Emily Darlington MP: speeches

Speeches

• 2 Sept 2026 · Representation of the People Bill · Hansard source

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  In the five minutes you have allotted me, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will try to speak to my clauses 41 to 47 in my name, new clauses 82 and 83, which are now in my name—I put them in my name on behalf of the Education Secretary—and amendment 4, which I put in my name on behalf of the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw (Jo White). I thank the previous Ministers, my hon. Friends the Members for Bethnal Green and Stepney (Rushanara Ali) and for Chester North and Neston (Samantha Dixon), for their constant engagement with me on this matter over the past year and a bit, and I also thank the Minister with responsibility for online safety. I welcome the new Minister to her place—she is a fantastic appointment. I thank the Electoral Commission, Philip Rycroft, members of the Online Safety Network in particular, Demos, Adobe, British broadcasters and colleagues from across this House for working with me to table these crucial amendments. Our democracy is under attack by foreign actors who want to destabilise our country, and individuals in our country who want to create chaos and division. They use the online space to create and spread disinformation, create deepfakes, and use algorithms to amplify bots pretending to be British citizens. These distort the debate, negate the facts, and take away our right to free choice in a free election. AI-generated material can be fun—for example, images of cats riding on dolphins—but it can also be destructive. A network of 73 TikTok accounts that pretend to be authentic news organisations suddenly sprang up in March 2025; they have nearly one million followers and have published thousands of deepfakes of Government Ministers supposedly announcing controversial policies. They use real BBC footage. In the first week of December 2025 alone, they had nearly one million viewers. That translates to the doorstep. I spoke to a voter in December 2025 who was convinced that the then Prime Minister was imposing a Christmas tax because she saw a video of him announcing it. Those accounts have made us less sure of who and what we can trust. When that happens, people still vote and make a choice, but the ground beneath their judgment shifts. New clause 47 would ensure that all material that is AI-generated is clearly labelled. It does not stop any party or candidate from creating crowds at their speeches or wearing a superhero outfit to leap over the Elizabeth Tower, but it would bring transparency to the public. As has often been said, democracy does not require us to agree, but it does require us to live in the same reality, so new clause 82 would create a liability for false statements, and new clause 41 would ensure that the law offline is applied online—mainly sections 106 and 114A from the Representation of the People Act 1983. These need to be made priority offences under the Online Safety Act 2023. I thank the Minister for online safety for his engagement; it allows us to work together to ensure that this happens and that Ofcom understands the importance of protecting democracy. The algorithms are powerful because they do not look dramatic. They look ordinary; it is just content in our feed. No single message changes our mind; scale, volume, emotion and the cumulative effect do. Online social media bosses can use their control of algorithms to promote their political views without reporting to the public. That is why I tabled new clause 42. I will skip new clause 44, on the Electoral Commission. I want to raise new clause 43, which would require a repository for political advertising, so that any voter can see what a party is advertising in different parts of the country and on different platforms. It would also ensure that all political advertising and the money spent on it can be audited and properly declared. Everyone in this House knows that this harmful activity is not limited to election periods, but is happening all the time, spreading disinformation or nudifying and humiliating female candidates and politicians. New clauses 46 and 83, which look to introduce the broadcast code to online platforms, would deal with this matter. Finally, we need an emergency election protocol that is appropriate, transparent and holds public confidence. That is what new clause 45 is about. None of my amendments has been selected for decision, so they will be relaid in the Lords. I thank the Minister for Online Safety, No. 10 and the Secretary of State for their engagement. Working together, I am sure that we can find a way to protect our democracy.

• 2 Sept 2026 · Representation of the People Bill · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is making fantastic progress on protecting our democracy. On criminal convictions, as she will know, I have taken over amendment 4 from my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw (Jo White). It is about listing on registers of interests, once a candidate is elected as an MP or councillor, that they have undergone a Disclosure and Barring Service check. That would provide schools, care homes and women’s shelters with the clarity that they can feel safe with that person. Will the Minister consider that, as part of ensuring transparency, so that people can understand who it is, and is not, appropriate to invite to particular venues?

• 8 Jul 2026 · Engagements · Hansard source

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  Q5. The Deputy Prime Minister and most of us in the House have been victims of AI-generated fake news, also known as deepfakes. They mislead the public and disrupt our democracy. BBC news coverage and coverage from other news channels is also being AI manipulated to tell untruths. Will he, alongside MPs from across the House, support my amendments to the Representation of the People Bill, which would force anything that is AI created to be labelled as such, stop the production of deepfakes of ourselves and colleagues, and protect the UK from these destructive tactics, used by foreign states and others who wish to weaken our democracy?

• 8 Jul 2026 · Societal Impact of AI: Government Policy · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms McVey. I have rewritten my speech because I do not want to repeat all the things that have been said. I think we are in agreement, although we may have different perspectives. I want to take us back to 80 years ago, to a country house a few miles from Milton Keynes in my constituency. A handful of mathematicians built a machine that cracked the enigma code, and it gave birth to modern computing. That was Bletchley Park, where Britain proved that it could outthink the world. That inheritance still runs through Milton Keynes in the data centres rising on our edge, the British Standards Institution at Knowlhill—the oldest standards institute in the world, whose kitemark has told people that a product is safe since 1903—and a plethora of AI start-ups that outnumber Oxford or Cambridge. Britain is standing at another one of those moments, as we see with our economy and our military tech coming together and pushing forward either for the good of the nation or for its ultimate damage. The potential benefits of artificial intelligence are enormous, and not only for the private sector. AI is a tool that can pull our public services back from years of managed decline. The technology will allow us to detect diseases earlier and cut NHS waiting lists. It will free nurses and other public servants from back-office grind for work that only people can do. However, every country can see that prize, and the question that decides whether Britain leads or merely buys in is whether we make the technology or just import it. A maker exports its products, services and ideas around the world, as we did in world war two, but the UK is at risk of becoming an AI taker and simply handing over the keys to giant US tech firms that are buying up our best young AI companies. It is still our technology; it is just being bought up, packaged and sold back to us so that we become indebted. As we are talking about the impact on our economy and our society, I want to point to Palantir, which has the contract with the NHS. We know that UK companies could do exactly the same work, because I and many Members present have spoken to them. Even more concerning is that the Ministry of Defence now uses the company. With the activist Government in the US turning off technology and restricting its availability outside the US, that puts at risk not only our NHS but, most importantly, the defence of our realm against Russia, for which others may have more sympathy than we do. There is also a social cost, as people look at a company such as Palantir and say that it does not reflect their values. It is used by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and by Israel to target Gaza. That has a huge impact on public trust. It is also bad for the UK economy and innovation, because it crowds out UK firms that could have those public contracts. That is just one example of a dependency that is putting us at risk both socially and economically. It does not have to be that way. British AI firms need three things to succeed: customers who will buy their products, the ability to increase supply to meet demand, and a USP that British AI is the most trusted. The Government can help with all three. First, we have to act as a good customer. Why should those NHS and MOD contracts not go to British AI firms? Not only would that increase trust, but those products would be developed in a way that meets our needs; we would not be buying something that had been developed elsewhere. That would also mean that we had to invest in the entire British AI stack—it must be British from start to finish. The second issue is supply. We need to make sure that we have the compute power we need and that we are not relying on US firms again for that. We are overly reliant: despite the fact that we part-own Crown Hosting, that accounts for only 6% of public sector data; the rest is nearly all on Amazon Web Services, which is a significant risk. We need to look at how we diffuse the supply of compute power—the underused capacity—to increase that. Finally, we need to increase AI take-up across British businesses by building trusted products. The British Standards Institution is at the heart of that. It does not always have to be about regulation; it can be about standards that lift everything up. What attracts the world to the BSI is that it is known for doing that and its standards become international, so we get first-market advantage. This partnership model of an industrial strategy is mission-driven, creates public trust, evaluates the impact on society and creates opportunities for our ideas and innovation to flourish. That is something we did with the innovations at Bletchley Park. We need to become an innovation leader again—an AI maker, not just an AI taker, which puts us at risk.

• 6 Jul 2026 · Foreign Interference in UK Politics · Hansard source

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  I thank the Minister for her engagement with me on this issue. I want to praise both the work of the Electoral Commission in addressing the many threats that we face and the Rycroft review, which I had the pleasure of speaking to Philip Rycroft about. In the review, he focuses not just on money, which many Members have spoken about, but on the ongoing threats in the online world. Does the Minister agree that this is a once-in-a-generation moment to take a tough line on disinformation that is deliberately created in the UK and then amplified by foreign bots? Such disinformation has a bad influence on our right to choose based on real, true information.