Britain becoming ‘soft target’ for Russian propaganda, says security expert

Britain is becoming a soft target for Russian and other state propaganda because the UK is not prepared to educate people on how to deal with information warfare, according to a former White House adviser and security expert.

Fiona Hill told a parliamentary committee that she feared the UK had become “extraordinarily vulnerable” to online manipulation feeding into the electoral system because there was a lack of discussion about civil defence.

“I think part of the problem is also on the societal level: that the UK increasingly looks like a soft target rather than a hard target, because modern war, as we all know, is fought with so many different methods now, including propaganda,” Hill said.

She contrasted the UK with Sweden, which has an idea of “psychological defence”. It is about “training people to think about how you deal with all kinds of information warfare, so people can recognise when they’re being manipulated”.

The concept dates back to the cold war, but after a hiatus Sweden set up a psychological defence agency in 2022, which tries to work with the public and highlight online disinformation.

Four years ago, the unit highlighted that false narratives were being spread, originally from sources in Egypt, that Swedish social services were kidnapping Muslim children for corrupt purposes. The disinformation was for a time picked up and believed, particularly in immigrant communities, until it was called out and quashed.

Hill was speaking at a meeting of parliament’s joint committee on national security strategy, which is composed of MPs and peers, and is inquiring how the UK can build societal resilience in the online era.

She appeared alongside George Robertson, a former Nato secretary general, who alongside Hill co-authored last year’s Strategic Defence Review, which recommended that the government engage the general public in a wider conversation about the risks posed by Russia, China, Iran and others.

Robertson said there “was a great necessity to share with the country the kind of threats that we face at the moment” given that Keir Starmer, the prime minister, had warned about the possibility of a Russian attack on Nato by the end of the decade.

“You would have thought that it would have been a matter of some urgency,” Robertson said, but he added that despite trying to remind Starmer of the pledge to communicate more “they haven’t started it”.

The former Nato chief said: “We cannot allow the idea to be there that it is purely a matter for the armed forces to defend the country,” and that it required “an all of country approach” which included engaging citizens directly.

But Robertson and Hill argued that the UK had generally become poor in engaging people in civil defence and a realistic appraisal of the threat faced from Russia or elsewhere.

Hill said during the Troubles in Northern Ireland there had been a successful effort in educating people about the dangers of unattended bags which could contain explosives, but no analogous efforts today.