UK government looked other way on Russia meddling: Report

Bloomberg

British intelligence services must conduct a full review of the 2016 Brexit referendum to see whether hostile Russian action swayed the vote, after the government failed to investigate, a panel of lawmakers said.
Members of Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee accused ministers of deliberately avoiding the question because they did not want to know whether Russia had tried to interfere in the European Union referendum.
The recommendation for a full-scale review is a key point in a long-delayed report on Russian involvement in British politics by the watchdog which oversees the work of the UK intelligence agencies. It is a politically explosive subject and one that Prime Minister Boris Johnson will be reluctant to revisit. The aftermath of the Brexit vote split the country, leading to years of turmoil and uncertainty for business and bringing down two prime ministers.
Johnson, who led the controversial pro-Brexit campaign, is now in charge and seeking to negotiate a future trade deal with the EU. He will want to avoid reopening past debates about the vote as he has pledged to move the country on from the past divisions over Brexit.

Hostile Action
But the panel said a full inquiry — with findings made public — would be essential. “It is important to establish whether a hostile state took deliberate action with the aim of influencing a UK democratic process, irrespective of whether it was successful or not,” the ISC report said. Members of the panel criticised the government for failing to try to establish what had happened sooner.
“The report reveals that no one in government knew if Russia interfered or sought to influence the referendum because they did not know want to know,” Stewart Hosie, a Scottish Nationalist member of Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee said in a briefing. “The committee found it astonishing that no one in government had sought beforehand to protect the referendum from such attempts or investigate afterwards what attempts to influence it there may have been.”
The study, which was delayed by nine months, threatens to further damage relations between London and Moscow, which have been in deep trouble since the 2018 Salisbury poisonings. Last week, the UK accused Russia of trying to interfere in the 2019 election and presented findings, backed by the US and Canada, of Russian hackers’
attempts to steal coronavirus vaccine research.
In its report, the ISC said Russia is so embedded in the British establishment that attempts to curb its influence are focused on damage limitation rather than prevention.
The committee found the British government has failed to tackle the threat to democracy from Russian interference.
The cross-party committee called for a full intelligence report on Russian attempts to influence the 2016 Brexit referendum along similar lines to investigations in the US into meddling in its democracy.
The UK intelligence services were too focused on counter-terrorism and not enough on protecting democracy, the report said. Some sections on the report on the Brexit referendum were redacted.