Democratic Institutions: Threats

Lord Pack Excerpts

Thursday 25th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pack (LD)]

As other noble Lords have done, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, for securing the debate. It is good to see him continuing to be so active in this Chamber, even after stepping down from his role shadowing the Cabinet Office. The timing of the debate is particularly opportune as we are in the middle of a change of Prime Minister, because, traditionally, it is the early days of a premiership that have often been the most fruitful for taking steps to improve and strengthen our democratic systems.

As we heard from multiple contributors in the debate, there are many important challenges that we need to face. Several people made reference to the figures from the Electoral Commission, showing that only 14% of people trust politicians. I am tempted to point out that it was 10% the year before, so we have had a rise of 40% in the number of people who trust, but perhaps one should not overegg that rise too much.

As has been a regular theme through the debate, there is the significant danger of foreign interference. Given some of the comments that were made, let me give the example, which was also mentioned in this House earlier this week, of what happened when the internet was shut down in Iran: a whole load of very active social media accounts passing themselves off as UK citizens with very vocal views on Scottish independence suddenly disappeared. Those accounts were not the rumbustious exercise of freedom of speech by genuine Scots or other people in the UK; they were fakery by a foreign Government, deliberately intended to stifle the expression of free speech in this country. That is why it is so important that we take such dangers seriously.

I am afraid some noble Lords may be disappointed, but I will also mention Elon Musk, not because he has views that I disagree with but because of the way his platform deliberately, repeatedly and persistently sets out to amplify and spread violent threats against individuals. The fact that it is, sadly, now a common experience for many politicians to receive large volumes of images featuring nooses, for example, directed at them, and for X to be so slow in responding, is a genuine threat to freedom of expression and free participation in our democracy.

Of course, one should not forget the record of Vladimir Putin and Russia. There is not only a track record that has been established over many years of the Russian state being involved in violence being carried out within Britain; we also, as we saw all too recently, now have the connections between the Russian state and the direct incitement of violence involving the Prime Minister. It is right to respond to that situation. It is not a panic but a wise, careful evaluation of the evidence to think, when there are connections between the Russian state and violence directly involving the Prime Minister, that that is something we need to respond to. That, indeed, is very different from what the Russian state got up to in the Cold War. It goes beyond that.

We should recognise that there are some positives that we can build on. There has been the recent rise in turnout in elections. We may not always be happy about who people have chosen to vote for, but we are, at the moment, in a period of rising turnout, as we saw most dramatically in the most recent parliamentary by-election, with the exceedingly rare occurrence of turnout being higher than in that seat at the previous general election. According to the Electoral Commission’s data, there are high, and maybe even slightly rising, levels of satisfaction with the processes of registering to vote and voting, and, indeed, of confidence that elections here are run well. That is a very precious commodity.

However, as many have mentioned in this debate, we must not be complacent. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester rightly highlighted some of the wider social trends that are the backdrop to many of these issues. As the noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone, the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, and many others mentioned, there are broader issues around trust that simply making some improvements to our democratic system on their own will not be sufficient to deal with.

However, there is good news: there are many reviews and reports, several of which have been mentioned in this debate, which give a rich menu of policy suggestions for the Government and others to pick from. There are also many legislative opportunities. All too often, we hear that something will be done “when legislative time allows”. Courtesy of the Representation of the People Bill, and indeed the commitment in the King’s Speech to legislation around the removal of peerages, we have legislative time coming up later this year in this House.

I want to concentrate for the moment on just one particular issue specific to today’s debate and to the Government’s legislative plans, which is the role of money, especially foreign money, in buying undue influence in our democracy. We are now in a new era of exceptionally highly concentrated donations. In the first quarter of this year, just two people were responsible for one-third of all the declared political donations made in the UK. Even though those sums were quite large and highly concentrated, they were still quite small compared with what a foreign Government or a billionaire could decide to spend.

For example, in the 2024 general election, Labour’s total declared national expenditure was £30 million. To those of us who have been involved in various ways with party fundraising, that feels like a lot of money: it takes a lot of raffle tickets to get to £30 million. But, in a different context, £30 million does not even buy you one F-35 aeroplane. Or, if you want to go for a slightly cheaper, slightly inferior model—I am not an expert in these things, so my pricing may not be absolutely correct—I believe the typical export price for a Su-57 modern Russian stealth fighter is around £30 million. So, if you are sat there in the Kremlin, just one plane costs the same as a complete national general election campaign by a party that won a landslide. So we should be worried about the possibilities of abuse.

I therefore very much welcome the Rycroft review and the implementation of its recommendations, so far as we have seen them, by the Government. However, they still leave a very significant set of loopholes. One I might call the “Trump loophole”. Although the Representation of the People Bill as it currently stands introduces some controls on the level of foreign ownership there can be of companies that donate to UK politics, all Donald Trump would need to do is split his ownership of a company with his children, and all of them would fall below the threshold. That is not an adequate threshold. Indeed, we recently approved in Parliament much tougher foreign ownership regulations for newspapers. It is a shame that the Government have not, so far at least, decided to drop the newspaper threshold for political finance.

There is also the donor cap in the Representation of the People Bill, which is welcome as a step forward from where we are, but, as it currently stands, is only a limit on what can be given to any one person or party in a year. If a political party has 650 candidates in the run-up to a general election, that means you can give 650 times the cap, giving a donation to each candidate and making a complete nonsense of the cap. Indeed, given that most political parties have local councillors as well, one could quite easily, and completely legitimately, give thousands of times the cap every year. It becomes not really any sort of cap at all.

I hope the Minister will be able to address four questions when she responds. One is to update us on progress in implementing the rest of the Rycroft review beyond the two measures that, to give credit to the Government, they have moved very quickly on. I know that she would not want me to disappoint her by not taking the opportunity to mention the importance of the consolidation of election law. It is very welcome to see the Rycroft review rightly highlight the need for us to have a robust and clear legislative framework for our elections. However, I hope the Minister can also explain, given that the newspaper ownership threshold was set so much lower for foreign interference in our media, why the Government have chosen not to set that threshold but instead to set a much more generous one when it comes to donations into our democratic system.

More generally, the narrow remit of the Rycroft review is specifically around finance, which is not the only form of foreign interference in our politics. What plans do the Government have to go beyond that in their further work? Our democracy requires nurturing and protecting. We need to be free to hold our own debates and make our own decisions free from foreign interference, so that we can exercise our own freedom.