There are many qualities about the Left that I find undesirable, but the one that really sticks in my craw is this tendency to treat voters as though they have no agency, moral or otherwise - as though they are mere vassals, incapable of thinking or acting independently, and therefore must be managed.
At best, this infantilisation results in nanny-statism; at worst, it leads to central planning and the deaths of tens of millions, as the events of the 20th century can attest.
The Left is so intoxicated with this idea that Andy Burnham’s latest “bombshell revelation” about Brexit is neither explosive nor revelatory. In fact, it’s a painfully predictable take from a man who appears to view an overbearing state as the panacea to Britain’s intractable problems.
The predictability of a take doesn’t make it any less maddening when it inevitably arrives, however.
My latest “trigger”- to borrow from the Left’s jargon - was the Prime Minister telling The Rest Is Politics podcast that Russia “clearly” interfered in the 2016 Brexit referendum, following briefings he received upon entering Downing Street.
After casting serious doubt over the integrity of our elections, “our Andy” did not feel the need to elaborate further, nor did the fellow Remainers in his company feel any journalistic responsibility to interrogate his claim. All three simply moved on. Case closed.
Not so fast.
Before I’m accused of being cavalier about an attempt on our democracy - an attitude bordering on treason, my critics might add - let me extend a degree of charity to the PM. Firstly, let’s deal in facts: credible intelligence indicates that Russia is seeking to destabilise Western liberal democracies through an active campaign of hybrid warfare.
These “grey-zone” tactics, which sit just below the perceived threshold for triggering a direct military response from Nato, have become increasingly brazen since Vladimir Putin illegally invaded Ukraine four years ago, with incidents ranging from suspected attacks on critical infrastructure by Kremlin-linked criminal gangs to explosive-laden drones and Russian fighter jets violating Nato airspace.
Cloaked in plausible deniability, they also take the form of bot farms that flood social media with disinformation in a bid to sow confusion and division at the heart of Western democracies.
I don’t doubt for a second that Moscow attempted such chicanery during the EU referendum campaign, but the operative word here is “attempted”, for it has never been proven.
All we really have to work with are a piddling amount of ad spend on referendum-related advertising and a damning cross-party report released in 2020, which concluded that the British government and intelligence agencies failed to conduct any proper assessment of the Kremlin’s attempts to interfere with the EU referendum - hardly slam-dunk evidence of a coordinated campaign by Moscow to influence the 2016 result.
Even if an attempt could be proven beyond reasonable doubt, how would one then go about proving that it influenced the result one jot?
Burnham could have contained some of the fallout by playing the national security card. Any fair-minded listener would surely accept that such intelligence would be highly classified. But to breezily move on from such an audacious claim without recourse to this argument begs the question: why mention it at all?
In a follow-up statement, a spokesperson for No 10 said it’s “inconceivable” that Russia didn’t attempt to influence the outcome of the 2016 Brexit referendum, but that the PM believes the 2016 Brexit referendum result was “legitimate”.
How magnanimous of him. I’m sure the 17.4 million British citizens who voted to leave the EU will be sure to thank him for clarifying that they aren’t Kremlin stooges. The problem for Burnham is that he said this within the context of his recent speech at the Labour Party conference, where he said Brexit had done “more harm than good”, and as he pursues a new deal with the EU and hints at rejoining further down the line.
It therefore smacks of a calculated move, just below the threshold of a direct confrontation, to cast doubt over the decision to leave the EU. A form of hybrid warfare, if you like, against the millions of working-class voters who deserted his party en masse in 2019.
Even if it weren’t a cynical ploy, is the alternative any more reassuring? The idea that our Prime Minister sincerely believes that Russian sabotage was a more decisive factor in determining the outcome of the Brexit referendum than having an unelected body foist change on whole communities without their consent suggests he’s entirely unmoored from reality and therefore unfit for office.
And if he doesn’t think it was a more decisive factor, then why didn’t the “man of the people” mention the latter instead?
Foreign influence is a real problem in Britain. The foreign influence of waves of legal and illegal immigration without the consent of the British people.
Remember the ‘people’s vote’, Starmer was one of its architects. Then there was the leaflet sent out by Cameron, very questionable content within it. They won’t give up.