If Brexit Was Hacked, Shouldn't We Know Exactly Who Paid?

Yes, the Leave campaign probably cheated. And yes, Remain played unfair advantages. But where did the Brexit dark money actually come from? And how is it still shaping our democracy?

- Mary Fitzgerald

Hours before the Observer published fresh, damaging allegations about how the various pro-Brexit campaigns colluded, possibly illegally, in the weeks before the UK’s knife-edge EU referendum, Vote Leave Campaign Director Dominic Cummings published a long screed of pre-emptive defence on his blog.

It’s thousands of words ‘what-aboutery’.

What about all the ways in which the ‘Remain Establishment’ skewed the campaign in their favour at every turn? Cummings asked. The £9m worth of taxpayer-funded pro-Remain propaganda delivered to every household in Britain before campaigning officially started? How David Cameron, George Osborne and others abused their privileges of office in myriad ways to try and scare people into voting Remain...?

(Actually, I’m with him on a lot of this. As I wrote days after the 2016 vote, “Britons were assured, relentlessly, that penury, unemployment, collapsing house prices and relegation to global irrelevance beckoned should they choose Leave. That the not inconsiderable forces of the UK establishment failed to win this argument suggests that the true Brexit majority may be much higher; we can only speculate as to how many people voted Remain but in their hearts wanted to go.”)

But fast forward to 2018, and Cummings’s what-aboutery is doing something altogether different. It’s there to reinforce the most cliched folklore of Brexit – and to obscure the most important question of all: who bankrolled the campaign that has caused one of the biggest political shocks in a generation? And how is dark money continuing to exercise power and influence not only in the UK, but across western democracies?

Brexit: A Tale of Two Establishment Stitch Ups