It took Reform leader Nigel Farage less than 12 hours following Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s maiden speech at September’s UN General Assembly to falsely claim the UK’s new National Centre for Information Defence (NCID) would be a “Ministry of Truth to clamp down on free speech.”
Given that the scope and powers of NCID have yet to be determined, Farage’s comments had no evidential basis.
Burnham spoke of a center that would “detect, attribute and disrupt” hostile state attacks and an organization that would “support and defend our democracy.” The prime minister and officials who have worked on this announcement and will shape the eventual center should be congratulated on this move and supported in their efforts.
The “chiefs” tasked with shaping the center now have decisions to make in terms of the scope, scale, and priorities of NCID.
What are the key considerations?
Firstly, NCID will not decide what Britons are allowed to say. Genuine speech of any kind, along with domestic information manipulation activity (DIM), should not be within its scope.
However, a full range of hostile nations and organizations should include Russia, Iran and any states or individuals who have sought to interfere in UK politics or manipulate the public by amplifying extremist narratives in the UK, or running covert information operations.
Any manipulative activity, undertaken by or at the behest of hostile groups, amounts to foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI). This includes covert foreign funding of think-tanks, bot networks or street protests and the range of activity I previously described in my CEPA article on election security.
Poland announced at disinfo2026, the most important annual counter-FIMI conference, that it is supporting a European Endowment for Information Integrity. A European-wide body such as this would allow for coordinated investigations of all FIMI activity, regardless of its origin, thus ameliorating some of the pressures against information defenders. The UK should form part of any such initiative.
NCID should ask four questions:
- who is behind an operation,
- who pays for it,
- what infrastructure enables it, and
- what else the same network is doing against the UK?
NCID needs legal powers, a wide investigatory remit and the ability to commission investigations from a range of government partners as well as partners outside government.
The stronger NCID’s operational capabilities are, the stronger its safeguards should be. It will need transparent lines of accountability and Parliamentary scrutiny.
As Burnham rightly suggested in his UNGA speech, the center should focus on the networks that threaten the UK’s information space.
Foreign information manipulation efforts do not exist as threats on their own. They sit alongside cyber threats, sabotage and corruption as key tools of the shadow war undertaken by Moscow and other authoritarian regimes against democracies like those including the UK, Canada and Europe.
Any national center must be given wide powers to investigate, commission investigations and act as a national open source intelligence (OSINT) hub for activity to identify, understand, analyze, assess and eventually attribute these often-wide-ranging networks. The A7 sanctions-evasion network of the Moscow-based convicted fraudster Ilan Șor, for example, was documented by the UK’s Centre for Information Resilience as working across multiple shadow war vectors, with one goal being political interference in Moldova.
Evidence on such networks gives democracies a set of choices for disrupting operations.
As Putin likely escalates his attacks on democracies, more thought must be given to harder-edged asymmetrical disruption of his malign networks.
Accurate investigation and analysis to provide data on network kill chains that can lead to disruption is resource-intensive. Burnham’s political leadership is needed to ensure sufficient funding and rigorous prioritization of this work on the networks posing the most serious threats to the UK.
Foster AI: It is essential that NCID maintain and build relationships with safety and trust teams at a full range of social media platforms and the frontier AI companies.
It should be empowered to foster two-way data sharing from these predominantly US-based companies to allow better threat intelligence and develop new investigative leads.
First mover advantage: It is essential that NCID has a communication function, separate from the often politicized communication channels across Whitehall. The function should aim to undermine narratives and expose networks that any reasonable individual would consider are being propagated by FIMI actors.
NCID needs the capability to respond to malign campaigns within news cycles (i.e. very quickly), communicate uncertainty quickly, and to undertake long-term resilience-building strategic communication campaigns and engagement.
National resilience: It takes a system to beat a system. NCID should be tasked with building a national structure resilient to FIMI across towns, cities and villages across the country. It needs to fund critical civil society initiatives and work with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade to foster our nascent private sector response to hybrid threats, including through the use of big data and AI.
Center of Excellence: NCID should become the UK’s center of excellence on information defense. Its experts need to advise on and inform all future government policy on current and emerging shadow war threats.
As part of a whole-of-society approach, it should provide briefings across the country to local government, the private sector, public sector, volunteer groups and academia – lifting our national comprehension of information threats and informing future digital literacy efforts.
Britain is not developing a Ministry of Truth. It needs an organization capable of identifying who is attacking its democracy, mapping networks and mobilizing the full range of lawful national capabilities to disrupt and deter them.
Andy Pryce is a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). He is a former British diplomat and a globally recognized expert in countering information threats, cognitive defense, and strategic communications. He brings decades of leadership advising governments and organizations on crisis management, countering foreign information manipulation, and impact in contested information spaces. As a diplomat, Andy led national efforts to counter foreign information manipulation, establishing innovative capabilities to anticipate, analyze, mitigate, and disrupt malign state actors and their proxies. His senior diplomatic roles included Head of Public Diplomacy at the British Embassy in Washington and at the UK Mission to the EU in Brussels.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
