Professor Anthony Glees, from the University of Buckingham, considers the various security tools the new government will have at its disposal after 31 December 2020
Any survey of the current security threats facing the UK (and how best they are to be countered after the UK has left the EU) must begin with the fixed truth that Brexit or no Brexit, the delivery of national security is one of the few core tasks of government, and if it fails to deliver it, its effectiveness and competence will (properly) be called into serious doubt.
This is well understood by those hostile state and sub-state actors who aim to do us damage and is, after all, why they threaten and attack us: it is to rock governments and undermine the confidence of the public in their ability to keep us safe. It has also been well understood by every UK government since the London attacks of 2005 and, we should assume, by the new government led by Boris Johnson, after his landslide victory against Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn. It is not fanciful to see that Corbyn’s clear sympathy for groups that many British people regard as terrorist or revolutionary played a key part in his ignominious defeat, itself a key indicator of the importance of security in our national life.
After reflecting on the nature of the current and potential threats facing the UK at the start of a new decade, we move to consider the various security tools the new government will have at its disposal after 31 December 2020 (the likely date of our full departure from the European Union which will also entail our formal exit from numerous EU-facilitated security institutions and data sharing platforms: Europol, Eurojust, the European Arrest Warrant or EAW, Passenger Name Record Data, INTCEN, ECRIS, SIS I & II, Prum, and several others). There will be those who will insist that because national security was not an EU competence (as the Lisbon Treaty makes plain) and because many intelligence-led arrangements are bilateral and, in any case, the UK prospers from its ongoing participation in the ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence sharing partnership, Brexit itself makes no difference to our national security position. Indeed, a few angry voices, such as those of Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of SIS or Richard Walton, former Met chief, either insisted the UK would be more secure post-Brexit or that tools we shared via our EU membership, for example Europol, would be unaffected. The current 鶹 Secretary, Priti Patel, has suggested that Europol could easily be replaced by Interpol as an agency promoting police intelligence sharing after 2020.
As we shall see, the argument that Brexit may make little difference to our security toolkit is perhaps not incorrect but not because such ‘ourselves alone’ claims are correct (they are not) but because the delivery of national security is so vital to any government, however ideological, that when push comes to shove it is unthinkable that the new tools that have been constructed over the past decade together with our former EU partners will not, in some form or another, be given new life. There are very few current security or intelligence chiefs who have not spoken out in favour of very close sharing relationships post-Brexit, including the outgoing heads of MI5 and SIS, and for a very good reason.
The scale of the threat
First, however, key incidents over the past year or so demonstrate beyond any question that the UK faces major national security threats (officially described currently as ‘substantial’ rather than ‘severe’, a change made, somewhat fatefully just before the second Islamist attack at London Bridge at the end of November 2019). They emanate from internal and external sources, from home-grown and foreign actors, from domestic subversive organisations as well as state actors, in particular (as our intelligence chiefs state publicly) Russia (responsible for the attack on Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in early 2018, Iran and China albeit all behaving differently when it comes to killings in the UK but in similar ways where digital subversive activity is concerned.
What we can see at once is that foreign states impact gravely on our national security coming at us from outside our own borders, not least (but also not only) in cyber space. In the case of Russia, its intelligence officers feel entitled to come to our shores and assassinate their targets over here (the Salisbury attack is but one in a long and depressing series over the past decade). At a stroke it becomes plain that to counter this, our foreign intelligence service, SIS, is as much part of the picture as our domestic one, MI5 and why it is that both must work intimately with our cyber intelligence agency, GCHQ and with the counter-terror police.
But we are not talking only about states. Sub-state networks and individuals from home and abroad, both Islamist and neo-Nazi, represent real threats to our national security. In today’s global environment, linked by digital highways by electronic media, an evil individual in one country can be inspired to murder and maim by real-time video shots of killings by another individual whom they do not know on the other side of the world. The neo-Nazi ideology (grounded in Fascist Hitler worship) is as dangerous as (if mercifully less widespread) than Islamist ideology (grounded in a cult of violence and killing).
The message for the new inter-connected decade is all current threats exist in a domestic and foreign context, and all are international and transnational in all key respects. ‘鶹 and abroad’ have lost all meaning in this sphere.
In January 2020 a 17-year-old man (who cannot be named) was jailed for six years for planning a neo-Nazi terror attack in Durham which included setting fire to synagogues. He was inspired by Anders Breivik the Norwegian neo-Nazi who murdered 77 people in 2011, and was obsessed with the history of the Third Reich. Just a few weeks earlier, at the end of November 2019, a British Muslim, Usman Khan, killed two on London Bridge. Khan had been jailed in 2012 for being a member of a nine-man Al Qaeda group (inspired by Osama Bin Laden) that had planned to bomb the Stock Exchange (this followed the 2017 London Bridge attack in which five victims and three attackers died).
Beyond our shores, a lone Islamist attacker in Paris killed one person and wounded another almost exactly five years after the 2015 attack on the Charlie Hebdo magazine when two Islamist brothers killed twelve, itself preceded by the Bataclan attack two years earlier that had killed 60 in Paris.
In the Autumn of 2019, Germany had to confront the murder of two people at a synagogue in Halle, eastern Germany by a neo-Nazi gunman whilst the trial began in Chemnitz, also in eastern Germany of eight neo-Nazis who were planning a rampage in Berlin. In Hungary, a neo-Nazi mob attacked a Jewish centre in Budapest.
It is not surprising that we were told (in May 2019) by the then 鶹 Secretary Sajid Javid and the UK’s counter-terror chief, Neil Basu, that ‘the tempo of terror attacks is increasing’, that in the period 2017-19 nineteen major attacks had been thwarted, of which fourteen were Islamist and five neo-Nazi. Just two years earlier, Sir Andrew Parker the director general of MI5 stated that 20 terror attacks had been foiled in the previous four years, many through ‘early intervention’ and that 379 terror related arrests had been in the same period. He added that seven attacks had been disrupted in the previous seven months, of which four had been Islamist and one neo-Nazi. 3,000 individuals were being investigated in 500 ‘live’ operations at that time. Noting that ‘terror breeds terror’ Parker concluded that this was a ‘scale and pace we have not seen before’ and that this was a ‘long haul for the UK’.
Various estimates suggest there are from 23,000-35,000 potential jihadists in the UK; some 30,000 European Muslims travelled to fight for the so-called Islamic State (of whom 5-6,000 came from the UK, of these some 30 per cent had returned to the UK; yet only 25 per cent of the returnees were investigated and a handful restrained in some way).
Whilst it would be right to point out that, individually, none of these terror attacks resulted in large-scale deaths and even more important to emphasise that the vast majority of terror attacks in Europe were successfully disrupted by security forces before they could be launched, it is equally correct to highlight the fact that terror attacks, from Islamists and neo-Nazis are rapidly becoming established as serious national security threats across Europe.
Small wonder then that the UK’s key current and former security heads (of MI5, SIS and GCHQ) have made speeches since Brexit stressing the importance of transnational cooperation and the need to re-create existing EU tools after 2021 precisely because they are convinced they are needed. Even Sajid Javid (by this stage an ardent Brexiter) made it clear in his May 2019 speech that ‘whatever the outcome from Brexit we will continue to work together with partners’ adding that ‘in the event of a no-deal Brexit the UK and Germany would intensify cooperation and swiftly conclude any necessary bilateral security arrangements’.
It is obvious that when the UK has finally left the EU, almost certainly on 31 December 2020, we will have to find effective and robust ways of replicating these key relationships that are consistent with the decision to quit the EU. Assuming that the deal negotiated by Boris Johnson is in most respect similar to Theresa May’s (we cannot yet be certain) what must be re-invented over the next year (a very tall order) will include: re-entry into Europol (perhaps as a third country under a bespoke agreement) to provide access to its data-sharing systems, SIENA I & II and its extradition arrangements, especially the European Arrest Warrant (the EAW). 40 per cent of Europol’s case work has a UK focus, some 2,500 UK cases have cross-border implications; the UK (in 2018) was involved in 40 major joint Europol investigations; from 2009-2017 the UK extradited 8,000 EU citizens via the EAW, receiving almost 1,000 by the same process of whom 300 were UK nationals. Without the EAW extradition would take three times as long and cost four times as much.
The UK accessed the SIENA systems, which had 76,000,000 alerts on it, 539,000,000 times in 2017, and it registered 9,832 UK hits of which 94 per cent involved terrorists and sex offenders. In 2016 alone ECRIS, the criminal investigation data base passed to the UK 155,000 cases of criminal convictions handed down outside the UK but of interest to the UK.
It is of course true that the EU27 have benefited hugely from the UK contribution; the UK spends a vast amount on its intelligence and security work and has shared the fruits very generously with them. In 2019 alone the UK sent 30,000 conviction notices to ECRIS (receiving 16,000 in return). Whilst things do not always flow smoothly (we have been told that for five years errors in the system meant we failed to send the system notices of 75,000 convictions) in general the UK is regarded as a key partner. For every one person arrested under the EAW issued to the UK, eight are arrested by the UK for the EU; and the UK has had the largest single liaison bureau in Europol (with seventeen full time officers).
As we look to the post-Brexit future, only a fool could believe that the institutions developed on a platform provided by the EU had not helped keep us safe and were not worth preserving in one form or another. As the previous Prime Minister, Theresa May, concluded at the Munich Security Conference on 17 February 2018 ‘our ability to keep people safe depends ever more on our working together’. Even if this contradicted the Brexit narrative at the time, to ignore this would not just be to defy common sense and ignore the evidence, it would increase, dramatically, the risk to our people. Our security community has done a relatively good job to keep us ever more safe since 2005. This should not be thrown away.
