David Davis is used to being spied on. When he was Brexit secretary he used to carry around his Brexit papers in a steel suitcase with a built-in Faraday cage to stop cameras taking X-ray photos of the contents.
But the revelations in the Telegraph about Whitehall’s secretive Counter Disinformation Unit (CDU) which has been used to suppress dissent from lockdown sceptics during the Covid-19 pandemic have really shocked him.
“What we have at the moment is a proliferation of things where the most paranoid wing of government is interfering in the democratic process,” he told me on this week’s Chopper’s Politics podcast.
“There would be a limit to what they could do 25 years ago … The trouble today is we don’t know what the algorithms do. We have no idea what deal they’ve struck with Google or Twitter or whoever.
“And that’s a really serious influence on debate, not just in Britain, but across the entire world.”
Alarmingly Mr Davis himself was targeted by the unit. A report from the Big Brother Watch campaign group found that Mr Davis was monitored by the CDU. A subject access request by Mr Davis, Conservative MP for Haltemprice and Howden, found that the MP’s tweets questioning the modelling put forward at the start of the pandemic were monitored and recorded.
“The entry does not cite which specific statements from Mr Davis warranted attention but mentions him as ‘critical of the government’,” Big Brother Watch said.
The timing of that entry came just weeks after Mr Davis had co-written a Telegraph article questioning the mathematical reasoning underpinning the Imperial College model that had influenced the government’s early Covid-19 decision-making on the lockdowns. Mr Davis was not alone. Big Brother Watch found that other MPs, including Labour’s Bell Ribeiro-Addy, had come to the CDU’s attention.
Mr Davis said he thinks he was targeted by the CDU because he had challenged the use of polling data to justify ministers’ authoritarian policies using Freedom of Information requests and Parliamentary Questions.
“Early on, during the early part of the Covid pandemic, I began to worry that we weren’t really making decisions on science,” he says.
“I started FOI-ing and putting questions in about the polling data because I thought it looked more like the Government was making judgements on focus groups and polls than it was on any science.
“Bear in mind the science was very primitive at that point and I started asking about that and getting absolutely blanked out.
“A lot of the arguments at the time were not really between science and non-science. They were between authority and non-authority.”
Mr Davis pointed out how some “quite well qualified people were worried that this virus had come from a laboratory. They were absolutely crushed on social media – they were cancelled”.
Ministers were lucky that the existence of the CDU had not been revealed during the pandemic, he said, helped by the Parliament not functioning properly for long periods during the lockdowns.
‘Absolute outrage’
He said: “We didn’t really know that we were actually being monitored. I think if we’d known at the time there would have been absolute outrage.”
The CDU appears to move far away from its original purpose to stop foreign governments interfering in UK elections.
It moved from the then Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport to the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology as part of the machinery of government changes in February.
Then culture secretary Michelle Donelan moved to the Science Department, and remains in charge of the CDU, although she is currently on maternity leave. Mr Davis said that Ms Donelan “was of a mind to shut it down but was talked out of it”. Asked if the Government should wind it up he replied: “Basically yes, I think it should.”
The CDU’s “genesis was in the concern that foreign nations might meddle in our electoral system. Now, that’s a legitimate concern.
“But then why be so cagey about it? You know, we still, to this day, can’t find out how much the Government spends on the CDU.
“If the state wants to do something to protect elections, which is important, against foreign influence, then they should do so explicitly.
“That requires one unit, one reaction system, one understanding of policy, which the whole House [of Commons], both sides, should be in favour of.”
The Public Accounts Committee – Parliament’s most powerful committee – should investigate its work and how it was funded, he said.
“A parliamentary inquiry is probably the best thing, the biggest combination of power and access and speed, because we want to get rid of this thing, either replace it with something we’ve got a very specific aim or limit its scope, one or the other.”
For Mr Davis, the warning signs about the CDU are there for all to see in its name. “You have to ask why. It is not called the Disinformation Monitoring Unit. It’s called the Counter Disinformation Unit.
Mr Davis asked about links between social media companies and the Government. He said: “Were they asking them to change the algorithm? Because bear in mind, in this day and age you can get away with reducing somebody’s effectiveness, not by cancelling them, which is high profile, but by changing the algorithms and nobody sees it.”
Mr Davis said he was also “cancelled by YouTube” after a video emerged of him making a speech against vaccine passports.
“I was doing that because the claim the Government made with the vaccine stops transmission has been proven to be untrue,” he said.
‘Very pro-Establishment algorithms’
“So the perpetrators of disinformation was the Government on that occasion. And you have to wonder how many of these algorithms are agreed with Government because they’re very pro-Establishment algorithms.”
On Friday night a Government spokesman said ministers would be “happy” to appear in front of Commons committees to discuss the CDU, which had a purpose “to track narratives and trends using publicly available information online to protect public health and national security.
“It does not monitor political debate and does not refer any content from journalists, politicians or political parties to social media companies.”
The CDU was currently focused on “disinformation related to Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine”.
Whitehall sources said it was categorically untrue that Michelle Donelan was “talked out” of axing the CDU.
I asked Mr Davis why Governments become more authoritarian. “Partly it’s the natural tendency of organisations,” he said. “Organisations don’t like being monitored…
“Whitehall is all about control of information. Information is power. They know that so they tend to hoard it for themselves. But the second reason, and this is understandable, … is they didn’t know what else to do.
“They’d never faced something like this before. The same is true with a disease, a pandemic.”
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