Dr Robert Seely MBE is author of ‘The New Total War’, ConservativeHome foreign affairs columnist and a former Conservative MP.
What on earth is Prime Minister Andy Burnham playing at, digging up the bones of the decade-old Brexit campaign?
On Sunday, a taster of The Rest is Politics podcast hit Social Media. Burnham gravely declared that the Russians interfered in the vote. Was he trying to please his ‘centrist dad’ hosts? Was he rolling the pitch to declare the Brexit vote null and void? Or was he just adding to his reputation for putting his foot in it on a regular basis?
Below is my take. There are some valuable truths to learn from this episode, both about Russia and about ‘foreign interference’ more broadly, but they are not necessarily those that Remain obsessives would want.
First, the likelihood is that Russia probably fiddled on the margins in the Brexit vote, but there is zero evidence that they succeeded in changing the outcome. They probably interfered less than the combined might of Barack Obama, EU Governments and, oh, our own government, which told us to vote to stay in.
The intervention this week by MI5 chief, Sir Ken McCallum, underlining the difference between “interference attempted and outcome swayed,” and “the Brexit referendum result is not in dispute” were slapdowns aimed at Burnham’s silly remarks. There was nothing new in it, and nothing new in the corrections made by Sir Ken and others.
However, that doesn’t mean that Putin hasn’t tried elsewhere. In the US, Russia did interfere in the 2016 US Election. Anyone with an hour or three to spare should read the two US Department of Justice indictments, numbers 1035477 from February 2018 and 1080281 from July 2018. They tell a remarkable and fascinating story. Below is a very brief summary.
In the US, Russian operatives used fake personas to impersonate political parties and target multiple groups to conduct information warfare against the US. The US Department of Justice alleged, in the two indictments, that both the GRU and a internet troll and bot farm mounted operations to “interfere with the US political system including the 2016 presidential election.”
The Internet Research Agency bot farm was owned by the then Putin ally and mercenary army boss Yevgeni Prigozhin, who has since been murdered by Putin’s secret services for his half-cock mutiny in the summer of 2023. His bot farm briefly featured in the superb film, The Wizard of the Kremlin. The two sub-units of Russian Military Intelligence were 26165 and 74455.
The July indictment stated the GRU plans to “hack into the computers of U.S. persons and entities involved in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, steal document from those computers, and stage releases of the stolen documents to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” In all, some 50,000 documents were stolen, many believed to be forwarded to Wikileaks, who dumped them on the Internet.
Other tasks include suppression of ethnic minority voting, and attempts to create significant divisions. For example, online trolls would organise both pro- and anti-gun rallies in the same cities on the same days. They also broke into computers of individuals responsible for administering US elections. Iowa, Georgia and Florida State Boards of Elections (SBOEs) were targeted. They also hacked into the vendors of election software too, presumably to understand the vulnerabilities on individual counties and states, with the option to electronically rig voting.
The Russian campaign was primarily aimed to harm Hillary Clinton, as the representative of a hawkish US foreign policy establishment. The Russians were also understood to be broadly positive about Berney Saunders. What they wanted was someone not tied to the status quo regarding Russia. They wanted to shake up the US system.
It’s only one voice, but Michael Hayden, the former director of both the CIA and the NSA, described Russia’s Interference in the 2016 election as the “most successful covert influence operation in history.”
So, has Russia mounted an information campaign aimed to divide and confuse? Yes. In the US, there was evidence, and frankly the campaign was pretty remarkable. Has any similar evidence been found in the UK? No. The US presidential election was predictable in its timing. Plans were put in place by Putin by September 2014. The Russian agencies had a 15-month run up. The conditions surrounding the Brexit vote; it’s timetables not least, were different. Britain was not then the Russian bete noire which it has since become.
But for despairing members of the elite, such as Rory Stewart, and that well known paragon of moral virtue, Alistair Campbell, there has to be an explanation for why poor people could be so dumb as to vote for Brexit. There must have been more to it than loss of borders, loss of sovereignty, pride in our country and the loss of industries to eastern Europe, and then, later, China. Could the oiks not appreciate cheap and attractive au pairs and cappuccino baristas?
But there’s another issue here. What counts as malign interference?
Russia and Iran definitely fall into this category, and Russian ‘hybrid’ combines all the tools of state power, military and otherwise, into a single strategic concept. It should not be underestimated. Yet what about China? In some ways it’s the greatest threat we face given its power, and yet we do not insist that it is on the upper tier of the FIRS – Foreign Agent Registration – Scheme. The FIRS scheme helps to transparently show foreign-state linked activities in the UK. Why do we still not take Chinese influence operations seriously?
During Brexit, what about the positions of EU leaders, the US president and others, telling us to stay in the EU? What about the position of our own then Conservative government, whose disinformation campaign was shameful: we were threatened with emergency budgets, a severe recession and pensions unpaid. All provable nonsense, of course.
What about the wider influence of organised leftwing groups? Over the last year, researcher Charlotte Gill has done brilliant work identifying the extraordinary nexus of leftwing open borders campaigners and the tens of millions of pounds that are funnelled to them, not least by our own Government, but also by other leftwing funders.
If this was organised by conservative-leaning groups and funded by a Tory or Reform Government, the mainstream media would be quick to expose it. Predictably, leftwing organised entryism and government funded propaganda in support of mass migration doesn’t seem to be high on their list of investigative priorities.
So, yes, of course we need to be mindful of disinformation campaigns from Russia and other states, especially given the centrality of its role in modern conflict. But we also need to be mindful of the lies peddled by our own government and other European leaders.
We need to properly see China as the threat it is. We need to question the funding sources of so many leftwing pressure groups.
Just a few days ago, The Telegraph reported that community cohesion fund put in place after the Southport murders was used to fund leftwing activists and anti-Reform and Tory material. Angela Raynor led the department at the time. Putin wants us to lose faith in our government, true, but when our own politicians politicise the deaths of children, we lose faith in it ourselves.