Cyber-security and UK Democracy

Pat McFadden Excerpts

Monday 25th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Mr Pat McFadden (Wolverhampton South East) (Lab)]

I thank the Deputy Prime Minister for his statement, and for advance sight of it. It is a statement about which there has been significant briefing in the press over the past couple of days. On questions of national security, Labour will support the Government in efforts to counter attempts by China, or any other state, to interfere with or undermine the democratic process, or attempts to stop elected representatives going about their business, voicing their opinions, or casting their votes without fear or favour. With that in mind, I pay tribute to the efforts made every day by the intelligence and security services to protect the public, and to protect our democracy and way of life. The economic relationship between the United Kingdom and China can never mean compromising on national security or our democratic integrity.

The Deputy Prime Minister’s statement touches on a number of issues, and I have some questions about them. Will he say more about the Government’s assessment of Chinese motives? Does he believe, for example, that Beijing wants to disrupt our democratic process, or instead to gather data about our citizens for some other reason? On the specific issue of the Electoral Commission and the electoral register, why does he think that the Chinese Government hacked what is a publicly available database? Does he believe they were after the details of those who may not be on a public register for good reasons, for example because they might be employed in security-sensitive areas? Does he believe they were after details and the personal data of political donors, or was there some other motive?

The Deputy Prime Minister referred to the democratic electoral process, and with an election coming it is vital that people have confidence in their ability to register and to vote. Will he confirm that our electronic register to vote system is sufficiently well protected? He said that the attacks on parliamentary accounts were unsuccessful. Does he believe that China now wants to engage in the kind of hack and leak activity that we have in recent years associated with Russia, in order to compromise either individual politicians or the wider democratic process? On sanctions, only last week the Minister of State was reluctant to respond to the claim that the Foreign Office “indefinitely paused” targeted sanctions against Chinese officials late last year. Will the Deputy Prime Minister explain what has changed in the past week?

We are grateful for the work of the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament, and the report it issued on China last year, which covered much of the same ground that the Deputy Prime Minister covered in his statement. When discussing individual politicians, paragraph 98 of that report stated:

“Targets are not necessarily limited to serving politicians either. They can include former political figures, if they are sufficiently high profile. For example, it is possible that David Cameron’s role as Vice President of a £1bn China–UK investment fund…was in some part engineered by the Chinese state to lend credibility to Chinese investment,”.

What have the Government done to look into that allegation from the Intelligence and Security Committee? How can Ministers ensure that those leaving politics are not targeted in that way?

In that spirit, Mr Speaker, I have read reports that the Conservative Back-Bench 1922 committee is to be briefed on these matters later today. Given the importance of national and democratic security to all the parties in this House, is the Deputy Prime Minister intending to arrange a briefing for the Leader of the Opposition, the Intelligence and Security Committee and, indeed, the other political parties represented in the House?

Experts in this field have warned of China’s voracious appetite for data, and its potential uses as computing power improves—for example, as quantum computing develops. The UK’s record on data security is patchy, to put it mildly. What are the Government doing to protect complex and valuable datasets from being stolen now, possibly in order to be manipulated later by more powerful computers that are controlled by authoritarian adversaries?

Finally, Mr Speaker, on the broader issue, does the fact that the Deputy Prime Minister chose to make this statement today signal a fundamental reassessment of the overall threat? He referred to the United States and our allies. On 12 February, the US Administration warned Congress that the cyber-threat from China was changing. Previously, a threat that largely involved spying and influencing now looked like it was getting ready to disrupt critical American infrastructure—aviation, energy, healthcare and other sectors. Is it now the UK Government’s view that we should change our assessment of the threat in a similar way? If so, this is of the utmost importance, and we would need to know what corresponding improvements the Government would make to the preparedness of our critical infrastructure, because if the threat really has changed then so too should our response.

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his questions. I shall seek to address as many of them as I can.

When it comes to Chinese motivations, ultimately, it is a matter for the Chinese to be able justify their motivations, but the points that the right hon. Gentleman made were apposite. First, the Chinese look at successful democratic countries, such as the United Kingdom, Japan or the Republic of Korea where I was last week, and they want to seek to undermine them. It is no surprise therefore that they should seek to interfere in electoral processes, in the way that we have seen conduct from Russia that aligns with that. Indeed, the successful democratic elections around the world right now stand in contrast to the sham elections that we saw in Russia last weekend.

On the right hon. Gentleman’s point about the public record of the Electoral Commission, I think that that is the essence of what has happened here. These attacks and these attempts were ultimately pretty unsuccessful. I reassure the right hon. Gentleman and Members of this House that there was no infiltration of the closed register of the Electoral Commission, so the concerns that he raised have not arisen. On the further strengthening of the electoral register, that is precisely the work that the National Cyber Security Centre does in co-ordination with GCHQ, working with Government agencies, including the Electoral Commission.

The right hon. Gentleman was right to raise the risk of hack and leak. It is certainly something that we saw in previous elections, and I remain concerned. I also remain very concerned about artificial intelligence, deep fakes in particular, being used to disrupt elections, hence the work that I undertook at the conference last week and the progress that we are making with the accord on artificial intelligence use by malign states.

In relation to targeted sanctions, it is not the case that the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office paused targeted sanctions. On the conduct of the former Foreign Secretary—[Interruption.] I am not sacking the Foreign Secretary from the Dispatch Box. On the conduct of the current Foreign Secretary, who sits in the other place, all appointments to Government are subject to the usual propriety and ethic processes. Lord Cameron is addressing the 1922 Committee in his capacity as Foreign Secretary in the usual way, addressing a wide range of issues. It is not a specific briefing on this issue, but if leaders of the principal Opposition parties wish to have a further briefing on this issue I am of course very happy to facilitate that, in the way that they know I have done in relation to other national security issues.

We are highly alert to the risks of hostile states hoovering up currently quantum-encrypted information that could subsequently be decoded with advances in quantum computing. We do extensive work with the National Cyber Security Centre and the Ministerial Cyber Board on critical national infrastructure to ensure that we guard ourselves against exactly that risk. On our relationship with China more broadly, Members of this House should take this moment very seriously. It is a grave moment, against a backdrop of an escalating threat from China, and we will take proportionate action in response to that escalating threat.