Prime Minister Andy Burnham has ordered the creation of a new National Centre for Information Defence to “detect, attribute and disrupt” hostile-state information operations against Britain. The threat is real. The unanswered question is what, exactly, the British state will be empowered to “disrupt”.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham has announced the creation of a National Centre for Information Defence, bringing together intelligence agencies, government departments, police and social-media companies to counter hostile-state information operations against the United Kingdom. The new body is to begin life within the Prime Minister’s Office and Cabinet Office and has been given three functions: to “detect, attribute and disrupt” foreign information attacks.¹
Burnham announced the initiative at the United Nations General Assembly on 22 September, where he accused Russia of mounting what he called an “industrial-scale assault” upon Britain’s information environment. According to the Prime Minister, Russian agencies have deployed bots, counterfeit websites, falsified newspaper reports and forged branding belonging to 28 British organisations, including universities and the BBC. He also referred to evidence of attempted Russian interference in the 2019 General Election and cited estimates that the Kremlin spends around £1.3 billion annually on manipulating information. He warned that artificial intelligence will multiply the threat.²
None of that should be lightly dismissed. Hostile governments conduct influence operations, and artificial intelligence makes convincing fabricated material increasingly cheap and easy to produce. False newspapers, manipulated video, impersonated institutions, coordinated fake accounts and covert state-controlled campaigns are genuine instruments of information warfare. Britain is entitled to defend itself against them.
But the announcement immediately raises a constitutional question which the Government has not yet answered publicly: what does “disrupt” mean?
Britain does not presently lack legal means of responding to genuine foreign interference. The National Security Act 2023 already creates a foreign-interference offence where prohibited conduct satisfies the relevant foreign-power condition and is intended, or in specified circumstances recklessly undertaken, to produce an interference effect. Those effects include interference with political participation and political decision-making.³ The Government has itself pointed to the Act, together with duties imposed through the Online Safety regime, as part of the existing machinery for countering state-linked interference online.⁴
The question is therefore not whether Britain may defend itself against hostile foreign operations. Plainly it may. It is what additional authority this new Centre will possess and, above all, what the Government means by the final word in Burnham’s formula.
Detection is readily understood. Intelligence agencies can identify coordinated foreign operations. Attribution is also intelligible, although an allegation that another state is responsible for an operation ought to rest upon evidence sufficient to justify it. Disruption is different because disruption means action. Something is to be stopped, disabled, removed, restricted or otherwise interfered with.
That may mean exposing counterfeit websites, identifying fabricated material and publicly demonstrating its foreign provenance. It may mean prosecution where criminal offences have occurred, sanctions against foreign operatives or technical measures directed against hostile infrastructure. Those are recognisable forms of state action capable of being grounded in identifiable law.
But does “disrupt” also mean asking technology companies to suppress, remove, demote or reduce the circulation of material which remains lawful to publish? Can an account operated by a British citizen become the subject of intervention because it repeats something originally promoted by a hostile government? Can lawful political arguments be algorithmically disadvantaged because intelligence officials believe their circulation benefits Russian strategic interests? If so, who decides, according to what evidential threshold, with what right of challenge and under whose oversight?
Those questions matter because the decisive distinction is not merely between true information and false information. It is between covert foreign activity and domestic political expression.
A website secretly created by Russian intelligence and designed to impersonate the BBC is an identifiable hostile operation. A British citizen arguing that the country is badly governed, culturally fractured, economically declining or pursuing the wrong foreign policy is exercising political speech. That distinction does not disappear merely because Moscow happens to prefer, repeat or amplify the same argument.
This is where information defence can become constitutionally dangerous if its categories are allowed to migrate. The legitimate target begins with provenance: who created an operation, who controls it, who funded it and whether a foreign state is covertly manipulating British political life. The danger begins when attention shifts from provenance to content: this argument resembles a Russian narrative; this opinion undermines public confidence; this criticism contributes to a hostile information environment.
At that point counter-intelligence risks becoming regulation of political opinion.
Burnham’s own language makes that distinction especially important. In the same UN speech in which he referred to falsified newspaper articles and counterfeit websites, he said Russian agencies had amplified “far right narratives” and sought to create what he described as a “negative, corrosive narrative about life in Britain”.² Those expressions extend beyond forged documents or fake accounts and enter the field of political interpretation.
Whether Britain is declining, whether immigration has harmed social cohesion, whether public institutions deserve confidence, whether Government policy is succeeding and whether particular political movements should properly be described as “far right” are contested political questions. Government is free to argue its case vigorously. It may expose foreign manipulation. What it should not possess is an undefined capacity to treat otherwise lawful domestic opinion as operationally suspect because a foreign power also promotes it.
Nigel Farage has consequently described the proposed Centre as a “Ministry of Truth” and warned that it could be used against free speech. The Government, for its part, has insisted that the target is hostile-state activity rather than domestic political dissent.⁵ Farage’s phrase is political criticism rather than a description of powers which have yet been published. But reassurance cannot substitute for legal architecture when intelligence agencies, police, government departments and private communications platforms are to cooperate within the same information-defence system.
Britain has been here before. The National Security Online Information Team, formerly the Counter Disinformation Unit, has already generated controversy over government monitoring of online information and the relationship between official assessments and platform moderation. In its work on misinformation and harmful algorithms, the House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee recommended that NSOIT should be placed on a statutory footing and brought under the remit of the Intelligence and Security Committee. The Government responded that NSOIT already operated within existing law and was subject to ministerial and parliamentary scrutiny, but it did not accept the Committee’s proposed statutory arrangement.⁶
More importantly, Parliament anticipated almost exactly the present problem months before Burnham announced the new Centre.
In March 2026 the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee recommended the establishment of a public-facing National Counter Disinformation Centre to combat foreign information manipulation and interference. But the Committee did not simply ask Whitehall to create another executive unit. It specifically recommended that the Centre “should be placed on a statutory footing”, “be subject to oversight by Parliament”, and be directed towards understanding, identifying and combating foreign information manipulation and interference campaigns against Britain and British interests.⁷
The Government’s response was to “partially agree”. It accepted the seriousness of the threat and the need for greater coordination but stopped short of accepting the recommendation in the form Parliament had proposed.⁸ Three months later, the Prime Minister announced the National Centre for Information Defence.
That sequence makes the present absence of published detail more significant, not less. Parliament had already identified statutory definition and parliamentary supervision as necessary safeguards before the executive announced its new machinery. Those protections should therefore precede controversial powers rather than be added later after practice has already established the boundaries.
Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, incorporated into domestic law by the Human Rights Act, does not confer an absolute right to say anything in any circumstances. Restrictions may be justified, including in the interests of national security. But such interference must be prescribed by law and necessary in a democratic society.⁹ “Information defence” may therefore describe a legitimate governmental objective; it does not, by itself, define a lawful power.
The Government should publish the Centre’s remit before practice is allowed to define its powers by precedent. Parliament needs a clear definition of what constitutes a hostile-state information operation, what evidence is required to establish foreign direction or coordination, and whether lawful speech by British citizens can ever become an object of intervention. There must also be explicit rules governing contacts with social-media companies, including whether officials may seek the removal or algorithmic suppression of lawful material, together with proper records, routes of challenge and independent oversight.
None of this requires pretending that Russian information warfare is fictional. Quite the opposite. A serious threat deserves serious institutions, and serious institutions require serious safeguards.
There is another reason for insisting upon them. Governments are not infallible arbiters of truth. Intelligence assessments can be wrong. Police can be wrong. Ministers can be wrong. Journalists, technology companies, academics and professional fact-checkers can be wrong. Sometimes information is incomplete. Sometimes apparently false reports contain elements of truth. Sometimes official accounts change as evidence emerges. Sometimes disagreement is not “disinformation” at all but legitimate disagreement over facts, interpretation, causation or policy.
The democratic answer is not paralysis. The state can identify foreign networks, expose fabricated material, prosecute unlawful interference, sanction hostile actors and explain publicly why particular material has been attributed to a foreign operation. Indeed, attribution accompanied by evidence may ultimately be more effective than secret suppression because it allows citizens to judge the evidence for themselves.
Information defence becomes something quite different, however, if an opinion is treated as dangerous principally because an adversary has amplified it. Russia does not acquire ownership of an argument merely by repeating it. Nor does the Kremlin acquire a veto over British political debate by choosing which British grievances it wishes to exploit.
The essential distinction is therefore straightforward: foreign involvement may justify investigation of provenance; it does not, by itself, justify suppression of content.
That brings the argument back to Burnham’s own three verbs. There is little constitutional mystery in detecting hostile foreign operations, nor in attributing them where the evidence supports attribution. The difficulty lies in disruption. Before the British state exercises a power to “disrupt” information, Parliament and the public are entitled to know precisely what is being disrupted, by whom, under what statutory authority, according to what evidential threshold and subject to what independent scrutiny.
The Foreign Affairs Committee has already supplied much of the answer. If Britain requires a national information-defence institution, it should have a statutory footing, a tightly defined foreign-interference remit and meaningful parliamentary oversight.⁷ That is not an impediment to defending democracy. It is part of defending democracy.
The danger posed by hostile-state information warfare is real. So is the principle at stake in the British response. A free society may defend itself against those who secretly manipulate its public conversation. What it must not do is allow the defence of that conversation to become an undefined power to control it.
¹ Prime Minister announces new National Centre for Information Defence — InfoGov, 23 September 2026
² PM speech at UNGA: 22 September 2026 — Prime Minister’s Office, 23 September 2026
³ National Security Act 2023: Foreign interference — UK legislation
⁴ Social media, misinformation and harmful algorithms: Government response — House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee / HM Government
⁵ PM’s new anti-disinformation unit won’t target domestic political dissent, defence secretary says — The Guardian, 23 September 2026
⁶ Social media, misinformation and harmful algorithms: Government response — House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee / HM Government
⁷ Disinformation diplomacy: How malign actors are seeking to undermine democracy — House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, 27 March 2026
⁸ Disinformation diplomacy: Government Response — HM Government, 8 June 2026
⁹ Human Rights Act 1998: Article 10, Freedom of expression — UK legislation
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