Russian Interference in UK Politics — House of Commons, 2017-12-21
Topic: International Affairs
Christopher John Bryant (Labour, Centre-left): I admire the right hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) and he said some good things, but ultimately I found his speech to be utterly naive and complacent. He cannot just say "Russia is a kleptocracy and there we are; that’s fine." It is also a ruthless security state: it prevents elections; it prevents journalists from doing their proper jobs; it murders journalists; and it makes sure that journalists elsewhere in the world are put out of their jobs and are unable to scrutinise Russia properly Even the Russian embassy in the UK flouts every single one of the normal rules of an embassy. It wrote to Mr Speaker on a previous occasion to try to prevent a debate on Russia taking place. On other occasions, it has tweeted aggressively against several Members. It even tried to rig the election of the chair of the all-party group on Russia. One would think it had more important things to do. I am the present chair, and the former chair, the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), is in his place on the Government Benches. He departed because he was so fed up with the way the Russian embassy was dealing with us The hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Mr Seely) may say something about this later—he is more of an expert than I am—but the Russians are engaged in a form of hybrid warfare. It does not involve military weapons so much, although they are keen to continuously flex those muscles and we know, from Georgia and Ukraine and what has happened in Crimea, that they are territorially ambitious. I just want to explain one element of this hybrid warfare I asked a man called Ben Nimmo, who runs digital forensic research at the Atlantic Council, to look at MPs’ Twitter accounts, including those of the hon. Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins), the right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake), the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, me and others and analyse the attacks we had received. I and others—the right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington referred to this earlier—believe that some anonymous troll accounts are centrally organised from St Petersburg The pattern is that the accounts often pretend to be British, even though they might originally have been tweeting in Russian. They tend to tweet in bad English and at Russian times of day. They infiltrate the hard right to propagate and amplify views held by others—that relates to the point about Goebbels that was made earlier—and they ostentatiously, aggressively and with foul language attack critics of Putin. They support the Kremlin line on Syria, George Soros, the Olympic ban, Ukraine, the M17 flight and Senator McCain The accounts tag other factory troll accounts. For instance, @iatetwit attacked Lucy Fisher, the journalist at The Times who has written about this, and me. It looks like a normal account, but the profile picture is of a Russian skater. It is not her account at all. It used to tweet in Russian, but now tweets very aggressive anti-immigration stuff in the UK. "I" effing "hate Irish", for instance, was one of the more expressive recent tweets, and @iamjohnsmith called on the right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington to resign. [Interruption.] Well, that of itself does not prove it is a bad person. But seriously, he was only being attacked because of his political views. This is why it is dangerous for us to be complacent: there is a specific body of work attacking Twitter accounts to intimidate British MPs.