The report on the threat to our national security from Russia, which was compiled in early 2019 by parliament’s intelligence and security committee (ISC), which I chaired at the time, has finally been published. It arrives 17 months after our work on it was first completed.
Nine months of that delay is the direct result of the prime minister deliberately preventing the report’s publication: this could, and should, have taken place in early November 2019, after the redaction process was complete, and prior to the general election, when parliament was still sitting and the committee was in existence. The explanations provided by Boris Johnson for not publishing then were patently untrue – as the ISC of the current parliament explained in launching the report on Tuesday.
It is to the great merit of the ISC that it has, since its formation, operated in a non-partisan fashion. Party politics has no role in its work, nor have differences of view of its members on issues such as Scottish independence or Brexit. Until the chairmanship was contested last week – with the Conservative backbencher Julian Lewis taking the role ahead of Chris Grayling – I do not think it has had a vote at any time in its history, as it tries to proceed on evidence-based consensus. It strives to be objective, professional, independent of government influence, and trusted to ensure it can be given highly classified material. By striving to speak truth to power, and not leaking, it has developed a reputation that enables it to work with the organisations it scrutinises, even if they may not always find what it says comfortable.
The decision to enquire into the threat from Russia was the result of the existing evidence of Russia’s willingness to use aggressive and unlawful means in its relations with the UK, shown in the past by criminal operations on UK soil in the Litvinenko and Salisbury poisoning cases, and by its malicious cyber activity. But we wanted to look at this threat in the round – not just at individual examples. We also wanted to look at the British government’s responses, and if more could or should be done to counter the threats that exist. The report is wide ranging and I can only touch here on parts of it.
One of those issues was the growing evidence of Russia’s spreading of disinformation through the internet to undermine trust in democracy and in democratic institutions, as well as its covert attempts at exerting influence on our public and political life. It has a clear track record of doing this elsewhere, with hack and leak operations in the US presidential election of 2016 and the 2017 French presidential election. Open source studies have identified significant activity on social media of bots and trolls from Russia and credible commentary that Russia undertook an influence campaign in relation to the 2014 Scottish independence referendum.
Despite the government accepting those findings, we were surprised to discover it had not sought any evidence of whether similar interference had taken place in other democratic events such as the 2016 EU referendum, and that there was effectively no information available. Nor was there anything to suggest that special vigilance had been exercised at the time in the face of such possible interference. As part of the ISC’s role is to inform the public of risks to our security and democracy, we were left unable to do this. The fact that the government now says that it believes Russia carried out such activities in the 2019 general election shows clearly the value of trying to establish the facts.
We noted in our report that Britain’s own intelligence and security agencies had a sense of extreme caution in taking any role in the UK’s democratic processes. But protecting those processes is part of their remit. It is also the plain duty of government to ensure this as well.
We were, however, provided with evidence of the impact in the UK of the arrival and settlement here of expatriate members of the Russian economic and financial elites. Some of those may have come to escape their country, and may as a consequence be at risk from Russia. Others, meanwhile, enjoy close links with the Putin regime, which intertwines intelligence and business interests without distinction, and will tolerate criminal activity such as illicit finance and money laundering if it can promote its own influence. This is a serious challenge to our values of democracy and rule of law. Some Russian expatriates in Britain are donors to political organisations.
Our report is also designed to help promote solutions. We recommend the Home Office taking the policy lead to protect our democratic processes through the Office of Security and Counter Terrorism, rather than it being left to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport and the Electoral Commission. We are pleased the government has a Defending Democracy programme. But legislation is now needed to introduce the requirement for agents of foreign governments to be registered in Britain; members of the House of Lords must also have full transparency of financial interests, just as it exists in the Commons. More generally, we need to ensure that our intelligence agencies have the resources and focus to deal with the various threats Russia poses for us. At their best, as we saw after the Salisbury poisonings, their effectiveness in identifying the culprits and co-ordinating an international response can be outstanding.
At the end of our report we recognise that total disengagement with Russia is not desirable. But in view of its aggression, this relationship has to be on our terms, and backed by an insistence on our values of freedom and democracy. A good starting point, at least, would be for our own government to desist from its childish interference in the workings of the intelligence and security committee.