Last week we saw an astonishing flip-flop from the minister of state at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Sir Alan Duncan.
A t 6.55am on Monday, Duncan seemed taken aback to learn that a Foreign Office-backed charity, the Institute of Statecraft’s Integrity Initiative, was running propaganda campaigns against Jeremy Corbyn (among other things the organisation has smeared him as “useful idiot” for Putin) and meddling in European politics.
Duncan said he wanted to get to the bottom of this and that “I would totally condemn it” if a government-funded organisation had been acting in this way.
Two days later, answering urgent questions about the Integrity Initiative, Duncan had changed his tune. In response to questions from shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry and others, he was firmly in dissemble and deny mode, before finally losing his rag with the opposition for doubting his words.
When he said the Integrity Initiative “does some automatic retweeting . . . of anything that happens to mention Russia” he was suggesting that the Initiative was some kind of glorified non-partisan twitter bot, that indiscriminately churns out anything mentioning Russia. Anyone who knows anything about Twitter could tell you this is unlikely in the extreme.
Duncan’s claim that the Foreign Office wasn’t funding any of the Initiative’s “domestic” activities, as if there is a solid wall between its ‘domestic’ and ‘international arms’, is contradicted by the evidence from the leaked documents and from from what Thornberry revealed in her subsequent letter to Duncan. The foreign office minister also insisted that what the Initiative does is “a proper part of government activity, within the rules, according to a contract.”
Duncan then sought to rubbish all media coverage of the organisation’s activities, implying that anyone covering the story was participating in Russian disinformation. He seemed far, far angrier with whoever hacked the files, which he suggested was Russia though he admitted he did not know, or reported on them, and with the Labour front bench for impugning his own integrity, than with the Integrity Initiative itself.
The performance was disturbing. It had had a Cold War, McCarthy-ite “reds under the bed” feel to it – as if Duncan wanted to erect some kind of smokescreen around the Integrity Initiative.
The government’s line appears to be that it is wholly wrong for British media and journalists to write about or expose what appear to be British “dirty tricks” – even though these could themselves be just as harmful to our democracy and to the freedom of the press as Russia’s disinformation campaigns are in the first place. To suggest that British government funded entity might have spun out of control, as a result of the paranoid world view of its founders and leadership, is surely not a thought crime.
The BBC quickly fell into line. An online article on the Integrity Initiative, published at 3.25pm on Monday and by-lined “Diplomatic Editor James Landale”, was headlined “Foreign Office probes Russia campaign over ‘anti-Labour retweets’”. By 7.25pm thesame story, on the the same URL, had been gutted and turned on its head, without any attempt to explain why to readers, to become something much more supportive and protective of the Integrity Initiative and the UK government’s revised line. The bowdlerised piece was headlined “Russia hack bid to discredit UK anti-disinformation campaign.”
It is possible that BBC has itself got the disinformation bug, or maybe the original, critical, slant proved too much for broadcaster’s deputy diplomatic editor Jonathan Marcus, who is listed a member of the Integrity Initiative’s “UK cluster”.
Duncan’s is determined to make out the whole thing a non-story. But the Orwellian sounding Integrity Institute is a story. Its parent, the Auchtermuchty, Fife-based Institute for Statecraft, is disingenuous about what it is and what it does. It claims on its website to be “independent and impartial, not dependent on funding from political or government agencies”, yet it’s bankrolled to the tune of £2.2m by the Foreign Office, with additional funding from the Ministry of Defence, British Army, NATO, the Lithuanian Ministry of Defence, the US State Department, and even Facebook. It is supposed to be a charity, yet it is churning out propaganda against Labour Party politicians and using a clandestine network of distinctly Russo-phobic “influencers” to try and manipulate European politics. No wonder it is now being investigated by the Scottish charities regulator.
For the sake of Britain’s reputation in the world, I believe more curiosity not less about the Integrity Initiative’s activities is required.
This article was published in the Sunday Mail on 16 December 2016. (The Sunday Mail is the biggest selling Sunday newspaper in Scotland and the Sunday sister of the Daily Record)