Russian Interference in UK Politics

Debate between Liam Byrne and Bob Seely

Thursday 21st December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) on securing this important debate.

The argument I want to make is that, unlike our agencies, the Government have been tragically late in waking up to the new world-view that President Putin set out with such clarity and force after his re-election as President in 2012. I also want to set out the opportunity, the means and the motive which have driven Russia to intervene in our democracy, and then to propose to the Minister a number of areas where I think we can work together on reform over the year to come.

Let me start with the motive, however. We have heard a lot, in particular from my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes), about the history of this, and that motive is important to underline. After Putin returned to the presidency in 2012, he offered a very different view about the possibilities of co-operation with the west from those he harboured during his first term. That world-view was not a secret. He set it out with great clarity in his 2013 state of the nation address, where he gave us the theory to match the fury he offered the world in his Munich security conference speech of 2007. He attacked what he called the “post-Christian” west of “genderless and infertile liberalism”, he attacked the Europeans who he said embraced an “equality of good and evil”, and he attacked what he said was a west trapped in moral relativism, lost in a vague sense of identity. Europeans, argued President Putin, had begun

“renouncing their roots, including Christian values, which underlie Western civilization.”

The Kremlin-backed Centre for Strategic Communications had a headline for this story. It described the pitch as “Putin: world conservatism’s new leader”. But of course, this world view has nothing to do with traditional conservatism. It has a great deal to do with the new trends of the alt-right. It has nothing to do with the party of Disraeli.

If Mr Putin were content to confine his philosophy to the limits of his own borders, we would not be having this debate. However, the reality is that he has set out systematically to wreck the vision, the legacy and the record of President Gorbachev, who set out, between 1987 and 1989, a very different view of the way in which Russia and Europe could work together to create what he called “an all-European home”, subject to a common legal space and governed by the European convention on human rights. That is not a view that President Putin shares. There is no all-European home for President Putin. Instead, we see a systematic effort to divide, rule, confound and confuse.

That brings us to the means of Russia’s new strategy. The right hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) did us a favour by sketching out the history of active measures. They have a long history in Russian warfare techniques. Major Kalugin, who was the KGB’s highest-ranking defector to the west, described the approach as

“the heart and soul of Soviet intelligence”.

Since 2012, under General Gerasimov, this doctrine has now been renewed. Some call it a doctrine, and some call it a philosophy, but the idea is that

“the very rules of war have changed”,

and that the role of non-military means of intervention behind an opponent’s lines is now very different.

As Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev of the London School of Economics have set out, these new tactics are characterised by opportunism and involve an unregulated network of propagandists whose material is distributed online. They point out that Russia is now operating in a post-truth environment, and there is no attempt to win people over to a Russian view of the world. There is simply an attempt to confuse and confound.

The way in which this goes to market in the west, however, is through an unholy alliance with extreme leftist groups and extreme right groups. Its aim is to polarise and divide, and to tear down the words on the coat of arms here in the Chamber, which state that we have “more in common” than sets us apart. If we look at the 45 new parties that have been created in Europe over the past 10 to 20 years, we see a clear majority that have some sympathy with Russia. They include Germany’s AFD, Austria’s FPO, the Golden Dawn in Greece, Jobbik in Hungary, the Front National in France, the Northern League in Italy and, indeed, the United Kingdom Independence party.

All those parties have taken a pro-Russia position on matters of huge international interest. The Front National, for example, was given significant loans by Kremlin-backed banks. If we look at the AFD’s relationship with Russia, we see how broadcasters such as Sputnik and Russia-linked accounts systematically intervened to attack Chancellor Merkel and to support the AFD. If we look at the relationship with UKIP, we can see very close links. Nigel Farage famously said that President Putin was the leader that he most admired, back in 2014. In the European Parliament, UKIP has taken consistent positions in favour of the Russian annexation of Crimea. The Atlantic Council has analysed a number of policy positions and concluded that UKIP MEPs

“made similar statements blaming the EU for the Ukraine crisis and asserting Russia’s right to intervene in the ‘near abroad’.”

Looking at all this in the round, the US intelligence community concluded that Russia was intervening systematically abroad in the west, and it would be naive of us to think that Russia was not trying to intervene here in this country.

[Mr Seely]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Liam Byrne]

I will not give way, because of the lack of time.

That takes us to the heart of the reform agenda that we need to look at. It has now become clear that there is a dark social playbook that is being used to great effect. We have hackers such as Cozy Bear hacking emails, and they work in partnership with useful idiots such as Wikileaks. Alongside them, we have what are politely called alternative news sites. These include Sputnik, Russia Today and, frankly, Leave.EU, Westmonster and Breitbart. They work hard to circulate news that will create a row on Twitter, then the troll farms kick in. The material is then sucked into private Facebook groups, at which point dark money is switched behind those ads to circulate them widely.

The study that I have commissioned for today’s debate from the data science firm Signify will be of interest to Conservative Members. It looked at the terrible front page in The Daily Telegraph attacking Conservative Members for being “Brexit mutineers”. Leave.EU and Westmonster probably picked up that story. Westmonster published the original content. Leave.EU then amplified the story on Twitter and Facebook channels, calling Conservative Members “a cancer” and “Tory Traitors”. Standard social listening tools show that the Twitter account attracted about 1,300 interactions. On the original post, there were only 44 interactions, yet the post on Facebook secured more than 23,000 interactions. The difference is explained by the fact that money, run in this case by Voter Consultancy Ltd, was being switched behind the story in order to attack, influence and attempt to suborn Conservative Members in the debates that we have had over the past week or two. Interestingly, Voter Consultancy Ltd is a dormant company, so we do not know quite where the money was coming from. It has, however, just set up an interesting subsidiary called Disruptive Communications, together with a man called John Douglas Wilson Carswell, formerly of this parish.

My point is that we now have a well-established playbook involving a method of creating rows on Twitter and sucking their content into Facebook using dark money. The ads are not going to everybody. Firms such as Cambridge Analytica or Aggregate IQ are very effectively targeting the ads at a particular demographic.