Terrorism threats soar in the UK against a backdrop of war in Ukraine and the Middle East

The UK is facing a “staggering rise” in assassination and sabotage plots carried out on its territory by actors working for Iran and Russia paid “to do their dirty work,” according to the head of Britain Intelligence Services, MI5.

MI5 Director General Ken McCallum said that many of those hired to execute the plots are criminals, ranging “from international drug traffickers to low-level crooks.”

MI5 “has a h e l l of a job on its hands,” McCallum concluded, alluding to the fact that in addition to the usual swamp of terrorist threats, there are now “state-backed assassination and sabotage plots, against the backdrop of a major European land war.”

Regarding Russia, the MI5 chief said in his rare public speech that Russian spies are on “a mission to generate mayhem” on UK streets.

“The GRU in particular is on a sustained mission to generate mayhem on British and European streets . . . arson, sabotage and . . . dangerous actions conducted with increasing recklessness,” he said, alluding to Russia’s military intelligence unit.

McCallum said that state-driven threats had undergone the biggest rise since 2022, particularly coming out of Russia.

This is despite the fact that the UK and other countries in Europe have expelled around 750 Russian diplomats, most of whom were spies, according to McCallum.

Still, the UK’s “leading role in supporting Ukraine means we loom large in the fevered imagination of Putin’s regime”, McCallum added. “We should expect to see continued acts of aggression here at home.”

Regarding Iran, McCallum said that they had derailed 20 deadly plots since 2022 and fear that the conflict in the Middle East will fuel the problem.

The plots coming out of Iran have so far been aimed at Iranian dissidents, with cases spiking after the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody, imprisoned for violating Iran’s head covering laws for women.

Now, however, with the conflict broadening in the Middle East to encompass Gaza, Lebanon, Iran and the Houthi rebels in Yemen, McCallum predicts there will be a wider spectrum of targets going forward.

There has been a 48% rise in state-backed threats in the past year, according to the MI5 chief, with China also providing the Intelligence Service with a significant number of investigations.

While MI5 called China Britain’s biggest “strategic challenge” back in 2022, McCallum toned that down in his speech, insisting on the importance of the UK-China relationship and adding there were “risks to be managed.”

Officially, it is said that 75% of the plots aimed at targets in the UK are driven by Islamic extremist ideology and 25% from groups with links to the extreme right.

However, McCallum made it clear that those categories “don’t fully reflect the dizzying range of beliefs and ideologies we see,” which are detected within a deluge of “online hatred, conspiracy theories and disinformation.”

MI5, he said, had witnessed a “threefold increase” in investigations of under-18s since 2021, attracted to far-right terrorism that leans “heavily towards young people, driven by propaganda that shows a canny understanding of online culture.”

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