Democratic Institutions: Threats
House of Lords · Lords Chamber · 25 Jun 2026 · 30 speeches · Official Report
Motion to Take Note
Moved by
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.
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...
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Wallace. I thank him for securing this debate. Democracy is certainly under threat. Some 87% of Britons have either not very much or no trust at all in politicians and 33% sympathise with the view of British political institutions that they should “just let them all burn”. One in five voters-21%-say that political violence is acceptable in some conditions. When you think that we live in the aftermath of two MPs being murdered for doing their job, that is a staggering figure. Some of this is due to direct political interference by hostile states, which the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, talked about. Last year, the director of MI5, Ken McCallum, pointed to a 35% rise in state threat activity and warned that Russian intelligence has been on a mission to generate “sustained mayhem” on British streets. We constantly see the generation of stories from various corners of the world. An example that is still notorious is that, after the terrible murder of three girls in Southport two years ago, an entirely false claim appeared online that the murderer was a Muslim immigrant. This is entirely false, but that claim was viewed more than 4 million times in Britain and across the globe. Iran’s record is even worse than that of Russia or China. A report earlier this year by the noble Lord, Lord Walney, who is in his place, detailed how Tehran is making a systematic effort to build a soft power structure through the use of charitable...
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, on initiating this debate and bringing out into the open so many issues that we ought to discuss much more than we do. I will fill my seven minutes or less with one observation and one question to the Minister. My observation is this. It is one that does not seem to be made in the media or general political talk very much, but the public and the voters of today-the electorates, in all except the police states where there are no electorates, but everywhere else where democracy tries to have a go-are now equipped with more information than ever before in history. There are layers and layers of information-avalanches of it-good and bad. There is misinformation, disinformation, fake information, distorted information, deliberately maligned information and malinformation. By far, not just by a little, there has never been such a flood of comment and view. As one newspaperman put it to me, “The trouble with our press is that every reader has become an author”. There are at least 18 billion mobiles out there in the UK alone, let alone in the wider world. There are billions of iPads out there-every time a person uses one, they feel that they have a right to challenge everything. What is more, they are equipped with a thousand and one briefs from social media upwards, or downwards, to challenge everything that any government puts out or attempts to do. The chip has really reshaped the world, but on a scale that is not...
Baroness Falkner of Margravine
My Lords, in speaking in this debate, I declare my long-standing association with the National Secular Society. I will be drawing on material from the think tank Policy Exchange, where I am a distinguished fellow. As time is so limited, I will make only two broad points: first, that the effective exercise of multi-party democracy in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious country such as the United Kingdom depends on the preservation and defence of a secular public space; and, secondly, that the guardrails of that exercise, as seen by voting at elections, are increasingly broken, and unless we move to improve them public trust in the institutions and in politics itself is likely to erode, with worrying consequences. Earlier this year, the National Secular Society published a report based on polling by More in Common called Brit on s and Secularism . Using More in Common’s well-known segmentation of groups into seven categories-for brevity, I will not detail them now-it found that 50% of the population is either unhappy with the social contract such that they have lost faith in traditional institutions or feel abandoned and overlooked by political elites-of course, by that we mean the political parties represented here-or, alternatively, they are highly distrustful of institutions and feel entirely disconnected from society. While there is a clear consensus in the public mind that religious expression should be tolerated, this is accompanied by unease when religion seeks to impose...
My Lords, I too am hugely grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, for securing this debate, and it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner. Our belief systems may differ, but we share much in common still. I speak as chair of a new Church of England working group on promoting unity in our nation, a role that has made me think hard about the three threats before us today and what they mean for our common life, indeed for the Church and for other faith groups. I believe that the three threats that the noble Lord has highlighted-our susceptibility to disinformation, foreign interference and falling trust in our democratic institutions-share a primary underlying cause: the slow loss of the institutions in which people once learned to trust one another and act together. In decades past, people found recognition and a sense of agency and belonging in the institutions closest to them: the parish and the chapel, the union, the club-the bodies that stood between the individual and the distant powers of state and market. In the past 50 years, both the membership of such bodies and their numbers have fallen dramatically. Without them, we have fewer spaces that bring people together across difference in search of a common aim, fewer ways to learn and practise the habits of democracy and fewer chances to trace the arc from discussion to decision to impact-the very things that give people a sense of participation and, with it, trust in our institutions. Trust, though,...
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, for giving us this opportunity, and I have enjoyed listening to the speeches so far. As has already been said, we have a real crisis of trust in politics and our institutions. I want to talk about why, and what I think we must do about it. I turn first to disinformation, which I agree is a real problem. Foreign state actors clearly engage in it; social media and AI make the spread of disinformation easier and cheaper than ever before. The Government must reflect this threat in their defence and the security of the United Kingdom. As real and problematic as disinformation is, and indeed is other foreign state activity described by noble Lords today, it is not why we are experiencing such low levels of public trust in Parliament, politicians, traditional media and many of our other institutions. Disinformation is not pulling people away, as I think we might sometimes find easier to believe. If we are to earn people’s trust again, we must understand that what we are doing is pushing them away from us to look for something new, whether that is different sources of information, political parties or places of solace. When we are talking about public trust, it is important to understand that levels vary between different demographic groups. One of my bugbears with the BBC, when it talks about being the most trusted news provider, is its failure to acknowledge, at least publicly, that, among a certain group, levels...
My Lords, I join the chorus of congratulations and thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, for securing this debate on a crucial subject. The United Kingdom has stood as a global beacon of democratic values, the rule of law and peaceful transfer of power for centuries. I was often told in the European Parliament that I was representing the mother of all democracies, so it is good that we are having this debate. But what concerns me is that those foundations are under severe threat. Those threats are not just from marching armies but from poisoning our collective minds and sowing the seeds of mistrust. It is now easier, quicker and cheaper to do this than to attack us physically. So it is good that we have a recognition of these issues and are having this debate. I will add my own experience. When I was elected, the level of vile social media comments I got-going back to the early days of the internet, early websites and social media-was unimaginable. I did not mind them attacking me on my politics-we are there to have those debates-but I did mind that it was about my race and my sex. That was a problem, and it is why so many women parliamentarians have these issues. I have stopped doing social media as a result. It is important that we educate the general public about how to react to and interact with politicians. I associate myself with the words of the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, about yesterday’s PMQs. I was embarrassed and shocked at how low our democratic...
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...
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, for enabling this debate because it gives us an opportunity to puncture the hysteria and moral panic that seem to have overwhelmed most of the British political class in recent years about disinformation, misinformation, foreign interference and all that. The noble Lord said something like, “I hope we all agree we have a problem”. It depends what he means by that. I agree that there is certainly a problem in disdain for politics and politicians. I do not agree that foreign interference, disinformation and all those sort of things are at the root of it. For after all, there has always been disinformation and foreign interference. It is not new; only the panic is new. There have always been people who want to harm us in this country. Many of your Lordships, like me, lived through at least the end of the Cold War. Have we forgotten that the Soviet Union spent 40 years trying to undermine British politics and British society? Then, there really was a real threat, and it even recruited a few Labour MPs to help it, if I remember correctly, but we did not clamp down on free speech to deal with that. Free speech was much freer then than it is now. We allowed people to advocate all sorts of terrible ideologies because we had confidence in the British people’s ability not to take them seriously. Now, seemingly, all that has changed. I expect a few noble Lords are familiar with Google Ngram, which allows you to track when words...
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, on initiating this most timely debate. The health of our precious democracy cannot be measured solely by a single transactional event at the ballot box. It is a continuous long-term process of how we shape our shared future. Our democratic institutions are the hard-won inheritance of our history, the bedrock of our freedom, and the foundations on which we face a synchronised, asymmetric challenge from foreign actors who wish to subvert our sovereignty from within. This brings us directly to foreign interference, a growing assault on our country. By utilising clandestine networks, cyber operations and illicit funding, hostile regimes ruthlessly attempt to influence British policy, disrupt critical infrastructure and manipulate democratic outcomes. This meddling seeks to ensure that policy decisions serve foreign interests rather than the common good of the British people, reared on free speech and opinion, by stifling open debate in our universities and establishing structures to intimidate minority communities who live here. To maintain a strong and secure nation, Britain absolutely has to protect its borders, institutions and political processes from any external manipulation. Foreign technological disruption targets our citizens so as to fragment our society into polarised, adversarial echo chambers. To counter this, we must look not just at the source of disinformation but its actual channels. The younger...
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, for securing this debate-there could hardly be a more important one. It might surprise noble Lords to hear me say that. In this unprecedented heatwave, with the people and infrastructure of these islands melting around us, noble Lords might expect me to say that we should talk about the climate emergency and particularly climate adaptation. I often do just that, especially having just come off the number 390 bus. I am speaking about political resilience today precisely because it is a crucial part of climate adaptation. Whatever the specifications of our rail lines, the designs of our school buildings or the nature of our food system, the single most important thing for the coming difficult decades-this age of shocks, in which climate is just one of the seven planetary boundaries we have burst through, to which geopolitical and health shocks, for starters, can be added to the tally of threats-is the resilience of our politics. That includes the trust and empowerment of individuals and organisations to make decisions under life and death pressures as well as during the daily grind. The ability to prioritise and make the right survival choices is crucial. That means a functional politics, starting from the smallest village and progressing up to the giant, fragile city of London and the national scale. That means a functioning democracy, in which everyone can contribute, have a say and share their knowledge, skills and energy. The...
My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, for procuring this important debate. I will focus my comments on the acceleration of the dissemination of disinformation which we are seeing in our media. I believe that is having an effect on public trust, and I would like to think about what can be done about it. This week, I read with great interest the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report , which looked at news consumption in 45 markets globally. All the markets showed a huge increase in consumption of news from social media and AI chatbots and, with it, a massive increase in distrust about news from these sources, caused by myths, disinformation and deepfakes. The search found that the US, which has seen the biggest increase in social media news consumption, has only 25% of audiences saying they trust news from all sources. What I found interesting was what is happening in Germany, France and the UK, where there is high trust in news from public service broadcasters. In the UK, while the trust in social media was low, trust in the PSBs and the Financial Times was at nearly 60%, although I take the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, that there are large groups who do not trust the BBC and our other public service media. It is therefore not surprising that a study by the European Broadcasting Union found that AI news summaries misrepresented the news 45% of the time, stating opinion as fact and producing what the tech bros call...
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...
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow such excellent speeches. I warmly welcome what the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, has done, which is to have this profound and overlapping debate at the same time that we are dealing with sensitive legislation. I am sure that my noble friend the Minister will make the connections between some of the speeches earlier this week and today’s debate. This debate is important because we really need to calibrate what is going on. We need to provide that context and there is still some ambiguity about what we are doing and whether we are doing the right thing. I will be talking about the national security part of this overlapping debate. As the noble Lord, Lord Frost, implored us not to have a moral panic, I inexplicably started to panic. I am not sure why, but I have calmed down now and maybe I can offer this perspective. The noble Lord talked about the Cold War and what the intelligence services have to do. Some years ago, I had the experience of, first, writing the report on the mass surveillance inquiry after Snowden, and then I chaired the debate on Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and political interference. It was an embryonic time, as many of these ideas were being explored. I am not going to bore your Lordships about European Parliament committees, but will say that we had unprecedented access to serving and retired senior intelligence officers throughout that period, some of whom have kept in touch. What is instructive about those people is...
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Moraes, whom I have considered a friend for some 30 years. He was a great champion for those in the European Parliament who had no voice but his-often overlooked and marginalised groups-and was always in the best Labour tradition of trying to build people up rather than trying to drag others down. “But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it”. So wrote JS Mill in On Liberty , which I think is still presented to the president of the Liberal Democrat Party as a kind of badge of office when elected. If noble Lords heard a clanking noise as we opened our debate, I suggest that was the shade of JS Mill hearing the opinions from the Front Bench of the party he served and loved, as expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, because he used the argument that every censorial and authoritarian Government begin with: he started talking about Russia and then he elided into talking about Elon Musk. This is how it always happens. We are presented with some terrorist threat, some terrible foreign actor, and then very quickly it turns into “someone whose opinions I happen not to like”. We, the nation that came through the great wars and travails of the 20th century upholding the principle of free expression, are now expected to throw it all in the air...
My Lords, it is a pleasure to have the opportunity to take part in this excellent debate, and I commend the noble Lord Wallace. I even agreed with the first two or three minutes of his speech. I do not suppose many in your Lordships’ House have read the Pope’s magisterial first encyclical letter, Magnifica Humanitas , published on 25 May, but it touches on some of the issues raised in today’s debate. The letter focuses on human dignity in the age of AI. Pope Leo XIV references “disinformation”, which he describes as the “manipulation of information”. His central thesis is that, despite the power of technology, which he calls the “culture of power”, it is possible to preserve humanity through “truth, work and freedom”. Human beings are quite capable of avoiding seeing themselves as projects to be optimised or commodified, rather than valuing themselves and others with inherent humanity and dignity. In short, we must and we can trust the interested electorate to have the common sense they were born with. It is in that wider context that we should critique calls by liberals, authoritarians, humanists and others to mediate and modulate political, social and cultural discourse online, supposedly for the common good. That reduces consumers of social media platforms, despite historically high levels of information, as my noble friend Lord Howell said, to the status of helpless supplicants needing the paternalistic protections of their social and cultural superiors to adjudicate the...
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire for securing this debate and for his excellent introduction, which was both forensic and alarming. He has certainly elicited a range of views in today’s debate. My view is that we are at a critical point for our democratic institutions, facing threats that have grown exponentially in sophistication and scale, and which successive Governments have been far too slow to address. I am grateful for the opportunity to disagree with the view of the noble Lords, Lord Hannan, Lord Frost and Lord Jackson, and the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, that the right to freedom of expression gives some sort of licence to spread disinformation with impunity. My noble friend reported that the Electoral Commission’s most recent survey found that only 14% of people trust politicians. The National Centre for Social Research reports record low levels of trust in how Britain is governed, with only 12% of the public trusting Governments to put the country’s interests before their party’s. That collapse does not exist in a vacuum. It is being actively engineered, and technology has become the primary instrument of that engineering. In 2020, Lord Puttnam’s Select Committee described a “pandemic of misinformation” and disinformation that would result in the collapse of public trust. Six years on, the failure of successive Governments to act on the bulk of those 45 recommendations has had predictable consequences. The World Economic Forum now...
My Lords, I too commend the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, for securing this debate. I also commend the Library briefing prepared for it. I wish to make one key point. Committing legal and electronic resources to tackling disinformation is necessary, but it is not sufficient to bolster trust in our political system. As has been mentioned, disinformation is exacerbating popular distrust, but it is not the cause of it. Countering disinformation is essentially a reactive process, but we need to be proactive if we are to build popular trust. Those who peddle disinformation exploit a lack of understanding of our political system-not only of how it operates but of the benefits it delivers to citizens. We have a political system characterised by accountability, effectiveness, flexibility and coherence. Yet, as has been mentioned, trust is low both in absolute terms and in international comparison. People do not trust either House of Parliament, the Executive or, especially, political parties. The noble Lord, Lord Cryer, referred to the “good chaps” theory of government. Our system of government derives its strength not from an elite of good chaps but from everyone being good chaps. Core to political stability is having a culture of constitutionalism. We tend to focus on form, but it is values that matter. There are changes that can and should be made to how our politics operate, both at the level of the individual politician, through a tightening of standards, and...
My Lords, I am delighted to follow my former politics lecturer at Hull University; I hope that I do not let him down too much with what I am about to say. Like a few others, I wish to move away from external factors and talk about our own faith in our democracy. Now is the time, especially with a new Government incoming, to ask ourselves some seriously hard questions. For background, I come from a working-class family. I was brought up in a terraced house in east Lancashire in one of the most deprived constituencies in the land. My first proper job, back in 2004, was a couple of years in a credit union up there. The aim was to tackle loan sharks and financial exclusion, as well as provide a service to the community. While there, I saw people really struggling. I distinctly remember a conversation I had with one lady. She did not complain at all, but made it very clear that she was working as much as she possibly could, even though, fundamentally, she would have been financially better off not working. She chose to work for the sheer principle of it. So, long before Brexit-before anyone makes that claim-people were feeling left behind and that London and the south-east are an entirely separate part of the country. I read two interesting pieces on the recent Makerfield by-election. The first was in the Times , where Quentin Letts commented that when he visited the patch and sought to speak to 20 voters, seven did not know there was an election. More starkly, in the New...
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, for making today’s debate possible. We have already heard some very interesting contributions. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Gascoigne, who has set out a compelling case around the challenges of the politics we face today. We have both had the privilege of spending time working in No. 10, and I think I know where some of his frustration comes from. The noble Baronesses, Lady Stowell of Beeston and Lady Featherstone, rightly challenged us to make sure that we do not look at this debate through just one end of the telescope. We can do two things at once; there is more we need to do to put our own house in order while recognising what I will focus on-the legitimate concerns around misinformation and disinformation in our politics today. This is not to absolve ourselves but to ensure that we can get across to citizens the information they need to make informed choices at elections. Two things are happening at the same time: the rise of misinformation and the collapse we have seen in local media as it has moved more online, with the rise of Facebook groups and similar platforms for local news. This has been highlighted in the report by the Social Market Foundation No N ews i s B ad N ews: T he H idden T hreat of U nchecked L ocal M isinformation , mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones. Some of its key findings were that nearly half of Britons seek out local news through social media-more than any other...
My Lords, I declare an interest as the co-chair of the new All-Party Parliamentary Group for Defending Democracy, which I urge all noble Lords who have made such compelling contributions today to join. That group has a remit in part following the Defending Democracy Taskforce. I agree wholeheartedly with what the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, said at the beginning: that it is regrettable that there is not more prominence from that taskforce in communicating and engaging with parliamentarians-and indeed anyone else, as far as I can see. That is one of the things the APPG wants to do. It is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Doyle. I am not sure whether it was by coincidence or mischievous design that the final three of our Back-Bench contributions have been from people who in the past have had senior roles in Downing Street-which many people would say has contributed over recent decades to decline in faith in democracy, but we will leave that for others to judge. I commend the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, for what I thought was an excellent speech. I thought he was a bit too harsh on the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, and a bit too lenient on Kneecap, but his central point, that democracies need controversy and freedom of speech to be able to evolve, and if they cannot evolve they will ultimately die, is fundamentally important and not sufficiently understood in the current political discourse. I spent close to five years, in the end, as the last Government’s-and for a while, this...
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...
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,...
My Lords, I am here today because my noble friend Lady Anderson had a minor accident and has been incapacitated for a couple of days. That is why noble Lords have me instead of her, I am afraid. I am sure the House would want me to wish her well and a speedy recovery from her injury. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, for securing this very important and-as the noble Lord, Lord Pack, said-timely debate, and I thank all noble Lords who have taken part this afternoon for the excellent quality of the debate. It has been an incredibly valuable discussion to listen to. I hope I speak on behalf of the whole of your Lordships’ House when I say that these matters require us to put the protection of our precious democracy at the front of our minds. Parliamentary debates on these issues offer a unique opportunity to raise awareness of the threats to the public and signal our unyielding resolve across the nation to confront foreign threat actors. This Government’s first duty, as is the duty of all Governments, is to keep our country safe. We are absolutely committed to taking all measures necessary to expose and disrupt attempts to interfere with our sovereign affairs. That is why the Government’s counter political interference and espionage action plan was announced in November to ensure that our national politics will remain a significant challenge for any foreign actors who try to target us. This plan is structured around three core pillars: delivering an enduring campaign to...
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...
Motion agreed.
House adjourned at 5.26 pm.