Democracy Shield?

UnHerd is excellent, carrying such outstanding writers as Thomas Fazi:

The EU loves talking about freedom. Just look at one of its recent press releases, launching something called the European Democracy Shield, which promises to protect everything from “free people” to “free elections” to — this being Brussels — “a vibrant civil society”. All admirable stuff, perhaps, at least on paper. In reality, though, the Democracy Shield is just the latest vision in unfreedom: suppressing dissent and policing speech under the pretext of defending democracy from foreign interference and fake news.

As part of the Democracy Shield, the Commission proposes the creation of a Monitoring Centre that would identify and remove “false content” and “disinformation” from the internet. As Henna Virkkunen, Executive Vice President for Security and Democracy, stated, the Shield will enable Europe to “respond faster and more effectively to information manipulation and hybrid threats”. The EU’s High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy, Kaja Kallas, made no secret of the anti-Russian nature of the initiative: “we are seeing campaigns, including from Russia, specifically designed to polarise our citizens, undermine trust in our institutions and pollute politics in our countries.”

The term “independent” appears repeatedly in the press release. A new “independent European network of fact-checkers” will be set up in all official EU languages, while the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO), the EU’s flagship “fact-checking” network, financed to the tune of almost €30 million, will gain new “independent” analytical powers to monitor elections and crisis situations. But, remember, independence in Brussels translates to financial dependence on the Commission. Indeed, to guarantee this “independence”, the Commission promises generous funding to “independent” NGOs and media outlets.

The Democracy Shield builds upon the recent Digital Services Act (DSA), the most sweeping internet regulation ever implemented in Europe. In theory, these initiatives are meant to protect democracy; in practice, they do the opposite. Their aim isn’t to “fight disinformation”, as claimed, but rather to control the narrative at a time when Europe’s political elites are facing unprecedented levels of public distrust, by centralising control over the flow of information and imposing a single “truth” defined by Brussels. In short, the European Commission is building a continent-wide censorship machine.

As one EU diplomat recently put it, in truly Orwellian fashion: “Freedom of speech remains for everyone. At the same time, however, citizens must be free from interference.” But who decides what constitutes “interference”? Who determines what is “true” and what is “fake”? The same institutions and corporate media outlets that have repeatedly engaged in fearmongering and disinformation themselves. Just a few weeks ago, Ursula von der Leyen claimed that the GPS system on her plane had been jammed by Russia — an allegation quickly debunked by analysts. Meanwhile, the BBC, often held up as a paragon of journalistic integrity, was recently caught editing footage of a Donald Trump speech to make it appear more extreme.

The EU claims to be protecting citizens from “falsehoods” but on what democratic or moral basis does the Commission assume the authority to decide what is true, especially when it is clear that the EU’s political-media establishment itself engages in disinformation and propaganda on a regular basis? Moreover, when so-called independent fact-checkers are hand-picked and financed by the Commission itself, the result is a closed feedback loop: the EU funds institutions that then “verify” and amplify the EU’s own narratives. The Democracy Shield, like its predecessors, thus institutionalises the power to define reality itself.

In a series of reports, I have shown that the European Union already operates a vast propaganda and censorship apparatus that spans every level of civil society — NGOs, think tanks, the media and even academia. The cornerstone of this system is a network of EU-funded programmes — notably CERV (Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values), Creative Europe and the Jean Monnet initiative — that collectively funnel billions of euros into organisations that are, in theory, “independent” but are in fact deeply enmeshed in the Brussels machine.

Through the CERV programme alone — which boasts a budget of almost €2 billion for 2021-2027 — more than 3,000 NGOs have received funding to carry out over 1,000 projects. Officially, these funds promote “European values”. In practice, they finance progressive and pro-EU activism: gender ideology, multiculturalism, anti-nationalism and “countering Euroscepticism”. Many projects are explicitly designed to “increase trust in the EU” or “counter anti-EU narratives”. Meanwhile, NGOs in Central and Eastern Europe are generously funded to “combat autocratic narratives” and “challenge Euroscepticism”, often directly targeting governments in Poland (under the previous executive) or Hungary — external influence strategies not unlike those historically associated with agencies like USAID. 

The result is a pseudo-civil society — a network of nominally “grassroots” actors functioning as proxies for the Commission, amplifying its agenda and manufacturing the illusion of popular support for its policies.

The same pattern applies to the media. My research has shown that the EU channels at least €80 million annually directly to newspapers, broadcasters, news agencies and “journalistic partnerships”— amounting to nearly €1 billion over the past decade. Programmes such as IMREG (Information Measures for Cohesion Policy) have paid media outlets to publish articles praising EU cohesion funds, in some cases without even disclosing that the content was EU-financed. The Commission calls it “raising awareness”. In any other context, it would be called covert advertising or propaganda.

The EU’s propaganda machine extends into academia as well. Through the Jean Monnet programme, the Commission allocates about €25 million a year to universities and research institutes worldwide, financing over 1,500 Jean Monnet Chairs in 700 institutions. The goal is not to support independent scholarship but to embed pro-EU ideology into higher education. Official documents state explicitly that recipients are expected to act as “ambassadors of the European Union” and “outreach agents” engaging with media and NGOs. The academy has effectively been transformed into an ideological instrument.

With the Democracy Shield, the Commission now intends to vastly expand this machinery. It proposes to not only establish what amounts to a de facto Ministry of Truth, but also to inject even more money into NGOs, “independent” media and fact-checking networks tasked with promoting “European values”. Von der Leyen is, in effect, buying consensus — and using citizens’ own money to do it — collapsing the boundaries between the European super-state, media, civil society and academia.

And if the EU’s goal, here, were merely to manipulate narratives, that would be alarming enough. But the pattern now points towards direct interference in electoral processes. We have already seen this play out in countries like Romania and Moldova, where local elites — with open or tacit support from Brussels — invoked the spectre of “Russian interference” (without providing much evidence) to justify blatant manipulation of domestic elections. In Romania, authorities cancelled an election and barred the leading populist candidate from running. In Moldova, pro-EU authorities used “security concerns” to prevent Russia-leaning expatriates from voting. Protecting democracy thus becomes the pretext for suspending it, even as the Democracy Shield explicitly foresees strengthening the European Cooperation Network for Elections and, ominously, promoting “systematic exchanges on the integrity of electoral processes”.

The Commission’s appetite for control is not limited to information and elections. Ursula von der Leyen recently also initiated the creation of a new intelligence unit under the direct authority of the European Commission. The goal, according to the Financial Times, is to unify intelligence data from member states and “enhance the EU’s ability to detect and respond to threats”. The plan foresees the eventual creation of a European intelligence cooperation service, effectively a supranational agency that would operate alongside national intelligence services. Officially, it would enhance “strategic autonomy”. In practice, it would likely function as a subsidiary of Nato and, by extension, of the CIA, especially since the same proposal explicitly calls for “strengthening EU-NATO cooperation”.

It points to a broader worrying trend of power centralisation in the hands of the Commission — and of von der Leyen personally. Understandably, many observers find the prospect of giving “Empress Ursula” an army of supranational spies — operating beyond the oversight of national parliaments — profoundly disturbing. Giving an unelected, opaque institution like the Commission its own intelligence apparatus would mark yet another milestone in Europe’s transformation into a techno-authoritarian juggernaut — one that surveils not foreign enemies, but its own citizens.

Seen in this context, the Democracy Shield appears like nothing more than a tool to further institutionalise a regime of managed speech and narrative control. Its goal is to police online speech according to vague, politically charged definitions of “disinformation”; to compel platforms, journalists, academics and citizens alike to conform to a narrow, Commission-approved worldview; and to silence dissent in the name of “fighting foreign interference”. Yet it is becoming increasingly clear that the real war on democracy isn’t being waged by Moscow or Beijing; it is being waged from within, by the very institutions claiming to defend it.

And Aris Roussinos:

Three hundred years ago, the Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift, putting the finishing touches to his great critique of British governance, Gulliver’s Travels, dashed off his sketch of the unhappy land of Balnibarbi. The people of Balnibarbi were ruled by a distant governing class on the floating island of Laputa, literally removed from their everyday concerns and instead devoted to the application of novel and abstract theorems of their own devising, which aimed to improve the general lot of mankind. Yet the “only Inconvenience is, that none of these Projects are yet brought to Perfection; and in the mean time, the whole Country lies miserably waste”. Of Balnibarbi, Swift writes, “I never knew a Soil so unhappily cultivated, Houses so ill contrived and so ruinous, or a People whose Countenances and Habit expressed so much Misery and Want.” And yet, “instead of being discouraged”, Gulliver finds the governing class of Laputa “Fifty Times more violently bent upon prosecuting their Schemes, driven equally on by Hope and Despair”.

Swift was, no doubt, inspired by his native Ireland, until now the historical benchmark for poor British governance mismanaging a nation under its purview, and inspiring spasms of inchoate anger among its benighted people that led eventually to revolution. Yet the portrait of a distant governing class obsessed with extracting solar energy from cucumbers as the cities they rule fall into squalid ruination, trying and failing to make reality conform to their ideal theories, is an uncomfortably apposite one for the British mainland today. British politics now looks less like the collapse of a party than of an entire regime.

If Keir Starmer did not exist, the governing caste he represents would have had to invent him. Indeed, so rigid and robotic are Starmer’s certainties, so unwilling to face reality and so strangely devoid of interior life is he, that we half-suspect they did: the Prime Minister seems less a person than a tulpa collectively dreamed up by this class at its moment of terminal trial. An idealist of a failed Utopia, a technocrat who cannot govern, a manager who cannot control the underlings who despise him, his failings are those of his caste as a whole; he is, it increasingly seems, the final incarnation of the old regime. Over just the past couple of years, the British electorate has eviscerated both parties of its two-party democracy: historic landslides have immediately crumbled into electoral extinction, rendering power illusory and the country ungovernable. Five prime ministers in a decade have tried and failed to impose some order to the chaos. And what is surely now the most revolutionary electorate in the Western world is drumming yet another leader to the scaffold.

It is useless, in these circumstances, for Starmer to remind his rebellious party that he won power barely a year ago with a landslide mandate; that he is, as his allies desperately brief the press, just one of two living persons to have ever won an election for Labour. Starmer’s devious and sharp-elbowed internal climb to power, then, reveals him as probably the most competent and successful politician that the modern Labour movement can produce. That he is already so weak, so luckless and so widely despised highlights the essential problem neither he nor any Labour successor can overcome: he is the incarnation not so much of a party as of an entire cohort about to be swept from the stage.

In a democracy — we are told often enough, anyway — governments win and hold power by giving voters what they want. Yet British democracy works in quite other ways: those who hold power are fearful of what the voters want, repelled by it on moral grounds, and instead see their role, like a stern Victorian nanny, as forcing down the bitter and improving medicine it is their duty to administer to its ungrateful charge. That the voters may grumble, sulk and spit it out is all, for them, an expected part of the process. The very existence of British democracy is, we may say, a testable proposition: in its greatest test so far, the Brexit referendum, our governing caste entirely failed. Viewing the result as a tantrum to be ridden out, rather than a demand for total reform, every element of our governing caste congealed together in a single mass to frustrate and subvert the vote. Brexit’s winning voters were, they told themselves, merely deluded and misinformed.

There is a pleasing synchrony, then, in the collapse of the Starmer project, and of the BBC’s latest and perhaps last great scandal: they are both, after all, the death pangs of an elite that has lost its legitimacy. When we see the BBC’s defenders mobilising, like worker ants scurrying to defend their threatened queen, we see revealed an entire class struggling to maintain its grasp on power. The narrow sweep of those who, in declaring the BBC’s non-partisan nature, reveal how precisely partisan the organisation has become, underlines the scale of the problem. From the Sixties onwards, through to winning power in the Nineties, a set of ideological assumptions became dominant within the Westminster State and its class allies in what we euphemistically term “the professions”. The BBC transmits the worldview of this class, whether those who pay for it wish to watch it or not. Gleefully adopting a role as combators of “disinformation” — that is to say, opinions conflicting with this worldview — the Corporation has veered ever more tightly to its own narrowing set of approved beliefs.

As its latest scandal shows, what is objectively true is now of less importance to the BBC’s tastemakers than what ought to be true, or simply feels true to them. From history documentaries to morning pabulum to the tired, court satire of Have I Got News For You, whose doddering panellists still trot out flaccid jibes at their caste enemies, it is now impossible to watch the BBC’s content without wading through its intrusive ideology at every step. “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us”, Keats wrote: yet having long foregone any pretensions to artistry, all that is left of the BBC’s output is the designs its makers wish to impose on those who fund them. Like the rest of their caste, in Westminster or in Whitehall, within the BBC’s management there is not the slightest hint of self-doubt or wavering, even out of self-preservation, in the face of the nation’s growing contempt.

This caste, when expressing the righteousness of its beliefs, likes to think of itself as the Sensible Ones, setting itself against the base enthusiasms of the British public. We may instead call them, as the ancient Greeks euphemistically did the Furies, the Kindly Ones. For the early results of their imposed ideological project are in, and their punishing regime of self-regarding kindliness has brought both daily horrors and petty humiliations into the routine of British life. Indeed, the collapse in wealth, liberty, public safety and basic capacity to govern that has so rapidly ensued is so dramatic that Britain has become, to America’s reigning Right, the whipping boy for an entire failed ideology — the cautionary Ruritanian end state, as Hungary once was to its liberals, of the opposing domestic faction’s worldview. From the American government’s perspective, a narrow ideological and cultural class has seized control of the entire British state, and the mismanagement that has ensued may yet be fatal. With all the unsentimental precision of an imperial bureaucrat taking stock of a failing colony, it is a more accurate assessment than anything in lobby commentary.

That Reform will come to power now seems increasingly certain. That the party is capable of governing Britain now — or that anyone can — is doubtful in the extreme. For Reform to win power, it must transition into a middle-class as well as working-class party, a process that is already well under way. After all, the Epping homeowners protesting migrant accommodation beneath their sea of flags are surely a more affluent demographic than the average Leftist wavering between the Greens and Your Party. Yet as Starmer’s fate reveals, winning power is not the same thing, in modern Britain, as wielding it. Reform’s ability to actually govern rests on either inspiring mass defections among the current professional class, or in the total personnel renewal of the entire British state. The BBC’s fate, under the incoming regime, will serve as a useful benchmark for their progress: does Reform intend to disestablish the Corporation, and all the other lavishly funded, senile and corrupted monasteries of the British state, or does it wish to reshape it in its own image? Will the crisis of the British state be resolved by the renewal of its failing institutions, or in starting afresh?

Yet unseating, or replacing, an entrenched and unelected shadow state, firmly convinced of its moral right to eternal rule, is not a simple task. Let us imagine that, in assuming power, Reform were to embark upon a great rolling series of referendums on the questions dividing the nation from its rulers: on immigration, on crime and punishment, on the headlong rush to Net Zero. Would the governing class, spread across all its perches in the British state, accept the likely results, or would it seek to frustrate and undermine them? Would the democratically expressed will of the British people be respected, whatever the nation decides, or would it be delegitimised as the populism of the base urges, with the establishment’s role being to protect the British people from their own desires? We already know the answer. 

British politics now resembles, rather than a crown in the gutter, an ancient sword of great power asking to be drawn from its calcified and rusting matrix, with the current establishment preferring instability and collapse than deigning to touch it. As long as their grasp on power lies beyond the reach of British democracy, the worst is yet to come. Just like Swift’s Laputans, “instead of being discouraged” by their failure, those who rule us “are Fifty Times more violently bent upon prosecuting their Schemes, driven equally on by Hope and Despair”. The nation has not yet escaped Laputa’s burdensome shadow. If the failure of the Starmer project was an inevitability, the failure of Farage’s last-ditch attempt at reform presents a far more worrying prospect.