British leader calls for national centre to counter state disinformation

Prime Minister Andy Bernham said the UK has experienced an "industrial-scale assault" on its information environment and accused Russian agencies of using bots, fake websites, and falsified articles to sow division. "The Kremlin spends around 1.3 billion pounds each year on manipulating information," he told the assembly, using the figure to underline the scale of the threat.

To counter this, Bernham said he had asked security chiefs to begin work on a new national centre for information defence "to detect, attribute and disrupt these kinds of hostile state information attacks." He framed the centre as part of a broader push to strengthen democratic resilience and offered UK experience to help other countries protect elections and public discourse.