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Intelligence and Security Committee

I am surprised that I have rattled the right hon. Gentleman's cage. Seeing as nobody else in this place is quizzing and questioning the whole raison d'être of the Committee and its report, I believe that I have a duty to do so. I fully understand that the Committee is a creature of statute, and that the number of Members is prescribed. It is rigid, not flexible, and the Prime Minister cannot increase its membership. My understanding is that certainly nobody would be appointed who did not find favour with the security and intelligence services. Paragraph 41 of the report, on page 13, states:""GCHQ is retaining the current external branding of its services, since CESG is a well established organisation that has supported clients in both the public and private sectors for many years."" May I ask the Chairman of the Committee and/or the Home Secretary what is meant by the mention of the private sector? To whom is GCHQ providing a service, and on what basis? I think that there should be some clarification of that. In paragraph 51, on page 16, we have the comments of the director general of the Security Service. I shall read them to the House, because I think that they are interesting. He states that one of the priorities is""to try and know more about the people we already know about, rather than to find the people we don't know anything about. It would be nice to know about the unknown unknowns, but it is probably a less rich seam than knowing more about the people that we know are a threat to us."" Frankly, I think that that is a load of gobbledegook—it is sort of Donald Rumsfeld-speak, and I do not know what is meant by that diatribe. Perhaps one of the Members who will speak subsequently, or the right hon. Member for East Hampshire, might like to share with me and the rest of the House what is meant by those comments. Paragraph 59 states:""Another key non-ICT focus for the Service is its counter-espionage work…with particular focus on China and Russia."" When I read that paragraph, I was disappointed that there was no reference to the serious national threat of sabotage—that is the only word for it—by highly skilled IT people, particularly but not exclusively in the Republic of China. They are threatening all our communication systems in the UK, our systems for sewage and food distribution and our banking and financial system, and this House has not woken up to it. I am conscious of the fact that the seat that I am standing in front of was the last in which Winston Churchill sat in his time in the House of Commons. In the '30s he warned time and again how complacent we were in not addressing certain threats. There seems to be a conspiracy of silence about the threat to us from those who are developing an intellectual weaponry to kill our communication systems. If those skills are developed, they will present a much bigger threat than there has previously been, because there will be instant proliferation, unlike with atomic weapons. Small states and non-states could gain the capacity to administer such a threat. It can target states in a way in which nuclear weapons clearly cannot because there is not fallout and collateral damage. I am surprised that we do not discuss that threat much more in the House. It is time we were given some assurances that great energies and resources are being directed at combating that most serious threat, which is equal to, if not more serious than nuclear weaponry.