MPs should be punished for spreading disinformation, think tank says, after “crackpot conspiracy theory” prompted government to slash active travel funding in “dangerous dereliction of responsibility”
Politicians should be punished for spreading and amplifying disinformation about active travel schemes, the think tank Demos has recommended, as part of a report exploring the implementation of low traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs) across the UK in recent years and the “explosion” of conspiracy theories – particularly surrounding 15-minute cities – that accompanied this policy.
According to the cross-party think thank, the Conservative government’s move last year to disown its previous active travel policies – as part of prime minister Rishi Sunak’s so-called ‘plan for drivers’ – and “actively attack” councils introducing such measures represented a “dangerous dereliction of its responsibility”, leaving a “wide open goal” for the conspiratorial narratives that subsequently flourished.
> “Crackpot conspiracy theory” led to government slashing active travel funding
In January, it emerged that a “crackpot conspiracy theory” that misrepresents the urban planning concept of the 15-minute city led to the government slashing funding for active travel and pledging to review measures aimed at curbing the use of private motor vehicles.
Documents obtained by the Transport Action Network (TAN), as part of its legal challenge to the swingeing active travel cuts imposed by Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt last year, revealed that conspiracy theories were at least partly responsible for the change in tack by the government, which saw Sunak pledge to review low traffic neighbourhoods and the rollout of 20mph speed limits, among other things.
In September, transport secretary Mark Harper repeated and endorsed a well-known and completely false conspiracy theory surrounding 15-minute cities, telling a Conservative Party Conference fringe meeting that the “Labour-backed” urban planning policy meant that “local councils can decide how often you go to the shops” and would “remove your freedom to get from A to B how you want”.
> Why is the 15-minute city attracting so many conspiracy theories?
And a new report by cross-party think thank Demos, in collaboration with the Public Interest News Foundation, has recommended that the Committee for Standards in Public Life and the Labour Party’s new independent Ethics and Integrity Commission should incorporate into their ongoing reviews the “way in which politicians behave in relation to disinformation narratives online” such as those repeated by the likes of Harper recently.
Demos’ report, titled ‘Driving Disinformation: Democratic deficits, disinformation and low traffic neighbourhoods – a portrait of policy failure’, concluded that the commissions should “specifically recommend how politicians educate themselves on such narratives and evaluate the extent to which such narratives weaken relationships with democratic institutions and the rule of law, before amplifying them via online platforms for their own political gain”.
Any politician guilty of such behaviour, Demos argues, should be punished, creating a “greater incentive to thoroughly investigate certain narratives before promoting them at scale”.
The report was based on a combination of digital media analysis of over 570,000 social media posts and face-to-face engagement with 47 residents and 24 interviews with local journalists, community leaders, activists, and politicians in three areas were LTNs were introduced: Oxford, Enfield, and Rochdale.
The report found that levels of LTN-related disinformation online “exploded” between 2022 and 2023. Between 2020 and 2022, social media posts on the schemes were evenly split between positive and negative, a trend that skewed dramatically in 2023, when 79 per cent of the most engaged-with posts were strongly anti-LTN.
Demos also concluded that disinformation has been allowed to flourish in the “democratic chasm” that exists and is widening, they say, at local level between councils and communities.
This is due, Demos says, to the failure of local authorities to provide their residents with sufficient information on active travel measures, as well as the demise of local newspapers and other media capable of facilitating reasonable debate on the matter, creating a vacuum which has pushed people towards social media and its increasingly toxic, polarising landscape.
On a national level, meanwhile, Demos concluded that the implementation of LTNs across the UK since 2020 was “beset by ambiguity at the top of government that trickled down through the local rollout resulting in significant variation, confusion, and disruption to its impact”.
The report continued: “The government’s move in late 2023 to explicitly disown the policy it had funded and then actively attack councils for how they implemented it represents a dangerous dereliction of its responsibility.
“The impact of this decision, together with the language used by politicians, left the information environment a wide open goal for the conspiratorial narratives that flourished.”
“An instruction to act ‘swiftly’, combined with historic funding constraints, led to serious shortcomings in the way the councils engaged citizens in LTN implementation,” Hannah Perry, Demos’ lead researcher on social media, said after the report’s publication.
“However, instead of working to bring a sense of calm, the government performed a screeching U-turn, in both policy and rhetoric, and ultimately fed the public backlash. Our analysis shows how this pivot coincided with the spike in LTN-related disinformation.
“It is absolutely essential that lessons are learned and that we radically transform how democracy takes place locally. There is a worsening democratic chasm between councils and communities. We are calling for a new layer of participation so that our local politicians can foster constructive relationships with citizens, working in partnership with them, not against them.”
