When Andy Burnham speaks about the threat of Russian disinformation, he does not sound like a politician reading from a carefully prepared script. There is something more personal in his voice, a sense of genuine frustration mixed with an almost pleading urgency. The Mayor of Greater Manchester has spent years watching the digital world change the way people think, talk and vote, and his message is simple: Britain is not doing enough to defend itself against a foreign enemy that does not drop bombs but plants lies. In a recent report carried by BBC News, Burnham argued that the fight against Russian disinformation is not some abstract geopolitical problem for intelligence agencies to manage quietly in the background. It is happening here, in our living rooms, on our phones, in the arguments we have with family members who have read something that simply is not true. He wants people to understand that this is a form of warfare, and that the British public have been treated as targets. The way he describes it, one can almost picture a battlefield where the trenches are comment sections and the propaganda leaflets are viral memes. It is unsettling, but it is also human. Burnham is trying to wake people up without terrifying them, to warn us without paralysing us.
At the centre of Burnham’s concern is the uncomfortable fact that social media platforms are not neutral spaces. They might claim to be open forums where people share their opinions freely, but the algorithms that run them are designed to reward extreme content, because extreme content keeps people online for longer. Russian disinformation specialists understand this very well. They do not need to convince everyone that their lies are true; they only need to make those lies loud enough, frequent enough and emotionally charged enough that they begin to feel normal. Burnham has pointed out that this is not a technical accident. It is a deliberate strategy, refined over years and deployed across the world. In the United Kingdom, the effects can be seen in the way debates about immigration, race, the pandemic and even the weather become twisted into culture war battlegrounds. He has said that the companies running these platforms have been profiting from division while washing their hands of responsibility. Every time an outraged post is shared, every time a half-fake headline is clicked, there is money being made. And behind all of it, there are Russian operatives systematically testing which buttons are easiest to press in the British psyche. Burnham’s language is often measured, but his warning is stark: we are being manipulated, and we cannot pretend otherwise.
Perhaps the clearest example Burnham has in mind is what happened in the aftermath of the tragic knife attack in Southport in the summer of 2024. The country was already in a state of shock, grieving for three young girls who had been killed and for the families whose lives had been torn apart. In that atmosphere of sorrow and anger, false claims began to spread online. The suspect was wrongly named, his background invented, and a story that had no basis in fact was repeated thousands of times. Russian state media and pro-Russian accounts picked it up and amplified it, turning a local tragedy into a national fuse. Violent disorder followed on the streets of Southport, Hartlepool, Rotherham and other towns. Burnham watched this unfold with a sense of horror, not just because of the violence itself, but because it proved how easily the British public could be steered. The people who rioted were not necessarily Russian agents; they were British citizens, many of them acting on information they genuinely believed was true. But the information had been placed in front of them by actors with no interest in the truth, only in chaos. Burnham’s point is not to excuse the rioters. It is to say that the system is built to be exploited, and that the exploitation is happening in real time. He asks us to imagine what will happen next time, if the crisis is greater and the lie is even more carefully crafted.
So what does Burnham actually propose? He is not talking about banning the internet or shutting down social media. He is talking about regulation, accountability and the need for a serious rewrite of the rules that currently allow foreign disinformation to flood British life. The Online Safety Act, which was supposed to bring tech companies into line, has been criticised by many as too weak, and Burnham has been among those voices. He has argued that platforms should be legally required to remove content linked to state-sponsored actors, and that they should face real financial consequences when they fail to do so. He has also stressed the importance of media literacy, because no law can catch every lie. People need to be taught how to question what they see online, how to spot the signs of coordinated inauthentic behaviour, and how to slow down before sharing something that makes them angry. But Burnham’s most powerful argument is about responsibility. He reminds us that disinformation does not succeed simply because it is false; it succeeds because it expresses a feeling that already exists. If people feel ignored, frightened or humiliated, they become more receptive to lies that blame someone else. So the fight against Russian disinformation is also a fight about belonging, about community, about making sure that British citizens feel secure enough not to be tempted by dark stories.
None of this can be done by government alone. Burnham has been careful to say that the solution lies in strengthening the institutions that create trust: journalism, education, local democracy and public service broadcasting. He has praised the BBC’s role as a fact-checker and a source of reliable information, while acknowledging that the modern media landscape is fragmented in ways that were unimaginable just twenty years ago. The old model, where everyone watched the same evening news and read the same newspapers, has gone. In its place is a personalised stream of information, and for some people that stream is mostly nonsense. Burnham believes that public interest journalism needs to be protected and expanded, not just in London but across the whole country. He has spoken about the importance of local newsrooms, because when a community has its own trusted reporters, it is harder for foreign liars to walk in and rewrite the story. There is something deeply human about this vision. It is not about building a wall around the truth. It is about planting enough gardens of honesty that the weeds of disinformation have less room to grow. Burnham understands that people do not trust politicians very much, and he knows he is asking them to trust the system again. But he also knows that cynicism is the soil in which propaganda thrives.
In the end, Andy Burnham’s message is one of hope, but it is a serious kind of hope, not a comforting fairy tale. He is asking the British people to look at the threat honestly, with clear eyes and without panic. Russian disinformation is not all-powerful. It does not work against a society that is aware of it. It fails when people talk to one another in good faith, when they know their neighbours, when they read widely and think carefully, when they are willing to say to a friend, “That doesn’t sound right, let me check.” Burnham wants the United Kingdom to treat this as a national priority, just as seriously as it treats terrorism or climate change. And he wants it to happen before the next crisis, not after it. There is a strange intimacy in his warning, a sense that he is not just talking to the country but talking to us, as individuals, asking us to look at our own screens and ask whether we are being played. It is a call to reclaim something that has been quietly stolen: our shared reality. When we cannot agree on simple facts, we cannot have the difficult conversations that democracy depends upon. Burnham seems to understand this at a fundamental level. He speaks like a man who has seen the damage that lies can do and refuses to look away. His message deserves to be heard, not because it is alarming, but because it is true.