UK Politics Has Been Subverted by US Interests But Instead the UK Looks for Ghosts Elsewhere

News:

London, 11 October 2026. UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham told The Rest Is Politics Podcast that Russia “clearly” interfered in the 2016 Brexit referendum, claiming he had received “the clear answer that yes, there was” upon entering Downing Street.

Comment:

He offered no evidence, no source, and also no detail on whether the alleged interference influenced the result, which brought a sense of betrayal to the nation when the promised benefits of leaving the EU (BREXIT) never materialized and now many UK politicians are contemplating how the country may crawl back again. Within twenty-four hours of his claim, Burnham retreated, admitting he had “implied no such thing” and conceding he possessed no evidence that the Kremlin influenced the outcome.

Burnham, who has left open the door to rejoining the EU, needed a narrative that delegitimised Brexit without confronting the dubious material interests that drove it. Russia serves as the perfect culprit: distant, hostile, and safely other. The economies of European countries, including the UK, are suffering; social unrest is escalating and people are getting poorer and the politicians whose mistakes have dragged down their countries are looking for someone to blame. In the UK, they blame the migrants and the Muslims, and in addition they blame Russia and now Burnham attempted to use the Russia bogeyman to cover the disastrous BREXIT.

While Burnham chases Russian ghosts, the documented interference in British democracy came in fact from Washington. Cambridge Analytica, the data firm part-owned by US billionaire Robert Mercer, provided free services to Nigel Farage’s Leave.EU campaign. Andy Wigmore, Leave.EU’s communications director, confirmed the arrangement: “They were happy to help. Because Nigel is a good friend of the Mercers”. Mercer also bankrolled Donald Trump and employed Steve Bannon, who later joined the Trump White House.

American money, American data expertise, and American political strategy shaped the BREXIT campaign and London’s political class welcomed it. This is just one amongst many examples of US interference in Western European affairs that is infinitely more impactful than interference from outside the Western bloc.

Then there is the Zionist entity and its influence. Approximately forty per cent of Prime Minister Burnham’s cabinet, including the Prime Minister himself, are directly linked to ‘Labour Friends of Israel’. An embassy official, Shai Masot, confirmed that ‘Labour Friends of Israel’ had access to £1 million from the Zionist entity to spend on all-expenses-paid trips for sympathetic MPs and students. A petition demanding an inquiry into pro-‘Israel’ influence in UK politics surpassed 100,000 signatures, forcing a parliamentary debate that the government opposed. These are documented, funded, and institutionalised channels of foreign influence operating within the governing party. Burnham says nothing about them.

The Intelligence and Security Committee’s 2020 report found that the government failed to fully assess Russian state media and troll accounts, but it did not conclude that Russia changed the result. Foreign Office Minister Stephen Doughty eventually conceded that no Kremlin attempt to interfere with Brexit had succeeded. Burnham’s own foreign minister could not confirm the evidence existed. Western states project interference onto Russia as an enemy state while their own networks of influence, American data firms, Zionist lobby groups, Gulf funding, operate openly. The Russian threat is useful precisely because it distracts from the uncomfortable reality that British democracy has been shaped by foreign money and foreign interests for decades.

Written for the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir by
Abdul Hamid Martin