Andy Burnham was once flagged by a government disinformation unit. Now he's building one
Andy Burnham told the UN that hostile states have 'amplified far right narratives' and ordered a new National Centre for Information Defence. Canada has already built most of the same machine.
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Article by Rebel News staff.
Three weeks ago, at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, Britain's new Labour Prime Minister gave his first speech to the world. Andy Burnham's big announcement: "Today I am tasking our 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."
Detect. Attribute. Disrupt.
To be fair, hostile states really do play these games. Russia runs bot farms and fake news websites. A counter-intelligence unit chasing foreign spies would be nothing to object to.
But listen to what Burnham said just before the big announcement, in the official transcript on the British government's own website.
"There is no national security without a strong, cohesive society."
Cohesive. Keep that word in mind.
"They've amplified far right narratives."
Far right. So the problem isn't forged documents or fake websites. It's narratives. Opinions.
And then this: "Over the last decade we have given too much ground to those who want to run a negative, corrosive narrative about life in Britain, which bears no resemblance to reality. Well, no more."
That's the Prime Minister of a country where people are arrested over Facebook posts, telling the world he's done tolerating people who are negative about Britain, or at least about his version of it.
He even said who's at risk: people "struggling with the cost of living," and young people "not in employment, education or training." They are "much more vulnerable to this kind of influence."
See how that works? Think the country is going downhill, and you're not a citizen with an opinion. You're a victim of Vladimir Putin. You need protecting, from your own thoughts. By that logic, why not abolish the official opposition? They're so negative.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage saw it right away: "Andy Burnham is setting up a Ministry of Truth to clamp down on free speech." Defence Secretary Wes Streeting insisted on GB News that the unit would not be used for "policing domestic political dissent."
Britain's earlier disinformation units tell a different story.
In January 2023, the civil liberties group Big Brother Watch published Ministry of Truth, built on freedom of information requests into what Whitehall's anti-disinformation teams, like the Rapid Response Unit and the Counter Disinformation Unit, did during Covid.
Who did they catch? Columnist Peter Hitchens. Conservative MP David Davis, for criticising vaccine passports. Oxford professor Carl Heneghan, for an article questioning whether the "rule of six" was arbitrary. Broadcaster Julia Hartley-Brewer.
And one more: a Labour politician written up in a Rapid Response Unit report for opposing local lockdowns in his city. The Mayor of Greater Manchester.
Andy Burnham.
The man now building Britain's new disinformation centre was himself logged by a disinformation unit for disagreeing with the government. Now he is the government. He was disinformation once. Now he decides who is.
It gets worse. A whistleblower told Big Brother Watch that during Covid, soldiers in the British Army's 77th Brigade, an information warfare unit, were collecting the posts of ordinary people who questioned lockdown. Then-defence secretary Ben Wallace admitted in the House of Commons that the brigade used "material shared on social media platforms to assess UK disinformation trends."
Then came Southport: three little girls murdered at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in July 2024, and riots across England. Emails made public last year by U.S. Congressman Jim Jordan's House Judiciary Committee show the government's National Security Online Information Team, the renamed Counter Disinformation Unit, flagging posts to TikTok as "exacerbating tensions."
One post it treated with "urgency" showed a rejected freedom of information request about asylum hotel locations and called the occupants "undocumented fighting-age males." Not a Russian. A Brit, holding a letter from his own government. And it took the United States Congress to find out.
Even Prevent, the Home Office's counter-extremism program, flagged Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four as of interest to the far right. A Ministry of Truth with Nineteen Eighty-Four on its watch list.
Here's the number to remember: 62,199. That's how many people Big Brother Watch found were arrested in Britain for speech offences over five years. A small city. Of them, 12,292 were convicted.
So much for not policing dissent. Every one of these units was born looking at Moscow. Every one ended up looking at British citizens.
Parliament saw this coming. In March, the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee urged ministers to create a national counter-disinformation centre, but said it "should be placed on a statutory footing" and "be subject to oversight by parliament." Burnham announced his at the United Nations instead. His speech mentioned no statute, no budget and no role for Parliament.
Why should Canadians care? Because Britain is a dystopian time machine. What happens there arrives here a few years later.
Canada doesn't have a National Centre for Information Defence. Not under that name. It just has all the parts.
During Covid, the Privy Council Office, the Prime Minister's own department, wanted to "procure a social media monitoring service contract, as a pilot project." Rebel News obtained the briefing note through access to information: "Without social media monitoring, we are missing an important tool to assess the efficiency of our communications." Staff knew how it would look: "There is a perception that such services are there to collect information about Canadians."
Then Ottawa bought the tool: Meltwater, a "social listening" firm that monitors social media in real time. The federal government has paid it since 2014, including a $49,437.50 Privy Council Office contract in November 2023 with an emphasis on media monitoring. Is that how you fight Putin?
After October 7, Canadian Heritage paid more than $128,000 to the British-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue for a "Digital Analysis Situation Room And Rapid Response Programming For Israel-Gaza Extremism, Hate And Misinformation." Tracking Hamas supporters? No. According to records reported by Blacklock's Reporter, it tracked "right wing responses to the conflict" and noted that many of the most active Twitter accounts had taken pro-Israel positions. Ottawa paid a foreign outfit to watch pro-Israel Canadians.
Remember Burnham's "far right narratives"? Same playbook, different country.
In 2020, the Canadian Armed Forces planned influence operations on Canadians during the pandemic. A Forces report later found military leaders saw Covid as a "unique opportunity" to test propaganda techniques. Reservists in Nova Scotia even mailed out a fake government letter warning that wolves had been released. Real letter, real mailboxes, fake wolves.
The Public Health Agency of Canada admitted it tracked 33 million mobile devices during lockdown.
And this summer, Blacklock's obtained a 35-page memo from Industry Minister Mélanie Joly's department titled "Misinformation and Disinformation Strategy." It names Facebook, X and LinkedIn. The department would decide whether posts are "factually incorrect, misleading or out of context." And the heavily redacted memo contemplates "legal action" against people posting what the government deems "false or misleading information."
The government. Suing citizens. Over posts.
The architecture keeps going up. Justice Marie-Josée Hogue's foreign interference inquiry called for a new government entity to monitor the "domestic open source online information environment." In March, the Carney government committed $31.5 million over five years so Global Affairs Canada's Rapid Response Mechanism can "detect and respond to foreign information threats that aim to harm Canadian interests at all times." Not just at election time. All the time.
Then there's Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act. It would create a cabinet-appointed Digital Safety Commission that could order platforms to remove categories of harmful content, including content that "foments hatred." On September 21, Prime Minister Mark Carney said his government would move ahead with it this fall.
Heritage Minister Marc Miller described the job: "What constitutes legitimate and illegitimate discussion is a very fine line." And it won't just wait for complaints: "when it comes to things like online gambling, misinformation, disinformation, to make it safe by design."
A very fine line. Drawn by him.
So here's a question for Andy Burnham and Mark Carney: name one thing Brits or Canadians believe about their own country that is false and that Vladimir Putin put in their heads. In Britain, Reform UK's Zia Yusuf put almost exactly that question to a former Labour adviser on live television. He got nothing.
Of course not. The "negative, corrosive narrative" isn't coming from Moscow. It's coming from the grocery bill. The rent. The mortgage. The hotel full of military-age migrant men down the road. People don't need a Russian bot to notice their own lives.
Putin isn't going to be disrupted by a committee in Downing Street or an office in Ottawa. The only people these units can reach are their own citizens. And every time the machine has been switched on, it has pointed at the same people: lockdown sceptics, immigration critics, pro-Israel Canadians. The negative. The corrosive. The "far right." About half the country.
Andy Burnham found that out the hard way. He was on the list. The only difference between him and everyone else is that he got to become Prime Minister and take over the list.
Ottawa is building its censorship machine one piece at a time. Tell the government to stop: sign the Stop the Censorship petition.
COMMENTS
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Bruce Atchison commented 2026-10-13 20:55:03 -0400 FlagRussia is a convenient scapegoat for politicians. So any person speaking common sense is labeled as a Putin operative by those censorious thugs.
