Counter Terrorism Policing (CTP) has confirmed that over one-fifth of its present casework now entails countering state-sponsored exercise slightly than terrorism, reflecting what senior officers describe as a pointy escalation in international interference throughout the UK.
The unit has developed devoted state threats groups for the reason that 2018 Salisbury poisonings, constructing capability to research espionage, cyberattacks, and state-backed felony exercise.
These operations goal what CTP calls “transnational repression”, actions that fall wanting open battle however are designed to hurt the UK’s nationwide pursuits.
State threats embody espionage, cyber intrusions, propaganda, political manipulation, and the recruitment of felony proxies. CTP’s remit now extends nicely past counter-terrorism, integrating counter-espionage and counter-intelligence strategies to detect, deter, and disrupt hostile state operations in cooperation with the intelligence businesses and native police forces.
Assistant Commissioner Laurence Taylor, head of CTP, stated there was “a fivefold enhance within the variety of investigations that we’re managing”, figuring out “the large three, Iran, Russia and China” as essentially the most energetic state actors. These nations, he stated, are “extra succesful, and the strategies they deploy are sometimes fairly completely different.”
These strategies more and more contain felony networks, such because the Russian-backed arson plot in London that led to a 29-year sentence earlier this yr. Taylor stated such instances spotlight how international states “use felony proxies to ship assaults and sow disruption.”
He additionally warned of a rising on-line dimension, with “important will increase in mis and disinformation” geared toward destabilising society and amplifying extremist narratives. “That mis and disinformation is making a extra destabilised setting the place a few of our extra extremist views are then getting extra traction and creating extra danger,” he stated.
Taylor described an evolving risk image through which conventional espionage overlaps with digital manipulation and home extremism. “That state risk expands from every part to bodily threats on the bottom, to espionage and our actual type of conventional spying by different states,” he stated.
Since 2021, referrals to the Counter Terrorism Web Referral Unit have risen by 150 % and will attain 40,000 yearly by 2029, reflecting the surge in disinformation and on-line radicalisation.
Taylor attributed a lot of this to automated exercise, noting “a 48 % enhance after the assaults on 7 October,” a lot of it “very clearly being pushed by robotics slightly than people posting on-line.”