Among the breadth and variety of the threats that the UK faces in 2022 is the ‘wicked problem of self-initiated lone actor terrorists, fiendishly hard to detect and disrupt’, according to the security service MI5 in its annual update.
That was said by MI5 Director General Ken McCallum in his annual threat update at MI5 headquarters in Thames House, central London. He stressed the complexity of their tasks, and the needs for prioritisation. The choice, he said, ‘is deciding what to pursue within hundreds of fragmentary leads to potential terrorist activity. Lifting up a level, how do we balance effort between, say, detecting teenage would-be terrorists radicalised in extreme right-wing spaces online, and protecting the UK’s military secrets from Russian cyber hackers? How to prioritise combatting repression of the Chinese diaspora or of Iranian dissidents here against the need to keep degrading Al Qaeda overseas?’
As for threats from other countries, he covered Putin’s war in Ukraine; Iran; and China, recalling his speech with FBI Director Christopher Wray, ‘that the activities of the Chinese Communist Party pose the most game-changing strategic challenge to the UK’; to national and economic security, and to the UK’s political system. As for response, he spoke of resilience and a ‘whole-of-system approach’, a concerted counter-state threat strategy bringing together expertise and tools from across government’. He hailed the work of the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI), which reports to him.
On terrorism, he noted that ‘getting ahead of terrorist plots is still the first thing the British public expects of us’. He recalled MI5 and CPNI’s ‘quietly effective work with the police to safeguard the national mourning events’ in September after the death of Queen Elizabeth II.
Since the start of 2017, MI5 and the police have together disrupted 37 late-stage attack plots, he reported: “That’s another eight potentially-deadly plots disrupted since I gave my update last year. And as before it’s a mix of Islamist and extreme right-wing terrorism.”
Islamist terrorism remains the larger problem, he said; ‘about three quarters of our terrorist caseload’. “As previously, much of the volume is self-radicalised terrorists seeking to conduct low-sophistication attacks.” Recalling the murder of Essex MP Sir David Amess, he pointed out that low sophistication does not mean low impact.
As for that quarter of counter-terrorist caseload about Extreme Right Wing Terrorism, he recalled the recent petrol bomb attack in Dover (pictured). “Just as with Islamist extremist activity, it is not always straightforward to draw lines demarcating what is and is not terrorism. In cases of previously-unknown attackers, who make no claim of responsibility, it takes time to assemble the facts – and even once they are assembled, they are often a confused mix of factors.
“The Extreme Right Wing landscape has continued to evolve away from structured, real-world groups such as National Action, to a diffuse online threat. From the comfort of their bedrooms, individuals are easily able to access right-wing extremist spaces, network with each other and move towards a radical mindset.” He pointed to more attempts by those extremists to acquire weapons, including 3D-printed; and ‘right-wing extremist influencers’ globally, suggesting that such extremism will be ‘enduring’.
He spoke also of Northern Ireland; and MI5’s work, such as the new Counter-Terrorism Operations Centre (CTOC), ‘in which MI5 staff are now working alongside the police’; and work more generally and widely, ‘going beyond traditional security agencies to connect with expertise in healthcare, education, social services and the criminal justice system, to respond to the complexity we are seeing’.
For the full speech visit the MI5 website. See also last month’s speech by Sir Jeremy Fleming, GCHQ director, to the defence and security think-tank RUSI.
