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Britain needs to prepare for the possibility of being attacked on its own soil, the government has warned in its security strategy, laying out in stark terms the range of threats ministers say the UK now faces.
Russia’s military buildup and Iran’s increasing attacks on dissidents abroad mean the country could soon find itself involved in a domestic war, the review says.
The warning echoes recent comments from Mark Rutte, the Nato secretary general, that without a major increase in defence spending, British people “better learn to speak Russian”. Keir Starmer, who is at the Nato summit in The Hague, has promised to meet Nato’s target of spending 5% of gross domestic product on defence by 2035.
The review says: “Some adversaries are laying the foundations for future conflict, positioning themselves to move quickly to cause major disruption to our energy and/or supply chains, to deter us from standing up to their aggression. For the first time in many years, we have to actively prepare for the possibility of the UK homeland coming under direct threat, potentially in a wartime scenario.”
In a written foreword to the review, Starmer, the prime minister says: “The world has changed. Russian aggression menaces our continent. Strategic competition is intensifying. Extremist ideologies are on the rise. Technology is transforming the nature of both war and domestic security. Hostile state activity takes place on British soil.”
The document was published on Tuesday, weeks after a separate strategic defence review recommended a major ramp-up of Britain’s defence industry, with a focus on building more drones, more submarines and more capability in artificial intelligence.
The security review goes into fuller detail about the threats which the country is dealing with both at home and abroad, naming Russia as the principal among them, given their frequent cyber-attacks and attempts at sabotage.
“[The Ukraine] war has been accompanied with a campaign of indirect and sub-threshold activity – including cyber-attacks and sabotage – by Russia against the UK and other Nato allies and the use of increased nuclear rhetoric in an attempt to constrain our decision making,” the review says.
It particularly highlights the threat Russia poses to the UK’s undersea fibreoptic cables, which carry 99% of the country’s digital data and which it says are under “persistent and growing” attacks by Russian submarines.
It also singles out Iran as posing a particular threat, given Tehran’s alliance with Moscow, as well as the regime’s intensifying attacks on dissidents abroad. “Iranian hostile activity on British soil is also increasing, as part of the Iranian regime’s efforts to silence its critics abroad, as well as directly threatening the UK,” it says.
The report strikes a very different tone from the last major security review, which was undertaken by Boris Johnson’s government four years ago. That report was published in the midst of the Covid pandemic and talked at length about pandemic resilience and vaccine manufacturing, both of which only get a single mention this time.
This year’s review does not go into detail about the danger posed by China, despite ministers having now completed their “China audit”, which officials say will never be published in full.
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Despite pressure from critics of Beijing, the review does not recommend that China is put on the enhanced tier of the foreign influence registration scheme, which would have required lobbyists working on behalf of Chinese state entities to register for the first time.
“In a more volatile world, we need to reduce the risks of misunderstanding and poor communication that have characterised the relationship in recent years,” the review says, making the case for more engagement with China.
The report adds: “Instances of China’s espionage, interference in our democracy and the undermining of our economic security have increased in recent years.”
Despite this, however, it declines to label China a threat to the UK, instead describing it as a “challenge”.
That message was undercut on Tuesday afternoon by the foreign secretary, David Lammy, who told MPs the country posed a “sophisticated and persistent threat” to the UK. A Downing Street spokesperson later refused to repeat Lammy’s language, pointing instead to the wording of the review.
Priti Patel, the shadow foreign secretary, accused the government of having “gone cap in hand” to China to bail out the UK economy.
