Democratic Institutions: Threats

Baroness Finn Excerpts

Thursday 25th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Finn (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, for tabling this Motion.

Within living memory, almost every public telephone call in this country travelled across a network owned by a state monopoly. Almost every letter was carried by another. Almost all televisual information reached the public through four channels. Even the printed press was concentrated in the hands of a small club of proprietors. Public opinion was essentially managed by a small, controlling class, mainly appointed by, licensed by or dependent on the state.

Fortunately, as my noble friend Lord Howell of Guildford made clear, technology has broken that arrangement. Satellite television, mobile telephony, the internet, podcasts, independent publishers and social media have loosened the state’s grip on the flow of news and opinion. That development has brought dangers, which this debate is right to consider, but it has also brought freedom. As my noble friend Lord Hannan of Kingsclere so brilliantly argued, we should be very careful that, in the name of fighting disinformation, we do not accidentally rebuild the old machinery of control.

Public trust is essential to democratic government, but trust cannot be restored by merely commanding the public to trust state institutions. It must be earned by conduct: by honesty, competence, impartiality and accountability. That applies not only to elected bodies but to all the institutions whose decisions shape public life: broadcasters and newspapers, the permanent Civil Service, the law and the judiciary, regulators, the Bank of England and indeed your Lordships’ House.

That is why the Mandelson affair has done such damage. When a Prime Minister appoints a Labour grandee to one of the most sensitive diplomatic posts, despite obvious and widely known reputational risks, the public are entitled to ask: who was protecting the national interest? The papers released after the humble Address have not calmed those concerns. They have deepened them. We have seen redactions, missing messages, disappearing communications and a Government who are apparently more interested in limiting embarrassment than in giving Parliament a complete account. It is not enough for Ministers to say that officials followed a process if the process produces an indefensible result. Can the Minister explain why a complete schedule of documents has not been provided in a form that Parliament can scrutinise? Can she tell us whether the incoming Labour Administration will commit to ending the casual use of private channels for serious government business?

This problem is not confined to Ministers. The permanent Civil Service is supposed to be one of the great stabilising institutions of the constitution. It is permanent precisely because it is meant to be impartial. Yet too often the public see a Civil Service that speaks the language of neutrality while indulging the instincts of activism. The Civil Service Code is not a decorative plaque. It is a condition of public confidence. Officials cannot be neutral between political parties in the office and partisan campaigners outside it if the public are not reasonably to conclude that the same instincts are shaping advice, implementation and enforcement.

There are also the problems of delivery, so ably articulated by my noble friend Lord Gascoigne. Most voters are not driven by ideology. They want to go to work, raise their family, send their children to good schools and take home as much as possible of what they work hard to earn. In return, they expect their public services to be decent, effective and accessible.

There is now a wider problem, as the noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone, made so clear, of institutional self-protection. In too many public bodies, failures are met with reviews. Reviews are met with action plans. Action plans are met with yet another layer of training, and nobody is ever plainly accountable. The British public can see the pattern. They are asked to pay more tax for worse services while being lectured by institutions that seem very good at protecting themselves and very bad at serving the country.

The same standard must apply to our broadcasters, especially the BBC. As my noble friend Lady Stowell of Beeston made very clear, the BBC is not just another media outlet; it is a compulsorily funded national institution with a privileged place in the life of the country. That privilege carries duties. Too often, the corporation behaves as though criticism is evidence of bad faith, rather than a warning that it has lost contact with large parts of the public who it claims to serve. We have had the resignation of senior BBC leaders and, as the noble Lord, Lord Frost, pointed out, serious questions about the handling of contested issues from Gaza to sex and gender. The BBC Arabic concerns, including the comparative handling of Hamas hostages, have only reinforced the suspicion that impartiality can vary by service, audience and internal culture.

The BBC must not merely avoid bias; it must avoid the appearance of belonging to a class, a faction, a world-view or a cause. At present, it too often fails that test. Editorial decisions rightly fall beyond the ambit of Ministers, but public trust in the BBC is a constitutional matter as well as a broadcasting matter. Will the Government support the strongest transparency on corrections, complaints, commissioning decisions and conflicts of interest? Will Ministers accept that the licence fee settlement cannot be discussed as though the BBC has a divine right to public money regardless of public confidence?

None of this means that we should be naive about the online world. The promise of greater freedom brought by social media has never been uncomplicated. The harms to children are real. My noble friends Lord Nash and Lady Barran showed great leadership in this House on child protection, and the leader of the Opposition, Kemi Badenoch, has been clear that social media is not for children. The Government, as usual, arrived late, copied the Conservative homework and then tried to claim the idea as their own. Whatever the route, we need serious protection for children.

At the same time, adults in a free society must be allowed to argue, offend, persuade and be wrong. The answer to disinformation cannot be a truth ministry staffed by the same institutions that have helped to lose trust in the first place. The state should be very strong against fraud, hostile state interference, impersonation and threats. It should also be very cautious before deciding that robust dissent is a harm to be managed.

Foreign interference, as mentioned by many noble Lords, is a real and growing threat. Reports of Iranian-linked social media activity amplifying Scottish separatism show the kind of low-cost, deniable operation that hostile states now use to inflame division inside democratic countries. Russia, Iran and China do not need to invent every argument; as my noble friend Lord Risby argued, they simply find our sore points and press on them.

What assessment have the Government made of the number of foreign-operated bot or sock puppet accounts targeting UK audiences? What work is being done with Ofcom, the Electoral Commission and the intelligence agencies to identify co-ordinated inauthentic behaviour before election campaigns are polluted by it? Are Ministers examining how artificial intelligence can be used not to censor legitimate opinion but to detect networks, trace amplification patterns and expose foreign direction?

The previous Conservative Government created the foreign influence registration scheme, which came into force last year. Russia and Iran are rightly included in the enhanced tier, but China is not. If the enhanced tier is for serious state threats, why is China absent? Can the Minister set out what lessons have been learned from including Russia and Iran, and what test China has failed to meet or, more accurately, what political courage the Government have failed to find?

It would not be right for this House to debate trust without looking to ourselves. Those in the media, the Civil Service and public bodies could fairly tell politicians, “Physician, heal thyself”. Your Lordships’ House is at its best when it is serious, courteous, expert and independent minded. Our debates on defence, security and constitutional matters show this House doing what it exists to do: testing government, improving legislation and bringing experience to bear. But breaches of our own standards damage the whole institution. We cannot demand accountability elsewhere while excusing it here.

We should therefore recommit ourselves to the disciplines that make this House valuable: courtesy, restraint, accuracy and scrutiny without grandstanding. We should also resist any attempt to use civility as a muzzle. In response to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, democracy is noisy. The public are entitled to be angry when institutions fail. It is our job to give them institutions worthy of respect.

The old world of controlled communication has gone, and we should be grateful for that. The public no longer need permission from a Minister, a mandarin, a BBC editor or a newspaper proprietor to hear an argument, and that is a democratic gain. The task now is not to rebuild the gatekeepers under the modern language of safety and resilience; it is to make our institutions trustworthy enough to survive scrutiny. That means Ministers who keep records and tell the truth, civil servants who remember that impartiality in delivery is their constitutional bargain, a BBC that serves the whole country rather than its own internal culture, platforms that protect children and expose foreign manipulation, and a Government with the courage to name hostile states, including China, when the evidence requires it. Public trust will not be restored by controlling what people may know; it will be restored when those in power stop behaving as though they have something to hide.