The Government is finally waking up to the threat of hostile information interference from Russia and others.
In a speech to the United Nations on Tuesday evening, Prime Minister Andy Burnham said Britain had “tiptoed around” Russian disinformation for too long. He described an “industrial-scale assault” on our information environment.
That diagnosis is hard to argue with. Russian agencies spread lies, amplify far-right narratives and use fear and division to turn people against one another. They exploit moments of tension, inflame unrest and undermine confidence in our elections and democratic institutions. AI will give them faster, cheaper and more convincing ways to do it.
The response is a new National Centre for Information Defence, tasked with detecting, attributing and disrupting hostile state information attacks. That marks a serious change in approach.
Open Britain’s report on Russian interference, published earlier this year, reached much the same conclusion about the scale of the threat and how badly Britain’s defences had fallen behind it. We have long called for this to be taken seriously, so the shift from tiptoeing to action is welcome.
How well these campaigns work also depends on the society they land in.
Russia does not need to invent Britain’s anger and division. It finds the cracks already there - people struggling, losing faith in politics or feeling shut out - and pushes them wider. Genuine grievances become fuel for false narratives, far-right agendas are amplified and communities are encouraged to turn on one another.
That makes tackling inequality and rebuilding trust part of Britain’s national defence. A society in which people feel secure, heard and able to shape their future is much harder to manipulate. Burnham has recognised this, and he deserves credit for doing so.
He summed up the public’s role in that strategy in one line. “Faced with this information warfare, security starts in every home.”
That line carries a responsibility for government too.
Burnham should take note of what experts have already been telling Parliament. In April, Russia expert Fiona Hill warned that Britain increasingly looked like a “soft target” because people were not being prepared for information warfare. Lord Robertson called for an “all of country approach”. Their message was clear. If security really starts in every home, the public has to be part of the defence.
That creates an immediate problem. In his speech Burnham claims that Britain has learned from the last decade and is ready to share that understanding with other democracies. The difficulty is that we never properly investigated what happened here.
There is evidence that Russia tried to interfere in the 2019 general election. The Brexit referendum was never subjected to a comprehensive assessment. The 2020 Russia Report found that the Government had neither seen nor sought evidence of successful interference in British democracy. No full post-referendum assessment had even been commissioned.
Successive governments treated the lack of definitive findings as though it proved there was nothing to find, even though the work needed to reach those findings had never been done.
The United States, France, Germany, Canada and the European Union investigated Russian political interference. Britain did not.
Our own questions remain unanswered. Claiming that we have learned the lessons and are ready to teach others feels a little rich when they did the investigating that we avoided.
Those unanswered questions have a direct bearing on the next attack. We need to understand how Britain was targeted, which divisions were exploited, where our institutions failed and which vulnerabilities remain open.
This is the gap in Burnham’s plan. Security is meant to start in every home, and the evidence given to Parliament shows that public understanding is essential. Yet without an inquiry, Britain cannot give people a credible account of what happened, how the country was targeted or what they should look out for. A new Centre may improve what the Government knows. Household resilience depends on how much of that knowledge reaches the public.
That knowledge cannot remain locked inside government. People cannot spot techniques that are never explained to them or trust institutions that refuse to account for previous failures.
Nobody is asking the Government to hand the Kremlin a guide to British intelligence. There is plenty it can do without compromising national security. Start with the full, independent inquiry Britain has avoided. Review the classified material and publish everything that can safely be released. Then give people practical help to recognise manipulation when it reaches their screens.
A robust defence needs the new Centre, an honest account of past interference and a public equipped to recognise future attacks. Burnham has started that conversation. He now needs to trust the public with it.
Security cannot start in every home while the truth remains behind closed doors.
