Arlene Foster – journalist

           

Last month in the House of Lords, we debated an issue that should worry every serious policymaker in this country: the rapid advance of superintelligent artificial intelligence, and the alarming lack of urgency from government in dealing with it.

This was the second debate on the subject in a matter of weeks. That is not a coincidence. It reflects a growing unease that Britain — and much of the world — is drifting towards a technology that could outpace our ability to control it.

This is not science fiction. Real harm is already happening. An advanced AI system developed by Anthropic was recently used in a Chinese state-sponsored cyberattack, with the majority of tasks carried out autonomously by the AI itself. In plain terms, machines are already being trusted to conduct hostile operations at scale.

AI does not recognise borders. It does not respect sovereignty. And once systems reach a point where they can outthink experts, compromise critical infrastructure or destabilise states, the damage will not be easily undone. That is why I am deeply concerned that the Government appears to be taking a “wait and see” approach.

Waiting is not neutral. It is a decision — and a reckless one.

There is international momentum, if we choose to grasp it. The Kuala Lumpur Declaration on responsible AI, agreed through the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, shows that serious global co-operation is possible. Too often we overlook the Commonwealth as a force for leadership, when in fact it offers an immediate platform for setting shared rules and expectations.

Beyond governments, the warning lights are flashing everywhere. More than 800 leading figures and over 100,000 members of civil society have now called for a halt on the development of superintelligent AI until there is proper scientific and public consensus on safety. Even the technology companies themselves are sounding the alarm. The head of Google DeepMind, based here in the UK said at Davos last week that he would support a global pause if others did the same.

Perhaps most striking of all was the warning from Geoffrey Hinton, one of the pioneers of AI, who said plainly that international regulation is needed to stop this technology being abused. He compared the situation to chemical weapons — tools so dangerous that the world eventually agreed they must be constrained by international law.

Despite today’s fractured geopolitics, that comparison matters. We did not abandon the Geneva Convention because the world was unstable. We created it because the risks were too great to ignore.

The United Kingdom has a real opportunity to lead. The AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park and the creation of AI security institutes give us credibility and convening power. We can help shape international agreements now — or we can wait until something goes catastrophically wrong.

We have been here before. With social media, governments delayed, dithered and reassured themselves that the market would self-correct. Only after serious harm — to children, to mental health, to democratic debate — did regulation finally arrive. We are still playing catch-up.

With superintelligent AI, there may be no second chance.

That is why I called on the Government to formally recognise extinction-level risk from superintelligent AI as a national security priority, and to lead international efforts towards a moratorium on its development, backed by verifiable commitments from all major AI-developing nations.

This is not about being anti-technology. It is about being pro-human, pro-security and pro-common sense. Britain can lead the world in putting safety first — or it can drift, and hope for the best.

Hope is not a strategy.

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Last night I stood in the House of Lords to move Amendment 450 to the Crime and Policing Bill. I did so because the United Kingdom has reached a dangerous point: terrorism can be publicly praised, romanticised and sanitised, while the law struggles to respond. That is not a theoretical concern. It is a lived reality for victims, and a growing risk for our society.

The result is a widening gap between what the public instinctively understands to be harmful and what the law is prepared to confront. Terrorist organisations and their actions can be lauded in public, provided the speaker avoids an explicit call to copy them. That distinction may satisfy a legal purist, but it bears little resemblance to how radicalisation actually works.

Terrorism is sustained not only by weapons and finance, but by narrative. It thrives on myth-making: turning murderers into martyrs, intimidation into “resistance”, and victims into inconvenient footnotes. I know this because I lived through it. I grew up in a society where bombs, shootings and threats were part of daily life. I know what it means to hear slogans and chants that reduce decades of murder and fear to something ironic or “cultural”. There is nothing cultural about terrorism, and nothing harmless about its glorification.

That is why I argued last night that glorification itself is the harm. It retraumatises victims and their families, reopening wounds that never truly heal. It also sends a clear message to younger generations, many of whom have no lived experience of terrorism, that violence can be noble, fashionable or justified. We see the consequences of this today in the open praise for proscribed organisations such as Hamas and Hezbollah on Britain’s streets, often by people who know little about their ideology or brutality but are drawn in by slogans and symbols.

The debate in the Lords was wide-ranging and, at times, deeply moving. Many colleagues, particularly those from Northern Ireland, spoke from painful personal experience about the damage done when terrorism is lionised. Others rightly raised concerns about freedom of expression and the risk of drawing the law too broadly, especially in relation to historical conflicts.

I listened carefully to those concerns. Some peers worried that removing the existing “emulation” test could risk criminalising commentary on events long past, or on movements that history has judged differently. The Government also relied on the view of the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, who has argued that there is no legislative gap and that existing offences are sufficient.

In light of those points, I chose not to press Amendment 450 to a vote at Committee stage. That decision should not be mistaken for retreat. It was a recognition that if Parliament is to act, it must do so with precision as well as conviction.

I therefore intend to bring the amendment back at Report stage in a revised and more tightly drawn form. In particular, I will make explicit that it applies to the glorification of current proscribed terrorist organisations. This addresses fears about historical overreach while preserving the core principle that praising terrorist violence today—here and now—is dangerous and wrong.

This is not about stifling debate, political dissent or historical inquiry. There is a vital difference between explaining terrorism and celebrating it. No democratic society should be comfortable with the latter. Laws that are theoretically available but practically unusable erode public confidence and deepen the sense among victims that the system is unwilling to confront their pain.

Defeating terrorism requires more than intelligence operations and policing. It requires moral clarity. Parliament should be capable of saying, without equivocation, that terrorism was wrong, is wrong and will always be wrong—and that glorifying it has no place in our public life. That is why I will return to the Lords with an amended proposal, and why I hope colleagues across the House will be prepared to meet this moment with the seriousness it demands

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For two decades the United Kingdom has nominally outlawed the glorification of terrorism. In practice, the law has failed. I am putting forward an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill  because Parliament must confront an uncomfortable truth: we have allowed the public celebration of terrorist violence to become normalised, sanitised and, in some quarters, fashionable.

The current offence under Section 1 of the Terrorism Act 2006 sets the bar so high that prosecutions are vanishingly rare. It requires proof not merely that terrorism is being praised, but that the speaker intended others to be encouraged to emulate it. That distinction might satisfy a lawyer’s logic, but it collapses in the real world.

Glorification radicalises whether or not a court can prove intent.

The problem is not confined to Northern Ireland, though it is there that the moral failure has been longest tolerated. The routine lionising of IRA terrorists by senior political figures has inflicted fresh trauma on victims while sending a corrosive message to a new generation: that murder can be reframed as heroism, and terrorism retrospectively justified as political struggle.

Chants such as “ooh ah up the ra” are not harmless cultural artefacts. They are the audible residue of a society that has failed to draw a firm moral line. When young people, ignorant of the brutality and barbarity of terrorism, are encouraged to celebrate those who carried it out, the consequences are predictable.

The scenes on Britain’s streets since October2023 with proscribed organisations such as Hamas and Hezbollah openly praised, should finally put an end to any complacency. Radicalisation does not begin with bomb-making manuals. It begins with narratives. Terrorism thrives where its mythology goes unchallenged.

Those who argue that this is all too complex, too sensitive, or uniquely “Northern Irish” are wrong. Terrorism is terrorism. Whether republican, loyalist or Islamist, the intent is the same: to murder civilians in pursuit of political ends.

No democratic society can afford to equivocate on that point.

The failure to prosecute under the existing law raises another troubling question: whether policing and prosecution have become overly cautious, even timid, when political pressure looms. The law must be applied without fear or favour. If legislation is so narrowly drawn that it discourages enforcement altogether, then the fault lies with Parliament.

My amendment offers a necessary correction. It removes the requirement to prove encouragement to emulate, recognising that glorification itself is the harm. It would bring the law into line with lived reality and send an unambiguous signal that celebrating terrorism is beyond the bounds of acceptable public conduct.

This is about sending a very clear message about how we reject terrorism.  It is about refusing to allow history to be rewritten by those who would airbrush murder into martyrdom. Terrorism was wrong. It remains wrong. It will always be wrong.

A society that tolerates the glorification of terror is one that invites its return. Parliament should choose clarity over cowardice, and pass this amendment.

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Donald Trump is rarely a model of diplomatic restraint. Yet every so often his instinctive bluntness cuts through layers of official obfuscation. His intervention on the proposed handover of sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius is one such moment.

Calling the plan an act of “great stupidity”, Trump has done what too few in Westminster have been prepared to do: state plainly that this deal makes no strategic sense. The United Kingdom proposes to give up sovereignty over territory that has been British for more than two centuries, home to Diego Garcia, a cornerstone of Western security in the Indo-Pacific, in return for the dubious comfort of leasing back what we already own.

Donald Trump may not choose his words carefully, but his underlying point is unanswerable. Diego Garcia hosts a vital United States military base, integral to NATO security and to stability in a region becoming ever more contested. Handing sovereignty to Mauritius while hoping that long-term access remains untouched is not statesmanship; it is wishful thinking dressed up as diplomacy.

The most striking hypocrisy lies in the Government’s justification for the deal. Ministers have repeatedly suggested that the only reason for pressing ahead was that it was wanted by Washington. That fig leaf was offered to those of us who asked why Britain was rushing to give away strategically vital territory for, apparently, no compelling reason. Trump’s intervention exposes that argument as hollow. The United States’ interest in Diego Garcia has not disappeared. It has been restated, loudly.

If Sir Keir Starmer was looking for a way off the hook, this is it. He can hardly continue to argue that American pressure demands the deal when the American president-elect is publicly condemning it. This is the perfect opportunity to pause, reconsider, and withdraw from an arrangement that commands little support and carries considerable risk.

There are deeper problems that cannot be wished away. Governments speak warmly of self-determination, yet the Chagossian people have never been properly consulted on this transfer. Their voices are invoked selectively, but not genuinely heard. It is particularly jarring to hear the same political class champion self-determination when discussing Greenland, while denying it in practice to the Chagossians themselves.

Then there is the cost. Each time the deal is discussed, the price tag appears to rise. We hear of compensation, development packages and long-term lease payments, all to secure access to territory we already possess. At a time of acute fiscal pressure, it is extraordinary that billions may be committed to solve a problem we have largely invented.

Environmental protection has been conspicuously sidelined. The marine environment around the Chagos Islands is among the most precious and unspoilt on the planet. British stewardship has, to date, provided meaningful protection. There is no credible guarantee that this will continue under Mauritian sovereignty. Warm words are no substitute for enforceable safeguards, and none are evident.

Security concerns multiply on closer inspection. Mauritius is party to international treaties that could constrain the basing of nuclear assets on Diego Garcia. Even the possibility of legal ambiguity should give pause. Deterrence depends on certainty. Introducing doubt into one of the West’s most important military facilities is reckless.

What is perhaps most damning is the absence of public or political enthusiasm for the handover. There is little evidence of popular support in the United Kingdom. Parliament has not been meaningfully engaged. Yet in its manifesto the Labour Party pledged to protect Britain’s Overseas Territories. It is hard to reconcile that promise with a policy that does the opposite.

As a member and adviser to Friends of the British Overseas Territories, I am acutely aware that this debate goes far beyond Chagos alone. The United Kingdom has 14 Overseas Territories. To the people of those territories, British sovereignty is not a bargaining chip. It is a guarantee of security, identity and protection.

The United Kingdom has a moral duty to uphold that guarantee. Undermining it in one case weakens confidence in all the others.

Trump may be all over the place on many issues. On this one, however, he has grasped the essentials. The Chagos deal is strategically unsound, morally confused, environmentally careless and politically unnecessary.

Sometimes it takes an outsider to say what should already be obvious. The real question now is whether the British Government is prepared to listen.

 

           

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