Military bases across Britain are on high alert after an alleged terrorist plot targeting RAF Fairford, with the prime minister saying there were “strong indications that Iran played a part”.
Writing in the Guardian, columnist Gaby Hinsliff said US B-1 bombers had taken off from the Gloucestershire base throughout the summer before being “hastily summoned home” last week. She said it was a farmer who raised the alarm over the alleged plot, prompting difficult questions about how vigilant rural communities should be.
Hinsliff noted the incident followed a serious security breach at RAF Brize Norton last year, involving pro-Palestinian protesters rather than Russians, and news this summer that the Manchester synagogue attacker had scoped out security arrangements at the nearby Shrivenham defence academy.
Two Latvians were arrested on Thursday on suspicion of trespass inside RAF Molesworth in Cambridgeshire, home to a Nato intelligence hub, she wrote, adding that bases nationwide are on high alert.
The writer said she had not felt so alert to anything seemingly out of the ordinary since living in London in the aftermath of 9/11. She recalled that after the 7/7 bombings people would change train carriages rather than stand next to someone with a rucksack, and that at the height of the Troubles Irish émigrés in Britain faced hostility.
She warned of a “particularly grim risk of a backlash against asylum seekers”, pointing to Reform’s use of unproven reports that Tehran may be using small boat crossings to smuggle covert operatives into Britain. Those arrested and released on bail in connection with the alleged Fairford plot have British nationality, she said, while a Kuwaiti citizen recently convicted of a terror plot against the Israeli embassy and two Iranian nationals recently charged with allegedly plotting to target Jews in Manchester reportedly reached Britain in dinghies.
Hinsliff said Britain faced a dilemma for the second time since 9/11 over how much of a “securocracy” it should become. She noted the “war on terror” had forced the last Labour government, including Andy Burnham, into a painful rolling back of civil liberties at home, and said the threat this time comes less from an ideology than from three hostile nation states with domestic reach — Russia, Iran and China — so future dilemmas may concern the movement of technology, assets and people.
Britain had historically kept a relatively open economy, she wrote, allowing Gulf states to buy football clubs, Russian oligarchs to prop up the prime London real estate market and Chinese money to bail out cash-strapped universities and build power stations. Tom Tugendhat, the shadow foreign affairs minister and a longstanding China hawk, revealed last week that he still receives letters from Beijing to his family home that “say, basically, ‘we know where you live'”.
London tech startups snapped up skilled young Russian coders, she added, and the UK did not impose tariffs on cheap Chinese EVs when the EU did, though business secretary Jonathan Reynolds suggested recently that the debate was not entirely closed.
Hinsliff said Iran and Russia were throttling shipping routes in the strait of Hormuz and the Black Sea respectively, with consequences for oil and food prices that are ringing serious alarm bells within governments.
She pointed to early signs of attitudes hardening: the Cabinet Office recently summoned CEOs of critical infrastructure companies to brief them on the threat of Russian sabotage, and last week MI5 issued a rare public warning to academics against working with a Chinese organisation regarded as a front for espionage. The concrete barriers going up around Fairford, she wrote, may be a harbinger of what is to come.
She argued a line must be held between vigilance and paranoia or xenophobia, saying no foreign national in the UK should be persecuted for the sins of their country of origin, and recalling the 1939 internment of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany and Austria as “enemy aliens”. New powers of surveillance, she added, should always come with new safeguards. She said security crises test liberal principles to breaking point and that she hoped Burnham was ready for that.
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