The Jihadist Threat Ignored by the British Government
"There’s not going to be another election if something isn’t done now.”
A version of this article was first published on Courage Media.
On the twentieth anniversary of the 7/7 Bombings, when four Jihadists detonated suicide bombs on the London Underground, killing 52 and injuring over 770, I received a call warning about the imminent likelihood of an Islamic terror attack in Britain. My contact allowed me to relay this on the condition of their anonymity; but stresses this information originated from a credible intelligence source. This source has briefed the British government time and again, warning that their immigration policies have exacerbated the risk of these attacks happening. The government has done nothing. Two decades on, and the state has refused to learn the lessons of 7/7.
In 2005, counter-terrorism police were inattentive to the potential of Jihadist networks travelling between cities to commit attacks. 7/7 taught counter-terrorism services that “the threat was national”. Peter Clarke, the Metropolitan Police officer in charge of counter-terrorism policing at the time, told the BBC, “I haven't spoken to anybody who was involved in either counter-terrorism or in the intelligence agencies, who don't regard it as a failure”.
Between 2014 and 2019, a spate of “DIY attacks” by a diffuse Jihadist network, inspired by ISIS, turned attention to preventing online radicalisation. But as William Shawcross warned in his 2023 review, “When discussing Islamism, Prevent staff frequently came back to issues relating to mental health concerns and ‘vulnerabilities’”, and denied that Islam is “an essential part of the trajectory towards terrorism”. Prevent remains focused on condemning “cultural nationalism” as a right-wing extremist ideology, while distancing Islam from any reputation damage that Jihadist attacks may cause, thereby allowing Islamists to evade interventions.
In 2025, these persistent failures pose an existential threat to Britain. My source explained that foreign intelligence is monitoring 30,000 active Islamic terror suspects in Britain. (Of the 43,000 people on MI5's terror watchlist in 2020, 90% were Islamists.) They predict a small group will arm themselves with homemade explosive devices, Molotov cocktails, and machetes, and attack critical infrastructure and dense civilian housing. Whole cities could be set ablaze. Multiple simultaneous attacks could spread the police and emergency services thin; and inspire copycat attackers and opportunist looters to capitalise on the chaos. Communications infrastructure could be targeted, crippling the emergency services. When I asked for a timeline for the attacks, the source said, “Before 2030, but it could be 3 months to a year away.” My contact suggested this could also be why the government plans to test the UK’s Emergency Alert System again on 7 September.
The source warned that people smuggling gangs are facilitating the passage of trained Islamic militants across Europe and into Britain. In 2015, intercepted telephone calls and letter correspondence between ISIS members revealed their ambition to use migrants in boats crossing the Mediterranean as a “psychological weapon” against Europe. Over 170,000 illegal migrants have crossed from France in the decade since – including a record >20,000 so far this year. Some have already been caught: including three Iranian nationals, given the right to remain in Britain after arriving illegally via lorry and small boats, charged with spying for Tehran and plotting terrorist violence in May.
Last week, Patrick Chrystys revealed on GB News that smuggling gangs are marketing themselves with ISIS recruitment videos and execution footage on social media. This follows years of gangs using footage of British women filmed without their consent, while drunk and dressed immodestly by Islamic standards, to advertise their services to North African clients. The £5.2 billion trade is financed by the honor-based 8th century Islamic Hawala finance system, which allows smugglers from nations of origin (like Afghanistan) to make payments to illicit businesses (Hawaladars) in Britain on behalf of the migrants. Whether customers are fulfilling their religious duty to emigrate and evangelise (Hijra), or simply looking for work as illegal delivery-drivers, the smuggling gangs who broadcast their violent intent are inundated with eager customers.
My source warned that smuggling gangs have also trafficked arms across the Channel. “They’ve been floating in arms shipments, basically,” they said. In his investigation, Chrystys obtained footage of one smuggler brandishing an AR-15 rifle and Hatsan's Escort shotgun, before helping migrants stow themselves aboard lorries in Calais. On 28 June, the National Crime Agency discovered a shipment of 20 firearms, 320 rounds of ammunition, and £4.9 million in drugs inside a lorry at the Port of Dover, crossing from France.
The driver of the Lithuanian-registered lorry, a 34-year-old Tajikistan national, was arrested and then released on bail. But how many more shipments have evaded detection?
Where are these militants and their weapons now? My contact explained that foreign intelligence fears, like in the Gaza strip, that they are hidden in the homes, mosques, and madrassas of Britain’s Muslim enclaves. One indication of this was during last summer’s riots, when a Staffordshire Police liaison officer was recorded telling members of a Muslim militia that “If there are any weapons or anything like that, then what I would do is discard them at the mosque. … Don’t give anybody any reason to have any interaction with the police, so if there’s any weapons, get rid of them, we are not going to arrest anybody.”
Prisons, too, are becoming epicentres of Jihadist radicalisation and recruitment. A former Muslim inmate at HMP Belmarsh told the Evening Standard in 2016 that the maximum security wing operates “like a jihadi training camp”, and that “governors, prison officers and imams all know about this”. Since 2019, a group (unimaginatively) calling themselves the Muslim Brotherhood have become the largest faction in British prisons. Last week, a Telegraph investigation revealed inmates are being taught how to make bombs by a nexus of convicted terrorists. In 2017, a Muslim terror cell calling themselves the “Three Musketeers” were jailed, after meeting in HMP Belmarsh and plotting to murder MPs when freed.
My contact reiterated that, after October 7th, the IDF had to assign 10-to-15 soldiers for every one Hamas militant. The IDF had 169,500 active-duty personnel, 465,000 reserve units, a Jewish and Druze population with experience from compulsory military service, and a $23.6 billion annual military budget to draw upon in October 2023. Britain has only a few thousand trained combatants among its >147,300 Armed Forces personnel, and the lowest number of reservists since the Napoleonic Wars. In 2025, 1,140 more personnel left the forces than joined. (Despite this struggle to recruit frontline servicemen, the Conservative government set a target in 2021 for women to account for 30% of the Armed Forces by 2030.) Armed police officers aren’t available to bolster numbers either, as many abandoned firearms duties over the persecution of officer Martyn Blake, who lawfully shot gangster Chris Kaba in 2022. There is a dearth of officers capable of bringing order back to Britain’s streets.
As Ferguson’s law states, any great power that spends more on debt servicing than on defense risks ceasing to be a great power. While defence spending is expected to total £56.9 billion in 2025, debt interest is almost double that at £104.9 billion — comprising 8.2% of total public spending. All of this is to say that Army personnel would be vastly outnumbered by the Jihadists already monitored by foreign intelligence and MI5, plus those awaiting release in British prisons, and emigrating through legal and illegal means. Thanks to successive governments’ failure to prepare for this eventuality, and their exacerbation of the problem through permissive immigration policies, Britain is on the brink of the barbarians within its gates putting all we love to the torch.
This source also suggested that practice attacks have already happened. At least eight electrical substations caught alight between March and May 2025 — including the infamous fire at Heathrow Airport. This could be the inevitable effect of entropy on a complex system staffed by people incapable of maintaining it. Or, as the National Grid suggested after a substation outside Exeter city exploded, it could be “third party damage”. Former colonel Philip Ingram suggests it could be the Kremlin: with such tactics “straight out of the Russian military intelligence playbook”. But Professor of War Studies at King's College London, David Betz, thinks domestic saboteurs are more likely.
In a sequel to his viral essay in Military Strategy magazine, Betz predicts an 18.5% chance that civil war will break out in Britain and/or France in the next five years. “Objectively,” Betz writes, “one must conclude that there is ample cause for concern about a worryingly large possibility of a form of war occurring in the West, to which it has not thought itself vulnerable for a long time.” A febrile cultural environment has been built by resentful racial identity politics, the proliferation of Islamism among ethnic enclaves in British cities, and the sudden cognisance of a loss of status (“Downgrading”) among the indigenous majority population. “‘No, you are not taking crazy pills’,” Betz reassures the general public, “the feeling you have had that something like this is going seriously wrong is right."
The catalyst for this conflict, which could claim tens-of-thousands of lives, could be vigilante attacks on critical infrastructure. Gas pipes, overhead electrical lines, substations, the railway network… All are viable targets for those looking to cut off cities from power, water, and food supplies. During an event at the Unherd club last week, Betz cited the Purdown BT Tower in Bristol — protected only by a thin wire fence, dummy security cameras, and the occasional unarmed security guard — as an example of how vulnerable our infrastructure is.
This may be why the government proscribed Palestine Action, after its activists broke into RAF base Brize Norton and vandalised military aircraft. The reason given, that “Proscription is ideologically neutral”, and demonstrates the government's “zero tolerance approach to terrorism, regardless of its form or underlying ideology”, is about as believable as Home Secretary Yvette Cooper's saying she thinks “The right to protest and the right to free speech are the cornerstone of our democracy”. Given the vote became a casus belli for spawning Jeremy Corbyn's rival Islamo-Leftist party, further splitting the vanishing Labour vote, it is unlikely the government acted out of principle or political prudence. Perhaps the state's antibody reaction was motivated more by wanting to deter future attacks against Britain's unprotected infrastructure than a sudden realisation that globalising the intifada would be a bad idea.
Why would I risk writing this down? Aren't I giving them ideas? “It’s not like releasing this information to the public is going to give them ideas,” my source said. “They’ve got the ideas.” The British government has been warned, and refuses to act. Even when Russia is the proposed culprit, as associate fellow of Britain’s Royal United Services Institute, Oleksandr Danylyuk says, “There is no appetite in Western European governments to tell people about things such as sabotage when you are not really ready to do anything”. As Dominic Cummings wrote, “If you’re not in the meetings, you can’t accurately estimate the relative levels of dishonesty and self-delusion involved.”
“… many politicians develop weird super-position personalities, where they sort-of-know and sort-of-lie to themselves such than an impartial observer can rarely conclude either ‘they’re lying’ or ‘they’re deluded’: it’s a bit of both.
“In No10 meetings with the Met on riots, I saw for myself a) the weird psychological zone of how much order rests not on actual physical forces but perceptions among a few elites about such forces that can very quickly change, and b) how scared the senior police are at the prospect of crucial psychological spells being broken.”
Much of the government’s response to the looming threat of civil unrest concerns maintaining the illusion that they are still in control, and that our incompetent politicians and under-resourced military are capable of handling the crisis. Hence the hysteria about “far right thuggery”, and Keir Starmer marshalling magistrates courts to work round-the-clock to convict people for social media posts, following last summer’s Southport riots. Cummings explains this is part of “propaganda operations with the old media to spread the meme that our ‘real danger’ is the ‘far right’ (code for ‘white people’).” The state’s playbook is to continue to force the discontented host majority to accept their “downgrading”, while appeasing aggrieved minorities as “marginalised communities.” (It is worth noting that Cummings came to this conclusion without ever speaking to Betz.)
The civil service also filters these warnings through ideology. As I have covered extensively for Courage Media, the Home Office, Metropolitan Police, and security apparatus have been targets of entryism by Islamic activists, who launder ideas on behalf of Jihadist groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir. On Monday, two Muslim soldiers in the British Army, signallers Zakariya Munir and Mohammed Salah, were dismissed after sharing videos of an ISIS execution and helmet-cam footage of desecrated corpses from the October 7th massacre. Whether through sympathisers in positions of power, or persistent ignorance by politicians, Britain is wholly unprepared to thwart this impending Jihadist attack.
Hence why Betz is pessimistic about the prospect of a political offramp to avert civil conflict. When I asked my contact what they thought, they said “People keep talking about ‘Oh, we’ll fix this after the next election…’ There’s not going to be another election if something isn’t done now.” Perhaps this is alarmist; but allied states are certainly acting as if this is the case. Israel’s Minister of Diaspora Affairs, Amichai Chikli has warned Jews to leave the UK and Europe because of the neglected threat of the Muslim Brotherhood, and rising antisemitism among Muslim enclaves. The US State Department has repeatedly intervened on UK citizens’ behalf: condemning the British government for persecuting critics of mass immigration and Islam as “Extreme right-wing terrorists”. But Britain’s politicians still insist there is no graphite on its roof.
There are a handful of exceptions. Conservative MP Nick Timothy has noticed “the spectre of civil war is being discussed”. Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick is tackling the Islamification of British prisons and enforcement of Islamic blasphemy laws via public order offences. Independent MP Rupert Lowe has launched pressure group Restore Britain, with policies designed to reverse mass immigration, ban the burqa, and prosecute the mob who drove a teacher and his family at Batley Grammar School teacher into hiding for showing a cartoon of their prophet Muhammad in a religious studies lesson. Former MP Douglas Carswell has suggested using the precedent set by stripping ISIS bride Shamima Begum of her citizenship to deport grooming gang perpetrators, Islamic terrorists, and immigrants who refuse to assimilate. But these voices remain a courageous minority.
A rapid repeal of legislation is required. The Human Rights Act (1998), which enshrines the European Convention on Human Rights in British law, is the source of the incessant appeals against deportation orders by foreign criminals. The Constitutional Reform and Governance Act (2010) prevents democratically elected ministers from firing and replacing obstructive activists in the civil service, making them effectively a permanent unelected government. The Equality Act (2010) and Race Relations Act (1976) require public bodies to act as arbiters of “community cohesion”, consult self-appointed representatives of “protected characteristics” groups, and hire disproportionate numbers of aggrieved racial and religious minorities to meet “Public Sector Equality Duty” quotas. The Charities Act (2011) creates a grievance industrial complex for activists who purport to be working on behalf of “the advancement of human rights, conflict resolution or reconciliation or the promotion of religious or racial harmony or equality and diversity”. All of these pieces of malign legislation must go.
The Labour government has no intention of doing this. Pressure must be applied by our allies, to save the UK from itself. The US could make sanctions against the Muslim Brotherhood and its Western outfits a condition of NATO membership. This security guarantee would sweeten the deal for Arab nations to ratify the Abraham Accords, since they have been sensible enough to ban the Brotherhood years ago. It would starve domestic idea-laundries of funding and marching orders. The British government must be made to listen to these credible and repeated warnings, before it is too late.
Chilling. None so blind. It seems as if the authorities are hoping to control those that they think they can control whilst hoping the immigrant population won’t do any of this.