Does not the hon. Gentleman agree that our system for referendums and elections is more vulnerable to invisible manipulation and corruption than at any time since 1880? The great weakness of the report is that it ignores the evidence provided, principally by the journalist Carole Cadwalladr, on the use of botnets, artificial intelligence and algorithms to influence millions of voters. The evidence is there from the United States and from this country. Under-the-counter systems are being used that we do not understand; they seek to trawl through websites to get information and subsequently influence voters. We are trying to deal with tomorrow’s systems and tomorrow’s high technology with regulations that are long out of date.
Is not it likely that in the coming election there will be more manipulation, that there could well be cyber-attacks, and that we cannot trust these results, because what is happening is under the counter and the Electoral Commission has no tools to deal with it in the way it should? We should not have a general election without
finding out the truth about the manipulation that has taken place here, in the US and possibly in other countries that we do not know about. We have not heard about that from GCHQ; we should have heard from it. It has reported on what has happened in the US, where there were cyber-attacks and manipulation. That could well have happened here; we do not know because we have not asked.