Rushanara Ali

I begin by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall and Camberwell Green (Florence Eshalomi) on her appointment as the Minister for Democracy. I thank her predecessor, my hon. Friend the Member for Chester North and Neston (Samantha Dixon), for the work that she and the brilliant officials in the Department did on this very important Bill, and I thank the Minister for tabling the Government amendments. I had the privilege of serving as her predecessor’s predecessor and working on the strategy that formed this important Bill. This is a significant piece of legislation, and the proposal to bring forward votes at 16 is important, radical and necessary. It is right that we give young people the right to vote when they can participate in other areas of life, and when they get the vote, political parties will absolutely pay much greater attention to their interests. I would like to see whether those who oppose this particular change go and canvass for the votes of 16 and 17-year-olds when they have the vote. We certainly will, because we believe that it is important to encourage participation from an early age. This Bill introduces important changes to tackle harassment and intimidation and to move towards automated voting, and it picks up on the important findings from the Rycroft review. This significant piece of legislation has been improved as it has gone through its different stages, and today marks another opportunity for my hon. Friend the new Minister to take on board some of the suggestions that have been made in the form of the amendments. I express my support for new clause 34, in the name of my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North (Liam Byrne), which would beef up our resistance to cryptoassets flooding our political system. I am grateful for the Minister’s reassurances that we are moving in the right direction, but we need to go further, as the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee also pointed out. For reasons that are well documented, and as my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Hodge Hill has said, the Bill must include digital tokens and meme coins accepted into crypto-wallets, as defined by the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002. My right hon. Friend has done a huge amount of work and provided an analysis to warn about the dangers of cryptoassets being used to drench our democracy with malign messages, fuelling populist hate and misinformation. We are seeing that play out in our streets and our communities at the moment. I do not think that I am allowed to make a plug for his excellent book on populism, but he has outlined that £200 million has already been spent in the UK on promoting division and undermining our democracy. That is terrifying. We need to put a stop to it, and that is why this Bill needs to go further. Nothing less than a full ban on crypto donations will do, and I hope that Ministers consider doing this now rather than coming back later. I have seen the ability of the enormously talented group of civil servants to move at pace in amending legislation and being more and more ambitious over time in making this Bill much more significant—from the time I started working on it to the end of the period when the strategy was published and subsequently. Where there is a will, there will be a way. In the interests of moving away from the incremental changes to which the new Prime Minister has committed, I hope that we can get this done in one go. I appeal to my hon. Friend the Minister to be bold and to get this done now. Furthermore, I support new clauses 41, 47, 82 and 83, in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes Central (Emily Darlington), which seek to tackle online harms and online hate in the context of elections and deepfakes, especially videos purporting to depict politicians and candidates. This has become more and more dangerous and serious. In the 2024 election, only a handful of candidates were depicted in AI-driven deepfake images, which were already presenting disinformation and causing damage to candidates’ election chances. Now, these have become more and more sophisticated, more and more problematic and, at worst, damaging and dangerous. It means that the elector often cannot see the distinction between a real image of a candidate and a deepfake-created image. Now—don’t get me wrong—I have seen some of those deepfakes, and some of them are quite entertaining. The problem is that the ones that are filled with poison and hate can do deep damage to the reputation of candidates. That is very damaging and is moving very fast. When citizens look at such material, we are asking a lot of them. We are asking them to make a distinction between what is real and what is fake in the context of social media, which is heavily funded with billions of pounds by tech companies. Ordinary citizens have to compete with that, and it is not feasible.  That is why it is really important that we make those changes. As I have said, when I worked on the election strategy that was the foundation for this Bill, it was challenging to get the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology to do more. I therefore hope that those Ministers can work with my hon. Friend the Minister for Homelessness, Democracy, Communities and Faith and her Department to include the changes that are needed in the amendments tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes Central, so that we can get this done in one go, rather than waste time while damage is done at the speed of lightning in the form of deepfake and disinformation spreading, which is infecting our democracy and forcing candidates and elected representatives out of politics. Increasingly, too many Members of Parliament, candidates who did not make it here and those in local government and other areas of public life are asking: how is it going to be at the next election? As well as trying to keep ourselves safe, how do we protect our reputations when lies are spreading at breakneck speed? What is the point, and how do we protect our families when these lies are being spread online? How do we compete with that as candidates? How do we protect our protected characteristics? People of colour and people from minority faiths are particularly targeted, and women—female candidates—are being subjected to a scale of misogyny and hatred using deepfake and disinformation on a scale and at a level that I never thought I would see in my lifetime.