Nick Clegg: We need to stand up and defend democracy in the era of Brexit and Putin Throughout the 1950s and 60s, the United States secretly financed Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic party. In 2013, the CIA finally […]

Throughout the 1950s and 60s, the United States secretly financed Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic party. In 2013, the CIA finally admitted that it had helped to orchestrate the coup against Iran’s secular prime minister, Mohammed Mosaddeq, 60 years earlier. And in Latin America US meddling in domestic elections was, for a while, almost routine.

Britain, too, has been no slouch when it comes to interference in other countries’ elections. In the US elections of 1940, for example, British intelligence officers waged a campaign of fake news and political manipulation in an attempt to marginalise candidates who were opposed to US intervention in the Second World War.

So meddling in elections is not new, and the Russians are not the only country to have been at it. Yet modern election meddling is still different in some important respects. “Western” democracies, including our own, are now the targets for the first time; and the internet and social media allow for false or malign messages to be fired at voters with a speed and scale never seen before.

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Getting closer to home

During the US presidential election in 2016, thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee were released, fake news from fake accounts appeared on Facebook and bots (automated accounts) came to life on Twitter.

In January of the same year, Russian state television began airing reports about an ethnic Russian girl named Lisa, who had allegedly been kidnapped and gang-raped by a group of Muslim refugees in Berlin. The reports were immediately dismissed as inaccurate by German police and other senior officials. Russian diplomats and media responded by accusing Berlin of staging a cover-up, a reaction which prompted dozens of street protests.

‘Politicians and press barons still spend far too much time, out of the public gaze, trying to influence each other. Our electoral and party funding systems are a joke’

In the French presidential elections, Vladimir Putin publicly backed Marine Le Pen. Just 36 hours before the polls opened, a massive hack (nine gigabytes) of Emmanuel Macron’s campaign emails was released. Independent analysts have asserted that Russian hackers were behind it (others have pointed the finger at US-based alt-right groups, who seemed to be the main ones pushing a concerted #MacronLeaks campaign on social media).

And we’re all familiar with the evidence of Russia-based bots and trolls spreading pro-Brexit messages online, the tawdry links and heavy-drinking meetings between Arron Banks and Russian officials, and the claims by Cambridge Analytica that it was able to manipulate data to swing votes.

So now that election meddling is happening to “us” in the same way it used to be inflicted on others, it is worth asking whether our democratic institutions and practices are strong enough.

Are we sufficiently protected against the bots, the trolls, the hackers and fake accounts who wish us harm? To answer that question, a new Transatlantic Commission on Election Integrity has been launched and held its first meeting in Copenhagen recently. It is co-chaired by Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former Danish PM and head of Nato, along with Michael Chertoff, a former US head of Homeland Security. I am a founder member, as are a number of other former government figures – from Joe Biden, Barack Obama’s vice president, to Felipe Calderón, a former president of Mexico – and journalists and analysts too.

By commissioning research into the changing nature of election meddling, we hope to cast a spotlight on the problem and, most importantly, give countries under attack a toolkit with which they can help protect themselves.

Democracy isn’t inevitable

I am part of a generation for whom the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was the biggest moment in our political lives – the end of the looming threat of nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union, paving the way for the reunification of a European continent ripped in two by the Cold War; and, if not quite Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history”, a feeling that democracy would flourish as an unrivalled means of freedom and self-expression.

Yet we now know that democracy cannot flourish unaided. It needs constant vigilance and attention. All married couples have to learn after the euphoria of a wedding and a honeymoon that strong relationships need to be worked at, all the time. Good things don’t just happen on autopilot. Our democracy is the same. It needs reform, strengthening, updating. Our democratic institutions and electoral systems were designed for a different age – they need to be future-proofed for the age of data.

Yet we have a political culture stuck firmly in the past, famously resistant to even the most modest reforms. The way we vote on Thursdays has barely changed in centuries. We have a second chamber which has become a bloated receptacle for political nepotism. Politicians and press barons still spend far too much time, out of the public gaze, trying to influence each other. Our electoral and party funding systems are a joke. Parliament is riddled not just with asbestos but stodgy anachronisms, and needs to be evacuated.

Boris Johnson’s contempt for both our Parliament and his constituents as he fled this week from a vote on Heathrow expansion sums it all up. Our democracy is not in good health.

Biden put it brilliantly when he said that a combination of external meddling and internal neglect means that the vitality of our democracy is being “sanded down”. People – and newspapers – who should know better attack the independence of our judiciary and the objectivity of our civil servants. MPs find themselves subject to appalling vitriol and regular death threats. Reason, evidence and discussion are dismissed in favour of bile, fury and unreason.

We must stand up for the central tenets of open, tolerant debate before our threadbare democratic institutions are enfeebled beyond repair.

@Nick_Clegg