New State Security Bill Hands the Home Secretary the Power to Control What Information the Public Can Access

London — The National Security (State Threats) Bill is, at its core, a bill about the control of information. It uses the threat of a fourteen year sentence to shape what people are permitted to read, share, and think about, particularly where doing so runs against the government's own account of events. A government can be caught in a lie, but under this framework, engaging with an alternative account, even to challenge or contextualise it, can itself become the offence, dressed up as countering hostile influence rather than what it actually is, which is the enforcement of a single permitted narrative. This sits alongside growing pressure on social media platforms to downgrade independent and niche content in favour of mainstream and institutional voices. Together, these form a single message to the public: defer to the security state's version of events, and do not go looking for another one.

The Bill also does something else worth naming. It takes the proscription architecture built over two decades of counter-terrorism law and copies it wholesale into a new domain. Infrastructure built for one stated purpose rarely stays contained to it, we have seen this already with stop and search, with surveillance powers, with the SIAC system. Designation itself is left entirely to executive discretion, with no meaningful judicial oversight, and we have already watched that same discretion applied inconsistently in the case of Palestine Action. This Bill extends that same unaccountable model into an entirely new sphere.

We do not intend to engage with this Bill clause by clause. It should be understood for what it structurally represents, a further expansion of the state of exception first established after 2000, now applied to information and dissent.

Anas Mustapha, Head of Public Advocacy at CAGE International, said:

"This Bill is not really about foreign states. It is about who gets to control information in this country, and what happens to people who look beyond the government's own version of events. We have watched this same infrastructure get built once before in the name of counter-terrorism, and we are watching it get copied and extended again. The pattern should be obvious to anyone paying attention."

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