Chinese state actors are a national security threat to the United Kingdom “every day”, Russian agents are committed to “causing havoc and destruction”, and Iran is actively trying to kill people on British soil, a top spy has said.
The head of the UK’s Security Service, best known as MI5, Sir Ken McCallum has given his annual threat assessment statement, which comes with undeniably conspicuous timing as the country reels over claimed Chinese spy plots, including a collapsed prosecution against alleged Beijing spies and an asserted massive breach of Westminster secret communications.
Given his position Sir Ken would normally be expected to be scrupulously non-political in his public pronouncements, but he seemed unable to avoid venting frustration at the collapse of the prosecution against two British citizens accused to passing secrets to China. Both men deny the allegations. Whether there was a political dimension to the trial collapsing, with assertions the left-wing Labour government intervened to mollify Beijing have been headline fodder for weeks.
Making apparently veiled references to the scandal, Sir Ken said “convictions are great” and that MI5 works closely with police to secure them against alleged spies. “It’s frustrating when they don’t happen”, he said.
The top spy appeared to imply that even without a conviction secured, espionage plots had still been successfully disrupted.
Indeed, speaking of China, Sir Ken said a Beijing plot had been intercepted “again just in the last week”. Crucially, he said: “Do Chinese state actors present a U.K. national security threat? The answer is of course yes they do, every day”.
The overriding message is evidently that intelligence threats to the United Kingdom by foreign powers are constant. The number of people being investigated for “state activity” is up a third in just one year and there are a “near record” number of investigations underway, he said, and they are becoming more violent with “rising aggression on UK soil”. Sir Ken said:
…State threats are escalating. In the last year we’ve seen a 35 per cent increase in the number of individuals we’re investigating for involvement in state threat activity. That means espionage including against our parliament, universities, and critical infrastructure.
But now, states are consistently descending into ugly methods MI5 are more used to seeing in our terrorism casework. My teams are routinely uncovering attempts by state actors to commission surveillance, sabotage, arson, or physical violence right here in the UK. We’re dealing with these threats every day.
China is just one of the “big three” of foreign power threats, with Russia and Iran. Of Moscow, the MI5 boss said: “Last year we and the police interrupted a steady stream of surveillance plots with hostile intent aimed at individuals Russian leaders perceive as their enemies” and that Russia is attempting to “sow the seeds of violence, chaos, and division here in the UK”.
Of Iran, Sir Ken added that the Tehran regime is actively trying to kill people in Britain, with “20 potentially lethal Iran-backed plots” detected by MI5 in the past 12 months.
As well as foreign interference, a considerable part of the work for MI5 — the UK’s domestic intelligence agency — is counterterrorism. Remarkably, it was revealed in the course of the address that one-in-five of all terrorism arrests in the past year had been of children and that “since the start of 2020, MI5 and the police have disrupted 19 late-stage attack plots, and we have intervened in many hundreds of developing threats”.
The focus of Thursday’s briefing, and the reporting on it, is conspicuously different to that of the same event in previous years. As reported in October 2024 when Sir Ken gave the same address, he noted 75 per cent of his counter-terrorism caseload was focussed on Islamist extremist plots and in the 2020 edition of the same he said “It is still the case that tens of thousands of individuals are committed to this ideology” and the top threat.
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