My Lords, my name is on Amendment 70 and I want to speak to Amendments 68 and 71. I stress that, in getting this Bill right, we need to make sure that it does not lead to a level of overreporting that swamps the Home Office, with a great deal of cynicism and a negative reaction from those who are asked to do the reporting. In the last week, I have received a dozen representations, not just from media and academic sources—the liberal metropolitan elite, whom the Minister may regard as not terribly important—but from the City and commercial enterprises, which are as worried about the negative impact that the Bill could have on their international activities as those in universities are.
I admire the speed with which the Minister talks when he responds to our questions, but I hope that he is carefully considering the reasoned and sometimes expert criticisms that we have of this Bill, that he is more concerned to get the Bill right than to get it through and that, between Committee and Report, we will have some long, further conversations on particular aspects of the Bill about which the House has been concerned.
To expand on that a little, I thought the Minister was a little flippant about my suggestion that there were non-state threats from the right in a number of countries, including the United States. He may have been following the attempted coup in Brazil. The reports of it that I read suggested that the Conservative Political Action Coalition in the United States was actively tweeting in support of Bolsonaro and may well have provided funds, and that Steve Bannon and his organisation were also actively in support of Bolsonaro. These things should worry us as much as terrorist and state threats, and this is another dimension that we need to think about in this Bill.
We know that foreign money has come into this country, that there have been some very odd things, such as the Conservative Friends of Russia element, in which the right has appeared to work with what we regard as the foreign left. Those sorts of things need considering. I look forward to the letter that the Minister will be sending me shortly—I hope—on the question of spiritual injury, which the discussion last week suggested is unenforceable and almost undefinable, and therefore should not be in the Bill. I also hope that we will have further discussions on the impact on
diaspora communities and dual nationals, because the extent to which our diaspora communities have relations with parties in the other countries to which they have links, and with the Governments of those foreign countries—be it Pakistan, Israel or wherever—is going to be complicated further by the Bill. We need to get to the end with an Act which commands public acceptance and public consent. Incidentally, it is likely to come into effect just before the next election, and if there was an adverse reaction to its implementation, the Government are likely to suffer.
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Some of us have seen the letter that Kevin Rudd sent to the Australian Government in response to their scheme some years ago, in which he lists the 35 foreign powers with which he was involved in 23 different capacities. I was thinking last night that perhaps I ought to try this for myself: I have been active in Liberal International. I am sorry that the Conservative Party withdrew from the European People’s Party, and has many fewer international links, except with the Republican Party in the United States, than the Labour Party or the Liberal Democrats, but part of the life of someone concerned with international issues in the Liberal Democrats is to meet liberals in government, or not in government, in a range of other countries.
I used to chair the UK-Netherlands forum, to regularly attend the Brussels Forum, and was for 10 years the research director of the Transatlantic Policy Forum, in the course of which I became very friendly with a number of Congressmen, Senators and others; one of my closest friends from that period is now Deputy Secretary of State. That is not dealing with a hostile country, nor is talking to US Senators. My colleague, the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Pittenweem, is a member of the North Atlantic Assembly; he does that on a regular basis. We need to be very careful not to get into positions where people start thinking: “Should I report this? Do I need to report this?”
What about the occasions on which I have spoken to meetings of former students of the London School of Economics or St Antony’s College, Oxford, in Berlin, Brussels and Helsinki? At one point, I found myself in the sauna of the president of the Finnish central bank, chatting about British politics and Europe. I should probably report that, and say what I was wearing at the time.
Britain declares itself to be a global country—global Britain—a science superpower, a world financial centre, and a leading democracy and open society. The Bill needs to be compatible with those objectives, not getting in the way of them. If we say that this applies every time one meets someone in authority in Washington, Paris or Berlin, that is absurd and contradictory to our principles. At the very least, we need to think about which countries we care about and which countries we are relaxed about. We have friendly countries, democratic countries; we should not intend to treat them as if they were China, Russia or Iran. Those are the purposes of these amendments, and we should have further dialogue on that. I would say that, having taught students from foreign countries on many occasions—my wife and I, between us, have taught two Prime Ministers, a President of the European Commission and various others—we
meet them occasionally; that is not unusual. There are many others involved in politics in Britain who have similar international links. How does this cope with the sorts of informal conversations on shared approaches to the international order which we all have on those occasions?
I think that this is too complicated and far too bureaucratic, and we need to think carefully how we tighten and narrow it, in order to win and hold public consent and produce an Act which will last for 10 to 20 years, and not just until the next Government come in.