Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)

My Lords, we also thank the Minister for repeating this Statement, and appreciate the subtleties of where we are now and the limits as to what we can say about this specific case. I declare an interest: I went to China for the first time in 1982 and have been many times since. I was, professionally, an academic working in a think tank on international relations and teaching international relations at a number of universities, and was actively involved in negotiations at the London School of Economics to build joint degrees with Fudan and Tsinghua universities. I well remember the difficulties we had in years after that with the pressure from the Chinese to double the number of students every year and not to maintain the careful controls that we wanted to have on them. We know that China has become much more of a threat than it was 20 or 30 years ago. That is part of it. We also know that we all live in a bit of a glass house on this and we should not throw stones. This afternoon, I reread the ISC report on China and it is deeply critical of David Cameron—the noble Lord, Lord Cameron —George Osborne and a number of others. We have all walked the very delicate line between maintaining good relations, including good social relations, and not allowing foreign Governments to gain information they should not have or get involved in any sense in undue influence. Foreign influence in British politics is unavoidable. Foreign interference, particularly when it involves money and covert activities, is completely unacceptable. It is not just China or even Russia. We had the statement from an under-secretary in the US Department of State the other week that she intends to use State Department funds for international development to influence British and European politics. That is also foreign interference in British politics. Some of us feel that right-wing foundations in parts of the southern United States now putting money into think tanks and lobby groups in Britain is also unacceptable foreign interference. We hope that will be part of what we will all actively discuss when we come to the Representation of the People Bill. We look forward to the Rycroft review and to the Government taking an active role in accepting the conclusions of that review and putting them in that Bill. The strategic defence review talked about building a whole-of-society approach to the diverse direct and indirect threats we now face. It is well over 12 months since the strategic defence review was published and we have heard nothing about that. It also spoke about the need for a “national conversation” on the hybrid threats we now face, many of which are not entirely easy to see but could clearly, in the long run, cause deep damage. We need public education, public information and public engagement. I urge the Government to take some action on that. We do not see it at present. For example, we are told that the Defending Democracy Taskforce is doing very good work, but we are not told what it is doing. I found this sentence on page 61 of the ISC report on China: “Effective Parliamentary oversight is not some kind of ‘optional extra’—it is a vital safeguard in any functioning Parliamentary democracy”. I encourage the Government to think how much they need to inform us and, through us, the public of the nature and complexity of the threats that we now face. I make one more point on think tanks and universities, all of which unavoidably work on a global scale. I have talked to vice-chancellors who tell me that among the biggest problems they face, in terms of discipline on campus, is relations between Chinese and Hong Kong students. I am conscious that a number of universities are now deeply financially dependent on the revenue they get from Chinese students. That is the result of the previous Government encouraging them to depend on Chinese students. I ask the Government to take into account that, if we are going to resist Chinese interference, they may need to look again at how they fund some of our best universities to ensure that they remain as good as they are.