thegrayzone | Caroline Dinenage served as the UK government’s Digital and Culture minister from February 2020 to September 2021, making her de facto chief of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS).
In this capacity, she was personally responsible for overseeing construction of the repressive, World Economic Forum-endorsed Online Safety Bill, which has been criticized by rights groups for threatening the rights to free expression, and privacy. For her leading role in crafting the speech-muzzling bill, Dinenage was honored by Princess Royal with the title of Dame Commander of the British Empire.
Moreover, during this period, the DCMS was home to the shadowy, intelligence official-run Counter-Disinformation Unit (CDU), which policed “COVID-19 disinformation narratives” online.
Investigations by the civil liberties organization Big Brother Watch have revealed that instead of suppressing content that posed risks to public health, the CDU was preoccupied with censoring and deplatforming reasonable online criticisms of the British government’s Covid-19 response, including opposition to lockdowns and vaccine passports.
According to an official fact sheet, the CDU’s focus turned to the Ukraine proxy war in 2022, and particularly to targeting content suggesting “the Bucha massacre and the bombing of the maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine, were both hoaxes.”
Dinenage’s husband is Mark Lancaster, a fellow information warrior dedicated to advancing the propaganda goals of the British government. Lancaster reportedly left his wife and four-month-old daughter in 2013 when he began dating Dinenage, who was herself married at the time to a British Naval officer.
A former Conservative MP and Armed Forces minister, Lancaster helped lead London’s blitz on pandemic dissent as deputy commander of the British Army’s 77th Brigade between June 2018 and July 2022.
Specialized in “behaviour and attitudinal change,” the 77th Brigade maintains a vast militia of real, fake, and automated social media accounts to disseminate and amplify pro-state messaging, and discredit domestic and foreign enemies.
During the pandemic, the 77th Brigade targeted people within Britain and across the West with advanced psychological manipulation strategies honed on battlefields against enemy militaries. The online profile of a 77th Brigade veteran notes they were deployed straight from a tour of the Middle East – where they “successfully implemented behavioral change strategies against ISIS” – to “countering dis- and misinformation during the Covid-19 crisis.”
However, in January, an ex-Brigade whistleblower revealed how the Ministry of Defence and RRU routinely circumvented British law to advance the government’s crusade against pandemic dissent:
“To skirt the legal difficulties of a military unit monitoring domestic dissent, the view was that unless a profile explicitly stated their real name and nationality, they could be a foreign agent and were fair game. But it is quite obvious that our activities resulted in the monitoring of the UK population…These posts did not contain information that was untrue or coordinated [emphasis added].”
As The Grayzone revealed in June 2023, British journalist Paul Mason had attempted to submit a “formal complaint” about The Grayzone to DCMS, believing it would trigger a government investigation into this outlet’s “funding and activities,” and ultimately its deplatforming. Mason’s handler, a British intelligence agent named Andy Pryce, boasted in leaked emails of his personal role in YouTube’s banning of “Russian stuff” in Britain. The CDU has been confirmed as the government body responsible for these censorship demands.
Now, this shadowy, intelligence-linked entity appears to be the spearhead of the campaign to silence Russell Brand.
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