The House of Lords is set to debate a motion on 25 June 2026 warning that the United Kingdom’s democratic institutions face a combination of disinformation, foreign interference and historically low public trust in politics. Lord Wallace of Saltaire, a Liberal Democrat peer, will move that the House “takes note” of these threats, in a session expected to scrutinise both the scale of the problem and the adequacy of the government’s response. The debate will bring together three overlapping issues: disinformation, defined as the deliberate creation and spread of false information with intent to deceive, often for political, personal or financial gain; foreign interference, which is distinct from the normal, transparent work of diplomacy because it is covert, malign and designed to undermine British democracy; and public trust, which researchers say has been in long-term decline. Disinformation itself is not new, but social media and generative AI have made it easier, cheaper and faster to produce and target at scale. According to Ofcom’s April 2026 report, based on a survey of 7,500 UK adults, 41% of online adults reported encountering false information, rising to 56% among social media users and 65% among social media users aged 16 to 34. The World Economic Forum, in its January 2026 global risks report, ranked “misinformation and disinformation” as the second most severe short-term risk facing the world, behind only geoeconomic confrontation and ahead of societal polarisation, extreme weather and state-based armed conflict. Trust in UK politics, meanwhile, remains very low: the Electoral Commission found in December 2024 that only 14% of respondents trusted politicians, a slight improvement on the 10% recorded in its previous study, while the National Centre for Social Research found that just 19% of the public think the current system of governing Britain needs little or no improvement, and only 12% trust governments to put the country’s interest before their party’s interests “just about always” or “most of the time”. The Office for National Statistics similarly found that Parliament and political parties are the least trusted institutions, with trust at 24% and 12% respectively.
The debate will take place against a backdrop of increasingly stark official warnings about foreign interference. The government has repeatedly distinguished between open and transparent influence activities, such as diplomacy, and covert and malign political interference designed to undermine British interests, institutions and political debate. The National Protective Security Authority, which advises politicians, candidates and parliamentary staff, has warned that the UK is a target of long-term strategic foreign interference and espionage from elements of the Russian, Chinese and Iranian states, and has listed a range of tools used by malign actors: elicitation, cultivation, blackmail, deceptive online approaches, financial donations, cyber compromises and the exploitation of overseas travel. The June 2025 Strategic Defence Review said the UK was “already under daily attack” from espionage, cyber-attack and information manipulation, describing these as “sub-threshold” attacks that fall beneath the threshold of war. The National Security Strategy published later that month said hostile activities had targeted British citizens, institutions, journalists, universities and businesses, and that adversaries were seeking to erode public trust through disinformation, malign use of social media and the stoking of tensions between generations, genders and ethnic groups. Concrete examples have continued to emerge. On 16 June 2026, the former head of MI6, Sir Richard Moore, warned that the Russian state was “trying to intimidate” the UK with sabotage, arson and cyber-attacks, shortly after two men were convicted of conspiring to carry out arson attacks on property and a car connected to Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer. The men had been recruited online by a Russian-speaking individual, reported to be likely a Russian diplomat. These episodes illustrate the practical threat posed by foreign actors seeking to disrupt British politics and weaken public confidence in democratic institutions.
The most detailed recent assessment of these dangers came from the independent review led by Philip Rycroft, a former permanent secretary, published on 25 March 2026. The review was announced in December 2025 following the sentencing of Nathan Gill, a former MEP, for accepting bribes linked to the Russian state while in elected office. Rycroft concluded that the UK faced a “persistent problem of foreign interests seeking to exert influence on, and to interfere in, our politics”, and that too much of this activity was malign and aimed at sowing distrust and exacerbating divisions. He said there was no immediate crisis of democratic legitimacy, but warned there was no guarantee that this would persist, pointing to a long-term and worrying loss of trust in the democratic system and processes, fuelled by public unease about political finance and a coarsening of political debate in a toxic online environment. “I am not pressing the panic button in this report; that would serve the purposes of those who would undermine the trust in our democratic processes. But I am ringing the alarm bell,” he wrote. “If government does not act swiftly to gear up to counter these threats, there is a real risk they will run away from us.” The review identified two broad domains of foreign financial influence and interference: attempts to directly infiltrate politics by gaining leverage over parties and processes, and attempts to create division and distrust among the wider public through social media and other vectors. It made 17 recommendations, including an annual cap on political donations from British voters abroad, a requirement that corporate donations be based on post-tax profits, a moratorium on cryptoasset donations, stronger “know your donor” checks, extended investigatory powers for the Electoral Commission, the creation of a dedicated police centre of excellence to investigate complex electoral offences involving foreign interference, the outright banning of foreign-funded online political advertising, and clear ministerial and senior official accountability for combating foreign online interference. The review also cited France’s VIGINUM and Sweden’s Psychological Defence Agency as models for the kind of capability the UK might need, and warned that recent allegations of foreign interference in elections in Moldova and Romania should serve as cautionary tales. The government said it would provide a comprehensive, line-by-line response to the recommendations before the report stage of the Representation of the People Bill.
Parliamentary committees have echoed and amplified these warnings. The Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy, in a March 2026 report on political finance and foreign influence, warned that the UK could no longer rule out the possibility of foreign states mounting a serious effort to influence political processes, or doing just enough to cast lasting doubt on their integrity. It said the system would be “too brittle, permissive, disjointed, slow, retrospective and underpowered to respond adequately”, and that public trust was already so low that “it would not take too much to fracture”. The committee called for a clear national lead for protecting democracy, changes to the Representation of the People Bill and stronger powers for the Electoral Commission. A later JCNSS report on the National Security Strategy said the government’s “whole-of-society approach” to security and resilience was not evidently getting through to the public, and that there was a long way to go in realising it. The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, in its March 2026 report “Disinformation diplomacy: How malign actors are seeking to undermine democracy”, argued that the scale and sophistication of foreign information manipulation and interference was increasingly recognised as an existential threat to democratic societies. It called for increased coordination with allies, more funding for the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office’s work in this area, and increased funding for the BBC World Service, warning that a loss of influence would significantly diminish the UK’s soft power and undermine its ability to counter information warfare. It also recommended the creation of a centralised National Counter Disinformation Centre, similar to the bodies in France and Sweden identified in the Rycroft review. The government responded in June 2026 that the FCDO’s hybrid threats directorate had been allocated a budget enabling sustained action, that the BBC World Service’s funding would allow it to operate effectively, and that it would take the recommendation for a dedicated response body into account. The House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee, in its July 2025 report on media literacy, warned that social cohesion was at risk and democracy itself threatened by inadequate media literacy, and called for media literacy to be embedded across the national curriculum, a senior minister to drive the agenda, and a public awareness campaign.
The government has already taken a number of steps in response to these threats. Its July 2025 strategy, “Restoring trust in our democracy”, set out plans for modern and secure elections, including measures subsequently introduced through the Representation of the People Bill in February 2026. The government has said that the Online Safety Act 2023 now requires services to remove illegal disinformation content, including state-sponsored disinformation in scope of the foreign interference offence and disinformation aimed at disrupting elections where it is a criminal offence. The foreign influence registration scheme under the National Security Act 2023 was brought into force from July 2025, providing transparency on foreign state influence, giving police and MI5 a new disruptive tool, and creating criminal offences for non-compliance. The government has also renewed the mandate of the defending democracy taskforce, which brings together ministers, law enforcement and the intelligence community to coordinate work protecting political parties, elected officials and electoral infrastructure; developed a counter political interference and espionage action plan to disrupt and deter spying from states like China; and sanctioned organisations and individuals responsible for delivering Russia’s information warfare. A March 2026 command paper, “Protecting what matters: Towards a more confident, cohesive, and resilient United Kingdom”, said the government would increase mechanisms for join-up across government to tackle foreign information manipulation and interference aimed at the UK, and emphasised the role of the media literacy action plan published for 2026–29, “A safe, informed digital nation”. The government said a refreshed national curriculum would equip children with the digital and media literacy skills needed to think critically, challenge false information and engage responsibly online. In the May 2026 King’s Speech, the government confirmed it would introduce a Tackling State Threats Bill, subsequently introduced as the National Security (State Threats) Bill, to allow ministers to designate organisations associated with foreign state threat activity and make it an offence to support or benefit from them.
As the Lords debate gets under way, the central question will be whether the government is moving quickly enough and with sufficient coordination to protect UK democracy. The Rycroft review was clear that the UK’s democracy remains robust in many respects, with vigorous political debate, a free press, high confidence in the administration of elections and broad acceptance of democratic outcomes. It also warned, however, that foreign actors are seeking to exploit the long-term erosion of trust in the system, and that in the context of newly volatile politics, even marginal impacts could have a disproportionate bearing on the civility of democratic discourse, on democratic outcomes and ultimately on confidence in democracy itself. Neither the problem of direct political infiltration nor the problem of online division and distrust is new, but both are now more acute, and the technological environment is changing rapidly. The review concluded that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, and that if the government does not act swiftly, the threats risk running away from it. The House of Lords debate will therefore be an opportunity for parliamentarians to press ministers on the implementation of the Rycroft recommendations, to call for a clear national lead, and to ask whether the UK is doing enough to match the capabilities being built by allies such as France and Sweden. With trust in politicians remaining close to record lows, concerns about election manipulation persisting, and foreign interference becoming more sophisticated, the debate reflects a growing cross-party and institutional consensus that protecting the integrity of British democracy must be treated as a priority rather than an afterthought.
