“A dereliction of duty.” That’s how Andy Burnham just described turning down a closer relationship with Brussels — and he’s hardly alone. For the past decade, the British establishment, and Labour in particular, have tried to neuter Brexit, or indeed even reverse it. Under Burnham, the project has acquired unprecedented momentum. Just a few weeks ago, in his first conference speech as Labour leader, Burnham became the first prime minister to open the door to rejoining the European Union. Shortly thereafter, he suggested his party’s manifesto at the next election might include a referendum on just that question.
It is in this context that Burnham’s latest Brexit “bombshell” should be read. Speaking to Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart on The Rest Is Politics, Burnham claimed to have “clear” evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 referendum — implying that Moscow had successfully tilted the vote towards Leave — while offering no details, let alone evidence. The goal, though, seems clear enough: to delegitimise the referendum result once and for all, and so pave the way for its reversal. And what better pretext than the Russian bogeyman?
This fits a wider pattern. Since the 2016 Russiagate fiasco, it has become standard practice among Western elites, especially in Europe, to blame every unwelcome election result — and above all every “populist” rebuke to their rule — on Russian “disinformation” and “interference”. The campaign has escalated dramatically since 2022. We are told that Russia has for years been running a vast influence operation aimed at manipulating helpless voters. Yet the evidence that this operation has reached, let alone swayed, any meaningful number of them is scant to say the least.
The consequences, however, are not. Across Europe, the spectre of “Russian disinformation” has been used to push through sweeping censorship regimes — chiefly via the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) — and “election-management” tools like the European Democracy Shield. The most extreme case came in Romania in December 2024, when the Constitutional Court annulled the first round of the presidential election — won by Călin Georgescu, an independent eurosceptic and Nato critic — on the grounds of alleged Russian interference. The court cited a TikTok campaign in Georgescu’s favour, but no proof was ever offered that it was funded by Russia. Indeed, internal documents later obtained by the US House Judiciary Committee showed that TikTok had explicitly informed the Commission that it hadn’t found “any evidence” of a coordinated inauthentic network.
Yet EU elites plainly regard the episode as a blueprint. As former commissioner Thierry Breton put it, with disarming candour: “We did it in Romania and we will obviously have to do it in Germany, if necessary.” Right-populist parties, such as the AfD and the National Rally, are routinely branded “Russian stooges”, with the usual experts already warning of Russian interference in forthcoming elections in France and elsewhere — preparing the ground to legitimise heavy-handed interventions in the electoral process. The same script was run during this year’s Hungarian election, with the mainstream media making evidence-free claims of Russian interference on Viktor Orbán’s behalf. Meanwhile, journalists and analysts have been sanctioned by the EU for “spreading Russian propaganda”, which in practice means dissenting from the EU-Nato line on Ukraine, as evident in the case of former Swiss army colonel Jacques Baud, among others.
The EU, in other words, is at the forefront of an authoritarian trend: invoking a permanent Russian threat to justify a rolling assault on democratic norms, from online censorship to the repression of dissent. It is hardly surprising, then, that Burnham, the Europhile that he is, should borrow a page — or rather a chapter — from the Brussels playbook. As is customary with sweeping claims against Russia, he offered no evidence for his Brexit claims. His statement was nonetheless amplified across the mainstream media. Indeed, pro-EU groups have duly called for Britain to rejoin in light of the Prime Minister’s “revelation”. “We have suspected for years that the 2016 referendum could have been subjected to interference because of how its result helped destabilise a united Europe,” said Richard Kilpatrick of European Movement UK. “Disinformation played a role at the time and it is important to have this public confirmation of those suspicions.”
Public confirmation, or rather evidence, would indeed be welcome — especially since the question has been investigated several times, and nothing has turned up. In 2020, Parliament’s intelligence and security committee published its Russia report. It reached no finding of interference in the referendum, though it blamed the Government for never commissioning an intelligence assessment of the question. Whitehall’s response was that it had seen no evidence of successful interference and therefore saw no need for one.
That same year, Elizabeth Denham, then information commissioner, concluded a three-year investigation into the use of personal data in political campaigning, including during the Brexit referendum, centred on Cambridge Analytica and its parent, SCL Group. Having examined more than 300,000 documents and some 700 terabytes of seized material, she reported that she had “found no further evidence to change [her] earlier view that SCL/CA were not involved in the EU referendum campaign in the UK”, and that her office had found “no additional evidence of Russian involvement” in the material recovered from the companies’ servers.
Another study by the Oxford Internet Institute examined thousands of tweets before the Brexit referendum and also found “little evidence” of Russian interference — though, to be fair, Twitter later revealed that the Russian broadcast RT had spent a total of £767 on adverts during the referendum. Facebook further reported that it had found no evidence of significant Russian advertising on its platform around Brexit, though accounts linked to the Internet Research Agency, a Russian “troll farm”, had spent 97 cents on three adverts shown to UK users (about immigration, not Brexit as such) and together generating around 200 impressions.
Funnily enough, this careful approach was backed by none other than Burnham’s own Foreign Office minister, Stephen Doughty, who, asked by Sky News about Burnham’s claims, said: “Well, the security minister has spoken about this before, and he’s been very clear that they’ve attempted to [but] they haven’t succeeded.” That is a very different statement from Burnham’s; the Prime Minister’s words were carefully chosen to imply, without quite saying it, that Russia had indeed swung the vote. If not, why raise it in a conversation about rejoining the EU?
Compare all this with the establishment-led Remain campaign, which enlisted most of the mainstream media and the Government itself — which spent more than £9 million of public money on a Remain leaflet delivered to every household. Add to that the EU, which funds many of the universities, research bodies and NGOs that lined up behind Remain, and private actors such as George Soros, who later bankrolled the anti-Brexit campaign to the tune of at least £400,000. In short, the Remainers campaigned openly, lavishly and with the full weight of the state behind them. Which is probably why they have never gotten over the fact that they lost.
It is, of course, possible that Burnham has been shown damning evidence buried for a decade. But how likely is that? The fact that he chose to make his claim to Alastair Campbell, of all people, is ironic indeed, given the latter’s role in the Iraq war debacle. Burnham, it is worth recalling, voted for the war — a war built on claims that could easily have been disproved at the time, and indeed were by many — yet defended his vote for years afterwards. Given his record, some scepticism is in order, especially since his latest suggestion is, so far, equally unsupported. And the stakes may be as high as they were a quarter of a century ago — perhaps higher. Then, it was about justifying an invasion to bolster a US-led unipolar order at the height of its power. Now, it is about propping up a liberal establishment facing its deepest crisis since the Second World War.
Little wonder Burnham is so adamant about rejoining: Brussels is the most powerful tool available to discredited national establishments, providing supranational instruments that can be deployed against democratic upheavals, and buttressing transnational financial interests, above all in the City of London, which fought Brexit a decade ago. It is also no coincidence that, on the podcast, Burnham singled out France and Germany as fellow victims of “Russian propaganda” — two countries whose leaders are at historic lows in the polls and who are likewise invoking the Russian threat to shore up their position against populist challengers.
Russia-blaming pays a further dividend too: it cements the rearmament drive. A Russia capable of swinging a British referendum is a Russia against which no expenditure is too great and no sacrifice too onerous. This narrative recasts any critic of Europe’s own choices — the “coalition of the willing”, the pledge to spend 5% of GDP on defence, the ReArm Europe borrowing schemes — as a Kremlin asset.
Indeed, one might argue that this is the real threat to democracy — not a few hundred dollars of Russian adverts, but a political class that would rather write off millions of voters as dupes of foreign propaganda. The 17.4 million who voted Leave in 2016 had profound and legitimate frustrations with the economy, with immigration and with the EU itself, and had voiced them for years without being heard. To recast them, a decade on, as the unwitting instruments of a Kremlin operation for which there is next to no evidence is not a defence of democracy but its negation. It also tells us something about Burnham himself. A prime minister who inherited a country in deep economic and social crisis might have been expected to confront its causes. Instead, his first instinct has been to relitigate 2016 and double down on the path — ever closer alignment with a sclerotic and increasingly authoritarian Brussels — that helped produce the crisis in the first place. That does not augur well for Burnham’s ability, or his willingness, to provide the answers Britain needs.
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