Democratic Institutions: Threats

Lord Frost Excerpts

Thursday 25th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, for enabling this debate because it gives us an opportunity to puncture the hysteria and moral panic that seem to have overwhelmed most of the British political class in recent years about disinformation, misinformation, foreign interference and all that. The noble Lord said something like, “I hope we all agree we have a problem”. It depends what he means by that. I agree that there is certainly a problem in disdain for politics and politicians. I do not agree that foreign interference, disinformation and all those sort of things are at the root of it. For after all, there has always been disinformation and foreign interference. It is not new; only the panic is new. There have always been people who want to harm us in this country.

Many of your Lordships, like me, lived through at least the end of the Cold War. Have we forgotten that the Soviet Union spent 40 years trying to undermine British politics and British society? Then, there really was a real threat, and it even recruited a few Labour MPs to help it, if I remember correctly, but we did not clamp down on free speech to deal with that. Free speech was much freer then than it is now. We allowed people to advocate all sorts of terrible ideologies because we had confidence in the British people’s ability not to take them seriously. Now, seemingly, all that has changed.

I expect a few noble Lords are familiar with Google Ngram, which allows you to track when words suddenly started to be used in public debate. These words all took off in around the middle of the last decade: misinformation suddenly shoots up from the middle of 2015; disinformation, even though many of us think of it as a Cold War concept, was hardly used, but now it has shot up as a concept and a usage; nobody had heard of “fake news” until it shot up as an idea in the middle of the last decade.

Was there some new external threat in the middle of the last decade—something new and dramatic that we had never faced before? I do not think there was. What we had was the election of President Trump and the Brexit referendum. A tide of hysteria was unleashed on the back of that—a fear of voters and a belief that they could not be trusted to make good decisions. There was endless worrying about malign actors, foreign agents, bot farms, weaponised Facebook and all that sort of thing. Politicians were forced to confront that many people did not agree with them. Rather than deal with that, they decided to blame the voters and take the view that, in the social media world, the ill-informed populace was easy prey to false beliefs, conspiracies, malign state interference and all the rest of it. Too many people, I am afraid, seem to believe that ordinary voters are too stupid to make their minds up about things or to distinguish between the true and the false. They think it is the Government’s job to do it for them instead.

We have a case in point in the absurd and dangerous Rycroft review, referred to earlier, which was written not to identify problems but to justify unnecessary and authoritarian solutions. Mr Rycroft worries about the

“coarsening of the political debate in a toxic online environment”

and that

“even marginal impacts could have a disproportionate bearing on … democratic discourse … confidence in our democracy”

and so on. He then uses this to justify an entirely illiberal clampdown on political party financing. Unfortunately, the Government seem to be taking this seriously. If implemented, this approach will do much more harm to our ability to run a democracy than any number of distasteful posts on X or Bluesky.

The problem with all this is that the worst and most difficult to correct disinformation and misinformation comes not from the general public but from the Government. That is the problem with government-based solutions. The list is long: the 45-minute dossier; the hoax around supposed collusion with Russia; the prediction that an economic crash was inevitable if we left the EU; the Hunter Biden laptop; the refusal to countenance the lab leak theory about Covid; the belief that wearing a flimsy mask could protect you from the disease; the reluctance, for a long time, to drop the belief that the Covid vaccine stopped the transmission of the virus; and, most recently, the reluctance to acknowledge the background of Axel Rudakubana and the fact that he was in possession of an al-Qaeda manual and tried to make ricin.

Governments are not to be trusted on this stuff. They promote contested issues as facts all the time and expect people simply to fall in line. This is why their seeming plans to require social media to promote only trusted sources are so dangerous. The BBC may, for some reason, still be the most trusted news provider in the country, but look at its record—the fabrications on Israel/Gaza, its obsession with trans issues and its fabrications of elements of the famous Trump documentary. No single organisation is to be trusted.

If there is a lack of confidence in our democracy and institutions, and I am sure there is, it is because they do not deserve it. Governments do not listen to voters’ clear messages. They block clear votes. Your Lordships’ House—dare I say it—and many others might have had a role to play during the Brexit era in undermining that confidence. Politicians and Governments have not delivered. The responsibility for the problem rests with politicians and institutions. It will not be made better by concealing things from voters and clamping down on social media.

The only solution to the problem we have is taking people seriously, allowing debate, being honest about things, letting voters make their own minds up and having confidence that they will be able to sift true from false, as they always have done. Freedom, free speech, a free society—those are the tools. Say no to the platonic guardians—it is the only sound basis. Trust the people.