Can we talk about how Brexit was a Russian plot again yet?

43 comments

1. >…having accountability to our neighbours…

   I don’t agree with much of what you’ve said here, but this in particular is a very strange concept as expressed (especially in the current political climate). Should governments be accountable to neighbouring countries, or should they be accountable to the people on which they purport to serve?

   The reason why the events happened that you dislike is because successive governments across many countries have chosen to ignore the concerns of people in a rapidly changing world (economically, politically, demographically, and ofc climate change).

2. Jesus get over it. I voted remain but its done now.

3. Give it a fucking rest, it happened. Bitching on reddit isn’t going to change that.

4. The problem is nobody cares anymore. And that is exactly what the Russians wanted to achieve.

5. People wanted to leave the EU as soon as we joined. Were the “fascist” Russians manipulating things for 40 years? Did they force Cameron’s hand on calling the referendum to appease backbenchers?

6. >How about that for the last 20 years every facett (sic) of our government has been infiltrated by fascist Russian influence?

   If this is the case, wouldn’t some of this influence be put to good use, like say preventing the UK from exporting arms to Ukraine? Or toning down sanctions, to ensure incredibly prominent oligarchs like Abramovich are able to easily retain incredibly public assets like Chelsea FC

   Or you know, not allowing the Ukrainian President to stir up support and positive PR with his appearances in UK parliament, or ask Johnson to dampen his public support of Zelensky so far?

   You would think that if the Russian state had any modicum of influence, these are some of the first things they would be ensuring should happen.

   You’d think at the very least, they’d be able to get someone in the British Secret Services to finish the job on the Skripals , rather than letting them live and out Russia’s agents as incompetent buffoons, incapable of carrying out a fairly simple hit.

   Because if Russians really are ~~in control of~~ exerting a level of influence over our government, they’re not really doing much to help Russia right now.

7. i think you mean “condem in the strongest…” not condone?

8. What do you mean “can we talk about it?”? Someone brings it up every 5 minutes here.

9. It absolutely needs to be investigated. I don’t understand how it’s not been a no.1 priority of the JIC.

10. 6 years and people are still writing long essays about it online… what a shit existence you must lead 🤣

11. Not sure what you expect regardless of what or who you think influenced the decision the British people still made the decision they did and like it or not it was a fair vote, everyone had access to the same information and maybe you didn’t like the result but you can’t just overturn an election on the basis of ‘the people can’t be trusted to make the ‘right’ decision’ it undermines the entire democratic system.

12. Some Brexit voters are so extreme about it, they just don’t care. All we can do is keep reminding them about it.

13. If you believe brexit happened purely because of the Russians then you are clueless, out of touch and a bit thick.

14. Blaming Brexit entirely on Russia ignores our own role in letting it get to that point

15. I think this is mostly a conspiracy theory. It could be true but it’s said with no evidence and just wild assumption.

    Its oddly similar to republicans claiming the recent US election was stolen by voter fraud in favour of Biden.

    There is a pattern emerging. If the result of the vote doesn’t go the desired way there must an alternative explanation. It simply cannot be legit.

    What do you think Russia would prefer. Influencing the election vs making citizens such as yourself doubt the democratic process of the nation.

    Don’t be a fool.

16. You give Mr. Putin too much credit. 🙂 really. he is not some evil genius. And brexit falls completely in line with aglo-saxon world. Different pole of power and all that. So it is EU block, the UK+US and other Crown subjects block and China+Russia block. Nothing new actually.

17. There is no evidence in the slightest that Brexit was a Russian plot. Plenty of mud was thrown, claiming that Russia financed the leave campaign but the evidence was not there. In the end, the electorial commission had to issue a grovelling apology. That of course, got as much press coverage as the Lib Dems being fined for breaking spending limits.

    Does Russia like Brexit, of course it likes the outcome.
    Does Russia like Biden? Of course it likes the outcome.

    Did Russia fund dodgy adverts on social media in every election globally? Probably. Did the European Union buy adverts on social media to influence the referendum? Yes it did. The EU tried to influence the internal political decision in a member country. Still to this day it does. Are people up in arms about that too? No? Funny that. You can have democracy as long as you vote the right way.

    What pisses off remain voters is that they lost. They had the world, the government, the press, everyone funnelling money into remain. There were thousands of “unpaid volunteers” trying to influence the vote. They had thousands of paid actors trying to influence the vote. The BBC, Channel 4, everything everywhere trying to influence the vote.

    Remainers told massive lies to scare people into voting remain. They told the masses you are a racist if you don’t vote remain , the told the masses you are uneducated idiots if you don’t vote remain.

    We were told millions unemployed, the end of western civilisation by the EU president (Tusk). We had the president of the USA telling us to vote remain.

    But yet you still blame Russians and a bus. FML.

    Britains were duped by Therisa May and Oily Robbins. Brexit could have been a success but these two acted against the interest of the country and sold the UK down the river. They gave away everything.
    Britain’s stake in the EU investment bank, gone.
    40+ billion Brexit settlement, money gone.
    Britain still ruled by EU courts.
    Britain bound to a backstop.
    Stuck in the EU customs Union.
    Transition period.
    Etc etc. The WA could have been very different if those two remainers had not sold Britain out.

    Brexit was a chance to escape the same old, it was squandered.

18. I mean, it was a Russian plot, and there were decent journalists pointing out stuff about Farage, Banks etc before Brexit happened. Really though, we have to blame the education system and the majority of the media, as much as Russia, and I don’t see the quality of those things improving, even if the Ukraine situation *has* woken us up a bit about Putin.

19. What incredible arrogance.

    I think you’ll find that the majority of people that voted for Brexit did so because they, their towns and cities were excluded from the modern globalised world.

    Their jobs were outsourced, their wages were depressed by unlimited migration and the opportunities on offer to their kids got less and less and it’s been like this for decades.

    https://youtu.be/S5lOUZdzo_I is a good example.

20. Remainers like you who are utterly incapable of seeing the other side of the argument are why your side lost and it weakens what would otherwise be a valid argument. Putin was undoubtedly cheering brexit on and spending money to help it along; the British government and most of the establishment were doing the same on the remain side. You only have to look at the behaviour of the polish and Hungarian governments in recent times to realise the eu is no protection from authoritarian, human rights violations and corruption. What you should be campaigning for is a ban on any paid adverts online during the purdah period pre any election or major vote, so that no one can use money to sway a vote and have to fight on the arguments alone.

21. Russia aren’t anywhere near as powerful as you believe.

    Brexit was inevitable.

    This war could be over immediately if the west wanted it to be. But it’s convenient to have an enemy now that ‘forever war’ is over, and have an excuse for the dogshit economy.

    Calm down mate.

22. Very well put OP. And once you realise Brexit was a scam, and notwithstanding the sources of its dark money funding, with various chancers leading it you start to look at their links to Putins regime:-

    Johnson,
    Johnson’s new wife,
    Cummings,
    Banks,
    Farage,
    Elliott.

    The list goes on, and their closeness to Putins regime gets bigger. Someone likened it to an episode of Colombo, where some people put the pieces together very quickly and others take their time. A natural refusal for any of us to admit we’ve been scammed is a problem though, the still openly Brexiters I know are desperately clutching at any intangible reason to hate the EU now.

    I always tell them if it was really about sovereignty surely we’d be leaving NATO.

    It doesn’t help that most of our media is either owned by billionaires or has zero balls. Many Brexit voters are genuinely unaware of the funding behind the Leave vote and the real reasons for it, and if realism ever gets through I think a lot will be horrified.

23. I hold my hands up and will say that I was wrong about this

    Although I voted to remain I did not believe that the Russian played a large part in the leave campaign

    However, there is strong evidence out there that many key players in the leave movement where Russian assets

24. Well said. Russia played both UK and US at the same time.

25. Anything I don’t like is caused by Russian interference

26. You can talk about it all you want, the people open to believing it already do. The ones who need to hear it won’t listen or don’t care.

    I don’t know what the solution is anymore. After the last decade of electoral and referendum failures i genuinely don’t see a legitimate way out of this.

27. I mean is it not obviois at this point. Patriotic Brexiters voted in Russias interests…. And then voted for a government that covered it up and refused to investigate. These UK flag wavers have done more for Russia than they have for this country.

28. For anyone doubting russian influence in british politics i implore you to wach this short timeline which very clearly lays it out

    https://fb.watch/cf3Qyy9VQV/

29. Been saying this for ages, those that voted to leave are still too committed to grasping onto their precious egos that they can’t admit they could have been lied to and fooled by anyone. It’s just one of the many reasons I despair for the future of this planet, people would rather dig themselves deeper under the shit and pretend it smells like roses than admit it may not have been that great an idea to smear themselves with shit in the first place.

30. Imma just leave this here

    >The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia is a geopolitical book by Aleksandr Dugin. Its publication in 1997 was well received in Russia; it has had significant influence within the Russian military, police and foreign policy elites.

    >The book declares that “the battle for the world rule of Russians” has not ended and Russia remains “the staging area of a new anti-bourgeois, anti-American revolution”

    >Ukraine should be annexed by Russia because “Ukraine as a state has no geopolitical meaning, no particular cultural import or universal significance, no geographic uniqueness, no ethnic exclusiveness, its certain territorial ambitions represents an enormous danger for all of Eurasia and, without resolving the Ukrainian problem, it is in general senseless to speak about continental politics”. Ukraine should not be allowed to remain independent, unless it is cordon sanitaire, which would be inadmissible

    >The United Kingdom, merely described as an “extraterritorial floating base of the U.S.”, should be cut off from Europe
    The book states that “the maximum task [of the future] is the ‘Finlandization’ of all of Europe”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics#Content

31. Were the Russians involved? Yes

    Did people feel a genuine grievance to the EU? Also yes

    Both things can be true and blaming everything on Russia gets us no where.

32. Come in now it’s not like there are Russians in the house if lords with direct influence

33. There has been a consistent anti-EU effort by grassroots campaigners in the UK for decades.

    Not saying Putin wasn’t happy to see a feuding Europe (or even actively sowing discord) but dismissing the long and complex series of grievances and the events that lead to referendum as a mere Russian plot isn’t just intellectual laziness, it’s indicative of the kind of attitude that helped deliver the disaster that happened in 2016

34. I can’t tell if some of these comments are Russian bot accounts or if people are genuinely that fucking stupid. I don’t even know which would be more scary.

    There was entire fucking report released by our own government on the influence of Russia. The fact that there’s any doubt on this matter is terrifying.

35. Is there any actual evidence for this, though? And I mean actual, hard evidence, not just “well it must have happened because the Russians are behind everything” – which is basically what this post amounts to.

    Without hard evidence, this is basically no more than a conspiracy theory.

36. There’s a lot of irony here, and it shows that you still don’t get it. A large part of why people voted to leave (much more so than any outside influence) was an anti-establishment backlash that had very little to do with our relationship with the EU and everything to do with the UK’s social order at the time. A lot of people – the same people to whom you are now denying agency by suggesting that they were manipulated and duped into voting the way they did – just wanted to throw a giant middle finger to a bunch of career politicians and poncey celebrities. Of course, there were plenty of people in the leave camp who genuinely believed in Brexit, and yes there was the odd xenophobe too, but if I had to pick out the one group most responsible for getting leave over the line, I’d pick the disenfranchised, downtrodden working class lot who were just sick of switching on the TV every evening to see some talking head telling them they were racist and uneducated and that they worshipped a fucking bus.

    Some of those people regret their decision. The vast majority of them don’t. That’s why in 2019, three years after the referendum, they flipped seats that had been Labour since Labour was first formed, and delivered the largest Tory majority since 1983 to the one man who sounded like he was prepared to listen to them. Why don’t they regret it? Because people like you haven’t changed one bit. In fact, you’ve gotten worse. Remember, UKIP only got around 13% of the vote in 2015. Cameron only called the referendum so he could close the book on that entire conversation and head off any risk to his razor thin majority. The idea that we might actually vote to leave probably didn’t occur to him for a nanosecond. The fact that you think we got from *there* all the way to Brexit entirely off the back of some foreign propaganda shows how condescending and out of touch you are and why I’d bet money that the Tories are going to win again in 2024 even if energy bills quadruple and somebody catches Boris doing cocaine off of Margaret Thatcher’s bust in the middle of the fucking cabinet office.

    You STILL refuse to accept that people have agency and make their own decisions on which way to vote, regardless of the reason. You STILL think anyone who voted to leave is a racist scumbag who doesn’t deserve to have an opinion. I’m using “you” in the general sense here, by the way. If you want to win these people back (and trust me, you do, because this government isn’t going anywhere otherwise) you have to realise that shitting on them for internet points isn’t going to help. You have to accept that they’re not evil and they’re not your enemy. And then you have to listen to them.

    Yeah, it’s way easier to sit here and call them blind morons and xenophobes. But if you want things to change you have to stop doing that. Just look across the pond – Biden succeeded where Hillary failed, but over here we’re almost certainly staring down the barrel of our fifth consecutive Tory victory. Why? Because we haven’t changed. We’ve bought into this my team vs your team tribalist bullshit and it’s allowing this government to get away with murder.

37. Brits drank the UK version of Kool Aid when they voted Brexit. And of course the last thing they can admit to now is that they were conned by a Putin-funded hate campaign and that the whole thing is turning Britain into a shitshow.

38. so what you’re saying is that every Brexiteer is Vladimir Putin’s b*tch

39. Russia upped their disinformation game in the latter half of the first 2000 decade. The success of Arab spring and the overthrow of the Russian sympathetic Ukrainian government via social media kicked started Moscow’s initiatives.

    Do not forget the billionaires in the west that benefit from disinformation and Brexit. These wealthy fund campaigns to distract out attention via culture wars. And so distracts attention from their hands on the public till.

40. Um…we all accept the Russian influence but the people in a position to do anything about it won’t because they’re getting what they wanted. And they will do whatever it takes to get what they want, even conspiring with a dictator.

41. I agree with this 100 percent. The Russians have blasted money into the fracture points in our western democracies for years, they are literally responsible for almost everything that is bad or evil. We need to completely sever all contact with them. No electronic links and no travel of Russians allowed into the west.

42. Well it’s more accurate to say that it was idiots in our own country that wanted brexit. The Russians just gave them a helping hand. Fucking traitors!

43. It wouldn’t actually be too inaccurate to suggest that Britain leaving the EU was actually Putin’s idea..

    Check out the book “The foundations of Geopolitics; The geopolitical future of Russia” by Aleksandr Dugin. Published 1997.

    One of their sections on U.K. states “ The United Kingdom, merely described as an “extraterritorial floating base of the U.S.”, should be cut off from Europe”.

    They also have some familiar comments about Ukraine: “ Ukraine should not be allowed to remain independent, unless it is cordon sanitaire, which would be inadmissible”.

    And why not the USA whilst we’re at it:

    “ Russia should “introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics”.

    This book states how Russia can slowly, without people really noticing, weaken all other countries from the inside out, leading to Russia’s dominance. It’s a multi-decade plan that is happening right now