Extract from Lords motion to regret the Surveillance Camera Code of Practice - Feb 2

Baroness Falkner of Margravine (CB):...In my opening remarks I have to say just a few things that demonstrate what a parlous state we are in as a country in terms of respect for human rights. The level of permissiveness in the capture—state capture, policy capture—of institutions that operate in authoritarian regimes, a list of which the noble Lord, Lord Alton, has given us, is truly staggering. We bang on about how fantastic our sanctions regime is, and so on, yet these companies, many of them Chinese, as the noble Lord described, operate here with complete impunity and we seem entirely content to allow them to do so, while we also recognise, in our foreign policy statements, that some of these countries have very ignoble intentions towards any freedom-loving democracy. I know the noble Baroness represents the Home Office, but I hope it is something the Government at large will take account of, because commercial surveillance, commercial espionage, commercial authority and commercial capture of the economy are all things we need to be incredibly vigilant about. One needs only to look at Russia’s capture of the German political debate, through Nord Stream 2  and what we are facing now with the Ukraine issue, to understand what is being discussed here by the noble Lord, Lord Alton...

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