that we have already taken action to address it, and I am pleased with the support that we have received on both sides of the House for our reforms to Companies House, which will deliver more reliably accurate information on the companies register, providing greater powers for Companies House to query and challenge the information it receives. The Government are also legislating, via the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill, to enhance data sharing between Companies House and public authorities, including the Electoral Commission. This will help the enforcement of the rules on donations by providing greater confidence in the accuracy of the data held at Companies House.

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

The Minister is one of the House’s experts on the malign influence of foreign money in this country and the creation of Londongrad, so he knows all too well that money from foreign powers is coming into the bank accounts of UK citizens and then moving almost immediately—sometimes even overnight—into the coffers of political parties in this country. That creates a risk to the integrity of our political system. He must surely accept that the drafting of the Bill does not yet provide sufficient safeguards against that risk.

[Tom Tugendhat]

The right hon. Gentleman flatters me, which is always a way to succeed in this place, but he will forgive me if I carry on, because I will address some of those points. He will see that I have considered them, and that there are some areas in which there may be some conversation.

Our reforms build on the updates to electoral law in the Elections Act 2022, which have closed loopholes on foreign third-party campaign spending. They also include other measures to ensure that our democracy will remain secure. The National Security Bill will give our agencies more tools to tackle foreign interference. The new offence of foreign interference includes manipulating whether or how any person participates in political processes. The Bill also provides for substantially higher maximum penalties where a foreign power is involved in the commission of existing electoral offences of the nature that the right hon. Gentleman describes. That includes those relating to making political donations, including via third parties.

In addition, the Bill’s foreign influence registration scheme, which the right hon. Gentleman and I both championed on the Foreign Affairs Committee, will increase the transparency of foreign political influence activities. The enhanced tier of FIRS, as we are calling it, allows us to list foreign powers that act against the safety and interests of the United Kingdom. A designation would require a person acting within the United Kingdom at the direction of a specified power or entity to register with the scheme.

Although I understand the aims of Lords amendment 22B, I do not follow its approach. The legal framework in this area is exceptionally clear: any person accepting a donation from a foreign power, whether made directly or indirectly, is already breaking the law. As such, the result of this amendment would be for political parties to submit a blank return to the Electoral Commission once a year. As I am sure colleagues would agree, this would do little to improve transparency or enhance our electoral security.

Secondly, as the Government have set out previously, Lords amendment 22B does nothing to enhance the ability of political parties to investigate donations of the nature that the right hon. Gentleman describes. Political parties do not have the financial investigative capabilities of the banks or security services. They rightly cannot access people’s personal financial records and do not have the means to trace layers of financial transactions. They cannot themselves undertake sophisticated forensic accounting. There is little to be gained by increasing pressure on political parties to identify impermissible donations without improving their ability to do so.

Thirdly, political parties are not global corporations. There are more than 380 registered political parties, many of which are predominantly made up of volunteers. Lords amendment 22B could be disproportionately burdensome for smaller political parties, disincentivising them from accepting donations and, in turn, harming grassroots democracy.

Finally, the requirement to publish an annual policy statement lacks utility. In previous debates on this matter, hon. and right hon. Members highlighted concerns that parties do not have to evaluate a donation and its perceived risk. This is not true. I reiterate that political parties are already required by law to take all reasonable steps to verify the identity of a donor and whether they are permissible. Failure to ensure that permissibility requirements are met is an offence under existing law. As such, parties are already required to have systems in place to mitigate the acceptance of such funds.

As to the political point: just because you can, does not mean you should. Political judgment should always apply to donations.

[Liam Byrne]

I thank the Minister for giving way once again. He is being characteristically generous.

We may as well test the argument he is rehearsing against facts that are now known. Mr Mohamed Amersi, for example, has given something like £775,000 to political causes in this country. The Financial Times has reported that a considerable fraction of Mr Amersi’s profits are made from trade in Russia. How does this Bill safeguard against profits made in a country such as Russia finding their way into this country’s political system and infecting it?

[Tom Tugendhat]

The right hon. Gentleman, as he will understand, raises an individual about whom I will not comment. The Government will not take a position of that nature on an individual based on such comments. I will not address him specifically.

What I will say is that there have been reports of foreign donations getting into political parties—that is true. What is also true is that political parties have a responsibility to check the sources of their donations, and all British citizens have the right to donate. If a specific accusation has not been reported to the Electoral Commission and investigated, and if a person has not been found guilty, the right hon. Gentleman will understand that I cannot make any further comment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Holly Lynch]

It would be unwise to speculate at the Dispatch Box, but I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for making that point. In the absence of clarity, he is right to put that question to the Government. Why have we not seen progress on this? It would seem to be sensible and proportionate to expect that engagement happens between the Government and the Prime Minister and the Intelligence and Security Committee, and happens on a regular basis.

Lords amendment 22B, tabled by Lord Carlile—once again, let me thank him for his services to this legislation—has continued to enjoy broad support, both across the Benches inside Parliament and outside. We know, from examples that have been exposed and from the most recent annual threat assessment by the director general of MI5, Ken McCallum, that it deals with one of the ways hostile state actors and their proxies are seeking to gain influence within our democracy. When we debated the merit of the previous amendment on this matter, I shared the examples of those linked to so-called Chinese secret police stations who had been involved in organising Conservative fundraising dinners. I also cited the Good Law Project’s research, which claims that the Conservatives have accepted at least £243,000 from Russian-associated donors, some of whom were linked to sanctioned businesses and organisations, since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

There is a comprehensive case for these proportionate changes. The Electoral Commission has said:

“Enhanced due diligence and risk assessment processes would help campaigners identify foreign money, identify potential proceeds of crime, and establish a culture of ‘know your donor’ within parties—similar to the ‘know your customer’ approach, encouraged through Anti-Money Laundering regulations for the financial sector.”

I hope the Minister is persuaded by its argument that:

“These requirements could be introduced in a way that recognises the need for proportionality, with different requirements depending on the size of a regulated entity’s financial infrastructure, or the size of a donation, to prevent the checks becoming a disproportionate burden on smaller parties and campaigners.”

Similarly, Spotlight on Corruption has argued:

“The rules that are supposed to prohibit foreign donations are riddled with loopholes which enable foreign money to be channelled to political parties and MPs through lawful donors.”

That point has just been made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne). Furthermore, the Committee on Standards of Public Life, in its 2021 “Regulating Election Finance” report, recommended that laws should be updated and that

“parties and non-party campaigners should have appropriate procedures in place to determine the true source of donations. Parties and campaigners should develop a risk-based policy for managing donations, proportionate to the levels of risk to which they are exposed”.

We know that the risk is there, and Lords amendment 22B is a rational and proportionate response to that risk. The Minister has said that the Lords amendment is unnecessary and that donations are covered by other provisions, but I ask him once again, can he truly assure us that dirty money, with a price attached, is not finding its way into our system and our democracy?

[Liam Byrne]

My hon. Friend is making a brilliant speech. Does she agree that the scale of this potential risk is now unprecedented, not least because in 2019 we saw the most expensive election year in British political history? More than £100 million flowed into British political parties then. Does that not underline the obligation on all of us to make sure that every penny of that money is clean?

[Holly Lynch]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for that, as he is absolutely right. I think we can all come together to recognise the responsibility that falls to all of us to clean up our democracy as much as we can. The world has changed, even since we started work on this legislation well over 12 months ago. The role of hostile state actors and their conduct in the world, and the interference that we are having to take every measure to protect ourselves from, means that these proposals are needed more than ever, so he is absolutely right to make that point.

If the Minister and the Government reject these proposals, the electorate will draw their own conclusions as to why. I will be listening carefully to the other contributions and to the Minister’s closing remarks. I am pleased that the Government have recognised the need to have a look at the updated MOU for the ISC—I just wish there was some substance to their amendment.

Once again, in case we do not see the Bill back again in the Commons, may I take the opportunity to thank all those who have worked so hard on it, and the law enforcement officers and security services who work so hard, every day, to keep us safe?