Session Three: Conspiracy Theories — How They Spread, Where They Are From and Where They Land

Conspiracy theories are no longer the preserve of the fringe. Increasingly they are taking root in comfortable, educated, professional households — the very people most of us assume to be immune.

The third session in our lunchtime series, Resilience & Reconstruction: An Insightful Deep Dive, put that assumption to the test and asked why. Who is actually drawn to conspiracy thinking today, and what does the rise of the middle-class conspiracy theorist tell us about trust, uncertainty and belonging in modern Britain?

Steven Lacey was joined by guest panelist Rebecca Skippage — for 25 years a BBC journalist, and from 2021 the BBC's first Global Disinformation Editor, now running her own disinformation consultancy working with government, NATO StratCom and Google DeepMind. The session was moderated by Dr Olha Mukha.

A trust void, not a knowledge gap

Steven opened at the individual level: fear about the economy, safety, a widely shared sense of powerlessness, and — since 2008 — a public that has largely stopped making five-year plans. Layered onto that is a collapse in institutional trust: people who no longer believe mainstream media, politicians or "the system" are telling them the whole story. That gap doesn't stay empty. Figures from Elon Musk to Katie Hopkins fill it — rarely confined to a single theme, but cutting laterally across immigration, health, climate and antisemitism alike, amplifying whichever grievance resonates on a given day.

Not who you'd expect

The session's central corrective was about who actually holds these beliefs. Where groups like the "Hard Pressed" or "Lively Lads" (mapped in the previous session on the Unite the Kingdom rally) have little time or appetite for conspiracy thinking — repeating what they hear rather than pursuing it — the "Conspiracy Truthers" are a different, often more educated audience: civil servants, university graduates, people with the time and inclination to self-actualise, who arrive at conviction through reading widely rather than too little.

Composite profiles drawn from the research illustrated the range: a former corporate banker turned crypto investor convinced mainstream media is a "scripted simulation"; a trainee midwife drawn toward natural living and vaccine scepticism through a protective instinct for her children, at real cost to her family relationships; an antique restorer who has given up television and smartphones and sees himself as standing above a manipulated crowd. Different entry points, the same underlying need: agency, in a world that feels increasingly out of anyone's control.

COVID as the master gateway

Across profiles, COVID came up again and again as the hinge moment — the point where scepticism of one official narrative generalised into scepticism of all of them. It functions now as origin story and reference point at once: whatever the subject (digital ID, vaccines, immigration), the reasoning tends to loop back to the pandemic as proof of concept.

Reading more, trusting less

Counterintuitively, this group consumes more media, not less — The Guardian, The Times, The Telegraph, the BBC, social platforms, even primary government sources, in what functions as an ongoing hunt for the "real" story. But volume doesn't produce clarity here; filtered through a starting assumption that no single source can be trusted, more information produces more confusion rather than less — what Rebecca Skippage, drawing on the concept of cognitive miserliness, linked to how readily repeated claims lodge as fact regardless of their accuracy.

Right about the disease, wrong about the diagnosis

Both speakers pushed back on treating this as simple ignorance or pathology. In a genuinely low-trust environment, "trust nothing until it proves itself" is, as Steven put it, a rational starting position — and conspiratorial audiences are sometimes right that something is being hidden, even when their explanation for it goes somewhere untrue. Distrust of institutions that have over-promised and under-delivered isn't irrational; the error tends to arrive at the point where a reasonable question about power gets answered with an unfounded story about who is secretly wielding it.

Why fact-checking alone doesn't work

Steven's framing was blunt: dry, villain-free facts are a worse product than a conspiracy theory, not because they're less true but because they don't compete on the same terms — a good conspiracy explains the world, names a villain, and offers belonging. He proposed five practical tests for whether a communication will land with this audience: who's paying for it; can it be checked rather than just asserted; does it move people emotionally; does it speak to them rather than down at them; and does it read as a sales pitch. Failing any one of these, he argued, loses the room.

What actually helps, at both scales

Rebecca argued the systemic fix runs in the same direction: institutions rebuilding trust through changed behaviour rather than by simply asking for it, meeting audiences where they already are rather than trying to pull them back to legacy formats, and getting ahead of disinformation through prebunking rather than only correcting it after the fact. She pointed to Estonia and Finland, where media literacy is taught from age five and woven into subjects like maths and science, as a model — alongside a UK Digital Literacy in Education Act due to begin rolling out in schools, and the government's recent acceptance of a recommendation to establish a national disinformation centre.

On the personal level, the advice from both was consistent: don't withdraw from people in your own life who are drawn into conspiratorial thinking. Cutting them off, Steven argued, tends to push people further toward the communities that will have them — the opposite of what's needed. Keeping the door open, staying curious rather than superior, and asking questions rather than arguing facts, came through as the more durable approach — on both an individual and an institutional scale.

Watch: YouTube