ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO SUNDAY WITH NIALL PATERSON, SKY NEWS

NIALL PATERSON: The Health and Social Care Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has written to social media companies demanding action to protect children’s mental health. In a letter to tech giants including Facebook and Twitter, he accuses them of failing to act and gives them one week to outline what action they plan to take or face the prospect of government legislation. Joining me now is the Defence Minister, Tobias Ellwood. Mr Ellwood, a very good morning to you, lovely to have you on the show. Jeremy Hunt has a problem with social media doesn’t he, a week doesn’t go past without him having a pop at them, what do you see as the problems created by social media for our younger people?

TOBIAS ELLWOOD: Well if you think back when you and I grew up, if I can say that, these things didn’t exist, there wasn’t this challenge as to firstly how much time any individual, our kids, would spend on these things nor how they were managed as well and the pace of change which has taken place has meant that actually we require, we oblige actually the companies themselves to provide the rules, how we actually operate these things, in a robust and professional manner. Now what Jeremy Hunt is saying today is that if you do not legislate, if you do not manage your own area then we will have to do it for you and we are seeing the consequence of that with the organisations such as Facebook being abused, if you like, having their systems, their machines taken advantage of by organisations so that’s why we need to act.

NP: So as Defence Minister you must surely know about sabre rattling when you see it, where in your mind does parental responsibility end and corporate responsibility begin?

TOBIAS ELLWOOD: Well there’s two aspects here, there’s the information that we see, the abuse of children and things like that, that’s absolutely aware the companies themselves have a responsibility to act and if they don’t act they have a period now to get their house in order. If they fail to do that then absolutely it’s right for government to step in, that’s the order it should be but as I mentioned before, the change that has happened to society, as we all go around with these gadgets, we’re now attached to them, we’re addicted to them. I just went on holiday with my family and I banned all these items, iPads, phones and so forth, for the entire week in order to try and break away from their use and if you think how many hours you and I use these things or our kids do, it is a fundamental change and I worry that it is affecting the ability of youngsters to communicate indeed with each other in the way that we used to.

NP: This may well be the one hour a week of my waking hours when I don’t actually, when I’m not actually glued to social media! But let’s stick with social media shall we, how concerned are you with that report into online Russian activity. Spend any amount of time on Twitter and you kind of get the impression that they might be winning the war.

TOBIAS ELLWOOD: It’s interesting you call it a war because firstly there is an erosion, as the Prime Minister has stated, of the rules based order, the way that we go around and do business which has been established since the Second World War, allowing countries and their economies to actually develop. Now if you get countries such as Russia starting to do their own thing, to avoid the rules that we actually set up, to interfere in elections, then that is a very, very worrying digression from the progress that we’ve made. What we are also seeing is instead of having direct confrontation through conventional methods, we’re seeing new forms of the art of war changing. Why actually attack somebody with bombs or even make bombs themselves when through cyber you can influence elections or you can close down the Stock Exchange or actually cause a virus…

NP: And shut down the NHS as happened last year. But where is the evidence that we’re actually keeping pace with this evolving form, as you say, of warfare? Misinformation, disinformation, call it what you will. You yourself were a victim of it, that photograph that was taken of you with the policeman at parliament and the allusions that were made by some, I mean how are we fighting against this because I have to say, I trawl through social media a lot and I don’t see government accounts or friendly to government accounts combatting disinformation campaigns.

TOBIAS ELLWOOD: Well firstly, it goes back to the first point that you made. There is a responsibility of the giants in this area to do their bit, to make sure there is a responsibility in the sector but secondly …

NP: Just on that point, what’s their responsibility for dealing for example with the Russian Embassy in the United Kingdom’s Twitter account?

TOBIAS ELLWOOD: Well they must have their standards to make sure that, whether it be the Russians or anything, that actually the material put out there is absolutely responsible. If you go into Waterstones and say ‘Can I have a book on how to create a dirty bomb’, for example, I would imagine they might call the police but you can now go onto the internet and search for that. Is that right? No, it isn’t, so again this goes back to the point I said earlier of legislation having to catch up with something which is very new, the whole concept of the internet as well. But I also make the point that the art of war, if you like, has changed. When these things come forward it changes the manner in which countries can actually challenge each other, no longer is it going to be the big guns and so forth or even nuclear weapon systems, you don’t need to bother with that when you can actually go right into a country and effect, through cyber challenges, if the parliament itself was attacked with a virus and so forth, you then have influence elections. This is now what’s happening which is why we have invested in our cyber security capability, with our cyber security centre which Is not only providing more robust platforms for ourselves but providing advice for companies on what they need to do to have robust protection systems.

NP: It seems we are possibly talking about two separate issues here. On the one hand, there is the example that you used of information on how to make a bomb and of course those cyber-attacks directed at energy, infrastructure, the health service and so on, what I was referring to though was the disinformation campaign. How do you combat, for example, the idea which has taken root online that somehow MI6, MI5 were responsible for the deaths of Yulia and Sergei Skripal?

TOBIAS ELLWOOD: Well this is interesting because again this goes to what Russia now does in putting this information out and the worry is the pace, particularly through social media, of a story, an innuendo, a lie going around, doing a couple of laps around the world before the truth has managed to be established, that is now the world that we’ve entered. We need to be far better at identifying the source of where this is coming from and putting accurate information out. That I’m afraid is now the way of the world, that’s what we then need to do but then accusing the individual or indeed the source to say why they have got it wrong, to actually make sure they are disincentivised from doing this again.

NP: Coming back again to the more weaponised end of cyber, do we currently possess an offensive cyber capability?

TOBIAS ELLWOOD: You’ll have to understand that I won’t be able to talk about any of that whatsoever but what I would say though is, from a defence posture, this is why the Defence Secretary, Gavin Williamson, the first thing he did was take a look at the architecture that we have, determine what sort of role we want to play in the world and if we want to have that full spectrum capability to be able to counter cyber-attacks, to be able to make sure we have a continuous [at sea?] deterrent and retain our conventional capability, then we are going to require a little bit more money in the defence budget.

NP: You mentioned Mr Williamson there, do you agree with your boss that Russia should shut up and go away?

TOBIAS ELLWOOD: Well what I would agree with my boss is the fact that we need to, our defence posture is absolutely critical. He’s made the case, and he’s won it and we need to understand that it doesn’t matter what our armed forces might or might not have in its armoury as such, it’s how we actually move forward and the defence posture that we have. We can only win that if we have somebody who understands where the power lies in the corridors at Number 10 and that’s what Gavin Williamson brings to the table.

NP: No one outside the MOD, and I presume most of those inside the MOD, want to think about military confrontation with Russia, can you explain to me why parliament should not by necessity be consulted ahead of any possible military action?

TOBIAS ELLWOOD: Well you are giving your game away really. If you were to come to parliament and present the case, to say this is actually what you want to do, then maybe there is a necessity, an urgency to act and to respond and that’s what we saw in the case of Russia. Were we to have to come to parliament to say this is what our intentions are, then not only Syria but Russia itself would have responded as well, making our ability …

NP: You don’t think the Syrians maybe had a bit of an inkling that we were going to be carrying out strikes on their chemical weapons facilities?

TOBIAS ELLWOOD: Absolutely but the longer that you delay it, the more the actual impact is diluted. Any Prime Minister needs to have that executive capability of making a response, an immediate response and then, as the Prime Minister has said, her actions are then held to account when she then reports to parliament. We had a big debate on Monday on this very subject but I think it’s correct for the executive to be able to make that decision and say this is what we need to do. We saw a country, backed by Russia, using these weapons systems on its own people. We then exhausted efforts through the UN Security Council, six times Russia voted against it, and then we had a punitive strike and those were the legal grounds on which we conducted this particular response.

NP: Can we turn to Windrush just for a moment? This is an absolute scandal isn’t it, it’s an embarrassment, why have there been no resignations?

TOBIAS ELLWOOD: Well we’re dealing with the situation now. Let’s put our hand up and say we got this wrong, not just today, not just last year but over a series of years. Records were destroyed or the decision to destroy records was made back in 2009 by the last government – that is no excuse. This is a generation that was invited from the Caribbean to help rebuild Britain after the Second World War and their authority, their legitimacy was confirmed in the 1971 Immigration Act and the absolute majority haven’t got any issues with their documentation. A small number, in their hundreds, do and it’s correct that the Prime Minister has stepped forward to say this is completely wrong. We’ve set up a taskforce in the Home Office to look at those details and further to that, the Prime Minister took the opportunity of the Commonwealth Summit to speak directly with the Prime Ministers of those countries affected to also apologise and say we’ll rectify this as quickly as we can.

NP: But it’s all a bit after the fact isn’t it? As you say, you had been warned over a number of year – I mean take 2014, the Legal Action Group published a report which said ‘A virtually invisible and rarely acknowledged group who can’t easily prove their legal status or whose status is irregular for a variety of legitimate reasons’. The Home Office responded ‘It would offer support to people with uncertain immigration status but it’s up to anyone that doesn’t have an established immigration status to regularise their position.’ You were told about this time and time again and yet nothing was done, so I ask again, why have there been no resignations in this?

TOBIAS ELLWOOD: Well I can’t answer for that, what I can say is that we need to rectify this situation here. We, rightly I think, the nation wants us to have robust immigration laws, there’s illegal immigration is a huge concern and it’s deeply worrying that a small number of people have been caught up in that particular situation.

NP: Don’t you detect that the Conservatives are once again, and perhaps fairly, being seen as the ‘nasty party’? You have the Windrush situation, British citizens being treated like common criminals, your Foreign Secretary has referred to ‘piccaninnies waving flags’ and you are now at local elections that are just about to come up, trialling ID checks at polling stations that the Equalities and Human Rights Commission says will disproportionately affect ethnic minority communities.

TOBIAS ELLWOOD: Now you’re mixing a number of issues there, let’s deal with the ID cards at polling stations. I’ve long been worried that in Britain you can roll up to any polling station and declare that you are a name and your name then gets crossed out or a name gets crossed out and you can participate in that vote and that ...

NP: But there is absolutely no evidence of widespread fraud.

TOBIAS ELLWOOD: … doesn’t seem right.

NP: There is no evidence of widespread fraud.

TOBIAS ELLWOOD: It doesn’t matter if it is widespread or not, if there’s enough fraud that takes place in any election where the vote is close then it would have an impact on the vote and in today’s day and age I think it is absolutely right and proper, and I think many of the electorate would agree, that there is no harm in presenting some form of ID. So that’s separate from this particular issue and absolutely I put my hand up and say this is unacceptable, it’s gone on far too long and we owe it to these people to sort this issue out and to make sure they feel welcomed, this is their home, they’ve come over here to stay here, they’ve come over here to be part of our community and that’s exactly how they should feel.

NP: Mr Ellwood, many thanks for joining us.

TOBIAS ELLWOOD: Thank you.