Russian Interference in UK Politics

Jo Swinson Excerpts

Thursday 21st December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Tom Brake]

That is a very good point, which I will come back to. The Minister now has advance notice that he needs to be prepared to answer that question, because it is clearly a source of concern.

There is no soft power in Putin’s eyes and, as far as he is concerned, the use of social media to interfere in foreign states is a vital, weaponised tool. The covert interference I referred to is supplemented by more overt attempts to create a media counter-narrative. I am now talking about RT. The RT chief editor, Margarita Simonyan, is on the record comparing RT to the Ministry of Defence, saying in 2008:

“We were fighting the information war against the whole of the Western world”.

She referred to “the information weapon”, which is used in “critical moments”, and said that RT’s task in peacetime is to build an audience, so they can fight the information war better next time. Not surprisingly, therefore, Chatham House and the Henry Jackson Society see RT as a tool of destabilisation from the Kremlin.

Members will know that RT was found in breach by Ofcom in September 2015 for stories about Assad and chemical weapons. However, as I understand it, Ofcom has not always enforced sanctions as and when appropriate. According to the Library, Sputnik has never been found in breach by Ofcom. Ofcom imposed 84 sanctions against 57 broadcasters in the 10 years up to March 2017—RT was not the subject of a sanction during that time—and found broadcasters in breach of the broadcasting code more than 2,500 times

I am certainly not advocating shutting down RT, and I do not think anyone else is. I just want to ensure that it abides by the broadcasting rules and that appropriate action is taken by Ofcom every time it does not. Is the Minister happy with Ofcom’s actions? Does it consistently pursue RT for breaches in the way he would like? As an aside, I would like Ofcom to be much more active in pursuing a number of other TV channels that are broadcast here, in particular when threats are made to the Ahmadi Muslim community on some of those channels.

No British parliamentarian should be taking money from RT. In fact, I would go one step further and say that, frankly, no British parliamentarian should appear on RT. The only exception to that rule might be if they have complete control and are completely unedited—if they can go on the channel and say what they want, knowing that it will not be chopped, edited and cut by RT. Apart from that, no one here or in the House of Lords should ever appear on that channel. The only time that RT ever contacts me is when I have said something critical about the Government. Well, I am happy to say critical things about the Government on the BBC, but RT is trying to create an agenda that is about attacking the Government at every turn, and I will not facilitate that process.

The next issue is the question of whether the Russians are infiltrating or leaking content from political party systems. Well, we know what they did regarding the Democrats. Incidentally, they also hacked the Republicans, but they only released the information on the Democrats. We also know that they attempted to infiltrate Macron’s team by setting up a number of websites with pseudo-official titles that would email Macron’s members of staff, trying to get them to click on links and provide back-door access to their systems. As I understand it, Macron managed to defeat that, mainly by inserting some fake news into the content that the Russians were trying to access so that the story was demolished because of the inconsistencies within it.

As Members will know, Monsieur Macron had a more aggressive and muscular stance towards Russia than any other parties in that French presidential election, and I believe that that is why he was targeted in a way in which the others were not. As I understand it, the other French political parties were targeted, but the Russians were clearly interested in releasing information that related to Macron in particular. Mr Putin has said that these hackers may not be associated with the Government and that they may be “patriotic” hackers. Well, they may be patriotic hackers as far as he is concerned, but one has to suspect that they have the Government’s endorsement, because I am sure that the Russian Government could clamp down on these so-called patriotic hackers if they wanted to do so.

I am trying to make my questions very clear because I know that the officials in the Box can then provide a written answer for the Minister to read out and get on the record straightaway, so I have another easy question for him. Will he consider making UK political parties part of the critical national infrastructure, and what are the implications of taking such a step?

To be able to ascertain the level of threat, we have to assess it accurately, otherwise I risk coming across as a conspiracy theorist. I know that I do already in relation to Brexit, but I do not want to become the person known for conspiracy theories in this place. The difficulty we have is that we do not really know the extent of the activity because, frankly, no one has investigated it properly yet. It is only when that has been done that we will know. I regret that it took so long for the Intelligence and Security Committee to be reconstituted, but I welcome the fact that it has stated that Russia will be a topic that it will focus on. Does the Minister think that the Committee should give priority to the subject? Would he also want the ISC to work effectively with the Electoral Commission so that it can go to places that the Electoral Commission cannot? An ISC inquiry would help us to establish accurately the level of threat.

To pick up on an earlier intervention, we know that Facebook was asked by the Electoral Commission to look at examples of paid ads from Russia, but it was not asked to look at the use of bots or trolls, so the picture we are going to get will, at best, be very incomplete. The response the commission has had—that the Russians apparently spent £7.50 on advertising—does not quite sound right to me.

[Jo Swinson (East Dunbartonshire) (LD)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend on securing the debate. We are not talking just about a few Twitter or Facebook accounts with no picture avatar and 10 followers. The David Jones account had more than 100,000 followers and was listed as one of the most influential Twitter accounts during the last general election. It purports to be from Southampton, yet it tweets exclusively in office hours in a Russian time zone. Surely the social media companies have a greater role to play in identifying fake accounts—which are pretending to be something they are not—for the integrity of the debate we should all enjoy online.