Andy Burnham’s anti-Brexit conspiracy theories

Remember when Andy Burnham promised the voters of Makerfield that he had no intention of overturning Brexit? As recently as May, when he was campaigning for a seat in that overwhelmingly Leave-voting constituency, he said: ‘I respect the decision that was made at the referendum, and it is going to undermine everything I have said about strengthening democracy if we don’t respect [the Brexit] vote.’

Despite being an Oxbridge English graduate, it seems Burnham has confused the verb ‘to respect’ with the act of defecating all over something. How else can we describe Burnham’s attitude to the Brexit vote since he became PM in July? At last month’s Labour Party conference, he was eagerly telling delegates that Brexit had ‘done more harm than good’ and that all ‘options were on the table’ for reversing the alleged damage – including ‘rejoining the EU’. Now he has gone even further by libelling the Brexit vote as a product of Russian scheming.

During an interview this weekend on centrist-twat podcast The Rest Is Politics (where else?), Burnham claimed that ‘disinformation and misinformation… emanating from Russia’ are fuelling the rise of the populist right in France and Germany. He then delighted his gurning Remainiac hosts, Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, with the following revelation: ‘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.’ He also added that it was important to state this ‘on the record’, so as to help ‘voters in Germany and France understand that some of this politics is instigated via our enemies, namely Russia’. In other words, Burnham was claiming that Russia is ‘instigating’ populist politics on the continent today, just as it supposedly ‘instigated’ Brexit back in 2016.

This is a mask-off moment for Burnham. The man who promised the voters of Makerfield that he would respect the Brexit vote just a few short months ago is now reheating that most disrespectful of anti-Brexit calumnies – namely, that Leave voters were somehow manipulated into doing so by the Kremlin. He is claiming, just as countless Remainiacs before him have done, that free-thinking, autonomous, adult voters were somehow ‘swayed’ into voting for national sovereignty by a few Russian social-media posts.

Burnham’s promotion of this anti-democratic, Brexit-voiding claim has certainly pleased Britain’s pro-EU elites. Anti-Brexit campaigners say Burnham has confirmed their ‘suspicions’. Lib Dem leader Ed Davey said it ‘took courage’ to reveal Russia’s role in the Brexit vote.

The problem for those desperate to believe this chattering-class conspiracy theory is that there is no there there. Yes, Russian Twitter bots may well have been posting during the EU referendum. But there is zero evidence that they had any impact whatsoever on the vote. The truth is this: 17.4million people voted, seriously, thoughtfully and in good conscience, to leave the EU. Their minds weren’t hacked. They weren’t disinformed into action. They simply wanted to repatriate lawmaking powers that had been given up to the EU. They wanted to ‘take back control’, as the slogan went.

Successive governments have, often against their instincts, backed up this view. In 2018, a petition calling for the referendum result to be annulled on account of ‘foreign interference’ prompted Theresa May’s administration to declare that ‘there has been no evidence of successful interference’. This was substantiated in 2020, when the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament published its long-awaited and (for tinfoil-hatted Remainers) thoroughly anti-climactic report into Russia’s alleged attempts to interfere in UK politics. ‘The impact of any such attempts would be difficult – if not impossible – to assess’, it admitted. This prompted Boris Johnson’s Tory government to state: ‘We have seen no evidence of successful interference in the EU referendum.’

Even Keir Starmer’s Labour government made statements to the same effect. Speaking in December last year, Dan Jarvis, the minister of state for security no less, stated unequivocally: ‘Successive governments have not seen any evidence of successful foreign interference in the [EU] referendum.’ This view has even been echoed under Burnham’s tenure by Florence Eshalomi, the minister of state for homelessness, democracy, communities and faith. As she put it last month: ‘There is no evidence of any foreign interference attempts having been “successful” in materially impacting the outcome of a recent UK election or referendum.’

In fact, after Burnham told Campbell and Stewart what they wanted to hear over the weekend, Andy’s own government was forced to correct his careless talk. Speaking on Monday morning, Foreign Office minister Stephen Doughty was forced to admit that Russia hadn’t influenced the result of the referendum. Later that day, Burnham’s official spokesman insisted that his boss did in fact accept that the Brexit vote had been ‘legitimate’.

Under questioning from Tory leader Kemi Badenoch in parliament on Monday afternoon, Burnham himself seemed to row back on his earlier claims. He now said that it was merely ‘inconceivable’ that Russia hadn’t interfered in the referendum – a claim rather different from saying that Moscow’s role had been confirmed. More dishonest still, he said he had never ‘implied’ that the Brexit vote was illegitimate, even though that was the precise implication of what he said on The Rest Is Politics.

Either way, Burnham has exposed his true colours. Against the backdrop of a Labour government seemingly yearning once again for the EU’s cold, technocratic embrace, Burnham’s promotion of anti-Brexit conspiracy theories shows his direction of travel. This scion of New Labour, this adherent to its globalist sentiments, has no intention of respecting Brexit.

Let’s face it, despite his man-of-the-people shtick, Andy Burnham is just as opposed to democracy and national sovereignty as the rest of the rotten establishment.