Foreign Influence scheme fails to tackle private dark money
Security minister Tom Tugendhat gave a speech on emerging state threats to the UK yesterday, setting out the thinking behind the Government's National Security Bill, and specificially its last minute inclusion of a US-style Foreign influence Registration Scheme.
The scheme’s aims are twofold, to strengthen the resilience of the United Kingdom political system against covert foreign influence and to provide greater assurance around the activities of specified foreign powers or entities.
Those who are working on covert political interference will I’m afraid face a simple choice: they will have to register and highlight the activities they seek to hide, or not - and risk prosecution.
The scheme will not impose restrictions on legitimate activities of people or businesses – it is here to encourage openness and transparency – and it is necessary precisely because we know that those who wish to do us harm are using the shadows to evolve new techniques.
Ironically, this speech was delivered at Policy Exchange, the very think-tank whose obscure funding was criticised by Lord Wallace during the bill's second reading. There was little to suggest the bill itself would address private foreign funding of think-tanks or of political parties, the issue raised by former MI5 chief Lord Evans in the Lords debate. Instead, the focus was on social networks such as TikTok, and their potential as a channel for disinformation.
Tugendhat did however mention political parties as part of the remit of the Defending Democracy Taskforce:
It will be looking at foreign interference in our elections and electoral process; disinformation; physical and cyber threats to the democratic institutions and those who represent them; foreign interference in public office, political parties and universities; and what we call transnational repression. What we mean by that is the activity of those who seek to stifle free expression in diaspora communities in the UK, those who try to silence the debate that they, as anyone else in the United Kingdom, should be able to enjoy. We have seen the most recent example of this in the so-called overseas police stations that China has set up around the country, and indeed around the world.
A registration system focused on states is only likely to increase the salience of private vehicles for foreign funding. As it happens, one intelligence expert who was written on the relative ease of such transactions is the brother of Policy Exchange director Dean Godson.
In his 1995 book Dirty Tricks or Trump Cards: Covert Action and Counterintelligence, Roy Godson wrote:
It is not very difficult to transfer money covertly. A bank account may be set up in Switzerland (or Luxembourg, or the Cayman Islands or other Caribbean haven), then the money transferred to a numbered account in another bank in the same country. Then, when needed, it is sent to another account in a different country. Occasionally, states get caught in these transactions, but not often.
Godson suggests that non-governmental organisations can be an ideal vehicle for covert action, but one with its own complexities.
Here the external power might have to give the internal group covert support without revealing its source. Sometimes the internal group will be aware of a particular effort and collaborate in it. On other occasions, to protect the local organization from "contamination" by a foreign government, that government will keep it in the dark about specific political manoeuvres designed to aid it. At least, the organization will feign ignorance.
The targets of such covert support can be unexpected. Godson argues that the Soviets boosted Giscard D'Estaing in 1974, at the expense of the French Communist Party, as a better way to weaken NATO.
Neither a state-focused register nor the kind of targeted counter-subversion campaigns favoured by Policy Exchange are adequate to such complexities. Without a broader regime of transparency, pools of foreign state funding can easily be hidden in the sea of dark money