Foreign interference is real - but the UK should look beyond the usual culprits
Last month the British government added interference in the democratic process to the National Risk Register, ranking it alongside cyberattack and pandemic as a threat to national security.
The framing is consistent, and mostly justified: the National Security Act 2023, the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme, and the Defending Democracy Taskforce target China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, and parliament's committees have documented sustained hostile efforts to shape British politics.
But the scrutiny rarely extends past those names, even though other states have made attempts of their own. Peers raised this in a House of Lords debate that prompted ministers to order a review, with Lord Wallace of Saltaire telling the House the money came "from the United States and the UAE, as well as from hostile states such as Russia and China".
Philip Rycroft's own March 2026 review went further, warning of "an emerging willingness of foreign actors and private citizens, including from allies like the United States, to interfere in, and influence, politics abroad".
The government accepted that finding in July but hasn't acted like it. Months later, when an Israel-based advocacy body appeared at the same House of Lords accusing British Muslims of importing foreign influence, nobody asked it the question already asked of everyone else.
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NGO Monitor was founded inside the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, a right-leaning Israeli think tank whose president at the time, Isidore "Dore" Gold, was simultaneously a serving adviser to two Israeli prime ministers.
Its founder, Gerald Steinberg, has been a paid consultant to the Israeli foreign ministry and National Security Council. Its funding runs through an opaque American vehicle backed by committed pro-Israel donors.
Israeli lobbying and US opacity
The Dutch foreign ministry found NGO Monitor's work rests on "selective citations, half-facts and insinuations". A UN special rapporteur said in September 2024 that NGO Monitor ran a "vitriolic online smear campaign" against a Palestinian human rights group.
It has company in the UK in the form of UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI). An Israeli government document showed UKLFI’s chief executive, Jonathan Turner, and his wife meeting a senior Israeli justice ministry official in 2019, seeking help against a British charity and a Palestinian children's NGO.
The group's methods have been described as lawfare, legal threats meant to intimidate rather than win in court. A single letter got Chelsea and Westminster Hospital to remove a display of plates painted by children in Gaza.
Turner has admitted his group's "support" for Israel's Ministry of Strategic Affairs, which runs defamation campaigns against rights groups abroad, and UKLFI has settled a libel claim after falsely accusing a charity of funding terrorism. It now sits under Charity Commission investigation over hidden funding, with the outcome still not clear. None of this, it seems, counts as the interference it plainly is.
The same week at NGO Monitor's House of Lords event, the Guardian revealed that the US State Department plans to hand $12m, awarded directly with no competition, to right-wing organisations founded by Jacob Rees-Mogg and Toby Young, framed as support for shared "civilizational bonds".
Earlier this year, Young's own Free Speech Union got a High Court injunction to block a leaked donor list that included US anti-abortion groups.
Germany's chancellor, watching similar money reach Maga-aligned groups at home, named it plainly: election interference.
None of this is new: Tufton Street think tanks, including the Institute of Economic Affairs, Policy Exchange and the Adam Smith Institute, have taken millions from American donors since 2012 through opaque US vehicles.
In 2018, an Unearthed investigation caught the IEA's director offering donors ministerial introductions for funding; this resulted in a formal legal warning by the Charity Commission for breaching charity law. This is not limited to shady think tanks and an exchange of cash. Elon Musk through his platform X, has boosted figures like Tommy Robinson, whose posts drew 434 million views during the 2024 riots, worth up to $19m a year to the platform.
Sinister UAE methods
As for the UAE, their methods go beyond lobbying and donations to more sinister methods. Citizen Lab confirmed multiple infections of Pegasus, a hacking tool made by the Israeli firm NSO Group, on Boris Johnson's Downing Street office and the Foreign Office network in 2020 and 2021, both tied to a UAE operator.
Baroness Pola Uddin, a sitting member of the House of Lords, was named among the British citizens who have been hacked with Pegasus on British soil and have filed a criminal complaint over it. Even its more conventional influence-buying runs straight through parliament.
If scrutiny stops at Iran, Russia and China, it ceases to be a coherent security strategy and becomes a filter for political convenience, one that spares Britain's allies difficult questions
Three members of the House of Lords hold paid roles at FGS Global, a firm that has lobbied UK officials for the UAE since October, duly registered under the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme. Transparency International's Steve Goodrich put it plainly in a MEE article: "When members of the House of Lords hold senior roles at firms lobbying for foreign governments, it's hard to know whose interests are being represented."
In Europe, their methods are no better. The New Yorker's 2023 investigation found the UAE paid a Swiss intelligence firm to run a campaign across Europe falsely smearing its critics and businessmen as linked to Qatar or the Muslim Brotherhood. None of this earns the word interference but rather “partnership”.
Russian, Chinese and Iranian interference deserve every bit of scrutiny they get. But if that scrutiny stops at three states, it ceases to be a coherent security strategy, and becomes a filter for political convenience, one that happens to spare Britain's allies difficult questions.
The government has the tools to tackle this threat from all quarters, head on. It just needs to use them consistently and evenly. Until foreign money and foreign direction are treated as a problem regardless of whose government sent them, interference will remain a word Britain reaches for selectively, not a standard it actually holds.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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