Democratic Institutions: Threats

Baroness Featherstone Excerpts

Thursday 25th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Featherstone (LD)]

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.

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.