Andy Burnham has said Russia did interfere with the Brexit referendum and warned that similar activities were taking place in France and Germany.
The prime minister told The Rest is Politics podcast that upon arriving in No 10, he had asked about possible Russian interference in the 2016 vote, adding: “I’ve had the clear answer that, yes, there was.”
“I think we’ve been too much on the back foot on that actually and we haven’t informed people sufficiently about the extent to which people are seeking to disrupt the political process from overseas,” he added.
No shit…
It was obvious while it was happening. At the same time the US was electing Trump and a far right nationalist was gaining popularity in France. You weren’t connecting the dots?
At the same time, Canada, of all places, had a hard right showing.
We know Russia was in on in, and doing dirty work, but were they the Origin? Is this a multi-national cabal? Is this Oligarch central?
I genuinely think that Europe didn’t have US capitulation on their bingo card.
Nope they are just bragging now. Reminiscing about all the cool things they used to do.
Everybody thought the wall coming down was the end but Russia has had a hell of a comeback with their Brexit-Trump 1-2 punch to Democracy. They might’ve overreached in Ukraine but even our best efforts haven’t stopped Donald from helping Russia.
Our best efforts have been pretty shit to be honest.
I’ve tried nothing and I’m all out of ideas.
I mean we elected an entire other administration between his first term and this one and still nothing was done about him.
Curious how he’s forgot all about Cambridge Analitica which was paid with American money …
Not to mention the very local, very British (mainly English, even) assholes that pushed for Leave as well as the (British and American) billionaires whose newspapers in Britain pushed for it.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m pretty sure Russia did try. China too. And then of course there’s Israel.
It’s just that in my experience living in Britain (including during, before and after the Leave Referendum) if you’re really looking for foreigners to blame it’s America which seems to interfere the most in British politics, by far, though even they don’t have the level of influence that the local “elites” have.
So it’s funny seeing Andy whitewashing the likes of Murdoch and the Rothermere family, most of the Tory party, as well as American money and Israel-funded Tory-aligned British Jewish Associations (though the latter were much more visible after Brexit during the attempt at moving the Labour Party back to it’s Leftwing roots with Corbyn).
it’s all useful idiots. Brexit used to be a marginal thing and then it wasn’t and the way it stopped being marginal is questionable. you don’t really need real assets to do much when you can just give a little nudge to some useful idiots and make their yapping louder and then you just keep the volume until you get the desired result. russians do it all the time.
As I see it (having been there since before 2008) Brexit was very much a natural consequence of how the 2008 Crash was handled, especially of the Austerity that was used to pay for saving the banks and the wealth of large Asset owners.
After a while of that and as people started getting restless, the solution found by the British elites who fucked it all up was “blame the foreigners”, and that was mainly immigrants (including EU immigrants) and the EU itself (it was said that the “straight jacked” of EU rules was stopping Britain from the growth that the country would get if it deregulated and aligned even more with America).
Brexit was born and bloomed in a field plowed, fertilized and sowed by British interests and actively pushed by people who wanted Britain to have the hardest of Neoliberalism, aligned with the US not with the EU (for example, to allow things like the infamous “bleached chicken”).
It’s the adding of the votes of the desperate people who lost faith in mainstream politics to the votes of the useful idiots that creates the voting majorities for things like Brexit and far-right populists in government (both the likes of Boris Johnson in Britain and Trump in the White House).
I think this is spot on. Russian propaganda can pull on a thread but that thread has to exist in the first place.
In both the UK and US case, you got a bunch of upset people scratching their heads wondering where all the fuckin money went. And the answer is generally the same in both cases.
and then it turns out things don’t magically get better
Well, yeah, all that shit was anchored on some massive Nationalistic Delusions Of Grandeur to the point that the Tories were before the Referendum pushing Leave with the idea that “When we leave the EU will give us the same rights as an EU member but without the obligations such as Freedom Of Movement for people from the EU to come here”.
Lo and behold in the real world rather than fantasy la-la-empire things weren’t at all like that, just like many like me (not necessarily immigrants in Britain, rather people who favored Remain) predicted again and again.
Partly the reason why I’m so pissed of at the “Blame Russia” distraction that pops up once every couple of years when a British politician wants to distract the plebes from some fuckup or other, is that this crap dovetails with the insane Nationalistic Delusions Of Grandeur of the place (on one side, the message is that Britain is so important that Russia was obsessed by it rather than, you know, doing their usual shit same as they would for France or Germany if the conditions were right, on the other it exonerates Britons, British Culture and British Politics, thus maintaining the far too common idea there that they’re all inherently better than the rest of Europe) and part is because it’s letting free of consequences serious assholes who even before the Referendum would use “blame the EU” as a get out of jail free card for the consequences of their own policies and even more so those who were hard at work during the Referendum swindling the useful idiots and the (thanks to almost a decade of Austerity) desperate to vote Leave and who thus have most of the blame for that shit show, like Boris Johnson, Murdoch and the Rothermere family.
well, it’s not like British political class lost the plot overnight during the whole Brexit shebang. Its been like that little by little since like late 60s maybe mid 70s. Brexit was more like cherry on the pie at that point and everything past that is frosting.
“It wasn’t Russia despite all the evidence. it was actually your own fault”
Fuck you, you Russian fucking hack.
Right. It was the Russians who went out and voted, then?
Sure mate, it’s wasn’t the Brits that did it to themselves, it was foreigners.
Fucking foreigners, always pulling Great Britain and its Superior People and Superior Culture down from it’s hollowed state of Greatness.
It if wasn’t for foreigners, Britain would still be an Empire.
I don’t even need to change a word to rebut your weak-ass attempt at propaganda.
“It wasn’t Russia despite all the evidence. it was actually your own fault”
Fuck you, you Russian fucking hack.
Sure mate, your nation is a great and very important nation and its people and culture are superior to the rest, which is why foreigners want so much to bring Britain down from it’s greatness and it couldn’t possibly be Britons having most of the blame as “such things don’t happen here” and definitely it couldn’t possibly be the product of the British elites blaming the EU for every shit that happened there for decades before Brexit and then pillaging the country like crazy in the aftermath of the 2008 Crash, especially during the Austerity period all the while blaming the EU and immigrants.
The only thing that makes sense is that Russia is entirely responsible for what Britons did in Britain and anybody who doesn’t totally agree with that and who doesn’t, for good measure, immediately starts an impromptu rendition of “God save the King”, is a “Russian fucking hack”.
Dude you’re a Russian shill. I literally don’t give a shit what your opinion is. Not even going to read it to be totally honest.
As far as I’m concerned, I hope you catch something untreatable and the only people who can save you are Western doctors…and then we just don’t.
lmao
The Russians made me do it mum!
Are the Russians in the room with us now?
Not as many, since the Ukrainians bombed the data center hosting them, comrade.
Russia was one of the biggest supporter, using some outfit in Northern Ireland. That’s actually old news. It is public knowledge for ages, but now it if officially confirmed.
Sure mate, I must just have imagined the daily pro-Leave articles in the Murdoch and Rothermere owned newspapers pushing for Leave and peddling anti-imigration and anti-EU bollocks during Leave Referendum, not to mention the shit coming out of the mouths of the likes of Boris Johnson who was constantly on TV.
Oh, they have been a good part of it. But a lot of advertising over several different channels had already been identified to be coming from the same sources. This has been known even during the referendum. The source was semi-identified shortly after as Russian.
Remember the fishing boats doing a procession up the River Thames? That was one of them. The money they got for showing up was paid out of this fund. That Murdoch had a field day spreading the “news” was just a normal development.
TIL the UK has a new PM. I just read a little about him and he seems worlds better than starmer.
Any Brits who would like to chime in? I always like hearing local perspectives
If you were to take Burnham’s pulse, he’d have one. I’m not sure about Starmer in that regard.
There has been a significant presentational change, plenty of symbolic gestures with little practical impact (for example, sanctioning Israeli settlers but still selling weapons to Israel to kill Palestinian civilians) and Burnham has had the good sense to dump some unworkable Starmer policies, but overall, there is still significant continuity with Labour under Starmer. So I’d say it’s too soon to tell if Burham’s going to deliver anything more than Starmer did (which was almost nothing). I sincerely hope he does, but I’m not optimistic.
I see. I suppose it makes sense to reserve judgment until he’s had a few more months to deliver. We’ll see where it goes I guess.
But overall this seems like a good course-correction. All the Brits I talked to in the last couple years seemed almost convinced they would end up with a Reform government. They seemed to view it as inevitable. You could really sense the dread.
Now that dread has lifted. And that’s a positive, even if the new PM isn’t perfect.
i don’t think i ever heard anyone say anything good about Starmer. He’s one negative person.
He was a token though. That’s basically all he had going for him…
Oh and his support for Ukraine was a redeeming quality, but I feel anybody besides Reform would support Ukraine by default, so I’m not sure that says much about him…
Support for Ukraine is basically UK’s honest attempt at doing the right thing regardless of ideology.
I was honestly blindsided leading up to 2024 when I was telling people that the republican congressman in our district supported ending aid to Ukraine, and I got hit with the response: “Good, why should we be paying for that anyway?”
Like, how do you even begin trying to reason with someone so crass, callous, self-centered, uninformed, and short-sighted that that’s how they view the situation?
given that politicians usually represent some big business benefactors first and stand for their interest, it is natural to expect that they are thoroughly uninformed about anything above their pay grade.
Brit here. Starmer spent two years doing absolutely fuck all. That’s an absolute gift to far right parties; why bother voting for Labour OR the Tories if they don’t make any difference to your life at all? Vote for us, and we’ll make life hard for poor brown people and trannies, that’ll fix decades of underinvestment in your communities. I can’t blame people with hard lives who have been betrayed by politicians for so long, for grasping at any straw available, but it should be so easy to shut down the lies of the far right.
Burnham isn’t as left-wing as I would like. However, as mayor of Manchester he did some good work in bringing public transport under public control, and housing the homeless. He’s come in and started making the right noises about making change - reforming social care, ending the pension triple-lock, bringing the water supply back under public control. He seems committed to electoral reform; it’s long overdue in this country. He’s making moves towards rejoining the EU. He’s given Ukraine the schematics for building their own Storm Shadows; expensive tech, but hopefully they’ll be able to make good use of it.
On the other hand; he’s chickened out of reforming campaign donations, and using the G word to describe Israel’s genocide in Palestine. He has not corrected the dreadful decision of our high court from a few years ago giving free reign to discriminate against trans people - that’s set back LGBT rights in this country a decade or more, and is a disgrace. He also failed to tell Trump to go suck a dick in favour of ‘diplomacy’.
He’s been (mostly) using the right words so far, and he has previously shown he’s turned the right words into action. I’m hopeful - been a long time since I’ve been able to say that about our government. But we need more action.
That’s a good, balanced explanation. Thank you.
Time will tell, but he seems better than anything you guys have had in a long time. Certainly better than we’ve had in the US in a long time.
And it might be enough for Labour to establish a more stable position, opening the door for further-leftwing movements without risking a regression into right-wing populism. Based on the sentiments and worries I was hearing just a few months ago, even if he’s not perfect this is still much better than people were expecting to get.
We shall see where it goes!
It happened arround the same time as the whole Count Binface vs Nigel Farage thing, which I only know because that caused problems for reform trying to win the PM’s old office.
So even though Farage won his local election, it lampooned him enough to torch reform’s hopes of a governing majority?
I feel Labour’s decision to dump Starmer likely helped too.
I mean that too, but more specifically because the two elections were happening around the same time and Farage pulled canvassers from the other district where they did actually have a chance of winning to his own district instead, which should have been a safe win for him and would have been even safer if he hadn’t called the by-election himself.
He’s a good speaker who at least sounds far more sincere and honest than anything in the last 20 years. He’s going to take a big chunk of voters who were center/center-right and ‘had no choice’ but to vote reform. Labour now seems like the only sensible choice. Beforehand there was no sensible choice.
He’s going to take a big chunk of voters who were center/center-right and ‘had no choice’ but to vote reform.
No centrist and few on the centre-right would ever have voted Reform. There’s very little middle ground between Labour and the fascists that can be recaptured. There’s far more potential for Labour to win back people who have stopped voting, and some of the voters who have changed over to the Green Party. But to do that, Burnham will have to jettison the Reform-Light cabinet ministers such as Shabana Mahmood and Yvette Cooper. So far, he’s shown no inclination to do so.
Labour now seems like the only sensible choice. Beforehand there was no sensible choice.
That’s a good summary, makes total sense. Thank you!!
There are only so many times you can say no shit sherlock.
True, but he’s the first PM to actually say it out loud. Starmer, Sunack, Truss, Johnson, May and possibly Cameron all either knew and didn’t think it was important enough to mention, or were satisfied enough with the outcome that they didn’t want anyone questioning it.
Then show us the iron-clad evidence and cancel the results of the referendum.
First time?
We need to normalize bombing AI not factories like this. Precision strikes to IRA locations. Russia wouldn’t do shit in retaliation or Putin goes down as well.
Oh cool so you can use this in your big move that should go something like…
“We’re really sorry can we come back to the EU if we dump our fascists pleaaaase it was all a Russian plot.” Lol
Same guy that says that those guys out on bail for stealing fuel were for sure Iranian terrorists.
Way to keep up. Good job being ten years too late to figure out what anyone with half a brain saw a thousand times a day on the internet.
How dumb are our world leaders?
I knew it!
“Burnham did not provide further details about the type or extent of Moscow’s activity during the Brexit referendum.”
is the government/corpo complicit media equivalent of ‘trust me bro’
Getting us stoked up for a war with Russia be like.
Don’t believe their lies.
Russia interfered AND NOBODY ELSE DID!!!
What’s your point? AFAIK the debate is not about what “nobody else did”, but the fact that Russia heavily influenced the debate in UK on a democratic election. Something that is against international law. It is pretty obvious that Farage was financed by Russia.
Something that is against international law.
The point is that this is a double standard. It’s hypocritical misdirection. Hiding the actual causes for the shit we’re in. It’s neoliberal and US empire propaganda.
The more complex point would be that our social media networks are unmoderated spaces owned and operated for profit and political power. It should be independent, meaning the workers and users have some democratic input on how it operates and how well it is moderated. This is the root cause - you cannot operate a system on “greed is good and nothing else is allowed” and expect good outcomes. You cannot. It’s a lie. It makes assholes out of all of us. A whole generation of people has been trained like dogs from social media that is why even in moderated space like lemmy you see this bullshit. Everyone fucking clapping like seals: “Yes Russia bad! Kill Russia and everything will be good again! Just one more coup in South or Central America!”
Against international law lol. Despicable.
Why do you need to make Russian interference into US propaganda?
You sound like a tankie when you do that.I’m saying blaming the decline of the west mainly on Russian disinfo is propaganda.
