National Security Bill — House of Commons, 2022-06-06
Topic: International Affairs
Robert William Henry Seely (Conservative, Centre-right): I will not take up too much of the House’s time, but I am delighted to see the Minister in the Chamber. I hope to make some suggestions and give some opinions on some things to do with the Bill It strikes me that there seems to be a debate about whether we go deep or go broad. That is a very important part of the debate. For me, anything that does not capture a considerable amount of information about Confucius Institutes, about the universities, and about what law firms, lobbyists and former civil servants are doing in relation to oligarchs, Huawei and Chinese and Russian interests, will not be of service to this country. I will focus very much on the foreign lobbying aspect, because it is something that I have written about and discussed with the Minister First, we know that we need to improve lobbying laws substantially, and the endless, tedious and avoidable scandals over that should give us pause for thought. Secondly, we know there is a specific problem with foreign lobbying, and thirdly, in this era of blurred and confused lines between espionage, covert influence and lobbying, to ensure the health of our democracy we need a stronger and more transparent system. Arguably the Soviets always played that game from the 1930s onwards, when they started using friendship groups, and they really geared things up in the 1950s and 1960s through peace societies, churches and different types of organisations. The KGB worked through front organisations, much as the Chinese communists now work, sadly, through the United Front We are really playing catch-up on this. Our closest ally, the United States, has had the Foreign Agents Registration Act since 1938. Why? Because it identified, rightly, that it had a problem with covert Nazi influence trying to corrupt and influence its politics in the run-up to world war two. I am very glad the US had that law, because things might have been different if it had not. In 2018, the Australians introduced the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme Act, largely in response to covert Chinese influence—the Australians were careful not to pin it to one country, but there is no doubt why it is there—and I congratulate Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on it In the US alone we know, because foreign actors have to declare this stuff, that foreign agents spent more than $2 billion between 2016 and 2020 to influence foreign policy making. The only reason we find out about some of the worst aspects of what happens here is that the big US papers such as The New York Times and The Washington Post report on influence operations happening here if there is a US angle. We know about Oleg Deripaska’s major operation to try to get part of En+ off sanctions and various Members of Parliament—unnamed, obviously—who were helping, but we only know about that because of the Foreign Agents Registration Act For me, it is a source of shame that we have to find out about what is happening in our democracy, in the nooks and crannies and dark corners of influence peddling, because of another nation’s laws. We need a good FARA, our own foreign lobbying law—a FOLO or a FARA, whatever people want to call it What else do I want to say? It seems to me—