ISIS is back, says British intelligence chief – POLITICO

“The decisions are complex and it is rightly up to ministers to make the big strategic decisions about our relationship with China,” he said.

Questions about capacity

These combined threats have resulted in MI5 and police foiling 43 late-stage attack plots since March 2017, the intelligence chief said on Tuesday. However, he argued that the security services are currently overstretched.

With just over two weeks to go before the UK budget is passed, McCallum said that “allocating our finite capacity” is now “more difficult than I can remember in my career”.

Responding to a question from POLITICO about whether MI5's caseload was still too high, as suggested by Parliament's Security and Intelligence Committee in 2022, McCallum replied: “The situation is absolutely excessive.”

“It's pretty safe to say that the overall level of counter-terrorism work that we do in MI5 today has remained broadly the same over the last four or five years,” he said. A decline in Islamic State activity will be offset and even exceeded by a rise in far-right terrorism, he warned.

Over the last three years, MI5's casework involving people under 18 involved in terrorism has tripled. That now accounts for 13 percent of cases, he said.

MI5 has “an uncomfortable life now” and has to decide what priorities to set and what things it “just can't achieve”, adding: “That puts quite a lot of pressure on us.”