Ministers have announced plans to redraw the UK’s national security and foreign policy plan for the 2020s just 18 months after it was published, with plans to include a new taskforce to protect parliament against the “growing threat from hostile states”.
MPs were warned by security minister Tom Tugendhat that Britain had become “more vulnerable” as countries seeking to do it harm had “levelled the field” by investing time and money in new technologies.
Tugendhat said that “the next few years are likely to be more challenging than the last”, and the new taskforce would seek to combat “the full range of threats facing our democratic institutions” – including attempts to imitate the murder of MPs Jo Cox and David Amess.
But Iain Duncan Smith, a former Conservative leader, warned that ministers and MPs had become “incredibly sloppy about any idea of security”, and claimed warnings that mobile phones could be bugged were being ignored inside government.
He also tackled Boris Johnson’s administration for not taking a stronger stance against China in the original integrated review, which set out the UK’s strategic security and foreign policy vision and was published in March 2021.
Several alleged security breaches by senior ministers were also raised, including Johnson meeting an ex-KGB agent at an Italian villa without officials when he was foreign secretary, and former prime minister Liz Truss having her phone hacked by Russians.
Tugendhat said a “new era of global competition” was dawning, and Britain faced “constant and concerted efforts to undermine our country and our institutions”, which was “not a simple clash of armour but a clash of ideas”.
Hostile states “threaten not just life but our way of life”, he told the Commons in a statement on national security.
Tugendhat said he would be setting up a taskforce that would report to the national security council, with new measures introduced in an update of the integrated review.
It was the first time since Rishi Sunak became prime minister that the government confirmed it would follow through with plans to update the key document.
Tugendhat also hinted a firmer stance would be taken on business decisions with national security implications, after the rows over Chinese firm Huawei’s technology being used in national infrastructure and the planned takeover of Newport Wafer Fab by a Chinese-owned microchip manufacturer.
He said that “our economic security guarantees our economic sovereignty just as our democratic security guarantees our freedom”.
Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, said Labour would support the new taskforce, but said concerns about Johnson and Truss undermined the government’s insistence it would take a tougher approach to national security.
Pointing to the re-appointment of Suella Braverman as home secretary despite her being sacked less than two weeks ago for leaking a government document, Cooper said: “It does not serve democracy if all these issues are not taken seriously by the person most in charge of defending our national security.”
She added the promise to prioritise the issue was “a far cry from the way successive cabinet ministers have responded, and from the lack of seriousness, and the carelessness and complacency that we have seen on some of these cybersecurity issues”.
