Burnham has announced that Britain is to have a ‘National Centre for Information Defence’, claiming that it is essential to protect us from interference by malign powers, particularly Russia. It is, of course, essential that Britain protects itself from hostile actors. But the Free Speech Union fears that the NCID will be used to target British citizens who refuse to subscribe to the progressive orthodoxies championed by the Labour Government. As Bob Seely, the former MP and soldier, writes in The Telegraph, given the egregious infringements of our free speech rights and the Government’s inability to foresee the unintended consequences of its legislation, we should not assume that this will be an effective tool for countering Russian aggression. Labour has consistently labelled inconvenient truths, such as the scale of migrant-boat crossings, as “disinformation”. We should all be alarmed that the Defence Secretary, Wes Streeting, has felt the need to insist that the NCID will not be used to target “domestic political dissent”. The new centre will quickly and inevitably become a useful tool for Labour to silence dissent and target those who criticise its policies. It also creates a blueprint for a future, more authoritarian government to claim that a democratic election might have been influenced by outsiders in an attempt to delegitimise it. We must be mindful that, beneath the surface, this is a deeply Orwellian project. Read more below in @Telegraph 👇