United Kingdom: ‘No One’ Protected British Democracy From Russia, U.K. Report Concludes | tephen Castle and Mark Landler/The New York Times
Russia has weaponized information as part of a broad and long-running effort to interfere in the British political system and sow discord, and those efforts were widely ignored by successive British governments, according to a long-awaited report released on Tuesday by the British Parliament. While the report examined Russia’s possible role in fomenting conflict surrounding some of the United Kingdom’s most divisive political battles in recent years — including the 2016 Brexit referendum that rejected membership of European Union and a 2014 referendum in which Scotland voted to remain part of the United Kingdom — it did not draw conclusions on the success of those efforts. Instead, the authors of the report told British lawmakers that they could not speak to the effectiveness of the Russian influence campaign because the government had failed to even be alert to the threat despite years of mounting evidence. It raised a fundamental question: Who is protecting the country’s democratic system? “No one is,” was the answer given by the authors. “The government here has let us down,” Kevan Jones, a member of Parliament who served on the intelligence committee that released the report, said at a news conference.