In November 2025, Nathan Gill—former leader of Reform UK in Wales and Brexit Party MEP—was sentenced to ten and a half years in prison after pleading guilty to eight counts of bribery for accepting at least £40,000 in Russian payments to make pro-Russian statements in the European Parliament. The judge confirmed the “ultimate source” of the funds was linked to a close associate of Vladimir Putin.
Three months later, in the Gorton and Denton by-election in Greater Manchester, a letter arrived on doorsteps across Denton’s predominantly white working-class wards. It purported to come from “Patricia Clegg, a concerned neighbour,” a 74-year-old pensioner. The letter amplified economic insecurity (“my pension does not stretch far enough”), cultural decline (“Britain no longer feels like the country I grew up in”), and institutional failure, while framing available choices as a binary: Starmer’s broken promises or Reform. It was printed by the same company that produces Reform UK’s official materials, used near-identical language to the party’s campaign, and carried no legally required publisher imprint. Clegg was real—but her son later stated she “never signed off on the letter.”
These two episodes sit at opposite ends of a spectrum—one involves proven foreign funding; the other involves a domestic campaign using a real person’s name to manufacture grassroots concern. But they share a common mechanism: the weaponization of identity to bypass rational deliberation. It is this mechanism—not who funds it or where it originates—that current frameworks are structurally unable to address.
This Analysis argues that ordinary political contests are becoming testing grounds for hybrid political warfare—a convergence of foreign-originated techniques and domestic deployment. Identity manipulation serves as the main weapon of this warfare that deepens polarisation and creates fertile ground for extremism.
How Identity Manipulation Works
Identity manipulation operates through two channels. The first is content: identity-based disinformation (IBD) exploits identity characteristics—gender, race, ethnicity, nationality—to offer narrow, rigid definitions of who people are, marginalizing communities, and restricting how people understand themselves. The second is the messenger: astroturfing and fake personas disguise who is speaking, manufacturing the appearance of an organic community voice. The Patricia Clegg letter deployed both simultaneously—IBD in its content (narrowing identity to anxious, left-behind pensioner) and deception in its form (disguising a party campaign as a neighbor’s letter).
The Organisation for Identity and Cultural Development (OICD) analyses such messaging for its effect on identity agency, or the capacity to hold multiple identity positions and adapt flexibly. Identity manipulation exploits universal psychological needs such as belonging, significance, and security by restricting that capacity. It does not require lies. It requires the strategic restriction of how people understand themselves and their choices.
Research demonstrates that cognitive rigidity—reducing complex identity to a single rigid position—is a measurable precursor to extremism. A person with a rigid identity is more prone to identity fusion (i.e., linking their identity to a group or ideology), or seeing the world and other people in static black-and-white terms, which makes them more prone for identity manipulation. The techniques that produce it (i.e., identity narrowing, threat inflation, emotional flooding, false binary construction) are recognizable across the literature on hostile state operations and extremist recruitment, though they appear under varied terminology. What has changed is not the technique but who deploys it—and how it is executed systematically.
From Foreign Operations to Domestic Playbook
Between 2013 and 2018, the Russian Internet Research Agency simultaneously ran fake Texas secessionist, Black Lives Matter, and Muslim community accounts, resulting in opposing protests at the same Houston location in May 2016. Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Project found the most far-reaching IRA activity was organic posting, not paid advertisements, with over 30 million users sharing content voluntarily. The US Senate Intelligence Committee concluded the campaign aimed at “influencing how this nation’s citizens think about themselves, their government, and their fellow Americans.” All political campaigns make identity-based appeals—that is inherent to democratic persuasion. What distinguishes the IRA operation is the deliberate, covert manipulation of identity cleavages by a foreign state actor to deepen divisions rather than win votes – though undoubtedly this technique may contribute to the success of a foreign actors’ preferred candidate.
What followed was an evolution in method. The September 2024 Tenet Media indictment by the U.S. Department of Justice revealed that state-controlled media outlet RT funnelled $9.7 million through shell companies to pay North American conservative influencers—one receiving up to $400,000 monthly—to broadcast content on YouTube aligned with Russian strategic narratives. Audiences perceived this as authentic domestic commentary. Researchers at Clemson’s Media Forensics Hub have developed the concept of “narrative laundering”—concealing the origins of misleading information through stages (placement, layering, integration) mirroring money laundering—to explain why studies measuring direct foreign exposure find limited effects. The influence runs through domestic amplifiers, not foreign-to-citizen contact.
While domestic actors have long used identity-based appeals, the techniques of covert identity manipulation have now been consciously weaponized. The Tenet Media influencers were already deploying identity manipulation to build audiences before RT’s funding, which is what made them attractive partners. The foreign and domestic playbooks have converged.
A Laboratory Demonstration: Gorton and Denton
The February 2026 Gorton and Denton by-election offers a vivid demonstration of identity manipulation. Political scientist Rob Ford described the constituency as a “Frankenstein’s monster”: Manchester’s Gorton wards are 42% white and 40% Muslim; Tameside’s Denton wards are 83% white, 86% UK-born, and predominantly working-class. This split enabled observation of entirely different psychological appeals to different populations within the same contest.
The findings were striking—and cross-spectrum. Reform UK framed the by-election as “a referendum on Keir Starmer” and a chance for “hard-working, law-abiding, tax-paying people” to be heard—language implicitly defining who counts as authentically British. Their candidate, former academic Matthew Goodwin, had studied the very communities he was targeting, deploying scholarly understanding of post-industrial identity grievances as a campaign weapon. The party’s operatives also ran covert Facebook networks disguised as grassroots discussion groups: micro-targeted identity manipulation that evades conventional electoral monitoring.
Meanwhile, the Greens targeted Manchester’s Muslim communities with Gaza-focused messaging, framing the vote as a moral test, while pivoting to environmental and NHS messaging in Denton. Labour presented the contest as a strategic vote in “hope versus hate.” Although these campaigns reflected substantive policy positions, they also sought to connect with voters’ identities and values. In this way, identity-based appeals may have shaped perceptions of which candidates were best suited to represent and address voters’ concerns, alongside more conventional evaluations of policy proposals and competence.
The result was the Green Party’s first-ever by-election victory—Hannah Spencer won with 40.7%—and Labour’s first loss in Gorton since 1931. Reform’s strategy may have been less about winning than splitting the Green-Labour vote in the long game toward coalition-building with whoever may get the majority of votes in the General Election 2029.
Regulatory Blind Spot
The UK now has an extensive electoral protection architecture: the Elections Act 2022 tightened foreign spending rules; the Online Safety Act 2023 created offences for knowingly false communications; the National Security Act 2023 criminalized foreign electoral interference; the Rycroft Review (March 2026) added donation caps and a cryptocurrency moratorium. Every instrument is oriented toward foreign actors, false content, or financial flows. None addresses the deployment of factually accurate content by domestic actors designed to weaponize identity.
The Electoral Commission has stated it is “not in a position to monitor the truthfulness of campaign claims.” But the problem here is not truthfulness. The Patricia Clegg letter may not have contained falsehoods. Its manipulation lay in disguising a party campaign as an organic community voice, targeting security and belonging anxieties, and evading accountability through the missing imprint. The newly introduced Representation of the People Bill (February 2026) only addressed the fact that the Reform failed to attribute the letter to themselves. But it contains almost nothing on disinformation or identity manipulation—a gap that Full Fact and others have publicly criticized.
The result is a striking asymmetry. UK consumer protection law already prohibits manipulative practices that distort economic decision-making—including pyramid selling and high-pressure tactics—even when no false claims are made. No equivalent protection exists for political choice. Electoral commissions regulate money. Platforms regulate content. Nobody regulates the psychological mechanism that makes both effective: narrowing who people believe themselves to be until only one political choice appears viable.
Beyond fact-checking: an identity-based framework
Closing this gap requires a fundamental shift. Cambridge Analytica’s psychographic profiling of 87 million Facebook users demonstrated that campaigns could be built on identity databases rather than policy platforms—a model now standard globally. The question is no longer whether identity manipulation is occurring in elections but whether democracies will develop frameworks to recognize and resist it.
The policy implications follow directly. The Online Safety Act should be extended to recognize identity-based manipulation in electoral contexts as a harm distinct from false content. The Electoral Commission requires the capacity to monitor psychological manipulation, not merely spending and accuracy. Tech platforms should invest in detecting IBD patterns and supporting alternative-narratives that restore identity complexity, rather than relying solely on content removal or ineffective counter-narrative strategies.
Most fundamentally, democracies need investment in identity literacy: population-level programs equipping citizens to recognize when their sense of self is being targeted, distinct from and complementary to existing digital literacy initiatives. Where critical disinformation scholarship analyses power structures behind manipulation, identity literacy provides metacognitive tools to recognize identity manipulation as it happens—and resist it. We teach people to spot false claims. We do not yet teach them to recognise when someone is manipulating who they believe themselves to be.
The primary threat to democratic integrity in 2026 is not that foreign actors are manipulating voters. It is that the techniques of identity weaponization—developed by hostile states, refined by extremist recruiters, now deployed by mainstream domestic campaigns—have migrated into the heart of democratic competition, operating in a regulatory void. The hybrid warfare is no longer at the gates. It is within.
Dr Bruce White is the founding Director of the Organisation for Identity and Cultural Development (OICD), a specialist think tank and consultancy which develops identity-based approaches to disinformation and radicalization.
Dr Anna Kruglova is a Lecturer in Terrorism Studies at the University of Salford and author of Terrorist Recruitment, Propaganda and Branding (Routledge, 2022).
Dr Jon Wilson has 24 years of experience in the Public Sector, is a member of the Counter Terrorism Evidence-Based Review Group and an advisor to the Organisation for Identity and Cultural Development.