A pair of major defence announcements have set out how the UK is countering threats from its enemies both in real space and cyberspace.
Andy Burnham revealed plans for a new security centre targeting disinformation in his speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, singling out Russia as one of the top culprits.
He said: ‘In recent years, we have seen an industrial-scale assault by hostile actors on the information environment in the UK and many of our allies.
‘Russian agencies have used every means at their disposal to spread lies and disinformation, and prey on people’s fears.’
Speaking in front of representatives from countries across the world, including Russia, Burnham announced plans for a ‘new national centre for information defence’.
The job of the unit would be to ‘detect, attribute and disrupt these kinds of hostile state information attacks’.
This morning, Defence Secretary Wes Streeting told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the current threats are ‘of a different order of magnitude than the historic challenges of propaganda’.
He said: ‘What we need to do is not just better co-ordination at the centre of government, but the better mobilisation of the whole of society.
‘And that’s supporting the public to separate fact from fiction, and to be able to discern the legitimate, real BBC, or indeed legitimate, real British universities, from the fake and the manufactured.’
In his speech on Tuesday, Burnham said the Russians had used ‘bots and fake websites, falsified newspaper articles, forged the branding of 28 British organisations, including universities and the BBC’.
He also referenced evidence that the country tried to interfere with the 2019 general election.
The result was an ‘insidious campaign that reaches into people’s homes and twists what they feel about their own country and community, creating a narrative of decline, stoking division and sewing despair’.
Russia was also singled out by Air Chief Marshal Sir Harv Smyth in a speech this morning announcing the UK’s first military squadron to defend satellites in space.
He said the Kremlin’s military satellites had made ‘dangerous’ manoeuvres near Finnish commercial satellites, citing such behaviour as ‘more irresponsible and provocative actions from our adversaries’.
In response, Sir Harv said No 3 Space Effects Squadron would be created to ‘disrupt, degrade and deny hostile activity to defend UK space interests’.
The UK would ‘never escalate military activity in space’, he insisted, though he also said space had ‘become a warfighting domain whether we like that or not’.
Streeting told LBC this morning that the squadron would initially comprise ‘tens of people’ though it may expand over time.
Burnham’s remarks at the UN were criticised by the Kremlin, with Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov saying Burnham was ‘fostering an atmosphere of total Russophobia’.
Peskov added: ‘From our point of view, this is an utterly short-sighted policy.
‘It in no way brings us any closer to any steps that might, in the long term, lead to a reduction in tensions and de-escalation on the European continent.’
The idea was also criticised by Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, who wrote on X that the new unit would be a ‘Labour Ministry of Truth targeted directly at Reform’.
He continued: ‘They know they can’t win by fair means, so they’re trying to destroy us by foul means.’
Streeting dismissed similar suggestions, telling BBC the government is ‘not interested in policing domestic political dissent’.
He said: ‘One of the great things about Britain, and one of the things that I have a responsibility to defend, is the freedom and democracy that we all enjoy.
‘And that includes the freedom to disagree, the freedom for people to challenge their government, to challenge government policy, to criticise robustly what we are doing and then to have the opportunity to choose a different government.’
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