Inside Britain’s Infrastructure Of Information Control

The term “Orwellian” is not supposed to be a compliment. But far too often in the modern world, governments behave as if George Orwell’s warnings against totalitarianism, notably in “1984” and “Animal Farm,” are instruction manuals for governance.

On September 22, Britain’s new (and unelected) Prime Minister Andy Burnham took to the stage at the U.N. and announced a new “National Centre for Information Defence” to “detect, attribute, and disrupt” hostile state information attacks.

The Right has correctly criticized this for being akin to Orwell’s terrifying “Ministry of Truth.” Our American cousins should be as concerned as we are because the Democrats will be sure to use this as a blueprint.

But this announcement is so pernicious because there is actually some merit in highlighting the kind of information warfare that is being waged against Western populations. But none of us can trust our own governments, given their recent track records, to have such power over information.

Russia, China, and Iran, not to mention the network of Islamists both foreign and domestic, really are all working on Western voters. Burnham told the U.N. that the Kremlin spends around £1.3 billion (about $1.75 billion) a year manipulating information. Russian agencies have forged the branding of 28 British organizations, including the BBC.

Beijing is a little subtler. When researchers at Rutgers searched “Uyghur” on TikTok, the Chinese-owned app, 2.5% of the results were critical of the Communist Party, compared with half on Instagram, and studies have shown that the heavier someone’s TikTok habit, the kinder their view of China’s human rights record. Americans fighting over data centers have found China-linked bots cheering them on.

But Andy Burnham kept talking. “We have given too much ground,” he said, “to those who want to run a negative, corrosive narrative about life in Britain, which bears no resemblance to reality.” While there are still many wonderful things about the United Kingdom, it is true that our social fabric is tearing, we have had no growth for 20 years, and there are many examples of two-tier justice favoring foreign criminals and illegal immigrants. These all matter tremendously to people, and they are all legitimate issues to which Burnham and his socialist party have no answers.

Instead, Burnham just claimed Russia had “amplified far-Right narratives” and “tried to interfere with the 2019 General Election.” That was the election the Conservatives won by a landslide. He did not mention 2024, which Labour won.

Hunting Russian spies is one thing. Using the power of the state to try to forcibly change the public’s “narrative about life in Britain” is quite another, and anyone who read the Twitter Files knows where the second one leads.

Britain already has a large infrastructure for information control that is largely unknown to the public.

In 2023, the civil liberties group Big Brother Watch found that Whitehall’s “counter-disinformation” units had spent the pandemic monitoring MPs, journalists, and academics who criticized lockdown. (One name on the list was Andy Burnham.)

Then there is the Home Office’s “Research, Information, and Communications Unit” or RICU. This body was born of Britain’s counter-extremism program and was supposed to be exclusively for countering the horror of homegrown jihadi extremists. However, it was reported by the Daily Mail in June to have ghost-written statements for victims’ families and worked to “control the narrative” after jihadi terror attacks, fearing that the scale of rioting over a population pushed to the brink would be uncontainable.

After one such horrifying attack a few years ago (I will spare readers the horror of the facts), there was huge focus on incarcerating protesters, including years-long jail sentences for people who tweeted very unpleasant things about asylum seekers. This was to show the country the penalty for getting too angry at the state of things.

This state-imposed “narrative control” jumped the shark earlier this year. After an illegal immigrant openly attempted to behead an innocent man on the streets of Belfast, the family of the victim issued a statement. Instead of saying what you might expect a shocked family to think of the blinding and attempted decapitation of their loved one, the “family’s” statement read:

We have many migrants who make a deeply valuable contribution to our country, including in our healthcare system and hospitality sector and we depend on them to make our country work.

I don’t know about you, but whenever some third-world barbarian tries to chop the head off my loved one, it’s always the migrants in the hospitality sector I’m principally concerned for.

And finally, these “far-Right narratives” keep awkwardly turning out to be, well, true. For years, anyone who said that gangs of mostly British Pakistani men were raping white working-class girls in northern towns was accused of spreading far-Right myths. But in June last year, a government-commissioned review was forced to admit the scandal was much bigger than previously thought.

It even found that offenders’ ethnicity went unrecorded in about two-thirds of cases, that “flawed data” had been used to dismiss the claims as “sensationalized, biased, or untrue,” and that officials had avoided the question for “fear of appearing racist.”

This Center will then end up doing Beijing’s and Moscow’s work for it. The Kremlin’s bots want Britons to believe their government sneers at them and make them feel that their country isn’t worth defending. But every time a state agency files a real grievance under “foreign disinformation,” it proves the bots correct, and turns another voter off mainstream parties who have clearly failed.

Many years ago, Margaret Thatcher said: “We shall tell the people the truth, and the people shall be our judge.” She saved Britain’s economy, saved the Falklands, and helped win the Cold War.

Today, Britain’s Prime Minister prefers the comms advice of Jack Nicholson in “A Few Good Men.” But I fear it’s not just that Burnham believes the British public can’t handle the truth. It’s that Andy Burnham himself can’t handle the truth.

***

James Price is a former Chief of Staff to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute.