Andy Burnham’s Ministry of Truth

So that’s the end of the nice guy act. Like a villain in Scooby Doo, Andy Burnham has had his ‘ordinary bloke’ mask torn off to reveal the evil censor beneath. He has announced the creation of a National Centre for Information Defence that will guard us dimwit Brits from ‘disinformation’ and ‘narratives of decline’ and tell us that actually everything’s hunky dory. If this sounds familiar it’s because it’s basically Orwell’s Ministry of Truth rebranded in the soul-eating vocabulary of corporate HR.

It was at the United Nations yesterday that Burnham took a break from saying ‘I’m just like you!’ to say ‘Actually I’m better than you and therefore I’m creating a vast infrastructure of information control to remould your minds’. From TikToker to tyrant in the space of one speech. The new national centre will ‘detect’ and ‘disrupt’ misinformation, he said, especially that which emanates from ‘hostile actors’ overseas who want to ‘twist’ our minds into thinking our country’s gone to shit. To Burnham we’re all internet-brained damsels in dire need of moral rescue.

Every single thing about the new centre sounds sinister as hell. Burnham is clearly a giddy adherent to the great chattering-class conspiracy theory of our age – namely, that a vast army of Russian bots are playing idiot Brits like fiddles and feeding us lie after lie. The Ruskies ‘spread lies and disinformation’ and ‘prey on people’s fears’, he said. They cultivate a ‘narrative of decline’. They change how Brits ‘feel about their own country and community’. They ‘sow fear and despair’. This spectacularly elitist vision of us plebs as the marionettes of evil Russians is rife in the managerial classes.

Burnham’s self-styled guardians of truth will create new forms of state ‘architecture’ to ‘stem [the] poisonous tide’ of misinformation. If you’re not scared yet, you might want to check your pulse. For masked in the greasy, focus-grouped jargon of ‘disrupting narratives’, this shiny new bureaucracy promises to do what every authoritarian in history has craved: appoint a cadre of bureaucrats to sit in judgement over what constitutes acceptable thought and what must be crushed as ‘disinformation’.

You can tell this is censorship masquerading as social concern because it is riddled with the classic paternalism of the censor. Burnham seems to think the poor in particular are susceptible to the lies of nefarious foreign actors. ‘If you’re struggling with the cost of living and your life is not improving… then you are going to be much more vulnerable to this kind of influence’, he said. Classist much? So much for his ‘man of the people’ shtick – this is a man over the people, fretting that the dirt-poor hordes are being hoodwinked by sneaky Russians.

The irony of Burnham’s Orwellian crusade against ‘lies’ is that it is built on the most intoxicating lie of our time: that Brits are angry because some bot told us to be. They said this about the vote for Brexit, and now they’re saying it about public fury over the migrant crisis – that it’s all whipped up by wicked actors online. As Burnham put it, really getting into his conspiratorial stride, there’s been an ‘insidious campaign that reaches into people’s homes and twists what they feel about their own country’. Are the bots in the room with you now, Andy?

In his haughty worldview, Brits are utterly robbed of agency. We are no longer conscious actors who freely decided to leave the EU and who now want the ‘small boats’ stopped too, but rather the witless fodder of foreigners who want to screw Britain over. But we don’t need bots to tell us our borders are broken and Britain is in decline. We can see it with our own eyes. This past month alone I’ve been flashed at by an inebriated immigrant, watched a ranting foreign bloke steal a fork from a restaurant and use it to threaten passers-by, and twice seen people steal food from a Costa Coffee. Or perhaps those events were planted in my brain by the Kremlin?

The truth is that it is Burnham’s new centre that will spread disinformation. If the aim is to relieve Brits of our apparently false belief that our once great country is in big trouble, then this is clearly a war on truth masquerading as a defence of it. Indeed, it’s officialdom that refuses to tell us the truth about things like migrant crime, and which buried the rape-gang scandal for years, and which thinks a woman can have a cock. You think we’re going to take lectures about ‘truth’ from a political class that prizes ideological conformity so much more highly than honest debate that it let girls be raped and young gays be mutilated? Get real.

Just how many taskforces against ‘misinformation’ do we need? The government already has the Defending Democracy Taskforce, the Research, Information and Communications Unit, and a raft of other ‘architecture’ designed to insulate oiks from wrongthink. All of this stuff really blew up after Brexit and the rise of populism. That’s not an accident. It was precisely ordinary people’s free-willed dissent, our rejection of the EU and infinity immigrants and technocracy more broadly, that riled the ruling class and made them think: ‘Shit, we need to regain control of the narrative.’

That’s what the new centre is really about: deploying an army of moral guardians to dislodge dissenting ideas and boost orthodox ones. They’re the bots who dream of ‘reaching into people’s homes’ and ‘twisting’ what we think. This sinister centre is not about protecting national security from foreign powers – it’s about protecting the managerial elites and their lunatic policies from angry Brits.