Brigadier Gerhard Wheeler discusses threats to the UK

Tindle News

Lib-Dems gathered at the Millennium Centre in Liphook to hear a visiting speaker. Retired Brigadier Gerhard Wheeler offered an insight into the threats facing the UK. After more than 30 years in the Army, commanding in Iraq and Afghanistan and later advising both the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office, he warned: “We are currently facing a wider spectrum of threats than we have for a long time."

Transcript

00:00From Russia, China or elsewhere, what should we be most worried about?

00:04Well, I think we are currently facing a wider spectrum of threats than we have for a really long time.

00:15I mean, in the background, there's always the threat of terrorism, and we've seen that for many years now,

00:22whether it had been from Northern Ireland, and there are still Northern Irish groups which are a threat to us.

00:29But we've seen threats from groups like ISIS and animal rights groups, all sorts of extreme right-wing groups,

00:41and perhaps more controversially, Palestine Action and other groups, all have created a background threat to the country.

00:49But more recently, we're now seeing that overlaid with what the Foreign Office would call state threats.

00:57Newspapers would call it grey zone or hybrid activity, but that's really hostile acts which are done by malign states

01:08who want to disrupt our way of life, but do it at just a level below where we might react in terms of going to war.

01:18So, you know, you'll see in the newspapers in the last week, accidentally, as they say, flying drones across borders.

01:28There's ships that don't have any licenses to be at sea or are legitimate ships who have a problem of dragging their anchors

01:41across transatlantic cables or gas pipelines being damaged, cyber security attacks, disinformation through our media.

01:52There's a huge array of low-level stuff and then getting more dangerous in terms of assassinations.

01:59And as we saw in the Yenco case and the Salisbury poisonings.

02:07So, a real mix of states.

02:10So, a real mix of states.

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