Andy Burnham has reopened the debate on Brexit with his statement to Parliament last Monday. The day before, in a podcast, he talked about Russian meddling in the 2016 referendum and said that when he first arrived in Downing Street he had asked about possible Russian interference, adding: "I've had the clear answer that, yes, there was." This is hardly news. I’ve always believed there was something going on and it certainly benefited Russia to drive a wedge between the UK and the European Union. What was surprising was the feigned outrage of the Brexiteers.
Nigel Farage was quick to call the prime minister “a liar”, apparently basing this on Boris Johnson’s slightly more nuanced claim in 2019 that the Russians hadn’t “successfully” interfered. Johnson couldn't say the Russians hadn’t interfered at all, only that it hadn’t been successful, something neither he nor the security services could possibly have known, even assuming Johnson is a paragon of truth, which he clearly is not.
It’s not difficult to see that if foreign interference helps to achieve your political goal, as it would in the case of Farage and Johnson, you may not be inclined to look too deeply into it. Russian interference relies on this iron principle.
Also, we shouldn’t forget that Farage’s own former Welsh leader is now serving a ten-year prison sentence for accepting Russian bribes. He has direct knowledge of this sort of stuff.
Let’s be clear, it is impossible to know if an undercover campaign to influence voters actually worked or not. You would need to interview individual voters and understand to what extent, if any, they were swayed by what they were seeing on social media back in the first half of 2016. But can we simply assume they weren’t swayed at all?
What Brexiteers fear, of course, is that the mere suggestion of Russian interference, successful or not, might call the result into question, which for many people it does.
What we do know beyond any doubt from research carried out by the campaign group 89UP and published in a 2018 report is that the Kremlin-controlled TV channels RT and Sputnik, both broadcasting in the UK, together carried no fewer than 261 media articles on the EU referendum, or with a strong anti-EU sentiment, which mentioned Brexit, from 1 January 2016 until 23 June 2016. Their report shows the social reach of these anti-EU articles was 134 million potential impressions.
The Vote Leave and Leave.EU websites, by comparison, had a total social reach of just 33 million and 11 million potential impressions respectively. In other words, Russian-owned outlets got over three times the reach of both main UK groups campaigning for Brexit combined. Astonishing, eh? It was a significant force multiplier.
Say what you like, but I really find it hard to accept that it had little impact and didn’t change the outcome. Did the readers of those page impressions realise who was behind the messages? I suspect not.
And anyone who doubts that Brexit was a Russian foreign policy objective going back decades should take note of a book published in 1997, written by Alexander Dugin, described by some as Putin’s brain. This was Foundations in Geopolitics, setting out a political philosophy for Russia, a sort of manual intended for Russian military, political, and academic leadership. You can read a summary of it HERE.
Dugin’s book calls for "Atlantic societies", with Russia controlling Eurasia and the USA controlling the Americas. He said that “the battle for the world rule of Russians" has not ended and Russia remains "the staging area of a new anti-bourgeois, anti-American revolution". Brexit was a perfect opportunity to weaken the EU and, at the same time, split Europe from US influence.
Russian ‘active measures’ have been talked about in the West since the early 1980s, although the old Soviet Union developed the concept back in the 1920s. It’s been common knowledge for years that Russia uses political influence campaigns and disinformation to spread division.
The Russians have been spending vast sums of money on active measures for decades, and they wouldn’t do it, if it were having no effect. We may not know the details yet, but it’s reasonable to assume there is political interference, and it is, in many cases, successful.
John Danzig in his EUrope blog, asks the question: Was Brexit decided in 1997, with reference to Dugin’s book, among other things. You can make the case that it was.
An article in The Times last week sets out the evidence so far. It’s not conclusive, but there’s enough of it to justify looking deeper, but the Tory government at the time studiously avoided doing that, and looked the other way:
Brexit and Russia… “I think you would have to start with Boris Johnson. “The reason why there is still this confusion is there was no public attempt to establish with confidence what actually happened because successive British governments declined to look closely at what was going on.” (Times)— Sarah Murphy (@13sarahmurphy.bsky.social) 17 October 2026 at 09:15
In recent years, Putin has been pushing his own Eurasian Union as an alternative to the EU. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus and Armenia have joined the bloc. Capturing Ukraine was part of the plan. Boris Titov, Russia’s business ombudsman, wrote on Facebook following the Brexit vote:
“UK out!!! In my opinion, the most important long-term consequence of all this is that the exit will take Europe away from the Anglo-Saxons, that is, from the US. This is not the independence of Britain from Europe, but the independence of Europe from the USA.”
Open Britain has published a 53-page report this year with the title: Russian interference in British politics, which sets out more evidence. And Sir Ken McCallum, the head of MI5 said threats from foreign adversaries had quadrupled in the last decade, with Russia "aggressor number one".
And of course, we need look no further than the USA, where Trump is doing the Kremlin’s work.
The notion that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 referendum is for the birds.
Polling
Perhaps the best indicator of how the 2016 referendum result was achieved by disinformation, distortion, manipulation and downright lies is the inexorable shift towards rejoining, as shown by the polls. There is no argument that voters have become disillusioned with Brexit. How could 17 million people have voted for something so damaging and antithetical to their own best interests without lies?
The present disillusionment is due to the mass of unfulfilled promises made by the Leave side. Promises that were never realistic and often contradictory. If voters in 2016 could have foreseen the outcome we’ve experienced over the last ten years, there would have been an overwhelming majority to remain. I have no doubt about that.
The latest polling by YouGov shows two-thirds of voters now accept we should Rejoin/Remain in the EU:
Artificial Intelligence
Finally, I think I’ve finally started to understand what AI is and why we should all worry about it. I watched a couple of YouTube videos of interviews with Dr Geoffrey Hinton, described (not by himself, I should say) as the Godfather of artificial intelligence. He is a very impressive individual.
Hinton is an AI pioneer, a Nobel Prize winner, and a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. He worked for Google for ten years, leaving in 2023 on fears the technology was becoming dangerous. He has said part of him now regrets his life’s work. Think about that. He asks if there has ever been a situation in the history of the world where less intelligent beings controlled more intelligent ones?
Hinton thinks we should be doing masses of research into how we might control the technology to minimise short- and long-term risks, but as we know, we aren’t.
In one video, in conversation with Alex Kantowitz in the Big Technology Podcast, he actually says these AI models “are beings like us”, albeit not biological, and they will, within the next few years, achieve superintelligence. He also says they will change our understanding of what consciousness is.
Here he is again, talking to US physicist Neil de Grasse Tyson in the Star Talk podcast.
He describes in very easy, basic terms, what AI is and why it’s different to ordinary computer code. He explains how AI can ‘look’ at a digital image and (as an example) recognise a bird, no matter if it’s seeing a duck on water, a heron in flight or a close-up of an ostrich’s head. It’s stunning and terrifying too.
Humankind, Hinton says, has to get used to the idea that we aren’t special anymore. AI can’t be uninvented. It’s here to stay, and I fear it will do terrible damage before it’s brought under control.
It's coming. We need to understand what the implications are for humanity.
