Electoral Commission Investigation: Vote Leave

Ben Bradshaw Excerpts

Tuesday 17th July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Chloe Smith]

I came here today to try to respond to the subject matter of the report, but also very clearly to lay on the record again that the people in this country want us to get on with delivering the result, rather than to go back over it.

[Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)]

The Government propose legislation. The Electoral Commission has made specific recommendations to the Government about what they need to do. Will the Minister do it?

[Chloe Smith]

I think that the right hon. Gentleman is referring to the Electoral Commission’s earlier report on digital campaigning, which I am considering very carefully. As I said earlier, there are a number of issues to look at in the round. There are other ongoing reports and investigations such as that of the Information Commissioner, which last week produced a progress report, but not its final report. As the right hon. Gentleman knows from his experience in government, it is important to look at those things together, and that is what the Government will do.

Leaving the EU

Ben Bradshaw Excerpts

Monday 9th July 2018 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I have had conversations with a number of European leaders in recent days, and the indication is that they do feel this is a proposal that can ensure that we move the negotiations on and move them on at pace. I will be seeing a number of European leaders over the next couple of days; we are hosting the western Balkans summit tomorrow and then there is the NATO summit. I believe this plan is good for the UK, and the EU will see that it will lead to a deep and special partnership that will be in both our interests.

[Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)]

I believe the Prime Minister to be a rational human being, so why does she not save herself, us and the country a great deal of misery and grief by putting the option inexplicably ruled out at Chequers, the EEA-plus option, to this House in a free vote?

[The Prime Minister]

As I indicated in the statement that I made, the reason I do not think the EEA-plus option is right for the UK is that it does not deliver on the vote of the British people. That is our duty: it is our job as a Government to deliver the Brexit that the British people voted for.

G7

Ben Bradshaw Excerpts

Monday 11th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

The President of the United States has always made it clear that he is keen to be able to sit down and talk with the UK about a future trade deal. We are also clear that we want to ensure that we have a trade deal that works for the United Kingdom, but let us not forget that we already have a good trading and investment relationship with the US. Every working day, 1 million people in the United Kingdom wake up and go to work for an American company, and 1 million people in the United States wake up and go to work for a British company.

[Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)]

How did the Prime Minister personally respond to Trump’s call for Putin to be let back into the G7? Given yesterday’s revelations, is it not now time for a full police inquiry into the relationship between the Kremlin and the leave campaign in the EU referendum?

[The Prime Minister]

The right hon. Gentleman asks about a police inquiry, which of course is a matter for the police, and the body responsible for looking at elections and the democratic process is the Electoral Commission. He asks about the comments made by President Trump on the G7 versus the G8. There was a good reason why the G8 became the G7—Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea—and the response I have given both in private and in public is that any conversations about whether or not Russia could come back round the table cannot take place until Russia has changed its attitude.

Syria

Ben Bradshaw Excerpts

Monday 16th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)]

Britain was absolutely right, with France and America, to take this long-overdue action in response to Assad’s proven and repeated use of chemical weapons. Since 2013, his regime and the Kremlin have lied and lied again about the continued development of his chemical weapons programme and their continued use. Will the Prime Minister reassure the House that if this does not prove to be a sufficient deterrent, she and our allies will not hesitate to act again? In those circumstances, though, I urge her to come to the House to seek Parliament’s consent first.

[The Prime Minister]

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to refer to the proven and repeated use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime. As I said earlier in response to a number of other questions, nobody should be in any doubt about our resolve to ensure that we alleviate human suffering by dealing with the use of chemical weapons and to ensure that their use is not normalised.

EU Referendum: Electoral Law

Ben Bradshaw Excerpts

Tuesday 27th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Tom Brake]

I could not agree more. I am sure that others will contribute to this debate—they may principally or exclusively be from the Opposition Benches—express their concerns about these allegation and ask that the matter be fully investigated in the way it deserves.

[Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)]

I am sure that were he not at the Liaison Committee, the Chair of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, who has done such a fantastic job on this and has just spent four hours listening to the testimony of Christopher Wylie, would be here making exactly the same points as the right hon. Gentleman.

[Tom Brake]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for that equally helpful intervention. I hope that during this debate Members who heard that evidence will be able to contribute and update the House on what was said there, although I suspect that a lot of that information will have been contained in the papers this weekend, which I am sure many Members have spent hours assessing over the weekend and since.

I want to focus briefly on the Electoral Commission. This is how its website describes its role in relation to referendums:

“Our focus is on voters and on putting their interests first. Our objectives for referendums are that:…they should be well-run and produce results that are accepted…there should be integrity and transparency of campaign funding and expenditure”.

It is safe to say that neither of those objectives was met with respect to the EU referendum campaign—I am not blaming the Electoral Commission but others involved in the campaign.

What action has the Electoral Commission taken to date? The allegations we read about this weekend were new allegations, but there were existing allegations working their way through the system. I thank WhatDoTheyKnow, openDemocracy and FairVote for their work on this issue. They obtained internal emails from the Electoral Commission that described Darren Grimes’ spending as “unusual”. I think we can all agree it was remarkable that someone whose organisation in the first 10 weeks of its existence apparently managed to raise £107 was given £625,000 to spend in a completely uncontrolled manner. It is remarkable that such confidence was placed in that organisation and the one or two people behind it.

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[Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)]

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) on securing this emergency debate. As Members will know, I have been raising this issue and concern in the House for almost 18 months now, and when I first did so I was treated as a bit of a crank. Subsequently, however, almost every single allegation that I have used parliamentary privilege to put on the record in this place has proven to be correct.

This debate needs to be taken extremely seriously. It is not about who won or lost the referendum; it is about the integrity and security of our democracy and electoral system. Any of the sceptics who have cast doubt on the nature and quality of the evidence of the whistleblower, Chris Wylie, should watch the four hours of testimony that I watched today before the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee: it was absolutely shocking and astonishing, and it should go to the heart of anybody who cares about our democracy.

Mr Wylie laid out clear evidence of serious lawbreaking by the leave campaign: not only collusion between Vote Leave and BeLeave, which is the one that has got most publicity, but collusion between Vote Leave and some of the other leave organisations, including Veterans for Britain, and indeed the DUP. Each of those organisations used either Cambridge Analytica—we know all about that, having heard the revelations last week about how it illegally harvested the Facebook data of tens of millions of people—or Aggregate IQ, a supposedly separate company based in Canada. It is not separate at all; it is all part of the same organisation. We know that 40% of Vote Leave’s budget was spent on Aggregate IQ and the work that it did. We still do not know how AIQ got that data, where the data came from or whether it was legally obtained and used. These are serious questions, and I am very pleased that the Chairman of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, who is a Conservative, is clearly taking the allegations seriously. He will be putting them to the Prime Minister at the Liaison Committee later this afternoon.

[Norman Lamb (North Norfolk) (LD)]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree, given the scale of the spending on digital campaigning now, that along with the investigation into what happened during the referendum there is an urgent need for a complete overhaul of the electoral rules to ensure that they are fit for the digital age?

[Mr Bradshaw]

Yes, I entirely agree. I shall go on to say something about that a little later.

Mr Wylie provided compelling and credible evidence not only of the collusion but of the effectiveness of the targeted advertising campaigns that these data companies conduct, based on the data that they have. In the case of the referendum, the campaigns were targeted on 7 million voters whom the companies had carefully profiled as people whose opinions they could shift. In his evidence to the Committee today, Mr Wylie produced a staggering statistic. He said that, in his experience, the methods used by Cambridge Analytica and AIQ in this case would have had the potential to shift between 7% and 10% of the people targeted. Let us not forget that he was and remains a leaver. He wants Brexit to happen, but he does not want it to happen based on a fraud on the British electorate. He said that

“it is completely reasonable to say that there could have been a different outcome in the referendum if there hadn’t been, in my view, cheating”.

There have been attempts to discredit Mr Wylie. There was even a disgraceful attempt from Downing Street to discredit one of his co-whistleblowers by, among other things, outing him as gay. I am amazed that the man who did that is still in his job, because that was totally unacceptable. Let me tell those people who are trying to discredit Mr Wylie that he is one of 200 people who have been allowed into this country because of their brilliance. He has been allowed a special visa because of the amount he knows about how all this stuff works. I do not have a clue how it all works, but he is one of the world’s leading experts, and he is a very serious whistleblower. Not all Conservative Members dismiss his evidence, but those who do do so at their peril. Let us just wait and see where all this ends. Mr Wylie also made a very worrying statement, and I think that this is the first time that a connection has been made between Cambridge Analytica and the Russian FSB—although I had heard about it privately—via the work that it did for the Russian oil company, Lukoil.

It must be clear to everyone in the House, whatever their view on Brexit, that the powers and resources of the Information Commissioner and the Electoral Commission are wholly inadequate. If the Government were serious about getting to the truth by letting the commissioners do their job, we would have less of this “what-aboutery” and more action and support for the Electoral Commission and the Information Commissioner, in terms of their powers and—critically and more immediately—their resources. Mr Wylie has been working for many hours with the Information Commissioner, and one of the worrying things he told the Committee was that he had had to explain to the officials in that office what all this was about. They do not have enough technical experts. They do not have people who actually understand how all this works and what has been going on. In my view, this guy should be employed by all the global regulators, because he seems to be one of the few people who knows how this electoral corruption works, not only in our country but elsewhere. There was loads of evidence, for example, about what has been going on in Nigeria and in parts the Caribbean. This is not just a problem for this country.

[Tulip Siddiq (Hampstead and Kilburn) (Lab)]

My right hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. The accusations that he is outlining go to the heart of the Government, and the people who led the leave campaign are now senior Cabinet members. Does he therefore agree that the Ministers in question should excuse themselves from this investigation and possibly from Brexit-specific Cabinet meetings in the future?

[Mr Bradshaw]

What matters at this stage is that the Electoral Commission, the Information Commissioner, the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, the Intelligence and Security Committee and Robert Mueller’s investigation in the United States, which is examining things that are relevant to us here, are given the full support and resources from our Government and from all their agencies that they need to do their jobs properly. In contrast to the outbursts from the Foreign Secretary and the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs trying to rubbish this testimony, I note that most of the rest of the Cabinet said that the Electoral Commission should be allowed to finish its work properly.

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

Does my right hon. Friend share my astonishment that it took the Information Commissioner so long to get a warrant to search Cambridge Analytica’s premises, given that Facebook got in there in a minute and a half?

[Mr Bradshaw]

This is in no way a criticism of the Information Commissioner or of the Electoral Commission —they are doing their best—but they do not have enough people, expertise, money or power. My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We had the farcical scene of the Information Commissioner trying to get access to Cambridge Analytica’s office for almost a week, while Facebook had got in right at the start. That just symbolises the paucity of the powers that we have to deal with this digital world when our legislation and resources are based on an analogue age.

[Martin Docherty-Hughes]

Given today’s evidence to the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, when clear links were made between Cambridge Analytica, Facebook and GCHQ, there is now a question not only of the electoral system, but of national security.

[Mr Bradshaw]

I agree. Any legislator in this House who takes his or her job seriously needs to read the testimony of Christopher Wylie before the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee today.

Finally—this is slightly away from the evidence given by Mr Wylie today—I have received other new information that also concerns me. Members will recall the dreadful murder of Daphne Galizia in Malta last year. At the time she was murdered, I am informed that Ms Galizia was investigating Pilatus Bank, which had its assets frozen last week owing to fears of money laundering. She was also investigating Cambridge Analytica and Henley & Partners, which sells citizenship in Malta, and there are other links with the Legatum Institute, concerns about which I raised in the House several months ago, and the mysterious Maltese professor, Professor Joseph Mifsud, who is named in an indictment by Robert Mueller’s inquiry. All those matters need to be examined incredibly carefully, and I want the Minister to give a full and categorical assurance that, given the significant British links, the Maltese authorities that are investigating such matters will receive the full support and co-operation they need from our law enforcement, intelligence and security agencies.

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[Sir Edward Davey]

My right hon. Friend anticipates a line of argument that I wish to come to in due course. He is absolutely right, though, that the Foreign Secretary and the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs were closely involved in the Vote Leave campaign, and we need to know whether these allegations go to the very top table.

[Mr Bradshaw]

I should not be doing the Conservative Members’ job for them but, in the interests of fairness, the hon. Member who has probably done more than most on this—certainly more than me—and who knows more than most about this subject is the Chair of the Select Committee on Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, the hon. Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins). He could not take part in the debate because he was hearing this vital evidence from Chris Wylie. I am sure that he will also be doing his job very adequately in front of the Prime Minister later this afternoon. We need to approach this issue as consensually as we can because it is about not party politics, but the integrity and security of our electoral system.

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[Sir Edward Davey]

In responding to the hon. Gentleman, I want to be clear that these are all allegations. We need proper authorities to investigate, but of course, if those investigations go to the door of any Member of this House, be they Minister or not, the full weight of the law should go against that individual. No Member of this House should be above the law in those investigations.

I want to be a little clearer than the debate has been so far about how the Electoral Commission, which is key to this, thinks about whether there has been cheating. The Electoral Commission’s guidelines about whether a campaign has colluded are quite clear. It sets out three criteria for whether campaigns are highly likely to be working together.

The first is whether the campaigns spend money on joint advertising campaigns, leaflets or events. The evidence brought forward by Fair Vote, which can be seen by anyone at www.fairvote.uk, suggests that Vote Leave and BeLeave co-ordinated with the same digital strategy vendor, Aggregate IQ, so there does seem to have been co-ordination between their advertising campaigns.

The second test the Electoral Commission has set out is whether campaigns have co-ordinated their spending with another campaigner. The evidence produced by FairVote is very clear: it shows that BeLeave appears to have been assigned specific responsibility for the youth audience by Vote Leave. That is co-ordination and collusion.

The third test on cheating set out by the Electoral Commission is whether a campaign can approve or has significant influence over the spending of another campaigner. Again, the dossier shows that BeLeave was based at Vote Leave HQ, as we have heard, and appears to have reported to Vote Leave directors and shared all its information with their staff.

In other words, the three tests put forward by the Electoral Commission on whether illegal collusion has occurred appear to have been met, according to the evidence in this dossier. I urge all right hon. and hon. Members to read and think about it before they tweet in the way that was done by the Foreign Secretary, who at the weekend dismissed these allegations as ludicrous.

The Foreign Secretary may well have tried to dismiss these allegations, because if they prove to be true, the investigations and inquiries that we all want to follow this debate and public discussion may well want to ask him questions. Ultimately, he was in charge of and a key player in the Vote Leave campaign, and people will want to know whether he knew about this collusion. Did he know that moneys were going from Vote Leave to BeLeave? Did he know that the staff of both campaigns were colluding and working together? Did he know that Aggregate IQ was being used by both campaigns in a very similar way? These are very serious allegations, and we need to have independent inquiries. The same questions could of course be applied to the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

I would like to ask the Prime Minister whether she has asked her Foreign Secretary and her Environment Secretary about what they knew. If she is in charge of her Government, she ought to be asking her Ministers what they knew, given the severity and gravity of the allegations now in the public domain. If she is not getting good enough answers from the Foreign Secretary and the Environment Secretary, she should be taking action. There is another issue with regard to the Prime Minister’s responsibilities, which is that she has key members of staff in No. 10 who were staffers in these campaigns and appear to be part of the alleged collusion. At the very least, she should be asking them questions and getting assurances from them, and if those assurances are not good enough, she should take the appropriate action.

I want to ask the Minister whether the Foreign Secretary was speaking for the Government when he pushed aside these allegations as nonsense. Is that what she will say at the Dispatch Box in a few minutes’ time? Does she, speaking on behalf of her Majesty’s Government, agree with the Foreign Secretary that these allegations are all complete nonsense—before they have been investigated? That would be a quite extraordinary position for Her Majesty’s Government to take, and particularly for the Foreign Secretary to take, given that he is supposed to speak for this country about the rule of law in other countries—and one wonders, doesn’t one?

[Mr Bradshaw]

Does not the right hon. Gentleman also think it is telling that the Foreign Secretary put out his statement as soon as the news broke on Friday evening? He cannot possibly have read the three huge files of documentation that have been presented to the Electoral Commission and the ICO, can he?

[Sir Edward Davey]

One does wonder about the people connected to the Vote Leave campaign who have tried to get in their rebuttals and answers rather rapidly. The head of the staff side of the Vote Leave campaign, Mr Dominic Cummings, put out a pre-rebuttal before the allegations were in the public domain. It sounds as though he knew quite a lot about what the allegations would be, but perhaps he knew the truth. I am afraid that his pre-rebuttal did not convince anybody. Now that we have the allegations, with detailed evidence of emails and photo grabs of things that have since been deleted, we know why Mr Cummings was desperate to get in his rebuttal. I cannot know whether the Foreign Secretary was in the same position, but one has to have one’s suspicions raised.

It is because the allegations are so grave, affecting the most momentous decision this country has taken since the second world war, that the Liberal Democrats, supported by all colleagues on the Opposition Benches, are absolutely right to ask these questions of the Government. Just because there is no Division after this debate does not make these questions and this debate something the Government can push aside. I say to the Minister that we will be coming back and back again to this until we have answers. When the Electoral Commission reports, the Information Commissioner reports and, hopefully, the police report, those reports need to be published and debated here in this House. We will not let this lie. Why? Because we want to defend British democracy. We want to defend parliamentary sovereignty. We want to defend the rule of law. I hope the Minister will say from the Dispatch Box that that is what she is going to do, too.

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[Tommy Sheppard]

Indeed, and we will have to await the outcome of the Electoral Commission’s investigation before we consider whether the legal framework and the support that is provided for the Electoral Commission are in fact adequate for this task.

We have this new evidence. The Electoral Commission, by the way, had already reopened the investigation before the whistleblowing information came out in the last seven days, but we are surely indebted to Shahmir Sanni for what he has done in the service of democracy in this country. I have watched his video recordings and it is clear that we do not share the same point of view. We did not share the same point of view on Brexit during the campaign, and we do not share it now, but I do not think that anyone who watches those interviews can fail to be moved by the decency, integrity and bravery of that young man in coming forward and putting himself at risk. We owe him a great debt.

The response of our Government to the whistleblowing allegations therefore worries me. Others have mentioned this, but the Prime Minister’s explanation yesterday that this was a personal statement by Stephen Parkinson just does not hold water. How can it be a personal statement when someone is at a desk in No. 10 Downing Street, at the heart of Government—when they are on the payroll, issuing a statement from No. 10 Downing Street? This must be the first occasion in history, certainly that I can remember, when the Government have decided to attack a whistleblower by outing them as gay, causing them the possibility of actual harm to themselves and their family, and it is a disgrace.

[Mr Bradshaw]

Is the hon. Gentleman also aware that according to reports, that statement was approved by the Prime Minister’s chief communications officer, Robbie Gibb? There is no way that that was not an official statement, as the Prime Minister claimed yesterday.

[Tommy Sheppard]

I agree, and on the email it says “official”, so there can be no question that the Prime Minister did not know what Stephen Parkinson was saying. I have written to the Government today to demand that this young man be apologised to for the actions that have been taken. That is the very least that we can expect. Most reasonable people in this country will be wondering why Stephen Parkinson has not already been sacked, quite frankly, and in many other companies and areas of life, that is exactly what would happen.

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[Chloe Smith]

I will not, because this is a time-limited debate.

To safeguard elections, it is vital to have an independent regulator. The Electoral Commission needs to be able to act independently, without Government interference. I am a little disappointed by the loose thinking of the hon. Member for Hemsworth (Jon Trickett), because I think his argument was that the Government ought to have been able to investigate such things, but then he said that that was not correct. He then said that the Electoral Commission can do that as a fall-back. Let me be absolutely clear that it is a good thing this country has that independent regulator, and we cannot have it both ways. The independent regulator should do its independent job. I have heard too many arguments in the Chamber this afternoon that suggest that this House ought to pre-empt the commission, but we should not do so and, as I said at the outset, I will not do so.

Allegations have been made about campaigners during the EU referendum, and the specific allegations about spending rules and the accuracy of campaigners’ spending returns fall squarely within the remit of the Electoral Commission. The commission has announced investigations into various campaigners in that referendum and has already investigated a number of complaints and found no wrongdoing. It will publish its findings in due course. As the right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington, who requested this debate—I thank him for doing so—acknowledged yesterday, there may be sub judice issues here, so I repeat that it would not be appropriate for me or the Government to comment on any ongoing investigations.

[Mr Bradshaw]

Will the Minister address the concern raised not only by me, but by the whistleblower Christopher Wylie, who spent a great deal of time with the Information Commissioner this week, that it does not have the resources or the expertise that it needs to do these investigations properly?

[Chloe Smith]

I think the right hon. Gentleman is asking me whether the Information Commissioner has the necessary resources. Is that right?

[Mr Bradshaw]

And the expertise.

[Chloe Smith]

And the expertise. Okay, I understand the point. The right hon. Gentleman, who is a senior and experienced Member, will appreciate that I am here to answer about electoral law, such was the title of the debate, but it is important that such issues come together. He will have seen the Minister of State, Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge (Margot James), who is leading the Data Protection Bill Committee, listening to part of the debate. The right hon. Gentleman will know that the Government are seeking to give the Information Commissioner stronger powers, such as around warrantry, compulsion and sanctions, and that the Government are considering doing even more after the Cambridge Analytica allegations. I believe that that will have been made clear to the members of the Data Protection Bill Committee. As for whether the Information Commissioner has the expertise, I would hope that it does, but I shall ask my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge to contact the right hon. Gentleman to ensure that he receives a satisfactory answer.

Allegations that the electoral rules may have been breached are rightly a cause for concern, but that does not mean that the rules themselves were flawed. It is not right to reach any conclusions on such issues until the Electoral Commission’s investigations are complete. It would not be right to jump to conclusions or to attempt to amend the system before any allegations have been proven.

In conclusion, the Government will continue to work closely with the Electoral Commission, along with many other stakeholders in the electoral system, to protect the integrity, security and effectiveness of referendums and elections. Let me make it clear for the record that we will continue to implement the referendum’s result and to make a success of it.

European Council

Ben Bradshaw Excerpts

Monday 26th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I absolutely agree with my right hon. Friend. That is why, as I said earlier, EU Foreign Ministers and the European Council will be looking at that issue again. What happened in Salisbury was part of a pattern of aggressive Russian behaviour, and we need to ensure that we are working across all fronts to deal with that aggressive behaviour, whether it is disinformation, propaganda or cyber-attacks. We need to work together to deal with all those threats.

[Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)]

I congratulate the Prime Minister on the level of support and solidarity she secured from our European friends on Russia. But how is it remotely acceptable that when a young whistleblower exposes compelling evidence of lawbreaking by the leave campaign, implicating staff at No. 10, one of those named, instead of addressing the allegations made, issued an officially sanctioned statement outing the whistleblower as gay and thereby putting his family in Pakistan in danger? That is a disgrace, Prime Minister, and you need to do something about it.

[The Prime Minister]

I say to the right hon. Gentleman that any statements issued were personal statements—[Interruption.] They were personal statements that were issued. I of course accept the importance of ensuring that we recognise that, for some, being outed as gay is difficult because of their family and circumstances. I want to see a world in which everybody can be confident in their sexuality and does not have to worry about such things.

National Security and Russia

Ben Bradshaw Excerpts

Monday 26th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I hope the hon. Member for Chelmsford (Vicky Ford) is not trying to divert us away from a discussion about oligarchs’ money in London and the need for a Magnitsky amendment.

[Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)]

Before more Conservative MPs stand up and ask their pre-prepared questions, they should listen again to what my right hon. Friend said in his opening remarks. He said that given the failure of the Russian state for the past two weeks to provide any evidence to the contrary, he accepts that the Russian state was responsible for the Salisbury chemical weapons attack—end of story.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his intervention and for the serious and close interest he takes in all these matters.

I was talking about Russian oligarchs and their power. As the Prime Minister will know, it is not just the Labour party pressing for action. Alexei Navalny, a Russian opposition party leader who was barred from standing for the Russian presidency and has faced down intimidation of him, his family and his supporters at the hands of the Russian state, has made clear that the most important thing the UK could do to curb the power and punish the actions of Vladimir Putin is to hit his billionaire allies in their pockets. I hope the Prime Minister will listen to that advice.

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[Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)]

May I start my remarks by repeating the welcome I gave to the Prime Minister earlier for the efforts the Government have undertaken to secure this impressive level of solidarity and support from our European friends and others? I welcome any personal role the Foreign Secretary played in that. This shows that they certainly have no doubt of Kremlin culpability, and I am sure they would have been given access to information that most Members have not had access to, which has helped them arrive at that conclusion, along with the clear evidence from Porton Down and elsewhere.

I warmly welcome the clear statement by my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition that he accepts Russian culpability. I deprecate the barracking he received from some Government Members, most of whom are no longer here, having just popped in to barrack him. They have never been here for debates on Russia before and they did not even listen to what he had to say. That was deplorable behaviour, and I want to put that on the record.

I have been raising my concerns about Russia for many, many years. Indeed, when I first started raising concerns about 18 months ago about Russian interference in our democracy, I was treated as a bit of an eccentric, a crank and a conspiracy theorist. I started raising those concerns because of the evidence of what had happened in the United States presidential election. Having expressed those concerns, I found myself to be the recipient of a great deal of very interesting information, some of which has since come out. I have to tell hon. Members that a great deal more that is very serious is still to come out. I shall confine my remarks to my concerns about Russia’s propaganda and interference in democracy as part of its hybrid war against the west. This is not just about the direct interference in elections or electoral systems; I want the Government to take seriously the attention paid by the Kremlin to political parties, think tanks and our educational establishment.

First, on elections, we know from the US about the extent of Kremlin interference in its presidential election and there is growing evidence here. I have to commend the Chair of the Select Committee on Digital, Culture, Media and Sport for the work he and his Committee are doing to look into what happened here in terms of social media. I hope that when the Intelligence and Security Committee commences its work, it will look into that in even greater detail. I first raised this issue in a question to the Prime Minister in December 2016, and I wonder whether the Foreign Secretary could tell the House what action the Government took in response to my raising those concerns. Did they just leave the matter to the ongoing investigations of the Electoral Commission, or did they make their own inquiries and take up their own responsibilities for ensuring that our electoral systems are safe and secure?

[Mr Dominic Grieve]

I just want to give the right hon. Gentleman the assurance that it was the Committee’s intention to look at the full spectrum of Russian activity.

[Mr Bradshaw]

That is extremely good news, and I very much welcome the fact that the right hon. and learned Gentleman’s Committee is doing that.

I would also like the Foreign Secretary to comment, if he can, on what the Government and their agencies are doing to take down Kremlin operations that seek to influence and infiltrate our political parties. He has a particular responsibility in this area, for example, to have satisfied himself that all those who have donated to his political party and to individual Conservative MPs, including some wealthy Russians here who give the impression of being Putin opponents, are in fact as stated. I hope that the Foreign Secretary and the agencies that serve under him are working very hard to make sure that he can feel confident on that.

I invite the Foreign Secretary to task the agencies to investigate the United Kingdom Independence party—this is much more serious. We already know that there are close political ties here involving Farage, who has been named as a person of interest in the Mueller investigation; that Aaron Banks is also under investigation by the Electoral Commission; and that of course Jim Mellon, the co-founder of Leave.EU, has extensive business background and current investment interests in Russia. So I would be grateful if the Foreign Secretary confirmed that as part of their investigations to counter criminal activities in this country, the Government are looking at some of the allegations that have been made around UKIP. Again, I first raised these concerns months and months ago.

Also, about 10 months ago, I highlighted concerns I had picked up about collusion between the leave campaign and these others bits of the leave campaign, such as BeLeave, to get around our strict electoral spending laws. At the same time, I also raised concerns about the role of Cambridge Analytica, and we have now seen the most extraordinary and shocking revelations this week from The Guardian, The New York Times, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, “Channel 4 News” and others. I hope that the Foreign Secretary will tell us whether the Government took the concerns I raised back then seriously and what they did about them.

Of course the other concerns that many of us have expressed was about the huge donation to the Democratic Unionist party for the leave campaign, whose source we are not allowed to know because, shockingly, the Government did not make the transparency of political donations in Northern Ireland retrospective. I hope that they will think again on that .The Electoral Commission has asked them to make that decision retrospective. It is always open to them to bring another motion to this House, so that we can do that and so that we can know and have confidence in the source of that huge donation. Again, a lot of that was spent on this digital advertising and digital work.

The United States has a powerful judicial investigation into Russian interference, under special counsel Mueller. Compare that with the farce this week of the Information Commissioner trying to get a warrant to search Cambridge Analytica’s office, which she finally managed to do late on Friday evening, having been trying all week. That clearly shows that our Electoral Commission, independent Information Commissioner and Select Committees do not have the powers they need to tackle this problem adequately. I hope that special counsel Mueller’s investigation will come up with more evidence and that the Foreign Secretary can reassure the House that all the various investigations into Russian interference in Britain are getting the full co-operation and support of all the Government’s agencies, because I have been told in the months past that that was not the case. I have since been reassured by Ministers that it is happening now, and would be grateful if the Foreign Secretary assured the House that he, the intelligence services and our other agencies are helping the Electoral Commission, the Information Commissioner and the Select Committees and providing them with anything that they ask for.

I could say a lot more on this subject, and I wanted to say more about the role of educational institutions, so I hope that the Foreign Secretary takes that on board. I have had a frustrating time trying to get some sense out of our universities—for example, those that employed Professor Mifsud, who has disappeared since being exposed in a Mueller indictment.

Let me say one more thing. On the issue of money, Bill Browder gave 12 other countries the dossiers that he has given to the British authorities. Those 12 other countries have prosecuted the people responsible; will the Secretary of State find out why that has not happened here and have a word with his fellow Ministers, to make sure that they act on the evidence with which they are provided?

--- Later in debate ---

[Boris Johnson]

I very much agree with my hon. Friend. I should stress that those countries that have chosen to expel Russian diplomats have consciously placed themselves at risk of the Kremlin’s retaliation. I know that I speak for not just my hon. Friend but every Member of the House when I offer my profound thanks to those countries for what they have done today. It is worth our asking why the global reaction to the outrage in Salisbury has been so much more pronounced than that which we saw in 2006 with the murder of Alexander Litvinenko. The reason, of course, may be that those countries have feelings of affection and respect for, and a desire to support, the United Kingdom. That is true—or, at least, that is possible. But it is not primarily about us. Today the world has shown that it agrees with the analysis of the United Kingdom regarding the threat posed by the Kremlin.

[Mr Bradshaw]

I am one of those who has congratulated the Government on their achievements with this coalition, but does the Secretary of State share my deep regret at the explicit refusal by the Austrian Government, whose leading party has a direct relationship with Vladimir Putin’s party in Russia, to expel any diplomats? That is extremely disappointing. Next time the Secretary of State is speaking to his Austrian counterpart, will he make Britain’s displeasure extremely clear?

[Boris Johnson]

I respectfully say that the right hon. Gentleman’s criticisms might be directed elsewhere.

I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Barrow and Furness (John Woodcock), who has shown with devastating effect in the course of this debate what an astonishing thing it is that 22 other countries have gone further in their condemnation of Russian actions than the Leader of the Opposition. That is a sad state of affairs. As speaker after speaker has said—I pay tribute to the hon. Members for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) and for Rhondda (Chris Bryant), my right hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois) and my hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat) —what happened in Salisbury was part of a pattern of reckless behaviour by the Kremlin. Some have called it a new cold war. Some have drawn attention to the annexation of Crimea and the pattern of cyber-attacks against Ukraine. My hon. Friend the Member for East Renfrewshire (Paul Masterton) spoke well and movingly about the suffering of the people of Georgia. We have seen the hacking of the German Bundestag, interference in foreign elections and attempts to conceal the use of poison gas by Syria’s tyrant. I note that Ukraine—the country that is suffering directly at the hands of the Kremlin—has expelled 13 Russian officials today.

Salisbury Incident

Ben Bradshaw Excerpts

Wednesday 14th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I thank my right hon. Friend for her suggestion. I recognise the role that Select Committees can play. I suspect that my right hon. Friend has just set up a stream of work for her own Treasury Committee to undertake.

[Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)]

I assure the Prime Minister that most of us on the Labour Benches fully support the measures she has announced today. Indeed, some of us think they could have come a bit sooner. On the wider issue of Putin’s hybrid warfare against our country, will she task the intelligence and security services to investigate Putin’s influencing operations in our universities, our think-tanks, our financial institutions and our political parties?

[The Prime Minister]

The right hon. Gentleman raises an important point about the propaganda activities being undertaken by the Russian state. I will certainly look at the suggestions he makes.

Salisbury Incident

Ben Bradshaw Excerpts

Monday 12th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I recognise that my right hon. Friend is supporting the amendment and has been working on this issue. I say to him, as I have previously, that we want to ensure that we get the maximum possible consensus across the House on this particular issue. [Interruption.] We will talk to the parties involved to ensure that the approach taken is one that—[Interruption.] The shadow Foreign Secretary keeps saying, “There is an amendment down.” There is an amendment down, and discussions are taking place with parties about the impact of the amendment as currently drafted. We will ensure that any action taken will be action that we can be sure will work.

[Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)]

May I commend the Prime Minister for today making the sort of resolute and realistic statement about the Kremlin that many of us have been looking for in this House for some time? Will she invite the heroic and brave Bill Browder, who has done more than any other single individual to uncover the Kremlin’s methods, to give her a full briefing about what he knows of Putin’s cronies’ money-laundering exploits in London and the British political figures who have been corrupted by Kremlin money? Will she also make sure that the whole of the Government machinery is now giving full co-operation to Robert Mueller’s inquiry in the United States, because of what he has already uncovered about what the Russians have been doing here?

[The Prime Minister]

We have already been clear, in relation to the Mueller inquiry, that we will of course respond to appropriate requests. I am told that the other individual to which the right hon. Gentleman referred has actually already met the Security Minister, and has therefore been able to brief him on what he knows.

UK/EU Future Economic Partnership

Ben Bradshaw Excerpts

Monday 5th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I thank my hon. Friend. I think it would be a much stronger position if the Opposition were to get behind the Government and agree to support the approach we are taking to get the best possible deal from Brexit. We are focused on delivering for the British people. Sadly, the Opposition want to frustrate Brexit and fly in the face of the vote that was taken by the British people.

[Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)]

Do President Trump’s trade barriers, aimed primarily at us in Europe and against Canada, and the news from this lunchtime that the Americans are offering us a worse deal on open skies than the one we currently enjoy as members of the European Union, ever make the Prime Minister think that we might be making a mistake by removing ourselves from our single biggest market and the world’s biggest free trade area?

[The Prime Minister]

It is very important that the British people voted for us to leave the European Union. If the right hon. Gentleman is saying that we should stay in the single market and in the customs union, he is suggesting that the trade policy for the United Kingdom will be determined by the European Union without our having a say in it. That would mean that the European Union would determine our external tariffs and the basis on which we traded with countries around the rest of the world. If he really thinks that the European Union, in those circumstances, would put the interests of the United Kingdom first, I have to tell him that I do not think it would. It is better for us to have our own independent policy.