479. Russian Influence in Britain: How Exposed Are We?

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28:21As the year draws to a close, it's time for our annual reminder that even in an age of political noise and division, one national consensus still stands firm. Roast potatoes. Oh, God, all this British stuff. If you're wondering, however, what to buy the politically obsessed person in your life this Christmas, might I gently suggest a year's membership to The Rest is Politics Plus? It's the thoughtful kind of present. Ad-free listening, bonus episodes, early access to Q &As, book discounts, and perhaps I think most interesting, it's our mini-series, available only to members focusing on the world's most complex characters and topics.

29:04We've already explored Rupert Murdoch and J.D. Vance, and we're doing many more subjects to come. So think of this as a civilised gift to allow families to disagree agreeably over Christmas. What could be nicer? And if you've left it until Christmas Eve, as I fear I often do, the great thing is it's digital. No queues, rapping or panic. The membership lands neatly in their inbox on Christmas Day. So spread a little political peace and goodwill. Head to therestlesspolitics.com and click Gifts.

29:40Welcome back to The Restless Politics with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Anastair Campbell. And Rory, today in Parliament, Steve Reid, Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, announcing an inquiry into Russian interference in our democracy. And I was very excited when I heard about this. I thought, oh, we're going to do Brexit finally. We're going to get the Russia reports. We can get all the intelligence. And we're going to get Musk. And it's going to be massive. And Farage will be compelled to give evidence under oath. It's not quite that. It's not quite that. But what it is, is an independent inquiry, as I understand it, headed by a former senior civil servant who can ask for witnesses, can't compel them.

30:27That could be a bit of a problem. But it is going to look at, on the back of the Nathan Gill imprisonment, just how deep a problem we have got with our politics, political financing, political donation, and the seeming ease with which it appears to be possible for people who are not British to interfere in our democracy. so i'm glad that it's happening i wish it had happened sooner i wish that it was actually an inquiry that compelled people to give evidence under oath but let's just see who agrees to turn up and who doesn't yeah my instinct i think which is shared with you is that actually if we want to resolve this issue properly we need to limit the amount of money that can be given and i would actually like to see us follow the south australia model of public financing for campaigns instead of private financing.

31:21So we're not in hock to businesses, trade unions, and as you say, foreign interests. And then deal with the problem of what MPs do after they leave parliament and the kind of jobs they can take and the kind of people they can work for, because that's another way that the influence works. And then I think we've also got to look at the bigger picture of what Russia is trying to do in our democracy, in the democracies of Europe and the US. Let's maybe take a step back because we can only really understand what they're doing when they're giving money to Nathan Gill if we look at the broader picture of what they think they're doing in general.

31:54And what do we mean by them? We really mean the SVR, the FSB, and the GRU, which are the key foreign intelligence agencies, GRU being the military lot. Their big idea is basically this, that they need to fragment and weaken Europe and the United States. and the best ways to do that are to destroy institutions like NATO and the European Union, or at very least to make them very, very weak and ineffective, because a lot of them operate through consensus. So if they can create breaks, that's a really good thing. And one of the ways to do that, it's not the only way they pursue, but one of the ways to do that is to back nationalists, far-right nationalists.

32:36And this is something that Anton Shikostov is just so, so good at in this wonderful book on Russia and the Western far-right. And there the story basically is that these far-right nationalists, and we could be talking here about Tommy Robinson, we could be talking about Marine Le Pen in France, we could be talking about the AFD. What they appeal to is that those groups agree ideologically with Russia on certain things. They basically agree with Russia that there is a big fight for traditional Christian values, in inverted commas, against kind of woke modern ideology. They basically have the same imperial nostalgia.

33:14And then I think also a sort of genuine favor for traditional authoritarian rule against what the far right see as liberal democracy, globalization. I mean, a lot of the times when you look, when we're being attacked on Twitter from people from the right, they will often refer to us as globalists. So a lot of this stuff is part of the general Russian rhetoric. I think investigating this is great. I think there's a big question about how on earth reform are going to find 650 candidates for the next election, given that they're leading in the polls, and vet them properly and make sure people don't have links into this.

33:49The only saving grace, I think, in Britain is that there's not much electoral support for being pro-Russian. By and large, Britain, unlike big sections in Germany, is on the Ukrainian side in the war. And one of the things that I think will have surprised Russia is they really felt that they'd sort of bought Britain. You know, there was a lot of Russian dirty money flowing into London. There was an enormous amount of Russian funding, particularly of the Conservative Party, my colleagues. They may well have thought that, you know, Boris Johnson would be somebody who'd be sympathetic towards him.

34:22In fact, when push came to shove and the Ukraine war happened, that all fell to pieces immediately. Johnson came out very, very quickly and powerfully in favor of Ukraine. And probably since Skripal, Britain has has been more hawkish than France or Germany, much more determined in terms of sanctions, in terms of weapons. Yeah. Yeah. But I guess what we were talking about in the first half, I think, yes, you're right that if you get, as people in an opinion poll, are you on Ukraine's side or Russia's side, people are going to see Ukraine, whether we would actually then follow through to the ultimate degree as to what that means, I don't know.

34:58What I think is really interesting about this though, so if you just think about it, you know, you and I've said, till we're blue in the face. How come it is that Nathan Gill, who has gone to jail for 10 and a half years for taking bribes from an adversary to spout their propaganda in the European Parliament, and he's still virtually unknown by the British public. His jailing was like a one-day wonder, and then it went away. I just don't know what's happened to our political and media psychology that that is not a huge, huge story. You said that Skripal was a wake-up call. I'm not sure it was a big enough wake-up call.

35:38I hope this inquiry can be a wake-up call because I do not believe that Putin, we've said this before, Putin was personally briefed on this guy, Nathan Gill. That means the idea that that's the summit of their intelligence operations and their bribery strategy inside Europe is a nonsense. They put billions into this stuff, into the sort of espionage and the sabotage and all the rest of it. So I hope this inquiry wakes us up to something that we've been asleep at the wheel for too long. And also, I hope that at some point, we're going to realise that we're not dealing with a black and white world.

36:19I mean, they're deliberately using lots and lots of tactics, many of which are quite difficult to pin down. This was the problem. Everybody, I think, in the entire world has heard Trump talk about the Russia hoax. But the fact is that Russia did an incredible amount during the 2016 election to try to help the election of Donald Trump. GRU, the Russian military intelligence, stole documents from Democratic candidates. Tens of millions of Americans encountered Twitter posts which were put out by Russian agents. There was a huge amount, of course, as people know, and Timothy Snyder's written about this, of support for Trump businesses that came from Russian individuals and Russian businesses.

37:02You know, Trump was paid$20 million to go and do Miss World in Moscow. A lot of the apartments bought in Trump buildings were bought by Russians, by Russian shadow companies. So, altogether, we have a world in which all of that exists, right? Russian money going into Trump businesses, Russia really trying to make sure that Trump is elected in 2016. They made no secret about that at all. Why? Well, they all explain that in detail because they think that Trump being elected is likely to weaken NATO and the EU and put Russia in a strong position. On which they've been proven right. Absolutely. But the problem was that Robert Mueller couldn't prosecute it because he had to prove something more difficult.

37:43He had to prove collusion. He had to prove that Trump had deliberately coordinated all of this with Russia rather than simply that Russia was trying to do it. Let's take another example, which would be difficult for your inquiry. How do we deal with someone like Tommy Robinson, who's not an MP? And have the press reported enough on Tommy Robinson's Russian links? What would be involved in it? So when he was sent to jail, people remember, but for defying a court order. As soon as that happens, Russian tabloid journalists start promoting him. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, this is back 2018-19, starts putting out messages saying Tommy Robinson is being persecuted for his beliefs.

38:23Robinson is then invited to Russia, where far-right ultra-nationalists platform him, where the major website that did the Trump interference with backing from Prigozhin, the guy from the Wagner group who was killed, profiles Tommy Robinson. Robinson gives interviews with Russian talking points basically saying EU's evil, Merkel is undermining Western security, America is supporting Islamist terrorists, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. He actually says that he thinks that there's not much likelihood that Russia did the scribble thing. And eventually in 2022, Tommy Robinson is to be found mounting a pathetic demonstration outside the Ukrainian embassy, effectively taking the Russian side on the Ukraine war.

39:08And one of the guys that's trying to give him political asylum is a man from the German AFD. And this guy from the German AFD has now been exposed as taking money from the Russians to ask questions in the European Parliament and in the Bundestag. Now, all of this is documented by Anton Shikostov, but none of it quite amounts to something you could necessarily put Tommy Robinson in jail for. And of course, everybody is very worried about legal challenge, very worried about being sued, very difficult to prove the money. I mean, when the Russian intelligence agencies are clever, which they weren't with Nathan Gill, they would be finding ways of moving money or promising future money to people that would be much, much more difficult to track down.

39:54Tommy Robinson, I'm sure, will push back hard on this. The sourcing for this has come from very detailed work done by Anton Shikostov, who is an extremely diligent academic working in Vienna. But of course, there will be two sides to all these stories. But what I suppose I'm trying to get across is that in all these cases, it's a very, very complicated story. And where the line is between visiting Russia, doing things with particular Russians, appearing on particular Russian medias, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs tweeting in your defense and your policy positions is one that you can litigate back and forth.

40:32So I mentioned to you recently the Carol Cadwalader, Peter Duke's podcast series, Sergei and the Westminster Spy Ring. So you mentioned Boris Johnson saying when Ukraine happened, Boris Johnson was out there very, very strong, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Fine. Prior to that, the extent to which the Conservative Party allowed London to become this place where Russian oligarchs could sort of, you know, do whatever they wanted and were literally queuing up at Conservative Party fundraising dinners to pay huge sums of money to play tennis with Boris Johnson, to go and hang out with whoever the senior politicians were at the time.

41:14And it was like it didn't matter. I don't think we've ever got to the bottom of how we allowed Lebedev not just to end up owning serious parts of our media landscape, but then getting a seat in the House of Lords and go back to Johnson as foreign secretary, going off to that bunga bunga party, getting rid of his security detail and ending up having lunch or dinner with Lebedev senior, who has worked for the KGB for years. So all of this, I think, tells a story that we didn't want to hear. And Trump was talking, by the way, about the Russia hoax even yesterday in the context of Rob Reiner, famous director, actor, horrible, horrible, horrible murder.

42:01He's murdered alongside his wife. It's a horrific story. And what does Donald Trump do? Suggest that he had Trump derangement syndrome because he was one of the guys who went on about the Russia hoax, not a single ounce of empathy for a truly horrific murder. This, by the way, the guy who, you know, from the MAGA crowd who wanted to lock up anybody who said that Charlie Kirk was anything other than a kind of, you know, hero of the American people. And so I think what you have here is Trump, who doesn't want to accept or believe that Russia might have been involved in getting him elected because he wants to believe it was all down to who's genius.

42:42And Johnson and anybody who backed Brexit, not wanting to believe that Russia might have had a role in that. So whenever I raise this with these guys, oh, you're telling me my granny voted Brexit because of some Russian bot? No, I'm not. But I am saying that Russia played a role in creating the landscape that led to the Brexit referendum and the outcome. And why did? It's not for nothing the russian ambassador at the time came out and said we've basically now got them where we want them for at least a generation and they're not coming back and that's the point you made earlier about we used to have america and europe and now we don't let's take this wider so that we can see the british strategy as part of a broader strategy so remember marine le pen in france her party took a six million euro loan directly from a russian bank which they only paid back two years ago we've talked about the afd in germany they're probably the most interesting i I mean, Anton Shikostov points out that one of the interesting things there is that their pro-Russian connections are also to do with voter bases, to do with the fact that there are an enormous number of Russian speakers in Germany.

43:49But a lot of East Germans have these sort of patriotic sentiments that chime with quite a lot of what Russia is saying. Hungary, which is probably the greatest Russian ally in the whole of the European setup. We've talked about what's happening in Slovakia and in the Czech Republic and the directions in which things seem to be moving there. We've talked about what's happening, I suppose, throughout Europe. But the final thing, just to complicate this even further, who in fact is it that absolutely agrees on the destruction of the European Union is undermining NATO and echoes an enormous amount of Russian talking points from transgender all the way through?

44:33It is, of course, the United States. So now we have a much more complicated problem, which, of course, the head of MI6 does not talk about, which is if you're really worried about state operations to undermine our democracy, promote far-right parties, disintegrate the European Union, weaken NATO, the drivers there now are coming from J.D. Vance's Munich speech, Musk platforming and supporting openly Tommy Robinson and telling people to vote for the AFD. And that brings us the final thing, which is actually, in a way, 2016, given it was only won by a small margin, Russia may have had a very significant influence on that election.

45:16You know, you'd have to do very complicated randomized control trials, but it's quite possible that Trump wouldn't have won the 2016 election without Russia's help, regardless of collusion. By the time you get to Trump too, he barely needs Russia because social media on its own weaponizes anger, creates the support for the far right that Russia can basically sit back and watch us trash ourselves on social media. well you mentioned Musk there Rory I think at some point whether we like it or not we have to face up to the fact that Musk has a power within our democracy that I don't that I think we're very loathe to admit and very interesting line in that blaze metropoli speech where she talked about algorithms not just the social media companies themselves not just Elon Musk but an algorithm having as much power as a state now I don't know whether that's something you're going to look at in your series.

46:08Well, that sounds to me like a quite terrifying concept. When you think that Trump has recently said the nation state is the most powerful and most important unit of the way that the world works. Well, is that still true? It might be true for the United States, might be true for China. But is it really true? So we're interviewing the president of Moldova early in the new year, Maya Sandhu. I mean, is it true for a country like Moldova that, yes, survived the Russian bombardment in her election. But how long can you survive that sort of onslaught on your democracy, on your public square, on the sense of having a set of facts around which your public debate can be held?

46:51So I hope this inquiry is just the start of something, not the end of it. And I don't think we've got to the bottom of Russia in relation to the hard right parties. You mentioned the AFD. There was a piece in one of the German newspapers this week about the number of times that the AFD have sought under the guise of transparency to extract from the government operational details about the way that the German military is operating in relation to Ukraine. Why is that an obsession? Why do they keep putting down, demanding inquiries into where troops are going and where weapons are being placed and so forth?

47:30So I think we're in a very, very, very fragile and dangerous place right now. And I think that this, I hope this inquiry is taken seriously. I hope that people, if they don't cooperate with it, then it's strengthened and they're forced to cooperate with it. And, you know, because I think this is something that we've turned a blind eye to for far too long. The other thing that's been happening on the Ukrainian front, well, a lot's been happening on the Ukrainian front, fighting is still going on. Trump saying that we're nearly there with the peace. Believe it when I see it. Big dinner in Berlin last night, Zelensky in Berlin with the coalition of the willing European leaders.

48:10But there does seem to be this really significant problem related to Russian assets tied up in Europe, which clearly the Europeans want to be able to use to help Ukraine through the next phase of this war. But it's becoming, it's getting bogged down in legalities, propaganda wars, and so forth. How do you see this EuroClear issue? So, yes, Alice, so this is an issue which you've been following very closely. it's about 210 billion euros of Russian assets. And this has been discussed for a long time. The idea is that basically this Russian money could be used to support Ukraine. To put it in context, 50 billion a year is about what the Americans were spending.

48:54So it's like four times the four years of American investment would go in. And it's one of these things which people often say, if you're really serious about supporting Ukraine against Russia, why don't you go after the shadow fleet, why don't you stop all Russian oil exports to anyone, India, China, Hungary, and why don't you seize these assets? And this has been sparked partly by the fact that it actually appeared in the Russian plan that this money was going to be given partly to the United States and Russia for investment projects around Ukraine and Eastern Ukraine. But you know more about it than I do over to you.

49:27Well, I don't know if I know more, but of course, it's very, very, it's complicated. You and I have been raging for months saying, why can't they just sort this out? The reason is, it is genuinely complicated. So you've got politics at the heart of it. Our friends from Hungary and Slovakia are making clear that they think this is a very, very, very bad thing. Orbán has said that any potential agreement on the loan is, quote, systematically raping European law. Friedrich Merz, the German Chancellor, he is leading the charge on this. And he's basically trying to get the others to see that without this, Ukraine faces serious financial and therefore military challenges coming up.

50:06Now, the big way the problem lies is that the majority of the seized assets sit in Belgium, in this thing called EuroClear, which is a Belgian financial clearing house. And it's somewhere between 60 and 80 % of the whole overall number. So the Russians have been taking lawsuits out against Euroclear for the last three or four years. And what the Belgian Prime Minister Bart de Wever is saying is that if this loan goes through as a loan, and the Russians are then successful in a legal appeal, Belgium, not the European Union or the European Commission, would be on the hook for it. And as the debate develops, you've got other countries now, Now, Hungary and Slovakia, obviously, Italy, Malta, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, all saying they've got doubts about whether this can be done.

50:57So you're in now to a situation where Merz is trying to drive something against a sense of opposition in some of the other countries that Orbán and Slovakia are exploiting. Let's now move on to the horror of what happened at Bondi Beach, which is an attack out in a Jewish community that was celebrating Hanukkah that killed 15 people, including one 10-year-old. Looks at the moment as though the attackers were two people armed with hunting rifles. Many people, I think most people now will have seen the horrifying footage. They also will have seen the very brave action by a man called Ahmed Abu Abid, who, it's extraordinary, literally creeps behind a car, comes up pretty quickly behind a man with a gun and unarmed himself, puts him in a bear hug, rips the gun out of his hand.

51:58And of course, this is very much touching every kind of nerve because many Australians, particularly obviously my friends in Australia who are Jewish or connect to the Jewish community, feel that not enough has been done by the Albanese government to tackle anti-Semitism. You know, I experienced this personally because the chief rabbi of Sydney accused me of anti-Semitism a few months ago because he said I was holding Israel to higher standards than European powers in Gaza. and this whole question of genuinely massive rise in anti-Semitic attacks. There have been arson attacks against synagogues.

52:39The Jewish community is increasingly frightened, but this is tangled up in the question around hate speech and the question around whether large demonstrations protesting Israel's actions in Gaza are encouraging people in this direction. And so we're now right back in the heart of this question. Is it possible to try to do what Albanese is doing, which is clearly condemning this, speaking out against anti-Semitism, in fact, even taking action in universities to stop it, which isn't enough for many Jewish people in Australia who feel he hasn't been on their side enough, but is beginning to very much worry people who feel that some of his stuff in universities is going to stop a free discussion about Israel's crimes in Gaza.

53:24Yeah, I mean, look, this goes to the heart of a debate that you and I have been having ever since October the 7th. And as we've said many, many times, any attempt that you do to try to, as it were, put both sides, you get sort of hit by both sides at the same time. And I think there were people who were trying immediately to exploit this politically. I thought the initial comments of the Israeli foreign minister were inappropriate. He essentially came straight out making this a political attack on the Australian government. I mean, I think when these things happen, I think everybody should find it within them to say that this is just to be condemned, to have, there is no possible justification for it.

54:07Somebody in Australia sent me the leaflet, you know, when they were advertising. I don't know if you can see that, Roy, but it sort of just sums up the whole thing. It's a sort of beautiful picture of the sea and the beach. And then it just Hanukkah with candles on top of all the letters. Come celebrate the light of Hanukkah together with the community. Bring your friends, bring the family. Let's fill Bondi with joy and light. And you sort of think, well, that is probably how these guys knew this was happening. It's an open event. And, you know, it ends in the most unspeakable horror. and but i i just think the the way that these things happen and then everybody wants to fit it not everybody but a lot of far too many people want to fit it to the to the worldview and the outlook they have on israel gaza and i think we can do without that and i thought that albanese i actually thought he spoke well i thought um my friend chris minns who's the premier of new south Wales.

55:07I thought he's been shown real empathetic leadership in the wake of what's gone on. And that's what leaders should do. And I think what they shouldn't do is try to exploit it to their own ends. And there's too many who, to my mind, have been doing that. I was trying to process this over the last couple of days, both because I'm very, very close to a Jewish family in Australia that almost every day for the last two and a half years have been contacting me talking about the rise of anti-Semitism in Australia, but also because we were celebrating Hanukkah with Shoshana and the kids yesterday. And I think it's important to try to communicate to people as often as possible what happened there.

55:51It would be like somebody choosing, if you were talking about a Christian community, to target children and grandparents celebrating christmas or if you were a muslim community everybody getting together for and you choosing to break into um a community place or a mosque on at eid to kill children and parents celebrating their most holy religious festival i mean yeah it's utterly utterly unspeakable but but the fact that it's unspeakable is is also what should give us pause to think that this this is when something like this happens we think well that is the entirety of that side of the debate actually you could come in i mean i i just thought you mentioned the guy ahmed al-ahmed i mean what a name to have for a hero in this context he's called ahmed al-ahmed and he emerges out of nowhere and disarms this guy and gets shot twice.

56:52And the whole world recognizes him as being a hero. And, you know, I just think we should maybe just think about what that means as well. What that means is that there is somebody who has been assimilated into Australian life, who sees something bad happening, and whose instinct is to do something of the utmost bravery that probably saved almost certainly saved a lot of lives it was absolutely unbelievable that's and i was just i just sort of keep replaying that shot trying to work out um you know whether i would have been able to pull it off i think i probably wouldn't i mean it's it's and to do it so quickly he's not doing what a lot of us would do which is hover behind that car thinking oh that was instinct that was pure instinct you know one of the great one of the many great things about Australia is when New Year comes and there's fireworks going off on the bridge.

57:48And that's going to be heavily influenced. The feeling around Christmas and New Year is going to be heavily influenced by this. And maybe to bring this all together, we're talking about a world of accelerating threats. We finished with terrorism, Islamist terrorism directed against the Jewish community in Australia, but we began with Russia, a national state actor using every different form of hybrid warfare. We talked about sabotage. We talked about assassinations of Russian nationals abroad. We talked about propaganda. We talked about artificial intelligence. We talked about social media. We talked about interference in the American elections, the AFD in Germany, Le Pen in France.

58:31And of course, we brought it all back home to Britain. How do we defend ourselves? how do we think about not just tracking down giving cash to a man like nathan gill but all the other ways i try to use the tommy robinson example to illustrate the ways in which russia can actually support people without doing anything that actually allows us to prosecute and finally are any of us britain france germany united states doing remotely enough to counter this where are the resources where are the people where's the spend what i fear we have is very good people like Blaise Metshweli at the top, your friend Jonathan Powell, very impressed in our security advisor book beneath.

59:09Where are the people? Where are the resources? Where's the real investment in this? And remember too, before we get too much focus just on the far right, how much the Russians proved with Gerhard Schröder that they can corrupt social democrats. That whole Schröder network, he was given an extraordinary, hugely high paid job, russian state-owned company and that's one of the reasons that that entire network was reluctant to impose sanctions was weak on ukraine etc so these threats can come from every form of unexpected direction and in order to deal with this we need to step up yeah okay well i suspect that is why all these speeches are being made but because their civil servants is where they can't say it quite as volubly as you have rory but i i think that's part of the point they've been making see you tomorrow we're going to talk about latin america we're going to talk about house of laws and whether it's sort of uh overstepping the mark in the way it's dealing with a couple of issues right now see you then see you then bye-bye the holidays mean more travel more shopping more time online and more personal info and more places that could expose you more to identity theft But LifeLock monitors millions of data points per second.

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1:00:47As the year draws to a close, it's time for our annual reminder. that even in an age of political noise and division, one national consensus still stands firm. Roast potatoes. Oh God, all this British stuff. If you're wondering, however, what to buy, the politically obsessed person in your life this Christmas, might I gently suggest a year's membership to The Rest is Politics Plus? It's the thoughtful kind of present. Ad-free listening, bonus episodes, early access to Q &As, Book discounts. And perhaps I think most interesting, it's our mini series available only to members focusing on the world's most complex characters and topics.

1:01:30We've already explored Rupert Murdoch and JD Vance, and we're doing many more subjects to come. So think of this as a civilised gift to allow families to disagree agreeably over Christmas. What could be nicer? And if you've left it until Christmas Eve, as I fear I often do, the great thing is it's digital. No queues, rapping or panic. The membership lands neatly in their inbox on Christmas Day. So spread a little political peace and goodwill. Head to therestispolitics.com and click Gifts.