LONDON — Prime Minister Andy Burnham sparked fury in Britain on Monday with his assertion that Russia had sought to interfere in the 2016 Brexit vote that took the country out of the European Union, breaking with previous premiers who said there was no evidence Moscow had meddled.
Burnham made the remarks on “The Rest Is Politics,” a popular British podcast released overnight, saying he wanted to highlight the danger of Russian misinformation as European countries prepare for elections at a time of hyperpolarization.
Burnham said he requested a briefing on Brexit interference as soon as he took office in July, believing the passage of time did not diminish the importance of the issue.
“I asked the question coming to Downing Street: Was there interference in the 2016 referendum from Russia? And I’ve had the clear answer that yes, there was,” Burnham said. “I mean, these things are important now to put clearly on the record and, I believe, help voters in Germany and France understand that some of this politics is instigated via our enemies, namely Russia.”
His remarks infuriated Brexit supporters, who accused him of resurfacing the issue to cast doubt on the results of a referendum that has divided the British for 10 years. Nigel Farage, a key architect of the Brexit vote and leader of the anti-immigration Reform party, said Burnham was making it up.
“The prime minister is a liar, yes, a liar,” Farage said at a news conference Monday. “There was no Russian interference. The Russian hoax has run all the way through this.”
Conservative shadow minister Katie Lam told the BBC that Burnham “risks sowing doubt about the result of a professionally run, independently monitored democratic vote.”
Officials scrambled to clarify that Burnham’s remarks did not mean the government rejected the outcome of the referendum, in which Britons voted 52 percent to 48 percent to leave the E.U.
“Yes, we believe the referendum result was legitimate,” a spokesperson for Burnham’s office told reporters after being pressed several times. “The PM absolutely accepts the referendum result.”
Burnham said he stands by the importance of acknowledging Moscow’s efforts to spread misinformation in the Brexit vote and in subsequent elections.
“I think we’ve been too much on the back foot on that, actually,” he said, “and we haven’t informed people sufficiently about the extent to which people are seeking to disrupt the political process from overseas.”
Conservative leaders have consistently dismissed the idea of Russian meddling in the referendum. Asked in 2017 whether he had seen evidence of successful Russian interference, then-Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson replied: “Nyet, not a sausage.”
In 2020, after members of a parliamentary committee said the government had avoided looking for it, Johnson, who was prime minister at the time, rejected the committee’s call for an assessment, saying the government had “seen no evidence of successful interference.”
After Burnham’s comments this week, Johnson again doubled down.
“As soon as I became foreign secretary I asked the security services the same question and they replied that there was no evidence of any successful interference in the 2016 referendum, by Russia or any other power,” Johnson said in a post Monday on X.
Burnham resurfaced the question as he seeks to steer the United Kingdom back toward Europe more forcefully than any leader since the referendum.
In his first party conference speech as Labour leader, he said last month that Brexit had done “more harm than good” and promised to lay out options for the country’s long-term relationship with the E.U., including a customs union and single-market membership.
His government is preparing for a U.K.-E.U. summit in Brussels in November, at which the sides hope to complete deals on food standards, a youth mobility program and linking their carbon-trading markets. Burnham has stopped short of proposing to rejoin the bloc, though he has said he hopes to see Britain back in the E.U. in his lifetime.
But Burnham said he spoke out now to warn other European democracies facing a surge from the populist right. He said he discussed Russian influence with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in Berlin last week, as Merz contends with regional election gains by the far-right Alternative for Germany.
Russia has denied any attempt to interfere in Brexit or other democratic elections.
Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, said Burnham may be calculating that disenchantment with Britain’s anemic post-Brexit economy could make revisiting the vote a political winner and build support for closer ties to the continent.
And goading the unpopular Farage could be “the icing on the cake,” Bale said.
But the move is not without risks in a country that has grown exhausted with a decade of Brexit debates.
“It’s one thing to delegitimize Brexit by bringing up the role played in it by a country that most Brits despise and distrust,” Bale said. “It’s quite another to be seen to be trying to relitigate what most Brits, however they feel about the merits of the decision taken in 2016, still regard as a broadly fair expression of how the country was feeling 10 years ago.”
The post U.K. prime minister accuses Russia of meddling in Brexit vote appeared first on Washington Post.
