The security services will be looking “very carefully” at who has funded the far-right leader Tommy Robinson, a former MI6 officer has said, after fears were raised that Russia had stoked the riots in the UK.
Christopher Steele, a former head of the Russia desk, said organisations such as MI5 would be looking into the background of people seen to encourage rioting to check whether they had links to the Putin regime.
He said this could extend to elected politicians like Nigel Farage, who queried whether the Southport knife attacker might have been “known to the security services”.
“I think the security service will be looking very carefully at the instigators of these activities, including people like Tommy Robinson, even conceivably Nigel Farage, who incidentally said that we were being misinformed by the government about Southport,” he told Times Radio.
“They’ll be looking at things like their travel movements, who they’ve been in touch with, monetary transfers and so on, because that will reveal or not, as the case may be, a pattern of behaviour which can lead to some conclusions about the degree to which Russia has been interfering in this situation.”
Steele, a counterintelligence specialist who worked for MI6 between 1987 and 2009, said it was “clear” that there had been some Russian involvement in stoking the riots, including false claims made on social media.
“The degree to which that’s happened and the effectiveness I think is still out for question,” he said.
“When you look at the original disinformation that surrounded the Southport killings, that does seem to have come from a Russian-linked website.”
The Sunday Times has reported that Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, and his associates created a web of secretive companies which have made profits of more than £1.6 million without paying tax before filing for insolvency.
Robinson’s spokesman has complained about a “…false narrative perpetuated by mainstream media and politicians…” and referred to “inaccuracies” in reporting without specifying what they are.
Over the period in which the companies were formed, Robinson has become ever more prominent and well resourced and has used Twitter/X and Telegraph, a Russia-founded messaging app based in Dubai, to engage with supporters and raise donations in cash and cryptocurrency.
He has repeatedly been accused of stoking the far-right violence of the past fortnight, with Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, calling him an “armchair thug”.
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Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, said far-right groups were “unchristian” and their use of Christian imagery in the riots was an “outrage”.
Writing in The Guardian, Welby said the riots had been “detonated by lies and fuelled by deliberate misinformation, spread quickly online by bad actors with malignant motivations”.
“Let me say clearly now to Christians that they should not be associated with any far-right group — because those groups are unchristian,” he wrote.
“Let me say clearly now to other faiths, especially Muslims, that we denounce people misusing such imagery as fundamentally anti-Christian.”
