Our enemies are working out how to bring Britain to a standstill. We need to wake up

Our enemies don’t need to land troops on a British beach to hurt us, writes LBC's Investigations Editor EJ Ward

WhatsAppEmailLink CopiedLinkCheckCircle People who wish us harm are thinking hard about how to make our lives fall apart. Picture: Getty By EJ Ward

I spend a lot of my working life talking to people whose job is to think about the worst things that could happen to this country.

Military contacts, intelligence specialists, people who worry about what happens when the electricity fails and help doesn’t arrive. Increasingly, those conversations come back to the same uncomfortable point. We’re used to living in a country where things broadly work, and we’re dangerously attached to the idea that someone else will sort it out when they don’t.

That’s what I took from MI5 boss Sir Ken McCallum’s warning today. After months of reporting on the threats facing Britain, very little of it surprised me. What worries me is the distance between what the people dealing with these threats are saying and how seriously the rest of us are taking them. We still talk about national security as though it happens somewhere else, to someone else, behind a fence guarded by soldiers.

But think about your own morning. You turn on the light, put the kettle on, check your phone and pay for something on the way to work. Now imagine none of those things works. Your children are somewhere else, you can’t get through to them, and you don’t know whether the problem will last an hour or three days. That’s when a conversation about “critical national infrastructure” becomes a very real question about whether your family is safe.

Our enemies understand that dependence. They don’t need to land troops on a British beach to hurt us. They can target the things we rely on, stretch the people we turn to for help, and exploit the anger that follows. Russia is escalating its campaign of sabotage and disruption. Iran is using criminals to do its dirty work. China is trying to steal information and exert influence. MI5’s state threats caseload has quadrupled in a decade, while terrorists remain intent on murder.

I saw something of that thinking when we infiltrated an online forum associated with ISIS supporters a few weeks ago. People were discussing arson, encouraging destruction and talking about exhausting firefighters and police. What struck me was how coldly they discussed the consequences. Behind every emergency appliance they wanted tied up was another person who might need it. Behind every fire were people’s homes, livelihoods and lives. To those posting, that suffering was part of the appeal.

So when Sir Ken says terrorists are already trying to use artificial intelligence to improve how they prepare attacks, I think about those people. I think about what happens when someone with the desire to kill gets access to something that could help them work through problems they previously couldn’t solve. We’ve spent years worrying about the internet bringing extremists together. Now the intelligence and security services are dealing with technology that could make them more capable.

The part of his speech that should really stay with us was the warning about biological weapons. Of all the ways AI could be misused, this was the one he singled out as most worrying. He said that danger hadn’t yet been realised. But a man who has spent thirty years assessing threats doesn’t raise the prospect of AI changing what’s possible with biological weapons casually. I find that massively worrying. We should all want to know whether our defences are keeping pace.

The creation of an AI Threat Assessment Centre is a serious response to a serious problem. But the wider question reaches well beyond MI5. When I spoke to Lord Harris, chairman of the National Preparedness Commission, he warned that households could have to look after themselves for several days during major disruption. Emergency services could be busy elsewhere. For anyone used to picking up the phone and expecting help, that’s a difficult thing to hear.

It’s also something government needs to explain plainly. What should we prepare for? What help will be available? Who looks after people who can’t manage alone? And how is a family already struggling to buy dinner supposed to put several days of supplies aside? You can’t build a prepared country by giving people advice they haven’t got the money to follow.

I’m not frightened every time I leave the house, and I don’t think anyone should be. But I’ve heard too much, and seen too much in our reporting, to shrug this off. People who wish us harm are thinking hard about how to make our lives fall apart. We need to put the same effort into making sure they can’t. Waiting until we’re standing in the dark, wondering why nobody warned us, would be unforgivable. We’ve been warned.

EJ Ward is LBC's Investigations Editor and covers intelligence, defence and security topics.

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The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official LBC position.