Democratic Institutions: Threats

Lord Bishop of Leicester Excerpts

Thursday 25th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Leicester]

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, has not disappeared; it has migrated, to online influencers, with whom people form parasocial relationships, and to new in-groups built on shared identity, often mobilised against a particular other. That is where foreign interference and disinformation thrive, because online we make ourselves far more open to manipulation by distant actors. As Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, put it, anger and hatred are the easiest way to grow the online platform.

In line with that, a recent BBC “Panorama” investigation traced a network of “patriotic” British anti-immigration accounts—pages with names like “Great British People”—that claim to be based in Yorkshire but actually operate from south Asia and the Gulf. Many of these had posted on entirely different subjects before pivoting to anti-immigration content because it drew more engagement and so more advertising revenue. People with no stake in our common life are profiting from deepening its fractures. Such content can give people a sense of common cause, but it is an ersatz belonging, one that depends entirely on the construction of a shared enemy.

I will go further still. It is not merely that populist movements benefit from the decline of our civic infrastructure; they have an interest in dismantling it. A thick, local, plural civil society does three things that this kind of politics cannot abide. First, a plural civil society meets the very hungers for recognition and purpose on which the populist movement feeds. Secondly, a plural civil society mixes the very people a populist movement would prefer to keep sorted into “us” and “them”. Thirdly, particularly where faith-based institutions are concerned, civil society offers a cultivated conscience, a reason to say no to manipulation or controlling behaviour, and to insist on the dignity of those whom a populist movement may wish to exclude. A people bound together by real and overlapping loyalties is far more resistant to fearmongering and far harder to divide, and so these loyalties must be loosened accordingly.

We see where this road leads. In Germany, the churches have declared ethnic nationalism incompatible with the Christian faith and the main far-right party, the AfD, unelectable for Christians. The response from the party, which claims to value Christianity, has been a move to cut the churches’ public funding. I am fearful of people who wish to wear the costume of Christianity with little care for its creeds and doctrines—those who parade the cross of Christ in anything but the name of love, and who speak of Christian values but are careless of the places in which they are learned and practised. Someone not given to overstatement recently spoke to me of what he called the existential threat—for us as a Church, but indeed for us as a democracy.

I am sorry to say that I am not persuaded that the measures taken so far—through the Online Safety Act, the Representation of the People Bill, the Pride in Place programme, and so on—come anywhere near meeting the scale of the threat that we face. I therefore make this plea to the Government: treat these threats, and the causes behind them, with the seriousness they demand. Rebuild the places where, across our differences, we still learn to trust one another. For a people who have somewhere to belong are far harder to set against each other, and that is the surest defence that we have.

Artificial Intelligence: Impact on Human Relationships and Society

Lord Bishop of Leicester Excerpts

Friday 5th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Leicester]

My Lords, in the past, if you wanted to persuade people to think badly of others, you were limited by two things: the number of people you personally knew and the number of conversations you could physically have. Social media removed the second of those limits, letting one person reach millions at once. Artificial intelligence is now loosening the first. It allows one person to produce vast quantities of content of increasingly high quality. The frictions that once limited the spread of contempt have disappeared. We should not, then, be surprised that the fabric of our society is being torn.

For society to function, we need a broadly common understanding of the world and what is happening in it. Democracy is about disagreements over what to do about the opportunities and challenges we face, but for that disagreement to be constructive, we must all be able to access the bare facts: what is happening, who is involved and who is affected? Generative AI throws all this into question. Anyone, anywhere can now produce an image of an event that has never occurred or a video of a public figure saying something they never said. I really do mean anyone, anywhere. The BBC recently reported that accounts producing AI-generated anti-immigration content that appeared to be British were in fact run from east Asia, the Gulf and the United States.

Even as the number and reach of deepfakes continue to grow, there is also the fact that AI allows people for the first time to visualise abstractions on demand. A fear or suspicion that once lived only in the imagination can now be rendered as an apparent photograph in seconds and shared to incite or confirm the same fear in others. This matters because human beings have always been moved more powerfully by images than by arguments. Importantly, what people see shapes how they act in the encounters of ordinary life and at the ballot box.

We know from Allport’s contact theory that what most helps people to let go of prejudicial abstractions is interpersonal encounter, particularly with a common purpose in mind. Here AI poses a further threat as a growing number of people are turning to AI companions for friendship, romantic intimacy, therapy or spiritual guidance. Systems are always there, always ready to listen. They never have a bad day. They have no ego or agenda of their own, apparently. They are in a sense the perfect partner, but that is the problem. As others have already said, real human relationships are difficult. They require us to tolerate frustration, to forgive, to be forgiven, to encounter a mind that is genuinely not our own. These are the muscles of social life.

I have two specific proposals to help ensure that we are intentional in the way AI develops and works for the good of relationships and our shared life in this nation. First, I suggest that we must require social media platforms to change their structural incentives so that they algorithmically deprioritise content damaging to public debate. As Frances Haugen, the former Facebook product manager, put it:

“Anger and hate is the easiest way to grow on Facebook”.


That should not be so. Secondly, following the EU, we should mandate a crisis protocol, a set of obligations that come into force when a platform’s content begins to threaten public order or social cohesion in a measurable way, as it did in Leicester in 2022, when false claims about attacks on Muslims and Hindus fuelled unrest.

In this parliamentary Session we have Bills before us concerning AI and others on extremism and state threats, but I dare to say that they barely scratch the surface of what I have described. They do not touch the structural incentives behind inflammatory content, and nor do they support positive connection across difference. This is what the Church of England, like so many in civil society organisations, wants to work towards, but we need the legislative and regulatory framework to be able to have the maximum impact.

The UK’s Demographic Future

Lord Bishop of Leicester Excerpts

Thursday 11th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Leicester]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, for his work in bringing together this report and giving us the opportunity to debate it. I add my thanks to him for his fascinating speech today and his wider contribution to this House, and I wish him well for the future.

The authors of this report raise various thorny policy problems, each of which demands careful negotiation so as to manage conflicting trade-offs. It would be easy to brush them aside in favour of more electorally popular concerns or to oversimplify them to stoke division. I want to put on record first my support for an open debate on questions such as, “What is a reasonable level of population growth?” It may be an uncomfortable question, but what are we here for if not to model healthy, mature debates on uncomfortable questions?

I want to focus my remarks on the chapter on social cohesion by Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali. While I would differ from Dr Nazir-Ali on a few of his points, I welcome his overall thrust: calling for more attention to be paid to the fabric of our society and how it is affected by the demographic shifts noted in the report.

Perhaps, though, it is not attention that is wanting. We are not short of policy papers, polling results or comment pieces telling us that we are a divided, lonely and polarised nation—ironically, that seems to be the one view that we are all agreed on. Rather, what is needed beyond simply attention is action and leadership. The former Faith Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Khan, is among those calling for a clear social cohesion strategy, and I add my voice to that. Indeed, my first question to the Minister is this: can she assure us that the Government are working on such a social cohesion strategy and doing so as a matter of urgency?

I use the phrase social cohesion, rather than integration, deliberately, because what is needed is something more than support for newcomers to the UK to settle well here. Here, my emphasis is slightly different from that of Dr Michael Nazir-Ali. If it were only immigration that affected the strength of our communities, we would find higher levels of loneliness, lower levels of civic participation and of social action, and a reduced sense of belonging in areas with higher immigration. But that is not what the data shows: once researchers control for poverty and neighbourhood deprivation, any negative correlation between diversity and social cohesion disappears.

Yes, the Government should pay attention to how new migrants can be supported to become active participants in our communities—I would give one example as restoring the funding for ESOL programmes to its previous level; it is almost impossible for somebody to navigate British society, let alone appreciate our history and values, if they cannot understand English.

However, that by itself will not heal our fractures. We need to wrestle honestly with the toll taken by poverty, deindustrialisation, decades of increasing individualism, institutional distrust and inequality. We must take seriously the fact that the media and social media do best, commercially speaking, when they drive us further apart; and we know that there are global actors who use social media, and who have no shortage of funding, to sow discord and fear.

In one of the letters of the Bible, St Paul describes the Church as a body with many members, all different and each indispensable. That is the image which, I believe, should ground a social cohesion strategy. How can we all be supported and encouraged to use our gifts to serve the common good and feel a sense of belonging, even of obligation, to one another?

Our debate today will naturally focus on what the Government should do. When it comes to social cohesion, Governments certainly have an important role. They can and should invest in community infrastructure, enforce laws against discrimination and create the conditions in which trust can grow; but for that to be sustainable and fruitful, everyone has to feel a sense of responsibility for our common life. I would like to see every institution—from schools to universities, businesses, public services, sports, arts and cultural organisations—recognising that bringing people together across difference is part of their social responsibility. Does the Minister agree with such a whole-society approach, and can she share how the Government plan to achieve it?

Preparing for Extreme Risks (RARPC Report)

Lord Bishop of Leicester Excerpts

Thursday 12th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Leicester]

My Lords, I, too, am grateful for the Select Committee’s work in tackling such an important subject and, in particular, I concur with the authors’ recognition that,

“the UK must move away from a risk management strategy which … often ignores or fails to appreciate the interconnected nature of our society”,

and that we must instead,

“produce a risk management system that ties all sectors of society together.”

Interdependence is a fundamental part of human nature and policies that follow the grain of that nature are far more likely to succeed.

I was disappointed, therefore, that although the report advocated for a whole-society approach, no reference was made to the role of faith groups in emergency planning and response. Faith groups and leaders across the country were an integral part of the response to Covid-19. A 2020 report by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Faith and Society, based on research with local authorities, found that faith communities were instrumental in local responses by offering buildings, running food banks, information-sharing, befriending, collecting, cooking and delivering food, and providing volunteers for local authority programmes. Accordingly, the APPG found that local authorities developed a new-found appreciation for the agility, flexibility and professionalism of faith-based organisations, and that local authorities were keen to continue and build on those relationships in the future.

When I consulted with my own local public health team, I heard a similar account. In Leicester, throughout 2020 and 2021 there was a fortnightly faiths engagement group that brought together public bodies with faith leaders to co-ordinate how to translate and disseminate important messages about the virus itself and the associated restrictions. Our city’s director of public health, Professor Ivan Browne, told me: “I would argue that any strategic document that in any way considers a community response to a crisis must consider the role of community and faith groups.” Another example would be the 2016 floods, when Khalsa Aid, a Sikh charity, together with groups of Muslim volunteers, spent weeks in the affected towns in Lancashire and Yorkshire, serving thousands of hot meals and helping with the clean-up.

Across the UK, when there have been terror attacks or explosions, churches have opened to offer shelter and hospitality for those affected and places for emergency services to base themselves. Of course, there is also the Salvation Army, which as well as being a Christian denomination is one of the world’s largest providers of social aid and humanitarian assistance, frequently on the front lines of the response to earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis across the globe.

Even as we speak, faith-based organisations are responding to another national emergency, which might not require flashing blue lights or daily briefings, but is shocking in its scale nevertheless. Across the country, and for several years now, churches, mosques, temples, gurdwaras and synagogues have been hosting and supporting food banks and community pantries. Faith groups may appear to be superfluous stakeholders to government departments responsible for risk assessment and planning, but the children of God in need of food parcels may tell a different story.

Faith groups also have a distinct contribution to make in the face of crises. Beyond meeting material needs alone, they are often central in reinforcing a local sense of identity and the connections that comprise a community’s social fabric. The gift of our common life together can easily be disrupted by disaster or conflict yet cannot be maintained or mended by a statutory service, no matter how well intentioned.

As well as their institutional presence, most faiths have an other-centredness at their core that prepares their members to be willing, as well as able, to help. Week in, week out, most people of faith are working to grow in patience, generosity, temperance, wisdom and, most importantly, compassion.

With this in mind, I suggest that the Select Committee’s report should go further when it speaks about the role of education in building our society’s resilience. We should also consider how our education system can build what psychologists identify as the five pillars of resilience: self-awareness, mindfulness, self-care, positive relationships, and a sense of purpose. These are the building blocks of a resilient citizenry.

If the Civil Contingencies Act is to be updated, as the Select Committee recommends, to reflect the importance of several societal organisations not recognised in the current legislation, might I suggest that faith groups and faith-based organisations are also included?