LABOUR prime minister Andy Burnham used his address to the UN General Council on Tuesday to announce that his government was setting up a new UK agency to fight ‘information warfare’ from ‘hostile states’ naming Russia as its prime target.
This new centre, initially led by the prime minister and the Labour cabinet, will work with intelligence services, government departments, the police and social media to create an all-encompassing agency to enforce control over information from countries identified as enemies of the British state.
According to Burnham, security chiefs will be organising the National Centre for Information Defence that will ‘detect, attribute and disrupt’ information attacks from foreign countries.
This new extension of the state security service will be tasked with ensuring the UK has the capability to combat ‘information warfare’ and build national resistance by helping communities to identify and combat disinformation.
Burnham made clear that the real aim of this new organisation was to prevent a ‘distorted and untrue’ picture of UK capitalism from poisoning the minds of workers and especially unemployed youth and a working class struggling to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads as the economy dives into recession.
Burnham said: ‘We’re talking about an insidious campaign that reaches into people’s homes and twists what they feel about their own country and community – creating a narrative of decline, stoking division and sowing despair.’
Burnham told the UN that there was no ‘national security without a strong, cohesive society’, insisting: ‘That’s the starting point for everything we hold dear and everything we want to achieve,’ adding: ‘But the fact is that it has been under attack’.
Burnham then went on to directly name Russia as being behind an ‘industrial-scale assault by hostile actors on the information environment’.
It is beyond irony that Burnham chose to make this announcement on the very stage shared by the biggest liar and spreader of ‘fake news’ in the world – US president Donald Trump – who used his rambling speech to claim victory in countless wars across the world, including the defeat of Iran while in the next breath saying he would bomb them ‘to hell’ if they didn’t admit defeat.
The main source of disinformation has come from the US controlled social media sites which have bombarded the UK with lurid claims that London has been occupied by Muslims and spreading ‘great displacement’ lies seized by neo-Nazi’s spurring on their brutal attacks on refugees.
The Trump administration gets a free pass on spreading disinformation as Burnham concentrates on the real enemy, Russia.
Burnham and the Labour government are desperate to whip up a war frenzy amongst workers and especially the youth against Russia.
His constant theme throughout the speech on the necessity for ‘social cohesion’ is a reflection of the fear haunting the Labour party reformists that the working class and young people have had enough of being expected to endure relentless poverty and unemployment while the bosses and bankers live the life of billionaires.
The reformist Labourites have always based their class collaboration with the ruling class around the call for ‘social cohesion’, summoning the working class to imperialist slaughter and demanding that they sacrifice their lives for the survival of a bankrupt capitalist system that is on its last legs.
The working class will never accept a future of wars, recession and poverty as the only future a collapsing capitalist system holds for them.
The time has come for the working class to force the TUC leaders to either break with the Labour government or be sacked and replaced with a new leadership prepared to call a general strike to bring down the Burnham government and replace it with a workers government and socialism – a workers government that will expropriate the capitalist class and base itself on the establishment of Councils of Action to run the country.
Join the WRP and Young Socialists to build up the leadership required for the victory of the British Socialist Revolution. There is no time to lose!
