Let’s be honest right from the start: the threat is not imaginary. The 21st century has turned information into a weapon of war, and the British public is standing in the trenches. You can feel it in the comments section under almost any news story, in the algorithms that reward fury, in the fake accounts that swarm every controversy within minutes. Every day brings a new barrage of malevolent online content, cooked up in the troll factories of Moscow, Beijing and Tehran, and aimed squarely at the fissures in our society. This is not Whitehall paranoia, whatever the sceptics say. When the Iranian regime disconnected outside internet access in January, it silenced a network of pro-Scottish independence social-media accounts in the same stroke. We may never know how many militant SNP voters are actually holed up in Tabriz, but I suspect the real number is considerably smaller than the number of accounts pretending to be them. Russian operations, meanwhile, have weaponised concerns surrounding the Henry Nowak case, using far-Right patsies to spread confusion and anger. None of this is new. Themistocles, the Athenian leader, did much the same in Ancient Greece, scratching messages onto stones at a watering hole to persuade his enemy’s Ionian levies to defect. Propaganda has always been part of warfare. So when the Government says it wants to defend the country against hostile information attacks, it deserves a fair hearing. But only a hearing. The new National Centre for Information Defence raises questions that go far beyond foreign trolls, and the British public is right to be suspicious.
At first glance, the new centre sounds eminently sensible. It is designed to coordinate the fight against deepfakes, “hostile information attacks” and what the announcement called the “distorted and untrue narrative about Britain” that thrives online. It will bring existing units together—the Media Monitoring Unit, the Defending Democracy Taskforce, the National Cyber Force—under one roof, saving money and avoiding duplication. That is the kind of bureaucratic logic that appeals to British common sense. But it should not be allowed to disguise what is actually happening. Consolidation means concentration. It means more power in the hands of civil servants, and that power tends to grow arms and legs, like a fish wriggling out of a swamp, desperate to feed and expand. It will also trigger the inevitable interdepartmental rivalries among spooks, police, soldiers and Whitehall officials, all of whom will want a piece of the action. Free-speech campaigners were quick to point out that the state already has a bubbling cauldron of acronymic monitoring units; now it will have one bigger pot. None of this would matter if the Government had a clean record of separating legitimate criticism from genuine disinformation. But it does not. During Covid, dissenting voices found their way onto official watchlists. Only last year, people who expressed concerns about mass migration were labelled “cultural nationalists” and treated as potential Prevent referrals. To an old Special Branch hand like me, that rings a distant Cold War bell. Subversion is back in fashion. Except the new “threat actors” are not sweaty Stalinists plotting in factory canteens; they are, increasingly, anyone who challenges the settled consensus of the past quarter-century.
The phrase I have always used for this kind of activity is “parapolitics”—the twilight zone that exists between conventional politics, intelligence, security and propaganda. It sounds like something from a niche sociology journal, but it describes the real world in which I worked for years, monitoring online extremists and actual terrorists. Parapolitical activity is often covert, hidden in the murk. This time, however, the Government has decided to hide in plain sight. Yes, we are watching, it seems to say, and we are not ashamed of it. Yet this is not the first time the British state has wandered into that nebulous territory. During the Second World War, Whitehall created the Ministry of Information and the Political Warfare Executive. Their official job was to counter Nazi propaganda and undermine enemy morale, but they also had a second, less advertised purpose: to keep a close eye on the home front by monitoring public sentiment. After 1945, the Attlee government established the Information Research Department to combat Soviet disinformation, and the Russian bear has loomed large in British domestic security ever since. In 1972, MI5 produced its classic definition of subversion: activities which threaten the safety or well-being of the state and are intended to undermine or overthrow parliamentary democracy by political, industrial or violent means. With that definition, the civil service effectively withdrew from the field, and anti-communist surveillance became a quasi-policing, quasi-intelligence exercise. Nobody could quite decide whether monitoring communists was police work or pure intelligence gathering. In the parapolitical hall of mirrors that was postwar Britain, no one really seemed to know. That ambiguity was troubling enough. But at least the enemies were identifiable. Now the definition of subversion has quietly expanded to include anyone who makes the establishment uncomfortable.
The old Cold War logic did not survive the fall of the Berlin Wall, and it was buried again by the towers of 9/11. Jihadi bombs were a horrific security threat, but they did not subvert the state. There was no evil empire behind them, no coherent ideological mission to undermine parliamentary democracy. Islamist terrorism was too fragmented to fit the old model, and saying that Islamism itself might be a problem was long seen as politically unacceptable. So the police and security services moved into a more granular, proactive counter-terrorism role—think Jack Bauer rather than John le Carré. “Domestic extremism” was downgraded, and combating the far-Right was increasingly contracted out to social services, educational institutions and charities. But while this was happening, the state was quietly building a digital panopticon. Content aggregation tools made it possible to harvest the internet for dissenting material. Online monitoring units kept tabs on groups and individuals, flagging “actionable” content for removal, for intelligence purposes and occasionally for prosecution. The Coalition government of 2010 seemed happy with this arrangement, and little changed until the late 2010s. Then came new artificial intelligence tools, and then came the populist surge: protests, riots, blockades. After Southport, after the anti-immigration demonstrations, after the “Patriot Platform” blockades at Dover, Whitehall’s appetite for counter-subversion returned with a vengeance. Every politically charged furore now triggers demands for instant information from ministers and chief constables. Populist protests can indeed disrupt critical infrastructure, as Dover showed, and they can occasionally incubate lone-wolf extremists—David Copeland had dabbled in the BNP before he became an infamous nail bomber. But proportionality has been lost. We live in an era of non-crime hate incidents, of police knocking on doors over lawful opinions, of journalists being cautioned for pursuing legitimate stories. Where exactly is the line between lawful and unlawful protest? Between genuine anger and hostile interference? These are judgment calls for skilled investigators, not questions to be answered by algorithms or quangos.
The Government knows these concerns exist, and it has tried to wave them away. Wes Streeting, defending the new unit, promised that it would never infringe the freedom to disagree, the freedom to challenge Government policy, to criticise robustly, and to choose a different Government at the ballot box. Fine words. But the party he serves has its own record of information-warfare shenanigans, and the relationships are too cosy for comfort. Labour Together, the party’s internal strategy organisation, shared an address with the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, an outfit whose stated aim was to “Kill Musk’s Twitter?” Hope Not Hate, an organisation that purports to monitor extremism, has had its former director of communications, Matthew McGregor, working as head of political strategy at No. 10. I am not alleging a formal conspiracy. I am merely pointing out that the boundary between activism, journalism and state power is increasingly blurred, and Westminster’s mini Machiavellians are perfectly capable of exploiting that blur. Then there is the record of actual censorship. No genuinely free democracy has ever managed to silence the internet completely, and Britain’s attempts have veered between farce and menace. Ofcom once embarked on a quixotic mission to tame 4chan, a site that treats any official attention as a badge of honour. Then came the Online Safety Act, with its obligatory nod to child protection and its barely concealed desire for mandatory age-gating of adult content. The new disinformation centre will, I suspect, soon be forming working groups to wargame all these “tactical options.” And because national security is the most convenient firewall ever invented, we will never know what they decide. There will be no transparent framework, no public criteria for who gets targeted and when. We will simply be told that the measures were necessary.
Still, the deepest problem is not bureaucratic overreach; it is the impossibility of the task itself. How do you tell the difference between a good-faith opinion and a piece of foreign propaganda, especially when they happen to agree? Kremlin trolls tell outrageous lies, but the most effective information warfare is material that subtly toys with reality, amplifying real grievances and presenting them in a distorted frame. If a British citizen sincerely agrees with a post that originated from a Russian influence operation, is that person a dupe, a shill, or a traitor? And who gets to decide? Most people of goodwill would like foreign propaganda to be identified and exposed for what it is. But I am not convinced that the scale of the threat justifies the scale of the response. Blurring the lines of legitimate debate will not soften the genuine anger that exists over small boats, migration, housing, or the cost of living. It will only make that anger suspect, and it will not make the anger go away. The point of a free country is that we tolerate opinions we hate, not just the ones we agree with. I am reminded of a small incident from my years in the field. One night, monitoring Twitter, I saw Tommy Robinson post a hastily scrawled Osman Notice—a police warning that his life was in danger—that had been pushed through his front door. Robinson compared his treatment with that of a Muslim cleric who had received similar protection. A senior police officer asked me to get the posts taken down. Why? Because they were embarrassing, and the chief constable did not like them. I refused. I had neither the power nor the desire to suppress something that trivial. But that is the mindset we are dealing with. The people who will run the National Centre for Information Defence are cut from the same cloth. They will have better technology and more power than my old colleagues had, and I have no reason to believe their judgment has improved.