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.
It's almost certainly both.
"Russia is behind the problems in our country" is the Liberal's version of the Far-Right's "Immigrants are behind the problems in our country" - blame the foreigners rather than the extremely wealthy people who own the news media that relentlessly pushes this shit and subsidize far-right politicians and lobbyist offices and hard-neoliberal "Think Tanks" pushing for laws that help their economic interest whilst making life worse for everybody else.
Specifically for Britain and Brexit, it takes some seriously selective memory to "forget" how the Newspapers owner by Murdoch and the Rothermere family were pushing extra hard nationalism and anti-immigration for decades in the run-up to Brexit, very openly for people voting Leave during the Referendum and some seriously unhinged takes on how Britain should negotiate the Exit Treaty with the EU.
Also, don't get me started on how the choices made by both New Labour and Tories in the aftermath of the 2008 Crash, both the unconditional saving of the wealth of the Asset owners (both the way banks were saved and the choices of the BOE which went way beyond just setting interest rates and even included buying corporate bonds from selected companies) and making most of the population pay for it with crushing Austerity. very much plowed, fertilized and seeds the field upon which Brexit was born.
Next to what was done by 100% local billionaires and their politician minions, foreign interference was minuscule.
...and also masquerading as left wing goons to spread confusion
this is why social media needs authentication. can't be social media without real people
also check out mr hindsight blaming the victim lol
The internet does not need authentication, that is single-handedly the worst thing that can still happen to us is to lose our free spaces.
If you want authentication. Go join Facebook, Reddit, and all the other large corpo sites that are rolling it out en masse so your face can end up in a Palantir or similar database which will not lead to anything good happening for you.
they’re not aware of outside interests in destroying the EU
They're aware. They were just avoiding the issue.
No mention of Cambridge Analytica? I mean, I'm sure the russians put in a coin or two because the breakup was very much in their interest, but I've yet to see clear public proof of it other than various politicians claiming 'it's clear'.
Meanwhile there's actual proof CA influenced elections and are probably working with the christo-fascists whose open goal is to break up the EU, so to me, in retrospect, it looks like maga and the US are the bigger fish here.
Cambridge Analytica had a number of ties to Russia. And using some sort of intermediary is kind of common Russian practice, in terms of how they handle foreign influence ops.
If they’ve sold out to Russia then yeah, obviously? Being “western” doesn’t make some incorruptible unwavering bastion of “the west” serving only “western” interests and using “western” thought
If there were no such thing as front companies, your comment might make sense.
The clear implication is that there is classified proof.
Cambridge Analytica provided data that allowed their clients to influence elections. If we're pointing fingers we should start with the people pulling the strings, not the enablers. And in the case of Brexit, CA were apparently not that involved.
In before .ml users tell them it's in their head and to stop believing imperialist lies
The actual Kremlin shills are popping up everywhere, haven't seen anything but the normal cognitive dissonance from .ml. They're clearly cheap and not well organized this time though. Its very odd
I doubt it.
Most of them have been created before the destruction of it, and are still active after.
Plus those data centers targeted much more popular platforms. Around smaller parts like these they use astroturfing on a much more manual basis.
It wasn't a bot farm, it was a search engine data centre. The impact of that on trolling is likely to be minimal to none, though there's been evidence that search spidering originating in Russia has declined a bit.
Gosh, now if we'd only get that kind of honesty here in the United States.
Way too many Tone Police, so-called "independents", Murc's Law Media, and of course wingnuts, will jump on you if you mention it here.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of fucking course they did. And they did in the US and they are doing so in Canada. If you wanted to destabilize your enemies and all you really had to do was get a bunch of bots and people (paid, or coerced) to play on pre-existing dissent and fear, why the fuck wouldn't you? Sure a lot easier and less traceable than shooting them. Best part is once you feed it enough, it turns into a self sustaining organism, and you can relax in your wing chair by the fire, vodka in hand, and watch any set of outcomes (all of which benefit you) play out.
Then, when your enemy is weakened, you gobble up the bite sized pieces you can.
It’s how they used Gaza to get trump elected in the states. The kids there cry genocide at one another and voilà! Millions of protest votes and non-voting helped elect Putin favorite puppet.
Keep in mind that none of these kids could have pointed to Gaza on a map prior to their willful sacrifice of the democracy of an entire country over it.
Yeah look back into uk political news over the past few weeks, this is almost certainly an indirect follow up to comments made about rejoining.
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).
Reap what you sow
What did Britain sow in Russia? Are you still mad about them supporting the Whites in the civil war?
Western European countries disrupting Democratic institutions globally for centuries. From propaganda and misinformation to outright assassinating elected leaders. The fact it's happening to western countries is karma.
Wait you mean
checks notes
Exactly what Putin did to get in power and stay in power?
So two wrongs cancel out?
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Politicians being so out of touch with international politics that they're not aware of outside interests in destroying the EU... That they'll do a Brexit without expecting international interference. That's the ridiculous thing.
That Britain went ahead and did it, is the ridiculous thing.
What's more elections these days are becoming questionable and will only become more questionable with the prevalance of AI culture bots.
Look at it this way: States that don't have democracy are common in the world today. States that don't have democracy tend to be rightwing and authoritarian.
It should be assumed that outside interference will then be rightwing and authoritarian in nature... And we're seeing that trend play out globally now. Gee I wonder why!
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