(Reform UK leader Nigel Farage at a business summit in central London on October 13th, 2025 [James Manning/PA Wire])
The United Kingdom has yet to come to terms with the damage Brexit has done to its economic prospects. The country has failed to tell the full story of Russia’s role in enabling Brexit. The result is confusion, drift, apathy and uncertainty.
A previous essay on ‘National Self-Harm’ mentioned some economic costs of Brexit. A recent report by Prosperity Through Growth – co-authored by one of Brexit’s chief supporters – projected living standards in the UK would fall behind Lithuania by 2030 and Poland by 2034. Commenting on Brexit’s impact on economic growth, Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey said on October 18th, 2025 that “for the foreseeable future it is negative” – though in the longer term he foresaw a “partial” recovery.
Until Brexit, there was no modern precedent for a country voluntarily removing itself from a large commercial union. One distant comparison is with the US, which in 1776 faced blockade and other restrictions, not to mention armed aggression, on a scale that made free commercial relations untenable. Even so, the UK was once again America’s top trading partner within little more than a decade after the peace.
Post-Brexit Britain looks likely to remain in trade purgatory for considerably longer. To achieve this remarkable result, Russia’s influence campaign made common cause with Eurosceptic wings of both Conservative and Labour parties channelling Enoch Powell who, as a back-bencher, famously railed against Europe and immigrants.
In retrospect, it is very unlikely this eccentric band of extremists, opportunists and crackpot economists would have convinced a majority of Britons to turn their backs on their own economic interest without a heavy assist from a hostile state actor. Russia went to great lengths to empower Brexit’s architects. Moscow fed the war in Syria and European migration crisis — crucial backdrops for the 2016 referendum. The Kremlin helped to make fringe views more mainstream by courting UKIP, the Friends of Russia Committee and social media.
Unsurprisingly, British voters today have buyers’ remorse. Since late 2021, a strong majority has agreed that Britain was wrong to leave the EU. Yet no major political party currently supports rejoining, largely because Brexit was accepted as the fair and democratic result of a public plebiscite. But was it?
Evidence of heavy malign Russian interference in the UK has been growing for two decades – ever since the Litvinenko murder in 2006, when Russian investment and spending on professional services in the UK was spiking. At the peak of Russian equity listings in the UK in 2007, these companies represented eighteen percent of the market capitalization of the London Stock Exchange (LSE). Yet in parallel, in the years up to 2014, a total of fourteen Russian businesspeople and British individuals were allegedly killed in the UK in cases with compelling links to Russia. In 2018, Russian military intelligence targeted a Soviet defector and his wife in a botched assassination attempt in Salisbury, resulting in another death.
Major controversies have erupted over Russia’s role in Brexit as it relates to Facebook and Cambridge Analytica; Victoria, BC-based AIQ; Russia’s Internet Research Agency and state media outlets such as Sputnik and RT, where Nigel Farage appeared 20 times over the seven years up to 2017. For well over a decade, Russia has sought to influence the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn; a former Liberal Democratic Party MP; senior Tory MPs and the Conservative Friends of Russia. Evgeny Lebedev, influential son of a well-known Russian intelligence officer, was Boris Johnson’s dinner guest only days before his decision to embrace Brexit. Yet the UK government has failed fully to investigate such active measures.
The Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament (ISC) presented a report on Russia on July 21st, 2020 – only after Boris Johnson was accused of delaying its release until after the 2019 election, which he won. This report has been widely dismissed as incomplete, particularly with regard to its failure fully to examine Kremlin interference in the 2016 Brexit referendum. Citing the Mueller Report and other US investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election, the ISC itself recommended that “the UK Intelligence Community should produce an analogous assessment of potential Russian interference in the EU referendum and that an unclassified summary of it be published.”
They also noted that “the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee has called on the Government to launch an independent investigation into foreign influence, disinformation, funding, voter manipulation and the sharing of data in relation to the Scottish independence referendum, the EU referendum and the 2017 General Election. If the Government were to take up this recommendation for a wider investigation, the assessment we recommend should take place could feed into it.” Yet no such independent investigation or assessment has yet taken place.
The ISC Russia report provided important insights. It assessed current legislation to be inadequate to counter threats from hostile state actors, including Russia. The National Crime Agency found contributions of Arron Banks, the top donor to Leave.EU who met the Russian ambassador on multiple occasions around the time of Brexit, not to have infringed electoral or company law. MI5 resources devoted to the Russian threat fell from twenty percent in 2000 to a low of three percent in 2008-09, before recovering to 14.5 percent in 2013-14. GCHQ experienced a similar cycle, leading to concerns the UK had taken “its eye off the ball.” The UK remained “clearly vulnerable to covert digital influence campaigns.”
More recently Nathan Gill — a former leader of Reform UK in Wales who was a UKIP member of the European Parliament from 2014 to 2020 — was convicted of eight counts of bribery by a Russian agent over eight months in 2018-19. The investigation was led by the Metropolitan Police counter-terrorism command. A few months after the ISC report was released, Evgeny Lebedev was created a life peer as Lord Lebedev of Richmond and Siberia on the recommendation of Boris Johnson.
Under Putin, Russia set itself the objective of driving wedges among allies. Taking the UK out of the EU was a clear goal. In the 1997 book ‘The Foundations of Geopolitics’, a blueprint for Russia’s external subversion agenda under Putin, leading ideologist of Kremlin fascism Aleksandr Dugin argued that the UK, which was “merely an extraterritorial floating base of the US” should be cut off from Europe.
With Brexit, the Kremlin took a victory lap. In Luke Harding’s book Shadow State, he cites a diplomat who was an eyewitness to the Russian ambassador’s boast that: “We have crushed the British to the ground. They are on their knees, and they will not rise for a very long time.” The consequences of Brexit have indeed been grave. Since 2016, approximately nineteen major companies with a combined market capitalization of $947 billion have de-listed from the LSE. The number of smaller companies that have left that bourse may be as high as 600.
Exposing Russian influence has been difficult because debate around it — even by those not under obvious Russian influence — has often been hyperbolic and incendiary. In his speech at the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham on September 30th 2018, then-UK foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt compared Europe to the USSR, saying the EU acted like a “prison” that prevented countries leaving.
Such extreme and inaccurate takes on Brexit and the EU are now less common in the UK, as public opinion continues to flip. But Farage’s Reform UK, with its many links to Russia, still tops the polls. Russia continues to exercise massive influence in the UK through both professional and covert networks, as well as online.
For now, the UK is in a bind. Political embarrassment lingers over the failure to curb Russian interference to date. There is also fear and self-censorship on the part of editors, journalists and officials anxious to avoid lawsuits or administrative sanction. Finally, there is caution in the face of Trump, Vance, Musk and others on the MAGA right publicly committed to putting Farage’s Reform UK into office.
Russian influence at Westminster has a long back-story. Charles Edward Fox was targeted in the 1780s when St. Petersburg was seeking to avoid war with Britain over Poland. Before becoming Tsar, Nikolai I visited Britain in 1816 and remained a strong Anglophile for decades afterwards. The Cambridge Five were in place as active Soviet agents from the 1930s to the 1960s. Arch anti-Bolshevik Churchill himself did the percentages agreement with Stalin in 1944.
To put relations with Europe, still the UK’s largest trading partner, back on track, the country needs to bring Russian influence and active measures fully to light. To defend democracy effectively and have debates that advance sound policies, we need to face up to past failures and confront current adversaries.