Andy Burnham’s new disinformation centre already has a twin. Documents supplied to Guido’s FOI Unit show the old Counter Disinformation Unit, renamed the National Security Online Information Team (NSOIT), is still running and moved to DCMS on 21 July 2026 when DSIT was broken up. Has anyone told Andy?
At the UN on 22 September, Burnham said his new National Centre for Information Defence would “detect, attribute and disrupt” hostile information attacks and will operate initially out of the Office for the Prime Minister and Cabinet. A month on, DCMS says there is no plan to merge the current NSOIT team into the NCID…
The government is covering up the headcount of the existing team as well as its 2026-27 and 2027-28 budgets, with DCMS claiming the numbers would give “hostile actors insights into UK capabilities”. The unit has, though, dished out almost £1.4 million of taxpayer cash on contracts since July 2024:
The unit is paying one firm for “monitoring online Mis/Disinformation narratives”. This includes taking in personal data including “Participants in social media activity” and their “Family, lifestyle and social circumstances”. The firm also gets a licence to use the reports to train its own machine learning systems…
This is while the Home Office RICU unit does its own propaganda work to influence “narratives“. Just how many secretive Ministries of Truth does Burnham need?
Robert Jenrick on the Today programme:
“Can you now give a guarantee to your listeners this morning that no BBC presenter in the future will be exposed as a paedophile, as a number have been in the recent past? No, of course you can’t…”