National Security

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, the scope of this new task force is, of course, enormous, since nowadays almost every aspect of connection and influence is being weaponised, including education, culture and issues far outside the normal security scope and outside the range of intelligence and cyberattack. We are subject, in this country, every hour of the day, to a bombardment of fake news and distortion, penetrating every aspect of our society and clearly covering our own debates. They say that the best form of defence is attack. Can the Minister assure us that this task force will also look at ways of returning in kind some of the material that pours out, in particular from the CCP in China, attacking not just democracy but our form of democracy and claiming, rather ironically, that China’s form is more precise and more effective than ours? Can he assure us that we have a full intellectual force ready to challenge the arguments at their roots in order to refute the kind of poison that is daring to try to demoralise and undermine our society?

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

I am pleased to be able to reassure my noble friend that I can. I am going to give a long answer, for which I hope the House will be forgiving, because this is important. In 2019, we established the defending democracy programme. It is a cross-government programme, with an overarching objective to safeguard elections and referendums related to democratic processes in the UK. It focuses on delivering four outcomes. Elections are secured through the protection of their physical personnel and cyber infrastructure; the safety of elected representatives, parliamentarians, voters, candidates, campaigners and poll workers is protected; the regulation of political campaigning must be robust; the impact of disinformation, misinformation and wider information operations is mitigated and minimised.

There is also, as part of that work, the DCMS Counter Disinformation Unit, which leads the operational and policy response for countering disinformation across HMG. That has included responding to acute information incidents such as the Ukrainian conflict, Covid-19 and general elections. When false narratives are identified, the CDU co-ordinates with departments across Whitehall to deploy the appropriate response. This could involve direct rebuttal on social media or awareness-raising campaigns to promote the facts. Obviously, I cannot go into—and I do not necessarily know—what other sorts of action we take overseas, but that is certainly what we are doing here, and it is fairly robust.