UK’s Burnham Moves Toward Authoritarian Rule, and That Means Trouble for the U.S.

New in PJ Media:

Here we go again: leftists have shown us again and again that they hate dissent and debate, which are the foundations of any free society. Now the U.K. is heading decisively toward authoritarianism as its crazy-left prime minister, Andy Burnham, has just announced that he plans to establish a “National Centre for Information Defence” in order to fight — you guessed it — “disinformation.”

The “National Centre for Information Defence“ is a canny name. It beats Old Joe Biden’s abortive “Disinformation Governance Board” in couching the whole totalitarian move as “defense” (as we spell it in the land of the free and the home of the brave) rather than “governance.” This is intended to give Burnham’s hapless citizenry the impression that what’s being done to them is not more control from the ruling elites, but protection from the evil machinations of deceivers.

Yeah, Andy, the Mafia offered protection, too. Anyway, GB News reported Wednesday that Burnham, “the Prime Minister, addressing the United Nations, announced the centre to improve ‘community cohesion’ and prevent a ‘distorted and untrue narrative about Britain.’” As a result, Burnham “ordered security chiefs to set up the quango, which will detect, attribute and disrupt ‘hostile information attacks’ and ‘deepfakes’ which hurt British interests.”

A “quango” is an organization that receives government financing but is ostensibly an independent group. And we all know that the far-left British government will stay fastidiously out of the affairs of an organization that is charged with stamping out “hostile information attacks” that supposedly “hurt British interests,” now, don’t we?

GB News explained that this new National Centre for Information Defence “is initially being led out of the Office for the Prime Minister and Cabinet, with the new centre working alongside intelligence agencies, Government departments, the police and social media firms.”

What could possibly go wrong, with all those agencies that have nothing but the best interests of the British people at heart running this new center? Surely it will only censor genuine disinformation, and not what the political elites falsely claim is disinformation because it could harm them politically, a la Hunter Biden’s laptop, right?

Burnham insisted that this censorship agency was necessary because there was no “national security without a strong, cohesive society. That’s the starting point for everything we hold dear and everything we want to achieve. But the fact is that it has been under attack.” From whom? Russia was the only attacker he focused upon, but once this monster is up and running, what is to prevent the Labour government from using it against the British patriots it smears as “far right”? Why, nothing, of course.

There is more. Read the rest here.