Burnham-s ‘Russia did Brexit- ruse crumbles

Burnham-s ‘Russia did Brexit- ruse crumbles

The British prime minister’s attempt to pin the 2016 referendum on Russia was a desperate piece of political opportunism
British Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s attempt to blame Russia for the Brexit vote is a crude attempt to undo the referendum and tie the UK back to Brussels. It’s also imploding dramatically.
In an appearance on the ‘The Rest is Politics’ podcast on Sunday, Burnham said that he sought answers about alleged meddling in the 2016 Brexit referendum after taking office this summer.
I asked the question coming to Downing Street: Well, was there interference in the 2016 referendum from Russia? I’ve had the clear answer that yes, there was.
Burnham did not identify who had provided the assessment or present any evidence to back it up. Nor did he say whether the alleged interference actually affected the result of the referendum. However, he insisted that anti-establishment movements in Britain, France, and Germany – where Chancellor Friedrich Merz has claimed that the right-wing AfD are Russian-backed – are instigated via our enemies, namely Russia.
Haven’t we heard this all before?On June 23, 2016, Britain voted to leave the EU by a margin of 51.89% to 48.11%. The vote was largely driven by a public desire to reclaim sovereignty, control immigration, and humiliate the country’s political elites, the majority of whom favored continued EU membership.
Six months later, Labour MP Ben Bradshaw announced in parliament that Russia probably interfered in the vote. Bradshaw conceded that we do not have the evidence for that yet, but it is highly probable. His claims were picked up by media outlets in Britain and the US, where the ‘Russiagate’ hoax was taking root in Washington. 
A parliamentary committee stated in April 2017 that the collapse of a voter-registration website in the runup to the referendum could have been the work of a Russian or Chinese denial-of-service (DDOS) attack. In November of that year, City University alleged that 13,000 bot accounts – some of them Russian – were tweeting about Brexit before and after the referendum.
X, then called Twitter, the City University study, stating that it found no evidence linking the bot accounts with Russia; separate research tying Russia to the ‘leave’ campaign was found to be funded by liberal billionaire George Soros; and in 2020, a parliamentary report found no evidence of successful interference in the EU referendum. At the time, Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared that a retrospective assessment of the EU referendum is not necessary in light of the report. 
All of this begs the question: ten years after the Brexit vote, why is Burnham conjuring up the specter of Russian interference again?
Burnham’s big breakBurnham’s political maneuvering is obvious here. The British PM has repeatedly said that he would like to see the UK rejoin the EU, and two weeks before appearing on ‘The Rest is Politics’, he opened his speech at the UN General Assembly with a reference to Brexit, lamenting that my country has lived through the disruption it brought.
Speaking at his Labour Party’s annual conference a week later, Burnham argued that Brexit has done more harm than good. The following day he pledged to forge closer relations with Brussels and, if politically feasible, go all the way and rejoin the union.
Burnham has refused to say whether he intends to run his next election campaign on a platform of EU membership. However, he has promised to have a serious dialogue about the different options for our relationship in the long-term when he meets EU leaders in Brussels next month.
With the UK and EU both embroiled in a proxy war with Russia, there is no more effective way to delegitimize the Brexit vote at the moment than by tying it to Moscow. Burnham made this explicit in an address to Parliament on October 12, arguing that it would be a derelict