National Security and Investment Bill

Lord Robathan Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 4th February 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Robathan (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I welcome the Bill. It has been a long time in coming. I intend to look at the context of the Bill and its genesis. Over a decade ago, when I was working in the MoD, we saw newspaper reports that 90% of cyberattacks on the UK came from one house in Shanghai. This Bill is largely about Chinese influence being embedded in our critical national infrastructure and that is why we should concentrate on China. I wish the Chinese people well but the Chinese Communist Party is pursuing a policy of hegemony and aggrandisement. The noble Lord, Lord McNally, agreed that this has been generated by China.

I will cite a few examples. The Chinese have been building military bases on reefs built out of concrete on islands in the South China Sea, which they now claim to have territorial waters around. The belt and road initiative, which is eight years old or thereabouts, was welcomed by the media and, seemingly, western Governments. But, in fact, China has been buying up Africa, Sri Lanka and elsewhere with its belt and road initiative. I was in Ethiopia 15 months ago, where there is a brand new airport in Addis Ababa. Ethiopia may find that some of these debts do not get repaid but that is for another day. Over a decade ago, we knew about Chinese reverse engineering whereby they get hold of sophisticated technology and military equipment, work out how to build the stuff themselves and then use western secret technology against us. I hope we understand that now the scales have fallen from our eyes at last. Charles Parton of the Royal United Services Institute, speaking to the Commons Committee on the Bill, described the Chinese Government as pursuing a policy of “civil-military fusion”. That sums it up.

As we can now see, we can believe reports about Chinese treatment of the Uighurs, which perhaps we denied for some time. There are BBC reports today about systematic rape. We know about organ theft [Inaudible] million people. We can see what is happening in Hong Kong, where the Chinese are breaking the terms of the joint declaration, a legally binding international agreement. We can see the military threat to Taiwan and, I fear, the chance of war. We can see Chinese moves to building a military and commercial empire, and using threats and economic muscle against, for instance, Australian wine exports after that country dared to criticise the Chinese and suggest that the virus came from Wuhan.

I support the Bill for those reasons because our national security is under threat. The Government have got the message rather late—Huawei being excluded from 5G is a particular point that I raise—but it is not six years since Xi Jinping was entertained here and declared the UK to be the best Chinese partner in the West. Indeed, George Osborne said that this would be

“a golden decade for the UK-China relationship”.

Today, Manchester University has cancelled an agreement with a Chinese electronics technology company because of that company’s involvement in surveillance in Xinjiang. Ofcom has—again, this day—revoked the licence of Chinese broadcaster CGTN because the company is

“ultimately controlled by the Chinese Communist party.”

Although Cambridge University has helpfully sent us all a briefing paper saying how important Chinese money is to it, I should have thought that the exposure by the noble Lord, Lord Moore, of Jesus College and others in Cambridge and their close ties with China would have shamed it a little, at least.

Surely nobody can doubt any more the unfriendly intent of China. The genocide amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Alton, two days ago showed that the House of Lords understands that the behaviour of the Chinese needs, at the very least, close examination. Sadly, the EU has just signed a huge trade agreement with China, which is regrettable. Yes, we want inward investment, as my noble friend Lady Noakes said, and economic growth. We want to trade with the world, including China, but we need to protect ourselves and peace first, and the Bill goes some way towards doing that. I know that Governments do not always get legislation right, so we will watch the progress of the Bill, and amendments will certainly be needed as it progresses, but its spirit is correct and I support it.

National Security and Investment Bill

Lord Robathan Excerpts

Committee stage & Lords Hansard
Tuesday 2nd March 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted (LD) [V]]

My Lords, there are very wide-reaching powers in this Bill and, to start where I ended my Second Reading speech:

“I am not against the notion of interventions, but the Bill should be more than notion and compulsion, and I hope that it is possible to include more direction and balance.”—[Official Report, 4/2/21; col. 2364.]


That is exactly the aim of Amendment 1. It aims to be positive rather than negative, by defining an overarching objective. One might debate whether it could be slightly different, but the idea is to have an overarching objective to safeguard national security in respect of economic and social harm. “Social harm” is a very broad term. Recognising that broad scope, it specifically lists that the Secretary of State must

“have regard to the effect … on technology investment… the research and innovation environment … and business opportunities for small and medium-sized enterprises.”

I can almost hear the Minister assuring us that the Secretary of State will have regard to a lot of things, and that would be right, but it is also necessary to make sure that there are correct messages given by the Bill—messages that endure and give confidence to the business sectors most likely to suffer, perhaps entirely unnecessarily, from rumours, concern or finger-pointing from competing jurisdictions.

If we take the starting point that the Bill has good intentions, that there are similar moves internationally, that we have perhaps been too slack in the past, and that there are inevitably burdens arising from both notification requirements and notification concern, that will lead to unnecessary voluntary notification. One wonders if there are not more mechanisms that can give an all-clear signal.

Maybe some will become clearer or develop over time but, wherever that is possible, as we work through the Bill, I am mainly looking to see what incremental steps can be made towards certainty. That can be helped right at the start of the Bill by using the combination of broad objective plus a list of the most sensitive “have regard” matters. This appears in various other pieces of UK legislation, not least in the financial services legislation that is occupying both my time and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, on the days either side of this sitting. Therefore, I hope that the Minister sees the advantage of taking that approach here.

[Lord Robathan (Con)]

My Lords, I will disappoint my noble friend Lady Noakes by making a comment that is more a Second Reading comment than anything else. But it is important we see this Bill in context. The genesis of this Bill is, I assume, largely about Chinese influence and the debates we have had about Huawei and so on. I want to raise only one issue on the context; it is the way in which British commerce and the economy are so intricately and deeply linked with China. Is that globalisation? I am not sure.

We all know how much we buy now comes from China on the one belt, one road programme or elsewhere. The interdependence between western consumers and economies and the Chinese economy is extraordinarily deep-rooted. I am going to use a little example—a silly one, you may say. Old-fashioned fellow that I am, I try to buy British if I can. Looking for a butter dish online, I bought quite an attractive one from the English Tableware Company. I thought that was pretty safe, until the moment it arrived. I turned it over and found it was made in China, which seems quite strange to me. I took it up with the company, and it came back to me saying its products were all ethically sourced and it had checked the suppliers. Of course, we have no idea about the working conditions or possibility of slave labour in Chinese factories.