The Rise of the Right?

I was taken this week by the UK national security update given by Ken McCallum, the Director General of MI5 .....

Ken McCallum, the Director General of MI5

.... Apparently, he gives these annually, although I don't recall much publicity being given to them in the past.

In this year's report, there were pretty much the usual bad players.

China: On one hand, the economic link with the UK has apparently given some security stability, but on the other hand the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have a state sponsored programme to steal economic, technical and military data and information from the UK, and that 20,000 obfuscated approaches to UK individuals were made by China to further that end.

Russia: Well its no secret that it has been trying to stir up domestic problems in the UK as well as within the EU. GRU (Russian Main Intelligence Directorate, a military intelligence agency of the General Staff of the Armed Forces) agents had carried out "arson, sabotage and more dangerous actions conducted with increasing recklessness" in Britain. This is apparently in response to Western support for Ukraine.

To this end, they have also had to increasingly use local criminals and private security firms, because their own spies have not been granted diplomatic passes to enter Western countries, following the expulsion of 750 Russian diplomats from Europe since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, "the great majority of them" suspected spies.

You might think that the UK's laws about traitors and harsh punishments might need amending to deal with those UK citizens or residents, who choose to aid Russia and others to harm this country, but no mention was made of this need in his report.

Iran: He reported that 20 plots (many of them assassination attempts against Iranian exiles), backed by Iran have been foiled since 2022. Again, with little diplomatic contact, one presumes that Iran is using local Muslim sympathisers within the UK population, to try and carry out their aims. Again, why are we harbouring what essentially is a fifth column inside our communities?

This brings me to another aspects of his report ..... He said the UK's counter-terrorism work remained split between "75% Islamist extremism, 25% extreme right-wing terrorism."

Now, I don't recall "right-wing terrorism" being a feature of any threat to the UK in previous decades. But surely the rise of this new threat mirrors, or is driven by, the rise of Islamic terrorism threats in the UK? It certainly looks like there is a link.

Our political elite have never understood that the importation of any group that doesn't integrate easily into our culture, and that harbours those who actively try to harm us (the 20 plots backed by Iran since 2022 for example), has also given rise to right-wing groups who fear these groups.

Our careless immigration and asylum rules (an illegal immigrant Albanian criminal, who married a Lithuanian woman living in the UK can't be deported from the UK due to European court rulings .... no matter that the Lithuanian woman is not a UK citizen), mean we may now be actually beginning to reap what we have sown over the last 40 years or so ....