Queen’s Speech

Lord Anderson of Ipswich Excerpts

Thursday 12th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Anderson of Ipswich (CB)]

My Lords, we are armed to the teeth against terrorism, but laws to counter the arguably more significant threat of hostile state activity are few, outdated and largely ineffective, so I welcome in principle the long-delayed National Security Bill published yesterday.

No doubt we will give careful scrutiny to the proposed state threats offences, but more striking, to my mind, is the omission from the Bill of two matters that were trailed in advance and formed the bulk of last year’s consultation. The first is the foreign influence registration scheme—a tricky one to pull off, as demonstrated by its troublesome American precedent, the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The second is reform of the Official Secrets Act 1989, which would raise complex and sensitive issues including whistleblowing, the criminal liability of journalists and the question of a public interest defence. The noble Baroness, Lady Williams, indicated earlier that the registration scheme will be introduced during the passage of this Bill. Can the Minister tell us when? Can he confirm that reform of the 1989 Act will not be introduced to this Bill during its passage?

Then there is the Northern Ireland Troubles legacy and reconciliation Bill. The NIO proposals of July 2021 did not impress with their thoroughness or inclusivity, but with a new approach promised and a Minister with the understanding of the noble Lord, Lord Caine, we must hope for better things when the Bill arrives.

The DCMS will need to lose its habit of referring to the Online Safety Bill as a world-first online safety law, political agreement having been reached last month on the EU’s Digital Services Act, now endorsed, rather surprisingly, by Elon Musk, whose views on free speech seem to be evolving rapidly. Seeking as it does to address abuses thrown up by a technological revolution, the Bill has been compared in its significance to the Factories Acts of the 19th century. The noble Lords, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath and Lord Wolfson, were right to point to some of its difficulties. We have some interesting debates ahead.

The so-called Bill of Rights will not live up to its grand title. The devolution settlement on the one hand and the trade and co-operation agreement on the other severely limit the room for manoeuvre where the ECHR is concerned—and a good thing too. I echo the view of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, that most of the proposed changes to the Human Rights Act appear somewhere on the dial between “pointless” and “harmful”.

The right honourable Sir Peter Gross and his expert panel—hand-picked by the Government, including from the ranks of Policy Exchange—produced a thorough, balanced and remarkably harmonious report on Human Rights Act reform that is a model of its kind, and the Lord Chancellor might have done well to heed it. I hope this House will ensure that the report’s wise recommendations are not forgotten as we consider the Bill.

The data reform Bill also merits a degree of wariness. The benefits claimed for relaxing the GDPR regime, tempting as they may be, will need to be weighed against the complications for business of complying with a further set of rules, and against the risk that changes proposed in the consultation could imperil our precious adequacy agreement from the European Commission. The proposal to reduce the independence of the Information Commissioner’s Office recalls debates that we had in the last Session about the independence of the office for environmental protection and the Electoral Commission and concerns expressed by the Joint Committee on the Draft Online Safety Bill about the independence of Ofcom.

The desire to increase the influence of government over nominally independent regulators is, unfortunately, not the only systemic abuse of executive power with which we are confronted in recent, current and promised Bills. Your Lordships, not least through last year’s dramatically titled committee reports that have already been referred to, have grumbled persistently over the increasing tendency towards skeleton Bills and overbroad delegated powers. Our debate on this issue on 6 January revealed a striking unanimity of opinion. However, grumbling will get us nowhere. Today we have heard a stirring call to arms by that unlikely revolutionary, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge. I agree with him, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, and a growing list of other noble Lords in today’s debate that we need to address this issue at source by rejecting the worst of these clauses when they are proposed. Perhaps the Brexit freedoms Bill, an executive power grab over the repeal and replacement of vast swathes of retained EU law, will by its sheer scale and audacity bring this issue to a head.

Finally, although this was not trailed in the Queen’s Speech, it seems that we may once again be invited to breach, or to facilitate the breach of, the Northern Ireland protocol, which was freely concluded in October 2019 and has been binding in international law since it entered into force in 2020. It could surely not be right for this House to make itself complicit in a patently unlawful scheme even if, as I very much doubt, there were short-term diplomatic advantage in doing so. We emphatically rejected such an invitation in the internal market Bill, and I hope that if the need arises we shall do so again.