Why we need urgent action to safeguard our democracy.

This is an approximate transcript of the meeting in Parliament on 27 April 2026 chaired by Richard Quigley MP on the subject of Defensive Constitutional Reform. It was attended by MPs and members of the House of Lords, and by invited guests.

Here is a link to the report they discussed.

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Welcome by Richard Quigley

Good afternoon and thank you for coming to today’s event, which I believe tackles an extremely important topic: Defensive Constitutional Reform.

There has been a great deal of progressive constitutional reform work over the years, focusing on how to make our system function better, but comparatively little attention has been given to the question of how we can protect what we have against bad actors inside or outside the UK who seek to subvert our democracy for their own ends.

That very pragmatic question of how we defend our democracy, as quickly as possible, against a threat which – as we can see by the US experience – is a clear and present danger is what we shall explore today.

I am delighted that we have such a strong expert panel to help us address that question.

• Professor Andrew Blick is Professor of Politics and Contemporary History at King’s College London, and co-director of the Centre for British Democracy. He is co-author with Lord Hennessy of Could it Happen Here? The Day a Prime Minister Refuses to Resign.
• Tom Brake is the CEO of Unlock Democracy. He previously spent 22 years as a Member of Parliament, where he was active in pushing for democratic reform, including extending Freedom of Information (FOI) laws to private companies like Serco and Capita when they undertake work for the public sector, for votes at 16, and in defending UK elections from foreign interference.
• Mark Kieran is the CEO of Open Britain. He is a passionate advocate for better democracy. He has had past roles in local government, Whitehall, and Parliament. Mark’s goal is to help build a new democracy with fair elections that are free from dark money and disinformation, and in which all votes count.
• Professor Christina Pagel is Professor of Operational Research at University College London. She has a background in mathematics and physics and has used these analytical skills in analysing health issues. More recently, in 2025, she launched the Trump Action Tracker, a comprehensive database of actions which tend towards authoritarianism.
• Mark Thomas is the Founder of The 99% Organisation – an all-volunteer group dedicated to protecting the UK’s social contract: safeguarding its democracy, ending mass impoverishment and protecting key public services.

As well as the panel, there are quite a few other experts in the audience we may also call on.

The bulk of the session will consist of an opportunity for you to ask questions of the expert panel, but before that I will ask Mark to give you a quick summary of the working paper.

Summary by Mark Thomas

Thank you Richard. And good afternoon, everybody. Thank you very much for coming.

As Richard said, we will spend most of the time in discussion with the expert panel, but first I’ll give a quick overview of our reports.

The need for the project which produced these reports became clear when Project 2025 was published in the US. It was nothing less than a plan to unwind US democracy for the benefit of an already extremely wealthy few.

After the election, as that plan began to be implemented (at pace), we pulled together a team with expertise in constitutional matters, politics, risk assessment and Systems Security to explore the question: if this can happen in the US, a country whose constitution was explicitly designed to protect against autocracy, what can we do to stop the same thing happening here in the UK?

I will quickly cover our conclusions on:

• The scale of the risk;
• The nature of the defences we could put in place;
• Our assessment of the effectiveness of those defences; and
• The immediate steps policy-makers could take.

Let’s begin by looking at the scale of the risk.

How significant is the risk to UK democracy?

Since it was the US that first worried us, it’s worth looking at how serious the democratic backsliding – the unwinding, in other words, of democracy – has been in America.

This slide shows an assessment published in the Financial Times; its conclusion is stark: the rate of democratic backsliding in America Is greater than that we saw in Russia, India, Serbia, Turkey or even Hungary.

In the UK, we have already received many warnings about bad actors disrupting our democracy. The Intelligence and Security Committee’s Russia report exposed the likelihood that Russia had meddled in the Brexit referendum (as the Mueller report showed had happened in the States during the 2016 presidential election); and Carole Cadwalladr’s research shows the role of American Big Tech in targeting misinformation and disinformation at voters. Elon Musk casually proposed making a $100million donation to a UK political party (as he had given over $250million to support Trump’s campaign). And foreign money is known to be funding think tanks which are producing a P2025-like plan for the UK.

The combination of money and ideas from hostile states, market fundamentalist Big Tech and Big Oil has enabled these bad actors to create an ecosystem of powerful influencers, media, lobbying groups – as well as simply acting as donors.

This ecosystem can reach both voters and politicians in extremely powerful ways. Sufficiently powerful to persuade any of us, to shake our confidence in our own beliefs and constitutional norms, and even to persuade us to act against our own self-interest.  This ecosystem acts a bit like a lethal autoimmune disease, turning our own protections against us, and weakening us at frightening speed.

While there is also an opposite risk – at least in principle – of left-wing extremist parties doing similar things,  they do not currently have a comparably powerful ecosystem to that developed by the far-right. So, it is on the risk from the far-right that we have focused our attention.

We are particularly concerned about  what we call the ‘multibillionaire-driven scenario’ in which a multi-billionaire with a powerful media / social media platform decides both to fund lavishly and to support in the media an extremist UK political party.

As the election approaches, an army of bots and supportive algorithms on social media can – and will – promote the extremist party while rubbishing mainstream parties; and with increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence, messages can be targeted to individual preferences in what amounts to military-grade psychological operations (Psyops). Billionaires can also buy-up or create new mainstream media to reinforce the message.

If those first two steps are enough to swing the election, an extremist party seizing power can then remove the  remaining checks and balances on its actions: it could take control of judicial appointments and pack the Supreme Court; It could pack the House of Lords; it could remove all human rights legislation; it could make extensive use of strategic litigation against critical media and individuals. In short, it could neuter resistance.

At this point, an unscrupulous government would be free to implement its own  project 2025-like plan for the UK – let us call it Project 2029. We already know what that looks like: privatising the NHS; slashing benefits; slashing regulations on businesses and slashing taxes for the wealthy; dividing communities; and making dissent a criminal offence.

By this point, the UK would already be well on the way to autocracy, and most people would already be suffering greatly from the changes. But we would still, in principle, be a democracy.

So the final step would be to consolidate power. There are many ways in which autocratic governments around the world have succeeded in holding elections but managing them in such a way that the result was a foregone conclusion. As we know, they can curtail voting rights for groups which are less likely to support the government – or simply place practical obstacles in the way of these groups voting; they can introduce electronic voting which cannot be reliably audited; and they can exploit the power of gerrymandering. And of course, the media barrage can be made even stronger.

Not so very long ago, such a scenario might have seemed far-fetched, but just look at what has already happened in the US – Christina will have more to say on this – and just listen to what the Reform Party and Restore UK are talking about doing here.

The new Head of MI6 appears to share our concerns, highlighting in her maiden speech many of the bad actors we have been tracking, and warning ominously that the United Kingdom is in a ‘space between peace and war.’ The risks are real.

But how real? You could grant that the multi-billionaire driven scenario was unacceptable and still be relaxed if the probability of it actually happening were low enough. But is it?

According to Electoral Calculus on 27 April, there is almost a 60% chance that, if an election were held tomorrow, the incoming government would be led by Reform which would get 27% of the votes and between 121 and 375 seats.

But the election will not be held tomorrow, and things change. That is important.

So we did not rely on these point estimates but instead used a technique used by the Intelligence Services, Bayesian probability, to make reasoned estimates of a scenario like the one described above coming to pass, taking into account that the probability of the later steps happening depends on the earlier steps being in place.

Unfortunately, our conclusion is only slightly less pessimistic. We estimate that, in the absence of defensive action taken now, the chances of a far-right government taking power after the next election are around 45% ± 10%. And the chances of a Project 2029 being implemented are of the order of 35% ± 10%.

If we do nothing, in other words, we are playing Russian roulette with UK democracy – but with two loaded chambers instead of one. That is not an acceptable game to play. The risk to our country and to our people is too great.

So, what can we do?

What options for defence do we have?

In brief, the options fall into two categories:

1. Things we could do before the next election to prevent it being corrupted – for the most part these are obvious, and some preliminary steps are being taken; and, in case that is not enough,
2. Things we could do after the next election to make anti-democratic actions harder.

There are too many options for defence for me to go through all of them right now, but many such options are set out in the full report. And we will be happy to discuss them in more detail in the Q&A.

How effective would they be?

By modifying the assumptions in our calculations of probability, we can estimate the impact of the different mitigations. The most obvious one, simply delivering national renewal as promised to voters, even if we were on track to achieve it in a short space of time, is on its own, not enough to reduce the probabilities of the high-impact steps significantly.

If we could also tackle disinformation, that would help more, and if we effectively remove dark money from the pre-election funding of parties we will see a significant reduction in risk.

And if we took steps to entrench protections, the probability falls further.

But even then, the residual risk would still be too high for us to feel secure: there would still be a 25% ± 10% probability of a Project 2029 plan being implemented.

Pulling it all together, we get a picture in which all these actions should be taken, but some should not be relied on, and some are difficult to take sufficiently effectively to have the desired effect.

For that reason there is one additional action that becomes extremely important, an action that we should be taking anyway: the introduction of proportional representation. If a far-right party won 30% of the votes, under first-past-the-post, it could command an absolute majority of seats, and, with Parliament sovereign, Project 2029 could begin.  Under PR, they would get only 30% of seats and driving through such controversial change would be far more difficult.

In summary, we need a combination of protective actions. They would not entirely remove the risk, but they would reduce it dramatically.

What should policy-makers do today?

One of the greatest risks we face is that the government, simply files away a report like ours, until it is too late to act.

But we must accept that MI6 are right: we are in a space between peace and war, and act accordingly, and act now.

For that reason, we have recommended that the first action should be to ask officials to assess the risk – a cross-departmental team led by the National Security Advisor  should report on the level of risk within weeks. A formal assessment of risk would significantly increase the chances of these issues making it to the top of the National Risk Register.

Although we have set out many suggested mitigations, we anticipate that a powerful cross-disciplinary team, perhaps in the form of a Royal Commission would be an appropriate (and credible) vehicle for defining precisely how they might be implemented.

We also believe that cross-party consensus and engagement will be important to ensure legitimacy for such a team.

And since the far-right ecosystem is guaranteed to mount a media and social media assault on any such plans, the government will need to develop and implement a powerful communications strategy of its own to secure public support.

Finally we recommend another practice from the discipline of Information System Security: constructing three lines of defence around those mitigations which have been implemented.

So, in summary: if we do nothing, we are playing Russian roulette with our democracy, there are many options for defence which, taken together could dramatically reduce the risk we face, so the key thing is to start to act now.

For many years, we have relied on the ‘good chaps’ theory of politics to protect our constitutional norms, rights and values. And that has largely worked so far. But today, in the presence of bad actors and in the space between peace and war, we would be negligent to continue to rely on it.

If we do not act quickly, this government risks being seen by historians as the Biden administration is likely to be: well-meaning but, despite all the warnings, ineffective in its defence of democracy.

This is a huge and vitally important topic, and I am sure you all have many questions for the panel. Thank you.

 

There followed around 45 minutes of discussion, which unfortunately we were not able to record, but the key points discussed included:

• Should we be so concerned about what is happening to US democracy? Short answer: yes, extremely — the action tracker now lists over 3,000 actions which weaken US democracy that have been taken since the election.
• Is the multi-billionaire driven scenario plausible in the UK? Short answer: it is already starting to happen, and if we do not arrest its progress, it will be too late to stop.
• Is there much we can do about it? Short answer: while there is no silver bullet, and none of this is easy in the UK system, there are many options for defence we should be planning.
• What should policy-makers do today? Short answer: they should take the immediate steps set out above, and to make that happen the Peers and MPs present should co-sign the letter developed by our friends at Unlock Democracy calling on the Cabinet Office to meet with the report’s authors and discuss action.

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This blog was originally posted by the 99% Organisation.

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