Security minister Lord West has announced that he is concerned that al-Qaeda terrorists could launch a radiological dirty bomb on London.
This announcement is not in itself new. As I observed on Centre Right last November, one of the major justifications for our current military engagement in Afghanistan is that there is clear evidence that the Taliban have already obtained nuclear materials and hence have the potential to create a radiological ‘dirty bomb’.
However, Lord West went further by highlighting the possibility of a radiological or Mumbai style attack launched either against London or another UK port from speedboats. He observed that hundreds of thousands of small boats arrived in Britain unchecked every year and that the agencies responsible for guarding the coastline did not know “with any clarity what is going on around our coasts”.
What is needed in the face of such threats is a paradigm change in the way we approach counter terrorism. Lord West’s comments illustrate the failure of our present approach. He is rightly concerned that the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) simply do not know about every small vessel entering British waters or heading for UK ports. However, as I revealed on Conservative Home recently, the MCA are at present considering closing one of only two main coastguard cordination centres on the East Coast of England...
The basic problem is that the government's approach to counter terrorism relies far to heavily on, to put it simply, ‘leaving it to the security services’. What is needed is a paradigm shift so that all government departments assess the impact of their activities on counter terrorism.
To illustrate the point, yesterday the Maritime and Coastguard Agency concluded a consultation on draft regulations concerning oil tankers in UK territorial waters. The consultation documents stated that the draft regulations had been checked against 12 interdepartmental impact tests ranging from carbon assessment to gender equality, race equality, human rights and rural proofing etc.….but counter terrorism wasn’t on the list…despite there having been specific threats against British oil tankers in European waters.
A fundamental principle of security planning is to make oneself less of a target, or at least a more difficult target, than others. That is why every government department should at the very least be required to undertake a counter terrorism impact assessment for each of its activities. This is the sort of paradigm shift that a future Conservative government needs to ensure happens to combat the terrorist threat we face.
The fact that, as Lord West observed, small boats can enter British waters and sail up the Thames or head for any other port without the Maritime and Coastguard Agency knowing about them highlights the urgency of this issue.
