Controlling The Epistemic Environment

They would appear to shed like snakeskins, so have the Russian passports been “found” yet? It does not look it, but if that photograph were genuine, then it would most plausibly show dealers who had been “caught” delivering to the American airmen at RAF Fairford, where Yulia Skripal had read out a prepared statement on 23 May 2018 before vanishing into thin air. On 18 May, Sergei Skripal had been discharged from hospital. Yulia had been discharged on 9 April. On 12 March, the front page of The Times had announced that Sergei was dead. 2018 was an Easter for the ages. In the dead of night and from 30 miles away, those “terror suspects”, four in number and at least one of them Middle Eastern-looking only if all coloureds looked the same to you, were apprehended in less than half an hour after an unidentified farmer, having supposedly spotted five men in balaclavas whom she was nevertheless able to identify as being of Middle Eastern appearance, had made a call to Gloucestershire Police.

Ah, Gloucestershire. As a Health Minister during the pandemic, does Nadine Dorries agree with the view expressed from the platform of last year’s Reform UK conference that it was “highly likely that the Covid vaccines have been a factor, a significant factor, in the cancer of members of the Royal Family”? Was the man whom David Lammy knew to have grown a cervix an earlier identity of the woman whose breasts Zack Polanski hypnotised to grow larger? But look, politicians are an odd lot. A distinguished Labour councillor repeatedly tried to convince me that Jesus had been an extraterrestrial. The Blair court featured Carole Caplin and her clairvoyant mother, the Temazcal of Nancy Aguilar and the stone circle of the wonderfully monikered Jack Temple, Cherie’s BioElectric Shield that had been given to her by Hillary Clinton, and much else besides. Temple was also a homeopath, and Jeremy Hunt promoted homeopathy (is the King using it to treat his cancer?) while he was Health Secretary. From 2017 to 2019, the Government’s majority was provided by Young Earth creationists. And a long-serving Conservative MP really and truly believed that the Government of this country was controlled by a witches’ coven in Gloucestershire, the county of which Paul Knaggs writes:

At a quarter to one on Sunday morning, somebody in Whelford picked up the phone. Three unfamiliar vans had arrived in a village of a few dozen homes on the edge of one of the most strategically important airfields in Europe. The caller did the ordinary, sensible thing. Julian Tubsbery, evacuated from his home in the early hours, told the BBC that the vans turned up in the middle of the village and a resident reported them to police at once.

By daylight the village had been emptied. A 400-metre cordon surrounded the vehicles while Army bomb-disposal specialists examined them, around 85 households were advised to leave, and a nearby leisure centre was opened for those with nowhere else to go. Aerial footage appeared to show a bomb-disposal robot moving between three white vans in woodland near the base. This is a live counter-terrorism investigation. What follows separates what the authorities have confirmed from what is being reported, and both from what is being guessed.

WHAT IS CONFIRMED

Gloucestershire Police’s Assistant Chief Constable, Richard Ocone, set out the sequence on Sunday afternoon. Police received a call at around 12.45am about three suspicious vehicles travelling towards RAF Fairford; armed officers responded and arrested five men in the Whelford area on suspicion of offences under the Explosives Act. The men were then further arrested on suspicion of preparing a terrorist act, contrary to Section 5 of the Terrorism Act. That offence sits in the Terrorism Act 2006, and it carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. It criminalises conduct in preparation for an attack, which is precisely why it is used when police believe they have intervened before anything happened.

Counter Terrorism Policing now leads the inquiry. Its national coordinator, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Vicki Evans, said: “We are in the early stages of an investigation, and five men remain in custody.” Under counter-terrorism law the men can be held for up to 14 days before charge. They have not been identified, and no motive has been suggested. Gloucestershire Police had earlier said: “We believe this incident is contained.” A government spokesperson said Prime Minister Andy Burnham is receiving updates. Five men, three vans, arrests under explosives and terrorism law, an Army disposal operation and a national counter-terrorism investigation. On its own, that is serious enough. It does not need embellishing.

WHAT IS NOT CONFIRMED 

Police have not said what was in the vans. That matters, because parts of the media have already decided. One outlet reported that the men were discovered with explosives; the police statements say nothing of the kind. They describe an arrest on suspicion and an examination that was still under way. Suspicion is not a finding, and an examination is not a result.

Nor have police explained the images of several arrested men, shirtless and handcuffed, that circulated on Sunday. The Daily Mail published video purporting to show several men under arrest in the early hours, apparently shirtless with their arms behind their backs. The defence website The Aviationist suggested they had likely been made to undress as a precaution against suicide vests. That is a plausible inference. It is not a police statement, and it should not be reported as fact. Claims that the SAS was deployed are circulating online. The Tribune can find no confirmation from the police or the Ministry of Defence. The confirmed military presence is the Army’s explosive ordnance disposal team.

Finally, and most importantly, police have not said that RAF Fairford was the target. Their words are that the vans were seen travelling towards it. Mr Ocone asked the public not to speculate but to follow official channels for updates. That request deserves to be honoured, not least because five men who have been charged with nothing are entitled to a fair trial if it comes to one. Whelford’s residents spent Sunday in a leisure centre because of a decision taken in Whitehall and Washington.

A BASE THAT WAS ALREADY BRACED 

What makes Sunday’s arrests harder to dismiss as chance is what happened in the days before them. Spotters reported alerts over the base’s tannoy on 26 September, aircraft being dispersed across the airfield, crash gates blocked and reinforced, and an apparent move to FPCON Delta. A local resident told PA Media that very heavy vehicles, including big tractors, had been placed across all the gates in recent weeks.

FPCON Delta is the top rung of the US military’s force-protection ladder. It applies where an attack has happened or where intelligence indicates terrorist action against a specific location is imminent. It has not been officially confirmed at Fairford. Open-source monitors reported Delta at Fairford and Charlie at Lakenheath and possibly Mildenhall, and the US Air Force’s reply was unrevealing: “For operational security reasons we will not discuss specific force protection measures.” One British outlet claims Lakenheath has confirmed it is operating at FPCON Charlie, but it does not say who confirmed it or how, so this article treats both alert levels as reported rather than established.

The reported posture is itself the story. If the American command raised protection at Fairford before the vans arrived, then somebody had intelligence of a threat. Whether British police acted on the same intelligence, or whether a vigilant villager got there first, is something the public is entitled to know once the investigation allows.

WHY FAIRFORD, AND WHY NOW 

Fairford is not a quiet training field. It has been used by US B-1 bombers targeting Iran and is a forward operating location for US Global Strike Command. After the US-Israeli war on Iran began on 28 February, the British government allowed the American military to use the base to strike Iranian missile sites. Ministers said in March that they had agreed to US requests to use British bases for “specific and limited defensive purposes.”

The following is The Tribune’s view, not established fact. Whatever the ministerial language, that decision made Fairford a front-line installation in a live war. A war does not stay politely inside the perimeter fence. Its risks spread into the lanes and cottages around it, to people who were never asked and never voted on it. Whelford’s residents spent Sunday in a leisure centre because of a decision taken in Whitehall and Washington. They carried the cost of that decision before anyone in government had explained it to them.

None of this establishes who the five men are or what they intended, and the Tribune draws no conclusion on either. It does mean that the government owes Parliament a statement when the investigation permits. That statement should cover what threat assessment lay behind the reported security escalation at US-used bases in the days before Sunday, whether local communities were warned, and whether the terms of US use of British airfields are being reviewed in light of the risk they now evidently carry.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT 

Counter Terrorism Policing has up to two weeks to charge, release or seek to extend detention. The Army’s findings on the vans will decide much of the story. Until then, the honest position is the one the evidence supports: a serious incident, a swift and apparently effective police response, and a series of large questions that nobody in authority has yet answered. Credit for Sunday belongs first to whoever made that call at 12.45am. The rest of us owe it to them, and to the five men who have not been convicted of anything, to wait for the facts. Whelford never chose to live beside a war. The least it is owed is the truth about what drove into the village at a quarter to one on a Sunday morning.

We stand little chance of getting that truth, but we would stand even less if we were still or back in the EU, as Norman Lewis writes:

Something significant happened in Strasbourg this week, yet hardly anybody seems to have noticed. No, it wasn’t the European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen’s annual State of the European Union speech. Rather, it was the European Parliament’s decision to endorse new measures designed to tackle ‘foreign interference’ in European politics. It’s a decision that will have enormous consequences for the future of democracy on the continent. The European Parliament was voting specifically on a European Parliament Special Committee report on the so-called European Democracy Shield. Parliament was effectively deciding whether to turn the Democracy Shield, an already existing project designed to ‘bolster democracy against foreign interference’, into a permanent institutional apparatus.

Ursula von der Leyen first proposed the Democracy Shield in 2024, and the European Commission formally unveiled it in November 2025. Its stated purpose is to protect European democracy against disinformation, foreign interference and increasingly sophisticated hybrid threats. Its key legal instrument, within a large armoury of laws, is the Digital Services Act – the law that enables the European Commission to determine what can or cannot be said online – with punitive fines for social-media platforms that do not comply. The ostensible focus of the Democracy Shield is what the EU calls ‘foreign information manipulation and interference’ (FIMI), by which it means a largely ‘non-illegal pattern of intentional and coordinated manipulative behaviour capable of damaging political processes and democratic values within [the EU’s] member states’.

This week’s vote confirms that the Democracy Shield is not really about FIMI. Its main objective is to police and control Europe’s domestic information environment. The machinery may appear to have been created with foreign threats in mind. But its focus is clearly on Europeans. It allows the EU to exercise authority over what information citizens encounter in their everyday lives. Asserting that opposition to EU immigration policies, for example, is the result of FIMI, which the Commission relentlessly does, allows the EU to delegitimise opposition to said immigration policies.

This is why this week’s vote matters: Brussels has chosen to consolidate the anti-democratic trajectory in European politics. The vote will entrench the power of the Commission’s European Centre for Democratic Resilience – an already existing hub connecting EU institutions, national governments and civil society – giving it its own mandate, dedicated budget and the ‘capacity to act’. What was originally conceived as a coordinating network will now become a permanent European institution for monitoring and controlling EU citizens’ information environment. The phrasing of the European Parliament’s report indicates the censorial intent. It explicitly refers to disinformation produced by ‘foreign and domestic actors’. It says the Digital Services Act should ensure ‘due prominence’ for ‘verified sources’. Finally, it calls for digital rules to protect ‘information integrity’ ‘during and outside election periods’.

A better name for the Democracy Shield would be the Ministry of Truth. It has shifted its focus from foreign interference to ‘domestic actors’. Its remit has expanded from regulating information environments during elections to doing so ‘outside’ elections, too – in other words, all the time. And the distinction between stopping covert manipulation and managing legitimate political disagreement has been blurred in a deliberate attempt to gain more control over what people can read online.

After all, who decides what is a ‘verified source’ and what should be given ‘due prominence’? Who decides whether a political argument is disinformation or a legitimate viewpoint? These questions go to the heart of democratic life. The consolidation and expansion of the EU’s Democracy Shield will only strengthen Brussels’ burgeoning censorship-industrial complex. It has already created ‘trusted flaggers’ and a network of ‘fact-checker’ NGOs. Platforms formally retain responsibility for deciding whether content is illegal, but with the threat of huge fines for non-compliance, they are effectively censoring at Brussels’ behest.

The extensive fact-checking infrastructure is set to expand exponentially. In March, the Commission awarded €5million to a project led by the European Fact-Checking Standards Network to strengthen fact-checking across Europe, create a repository of fact-checks and establish an emergency-response capacity. The Commission has separately provided €2.5million to continue the European Digital Media Observatory, whose new mandate includes monitoring and analysing online information to support ‘situational awareness’, particularly around elections and crises. The European Parliament vote this week has thus consolidated an interconnected governance system, linking together everyone from the Commission to the platforms, to the fact-checkers, to the EU-funded civil-society organisations, all in the name of regulating European citizens’ information environment.

The author of the report on the Democracy Shield, Swedish MEP Tomas Tobé, still insists that the shield’s objective is to counter foreign interference, Russian bots and electoral manipulation, not to regulate free speech. This is disingenuous in the extreme. What he and his committee have ushered in and legitimised is an administrative infrastructure designed to control what people say and think.

This is a breathtaking attack on democracy. After all, democracy rests on the presumption that citizens are morally and intellectually capable of engaging with competing arguments, judging them and deciding for themselves. Controlling the epistemic environment in which those citizens form their judgements runs counter to that presumption. Citizens are now regarded and treated less as autonomous political subjects than as vulnerable inhabitants of a dangerous information environment. They therefore require continuous protection, monitoring and management. The decisive struggle over free speech in Europe is no longer merely about what people are legally permitted to say. It is now about something broader – namely, who decides what Europeans are most likely to see, whom they are encouraged to trust and which ideas are classified as risks. The fight for free speech has reached a pivotal point in Europe.