My Lords, this Bill is clearly necessary. I welcome the intentions behind it, but I want to focus on some of its weaker provisions, specifically Clauses 13 and 14, Clauses 29 and 30 and Part 3.
In Clause 30, the definition of “foreign power” is extremely broad, covering all foreign states except Ireland, including political parties in government and agencies that are subject to effective control by government. Last week in Westminster Hall, I was talking to some Canadian Liberal MPs, currently in the governing party. On the face of it, under the provisions of Clause 30 and Part 3, I in should have declared that interaction to the Home Office. Do I need to fill in a form every time I go to meetings with like-minded politicians from foreign Liberal parties? We need to find some way of narrowing the definition of “foreign power” to prevent overwhelming the Home Office and confusing the many, many British people who interact with representatives of other foreign states. Should we not amend the Bill to exclude all members of NATO, or all states with which the UK has a security relationship?
How do we tackle foreign powers that are deeply embedded in British life, such as the Gulf states? These are anti-democratic monarchies, with a record which includes kidnapping their nationals on British soil and murdering their critics in third countries, but they are visibly present at Ascot and Newmarket, with houses in Belgravia and estates in Surrey, mixing and conversing with British society at the highest level, including MPs and Members of this House—more difficult to disentangle than the Russian connection of which the ISC report warned.
Clauses 13 and 14 deal with foreign interference in British politics and elections. I find it astonishing that action is now proposed in response to what the Government rightly recognise as a serious threat without their having followed the recommendation of the Intelligence and Security Committee to publish a substantial part of the evidence it had collected on Russian interference. When I asked an Oral Question about this last year, the noble Lord, Lord True, told the House that the Russia report had found no evidence of “successful interference” in UK elections—an admission that they had indeed found evidence of attempts to subvert our democratic processes but were nevertheless refusing to publish it.
This is not a dead issue. Mrs Justice Steyn, giving her judgment in the libel case Arron Banks brought against the journalist Carole Cadwalladr in June this year, stated that Mr Banks had lied about his meeting with the Russians, that at least some of the meetings were covert, and that more investigation was needed into whether the Brexit campaign had accepted any funds from Russia. Earlier this year, Mr Banks reportedly wrote off a further loan of £7 million to Leave.EU when it went into liquidation. The source of the funds for his remarkable generosity over the last seven years remains unclear, except that it came from somewhere foreign. If we are to have an informed debate in Committee, the Government must now publish what the ISC recommended we should be told.
The Minister in the Commons spoke in Committee of the importance of Parliament and the public understanding and the nature of the threat. That would help us understand the nature of the threat that we recognise so far.
I have asked for advice on the interaction between Clause 14 and the Elections Act, which this House considered earlier in the year. That Act extends the right to vote in UK elections to all UK citizens resident in all other states in the world for their lifetimes. There is little provision to check the identity or status of overseas citizens applying for the register; personation will be easy, the origins of donations almost impossible to verify. This Act takes a much tougher approach, against personation, misuse of proxies and acting as a channel for funds from a foreign power. I welcome that, but Tom Tugendhat’s new Defending Democracy Taskforce, which he announced the other week, will need to rewrite parts of the Elections Act.
The Act’s references to undue influence in UK diaspora communities also raise delicate and sensitive issues that we will need to examine. I speak as someone who has done a lot of politics in Bradford. The Israeli embassy and the Indian and Pakistani high commissions, for example, work actively to maintain the links between British diaspora communities and the states they represent. Britain has many diaspora communities, and many dual nationals who have settled here, from hostile authoritarian states as well as from Commonwealth members and democracies—Iran, for example. So far as I am aware, the UK has no coherent policy on the legal rights and obligations of dual nationals, either when in the UK or in their other countries of citizenship. This suggests that greater clarity there is badly needed.
Part 3, which establishes a foreign influence registration scheme, was added in Committee in the Commons. Sir Iain Duncan Smith remarked in Committee:
“The Government seem almost to have cut and pasted some of the US legislation and possibly the Australian legislation.”—[Official Report, Commons, 16/11/22; col. 747.]
The Minister must be aware that the Australian legislation led to an unanticipated surge in reports of “foreign activity arrangements” by Australia’s eight research-intensive universities, which overwhelmed the Government’s capacity to process submissions. The UK has a great many more research-intensive universities than Australia, which are actively involved in research partnerships across the world. We also have world-renowned research institutes in Chatham House, the International Institute
for Strategic Studies, the Royal United Services Institute and others. As it stands, Clause 62 would lead to a flood of reports from all of these to the Home Office, far beyond its limited capacity to cope.
I speak with passion on this subject because it would have hobbled my own career. I was director of research at Chatham House for 12 years from 1978 to 1990, and thereafter taught international relations at Oxford and then the LSE. At Chatham House, among other things, I was the British secretary of the Anglo-Soviet Round Table, a forum for dialogue with the Moscow institute for world affairs—a state-controlled entity close to the Politburo. Our engagement was supported by the Foreign Office but repeatedly attacked as subversive by the Murdoch press throughout that period.
My wife would still be caught by this clause. She keeps in touch with, and visits, several former students who are now in government in several countries across Europe. Some of her visits have no doubt been paid for from state funds in those countries. My son would be caught, too. He is a systems biologist at Edinburgh University, involved in a number of international collaborations with universities in Germany, the Netherlands and the United States, and with the government-funded Institut Pasteur in Paris. When attached to an American university, he was working closely with Russian mathematicians. They and thousands more academics and researchers will be filling in forms and sending them off to the Home Office. What do we do about the many foreign nationals working in UK universities? Over 40% of the staff in some of our top universities—the figure is higher in the London School of Economics—and a good deal more of the students in some of our universities are from a wide range of friendly and unfriendly countries.
I have been told that the proposals in Part 3 were floated by the Home Office before and then withdrawn after sustained criticism from other Whitehall departments and outside bodies. I have the strong impression that the Home Office has not considered the overlap and duplication of this provision with clauses in the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill, which the House will consider on Report tomorrow. I understand that there has been very little consultation with universities so far. One academic told me yesterday that the Bill as currently drafted will transform the UK from a science superpower to a scientific bureaucracy superpower.
A concern with real threats must nevertheless consider that Britain’s universities are among its greatest international assets and that Clause 62, as drafted, could severely damage their reputations and future operations. Can the Minister assure the House that Part 3 will not be considered in Committee until the Home Office has ensured that other Whitehall departments are content with what is proposed; that it does not contradict other Bills or Acts; and that our research universities, our leading international institutes, the Royal Society and the other academies have all been properly consulted on its implications?
The Bill focuses on state threats, rather than on non-state threats. It is fuzzy on quasi-state enterprises—companies owned by sovereign wealth funds in Malaysia or Qatar, or companies with a substantial and sometimes controversial presence in the UK, such as DP World—and does not touch on the role of immensely wealthy
private persons, whether Russian, American, Arab or Asian, attempting to influence events in the UK by penetrating British society and through money.
Right-wing authoritarians such as Viktor Orbán in Hungary have made much of what they regard as the malign influence of George Soros and his open society foundations. I am concerned about the malign influence of the American Koch family foundations and their attempts to influence British politics through their close links with right-wing think tanks here. I read footnotes to Koch foundation publications in the Policy Exchange papers that shaped the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill. Policy Exchange does not publish where its funds come from. Nor does the Institute of Economic Affairs or the Adam Smith Institute, which together exerted such strong and malign influence over the Truss Government. We know, however, that they have received funds from American multinational companies and foundations, and we have a right to know more about all their foreign funders.
The Boardman review of the fallout from the Greensill scandal in 2020 recommended to the Government that they
“should consult on whether think tanks, research institutes and lobbying academics should be required to disclose their sources of funding and whether there are circumstances when they ought to be required to register as consultant lobbyists.”
I am surprised that this proposal is not in the Bill, at least as far as foreign funding is concerned. I will attempt to amend the Bill to force political think tanks to declare all overseas sources of funding.
This is an important and necessary Bill but it has been badly drafted and inadequately thought through. It is better to get it right than to rush it on to the statute book.
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