Democratic Institutions: Threats

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Thursday 25th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, is right to raise the important issue of threats to democratic institutions. He has asked us to consider disinformation, foreign interference and levels of distrust in politics. Disinformation as a weapon used by hostile states is a serious threat that needs to be tackled vigorously. However, we must be honest and admit that, sometimes, blaming foreign interference can itself be a form of disinformation. Everything from 17.4 million people voting to leave the EU 10 years ago—happy Brexit week, by the way—to the proposition that Covid originated in a Wuhan lab were falsely blamed on Russian bots. We should interrogate whether an overzealous focus on foreign interference and disinformation and misinformation is being too easily weaponised by hostile forces closer to home: domestic politicians.

This bad habit has partly contributed to a collapse of trust, based on hypocrisy. One of the final legacy policies bequeathed by Keir Starmer as Prime Minister has been the proposal that the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, has just mentioned, forcing major platforms such as Facebook and YouTube to algorithmically boost content from “trusted” public service broadcasters, especially the BBC. The stated reason is fighting disinformation. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Frost, pointed out, how grotesque is that, when public trust in the state broadcaster has taken a battering lately due to documented scandals of fabrication? Where were the BBC fact-checkers when the BBC spliced together two separate parts of a Donald Trump speech to make it appear that he told his supporters to march on the Capitol and fight while cutting the part where he told them to protest peacefully? Rather than a mistake in editing, that appears to have been produced to create a false impression.

What is more, the BBC’s own internal memo prompted by the scandal admitted egregious distortion of coverage of the war in Gaza, such as uncritical airtime regularly given to Hamas propaganda and personnel on BBC Arabic. It also acknowledged a unit of activist reporters distorting coverage of the gender/sex debate to fit a pro-trans ideology agenda. You cannot get a more obvious example of disinformation than BBC journalists stating as fact that trans women are women, in defiance of biology, truth and now the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, while illiberal regulations are justified as necessary to protect the public from being manipulated by disinformation, lots of solutions involve official manipulation—but for the greater good, so that is okay. That takes an insidious form of nudge units or Orwellian narrative control techniques. The recent revelations about the role of the Research, Information and Communications Unit based in the Home Office is a chilling case in point. Examples include advice to the police on how to present a wide range of protesters as unsympathetic thugs or helping to shape statements from victims’ families to keep the lid on any public rage, however deserved, over horrendous crimes.

What about narrative control NGOs, which receive millions of pounds in public support to influence public opinion through the media? One example is the recent revelation that a racial injustice influencer—whatever that means—was employed to write pro-migration storylines for EastEnders. Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy stressed that TV is a cornerstone of democracy and, as such, a key tool in “supporting social cohesion”. Well, that is one way to describe the embedding of partisan political viewpoints in broadcasting cultural artefacts; another might be propaganda.

Despite such examples, when politicians discuss disinformation their target is rarely such dodgy interventions or state misdemeanours and untruths. Instead, the debate often takes the form of self-righteous campaigns against foreign actors manipulating the easily duped masses. As a consequence, it seems that there is no problem that allegedly threatens the democratic institutions that cannot be solved by controlling what ordinary people can see and read, or by limiting the information that the public have access to, often deploying tactics which betray civil liberties and democratic norms, such as censorship or surveillance.

This seems as though it is driven by the management of voters’ increasing refusal to unquestioningly accept PR about policies as though it is truth. Popular scepticism about, for example, the hidden economic costs of net-zero targets or fury at years of deception by the state about the statistics on mass migration are met with incredulity. Warwick University’s professor of philosophy, Quassim Cassam, has written insightfully on this issue, locating the start of this trend back to 2016, as has already been mentioned. The establishment’s shock and surprise at the election results that year led to a despairing question: why and how on earth did millions vote for Brexit or for Trump? Rather than digging deeper, the standard liberal answer, Professor Cassam argues, was that those voters voted the wrong way because they were either irrational or victims of misinformation. He argues that this conclusion by elites

“allows them to explain supposedly ‘deviant’ conduct in a way that doesn’t require them to interrogate their own assumptions”,

while promoting

“the idea that their own political views are not just true, but self-evidently true, so that only some kind of cognitive failure can explain someone else’s failure to share them”.

Such top-down condescension and complacency have led, disastrously, to politicians smearing reasonable popular scepticism about official truths. Over recent years, everything from concerns about two-tier policing, farmers’ fury at inheritance tax hikes and public outrage at the horrors of the rape grooming gangs, through to local opposition to low-traffic neighbourhoods or ULEZ-style anti-car measures, or protests at asylum hotels and much more have been mischaracterised in this House and the other place as having been incited by far-right misinformation or populism—terrible—whipped up by the goateed bogeymen of tech bros, especially Elon Musk. This approach not only avoids the real reason for declining trust but exacerbates it further.