Rory Stewart

It's extremely easy to change the behavior of our members of parliament if you are a big American tech company by saying, come and give a speech for which we will pay you X thousand or

here's an opportunity after you leave parliament to help us with consultancy, or here's some stuff that we can do in your constituency, non-party political, but helping you with the digital infrastructure in your constituency and understanding how to use these platforms.

And that general sense that these are powerful, wealthy organizations that could give you money, that could do you harm, that could be useful to you, can do an extraordinary amount to stop parliamentarians regulating those social media companies, confronting them,

calling them out.

I think we need to worry about our democracy, not just in the really obvious, here's some dirty bundles of cash, but all the other ways in which different countries use paid trips, parties, gifts to get people on their side.

Well, there's a wonderful book by a man called Chekhovstov, who's based in Vienna.

It's called Russia and the Western Far-Red, looking at this whole relationship.

And it's not just what's going on here with Brexit reform UKIP.

It's what's going on with the Front National in France, where you end up with them taking huge loans from Russian banks.

It's to do with the way that they're inviting people from the German AFD, their far-right party, over to meetings in Moscow.

And they're getting plenty in return in terms of the politics of that.

Pro-Russian statements.

And he continues to develop this, the Golden Dawn in Greece, etc., etc.

This has been a Russian policy really at the heart of Russian intelligence since the 1920s, 1930s.

One of the great chiefs of what KGB became the SVR said, the difference between us and the British is that we're not fundamentally an intelligence gathering organization.

We're fundamentally about destabilizing and shaping other people's politics by the way in which we create connections with social media, opposition groups, party members, party leaders.

So this Russian move is part of a much broader movement.

Russian move across many, many different trends.

There will be hundreds of Russian intelligence officers working in different ways through different intermediaries to shape the space.

And basically what they want to do is shape the space against liberal democracy, against NATO, against the European Union.