Assistant Commissioner Laurence Taylor, head of Counter Terrorism Policing, warned this week of a steep rise in hostile state activity, including the use of criminal proxies and online disinformation to destabilise the UK.
Speaking to myself and other journalists, he said, “We have seen a five fold increase in the number of investigations that we are managing, and it’s now about 20 percent of our casework,” Taylor said. He identified “the big three, Iran, Russia and China” as the primary state actors involved. “They are more capable, and the methods they deploy are often quite different,” he added.
Those methods now include recruiting criminal networks to deliver attacks and sow disruption. “You’re seeing those sort of criminal proxies being used by those foreign states,” he said, citing the case of a Russian-backed arson plot on a London business, which led to a 29-year prison sentence.
Taylor said disinformation and manipulation online are central to these efforts. “We’re also seeing significant increases in mis and disinformation,” he told journalists. “That mis and disinformation is creating a more destabilised environment where some of our more extremist views are then getting more traction and creating more risk.”
He described a hybrid threat picture that combines physical attacks, espionage, and the weaponisation of information. “That state threat expands from everything to physical threats on the ground, to espionage and our real sort of traditional spying by other states,” he said. The online component, he warned, amplifies domestic extremism by exploiting polarised debates and vulnerable audiences.
The risks are heightened by the nature of social media platforms. “It’s very easy for a young person, for example, to look up something, let’s call it ISIS, and then a whole load of material starts coming across their phone,” he said. “With the exponential growth of artificial intelligence and the algorithms that the platforms use, it’s very easy for that content to push you down the river.”
He was frank about what policing can and cannot do in that space. “We can’t police the internet. We’re not the moral police,” he said. “Extremism sits between terrorism and hate crime, and that’s much harder to deal with. It’s legal, and the police deal with illegality, not things that are legal.”
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Jon Savell said the same dynamic plays out through automation. “The proliferation of bots raising the profile of bits of information fuels extreme views,” he said. “That is either hostile state interference with information, or individuals motivated to generate disinformation.”
Taylor told the Home Affairs Committee last week that these trends are measurable. Since 2021, referrals to the Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit have risen by 150 percent, and could reach 40,000 a year by 2029. “We saw a 48 percent increase after the attacks on 7 October,” he said. “Some of that was very clearly being driven by robotics rather than individuals posting online.”
Much of that content, he added, originates overseas. “A lot of this stuff plays out in communities in exactly the same way as counter terrorism, through social media or issues on the ground that look and feel the same as anything else,” he said. The result is a blurring between hostile state operations and homegrown extremism, where conspiracy theories, propaganda and polarisation reinforce one another.
Taylor said hostile states often conceal their role through intermediaries. “We have seen examples where people are probably unaware that it’s state sponsored, or unaware to the extent of the state sponsorship, and therefore conducting these things in that sort of ignorance,” he said.
Despite that, he argued the UK’s counter-terrorism system is well placed to adapt, with strong partnerships at the border and internationally. “We work really closely with international partners,” he said. “We’ve got really strong partnerships, particularly with our Five Eyes partners, and we are far better at being able to identify people we need to be concerned about.”
Taylor warned that the line between terrorism, extremism, and state interference is narrowing, and that the digital ecosystem is the common ground. “We need to create an environment that is hostile to those who are intent on harming our communities, making it as hard as we can for them to operate,” he said.
