Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee

Paul Flynn Excerpts

Thursday 20th April 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jenkin]

I ask the hon. Gentleman: why stop at 16? Why not 14 or 12? These are subjective judgments made by different bodies in different parts of the constitution. That franchise is a devolved matter; it is a matter for the Scottish Parliament. Personally, I favour maintaining the status quo in the UK.

[Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)]

Does not the hon. Gentleman agree that our system for referendums and elections is more vulnerable to invisible manipulation and corruption than at any time since 1880? The great weakness of the report is that it ignores the evidence provided, principally by the journalist Carole Cadwalladr, on the use of botnets, artificial intelligence and algorithms to influence millions of voters. The evidence is there from the United States and from this country. Under-the-counter systems are being used that we do not understand; they seek to trawl through websites to get information and subsequently influence voters. We are trying to deal with tomorrow’s systems and tomorrow’s high technology with regulations that are long out of date.

Is not it likely that in the coming election there will be more manipulation, that there could well be cyber-attacks, and that we cannot trust these results, because what is happening is under the counter and the Electoral Commission has no tools to deal with it in the way it should? We should not have a general election without finding out the truth about the manipulation that has taken place here, in the US and possibly in other countries that we do not know about. We have not heard about that from GCHQ; we should have heard from it. It has reported on what has happened in the US, where there were cyber-attacks and manipulation. That could well have happened here; we do not know because we have not asked.

[Mr Jenkin]

With respect, I have asked that question, and I feel I have been rather brushed off by Ministers, perhaps on the advice of officials who are perhaps not as knowledgeable as the Committee is about the technicalities, algorithms or indeed the cognitive approach taken by some of the countries with which the Committee has made itself familiar. I am always grateful for the hon. Gentleman’s contributions to the Committee—I think he is our longest-serving member—but personally I do not agree that this threatens the credibility of our elections. In 1880, one of my predecessors in North Essex conducted his election with his wife walking behind him down the high street handing out gold sovereigns. We have come a long way since that kind of corruption in elections, but we need to be alert to the things that the hon. Gentleman draws attention to, and to be ever more alert to the fake news that appears on the internet and is designed to manipulate people’s expectations.