By Michael Rainsborough
The Daily Sceptic
September 28, 2026
In previous essays I have sought to describe the political condition into which Britain and other Western democracies have been drifting by offering various analogies. At first, I tried being serious. My initial forays drew comparisons with the post-totalitarian societies of late communist Eastern Europe, where the widening distance between official propaganda and observable reality produced an ever-greater institutional effort to enforce the official world view. Later essays pursued the analogy more directly, asking whether Britain was becoming increasingly Sovietised, with some of the same characteristics of a political order in severe decline becoming recognisable. With the supply of serious comparisons running low, and the ironies apparently passing unnoticed, there seemed little left to do except laugh.
Once the absurdities become difficult to describe with a straight face, parody is the logical next step. The difficulty now has been making the exaggeration last until publication. Institutions and bureaucratic inventions for comic effect have acquired real-world counterparts before the joke has had time to land.
WISDOM escapes into the wild
A few weeks back my satirical turn took the form of ' The Spy Who Came in From the Consensus', a John le Carré spoof in which the machinery of the contemporary British state deployed its formidable powers of information gathering to confirm what it already believed. At the centre of the story was WISDOM, the Whole-of-Institution Strategic Data and Outcomes Management system. Created to defend Britain against foreign disinformation, it soon graduated to monitoring "harmful narratives", "problematic nostalgia", declining trust and negative sentiment about immigration. A genuine photograph of migrants arriving on a beach was flagged for "decontextualised visual framing". Requests for original sources and factual corrections became possible indicators of hostile interference.
Having begun by investigating Russia, China and Iran, WISDOM eventually discovered that the most troublesome source of misinformation about Britain was British people's stubborn attachment to feeling British. WISDOM's final diagnosis of the country's deteriorating social cohesion was commendably concise: "The problem isn't the problem, the problem is the people noticing the problem."
On Tuesday, Prime Minister Andy Burnham stood before the United Nations and announced the creation of a National Centre for Information Defence. Barely had WISDOM escaped onto the page before reality began catching up with the satire.
According to Burnham, NCID will detect, attribute and disrupt hostile-state information attacks. He cited Russian bots masquerading as British citizens, fake websites, fabricated reports, forged newspaper branding and covert interference. Most insidious of all, naturally, was the amplification of " far Right narratives". Russia, Burnham said, was creating a narrative of British decline. Britain, he claimed, had surrendered too much ground to those promoting such an account.
Burnham insisted that the "negative" and "corrosive" narrative about life in Britain " bears no resemblance to reality". A few moments later in the very same speech, Burnham described people struggling with the "cost of living", lives that were "not improving", young people outside employment, education or training, widening inequality and a society vulnerable to division. Making life more affordable, he then announced, would lie at the heart of a new "10-year plan" for Britain.
The narrative of decline therefore bears no resemblance to reality, although reality apparently requires a 10-year plan.
Burnham began his speech alleging that Russian agencies had forged BBC branding, faked websites and used bots to "stoke tension", "spread lies" and "play on people's fears". There is nothing inherently implausible about any of this. A fake newspaper article is false. A Russian bot pretending to be Derek from Wolverhampton is not Derek from Wolverhampton. No doubt Russia conducts information operations against its enemies, as does nearly every other major nation. It's part of statecraft. It always has been.
However, contentions about whether Britain is declining, its economy is struggling, its institutions are failing or its social cohesion is deteriorating are not in themselves acts of deception. Arguments about the condition of the country do not become disinformation because somebody in Moscow presses the retweet button. For all the concern about foreign deception operations, Britons are perfectly capable of looking at their country and coming to what the Government perceives as the "wrong" conclusions without Russian assistance.
WISDOM would have understood the problem and known what to do. It would recommend the immediate establishment of a National Centre for Information Defence.
The irony is that Whitehall already has an expanding bureaucracy operating across this field. Britain has units dealing with misinformation, hostile states, strategic communications, cyber interference and influence operations. Having concluded that these arrangements are fragmented and overlapping, Whitehall has reached for its traditional instrument of administrative simplification: another organisation.
Maybe the Russians should be warned that Britain now has so many organisations watching for hostile information that any Kremlin operative attempting to penetrate them risks dying of old age during the induction process.
Why, exactly, does Britain need another one?
The Department of Additional Departments
The case for another organisation becomes less obvious once the existing machinery is examined. Most obviously, there is the National Security Online Information Team, formerly the Counter Disinformation Unit, which already leads the Government's operational response to online information threats. Its remit covers misinformation and disinformation affecting national security and public safety, online narratives and attempts artificially to manipulate the information environment. A foreign power conducting the activities Burnham described at the United Nations would therefore fall comfortably within its field of interest.
Should the threat be more obviously the work of a hostile state, the Joint State Threats Assessment Team within MI5 provides cross-government analysis of hostile-state activity. The Home Office also has its now infamous Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU), concerned particularly with extremist propaganda and counter-narratives. The National Cyber Security Centre deals with cyber threats, while the Armed Forces possess 77th Brigade and its expertise in what the Army calls "information manoeuvre".
The Foreign Affairs Committee identified the resulting fragmentation in March. Britain's work against foreign disinformation, it concluded, was dispersed across government and insufficiently coordinated. Its proposed remedy was a statutory, public-facing National Counter Disinformation Centre to bring the disparate effort together. The Government initially agreed only to consider the proposal; the committee duly welcomed Burnham's announcement when it came.
The remedy has an unmistakable Whitehall logic. Faced with too many bodies doing related things without sufficient coordination, the Goverhttps://moj.esdnevnik.rs/loginnment has created another body. By July, seven ministers were responsible for disinformation, prompting the Foreign Affairs Committee Chair to observe that this meant nobody was responsible for it. NCID will now have the unenviable task of bringing order to the organisations created to bring order to the information environment.
Quite how it will do so remains unclear. Its organisation and powers have yet to be specified, as has the practical meaning of Burnham's promise that it will "disrupt" hostile-state information attacks.
The more consequential question concerns its remit. New bureaucracies acquire officials, definitions, reporting requirements and, sooner or later, things to report. NCID is being created as the Government's language about information threats extends beyond fabricated stories and covert foreign operations towards the stories Britons tell themselves about Britain.
The question is where countering hostile information ends and policing political interpretation begins.
Your narrative has been marked incorrect
A foreign power doesn't have to invent Britain's difficulties. It can select them, exaggerate their significance and distribute them for hostile purposes. None of that alters the underlying facts. If Moscow circulates a photograph of a British pothole, its reasons for doing so have no bearing on whether the pothole exists. Filling it would also deprive the Kremlin of the photograph.
Burnham's description of a narrative of British decline as " corrosive" therefore raises a different question from whether the claims themselves are true. "Corrosive" describes an effect. A hostile actor may assemble the evidence and promote the bleakest possible account of the country, but neither its involvement nor its purpose settles whether that account is false.
Information defence then begins to move beyond establishing what is true and who is responsible for spreading it into judging which conclusions drawn from the facts are damaging. A false claim can be tested; a covert foreign operation can be investigated and attributed. Whether Britain's institutions are failing, its social cohesion is deteriorating or the country is in decline cannot be settled in the same way. These are political judgements made from evidence over which citizens are entitled to disagree.
Disagreement over those conclusions is the ordinary stuff of politics. Governments marshal statistics, advertise successes, blame their predecessors and assure the country that recovery is under way; oppositions inspect much the same landscape and announce national ruin. Newspapers offer further diagnoses, while citizens remain obstinately free to believe whichever account best accords with what they can see around them. None of this requires an official referee to determine which interpretation of Britain has passed the national resilience test.
A foreign power can promote an account of British decline for hostile purposes without making that account either true or false. Russian propagandists can describe Britain as declining for hostile purposes; a Briton can reach the same conclusion after waiting six weeks for a doctor's appointment. That they reach the same conclusion proves nothing about whether it is correct. Still less does Russian endorsement render it false. Otherwise, any genuine grievance can acquire the taint of disinformation once Moscow notices it.
Conflating hostile provenance with the truth of what is being said changes the purpose of information defence. A government concerned about foreign manipulation has every reason to identify covert networks, expose fabricated material and attribute hostile operations. Once attention turns to the political conclusions citizens draw from genuine conditions, however, the object has changed. Information defence is no longer simply protecting the public from deception. It is deciding which descriptions of reality the public should distrust.