Democratic Institutions: Threats

Lord Walney Excerpts

Thursday 25th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Walney (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as the co-chair of the new All-Party Parliamentary Group for Defending Democracy, which I urge all noble Lords who have made such compelling contributions today to join. That group has a remit in part following the Defending Democracy Taskforce. I agree wholeheartedly with what the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, said at the beginning: that it is regrettable that there is not more prominence from that taskforce in communicating and engaging with parliamentarians—and indeed anyone else, as far as I can see. That is one of the things the APPG wants to do.

It is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Doyle. I am not sure whether it was by coincidence or mischievous design that the final three of our Back-Bench contributions have been from people who in the past have had senior roles in Downing Street—which many people would say has contributed over recent decades to decline in faith in democracy, but we will leave that for others to judge.

I commend the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, for what I thought was an excellent speech. I thought he was a bit too harsh on the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, and a bit too lenient on Kneecap, but his central point, that democracies need controversy and freedom of speech to be able to evolve, and if they cannot evolve they will ultimately die, is fundamentally important and not sufficiently understood in the current political discourse. I spent close to five years, in the end, as the last Government’s—and for a while, this Government’s—independent adviser on political violence and disruption. It is one of the reasons why I recommended in my 2024 report, Protecting our Democracy from Coercion, that we should be very careful in the way in which we seek to restrict freedom of speech through noble objectives such as online safety and cutting out misinformation.

Nevertheless, it is incumbent on us to accept how big a problem this can be. The explosion in artificial intelligence can genuinely warp people’s perceptions. So much of our understanding of the world, the country and the community around us now comes from a screen. While misinformation and disinformation have always been used as a tactic to disrupt people, it is qualitatively different now, as it has become so difficult to tell reality from fabrication, which is fundamental to a functioning democracy. My noble friend Lord Doyle’s suggestion for increased responsibilities on social media companies to detect fakes—which artificial intelligence can also help to do—is important.

Another of my recommendations from the 2024 review was that, while it was always going to be difficult to draw where the boundaries ought to be on freedom of speech, and while we should not be quite as gung ho as we often are in restricting topics for debate, there should be a much broader consensus on saying that foreign state manipulation is wrong. When talking to the intelligence services during the making of that report, they were clear that they lacked a level of resource to shut down some of the sources of this misinformation, having identified them. That has been acted on somewhat since then, but we clearly have a significant way to go.

While this is not a new venture, there is a sustained attempt by hostile states—particularly Russia and Iran, and I would count China in that—to use the freedoms in our democracy to undermine that democracy from within. The noble Baroness, Falkner, made a very important point about manipulation: while the manipulation from Islamist actors who want ultimately to replace democracy may not be state based, that is an organised activity for which there ought to be more resource, focus and recognition in this country.

In my final two minutes, I will make two more points. The first is an issue that I have spoken about at some length in the Chamber: the way in which extreme illegal disruptive protests are used as a tool to undermine democracies. Many noble Lords who are generally on the right side of things in this place should be more hard-nosed and clear-sighted on what organised groups are trying to do here—often funded or supported in some way by foreign states—ultimately to twist the sense of a right to protest into a threat to our democracy. We should do better at standing up for our parliamentary democracy. If we always think that the right and the nobility is on the side of those outside who are shouting at, abusing and intimidating us then we cede too much ground and contribute to our own undermining of democracy.

I turn to my final point. Important as all of that is, the biggest threat to democratic institutions may soon be the speed at which AI is developing. There has been a lot of discussion about AI’s role in misinformation, which is important, but there has not been enough discussion about the potential for the incredible national and global economic upheaval that may be inflicted on us by the replacing of jobs with AI. That will need to be very skilfully managed so as not to create enormous levels of disruption.

Finally, if the Front Bench will forgive me, my eyes were opened by a documentary called “Chasing Utopia”, which noble Lords should go and watch, by the same people who put together the Al Gore documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”. It pointed out that if AI reaches parity in intelligence with people by the end of the decade and comes to grow exponentially beyond that then that will have fundamental consequences for who we are as human beings, where we are in the world and how our democracies will function. We need to think a lot more about that potential danger.