That this House takes note of the threats to democratic institutions in the United Kingdom, including disinformation, foreign interference, and levels of public trust in politics.
My Lords, I am sure we are all grateful for how cool the Chamber is today. I want to talk about the interconnection between domestic and foreign threats to British democracy.
Philip Rycroft, in his report this spring, warned that
“there is a long-term and worrying loss of trust in our democratic system and processes”.
He further warned that the problem of public disillusion makes it easier for hostile foreign actors to interfere in British politics, seeking
“to sow distrust and exacerbate divisions in UK society, with the ultimate aim of undermining confidence in our democracy”.
Later in the year, the Chamber will consider the Representation of the People Bill, which addresses the issue of foreign interference but only touches on the alienation of a substantial proportion of Britain’s citizens from Westminster politics. The Rycroft report recommends that we amend the Bill to strengthen its protections against foreign finance and disinformation, which, as he rightly points out, are deepening public mistrust. However, the UK was already an outlier among democratic countries for public disengagement from national politics, before financial globalisation made it easy to disguise where political donations came from and social media made deliberate disinformation campaigns a regular part of our political life.
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Wallace. I thank him for securing this debate. Democracy is certainly under threat. Some 87% of Britons have either not very much or no trust at all in politicians and 33% sympathise with the view of British political institutions that they should “just let them all burn”. One in five voters—21%—say that political violence is acceptable in some conditions. When you think that we live in the aftermath of two MPs being murdered for doing their job, that is a staggering figure.
Some of this is due to direct political interference by hostile states, which the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, talked about. Last year, the director of MI5, Ken McCallum, pointed to a 35% rise in state threat activity and warned that Russian intelligence has been on a mission to generate “sustained mayhem” on British streets. We constantly see the generation of stories from various corners of the world. An example that is still notorious is that, after the terrible murder of three girls in Southport two years ago, an entirely false claim appeared online that the murderer was a Muslim immigrant. This is entirely false, but that claim was viewed more than 4 million times in Britain and across the globe.
Iran’s record is even worse than that of Russia or China. A report earlier this year by the noble Lord, Lord Walney, who is in his place, detailed how Tehran is making a systematic effort to build a soft power structure through the use of charitable organisations—registered charities which are being subverted or even created by proxies. As we have discussed many times, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is regularly using proxies. Its use of proxies is getting worse because less obvious proxies are now being used. Criminal gangs are doing its dirty work. We have just seen a court case in which two men were prosecuted and convicted for the near murder of an Iranian journalist working in London.
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, on initiating this debate and bringing out into the open so many issues that we ought to discuss much more than we do. I will fill my seven minutes or less with one observation and one question to the Minister.
My observation is this. It is one that does not seem to be made in the media or general political talk very much, but the public and the voters of today—the electorates, in all except the police states where there are no electorates, but everywhere else where democracy tries to have a go—are now equipped with more information than ever before in history. There are layers and layers of information—avalanches of it—good and bad. There is misinformation, disinformation, fake information, distorted information, deliberately maligned information and malinformation. By far, not just by a little, there has never been such a flood of comment and view.
As one newspaperman put it to me, “The trouble with our press is that every reader has become an author”. There are at least 18 billion mobiles out there in the UK alone, let alone in the wider world. There are billions of iPads out there—every time a person uses one, they feel that they have a right to challenge everything. What is more, they are equipped with a thousand and one briefs from social media upwards, or downwards, to challenge everything that any government puts out or attempts to do.
My Lords, in speaking in this debate, I declare my long-standing association with the National Secular Society. I will be drawing on material from the think tank Policy Exchange, where I am a distinguished fellow.
As time is so limited, I will make only two broad points: first, that the effective exercise of multi-party democracy in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious country such as the United Kingdom depends on the preservation and defence of a secular public space; and, secondly, that the guardrails of that exercise, as seen by voting at elections, are increasingly broken, and unless we move to improve them public trust in the institutions and in politics itself is likely to erode, with worrying consequences.
Earlier this year, the National Secular Society published a report based on polling by More in Common called Britons and Secularism. Using More in Common’s well-known segmentation of groups into seven categories—for brevity, I will not detail them now—it found that 50% of the population is either unhappy with the social contract such that they have lost faith in traditional institutions or feel abandoned and overlooked by political elites—of course, by that we mean the political parties represented here—or, alternatively, they are highly distrustful of institutions and feel entirely disconnected from society.
My Lords, I too am hugely grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, for securing this debate, and it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner. Our belief systems may differ, but we share much in common still.
I speak as chair of a new Church of England working group on promoting unity in our nation, a role that has made me think hard about the three threats before us today and what they mean for our common life, indeed for the Church and for other faith groups. I believe that the three threats that the noble Lord has highlighted—our susceptibility to disinformation, foreign interference and falling trust in our democratic institutions—share a primary underlying cause: the slow loss of the institutions in which people once learned to trust one another and act together.
In decades past, people found recognition and a sense of agency and belonging in the institutions closest to them: the parish and the chapel, the union, the club—the bodies that stood between the individual and the distant powers of state and market. In the past 50 years, both the membership of such bodies and their numbers have fallen dramatically. Without them, we have fewer spaces that bring people together across difference in search of a common aim, fewer ways to learn and practise the habits of democracy and fewer chances to trace the arc from discussion to decision to impact—the very things that give people a sense of participation and, with it, trust in our institutions.
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, for giving us this opportunity, and I have enjoyed listening to the speeches so far. As has already been said, we have a real crisis of trust in politics and our institutions. I want to talk about why, and what I think we must do about it.
I turn first to disinformation, which I agree is a real problem. Foreign state actors clearly engage in it; social media and AI make the spread of disinformation easier and cheaper than ever before. The Government must reflect this threat in their defence and the security of the United Kingdom. As real and problematic as disinformation is, and indeed is other foreign state activity described by noble Lords today, it is not why we are experiencing such low levels of public trust in Parliament, politicians, traditional media and many of our other institutions. Disinformation is not pulling people away, as I think we might sometimes find easier to believe. If we are to earn people’s trust again, we must understand that what we are doing is pushing them away from us to look for something new, whether that is different sources of information, political parties or places of solace.
When we are talking about public trust, it is important to understand that levels vary between different demographic groups. One of my bugbears with the BBC, when it talks about being the most trusted news provider, is its failure to acknowledge, at least publicly, that, among a certain group, levels of trust in it are very low. I think if it did that, it would find life so much easier. It should be no surprise that the demographic group most distrusting of the political and media classes are people who were leave voters and live in the post-industrial and coastal towns and in rural areas—the people who have consistently voted for and demanded change for at least the last 10 years and whose demands have not yet been met.
My Lords, I join the chorus of congratulations and thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, for securing this debate on a crucial subject. The United Kingdom has stood as a global beacon of democratic values, the rule of law and peaceful transfer of power for centuries. I was often told in the European Parliament that I was representing the mother of all democracies, so it is good that we are having this debate. But what concerns me is that those foundations are under severe threat. Those threats are not just from marching armies but from poisoning our collective minds and sowing the seeds of mistrust. It is now easier, quicker and cheaper to do this than to attack us physically. So it is good that we have a recognition of these issues and are having this debate.
I will add my own experience. When I was elected, the level of vile social media comments I got—going back to the early days of the internet, early websites and social media—was unimaginable. I did not mind them attacking me on my politics—we are there to have those debates—but I did mind that it was about my race and my sex. That was a problem, and it is why so many women parliamentarians have these issues. I have stopped doing social media as a result. It is important that we educate the general public about how to react to and interact with politicians. I associate myself with the words of the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, about yesterday’s PMQs. I was embarrassed and shocked at how low our democratic debate had fallen when I watched that.
My Lords, I too thank my noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire for securing this important debate. He and others have already hit the nail on the head by referring to the loss of trust. However, we speak of disinformation, foreign interference and declining trust in politics as though they form a straightforward chain of cause and effect. We assume that disinformation leads to declining trust. It does, of course, but that is not the whole story. The reason disinformation has become so potent is that trust had already ebbed away. Once trust has gone, foreign actors can exploit distrust. They can amplify and weaponise it, but can they really create it from nothing? I do not think so.
Across much of the democratic world, we have witnessed the rise of populist parties and anti-establishment movements. Many of us disagree with their solutions and some of us are alarmed by their rhetoric. Yet we must face the fact that millions of people have turned to them because they felt that the established order was no longer working for them. In some respects, perhaps the status quo did need a rocket up its backside, because too many people felt ignored, too many communities felt left behind and too many citizens came to believe that decisions affecting their lives were being taken by people who neither understood nor cared about their concerns—I am beginning to sound like Andy Burnham; I apologise. That sense of disconnection did not arrive with social media. It has been building for years.
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All of us involved in politics should be concerned about the depth of public disengagement from political life and of disillusion with our democratic institutions. Some 50 years ago, several million British citizens belonged to political parties; now, that figure has sunk to less than 1 million. In the first general election I was aware of, 80% of registered voters turned out. In 2024, turnout was down to less than 60%, while the number of eligible voters not on the register is estimated to have risen to between 6 million and 8 million. That means that the massive Commons majority of Labour MPs, on whom our current Government rest, received the support of not much more than one-quarter of adult British citizens. Registration and turnout were lowest among young people.
Opinion surveys confirm deepening public mistrust of “Westminster politics”. Similar trends in declining confidence are observable in other democratic states, but disillusion with democratic institutions has fallen further in the UK than in most other comparable countries. The Electoral Commission has recently reported that public trust in politicians has marginally improved, rising to 14%—we are down there with bankers and worse than estate agents.
We may disagree on the underlying causes for what a recent report from Demos described as a democratic emergency, but I hope we all agree that we face a major problem which will require co-operation across our parties to resolve. I have been involved in politics in West Yorkshire for most of my career, and I am painfully aware of the reality of feeling “left behind” in what were once council estates, where sold-off council houses have been sold on to distant landlords and converted into houses in multiple occupation; where the shrinking and outsourcing of local services means that public service workers are rarely seen; where local companies have given way to distant private equity owners; and where local government is distant and too close to bankruptcy to provide much assistance. I understand why many of them feel abandoned and inclined to vote against any established party.
Some 350 years ago, John Locke wrote about the state as resting on a social contract between government and citizens. Our left-behind do not see much of a social contract; for many of them their only contact with government is with the DWP. If we are to rebuild trust between citizens, political institutions and government, we need to treat the people of the United Kingdom as citizens rather than as consumers or as people who sit at home and wait for public services to be delivered. We need to inform them about political choices and engage them as far as we can in local public life.
The overcentralisation of government and politics in Britain has left us with what a Commons inquiry into voter engagement a decade ago called
“broad negative stereotypes about Parliament and Government … which go beyond healthy and necessary scepticism”.
We will not regain public trust until we reform and modernise both Houses of Parliament.
Our Chamber provides essential scrutiny of legislation, but the accusation I heard the other day that we are “just a bunch of failed politicians” is not entirely untrue. Labour’s manifesto promise to establish a Modernisation Committee in the Commons has so far achieved little more than improving accessibility for disabled Members. On one of the Bills I was concerned with in the last Session, the Commons spent less time debating the Report and Third Reading stages than in voting down amendments to the Bill. The style of the leader of the Opposition’s intervention in yesterday’s Prime Minister’s Questions fed into the worst stereotypes of partisan Westminster politics.
A healthy democratic country is one in which citizens are all engaged in public life, to one degree or another. The Thatcherite revolution, replacing public services with private provision and reducing the role of local government, reduced the visibility of state action and the opportunities for ordinary citizens to participate. David Cameron, as Prime Minister, wanted to limit the anti-social effects of our market society by building a voluntary “big society”, but that never progressed much further than the modest experiment with “citizen service” for a small number of young people. Labour’s English devolution Act completed the Conservative destruction of district councils and gave most power in devolving government to 30 or so elected mayors. There is little local democracy in that, with no chance of meeting your councillor to discuss politics in the street or the pub.
The strategic defence review, published 12 months ago, set out a vision of a national society remobilised to meet the new threats that our country faces—a “whole-of-society” approach, as it called it, with volunteer reserves for civil emergencies and
“the development of a new force that is modelled on the Reserves and connects local communities with Defence: recruited and employed locally”.
Alongside this, it welcomed the Prime Minister’s launch of a
“national conversation on defence and security”
to persuade citizens to take their share of the responsibilities involved. We are still waiting to be persuaded. The noble Lord, Lord Coaker, told us last week that he has been designated the Minister of the national conversation. I think the SDR intended that it should be the Prime Minister who led it.
The public need to be informed. Last week, I read a published report from the French equivalent of our Government’s Defending Democracy Taskforce. I find it extraordinary that the British taskforce does so little to inform Parliament or public more fully about the work it does and the threats it counters. British citizens are unlikely to respond to the SDR’s call for active engagement in ensuring our security, unless they regain greater trust in our political institutions, both national and local. That is a challenge for all of us who believe in liberal democracy.
Foreign interference is much more likely to gain traction in British politics when public trust is so low. Foreign state interference was a challenge before social media achieved its current dominant role in political communication: Russian money flowed into the Conservative Party and the Brexit campaign, as the ISC’s Russia report described. Russian assassinations on British soil go back to Soviet times. We have since seen examples of Chinese and Iranian state interference. We just learned that an Israeli company attempted to influence the Scottish elections. American corporations, foundations and extremely wealthy individuals have interfered, most prominently Elon Musk, who has been beamed into a Tommy Robinson rally in Trafalgar Square and used X algorithms to spread disinformation and attempt to shape election campaigns.
Others from these Benches will talk further about disinformation and social media, and about tightening controls on donations to political parties and campaigning bodies from abroad. I want to talk about how we should strengthen our domestic defences against these malign influences by informing and educating our citizens on how to discriminate between evidence and fictions, and engaging them again in addressing the difficult choices that national and local government have to make.
Some may disagree that foreign interference constitutes a threat. On Tuesday, the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, who is in his seat, defended Elon Musk’s use—and misuse—of X to promote a political party. I am surprised that someone who campaigned so vigorously to defend national sovereignty from the European rules that our Government had participated in shaping should be so relaxed about interference from the United States. He knows well the rising flow of finance across the Atlantic to support third-party bodies and partisan think tanks in Britain that promote everything from climate change denial to the banning of abortion to the shrinking of the state, and he appears entirely relaxed about it. I look forward to hearing his definition of a healthy democracy, which I hope might be a little familiar to traditional Conservatives from Burke to Macmillan, and to learning how he considers it possible to reconcile that vision with the libertarian, minimum-state approach that neoliberals on both sides of the Atlantic want to create and attempted, under Mrs Thatcher, to create in Britain. I also look forward to the definition by the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, of what the Conservative Party now considers a healthy democracy, which I suspect is somewhat more constructive than the noble Lord’s.
Multiple reports from both government and Parliament have advised us that better political education is what we need, particularly so now that the cacophony of social media is making it more difficult for readers to distinguish fact from fiction. The move to votes at 16 adds new weight to education about the responsibilities of citizenship. I have visited several secondary schools, both state and independent, in recent months to discuss how they will adjust their curriculum to meet the demands of citizens preparing to vote. What struck me most, in every school, was the response from teachers that they are already overloaded with topics to cover on social, economic, political and personal life, and cannot persuade their colleagues to spare more time in form for this. A lot more work is needed on this aspect of the curriculum review.
I was also told by teachers and students alike that teenagers now rely on social media—most of all TikTok—for their political information, which raises questions about the wisdom of a full ban on social media for under 16 year-olds when that birthday will give them the right to vote. The Minister to whom I posed this dilemma some days ago replied that the BBC would be asked to provide more news and discussion suitable for teenagers. The following day the BBC announced substantial cuts in its news services, which cuts across any hope that it can somehow lay on more for new voters.
MAGA Republicans in the United States are doing their best to dismantle public service broadcasting, along with so many other aspects of public services. We need the BBC to hold the balance and struggle to verify the facts in our often-contentious political debates. The BBC, for all its flaws, provides a shared platform for our public debates.
Discontent with democracy increases when economies hit recession or rapid technological change, both of which now face us. Our democracy is challenged when hostile states or malign foreign actors threaten our prosperity or our way of life. The chaos of British government over the past decade has intensified popular discontent with our political institutions, opening the door for wealthy populists, here at home and from abroad, to exploit ethnic grievances to undermine democracy further. Across all democratic parties, we need to rebuild public trust in order to defend our weakened democracy.
The All-Party Group on Counter Extremism, which I am a member of, has recommended steps, including a new directorate across Whitehall aimed at preventing democratic decline. There are other recommendations in the report by the All-Party Group that I have not got time to cover but which are all well worth looking at. I add that the Charity Commission should be far quicker and far sharper at investigating dodgy charities with links to Tehran in particular, and to China, Russia and other states. A list should also be established of charities found to have links to hostile states or their proxies. The noble Lord, Lord Goodman, has presented this idea a number of times in this Chamber. It is well worth thinking about.
I have raised again and again—I used to raise in the other place when I was a Member of Parliament—that we should have the full proscription of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Government after Government, going back to 1979, have failed to act on it. Many of us have seen Ministers here and in the other place come to the Dispatch Box very sympathetic towards an outright ban of the IRGC. Somehow, that sympathy gets lost in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and the ban gets blocked. We have legislation going through both Houses of Parliament to create the legal framework allowing this Government or a future Government to proscribe the IRGC. However, it would then take the political will of a serving Minister to say, “We’re going to take action and proscribe the IRGC”.
I have talked almost entirely about the influence of hostile states and their proxies. However, I will also say something about the threat to our democratic institutions from within democratic institutions. Many of us heard Lord Hennessy’s valedictory speech a few weeks ago in this Chamber. He was the first person to present, in the language of a few decades ago, the “good chaps” theory of the British constitution—that politicians, civil servants and others are largely men and women of good will, intelligence and capability. Largely, that theory still holds true.
However, we are now seeing the rise of elements in the British constitution and politics that were not there when Peter Hennessy wrote his outstanding books about the British constitution. For example, at the other end of the Corridor, in the other place, we have a group of five Gaza independents—for want of a better phrase—who were elected on a purely sectarian basis. Their appeal is purely sectarian. We have not had that in living memory and, in my view, that is a threat to democracy. One of them led a campaign, which he has boasted about, that aimed to make Britain’s second city a no-go zone for Jews when Maccabi Tel Aviv was playing a football match in Birmingham. Sadly, that campaign was successful, and that is a tragedy.
We have always had scandals in British politics—Suez, Marconi and Profumo spring to mind. What seems to have changed is that the scandals come thicker and faster, these days. At the moment, we are still living through the Mandelson and McSweeney scandal, which still has some way to run. Before that, a previous Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, insisted on staying in Downing Street when the Government had, in effect, ceased to function, because so many Ministers, including some in the Cabinet, had resigned. Before then, we had a period when the leader of the Opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, refused to leave, despite an overwhelming vote of no confidence, which, in effect, meant that the Opposition ceased to function.
Having taken all that in the balance, I suspect that the British constitution will prevail because the checks and balances are there. But it is not a foregone conclusion.
The chip has really reshaped the world, but on a scale that is not fully appreciated. In the 1960s, Fairchild put four transistors on a chip, but now it is putting 11 billion transistors on a chip—it is not Fairchild, of course, but TSMC in Taiwan and some American companies. This is a different world from anything that any democracy has ever faced or tried to face in its history.
Further—this is more the issue of the hour—rotating Governments and, dare I say it, Prime Ministers are not the answer to this. In the 1990s, I used to take delegations to Japan, and every time we went they had arranged, very politely, for us to see the Prime Minister, but I remember that it was always a different Prime Minister. Their rotating of Prime Ministers was part of their effort to stabilise their economy and get out of stagnation. It worked in the end, but only in the end.
The truth is that the problems facing us now are far deeper than can be solved by changing personnel at the top, and certainly by switching Prime Ministers. They cannot be reached, because the biggest problems—energy, inflation, climate, environment, defence and security—are all accessible only by collections of nations and not by one nation state. We cannot blame our Government for all the things that are clearly happening on a global scale and have to have a global resort. I know Labour had some fun blaming the outgoing Conservative Government—we apparently were responsible for Covid, Russia invading Ukraine and many other things. This makes for good politics in the very short term but is, of course, nonsense, because the solutions lie well beyond the powers and capacities of one Government, and certainly a one-party Government.
We are now in a crisis not of policy, which might be helped by changing personnel, but of ideology. It is a crisis of wrong-headed thinking about what politics should be doing to serve the people. It imagines that we can go on talking about the state versus the market, what Marx taught or did not teach, whether there is a will of the people and how it should be translated, how collectivism is better or worse than individualism, and whether the state and the market are against each other or working with each other. If we go on with that language, we will lose the interest of all those who wish our country to prosper. That will lead us in a downward spiral to worse and worse difficulties ahead.
What we need now is to drop this kind of language and the old ideology of the 20th century. We need now to get rid of the last vestiges of Marxian collectivism which, I am afraid, linger in British politics. We need now to marry private funds, of which there are masses in the world, to public needs, with new techniques and new methods, as many industrial countries are now doing. At least eight leading industrial countries—I could name them but there is not time—are employing new methods of financing their public projects by private finance and sharing the risks in new ways. None of that seems to be going on here at all. There is some thinking, but it certainly does not get into the media, the public press or the Government’s discussions. That marriage is needed.
I would like to know from the Minister what is being done behind the scenes, or anywhere, to expand the sort of ideas that existed with the old PFI—private finance initiative—which we tried in the 1980s and 1990s and at the beginning of this century but then discarded. Other countries have taken up the idea and expanded and developed it in ingenious ways. Unless we do the same, we will be trapped in the old traps of the state versus the individual, with more money to the state being available only from tax, which puts everybody off, or from borrowing, which we cannot do because we are already underwater on our borrowing and any more will raise debt and increase rather than decrease the pressures.
That is our problem, and we have to face it honestly and clearly. With whom as leader? It does not really matter at this point. It is simply that we have to understand that the world has changed beyond all recognition. Human relationships have changed, and relationships between the electorate, the voter, and those who they trust to govern them—the citizens and the state—have changed fundamentally. Until that is grasped by politicians trying to push here and there with policy changes, we will continue to have enormous and, I think, worsening difficulties.
While there is a clear consensus in the public mind that religious expression should be tolerated, this is accompanied by unease when religion seeks to impose itself where it is not wanted or is used to obstruct the rights and freedoms of others. The public are deeply uneasy when religious groups receive special privileges from the state, such as the IHRA or Islamophobia definitions. This latter point is extremely important to social cohesion, as the public holds a settled liberal instinct that faith belongs in the personal sphere and that the public space should be governed by shared civic values such as equality, the rule of law and the right to criticise ideas, including religious ones.
A further feature of public scepticism is the role of religious charities, and here I pick up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Cryer, where,
“the public draws a clear red line against any blurring of charity work … and believe that the promotion of religion should not automatically grant charitable status”.
In questioning support for the legal activities of religious charities, including the ideas, for example, that being gay is a sin or that women should obey men, around three-quarters of those polled were against either idea. They fly flagrantly against the law in this country on discrimination, and it is something for the Charity Commission to tackle more vigorously than it has done to date.
This brings me to my second theme: the rise of Muslim sectarianism in elections. Much is known of far-right populism, but we do not worry enough about the rise of Muslim sectarianism with loyalty to one’s own religious and ethnic group trumping all other public policy offers from the mainstream parties. The two groups most associated with this are The Muslim Vote, which I will refer to as TMV, and Vote Palestine, which have successfully carved out certain constituencies into bloc votes to win elections. Policy Exchange’s second report into this trend, Islamopopulism Part 2, highlights how both groups have positioned themselves to direct Muslim voters towards candidates best able, in their words, to “punish” principally the Labour Party but also the Conservatives.
We know that all mainstream political parties face pressure groups that want them to move in a certain direction, but when real intimidation is employed against prospective parliamentary candidates going about their normal duties in election campaigning, and when this remains unprosecuted in law, we are in real danger. One only has to look at the treatment suffered by defeated MPs Jon Ashworth or Kate Hollern, or those recently elected such as Jess Phillips, Shabana Mahmood, Naz Shah, Roshanara Ali or Wes Streeting, who faced unusually toxic levels of abuse from some Muslim voters. What discussions are the Government having with the Electoral Commission on forthcoming legislation regarding criminal offences for the harassment of or hatred directed at candidates in elections?
I ask this as we have seen an increase in custom-made electoral literature, both print and digital, in non-English—not a translation of leaflets from the languages of our country, English, Welsh or Gaelic, into others, but leaflets containing entirely different messages in languages that a neighbour does not receive or that an opponent cannot read without specialist translation. We saw ample demonstrations of this in the recent Gorton and Denton by-election, with videos carrying inflammatory material in Urdu, which if said in English would have encountered a vigorous response from the majority of the voting public. I do not have time today to go into what those different dog whistles contained, but suffice it to say they were not run-of-the-mill political opposition messages.
Part of the problem lies with the Electoral Commission itself, which publishes its information in a multitude of languages as the norm. This works against efforts at integration and social cohesion. Why, when it takes several years to become a citizen and to vote, is the assumption from our independent Electoral Commission that voters will not understand English? Once the commission sends a signal that our citizens can never expect to form the mainstream of the voting public, what hope is there for integration or incentives towards active citizenship? It is time that we ensure that electoral and printed campaign materials must only be produced in English, Welsh or other UK languages. The Electoral Commission cannot be expected to chase around checking compliance in material in potentially dozens of different languages.
I conclude by coming back to where I began: the British public, who do not want this. The More in Common research is clear that shared civic values, equality and the rule of law take precedence over unrestrained religious strictures in the public mind. They are deeply uneasy when religion imposes itself in the public sphere. The public understand this. I hope that in time the political parties will too.
Trust, though, has not disappeared; it has migrated, to online influencers, with whom people form parasocial relationships, and to new in-groups built on shared identity, often mobilised against a particular other. That is where foreign interference and disinformation thrive, because online we make ourselves far more open to manipulation by distant actors. As Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, put it, anger and hatred are the easiest way to grow the online platform.
In line with that, a recent BBC “Panorama” investigation traced a network of “patriotic” British anti-immigration accounts—pages with names like “Great British People”—that claim to be based in Yorkshire but actually operate from south Asia and the Gulf. Many of these had posted on entirely different subjects before pivoting to anti-immigration content because it drew more engagement and so more advertising revenue. People with no stake in our common life are profiting from deepening its fractures. Such content can give people a sense of common cause, but it is an ersatz belonging, one that depends entirely on the construction of a shared enemy.
I will go further still. It is not merely that populist movements benefit from the decline of our civic infrastructure; they have an interest in dismantling it. A thick, local, plural civil society does three things that this kind of politics cannot abide. First, a plural civil society meets the very hungers for recognition and purpose on which the populist movement feeds. Secondly, a plural civil society mixes the very people a populist movement would prefer to keep sorted into “us” and “them”. Thirdly, particularly where faith-based institutions are concerned, civil society offers a cultivated conscience, a reason to say no to manipulation or controlling behaviour, and to insist on the dignity of those whom a populist movement may wish to exclude. A people bound together by real and overlapping loyalties is far more resistant to fearmongering and far harder to divide, and so these loyalties must be loosened accordingly.
We see where this road leads. In Germany, the churches have declared ethnic nationalism incompatible with the Christian faith and the main far-right party, the AfD, unelectable for Christians. The response from the party, which claims to value Christianity, has been a move to cut the churches’ public funding. I am fearful of people who wish to wear the costume of Christianity with little care for its creeds and doctrines—those who parade the cross of Christ in anything but the name of love, and who speak of Christian values but are careless of the places in which they are learned and practised. Someone not given to overstatement recently spoke to me of what he called the existential threat—for us as a Church, but indeed for us as a democracy.
I am sorry to say that I am not persuaded that the measures taken so far—through the Online Safety Act, the Representation of the People Bill, the Pride in Place programme, and so on—come anywhere near meeting the scale of the threat that we face. I therefore make this plea to the Government: treat these threats, and the causes behind them, with the seriousness they demand. Rebuild the places where, across our differences, we still learn to trust one another. For a people who have somewhere to belong are far harder to set against each other, and that is the surest defence that we have.
Worse than that, they have observed politicians battle among ourselves to stop Brexit and to not reduce immigration, never mind to not stop illegal immigration. These are the same people who have watched as the law-abiding and taxpaying are subject to more taxes, rules and regulations, while lawbreakers get away with whatever they choose to do.
The expectations and demands of these people are legitimate. They deserve to be taken seriously and shown respect. Indeed, what they want would create better conditions for far more people than just them, but they are the people, who we have already heard about, who have lost out most over the last 30 years or so. It is that we ignore or wilfully misunderstand them—sometimes even abuse them for their views and demands of us—that is making them give up on us.
Mainstream political parties and traditional broadcast media—it is the broadcast media and the BBC in particular which have the biggest responsibility in this area—have a choice. We either acknowledge where we have gone wrong or been too slow when it was obvious we needed to change course, or we continue to see the rise of alternatives who are very good at showing that they understand people’s legitimate frustrations, even though it is fair to question whether they can or will deliver the solutions they promise.
My own party does not escape blame. I backed Kemi Badenoch to lead the Conservatives because I believe she has what it takes to meet the challenge that I described. For example, she has admitted where we went wrong on net zero and our failings on immigration and is showing how we have learned from that in the plan she is coming forward with. That is why I think she is making some headway. But I know, even though she is making some headway, that my party still has a lot of work to do.
However, if we all really care about restoring trust in political institutions, the whole political class—by that I mean all parliamentarians, including the Cross-Benchers and the Bishops, because do not think for one moment that they are not as much a part of the problem as everyone else—have to start showing that we know where we have been going wrong and start putting it right. While, of course, we have policy differences, as we should in democratic politics, it is our disregard of and disrespect for what the majority has been voting for that is the common cause of their disrespect and distrust in us.
Time is running out. Our institutions, whether political, media or others, should be the solution to our divided society that represents a real threat to our future and is being exploited by our enemies. But we are losing our moral authority to lead these institutions because we are denying our part in creating the problem that our institutions were previously trusted to be the solution to. Blaming disinformation, or voters for wanting simple solutions to complex problems—by the way, I think that is such a disrespectful thing to ever claim, because I just do not believe that is what people want; what they want from us is a demonstration that we understand the problems that they are facing from their perspective—is displacement activity. If we do not show that we understand how we are the problem and that it is us, not the public, who need to change, we will be powerless to stop our institutions from being demolished, or they will crash.
Moving back to the subject, I welcome that the Government instigated the Rycroft review, which reported in March this year. I am sure that everybody is familiar with the fact that it noted that our political and financial systems are increasingly targeted by hostile foreign actors—it named Russia, China and Iran mainly—that try to covertly manipulate our political discourse. Their goal is to inject discord, poison our core values and polarise our society. They are infiltrating the digital space where we communicate and debate. This is not simple propaganda but lies on an industrial scale.
With algorithms, malign forces can now spread deepfakes, bot networks and false narratives at an unbelievable speed and on a global scale. On the doorstep prior to the 2024 election campaign, I recall hearing arguments worded in the same way about our Prime Minister, Keir Starmer. One woman in Bromsgrove said to me, “Why don’t they just leave him alone? I get these all day long”. She showed me her phone notifications page, full of anti-Keir notifications from Facebook. I heard exactly the same arguments elsewhere in the West Midlands when I was campaigning in that general election. I have friends in India who sometimes receive exactly the same messages about our politicians as we do here. Clearly, the bots cannot tell the difference between people being in the UK or elsewhere. I often have to defend our democracy to them and say that it is not that bad, because they are getting all this misinformation.
So it is hardly surprising that trust in politicians is at an all-time low. Much has been said in the last few days, and the media are wondering why we are about to have the seventh Prime Minister in 10 years. Maybe we need to look at how these algorithms have been manipulated to demonise individuals. I suspect that, as long as our future PMs remain committed to supporting Ukraine, they will continue to be targeted in the same way.
With the indulgence of the House, I will reiterate some points that I made in a debate earlier this week about subversion of our democracy. It is not new; it has been systematically grinding away in our society since well before the Brexit referendum. I remember scrolling through my own feeds years ago, receiving highly targeted anti-EU questionnaires on social media. Platforms such as Facebook were not just places to connect; they were being actively weaponised to push an anti-EU narrative. Their sole aim was to manufacture chaos and shatter public trust in our core institutions.
What we see today is simply an escalation of that same campaign, but there is no longer just a quiet wall of digital propaganda. The line between foreign espionage and domestic terror has evaporated. We need to modernise our financial frameworks and have the means to regulate cryptocurrencies and Russian bots. The Government must apply the same urgency to countering state-sponsored information warfare as they do to traditional national security. Perhaps we need to look at our near neighbours such as France and Sweden, which have set up departments to tackle disinformation. It is also important that we have transparency in political financing, close loopholes that allow opaque funding to influence our elections and treat foreign interference as the severe state threat that it is.
Politicians must not imagine that we stand outside this story. Indeed, I sometimes think that we are far too quick to diagnose the public’s loss of faith and far too slow to ask what role we ourselves might have played in creating it. Over-promising and under-delivering is not a recent phenomenon: nor is the temptation to prefer the short-term headline to the long-term solution. Politics appears now to be far more about messaging than actual delivery. Trust is not restored by demanding respect; it can be restored only by demonstrating integrity.
This issue is not just around politics. Everything we used to believe in—pillars of integrity and truth—is indicted. Over recent decades, the public have watched a succession of scandals unfold. What conclusions should they have been expected to draw? Churches have moved abusive clergy rather than confronting that abuse. The Post Office has prosecuted innocent people while insisting its systems could not be wrong. The families of Hillsborough victims have had to spend years fighting for the truth. Victims of the contaminated blood scandal—I always have to declare an interest as my nephew was a victim, killed, in my view, by the state—have spent decades seeking recognition and justice. Meanwhile, institutions have defended themselves, withheld information, covered things up and resisted accountability. Only today, we are learning about the horrors of the Nottingham hospital maternity and baby unit scandal.
I sometimes wonder why we are surprised by a loss of trust that should not, in truth, surprise us at all, because the issue is not that institutions make mistakes—every institution made up of human beings will make mistakes—but what happens next. Do they tell the truth? Do they admit their errors? Apparently not. Do they place truth above their reputation? No. Do they close ranks? Yes, they do.
Nor can we ignore the role of the media in our decline and fall. For generations, newspapers and broadcasters acted as intermediaries between events and public understanding, but no longer. Many people regard the media as just another institution whose motives they question and, sadly, quite rightly. The relentless pressure of the 24-hour news cycle, the race to be first, the search for attention in an increasingly crowded marketplace and the tendency to frame issues as conflicts rather than problems to be solved have all played their part. Outrage attracts attention; nuance does not. If citizens lose confidence not only in politicians and institutions but in those whose role it is, or was, to hold them to account, where do they turn for reliable information?
Internationally, we are seeing similar contradictions. Citizens see institutions that were established to uphold human rights apparently unable to prevent atrocities, while countries with deeply troubling human rights records sit on, and sometimes even lead, bodies charged with defending those same human rights. This is a world gone mad.
Healthy scepticism is a virtue in a democracy, but scepticism can curdle into cynicism, and cynicism creates a fertile ground for conspiracy theories, disinformation and those who seek to divide us. If we wish to defend our democracy against disinformation and foreign interference then of course we must challenge falsehoods wherever they arise, expose hostile actors and protect the integrity of our democratic processes, but we also absolutely must rebuild trust—not through slogans, public relations, lines to take or demanding respect, but by ensuring that our institutions, our politics, our media, online and off, and our public life are worthy of it. For, once trust is lost, everything else becomes much harder to sustain against the malign influences that seek to destroy our democracy.