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The Guardian
5 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Why is it so hard for the authorities to win public trust? Maybe because they keep lying to us
If you were to invent a scandal expressly to convince conspiracy theorists they were right all along, the story of the Afghan superinjunction would be hard to beat. A secret back door into Britain through which thousands of immigrants were brought, under cover of a draconian legal gagging order that helpfully also concealed an act of gross incompetence by the British state? It's a rightwing agitator's dream. 'The real disinformation,' wrote Dominic Cummings on X, a platform notably awash with real disinformation, 'is the regime media.' Yes, that Dominic Cummings. It was hard enough already to counter paranoia about alleged grooming gang cover-ups, policing of immigrant communities or imaginary supposed plots to flood the country with refugees just so they can vote Labour. Now, like stopped clocks fleetingly getting the time right twice a day, the usual suspects will pounce: see, the deep state does lie to you! Meanwhile fantasists of all political stripes and none, whose go-to explanation for why the hated mainstream media mysteriously isn't covering their pet theory is invariably 'there must be a superinjunction', will have a field day. But you don't have to wear a tinfoil hat to find this particular cover-up unnerving. In parliament, the Conservative MP Mark Pritchard asked the defence secretary, John Healey, how anyone could be sure there were no other government superinjunctions active. If there were, he added, presumably Healey couldn't tell him anyway. How does anyone know who to trust, in an era when excess naivety and unwarranted suspicion can both have demonstrably terrible consequences? It's not just a political question. This week, Constance Marten and Mark Gordon were convicted of the gross negligence manslaughter of their newborn daughter Victoria, who died sleeping in a tent on a freezing January night while her parents were on the run from social workers, their families, and authority in general. The couple, whose first four children were already in care, were probably right to fear her being taken from them. But at least she could have lived, if they'd trusted social services enough to engage. The week before, it emerged that a child had died in Liverpool of measles, a completely preventable disease of which there have been continuing outbreaks thanks to a complex mix of complex factors, including vaccine scepticism and mistrust of the medical establishment. (Though it's not known if this poor child was vaccinated – measles can be dangerous for people with compromised immune systems even if they've had the jab – the point of keeping vaccine uptake high is to protect the vulnerable, by preventing outbreaks such as the one currently active in the north-west.) In the US, meanwhile, Donald Trump has enraged his own fanbase by insisting that only 'stupid people' believe there was a government cover-up over the death of the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein – a cherished Maga belief Trump seemed happy to stoke back when the idea of a plot to protect some wicked liberal elite suited him. There would be more schadenfreude in seeing the president hoist by his own post-truth petard, if his followers didn't have a proven capacity for violence when angered. What ties these very different stories together is a creeping crisis of faith in institutions from medicine to the law, politics to policing, which has begun to feel actively dangerous. Yet knowing that doesn't make reversing it any easier. I've been thinking about this on and off for months, since joining a thinktank roundtable on restoring public trust that posed some difficult practical questions. My tuppence worth was on rock-bottom levels of trust in the media. But would a return to believing everything you read or hear be healthy? I can't in all conscience say so: not when there are so many underregulated new platforms I wouldn't trust to tell the time of day, and AI fakes are getting so sophisticated. Trusting the media less is logical, maybe even necessary, in the circumstances. Yet rational scepticism can all too quickly spiral into blanket suspicion of everything and everyone, justified or not. No society can function like that. One answer is that where trust is no longer automatic, powerful institutions can earn it back by submitting to clear checks and balances. And that's exactly what didn't happen with the Ministry of Defence superinjunction. Faced with a catastrophic leak – a soldier emailing a spreadsheet of names that put up to 100,000 Afghans potentially at risk – the then Conservative government had a moral duty to protect those endangered. Though it's likely many were already identifiable as Taliban targets via other means, it wasn't unreasonable to seek a brief temporary news blackout while organising an evacuation, followed by full public disclosure at the earliest safe opportunity. But it should have been brief – nothing like a 600-day injunction – and crucially parliament's intelligence and security committee (ISC) should have been brought into the loop to ensure it was. Invented to provide democratic oversight in sensitive situations when briefing every last gossipy backbencher is impractical, the ISC could have acted as guarantors of the public's right to know. Instead, it was left to an incoming Labour defence secretary to question whether spending billions on secretively righting past wrongs was the best use of public money, prompting a review that collapsed the whole house of cards. Trust in the British state, at home and abroad, will inevitably be the casualty. While about 24,000 of those named in the leak are already in Britain or on the way, the rest are being expected simply to accept the revised view that they're safe where they are. Amid the chaos, as the former veterans minister Johnny Mercer points out, it's likely some with frankly tenuous connections to the UK gained sanctuary essentially for being victims of British ineptitude, while some Afghan special forces soldiers who bravely fought the Taliban alongside the British (and were promised they'd be looked after as a result) have been puzzlingly left behind. That is the kind of injustice that echoes down generations. Back home, meanwhile, ministers must now brace for far-right attempts to exploit this scandal, and for some uncomfortable questions. Was the superinjunction really about saving lives, sparing political blushes, avoiding inflaming already high tensions over immigration or all of the above? And when exactly would the MoD have voluntarily confessed, if a handful of journalists – the same old legacy media that apparently nobody trusts – hadn't got wind of what happened? For that's the paradox, right there: sometimes the alternatives to putting your faith in an institution which has previously failed you – be it social services, doctors, journalists or conventional politics – are even worse. Trust everybody, and you might get taken for a fool. Trust nobody, and you become the fool. Unfortunately, there's no easy way round that. Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
Spectator
5 days ago
- Politics
- Spectator
The irony of the Afghan resettlement scandal
If there is one wholesale conclusion to be drawn from the Afghan resettlement scheme scandal, it's that a problem we have today is not so much a profusion of 'misinformation' but rather the suppression of genuine information. In Britain now, it's not 'fake news' that causes widespread resentment and anger, but moves made by successive British governments to silence real news. Ever since the masses decided to vote against their overlords in Britain and America in 2016 in the EU referendum and US presidential election of that year, the elites have propagated the belief that an unintelligent populace has been vulnerable to 'misinformation'. This is the idea that the suggestible lower orders have only become persuaded by populism because they get their news from unreliable social media outlets. Notwithstanding that there are myriad, genuine reasons behind the populist turn of the past ten years, what indisputably generates current indignation and fury are efforts to withhold information from the public. The decision by the previous Conservative administration to allow thousands of Afghans into the country secretly, and then by the successive Labour government to cover it up, is but the latest in a long line of fateful decisions to withhold the truth from the people. Many became aware of this increasing inclination towards state secrecy during the last decade, as revelations of the grooming gangs scandal began to emerge. Not only did the extent of these horrors come fully to light in January this year, but so too did the lengths to which local authorities and police forces had gone to keep these crimes quiet. While their failure to act, out of fear of accusations of racism, became a further source of outrage, revelations made by Dominic Cummings last month that Whitehall officials wanted to go to court in 2011 to cover up the whole episode have heaped yet more disgrace upon the state. The cowardly and deceitful response to these crimes by those in charge – a response going right to the top – is as much remembered now as the crimes themselves. Yet dishonesty, evasiveness and an active determination to withhold facts seem to have become the norm among those in charge. This was made clear after the mass stabbing and murder of three girls in Southport last July, the chief suspect of which, the public was simply and repeatedly told, was 'from Cardiff'. Were we told this because the authorities didn't want to let it be known that the chief suspect, Axel Rudakubana, was born in the Welsh capital to Rwandan parents? Merseyside police and countless politicians knew shortly after the attack that he was in possession of terrorist material, but on the advice of the Crown Prosecution Service, the public was not told. It was the failure to disclose this information, one borne perhaps from a fear that it might inflame anti-immigrant sentiment, that paradoxically fanned the flames of anger which led to the riots that actually followed. The online rumour mill had indeed gone into overdrive, but it did so because many people don't trust the government to tell them the truth about these matters anymore. The public had become especially driven to cynicism and disbelief following the Islamist attacks in Britain and Europe in the 2010s, after repeatedly being informed that the perpetrators had 'mental health issues' or other such mendacities. Yet still the authorities continue to make matters worse out of fear that the truth must not out, lest the easily-aroused hoi polloi fly into a rage. Elsewhere this week we've read that the Home Office has refused to share the location of asylum hotels with food delivery companies such as Deliveroo, citing 'safety concerns' for hotel occupants. And only yesterday the Daily Telegraph reported that ministers once more fear riots will break out in Britain following the disclosures of the Afghan resettlement debacle. There is indeed much anger in Britain today about immigration. Yet the anger has seldom been conspicuously directed towards the incomers themselves – the assaults against immigrants after Southport last year were remarkable because they were unusual. However, the ire has mostly and increasingly been aimed at the liberal overclass who first decided that large-scale immigration was a good idea – for ideological reasons and stemming from vested economic interests – and then have lied and continued to lie about its consequences. When the general public do voice their resentment at the ballot box, or via mainstream or social media, the elites then have the audacity to accuse the masses of being stupid or ill-informed. The ultimate irony of our situation today, one in which the smothering of information has become the norm and expectation, is that it feeds a genuinely counter-factual, conspiratorial mindset. The language of 'government cover-ups' is rapidly becoming common parlance. This is the direct fault of governmental deceit and dishonesty over actual facts.
Telegraph
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Starmer's ‘synthetic voters' show Downing Street's lost the plot
In 1953 the communist government of East Germany was grappling with widespread unrest. It blamed the German public for not being appreciative enough of its political leadership. 'Would it not be simpler,' responded the playwright Bertolt Brecht, 'if the government simply dissolved the people and elected another?' Brecht was joking, of course. But the sentiment came to mind when considering Labour's current approach to artificial intelligence (AI). The Spectator magazine reported this week that No10 is 'experimenting with 'synthetic voters' – fake focus groups of AI chatbots, who can tell ministers more quickly and cheaply what the public thinks of policies. Instead of us telling the Government what we think, chatbots will ventriloquise on our behalf. The initiative is said to be the brainchild of the Prime Minister's chief of staff Morgan McSweeney and, as this column noted last year, it is being championed by one of his predecessors, Dominic Cummings. A pioneer in this new field of synthetic voters is Ben Warner, the data guru who was a special adviser to the government between 2019 and 2021. Think of him as the Benji Dunn to Cummings' Ethan Hunt in Mission Impossible. As Cummings enthused last year, with AI you could test your policy or message on synthetic voters and get feedback quickly and cheaply. Political advisers could ask a special AI chatbot what we think, and get an answer in seconds. No need to commission costly national polls or convene time-consuming focus groups. Underpinning today's AI chatbots are large language models, statistical predictors that are fine-tuned mimics. They have ingested vast amounts of other people's thoughts and creative work, and can generate a pastiche of them on demand. The hope is that this pastiche is now good enough to augment or even replace the responses of real human beings. '[If] you compare the output of that to an actual focus group transcript of people, most people can't tell the difference between the two,' claimed Cummings. Warner is doing just that in a new venture called Electric Twin, which says that it can capture the messy nuance of humanity with reliable precision. 'Our synthetic populations are carefully crafted simulations of real-world populations,' Electric Twin explains on its website. Its models 'see and engage the fragments, the outliers and the disenfranchised. They understand the misunderstood'. 'We think this is an exciting technology with huge benefits for the public sector and think it is great if No10 is experimenting with this technology,' Warner told me, though he said Downing Street was not using Electric Twin but some other technology. Downing Street didn't respond to a request for comment. Alas, synthetic voters may simply be making a problem worse. The chief critique of Sir Keir Starmer is that he is out of touch. Hiding behind a computer screen is unlikely to dispel that image. 'Societies feel unknowable … leaders and teams are frequently blindsided,' Electric Twin's website asserts. Forty years ago, that wasn't a problem. Politicians such as Thatcher, Healey and Foot revelled in open public hustings. They weren't scared of hearing what we thought. But political advisers became wary of their candidates making gaffes, and became obsessed with cosmetic presentation. Focus groups were a sign that the political class had lost confidence in its own ideas, or maybe even run out of them. Once MPs retreated behind a wall of consultants, no wonder the public became a mystery. With AI, the consultants have simply contrived a paid-for solution to a problem they created. However, it is difficult to see how the chatbots can help. The AI model can only be trained on what has already been said and written, so cannot originate authentic responses to new political ideas. For example, there is no corpus of public reaction to the idea that illegal immigrants to the UK should be sent to the Falkland Islands, for that idea has never been advanced. 'No doubt Starmer would prefer to inhabit a world in which an AI synthetic focus groups showed he and his policies were loved by the populace,' says the author Ewan Morrison, whose new dystopian thriller For Emma probes the post-human fantasies of the giant technology companies. 'The most dangerous thing is not that these AI surrogates develop some vast superintelligence, but that we lower ourselves to their level, becoming dependent on technologies that are riddled with inaccuracies,' he thinks. 'Today's AI is a synthetic slop information generator, so any government that incorporates this flawed technology will hit trouble.' Cummings, in his promotion of the concept last year, became visibly excited by extending the idea even further. He muses how chatbots could generate targeted videos aimed at specific demographics. He starts to say such an idea would be 'science fiction', but stops himself. This is rather a giveaway. Much like his determination to put giant data dashboards into Whitehall and turn the Government into a sci-fi control room, it's the ultimate fantasy of the consultant class to become the controller of our destiny, a mini master of the universe. But it's a very sterile view of the world in which we are not humans, just data to be filtered and processed. Why are Labour and Cummings so obsessed with this science fiction fantasy of AI as the solution to all their problems, following a script written by Silicon Valley? Maybe because, to paraphrase another poet and dramatist TS Eliot, the modern politician cannot bear very much reality.
The Independent
30-06-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
Even after the welfare rebellion, it is too soon to write off Keir Starmer
In a parallel universe, and perhaps a happier one for him, Sir Keir Starmer would have ended up as attorney general in some sort of Labour government, led by someone other than him. He confessed as much to his sympathetic biographer, Tom Baldwin, some time ago. More recently, this accidental prime minister has been unburdening himself in a series of interviews to mark his first, rather difficult year in office. 'In office', that is, rather than 'in power', as the old saying goes, because his authority has been draining away at an alarming rate lately. It seems to be getting him down. The leadership was a job Sir Keir may not have wanted that much, but it was almost thrust into his safe hands after the debacle of the 2019 general election, and he did his duty. Picking up the pieces after Jeremy Corbyn stepped down, the most famous son of a toolmaker in the country was soon rolling up his sleeves – a favourite expression – and rebuilding his party in his image. He took on the role because there was no one else in the party capable enough, and willing to take it on. He thought, as did virtually everyone, that it would take two terms to unwind Boris Johnson's thumping majority. As it turned out, Mr Johnson and his colleagues, most notably Dominic Cummings and Liz Truss, plus Brexit, helped make sure that the task of returning Labour to government could be undertaken rather more quickly. Sir Keir and his advisers did well to campaign in such a way as to secure a landslide Commons majority – but at 34 per cent of the vote, their mandate was less solid than it looked, and Sir Keir's personal ratings never approached the stellar figures achieved by, say, Tony Blair, or indeed Mr Johnson. Now, those ratings are heading towards nadirs suffered by prime ministers much further into their tenure. The general sense of malaise seems to have entered the prime minister's soul, confessing to any passing journalist his regrets, mistakes and failures, including, most unfortunately, not realising what an impact his 'island of strangers" speech would make. The latest U-turn, on reforms to social security, must surely eat further into his self-confidence. It is not so much the details of the changes – they are mostly sensible – but the way they have been wrung out of the government that has done the damage. Despite early warnings, Sir Keir seems to have failed to engage with the whips and his own ministers until it was too late to prevent an open mutiny of such strength that any premier would have had to back down. As a result, Sir Keir looks like he is following his backbenchers rather than leading them – weak. This is bad enough, but the measures in the revised welfare reforms aren't all that popular with the general public. At least when the prime minister climbed down on the pensioners' winter fuel payment and the grooming gangs inquiry, eventually, he was on the right side of public opinion. He may not get much credit, but at least he tried to rescue some goodwill; the U-turn on welfare doesn't even have that meagre consolation. In fact, it might have been better to pause and work for a more comprehensive resolution that protected the fiscal position and the welfare of vulnerable people. As the Liberal Democrat spokesperson Steve Darling reminded more experienced colleagues in the chamber, rushed legislation has often proved bad legislation. After all, there is no logic in someone with exactly the same mobility challenges as an existing claimant receiving less financial assistance. This messy compromise is an unfortunate way to mark the Labour government's first year of ' change ' – changing their minds three times in as many weeks. Still, hope springs eternal in the Labour Party, as it generally must. Sir Keir's battalion of sorrows has arrived remarkably quickly, but they are not so different from the 'mid-term blues' that have awaited almost every government since the Second World War. The prime minister can be proud of his record on foreign affairs – three substantial trade deals, including the Brexit reset, plus an inexplicably warm relationship with Donald Trump. Proof, at last, that opposites attract. The prime minister has also ended long-running disputes relating to the Chagos Islands and Gibraltar – and, albeit far too little and too late, has at least now declared that the conduct of Israel's war in Gaza is unacceptable. The UK should be boosting spending on defence, and trying to sustain Nato and the defence of Ukraine. The prime minister has done all of that, too. Domestically, things have not proceeded so smoothly – and that has hammered his authority, as rounds of elections and the resurrection of Nigel Farage show. Only if the public perceives tangible changes in the quality of public services will they be prepared to back Labour for a second term of office. The same goes for the economy more broadly, and on control of migration. The government still has time on its side here, if it is not complacent. It needs a 'narrative' – but also improvements people can see and sense. Thanks to his restless health secretary, Wes Streeting, the NHS is being reformed and restored, and waiting times are coming down. There is clearly much more to do, but previous prime ministers have been through worse, and some even went on to win, against all odds. One year in, it is far too soon to write off Sir Keir, unless he himself decides to do so.
The Independent
26-06-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
Morgan McSweeney: Is welfare backlash the beginning of the end for Starmer's right-hand man?
Dominic Cummings, Theresa May 's 'Nick and Fi' - prime ministerial advisers rarely last as long as the PM they work for, as they become lightning rods for criticisms of the administration. And with anger growing over Labour 's welfare cuts, will the same now be true for Keir Starmer 's background fixer Morgan McSweeney? Labour MPs are calling for 'regime change' in Downing Street, with some hitting out at the 'over-excitable boys' in Sir Keir's top team. Many blame Sir Keir's chief of staff, the softly spoken Irishman Mr McSweeney, for ignoring the rising concerns of a huge number of Labour backbenchers over his plans to deny welfare payments to hundreds of thousands of disabled people in a bid to save £5bn a year. The government has been thrown into chaos after more than 120 Labour MPs - enough to sink the government's large majority - signed up to a move that could scupper the cuts, despite threats of deselections and warnings over the government's potential collapse. Backbenchers say they have been warning for months about the upset in the party over the issue, but they have been ignored. As the PM flew back from the Nato conference in The Hague on Wednesday, one told The Times: 'We are all very happy that we have a leader who's so respected around the world… we just think he needs fewer over-excitable boys in his team.' As Labour's former elections guru, and now Sir Keir's closest aide, Mr McSweeney has near-unrivalled influence. But he is facing criticism from some who wonder if he is better suited to campaigns than the day-to-day job of running something as large and unwieldy as the day-to-day running of government. He is not tied to the Westminster bubble – his wife is an MP for a Scottish seat – but is seen as the ultimate Labour insider, with many giving him credit for delivering Labour's landslide victory last summer. But he has long been considered a bogeyman of the left of the party for his drive to expunge Corbynism from Labour. He has been accused of ruthlessly promoting loyalist MPs into safe and easily winnable Labour seats, a tactic that appears, however, not to have worked in the latest crisis. Even before the latest row erupted, he was facing the ire of some Labour MPs over the controversial two-child benefit cap. The PM is reportedly keen to scrap the limit, which prevents those on benefits claiming support for more than two children, one of George Osborne's 'austerity' decisions, although it would be difficult to fill the multi-billion pound black hole it would leave. However, the Labour leader's right-hand man is thought to back the policy, arguing that voters support it on the grounds of fairness - that if working families have to consider if they could afford another child, so should those on benefits. But Mr McSweeney is not the only senior Labour figure under fire over the welfare cuts. Labour backbenchers are also gunning for the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, who needs the £5bn the move is designed to save to balance the books. Labour MPs told The Independent this week that either Ms Reeves had to go, or his own backbenchers would oust Sir Keir. Others pin the blame for the crisis on the veteran Labour chief whip Alan Campbell, for not seeing the rebellion coming. Still, it is striking that, once again, a backroom figure like Mr McSweeney has been thrust to the fore when a government gets into trouble.
