UK Edition
UK will face Islamist terror threat for next 30 years, former MI5 chief warns
The UK is likely to face an Islamist terrorist threat for the next 30 years, the former head of MI5 has warned.
Jonathan Evans, who stepped down as director general of the spy agency in 2013, described the threat as a “generational problem” which will take decades to tackle.
Lord Evans also claimed the Westminster Bridge attack earlier this year may have had an energising effect on extremists.
Meanwhile, he said he would be “very surprised” if Russia had not tried to interfere in the UK's last general election.
Lord Evans, who now sits in the House of Lords as a crossbench peer, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I think on the terrorism side we are at least 20 years into this. My guess is that we will still be dealing with the long tail in another 20 years time.
“I think this is genuinely a generational problem. When I left MI5 in 2013 if I had been asked I would have said that I thought that we probably were over the worst of the al-Qaeda threat.
“That may have been true but of course not the development and emergence of IS with the same ideology and many of the same people.
“I think that we are going to be facing 20, 30 years of terrorist threats and therefore we need absolutely critically to persevere and just keep doing it.”
The former spy chief said that the London bombings in July 2005 triggered an "energising effect on the extremist networks in the UK" and that he thought there would be a similar feeling following the Westminster Bridge attack earlier this year.
He said: "We did see a huge upsurge in threat intelligence after July 7 and I suspect that there's the same sort of feeling in the period after the Westminster Bridge attack - that a lot of people who thought 'I'd like to do this' suddenly decided 'yep, if they can do it, then I can do it'."
Since the atrocity in March, there were attacks in Manchester, London Bridge and Finsbury Park.
Mark Rowley, the head of National Counter Terrorism Policing, told Radio 4 that the "change in tempo" in terms of the frequency of attacks and plots faced by the UK has been "quite dramatic".
He said: "In February Andrew Parker (MI5 director general) and I would have spoken about in four years foiling 13 plots and how that felt quite a challenge and then over a few months we had four successful attacks and at the same time we stopped six more plots.
“That number of 10 over a few months compared to 13 over four years illustrates the change in tempo that we have seen which is a real challenge for us and that’s why we are going to have to do some things differently.”
The assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police also said the police needed help from communities to tackle terror because of the thousands of people who are subjects of interest to the security services.
He said: “Our ability to keep our radar on them, that’s no longer just just a job for police and security services.
“We will always do what we can do to improve our business but it is going to take a whole community effect.”
Meanwhile, Lord Evans also sounded a stark warning about the potential for Russian interference in the UK’s democratic process.
He said: “It would be extremely surprising if the Russians were interested in interfering in America and in France and in various other European countries but were not interested in interfering with the UK because traditionally I think we have been seen as quite hawkish.
“I would be surprised if there had not been attempts to interfere with the election, equally I don’t have insight into exactly what was going on behind the curtain during the election period.
“But I would be very surprised if there was not some form of conflict going on.”
The peer also stressed the importance of the UK being prepared to defend against cyber attacks, especially as the nation’s infrastructure and people’s daily lives become increasingly reliant on the internet.
He said: “I think we are going to have to think very carefully about our dependence on the internet particularly on what’s called the internet of things, that as our vehicles, as our air transport, as our critical infrastructure is resting increasingly on the internet we need to be really confident that we have secured that because our economic and our daily lives are going to be dependent on the security that we can put in to protect our infrastructure from cyber attack.”