‘Keir Starmer’s Government Is Ignoring Growing Demands to Come Clean on Russian Interference in Our Democracy

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Over the past week Keir Starmer’s Government has continued to resist transparency about the extent and reach of the Russian shenanigans around Brexit, despite introducing an electoral bill billed as a bid to combat foreign political interference. 

Last week over 20 MPs spoke in support of a petition which demanded a full public inquiry into the Russian interference in British politics. Not one MP from Reform UK attended. 

Answering for the Government, the Security Minister Dan Jarvis did depart from the previous Government’s view that a public inquiry was unnecessary because “there is no evidence that the outcome of any previous election or referendum was affected by any foreign interference”. However, he stated that doing so now would be premature” due to the upcoming publication of the so-called ‘urgent’ Rycroft Review into financial foreign interference, after which, he insisted “there will be significant opportunity for further parliamentary scrutiny and debate.”

Many MPs have been insisting on a public inquiry, particularly after the Rycroft Review specifically ruled out looking at the Russian covert operation around Brexit.

Speaking at the Petition Debate, Liberal Democrat MP Claire Young said that while her party welcomes “any scrutiny of foreign interference, […] the [“urgent” government] review falls short on the transparency and information that the public deserve. We need a thorough and independent inquiry to understand fully the extent of foreign interference in the UK’s political system.”

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So why is the Government still unwilling to reveal the full extent of what was going on around Brexit? The most frequently mentioned issue raise by MPs during the debate was dirty Russian money, which many feel has been laundered unabated into UK politics.

Another LibDem MP who spoke at the debate, Manuela Perteghella, had introduced a private Member’s Bill last year that would have capped political donations and closed the loopholes that “allow foreign-linked dark and dirty money to flow into our politics.”

However, just three days later, Starmer’s Government showed again that it was not taking the problem seriously. The new Representation of the People Bill was published on Thursday and was almost immediately torn to shreds by pro-democracy and anti-corruption groups for failing to protect elections from dirty foreign money.

Both Transparency International and Spotlight on Corruption pointed out that the Bill fails to introduce caps on political donations (which would have protected against people like Musk channelling millions to British far right populists in Britain), reduce reporting thresholds for political donations to increase transparency, and further limit permitted spending on political campaigns. 

There had been a lot of talk in Parliament about the urgent need to return powers and independence back to the Electoral Commission. This Bill has not done that. Amazingly, it didn’t even ban the use of cryptocurrencies for making political donations, a no brainer for anyone, unless they are joined at the hip with Trump’s White House. 

Privately, there was a strong sense of disappointment among pro-democracy groups, who engaged with officials extensively for many months while the Bill was being drawn up, and had been under a strong impression that the Government had moved on many of the above issues.

Instead, the government dithered and failed to properly protect the UK against such an important threat to our democracy. That only strengthens the case for a full inquiry, to identify where our institutions failed, and to put in strong countermeasures.

Curiously, Saturday brought an official revelation which offered an interesting historical perspective, and a sense that political will is emerging to strip away the veil of secrecy around the Kremlin’s past behaviour.

The Foreign Secretary, flanked by her counterparts from Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands, stood at the Munich Security Conference and confirmed that the cause of death of the Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, in his Siberian prison in February 2024, was poisoning by the Russian authorities.

The speed and clarity with which this was made public presented a stark contrast to Marina Litvinenko’s 10-year legal battle to force the British Government to make a similar admission, about the Kremlin ordering the murder of her husband Alexander in London in 2006.

This has shed a new light on how the cozy relationship between London and Moscow under the previous Conservative administrations had corrupted our system of justice and transparency of government. It is highly unlikely that it did not also impair the ability of our national security and law enforcement agencies to protect our democracy in the run up to the Brexit referendum and beyond.

The Russian Report, published in 2020 by the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament, is still fresh in everyone’s memory.

The Committee revealed that the agencies have not, in fact, disrupted these threats. In a recent interview, a former Director General of the GCHQ admitted that the legislation at the time did not even identify political interference as a national security threat. Given that the agencies supposedly had known that Russia interfered in the run up to the Scottish Referendum, which clearly was a national security threat given the role Scotland plays in the British nuclear deterrent, why was nothing done to put that on a statutory footing? Were there hidden vested political interests involved in that decision, and what were they?

While the Security Minister assured MPs last Monday that “intelligence and security agencies […] are working tirelessly to monitor and disrupt Russian threats to UK politics,” how do we know that they won’t fail as they failed before on Brexit? 

These ongoing failures to deliver effective safeguards against foreign interference in the new Representation of the People Bill draw sad parallels with the failures of the past. Only a proper disclosure through a powerful public inquiry would provide the push the Government needs to start walking the walk, rather than just talking the same old talk.