“The choices are complex, and it rightly falls to ministers to make the big strategic judgements on our relationship with China,” he said.
Capacity questions
These combined threats have seen MI5 and the police disrupt 43 late-stage attack plots since March 2017, the intelligence boss said Tuesday. But he argued that the security services are currently stretched.
With just over two weeks until the U.K.’s government-wide budget, McCallum said “allocating our finite capacity” is now “harder than I can recall in my career.”
Responding to a question from POLITICO about whether MI5’s caseload is still too high, as suggested in 2022 by parliament’s security and intelligence committee, McCallum said: “Things are absolutely stretched.”
“It is about accurate to say that the overall volume of counterterrorism work we are doing in MI5 today has been, broadly speaking, about static for the last four or five years,” he said. A reduction in Islamic State activity has been offset and exceeded by a rise in extreme right-wing terrorism, he warned.
There has been a threefold increase in the last three years of MI5 casework involving people under 18 involved in terrorism. That now makes up 13 per cent of cases, he said.
MI5 “now have an uncomfortable life” deciding what to prioritize and what things “we just can’t get to,” adding: “That puts us under pretty sharp pressure.”