A Labour MP has pressed his own government to speak to the public on the true scale of Russian hostile activity in Britain, with Graeme Downie saying the UK is already in conflict with Moscow even if ministers won’t say so themselves.

The Dunfermline and Dollar MP tweeted about his concern on the matter after a New York Times investigation found Russian-linked hackers were behind the ransomware attack that crippled Jaguar Land Rover last year, and says he’s been raising it for months, including in the Commons just last week, in the hope of getting more made public. In his words:

“For months, I have called for the UK government to make more information about this attack public, including in the Chamber just last week, so the British people can see we are already in a conflict with Russia.”

The Times investigation, citing people close to the case, says the FBI, the National Crime Agency, the National Cyber Security Centre, Microsoft and Google’s Mandiant unit all worked on it, and that their conclusion is the breach traces back to a Russian-linked group, though what’s still unclear is whether the hackers were acting on direct Kremlin orders, on their own, or with the state simply looking the other way. Microsoft reportedly flagged the suspected group to JLR within days of the attack.

The numbers are big: around 800 of JLR’s computer systems went down, production stopped for more than five weeks across plants in the UK, India, Brazil and Slovakia, and a 200,000-strong supply chain was left hanging, with the damage to the British economy put at up to £1.9 billion and the government ending up stepping in with a £1.5 billion support package to keep the carmaker afloat.

None of this is entirely new, since the Telegraph was already reporting Russian involvement as an “active line of enquiry” back in October, after no ransom note ever showed up, which investigators took as a sign this wasn’t standard criminal ransomware, while a government spokesperson at the time wouldn’t be drawn beyond saying the UK “will continue” calling out malicious cyber activity where the evidence holds up.

Downie didn’t stop at the hack, and in a follow-up post talked about cyberattacks, poisonings, damage to subsea cables, and a foiled arson plot against the Prime Minister’s car as all part of the same picture. He wrote:

“Cyber attacks, poisonings, subsea cables, a planned arson attack on the Prime Minister’s car. This is not ‘sub threshold’ or ‘grey’ activity. These Russian attacks directly impact ordinary British people every day. We should tell them that and protect them.”

The arson reference is to Roman Lavrynovych and Stanislav Carpiuc, convicted earlier this month over a string of arson attacks on properties and a car linked to Sir Keir Starmer, with reporting since suggesting the pair were directed by a Russian-speaking handler over Telegram as part of a wider Moscow-run sabotage and disinformation campaign, though UK authorities haven’t gone that far in court and formal attribution to the Russian state hasn’t happened.

Former defence secretary Ben Wallace has called the arson campaign a “deliberate and definite escalation against the British state,” one that in his view would have needed sign-off from somewhere near the top in Moscow.

Ministers still won’t use the word conflict, but add it up, a £1.9 billion hit to one of Britain’s biggest carmakers, two convictions over an arson plot against the PM’s own car, and questions still hanging over subsea cable damage, and Downie isn’t the only one at Westminster wondering why the government keeps reaching for “grey” instead.