King’s Speech

Baroness Manningham-Buller Excerpts

Monday 18th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Manningham-Buller (CB)]

My Lords, I welcome the maiden speeches of my noble friend Lord Case and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich.

I am not looking forward to the valedictory speech of the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, not because I do not think it will lighten our spirits and we will enjoy his wisdom, but because it is his final speech. I for one will miss him very much from this Chamber. We heard earlier from the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, of the King’s visit to Golders Green, which was endorsed by the House. I will pick up another thing that the King has recently done, for those who missed it: he endowed on Peter—the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy—the Order of the Garter. His qualities have been noticed not just in this House but beyond.

In the gracious Speech, I noticed 17 references to “security”. As the former head of the Security Service, more regularly known as MI5, I thought that was quite a lot and I welcomed it. I will just say a few things about the current national security threat, derived largely from the current head of the service in a speech he made in October.

Russia is attacking us on all fronts through cyber, influence operations, exploring our underwater cables, drone attacks, sabotage and murders, as well as conventional espionage. China is engaging in cyber, in influence operations and politically; it is seeking to exercise influence over the diaspora and is stealing our technology. Iran is sponsoring violence and terrorism and exacerbating antisemitism at a substantial level. Additionally, al-Qaeda and ISIS are still there. While we had hopes that Northern Ireland was peaceful, we had a car bomb there last month. Since I retired, we have also had extreme right-wing terrorism.

The most frightening thing—again deriving from the October speech—is that last year, 235 people were arrested for terrorism in this country, one in five of whom was under the age of 17. I touch on my sadness that the gracious Speech did not refer to under-16s on social media.

I will also say a little word in defence of Prevent at this stage. It is often pilloried; obviously, there was the most recent and notorious case of Southport. However, without it, the efforts to stop young people getting on to violent tracks, whether terrorism or extremism, are likely to be less successful.

I turn to tackling antisemitism and growing threats from states, protecting people from extreme violence and improving cyber defences. I think the whole House would applaud those aims of the Government and we look forward to the legislative frameworks for doing that. I have just one word of caution. The solutions to these problems will come not from law but from people—from the men and women from my organisation and the police, and more broadly—seeking to stop it.

This brings me on to Hillsborough. Who can dispute that the public deserve trust from their public servants? Of course they do. Who can dispute that the families concerned in this and other cases have suffered enormous anguish, from not just the event but the aftermath and the treatment of it? Therefore, the concern I am going to raise is difficult to raise because it sounds unsympathetic. I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Lemos, as I am going to go slightly over four minutes; I know this is a bad precedent, but I need to say these things. Nor is it the case that I think my former service should not expect accountability and oversight—that is why we sought a parliamentary committee long before we got it. However, there are three problems here and the House will need to work hard to ensure that this Bill does not compromise national security.

The three problems, briefly, are these. The first problem is that this will take people off current work, plus lawyers, to deal with the requests. How much and how extensive is hard to judge, but it will remove people from front-line work. The second problem is that we get a great deal of intelligence from foreign services. They may be cautious about sharing that with us if it cannot be protected. Thirdly, human sources who work for us at risk of torture and death may be—it all depends on the detail—reluctant to offer their services if they think that their identity will be compromised. That said, I know this House will consider this important legislation very carefully and scrutinise it closely.

“Hillsborough Law”

Baroness Manningham-Buller Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede (Lab)]

I take the point that the noble and learned Lord has made. It is regrettable that we need this duty of candour, but we do need it. We have seen what has happened in events over the last 20 years or so. As I have said in answers to other noble Lords, it is the intention that there will be criminal sanctions in the duty of candour when it is brought forward, and that is the firm commitment of the Government.

[Baroness Manningham-Buller (CB)]

My Lords, will the Minister explain how the duty of candour—notable in its lack at Hillsborough, and not only at Hillsborough —can still be made compatible with the need to protect secrets, which we need to address the complex national security threats that we face? This was referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan; it is a critical part of getting this legislation right, I suggest.

[Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede (Lab)]

The noble Baroness has made a very good point. I will write to her on that matter; it is clearly a sensitive matter, so I think it is more appropriate to write.

Queen’s Speech

Baroness Manningham-Buller Excerpts

Tuesday 18th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Manningham-Buller (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I swapped my slot with my noble friend Lady Meacher, at her request.

In the gracious Speech, Her Majesty the Queen referred to

“measures to increase the safety and security of … citizens”.

I pick for comment from that broad aspiration the proposed legislation to make it easier to counter threats to this country from other states: the counter-state threats Bill, to which the Minister referred at the beginning of this debate. We do not yet have a Bill, although we can get a reasonable sense of it from the Home Office consultation. The Minister described the aims of the legislation and—for once, despite the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, that Cross-Benchers always disagree with the Government—I wish to reinforce what the Minister said in his opening remarks: modern tools and powers are needed to detect, prevent and respond to threats from states whose aim is to undermine the safety and interests of the UK.

In thinking about what I wanted to say at this very preliminary stage, I reflected that in my dozen or so years in your Lordships’ House I have rarely spoken about hostile state activity, despite many years of experience of trying to counter it, mainly in the Cold War. The fault is mine; my excuse is that successive Governments have not had the appetite to tackle the problem, rather preferring to rely on creaky legislation from the last century designed to deal with German espionage in the run-up to the First World War and Nazi espionage in the run-up to the Second World War. The Government moved to fill some of the legislative gap in the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act 2019, but then recognised that more was needed. I strongly welcome their intention to legislate, and I look forward to seeing what the Bill says.

Why do we need it, and what are we talking about in 2021? I start with what we are not talking about. As a young intelligence officer, I remember interviewing a Russian intelligence officer who was distressed to discover that the papers in his carefully chosen dead letter box—a hollowed-out tree in which his agent was going to stow top-secret documents—had been eaten by squirrels. That is not what we are talking about any more; we are talking about activity at scale—industrial, economic and academic espionage, and cyberattacks to steal our secrets, distort data, spread lies, amplify disinformation, and, as I hope is of particular concern to this House, to interfere with and undermine democratic process.

I look forward to the scrutiny of this overdue legislation. I do not anticipate that it will have an easy passage, as it is a complex subject, but we need a law that is balanced and proportionate, recognising the public interest while allowing us to better defend ourselves against covert attacks, of which the scale and cost of the damage are not well understood.