In the digital trenches of the 21st century, the British public is said to be under constant fire from a seemingly endless barrage of malevolent online content, cooked up in the troll factories of Moscow, Beijing and Tehran. The article insists this is not mere Whitehall paranoia. It points to the Iranian regime’s decision to disconnect outside internet access in January, a move that silenced a network of pro-Scottish independence social-media accounts, and asks, with a measure of sarcasm, how many militant SNP voters could really be holed up in Tabriz. Meanwhile, it claims, the Russians have weaponised concerns over the Henry Nowak case using far-Right patsies. Information warfare is real, and foreign powers have always used propaganda against their adversaries — the Athenian leader Themistocles, after all, engraved stones at a watering hole to encourage his enemy’s Ionian levies to defect. But if the Government is right to combat outside threats, the article argues, its domestic opponents are equally right to be suspicious about the new National Centre for Information Defence (NCID). Announced by Andy Burnham, the unit promises to disrupt “hostile information attacks” and “deepfakes” and to quash a “distorted and untrue narrative about Britain.” That sounds fine in theory, but free-speech campaigners immediately noted that Whitehall already possesses a bubbling cauldron of acronymic monitoring units, from the Media Monitoring Unit to the Defending Democracy Taskforce to the National Cyber Force. The NCID may be a classically British amalgamation, designed to avoid duplication and waste, but by putting these operations under one roof it concentrates power in the hands of civil servants. That only increases the danger that the NCID “grows arms and legs,” evolving like a fish wriggling out of a swamp, desperate to feed and grow. Interdepartmental rivalries among spooks, cops, civil servants and soldiers are likely to be triggered, with the NCID eager to make its mark.
The deeper worry, however, is that the Government can no longer be trusted to separate opinion from genuine disinformation. During Covid, dissenting voices found themselves on official watchlists, while only last year Whitehall labelled people concerned with mass migration as “cultural nationalists” potentially worthy of Prevent referrals. For an old Special Branch hand, the NCID rings a distant Cold War bell: subversion, it seems, is back in fashion, except this time the primary “threat actors” are less sweaty Stalinists and more anyone challenging the post-1997 consensus. To the author, the NCID operation is pure “parapolitics” — the liminal space between conventional politics, intelligence, security and propaganda, usually the domain of niche sociology journals. Parapolitical activity is sometimes practised covertly; this time, the powers-that-be have decided to hide in plain sight, as if telling the public: yes, we are watching. But Whitehall has long maintained such capabilities, mashing up civilian media operations with politics long before the internet existed. During the Second World War, it established the Ministry of Information and the Political Warfare Executive, designed to counter Nazi propaganda, undermine enemy morale and, crucially, keep an eye on the home front by monitoring public sentiment. After 1945, the Attlee government created the Information Research Department to combat Soviet disinformation. During the Cold War, monitoring and combating “subversion” became primarily an MI5 and Special Branch problem. The official definition, first introduced in 1972 by MI5, encompassed activities that threatened the safety or well-being of the state and were intended to undermine or overthrow parliamentary democracy by political, industrial or violent means. The civil service effectively withdrew from the field, allowing anti-communist surveillance to become a classic quasi-political, quasi-policing issue. Were operations keeping tabs on communists designed for police action or pure intelligence? In the parapolitical hall of mirrors that was postwar intelligence, no one really seemed to know.
That thinking did not survive the fall of the Berlin Wall, let alone the towers of 9/11. Despite the dangers of jihadi bombs, the article observes, they hardly subverted the state; there was no overwhelming ideological threat from overseas, no evil empire. Islamist terrorism was too fragmented to seem threatening, and to suggest that Islamism generally might pose problems was long deemed politically unpalatable. Instead, the police and security services switched to a far more granular role, encompassing proactive counter-terrorism intelligence and law-enforcement operations — think less John Le Carré and more Jack Bauer. Not unrelatedly, the post-9/11 CONTEST strategy saw “domestic extremism” downgraded in the face of the al-Qaeda threat, with combating the puny far-Right increasingly contracted out to social services, educational institutions and charities. All the same, that did not stop the powers-that-be from gradually developing a digital panopticon capable of using content aggregation tools to harvest the internet for dissenting material. Online monitoring units kept tabs on groups and individuals, flagging “actionable” content for removal, for intelligence purposes, and occasionally for criminal prosecutions. The Coalition government seemed perfectly happy with this Blair-era arrangement, and little changed until the late 2010s. Since then, the surveillance state’s appetite has only grown, especially with the development of new tools like AI and, more significantly, because powerful anti-establishment forces really are on the march. Every protest, riot and politically charged furore now sees ministers, civil servants and chief constables demanding instant information, as if their intelligence minions possessed scrying balls and oracles. Populist protest movements have the potential to disrupt key infrastructure, as seen in Dover, and they can also potentially incubate lone-wolf extremists — David Copeland, the infamous nail bomber, had dabbled in the BNP.
The post-Southport disturbances, anti-immigration protests and “Patriot Platform” blockades have triggered, once more, Whitehall’s hunger for counter-subversion, and the article’s central concern is proportionality. Where is the line between lawful and unlawful protest? This is, after all, the era of non-crime hate incidents and knocks on doors, of journalists being warned of harassment for pursuing legitimate stories such as the Jason Arday case. Then there is the question of interpretation: does genuinely agreeing with a Kremlin-funded troll make one a dupe, a shill, or even a traitor? Managing such questions, the article argues, is work for skilled investigators, not algorithms or quangos. The Government does not seem completely oblivious to these dangers. As Wes Streeting, the Defence Secretary, put it, the new unit would not infringe upon “the freedom to disagree, the freedom for people to challenge their Government, to challenge Government policy, to criticise robustly what we are doing, and then to have the opportunity to choose a different Government.” Yet the party Streeting serves has previous for its own information-warfare shenanigans. One example is Labour Together, which shared an address with the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, whose stated objective was to “Kill Musk’s Twitter?” That is parapolitical indeed. The article also points to the closeness between Hope Not Hate and its former director of communications, Matthew McGregor, now the head of political strategy at No. 10, and wonders how easily such relationships could be exploited by Westminster’s mini Machiavellis.
No genuinely free democracy has successfully managed to entirely censor the internet, and British attempts so far have been more farcical than sinister, not least Ofcom’s quixotic attempt to silence 4chan, that venerable US shitposting site. Yet downstream from such debacles come the “think of the children” excesses of the Online Safety Act, with mandatory age-gating of content the preferred, if unspoken, option of politicians. The article predicts that the new disinformation unit will soon be forming working groups to wargame “tactical options” for countering disinformation. But without transparent frameworks, for instance around who to target and when, the public will never know how these ideas are formed. National security becomes a convenient firewall for policymaking on the sly, with technical possibilities around internet censorship occasionally “run up the flagpole” with investigators. There is also a broader point: even if the new agency is successful in identifying online content made in good faith and distinguishing it from foreign propaganda, how will it police one against the other? Kremlin trolls do tell outrageous lies, but some of the best information warfare is material that subtly toys with reality. The challenge is to know the difference and act on it accordingly. Most reasonable people want foreign propaganda called out for what it is, but the article is not convinced that the threat is concomitant with the solutions proposed. Blurring the lines of legitimate debate is unlikely to soften the genuine anger that exists over issues such as small boats.
These are ultimately matters of judgement, and the author illustrates this with a personal recollection. Monitoring Twitter one night, he saw Tommy Robinson post a copy of a hastily scrawled “Osman Notice” — informing him of a threat to his physical safety — pushed by police through his front door. Robinson contrasted it with the apparently favourable treatment of a Muslim cleric who had been similarly threatened. A senior police officer asked the author, “Can you get that taken off the Internet?” Why? “Because it’s embarrassing and the chief constable doesn’t like it,” came the reply. The author refused, having neither the power nor the desire to involve himself in something so trivial. Yet, he concludes, these are more or less the people who will be in charge of the NCID, and he has no reason to believe they are much better now. The article thus delivers a stark warning: in the name of defending democracy, the state may be building a machine that treats legitimate dissent as a security threat, and the very people tasked with distinguishing truth from falsehood are the same officials who once wanted a tweet removed simply because it embarrassed a chief constable. The NCID, whatever its stated aims, risks becoming another instrument for enforcing establishment narratives rather than protecting the public from foreign interference.