The Russia Report is thin, flawed and biased

Foreign funding of national elections and referendums, as well as other forms of influence peddling, are a vital topic. It is greatly to be regretted that the “ Russia Report ” of Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee, published on 21 July, was so thin, so flawed and arguably so biased in its comments that it was a wasted opportunity.

It is likely to hamper future study of the subject, which I have followed for over 40 years as a scholar of election and party funding.

The multiple misunderstandings and misleading commentaries which have followed the report’s appearance (including, unfortunately, in TheArticle) were only to be expected from its undue focus on the 2016 Brexit referendum and from the dearth of evidence provided to support its conclusions.

The report contained much on other aspects of alleged Russian intelligence activity. I will not consider them here since they are outside my field.

There have been endless efforts by aggrieved members of the Remain camp to discredit the vote in 2016 to leave the European Union. The “ Russia Report ” was right to mention that the grumbles included widespread public allegations of Russian attempts to support the Brexit case, for example in broadcasts of the RT and Sputnik channels. UK law greatly restricted foreign financial or in-kind contributions to campaign groups. The reports of Russian involvement apply therefore either to illegal payments or to activities such as social media posts or media commentaries not covered by the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act. The evidence provided about the activities and influence of Russian-funded channels, press outlets and social media is simply inadequate to support any firm conclusions.

I am no more able than the committee appears to have been to assess the allegations of Russian media interference in the Brexit referendum. Rather than refer merely to “widespread public allegations”, surely its months-long inquiry could have been expected to be more specific. Nor ought we to ignore the fact that the most obvious Russian financial stake in UK public life at the time of the referendum, Alexander Lebedev’s ownership of the London Evening Standard, was of a newspaper which was hardly in the Leave camp.

The report is on even shakier ground concerning the allegation of Russian sources of campaign payments. The most serious of these concerned payments by Arron Banks to pro-Brexit campaign organisations. The ISC states: “Banks became the biggest donor in British political history when he gave £8 million to the Leave.EU campaign.” By contrast, the National Crime Agency (NCA) — which the Electoral Commission had asked to investigate whether the money had been derived from an allegedly Russian “third party” — made clear on 24 September 2019 that the money had not been in the form of donations, but of loans to “Better for the Country Ltd and Leave.EU.”

On 29 April 2020, the Electoral Commission then issued a joint statement with Banks, accepting the NCA ’ s conclusions that it “had not received any evidence to suggest that Mr Banks or his companies received funding from any third party to fund the loans, or that he acted as an agent on behalf of a third party”.

Given its sparse, vague coverage of Russian funding and other support for the Leave campaign, the ISC report casts aspersions without supporting them with evidence. The committee’s chair when the report was prepared was Dominic Grieve, the former Attorney General who lost the Conservative whip and ultimately his membership of the House of Commons as a pro-Remain rebel.

Moreover, if we are to consider foreign funding and other forms of influence peddling during the 2016 referendum campaign, we surely need, if only for the sake of balance, to investigate sources for Remain as well as for Leave, including backing from other countries as well as Russia and from international bodies. It was a committee of the European Parliament which drew my attention to what seemed to be its interest in backing the Remain campaign when it asked me and other specialists in political finance whether I would be prepared to bid for a contract to prepare a report on what I interpreted as an effort to establish how it could intervene in the referendum within the terms of UK law. More broadly, there is little question that EU intervention in the campaign took place.

The US also became involved. Once the campaign was in progress, I wrote in Standpoint questioning the legality under UK referendum law of President Obama’s warning in London that, in the event of a Leave victory, the UK was going to be at the back of the queue for a trade agreement with the US. It was confirmed in 2018 by White House staffer Ben Rhodes that Obama had made the statement at the urging of David Cameron, Britain’s strongly pro-Remain Prime Minister. According to the letter of UK law, a speech by a foreigner may be valued as an in-kind political payment, if given in the speaker’s normal office hours. The value of a presidential speech clearly is above the legal limit for a foreign contribution. Absurdly, therefore, the legality of Obama’s pronouncement could have depended, firstly, on whether “normal office hours” should have ben reckoned according to UK or Washington time and, secondly, on whether the law would apply to foreign elected office-holders.

As if these were not sufficient complications, matters become foggier when the boundaries of political payments and “ influence ” are broadened. I warned of the wide range of indirect political payments in my August 2016 report on British political funding, commissioned by the Committee on Standards in Public Life, referring to work published by the Hudson Institute on the alleged political influence and activities of Russian “ kleptocrats ” resident in the UK. For a time, British journalists were invited on “kleptocracy tours” in Oxford , as well as London, to view rich homes and public institutions funded by Russian billionaires.

Techniques whereby extremely wealthy foreigners may gain legal protection and then public influence are manifold. Legal and associated services have been offered by boutique legal departments in London. A target of the “kleptocracy tour” to Oxford was a major new building funded by a Russian billionaire, resident partly in the UK, some of whose wealth was seen by those involved as having been dubiously derived. The implication was that the gift provided an avenue to associate with leading political figures, thereby making valuable contacts. It is not intended here to give any weight to such a view, but rather to illustrate the indirect character of the influence in question and correspondingly the difficulty of determining and controlling it.

One measure suggested in the ISC report is legislation to regulate “foreign agents”, similar to the Foreign Agents Registration Act in the US. That legislation is fuzzy and easy to evade since, not surprisingly, the legal definition of “foreign agent” is filled with holes. We also need to consider carefully when foreign funding constitutes “influence peddling” and whether, if it does, it should be banned. Should press and TV outlets, newspapers or publishing companies be allowed to fall into foreign hands for fear that they may influence elections and referendums?

Clearly, special care needs to be taken when foreign influencers represent “hostile” countries. How these are to be defined is a further legal nightmare.

Then there is another problem. The greater our restrictions on foreign funding and potential foreign influence, the more tightly we may expect foreign cultural policies of our own and of our allies to be curbed. Without mentioning recent “soft power” ventures, historical examples demonstrate how common and how important they have sometimes been, whether public or covert. Nor have superpowers necessarily been the principal actors. Not only may superpowers find that smaller allies may operate without attracting as much notice, but some smaller countries may and do find that influence peddling is more affordable than military and economic investments abroad.

I cannot help feeling that the Intelligence and Security Committee may have strayed too far from its core mission in its recent report. Obviously any foreign (or, for that matter, domestic) corporations, individuals, media may be subversive. Short of a police state populated by informers, it is reasonable for MI5, MI6 and GCHQ to focus on specific threats and not to spend time following up every rumour about the behaviour of political opponents in elections and referendums. Following the 2006 murder in London of Alexander Litvinenko and the poisoning of the Skripals in Salisbury in 2018, inquiry into and protection against Russian “special measures” plainly is needed. But it is less obvious how many staff MI5 needs to devote to assess Russian political influence measures. The committee’s stress on these measures may have reflected its choice of outside experts. They tended to be prominent anti-Russian hawks.

What conclusions emerge?

1. Constant potshots against the validity of the pro-Leave campaign of 2016 have tended to be unbalanced and vague. Press investigations have tended to disintegrate and independent commissions have not always been reliable.

2. Allegations of Russian political influence in the UK need more evidence.

3. It is questionable whether policing of electoral integrity should be primarily a responsibility of the Security Service, MI5. It should be involved, not as a general regulator, but specifically when there is a need to investigate subversion.

4. The Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament, whose independence has been stressed in recent days, needs to focus on non-political scrutiny of the intelligence services. Arguably it strayed into potentially partisan territory in attempting to make recommendations arising from the Brexit referendum. It did little more than recycle rumours.

The author is president of the International Political Science Association’s research committee on political finance and political corruption, a former consultant on “Political Aid” to the FCO policy planning staff, a founder governor of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, a former director of the International Foundation for Electoral Systems and consultant on electoral administration and political finance to the Committee on Standards in Public Life