Democratic Institutions: Threats

Lord Risby Excerpts

Thursday 25th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Risby (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, on initiating this most timely debate.

The health of our precious democracy cannot be measured solely by a single transactional event at the ballot box. It is a continuous long-term process of how we shape our shared future. Our democratic institutions are the hard-won inheritance of our history, the bedrock of our freedom, and the foundations on which we face a synchronised, asymmetric challenge from foreign actors who wish to subvert our sovereignty from within.

This brings us directly to foreign interference, a growing assault on our country. By utilising clandestine networks, cyber operations and illicit funding, hostile regimes ruthlessly attempt to influence British policy, disrupt critical infrastructure and manipulate democratic outcomes. This meddling seeks to ensure that policy decisions serve foreign interests rather than the common good of the British people, reared on free speech and opinion, by stifling open debate in our universities and establishing structures to intimidate minority communities who live here. To maintain a strong and secure nation, Britain absolutely has to protect its borders, institutions and political processes from any external manipulation.

Foreign technological disruption targets our citizens so as to fragment our society into polarised, adversarial echo chambers. To counter this, we must look not just at the source of disinformation but its actual channels. The younger generation is increasingly turning away from conventional news, relying instead on platforms such as TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram. Hostile foreign states hold significant opaque sway over the very algorithms that act to promote the information that our youth consumes.

We are an increasingly diverse society. When citizens can no longer distinguish between verifiable facts and deliberate fabrications, the state loses its capacity to forge a unified national consensus on vital strategic interests. Political warfare deliberately leverages social cleavages, such as economic disparities or cultural anxieties, in extreme cases leading to violence, so shockingly manifested recently. Declining trust in political institutions poses a severe threat to the stability and governance of our country. When the public perceive that the political and legal system serves a particular ideology or specific groups, the foundational bond between the citizen and the national state dissolves.

This alienation leads to voter apathy, civic disengagement and the rise in populist movements. This in turn has consequences for Britain’s global position, as a state perceived increasingly in some respects as lacking internal legitimacy and as fundamentally weak and unstable. If this trust collapses, hostile foreign intelligence agencies can then exploit domestic cynicism or disconnection to sow discord, reducing our overall power on the world stage.

We have suffered, regrettably, unacceptable security failings which have arisen out of hostile sources. It is critical that our digital resilience is treated as a core pillar of national defence, reinforced by robust trilateral security partnerships such as AUKUS. The decline in public trust in politics is our greatest structural vulnerability. The legitimacy of our state rests upon a basic social contract that our political and legal systems operate fairly and transparently. When the public perceive these as remote or choked by excessive Whitehall control, disconnection takes root.

We must also ensure that we do not lose sight of the strategic dangers within our political finance framework. Having spent more than 20 years in the financial sector, I know how easily complex corporate accounting can be weaponised, with cryptocurrency exchanges being but one example. If we allow opaque shell networks with no genuine domestic footprint to route wealth into our political system, we are, in effect, leaving a back door open for hostile foreign interference.

The United Kingdom has unique, complicated and often separate constitutional structures. Our vulnerability is enhanced by greater cultural differences. From time to time, I receive deeply and grotesquely unpleasant emails seeking to exploit and magnify those differences. We are threatened by those, abroad or living here, who despise our history and our open and free way of life. The sacred duty of the state is the defence of the realm and the preservation of our national independence. We are currently struggling to find the resources to pay for increased defence expenditure, but defence spending has to encompass sufficient resources, so that we have the capability to deal assertively with the way that hostile countries and organisations seek to infiltrate our country.