26th CSPOC: PARLIAMENTARY SECURITY AND ITS IMPACT ON DEMOCRACY
THE IMPORTANCE OF SECURITY FOR OUR PARLIAMENTS AND ITS IMPACT ON DEMOCRACY The Speaker of the UK House of Commons highlights how security issues for Parliamentarians can impact on administering Parliament and the democratic process. When we talk about security, I think it’s important to be clear about what it is there to protect. This isn’t just about people; or even about buildings, information or IT systems. Our Parliaments and the Parliamentarians who serve in them symbolise our democracies, our freedoms, our ways of life and it is democracy that needs defending across many fronts from an ever-evolving range of threats. At the most fundamental level, we must ensure that our elected representatives, and those who work with them, have the protection they need, both on, and away from the Parliamentary Estate, to feel secure enough to continue to participate in the democratic process. Security is about safeguarding our democracies. In 2016 we lost Jo Cox, a UK MP shot and stabbed in a brutal act of terrorism. And in 2021, my friend and colleague, Sir David Amess, another UK Member of Parliament, was stabbed and killed while working with his constituents. Jo and David were all helping others, serving our nation. They did not deserve to die. We should also remember PC Keith Palmer, a police officer who was stabbed to death on the Parliamentary Estate in 2017 as he heroically confronted a terrorist who was intent on taking further lives after he had murdered members of the public on nearby Westminster Bridge. The UK Parliament’s security requirements are ever evolving because the nature of the threat is rapidly changing, or to be more precise, new and different threat actors and vectors are emerging, while some of the old ones haven’t gone away. The Palace of Westminster and the UK Parliamentarians who serve there have long been iconic terrorist targets. Looking back at British history, we had the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, and the assassination of a serving UK Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, in 1812, just outside the Chamber itself. In modern times, we have faced the threat of Irish terrorism: In 1979 Conservative MP Airey
Neave was murdered driving into the car park at the Palace of Westminster, the Grand Hotel in Brighton saw a bomb detonated at the Conservative Party Conference in 1984, murdering five people. However, the nature of that threat has morphed, and will likely do so again; the capability of groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS to mount spectacular attacks in locations like London – as we experienced in May 2005 – seems to have receded for the time being, with the disruption of their bases in Afghanistan and Syria. Their ability to regroup and rebuild capability is a real possibility which we need to factor into our planning and mitigations: if we aren’t focused and determined, terrorist groups can form and build capability more quickly than we can install our defences. As our politics have become more divisive, and extremism has developed more generally, we have seen the rise of far-right extremism, and it was one such individual who murdered Jo Cox. As we have seen from recent events in Germany, this is a global phenomenon. These are the tangible threat actors, those who wish us physical harm. Over the past 5 years, I have become increasingly aware of the threat to our democracy from foreign state actors. In 2017, our Parliamentary network was attacked by a state actor. We learnt a lot from that experience, and have invested heavily in cyber security since, but I am acutely aware of the sheer volume of attacks, from criminals as well as state actors, that we need to plan on the assumption that it’s a “when”, not an “if” that the next attack penetrates one of our defences. We have also become increasingly aware of attempts by foreign powers to subvert our democracy. This time last year our Security Department at the UK Parliament worked with the UK’s Security Service to issue an interference alert to Members of both Houses, naming a Chinese-British dual national, Christine Lee, as
Rt Hon. Sir Lindsay Hoyle, MP is the Speaker of the House of Commons in the
UK Parliament since 2019 and the Joint Branch President for the CPA UK Branch. He was first elected as a Member of Parliament in 1997 for the constituency of Chorley in Lancashire, having previously served in local government as a councillor and Mayor. He held a number of Select Committee roles in Parliament before being elected as the Chairman of Ways and Means and Deputy Speaker in 2010. As Honorary Colonel of 3 Medical Regiment, he is a keen supporter of and advocate for the UK Armed Forces. A key priority during his Speakership is to strengthen the United Kingdom’s ties with the Commonwealth and the UK Overseas Territories.
32 | The Parliamentarian | 2023: Issue One | 100 years of publishing