Russian Interference: Some Good News for Once – Journalism Can Make a Difference

Some good news for once, and a word of thanks for all of you who have supported Byline Times over the six years since our launch on 31 March 2019.

By coincidence, the day after our sixth birth, the Government announced that it was putting Russia as the second country (after Iran) on its new Foreign Influence Registration Scheme (FIRS). As Foreign Secretary David Lammy explained, this will expose Putin’s “shady attempts at interference to sunlight – helping us to detect & disrupt threats to the UK”.

“Now more than ever,” Lammy said“we must hold them to account for their increasingly hostile policies against the UK.”

According to the Home Office minister, Dan Jarvis, the scheme, which will go live on 1 July, will register and publicise “arrangements to carry out political influence activities in the UK at the direction of any foreign power”. 

An enhanced tier, which will include Russia, has been “specifically designed to shed light on activities directed by those foreign powers or entities whose activities pose a threat to the safety and interests of the UK”.

---

Better Late than Never

This is an issue Byline Times has been passionate about since its inception. 

Russian influence in both the EU Referendum and the first Trump presidential election in 2016 was a key theme of our original crowdfunding site Byline.com. We joined Carole Cadwalladr and various other media organisations like openDemocracy and Channel 4 News in exposing Russia’s influence operations in our elections. 

Then Deputy Leader Tom Watson spoke up at the Byline Festival in 2018, calling for a criminal investigation into Russian interference in Brexit.

In 2019, in one of my first articles for Byline Times, David Lammy, then an opposition Labour MP, told me that  “the scale and depth of malicious disinformation and foreign interference this report uncovers demands an urgent response from the Prime Minister on behalf of the British Government.

“It is now blindingly obvious that we need a criminal investigation”, he added, “equivalent to the US’ Mueller inquiry – to investigate any possible links between the 2016 Leave campaign, Donald Trump’s campaign team and Russia.”

The DCMS report concluded by calling for an “independent investigation into past elections” – including the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum, the Brexit vote and the 2017 General Election – “to explore what actually happened with regard to foreign influence, disinformation, funding, voter manipulation, and the sharing of data, so that appropriate changes to the law can be made and lessons can be learnt for future elections and referenda”.

Byline Times has been pushing for a UK equivalent of the US FARA (Foreign Agents Registration Act) ever since. We published a whole book, Digital Gangers, on the subject, written by a former  DCMS committee member, Ian Lucas. 

Six years on, some limited criminal inquiries have taken place. However, further investigations by me and Carole Cadwalladr with the whistleblower Sergei Cristo in our podcast series Sergei and the Westminster Spy Ring reveal an even more stunning lack of action or accountability by the security services over Russian Interference.

So we remain in the dark in too many ways, and a public inquiry is still needed to learn from the past and find ways to fight back against information warfare and foreign influence. 

However, David Lammy has been as good as his word on the FIRS announcement. This will do much to mitigate the role of Russian interference in our politics, media, and the laundering of money and influence in the City.

While we remain critical of much of what this Government has done, and failed to do, and we would like it to extend its analysis of foreign interference to countries such as Israel, India and China, something is still better than nothing. 

Credit where credit is due. It’s a fitting celebration of six years of hard work by over 1000 Byline Times writers, and the hard work of our staff, and above all, the support of tens of thousands of our readers. Together, we made something happen. 

Come join us if you can, both to celebrate and dig deeper into the ills and cures of our times with a Down the Rabbit Hole, an Adventure with Byline Times, next week.