Russia interfered with the Brexit vote. What stops them undermining all our votes?

Andy Burnham is the first PM to say Russia interfered in the Brexit vote. He didn’t say it changed the result, or show the evidence. If the next election is to be safe, we need to see it.

In July 2020 the government answered a question from Parliament in one sentence: “a retrospective assessment of the EU Referendum is not necessary.”

This weekend the Prime Minister said he had asked the question anyway. Speaking on The Rest is Politics, Andy Burnham said: “I asked the question coming to Downing Street: was there interference in the 2016 referendum from Russia? And I’ve had the clear answer that yes, there was.”

The BBC reports it is the first time a UK prime minister has said that. Both sides of the Brexit argument are reading it for what they wanted to hear. Read it instead for what it tells us about the next election.

What we want, and why this matters

Open Britain’s aim is simple to state. Future elections should be open and fair, and serve the needs of the people of this country. That can’t be true unless we are as sure as we can be that results aren’t swayed by foreign interference.

You don’t get that assurance by hoping. You need four answers. How did foreign actors try to undermine our democracy in the past? What impact did they have, or might they have had? What new tools, from technology and elsewhere, do they have now? And what defences does the Government have to prevent, mitigate and deter them?

Burnham has just given us a sliver of the first answer. Nothing yet on the other three.

What he said, and what he didn’t

He said that when he arrived in No 10 this summer he asked about 2016, and the answer was yes. He added that Britain has been “too much on the back foot” and “we haven’t informed people sufficiently about the extent to which people are seeking to disrupt the political process from overseas.”

He didn’t say who gave him the answer, what the evidence was, or what kind of interference it was. And he didn’t say it changed the result. The Guardian noted he did not disclose “whether any interference had affected the result of the vote.”

So this is a conclusion without the working: serious, but still a sentence on a podcast.

Nothing here makes the 2016 result illegitimate. Seventeen million people voted Leave for their own reasons. The result stands. Burnham hasn’t claimed otherwise, and neither do we.

Impact is the wrong place to start

Britain Unbound, the pro-Brexit campaign, called his comments “another crude attempt to undermine the legitimacy of the decision that the British people made in 2016,” adding: “There is no good reason to believe that Russian intervention influenced the outcome.”

Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) would partly agree. Its 2020 Russia report said the impact of any interference “would be difficult – if not impossible – to assess, and we have not sought to do so.” But it went on: “it is important to establish whether a hostile state took deliberate action with the aim of influencing a UK democratic process, irrespective of whether it was successful or not.”

That’s the point both camps skip. Whether someone tried to tamper with a British vote is about our security, not about Leave or Remain. You’d want to know if someone had tried your front door, even if they never got in. Not least because they might come back with better tools.

The state that chose not to look

The ISC said the Government’s written evidence “appeared to suggest that HMG had not seen or sought evidence of successful interference in UK democratic processes.” It added: “We have not been provided with any post-referendum assessment of Russian attempts at interference.” In the United States, by contrast, an assessment of Russian activity in the 2016 presidential election was produced within two months of the vote, with an unclassified summary made public.

So the ISC asked for the same here, “and that an unclassified summary of it be published.” Even a finding of minimal interference, it said, “would nonetheless represent a helpful reassurance to the public.”

Boris Johnson’s government said no: “We have seen no evidence of successful interference in the EU Referendum,” and a retrospective assessment was “not necessary.”

It is easy to see no evidence of success if nobody is asked to look. Six years later the Prime Minister says he has a clear yes. Either that answer was in the system all along, or someone has since done the looking. Either way: where is the summary?

We asked these questions in May

In May, Open Britain published Russian Interference in British Politics, a report co-written by our CEO, Mark Kieran, and Sergei Cristo, a former Conservative Party fundraiser turned whistleblower.

It found the UK is an international outlier. France, Italy, Germany, Canada, Moldova, the European Parliament and the United States have each run substantive investigations into Russian political interference, and most reported within two years. Britain has not. It found there is no structured channel between our intelligence services and the Electoral Commission, so the regulator cannot draw on classified intelligence when deciding what to refer to the police. And it warned that the next election will be fought with more capable technology and new weak spots, not least cryptocurrency donations, that the current rules don’t properly cover.

Put that against our four questions. The past has never been fully investigated in public. No government has published an assessment of the impact. The tools have moved on. The defences have gaps. The report calls for a full, independent public inquiry. Publishing a summary of what Burnham was told is the first and easiest step towards it.

Back foot, front foot

Burnham set the test himself. If Britain has been “too much on the back foot” about telling voters, the fix is to tell them properly.

He says defences are coming. At the UN last month he said Russian agencies “spread lies and disinformation” and announced a centre to “stem the poisonous tide.” The Guardian reports the UK is developing a National Centre for Information Defence.

A centre like that will only be trusted if it shows its evidence. Telling a podcast the answer is clear asks people to take national security on faith.

You can think Brexit was right and still want to know what a hostile state did in 2016. You can think it was wrong and still accept the result. What none of us should accept is walking into the next election without knowing.