Only about a third of the UK public expect their government “to do what is right,” according to the 2026 Edelman trust barometer. This isn’t just any old opinion poll result — it underlines that long-standing democracies might lose the hybrid war with Russia and the next all-out war because they lack the trust of their own populations.
Trust and perceptions of government competence are two of the key elements in a nation’s will to fight. London and allied capitals need an urgent response and national strategy to rebuild, revitalize, and re-engage.
The Shattered Britain report (July 2025) from More in Common described a nation where trust has been hollowed out, creating a functional vacuum in state authority. From a national security perspective, this “agency gap” — where 70% of Britons feel the state has lost control of its core functions — is a material weakness as it indicates a shrinking ability to command public consent and collective action in a crisis.
Some 40% of the population are classified as “dissenting disruptors” and “sceptical scrollers” who say they would actively refuse to follow government instructions in a future national emergency.
For a hostile state, this is a force multiplier. They no longer need to invent disinformation when the domestic audience is already primed to view any state communication as a deceptive, self-serving “psy-op.”
The UK’s adversaries in Moscow and Tehran have built on decades of experience, and much of their focus is on trust. As former KGB Major Stanislav Levchenko said when defecting to the US in 1979: “Look for your vulnerabilities, and there you will find the KGB”.
Civil society must be rebuilt across towns and cities, the BBC revitalized, and the public re-engaged in a national campaign to tackle the trust crisis.
Liverpool, northwest England, was an early adopter in losing faith with politicians and institutions. The 1989 Hillsborough disaster saw police incompetence result in the deaths of 97 people attending a soccer match, while Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, a host of officials, and the police lied about the causes to escape blame.
Tabloid newspapers, particularly Rupert Murdoch’s Sun, printed false accusations about the behavior of fans, police altered their evidence, and a unit that was supposed to investigate police misconduct concealed the truth.
It took decades of campaigning before there was a full enquiry and proper inquests. The truth finally came out, but only after a significant proportion of Liverpudlians had lost all trust in officialdom.
The Public Office (Accountability) Bill currently being considered by Parliament would impose a duty on public authorities and officials to act with candor, transparency, and frankness.
This law is an essential step in a long-term process to rebuild trust. Those seeking to amend the bill in the name of national security, no doubt to protect intelligence officers and their sources, are misguided — other options should be considered to ensure national security is maintained. Delays and unhelpful changes will further undermine the UK’s social cohesion and trust in politics and institutions.
And, in doing so, this undermines the defense of the nation.
Hillsborough is one of a long line of cover-ups by the UK establishment, which includes innocent Post Office workers being jailed for IT failures; hemophiliacs killed by infected blood, and Caribbean immigrants denied the rights they were promised when they helped rebuild Britain after the war.
These injustices have been accompanied by denial, defensiveness, or obfuscation by state institutions and have helped undermine the UK’s social contract.
An urgent national cognitive resilience strategy is needed that encompasses every public servant, from King Charles down, and every sector in UK society.
It could start by rebuilding local connective tissue.
Where local institutions are weak, civic participation is thin, citizens lack trusted intermediaries, and hostile narratives face little resistance. Community groups can act as connective tissue between citizens and the state, creating shared norms, peer-to-peer trust, and providing early warning when misinformation or grievance is taking hold.
The problem is that civic organizations are more numerous, better resourced, and more sustainable in richer areas, where trust tends to be stronger. The challenge is to identify and work with existing public interest groups, maintain volunteer interest, and build sustainable citizen-led groups in poorer towns and cities.
These groups could be trained in cognitive defense, and, if the threat of all-out war became graver, would form the backbone of a future national civil defense network.
It would need government funding, but a network of groups across the UK would cost very little compared to military hardware and form part of national deterrence to hybrid war.
Ukraine provides a case study in how civil society is critical to democracy. Since Russia’s initial aggression in 2014, the country has experienced sustained foreign interference and conflict, yet its democratic institutions and civic culture have strengthened, driven by an active, locally embedded civil society.
Such local groups can invest in bringing people together, listening and understanding needs, and providing training to detect and act on security threats to their community.
It is also vital to revitalize the BBC, Britain’s national broadcaster.
The BBC was not founded because the UK wanted a cultural project in 1927, it was an institutional response to rapid technological change, social disruption, and fragmented public debate following World War I.
Today, it is an organization that is cutting local journalism and radio, while focusing more on entertainment than public interest, and has a staff five times more likely to have been privately educated. It is out of touch, geographically, culturally, socio-economically, and psychologically. Public trust fell to 45% in 2024 from 57% a decade earlier.
This creates opportunities for foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI), which thrives where audiences lack trusted intermediaries and civic discourse is organised by attention-maximizing platforms rather than public interest.
The BBC needs to prioritise rebuilding trust, resilience, and relevance as much as content and its own brand.
Regional public broadcasting, for example, should be treated as infrastructure, with journalists and producers living and working across the country. They should be encouraged to engage, investigate, and be ready should Britain’s national resilience be tested.
The public must also be re-engaged in governance.
Government in the UK would still be recognisable to Victorians, with civil servants supporting ministers drawn from either House of Parliament. The principle of a politically neutral civil service, accountable to ministers, dates back to 1854 and remains the bedrock of a professional state, but needs to adapt to challenge the deficit in public trust.
In 2026, social media and permanent connectivity mean lawmakers simply do not have the capacity to listen and engage in the way most citizens expect. At the same time, many civil servants are London-based, socially narrow, and distant from the public.
Senior civil servants should be obliged to engage directly with voters, through open meetings in town halls, libraries, and civic spaces across the UK’s major towns and cities. Every community should host regular policy discussions — from hybrid threats and Iran to water resilience and education — bringing together citizens, businesses, and civil society.
Officials should listen, explain risks and trade-offs, and learn. If policymakers cannot engage with the public they govern, they should not be in post.
Against this backdrop, the government’s reported ban on civil servants speaking at public events is deeply counterproductive. Rather than rebuilding trust, it entrenches suspicion and cossets public servants from the reasonable inquiries of the people.
Defense in a hybrid war is more successful if societies distribute agency, embed trust locally, and move faster than their adversaries expect. Ukraine has shown what a beehive can do to a mammoth. The UK must decide which it wants to be.
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.
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