MI5 director General Ken McCallum’s threat update.
Since March 2017, MI5 and the police have together disrupted 43 late-stage attack plots. Some of those plotters were trying to get hold of firearms and explosives, in the final days of planning mass murder. Our vital work together has saved numerous lives.
The headline split of our counter terrorist work remains roughly 75% Islamist extremist, 25% extreme right-wing terrorism. But under that headline, much has shifted. Straightforward labels like “Islamist terrorism” or “extreme right wing” don’t fully reflect the dizzying range of beliefs and ideologies we see.
We’re encountering more volatile would-be terrorists with only a tenuous grasp of the ideologies they profess to follow. People viewing both extreme right wing and Islamist extremist instructional material, along with other bits of online hatred, conspiracy theories and disinformation.
Compared to my years combating Al-Qaeda, it’s harder these days for my investigators and their police counterparts to quickly and definitively determine whether an act of violence is ideologically motivated or driven by another factor like mental health.
Today, an attacker may have no connections to other terrorists.
They might not be on our records.
And there’s often no claim of responsibility.
MI5 and the police follow the intelligence and evidence to whatever conclusion – or lack of conclusion – they support. To be explicit, politics plays no role in these decisions. We will continue to do the best professional job we can of analyzing a picture which is inherently messy.
The most concerning trend for national security in the UK is the worsening threat from Al-Qaeda and Islamic State, with over a third of top-priority investigations recently linked to these organized overseas groups.
This may come as a shock to McCallum, but the domestic threat from Islamic terrorists has grown exponentially thanks to his government’s feckless policy of importing hostile muzzie foreigners.
The UK government needs a good dose of the consequences of their open arms to terrorist policies. They won’t understand until it happens to them, their children, their friends, their neighborhoods. They have exclusive residences and 24 hour security. The human garbage needs to be dumped at their homes.
Britain is in the throes of suicide. It allows violent terrorist muzzie pigs onto its soil and the ensuing carnage is condoned by gutless law enforcement. They murder, rape, and commit acts of terrorism with impunity while citizens who speak out against it are censored, harassed, and prosecuted.
Put a gun to your heads, Britain. It’s faster.