National Security Bill

Lord Carlile of Berriew Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments
Wednesday 21st June 2023 Lords Chamber

Motion A1 (as an amendment to Motion A)

[Lord Carlile of Berriew]

Moved by

At end insert “, and do propose Amendment 22B in lieu—


22B: After Clause 14, insert the following new Clause—


“Foreign interference in elections: duties on political parties


(1) A UK-registered political party must, within three months of the passing of this Act, and annually thereafter, publish a policy statement to ensure the identification of donations from a foreign power (whether made directly or through an intermediary).


(2) A UK-registered political party must provide the Electoral Commission with an annual statement setting out individually the details of all donations from a foreign power, including whether made directly or through an intermediary (and identifying all such intermediaries).


(3) In this section, “UK-registered political party” means a political party registered under Part 2 of the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000.””

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords, in moving Motion A1 as an amendment to Motion A and proposing Amendment 22B in lieu, I should say that I shall support, if it is necessary to do so, Amendment 122B, which will be moved by the noble Lord, Lord Coaker.

The Minister mentioned the very pleasant meeting I had with three Ministers and a number of officials about my amendment, and I was very grateful for that meeting. I was given a very simple message—with which I do not agree—that the law goes far enough to protect political parties and those who vote for them from the intervention of foreign powers. My amendment would place no extra burden on Ministers; I removed that from the original version. What it does—rightly, in my view—is place a burden on political parties to do what in the commercial world is routine and carry out proper due diligence, as the term is, on the people who contribute to them.

I listened with great care to what the Minister said a few moments ago. If my noble friend Lord Kerr will forgive me for quoting one of his many memorable sotto voce utterances, he turned and said to me, “So that leaves it to the thief to report the crime, doesn’t it?” I agree with him. Indeed, what the Minister said suggested that when, say, a company is used, up there in Companies House, if you make a complaint, there are investigators who will carry out an investigation to see where the money ultimately comes from—the ultimate donors, not those nice nominees who are nominated directors of the company. However, I do not know how many of your Lordships know this, but Companies House has no investigators whatever—zilch, zero. If noble Lords will take the trouble, during the boring parts of what I hope will be a short speech, to look at GOV.UK, they will see that it tells people that if they want an investigation done into a company they should go to the Serious Fraud Office or somewhere like that.

I accept that the Government want political parties to be properly funded, not improperly funded, although some political parties have accepted unusual sums of money from unusual places. However, I hope that the Minister—and noble Lords if this comes to a vote later—will agree that more due diligence is needed, and that we cannot take at face value that the criminal should report his own crime. We are dealing with bad people here, not good people.

I thank the organisation Spotlight on Corruption for some excellent research that it has done; I feel that it deserves that namecheck. Donations from foreign powers are a significant threat to the UK’s national security and undermine the integrity and credibility of our democratic processes. There is plenty of evidence to support that. A report in 2020 by the Intelligence and Security Committee identified that members of the Russian elite linked to Putin had donated to UK political parties.

Another bit of evidence is that in January 2022 the Security Service warned that an alleged Chinese agent had sought to influence UK parliamentarians on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party and had donated to two major political parties that stand in every seat in this country. In mid-April 2023 concerns were raised in Parliament about alleged links between the Chinese Communist Party and Conservative Party fundraising. The Minister of State for Policing said that

“all political parties need to be alert to the danger of representatives of hostile states seeking to infiltrate or influence their activities”.—[Official Report, Commons, 19/4/23; col. 249.]

This amendment is just that alert.

The Home Office impact assessment for the Bill emphasises that foreign interference is a direct attack on our sovereignty, national institutions and values. The Bill will not prevent that attack unless political parties are required to play a part. One of the noblest things that this noble, unelected House does is to protect democracy from itself, and that is what the amendment is intended to do.

We turn to the safeguards that the Minister says are effective. They are not. The rules that are supposed to prohibit foreign donations in the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 are absolutely riddled with loopholes. They enable foreign money to be channelled to political parties and MPs through what appear to be lawful donors, such as UK-registered businesses and unincorporated associations. The Act requires UK political parties only to check the status of donors; it does not require them to have a risk-based approach to donations. The nominated directors may look like ordinary nominees, but I think it was yesterday that we heard from my noble friend Lord Vaux, in an excellent speech, how names can appear in Companies House as directors and bear no relationship to the control of a company. We come to the same point twice in two days. While the UK’s anti-money laundering framework has been progressively tightened over the last decade, the minimal checks that parties are required to perform are a glaring anomaly.

How effective are the sanctions? The Electoral Commission referred eight cases to the Metropolitan Police in the period 2011 to 2021. I will give your Lordships one guess as to how many prosecutions there have been—absolutely none, because it is completely unreasonable to ask the police suddenly to move into this complex area to carry out the detective work and do the due diligence that any company, whether significant or relatively insignificant, should carry out.

I do not accept for one moment that what I am proposing will affect tiny political parties, because they will be taking their funds from a small group of closely interested people who will, effectively, be their close friends. What we are talking about here is the bigger political parties.

There is consensus among independent experts that parties should check the source of donations. In 2018, the Electoral Commission argued that risk management principles adapted from anti-money laundering undertaken by businesses could

“prevent foreign money being used in UK politics”.

It emphasised that political parties had a duty to do just that. This was supported, in effect, in the July 2021 report Regulating Election Finance by the Committee on Standards in Public Life.

I was pleased to note that my original amendment, to which this is in itself an amendment, was supported in the other place by the Conservative chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee, Sir Julian Lewis MP, who said that the need for political parties to do more to determine the source of donations is “entirely appropriate” and that the additional measures would not be “over-onerous” and were “eminently reasonable”. The Government said that the amendment would impose “huge administrative burdens” on grass-roots political campaigning, but this is just not the case. As the chair of the Electoral Commission has highlighted, a requirement to determine the true source of donations is proportionate and would not by design overburden smaller parties with limited resources.

About 35 years ago, when I was an MP in the old Liberal Party, my Whip and the Opposition Labour Whips asked me to go and sit on the Reasons Committee in the other place. I think it was not really a compliment. If your Lordships have ever been behind the Speaker’s chair they will know that there is a little room, which I thought until that night was private facilities for the Speaker. In fact, it is the reasons room, though that is not on the door, because visitors would assume that it was straight out of “Alice in Wonderland”—and it is, a bit. The Government of the time were privatising the railways and the opposition parties had tried to avoid ping-pong happening twice in one night. I think the reason I was chosen was that they thought I could keep a debate on next to nothing going for an extremely long time.

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

I am not sure how to take that laughter.

Interestingly, we debated for one and three-quarter hours who should be the chair of the committee, until my pager pinged—we had pagers in those days. It read: “You can go home now. Their Lordships have gone to bed”.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

Obviously, I will make sure that those concerns are reflected to my right honourable friend the Security Minister, who will see the committee fairly soon. As I have just said to the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, clearly I will make sure that this debate is widely understood in the appropriate places.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords, I am grateful to all those who have spoken in this debate; I am particularly grateful to the Minister for his great courtesy. I say to him, with great respect, that he has answered mostly questions of his choice that were not directly relevant to the points I made. In my experience over the years, the repetition of a weak defence is capable of convincing only the defendant and nobody else.

I thank those who spoke. It is worth mentioning their names for a particular reason. The noble Lord, Lord Coaker, was powerful, as ever. The noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, made some powerful additional points. The noble Lord, Lord West, is always the right person to have on the bridge with you if you can arrange it; he spoke powerfully about the views of the ISC. The noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, speaks on matters of the constitution with great political and academic knowledge, and has done so for many years. I have always respected the noble Lord, Lord Anderson of Swansea, whom I have watched in the other place as well as here, for the wisdom of his views. The noble Lord, Lord Purvis, has yet again made another powerful speech in your Lordships’ House. Interestingly, the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, was the only Member on the Conservative Back Benches to speak in this debate—a factor that I take to be of significance.

Taking all that into account, it is my intention to invite the House to agree to my Motion by expressing its opinion.