I’ve got an article in this month’s World Today, Chatham House’s monthly magazine. It’s about the UK’s approach to national security. Here’s a taster:
British Governments have rarely taken a strategic approach to national security, preferring instead to focus separately on issues of defence, foreign affairs,development and intelligence. Invariably, this has led to narrow strategies, which have centred on individual Whitehall departments, or created new agencies and units to meet emerging security challenges.
In the wake of September 11 2001 for instance, the Security Service MI5 moved away from managing a portfolio of risks, which included organised crime, to focus almost entirely on the threat from international terrorism. Nearly all the service’s work on organised crime was passed to the Serious Organised Crime Agency, an amalgamation of a number of different organisations including the National Crime Squad and National Criminal Intelligence Service, which was established by the Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill of 2005.
Current operations, policy decisions and legislation also prevent the government from taking a strategic approach. At present most of the Ministry of Defence’s time and resources are devoted to operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, while the new Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism, based in the Home Office, focuses on counter terrorism, rather than wider security issues, as originally envisaged by the former Home Secretary John Reid.
Most important of all, an institutional bias is alive and well in Westminster, Whitehall and beyond. Instead of discussing the global risks to Britain, recent debate on national security has focused on the roles of government institutions rather than the problems that need to be solved. Some commentators have lamented the decline of the Foreign Office, while others have questioned the increase in spending on development aid at a time when savings have to be found in the defence budget. It is a depressing cycle of claim and counter claim which smacks of short-termism and a lack of leadership across government.
