The official threat level is classed as being "Severe" - this is one down from the highest level, "Critical", which means an attack is imminent. Over the last few months, we in Britain have become a little obsessed with the economy, falling house prices and the credit crunch, but it should not be forgotten that a significant number of UK citizens have been planning to carry out attacks with the aim of causing mass casualties.The report leaked to The Sunday Telegraph identifies three areas - London, Birmingham and Luton - which MI5 and Special Branch believe are enclaves or hot beds of terrorist activity, where "some thousands" of extremists committed to supporting Jihadi activities. It is this fact alone which will worry the security services the most. Each of these areas has sizeable Muslim populations and while the vast majority are peace loving and regard militant Islam as an abomination, some are also in denial about the size of the threat from members of their communities. But it should not be forgotten that Islamist terrorists are members of a covert conspiracy, where even members of there own families have little idea that their sons or daughters have become radicalised.
The Government has attempted to combat the radicalisation of disaffected members of the Muslim community by urging religious leaders to ban Islamist preachers from getting a foothold in mosques. While this policy has met with some success, this report would suggest that the numbers of young Muslims signing up to al-Qaeda philosophy is growing. Preventing radicalisation is almost an impossible task especially when Britain and a large number of its allies are locked into conflict in Muslim countries.
The report also tells us that Islamist groups are still managing to send British nationals, some of whom will be Muslim converts, to fight against British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. In camps dotted along the Pakistan/Afghan border they are being taught how to build bombs and form covert cells. Some will be sent to fight on the frontline in Iraq and Afghanistan while others, according to the report, will be ordered to return to the UK to establish new terrors networks.
MI5 has doubled in size since 9/11 and now has nine regional offices across the country. But its staff can only achieve so much. Unlike the BBC television series "Spooks", not every covert MI5 mission will end in success. The Security Services' 3,500 spies have been working flat out since the 2005 London bombings and it is likely that the Security Service may need to expand again in the next few years to keep pace with the growing threat. This will no doubt raise certain moral questions for a liberal democracy.
MI5 is well aware that it cannot uncover every plot or stop every attack - eventually one will get through. All we can hope for is that the attack will be unsophisticated, like that attempted by Nicky Reilly, who attempted to blow up a restaurant in Exeter using a crude home made device. But the horrible reality is that eventually a highly sophisticated plot will one day slip under the radar and the consequences for us in the UK will be catastrophic.
Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former director general of MI5, often said that in all likelihood al-Qaeda will detonate a "dirty bomb" in a western capital in the near future. If that was to happen in London today the entire western banking system - which is already fragile - would collapse. When the British Army was fighting a counter-insurgency war in Ulster, the mantra of the IRA was "We only have to be lucky once - the British have to be lucky all the time". The same is still true today in the war against Islamist extremists.