Boris Johnson and Theresa May’s lack of action over Russian interference is a shameful stain on our democracy

The report from the Intelligence and Security Committee raises the question – who has been protecting our electoral processes like the Brexit referendum?

No one in government wanted to know whether Russia interfered in our democracy including the Brexit referendum. No one has been protecting British democracy.

There has not even been any investigation into what happened in terms of Russian interference in the 2016 referendum. Neither the Theresa May government nor its successor under Boris Johnson seemed to want to go anywhere near the whole embarrassing business. Both set their face against any review of interference.

It is a lot take in, this Russia report, about as bad as could be imagined. Potential Russian interference, whatever it was, was, in the words of one member of the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), too much of a “hot potato”.

The Conservative governments didn’t want to know. The consequences would have been awful, so it was not pursued; it would have meant, in extremis, discrediting this crucial referendum, cancelling Brexit and calling a second vote with fresh safeguards. That possibility was never considered. There was not even a confidential probe by the security services.

It would have been apocalyptic to have to go through the whole Brexit thing again, after Article 50 had been triggered. Yet that is the scandal. That is the failure of two successive Conservative prime ministers. This leaves open the door to the idea that Britain may have left the EU on a false prospectus, after activity by the Russians.

In other words, the very notion that the result of the Brexit referendum might have been found to be in some way illegitimate was so awful to contemplate that two successive governments just ignored it and hoped the question would go away. It has not.

Plainly the vote, based on paper ballots across many counting stations was not literally rigged; but the debate, the campaigns, social media activity, and the basis of the arguments - propaganda by bots and trolls - may have been affected.

That is unprecedented and appalling - but we don’t know even now exactly what happened. Maybe Leave would still have won, but we just do not know, or have any idea. That is shameful.

The Russia report means that the validity of the Brexit vote will always be doubted and will always be a running sore in national life.

Leavers can no longer say to Remainers “you lost fair and square - get over it”. The question of whether it was a free and fair referendum has not been settled. That abiding legacy of long-term bitter division and with the UK out of the EU is the ideal outcome so far as Russia is concerned. It is a national nightmare for Britain.

It’s probably a mistake to look for much in the way of ideological consistency in the Kremlin’s alleged attempts to swing British elections. As you’d expect, they are evidently all aimed at pursuing the Russian national interest, which means weakening the UK and the Western alliance, including, seen from Moscow, the European Union.

Everything that the Russian state and its informal allies get up to is dedicated to that goal. That includes accusations of assassinating “traitors” who’ve found refuge in the UK, such as the Skripals, as well as trying to allegedly seeking to steal the Oxford Group’s research into a Covid-19 vaccine.

It also means using social media and other channels, to spread fake news, conspiracy theories and spread hatred and division, amplifying our debilitating culture wars. They really don’t care one way or the other about Nigel Farage, Nicola Sturgeon, Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn, Boris Johnson or Scottish independence or the European Union, as such. Sometimes, as in the 2016 Brexit referendum, Russian interests coincide with those of Johnson; but in the 2019 general election they diverged.

This is perfectly understandable when you appreciate that motivates the likes of the FSB or Cozy Bear is the cold calculation of what Vladimir Putin would be most pleased with, if he’s not already let it his desires be known.

The Russians take exactly the same approach to America and to any other rival power. Nothing is off-limits, no collateral damage unacceptable, nothing that won’t be blandly denied. The methods may be novel, but the habit is long standing.

What’s disturbing, and depressing, is how the various leading players in British political life were, and are, so reluctant to tell the British people about the scale and detail about the level of Russian interference. That is where the Russians have scored the greatest success - eroding confidence within the Establishment, and confusing our political institutions, which includes those on radical left and populist right who think themselves as “outsiders”; to the Russians they are all useful idiots.

Hence the long, long delays in publishing this report. Hence the redaction of some if it’s juiciest details; hence the wider nervousness about the revelations around Downing Street, Labour and Brexit circles, and perhaps the SNP, rather unexpectedly. The caution shown by Jeremy Corbyn in his response to the Skripal poisonings could be read in the same light.

Espionage, with its allied trades of hacking and chemical warfare, after long experience in the Cold War, is one of the few areas where Russia can boast some international competitiveness. Where other countries try to achieve a comparative advantage in farming or artificial intelligence or hydrogen fuel cells, say, the Russians content themselves with this.

Fair enough, it’s what they do, and have always done. What we want to know much more about is how they’ve been damaging not just our democracy but the whole cohesion of British society, making thus country an angrier, uglier, poorer place. The Russians are winning this particular war, and Britain is losing it in the most fundamental of ways.