The lead story on the front page of today’s Sunday Times (behind the paywall) proclaims “China gives £50 million aid for Olympics” and reports that:

“A Chinese company is offering Britain £50 million of ‘aid’ to put in a free mobile phone network in time for the Olympics.

Huawei, one of the worlds biggest telecoms equipment firms, is presenting the offer for the London Underground as a gift from one Olympic host nation to another.”

This proposal has the support of Mayor Boris Johnson.

However, as the Sunday Times warns:

“The offer has been made only two years after intelligence chiefs warned that China could have the capabilityto shut down Britain by bringing down its telecoms and utilities systems.

They raised fears that equipment already installed by Huawei in BT’s network could be used to cripple vital services.

A deal would see Huawei, which has close military links, install mobile transmitters along the ceilings of tunnels so that commuters can make and receive calls for the first time while travelling underground.”

I have been concerned about Huawei for some time.  We are breath-takingly complacent about the vulnerability of our critical national infrastructure and – particularly in the current economic climate – there seems to be no appetite from the Government to prevent huge chunks of it falling into foreign hands.

This is potentially another example – aided and abetted by Mayor Boris Johnson.

Not all Tories are so relaxed (and Mayor Johnson has a reputation for being very relaxed!): Patrick Mercer MP has pointed out:

“… it absolutely answers a terrorists’ prayers to be able to detonate devices on the Underground.  …  It has been proven that a proportion of the cyber attacks on this country come from China.  I wonder when the eyes of the world are upon us whether there is sense in using a Chinese firm to install a sensitive mobile network.”

These are serious matters and a serious London Mayor should not complacently give his support, presumably he hopes that if his eyes are firmly closed and his fingers are crossed that it will all be OK.

There is an arrogance about the Conservative Coalition, especially in respect of those who will bear the brunt of their policies. 

There could not be a starker illustration of this than the story in today’s Sun, “Heroes sacked by email“, which reports that:

“TROOPS were stunned yesterday after 38 senior heroes including one on the Afghan front line were crassly sacked by EMAIL.

The shocked men – all warrant officers – were informed they were victims of defence cuts.

Each got an impersonal message advising them: “Start planning your resettlement.” One stormed: “I thought it was a joke.”

The MoD was branded “shameful and callous”.

The group, who all have more than 20 years’ service, includes a Royal Tank Regiment veteran unceremoniously dumped while serving on the frontline in Afghanistan. Another – who risked his life doing FIVE warzone tours – said: “It was out of the blue. We’re disgusted.

“Essentially 38 of us are ‘sacked’ having spent our lives in the military. It’s not good – five tours of duty and sacked by email.”"

Shadow defence secretary Jim Murphy has responded to the news, saying the soldiers had been treated in a “callous, cold-hearted, soulless” way and called on ministers to take responsibility for the incident.

“We can’t halt every redundancy in the armed forces, but this is no way to treat men and women who have served their country fearlessly for so many years,” he told the BBC Radio 4′s Today programme.

“Sacking anybody by e-mail is wrong, but sacking our armed forces in this way is absolutely unforgivable.”

Is he bothered?

Are they bothered?

Expect more of this.

I spent a large part of today sitting in on a table-top exercise designed to see how London’s police and other services and agencies would respond to a developing emergency on the streets of London.  It would be inappropriate to go into more details. However, it did bring home to me the importance and value of such exercises.

I will readily admit to once having been something of a cynic about such “war-gaming”.  The idea of bringing together quite a large group of people to act out how they would do their jobs in an imaginary set of circumstances at first sight could appear rather absurd.  Yet the evidence from de-briefs after real emergencies convinced me long ago that these sorts of exercises and practices have a real benefit.  Organisations or parts of organisations that only work together occasionally or only do so under normally fairly clearly-defined situations need to understand each other’s capabilities and practices in the very different circumstances that would apply in a major emergency.  Exercises mean that key individuals get to know each other, procedures are tested and worked through and – most importantly – potential problems are identified and can be resolved.

Although some of the reports from the inquest into the deaths of those killed in the July 2005 bombings have inevitably focused on those things that did not work as well as they might have done, much of what the witnesses have described has demonstrated how well London’s emergency services performed under the terrible circumstances of that day.  I know from those I have spoken to who were intimately involved how important previous exercises had been in planning for what unfolded five years ago and improving the collective response of the emergency services.

I am sure today’s exercise will have been similarly valuable, even though one hopes that the procedures tested never have to be carried out for real.  Several issues emerged where it was clear existing plans were inadequate or required further consideration.  And it has to be better to discover such problems in an exercise than in the middle of a full-scale emergency.

We are told that there will be a revamped National Cyber Security Strategy published in the next few months.  This will explain what the £650 million of new money allocated for cyber security in the spending review will actually be used to deliver (I understand that Whitehall Departments are still bickering over who will get their hands on this money - the Ministry of Defence and the Home Office both believe it should come to them rather than the Cabinet Office).

However, I wonder whether it will also propose legislation.  In the United States a number of members of Congress are putting forward what they are calling the “Homeland Security Cyber and Physical Infrastructure Protection Act of 2010”.  This will give a statutory basis to the Office of Cybersecurity & Communications based in the Department of Homeland Security and would, in particular, create a new Cybersecurity Compliance Division to oversee the establishment of performance-based standards responsive to the particular risks to the .gov domain and critical infrastructure networks.

This is an interesting model.  In the UK, the Government bodies that are responsible for protecting the critical national infrastructure do not have a statutory basis and do not have any formal powers.  In my view, this hampered the effectiveness of the old National Infrastructure Security Coordination Centre, which is now incorporated into the Centre for the Protection of the National Infrastructure and falls under the ambit of the Security Service.

I have long advocated that underpinning the “voluntarist” and consensual framework Government needs to have a statutory frmaework that – in extremis – can be used to require Government agencies and those private companies that supply much of the national infrastructure to meet certain minimum standards and can direct action effectively in the event of some major problem arising.

It is a sign that a politician has achieved a certain status when folk songs are written about them.

George Osborne’s cup must thererefore be running over about this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BejSPeP3lFE&feature=related

One of the lead stories on the BBC News this morning was “Police in training for ‘Mumbai-style’ gun attack in UK“.  This reported that:

“UK security chiefs have ordered an acceleration in police training to prepare for any future “Mumbai-style” gun attack in a public place.

A series of counter-terrorism exercises are being held with police marksmen training alongside units of the SAS.

Police armed response units are also being given more powerful weapons.”

There is no doubt that this issue is one of the current preoccupations of those concerned with security on the British mainland (and indeed elsewhere in Europe).  There is also no doubt about how difficult this would be to cope with given the current style of British policing.

Most police officers here are unarmed.  Even in London, where the Metropolitan Police has a higher proportion of armed officers than elsewhere (mainly because of static protection responsibility around embassies, Government buildings, Heathrow airport etc), only around one in ten officers are authorised ever to carry guns and the areas where there are routine armed patrols are very limited.

In Mumbai, over a three-day period in November 2008, ten terrorists operating in pairs with automatic weapons, improvised explosive devices, equipped with GPS and apparently communicating with a remote controller by mobile telephone, killed 173 people and wounded 308.  They applied hit and run tactics, were opportunistic, took hostages and established defensible positions.

By contrast,earlier this year in Cumbria, a lone individual, Derrick Bird, armed with two non-automatic weapons went on a killing spree which left twelve dead and a similar number seriously wounded before he killed himself.

Gross that tally up with more gunmen, automatic weaponry in a more populous area and the scale of what is possible becomes apparent.  For any Western democracy, planning a strategy to deal with a ruthless heavily armed coordinated attack in a populous city is no easy task.

Current training does not equip the police to deliver the sort of response needed to deal with Mumbai-style insurgents.  And it would be the police that would be likely to be the first on the scene.

For those who think Special Forces are the answer, it is worth remembering that the time for any conventional armed forces to be mobilised would be measured in hours –  and this would inevitably mean a very high casualty rate before any intervention could succeed.

It is no surprise therefore that the BBC reports that “David Cameron has taken a personal interest in the problem ever since his first threat assessment given to him when he took office in May.”

And there are real dilemmas.  Even in London – with more armed police to draw on – dealing with multiple mobile attacks would be extremely difficult and police tactics are focused on containing an incident – usually involving a single gunman.  Exchanging fire with heavily armed ruthless gunmen requires military-style engagement and different weapons and ammunition.  Police officers have not previously been trained in this way and not all of the currently armed officers would be suitable for such a task or willing to engage in it.

Such training will take time.

And even when units of suitably trained officers have been created, having them on continuous standby will be expensive and having such units on regular patrol will mark a massive movement away from the traditional vision of unarmed British bobbies-on-the-beat.

Today’s BBC report will no doubt start a public debate on the implications of all this, but the reality is that the face of British policing is likely to be changed forever as a result – particularly if the public expenditure review means that more conventional “traditional” policing has to be cut back to pay for it.

I am told that some people are having trouble understanding the logic behind the decisions on aircraft carriers contained in the Strategic Defence and Security Review.

This will help:

Helpfully highlighted by Guido Fawkes.

And it was made three years ago ….

The BBC is reporting that the Coalition Government is considering not taking a final decision on the replacement of Trident until after the next General Election.

This would save money in the short-term, but not in the long-term, as it will risk losing the skills of engineers who might lose their jobs if there is no work for them, and will increase the costs of repairing existing Vanguard submarines which will have to last for longer.  If the decision is ultimately not to proceed, substantial costs will still be incurred between now and 2015 and these will be wasted.

One of the key reasons for the delay is, according to the BBC:

“Delaying any decision beyond 2015 would also mean avoiding a political row in the run-up to the next general election.  While the Conservatives strongly support Trident renewal, the Liberal Democrats do not and it remains one of the few disagreements left unresolved by the coalition agreement.”

This is pathetic.  Either Trident is necessary for the nation’s defence or it is not.  If it is, delay will put the country at risk because the Trident submarines may become unusable before the replacement is ready.  If you take the view that Trident is a luxury that the UK can no longer afford, then this delay in taking the decision merely costs more money.

It is hardly leadership to dodge a decision like this, just to avoid a row between Coalition partners.

Am I surprised?  Well no – I already knew that the Coalition was gutless and unprincipled.

I have already speculated that:

“David Cameron personally has been convinced that the comprehensive spending review must ensure that substantial extra resources are spent on developing the UK’s capacity to counter cyber threats to its infrastructure and that the debate between the Treasury and the Cabinet Office is whether the new investment should be £1.5 billion or £2 billion.”

Now The Register reports:

“An awkwardly-worded reply by Defence Secretary Liam Fox to questions in the House of Commons suggests that cuts in information security spending are not on the agenda for the Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR), which is due to report back in the Autumn. On the contrary, Britain is looking to boost its capabilities in the area.

Cyber-security is an important element of the SDSR and has already had considerable consideration. Decisions on enhancing our capabilities will form part of the review, which we will announce to the House later this autumn.

Developing a military cyber-security policy should not be the responsibility of the Ministry of Defence alone, Fox added.

Investing in better cyber-security will not be an option for the United Kingdom. What is being considered under the National Security Council as part of the SDSR is how that occurs. We will face increasing threats in cyberspace in the years ahead-the question is how we identify the weakest areas, which need to be looked at first, and how we develop the technologies so that, as the other technologies that might affect us continue to evolve, we are best protected. That will require us to look at research across the board.

The exchange, which occurred during defence questions in the House of Commons on Monday, is recorded for posterity by Hansard here.”

It is, of course, possible that Liam Fox was speaking “off-piste” or was simply “mis-speaking“.

However,  the topic was on the agenda of a recent meeting of the National Security Council – so this may be the best indication yet as to what is emerging from this aspect of the Strategic Defence and Security Review.

We will know soon enough.

My default position is that the new Coalition Government is hell-bent on creating a double-dip recession and on dismantling vital parts of the public sector, is ideologically-driven and is cavalier about the impact of its policies on disadvantaged communities. And I remain to be convinced that it is not taking unacceptable risks with national security.
So the stories I have been hearing about the willingness of the Government to invest in the nation’s cyber-security come as an unexpected, but pleasant, surprise.
I am told that David Cameron personally has been convinced that the comprehensive spending review must ensure that substantial extra resources are spent on developing the UK’s capacity to counter cyber threats to its infrastructure and that the debate between the Treasury and the Cabinet Office is whether the new investment should be £1.5 billion or £2 billion.
This of course is still far less than many other countries are investing. However, if my informants are correct, this would be a useful step in the right direction. Seeing will be believing. And we’ll see on 20th October.