You can see it now. The head of MI5 is having his weekly meeting with the security minister. They are casually lamenting Donald Trump’s worrying closeness to Vladimir Putin and the threat that this poses to Britain. Suddenly, Sir Ken McCallum gets to his feet so sharply that his tea sloshes onto the table. “Good Lord, minister,” he exclaims, palming his forehead. “I think we’ve forgotten to proscribe Russia.”
Did it really happen like that? We will never know. But it was only yesterday that Putin’s gangster nation – which not only invaded Ukraine, but has also been responsible for the Salisbury nerve agent poisonings and widespread espionage and cyber attacks on these shores – was for the first time declared a danger to our national security. I know. Quite the oversight.
While the rest of us marked April Fool’s Day, Dan Jarvis, the security minister, made a statement to the Commons announcing that Russia presented an “acute threat” and would join Iran on the highest “enhanced tier” of the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme (Firs). This is a new system intended to guard British interests against covert foreign influence that will come into force on July 1.
The scheme features two categories. According to the Government website, the lower of these, reserved for those countries bent only on “political influence”, requires spies to “register with the scheme if you are instructed by a foreign power to carry out” such operations.
Presumably, this would include wizard wheezes like when the Chinese persuaded parliamentary researchers to pass them sensitive information, or when they apparently inveigled an agent into the close circle of Prince Andrew (though what good that did them is anybody’s guess). As soon as July comes about, our friends from Beijing will be required to fill out an online form first.
The “enhanced” tier, meanwhile, asks spooks to “register with the scheme if you are instructed by a specified foreign power” to carry out “relevant activities”. The coy euphemism of “relevant activities” probably implies things like, I don’t know, poisoning British citizens by Smeang novichok on their door handles or putting polonium in their tea.
Such is the genius of the British state that our most innovative counter-espionage idea is to demand that foreign spies – whose literal jobs are to break the law of the land in this country – visit the Government website and register their covert operations before they put them into action.
Will they put on a false nose and moustache to avoid the gaze of the webcam? Will there be a dropdown menu for types of poison? Will there be a tickbox asking “does your operation involve discrimination based on characteristics protected under the Equality Act 2010” and a request for spies to fill in their gender identities (male, female, nonbinary, prefer not to say, other) at the end?
Such an idea could only be born of civil servants so thoroughly institutionalised by bureaucracy that they cannot conceive of anybody, even a foreign assassin, failing to comply with the petty strictures of officialdom.
Failing to register will be a criminal offence, but these people are committing crimes anyway. Could you imagine any other country in the world seeing a Bike2Work-style registration scheme as a viable counter-espionage measure? The Americans? The Israelis? The Canadians? (OK, maybe the Canadians.)
I jest. A little bit. But things have come to a pretty pass when we discover a vulnerability only after years of espionage against us – much of which has not been reported – and land on this as a solution.
It’s not just Russia. Tehran has so infiltrated our country that earlier this year a pressure group called United Against a Nuclear Iran launched a campaign calling on the Government to make Britain a “Khamenei free zone”.
In the launch video, the group’s head of research, Kasra Aarabi, said: “I’m outside the office of Ayatollah Khamenei. but I’m not in Tehran. I’m in London, in the heart of Europe.”
Hiva Wallace, a senior advisor, added: “Khamenei has built a network of infiltration centres across Europe…some of [the] most violent and extreme commanders were hosted by Khamenei’s London-based Islamic Students Association.” The clue is in the “London-based”.
I know what my friends in the Foreign Office will say. For years, many sensible voices, like former security minister Tom Tugendhat, have been calling for Iran’s sinister Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps to be blacklisted in Britain. But the sages of King Charles Street have blocked the move, worried that this may harm their diplomacy. Similarly, they are treading carefully with Russia.
Make no mistake: the introduction of Firs is intended to satisfy political and diplomatic concerns. It is not a robust security doctrine.
The fact that the Government is making such lame moves when our country is already infested with spies is simply another indication of our national somnambulance.
What will it take for Britain to wake up? That is a question I do not want to answer.