My Lords, this amendment comes with Amendment 75, which is the substantive amendment. I suppose I should declare a certain underlying prejudice as I start: more than 30 years ago, when I was in charge of research at Chatham House, the international affairs think tank, when we worked with departments across Whitehall on foreign policy issues, we found that the Home Office was the most resistant to the idea that foreign interests had to be taken into account. I have a vivid memory of a conference at Chatham House convened on behalf of the Metropolitan Police with police from the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Spain and elsewhere, at which a number of Home Office civil servants stood in a corner of the room during lunch rather than talk to foreigners. I am sure, 30 years later, that the Home Office is far better than that, but I think there is a problem of how the Bill, as it becomes an Act, looks to our closest friends and allies.
The aim of the Bill is to guard against foreign interference in British politics and British life by hostile foreign powers—above all, by China, Russia and Iran, but also other non-democratic states that want to undermine open societies and democratic government. Yet the definition of “foreign power” does not discriminate in any way between the more than 190 foreign powers with which the UK maintains political, economic and social relations, except for Ireland as a special case. I understand that there have been critical comments from within the US Administration and several European Governments. Yesterday, the German party foundations were speaking to my noble friend Lord Purvis about their worries about being caught by the new red tape which this threatens to impose on them.
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I have heard Ministers say that it is important in passing Bills to give signals to those whom they will affect. Well, this Bill sends a signal to our friends and allies that we think they are potentially hostile and untrustworthy. Offence will be given, obstacles will be erected and bureaucratic procedures will be created. Yet the intensity of our political, economic and social relations with friendly states is of a qualitatively different order from those with hostile states, in particular pariah states such as Iran.
Many of us have spent a great deal of our professional and political lives engaged closely with foreign Governments and political parties with which we are aligned. I should here mention Amendment 74, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, will no doubt speak. Those of us who belong to international party federations or who have spent our professional lives dealing with international policy will find ourselves very rapidly caught up in this. During my career, I got to know a number of Republican senators on the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations at conferences and other places, as well as senior officials at the State Department and elsewhere—and, yes, occasionally the people I met were in the CIA.
That is the sort of thing that one has to do when working in think tanks trying to understand international relations, and not just non-partisan think tanks such as Chatham House; some of the well-funded right-wing think tanks that have grown in the last few years have
very close links with their comparators in Washington and with senior Republicans. This would mean red tape for all of them, from a Government who are not in favour of adding red tape. Of course we talk about things; we engage in second-track diplomacy and try to influence each other.
In those contexts, one wants to consider whether some of our friendly states—those with which we have the closest interactions—should be excluded. That is what this amendment does. We have chosen to put down the member states of NATO because that is a clear category of close allies. We recognise that it does not include Australia and New Zealand, for example, and the Secretary of State might well like to designate Japan. However, the purpose of this amendment is to give the Government an opportunity to say that we do not regard as hostile all foreign powers or intimate conversations about politics and attempts to influence—and perhaps on occasion to direct—each other.
I have another vivid memory of a meeting at Chatham House when the second President Bush was about to take office. John Bolton and a number of others came to Chatham House and told us what we must do on behalf of the British Government in terms of following whatever the US Administration gave us. It was a pretty blatant attempt to direct what we did—no doubt we should have reported it to the Government at the time, instead of which we simply boiled internally.
I hope the Minister will assure us that the way in which contacts with the American, Dutch, Danish, Swedish and other Governments are treated will be of a qualitatively different order. I hope he will say that we need to change that part of the Bill. On a previous occasion when I criticised some of what this Government have done in the last few years, the Minister responded, “Yes, but now this is a different Government”. Happily, it is. We now have a Prime Minister who understands diplomacy and understands that we gain more by treating our neighbours as friendly Governments. I congratulate him on the achievement that he has just managed to negotiate. In that case, we need a different approach in this Bill as well. This amendment is a way of pushing us in that different direction, towards the foreign powers that are our closest friends, allies and neighbours. I beg to move.