Democratic Institutions: Threats

Baroness Gill Excerpts

Thursday 25th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Gill (Lab)]

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 debate had fallen when I watched that.

Moving back to the subject, I welcome that the Government instigated the Rycroft review, which reported in March this year. I am sure that everybody is familiar with the fact that it noted that our political and financial systems are increasingly targeted by hostile foreign actors—it named Russia, China and Iran mainly—that try to covertly manipulate our political discourse. Their goal is to inject discord, poison our core values and polarise our society. They are infiltrating the digital space where we communicate and debate. This is not simple propaganda but lies on an industrial scale.

With algorithms, malign forces can now spread deepfakes, bot networks and false narratives at an unbelievable speed and on a global scale. On the doorstep prior to the 2024 election campaign, I recall hearing arguments worded in the same way about our Prime Minister, Keir Starmer. One woman in Bromsgrove said to me, “Why don’t they just leave him alone? I get these all day long”. She showed me her phone notifications page, full of anti-Keir notifications from Facebook. I heard exactly the same arguments elsewhere in the West Midlands when I was campaigning in that general election. I have friends in India who sometimes receive exactly the same messages about our politicians as we do here. Clearly, the bots cannot tell the difference between people being in the UK or elsewhere. I often have to defend our democracy to them and say that it is not that bad, because they are getting all this misinformation.

So it is hardly surprising that trust in politicians is at an all-time low. Much has been said in the last few days, and the media are wondering why we are about to have the seventh Prime Minister in 10 years. Maybe we need to look at how these algorithms have been manipulated to demonise individuals. I suspect that, as long as our future PMs remain committed to supporting Ukraine, they will continue to be targeted in the same way.

With the indulgence of the House, I will reiterate some points that I made in a debate earlier this week about subversion of our democracy. It is not new; it has been systematically grinding away in our society since well before the Brexit referendum. I remember scrolling through my own feeds years ago, receiving highly targeted anti-EU questionnaires on social media. Platforms such as Facebook were not just places to connect; they were being actively weaponised to push an anti-EU narrative. Their sole aim was to manufacture chaos and shatter public trust in our core institutions.

What we see today is simply an escalation of that same campaign, but there is no longer just a quiet wall of digital propaganda. The line between foreign espionage and domestic terror has evaporated. We need to modernise our financial frameworks and have the means to regulate cryptocurrencies and Russian bots. The Government must apply the same urgency to countering state-sponsored information warfare as they do to traditional national security. Perhaps we need to look at our near neighbours such as France and Sweden, which have set up departments to tackle disinformation. It is also important that we have transparency in political financing, close loopholes that allow opaque funding to influence our elections and treat foreign interference as the severe state threat that it is.