Democratic Institutions: Threats

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 25th June 2026 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

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.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

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.

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.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for that very thoughtful reply. I am very sorry to hear about the noble Baroness, Lady Anderson. We all hope we will see her again soon.

We will be continuing this debate in a range of other contexts over the next year—on the Representation of the People Bill and in many more discussions about online safety, and so on. We have not agreed how to resolve the problem of public trust, but I think we do all now accept that we have a serious problem of public trust, which will be tested, as the noble Lord, Lord Walney, was suggesting, as we go through the economic disruption of AI and other factors. We well know how, in periods of economic disruption, democracy is challenged, so we will continue to have some real problems.

We could perhaps have spent a little more time on the question of local community and the loss of the sense of localness. I thought the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester’s speech was extremely interesting in that respect. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, who suggested that we used to have a concentrated media scene, that we had local media. The first time I fought a parliamentary campaign in Huddersfield, the Huddersfield Daily Examiner was the thing which everyone read to keep in touch with local politics. We have lost a lot of the network of local media, as we have lost the network of nonconformist churches and others which held local communities together. Moving to the virtual online world is part of what has torn our society, to some extent, apart.

I would love to have taken further the role of think tanks and foreign Governments. I spent 12 years at Chatham House in the last period of the Cold War. We had delicate relations with the Soviet Union and others, and the Sunday Times attacked us for having a relationship with think tanks in Moscow. Certainly, there are delicate roads one has to tread, and it is very easy to fall off on one side or the other.

I enjoyed the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Hannan—as always. He is one of the most wonderful pamphleteers I have ever come across. He can make a plausible argument about almost any subject you wish. We have not discussed money enough—not just state money but private money. Among the threats to democracy are extremes of wealth and poverty. What we see going on in the United States at present is how extremes of wealth pouring through American politics are biasing what would otherwise be a free flow. The noble Lord quoted John Stuart Mill, who said that truth always beats falsehood in a free and fair fight. Extremes of money prevent a free and fair fight, so I will end by quoting Francis Bacon to the noble Lord:

“Money is like manure, of very little use except it be spread”.


I would add that money, when put together in piles that are too large, begins to stink.

Let us continue this argument. I look forward to the many arguments, on Bills and other things, that we will have over the next year—before I retire from this place—discussing how we maintain the quality of our democracy and do our best to ensure, through education and everything else, that not only do we have good chaps in the elites but, as the noble Lord, Lord Norton, suggested, we help to build more good chaps among the public as well.

Motion agreed.