UK laws on electoral interference are hopelessly outdated amid a threat from Russia and far-right web propaganda, Labour is to argue, calling for the national security strategy to include a specific commitment to defend democracy.
The party’s shadow digital minister Liam Byrne, during a Commons debate on the issue on Thursday, is to call for a series of updates to laws to prevent future interference and ensure confidence in the electoral system.
Labour has already asked the government to investigate whether Russian “troll factories” interfered in the EU referendum and June’s general election, following evidence from academics about the apparent scale of such activities.
Ahead of the debate, Byrne said new analysis for Labour showed how rightwing memes attacking Tory Brexit rebels were distributed on Facebook, often without the scale of them being publicly tracked.
Byrne, who was to close the debate for Labour, said that among other changes, the government’s national security strategy should be updated to include a specific objective of defending the integrity of UK democracy.
“It’s now a fact that Russia is using a new generation of active measures to interfere in democracies across the west,” he said. “Even the new American national security strategy, on Tuesday, had to acknowledge that truth.
“Second, we know that there was some kind of Russian intervention in the British elections and referendum, but we don’t know how widely it ran. That’s a problem – we should know. Politics should be transparent, that’s how you guarantee elections are free and fair.
“The third point is that our systems and laws are no longer fit for purpose to defend the integrity of our democracy against this new generation of threats.”
Byrne pointed to rules drawn up more than a decade ago stipulating that social media companies are platforms rather than publishers, and a law from 2003 barring political advertising for broadcasting, but permitting targeted adverts via social media.
The Electoral Commission also has no power to investigate foreign donations or sanction foreign donors, he said.
“Our systems and strategy legislation is now hopelessly out of date, and we’ve heard nothing from the government about what they’re going to do about it,” he said.
“It feels to me there is a known new threat, it’s jeopardising the integrity of our democracy, our systems and laws are out of date, and the government is asleep at the wheel. That’s a problem.”
The lack of action, Byrne said, was down to the “all consuming” nature of Brexit, meaning ministers had no time to focus on anything else.
