The new heads of the British military and UK foreign intelligence insist war is coming – most likely with Russia. In parallel speeches, Blaise Metreweli, newly crowned boss of the Secret Intelligence Service (aka MI6), and Air Chief Marshal Richard Knighton painted a bleak picture. If you saw the mainstream reporting, you’d think a Russian airborne division was about to parachute into Hackney.

Naturally, the imperial press went giddy for the pair’s fiery rhetoric. But the UK’s new intelligence report – released at the same time – paints a quite different picture. It suggests something more subdued. Tit-for-tat so-called ‘gray-zone’ conflict, not Vladimir Putin bombing your nan by New Year…

There’s certainly something in the air. Both speeches follow a similar pattern to comments by NATO boss Mark Rutte just days earlier on 13 December:

We must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents or great-grandparents endured.

Rutte went on:

Imagine it, a conflict reaching every home, every workplace, destruction, mass mobilisation, millions displaced, widespread suffering and extreme losses.

Their words also align with Keir Starmer’s vision. The Labour PM has followed on from his Tory predecessors with a strategy to militarise the whole of UK society and build an economy around war.

So what the hell is going on?

Military say to Bring your daughter to the slaughter?

Knighton’s speech made headlines over a bloodcurdling suggestion that Britain’s ‘sons and daughters’ would have to be sacrificed:

We should also be honest that perhaps the most obvious impact on all of us will be the cost of building this resilience.

Sons and daughters. Colleagues. Veterans. …will all have a part to play. To build. To serve. And if necessary, to fight. And more families will know what sacrifice for our nation means.

Metreweli previously worked for MI5 and as MI6’s head of technology. Yes, like ‘Q’ in James Bond as the legacy press keep tediously pointing out. She riffed on AI and computing before choosing to focus on Russia:

We all continue to face the menace of an aggressive, expansionist and revisionist Russia, seeking to subjugate Ukraine and harass NATO.

Metreweli also boasted that she “was operational to her core”:

Over nearly three decades, my career has involved recruiting and running agents in hostile territory; and leading operations in warzones to defuse threats and support peace.

What that means is anyone’s guess. But given Metreweli joined the intelligence services in 1999, we can probably infer she ran intelligence assets in the post-9/11 dirty wars.

Meanwhile, Knighton insisted the Russia threat to the UK was the same as to Germany. And Metreweli lamented the death toll in Ukraine, and warned:

Alongside the grinding war, Russia is testing us in the grey zone with tactics that are just below the threshold of war.

But there’s an issue. On the day this grim vision of the future was being laid out for us, a major intelligence report was released which contradicts it.

Threat assessment

The Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) scrutinises all the main intelligence agencies and has oversight over various other intelligence-related bodies of the British state. The ISC chose to publish its latest report on 15 December. It differs in tone from the two addresses above considerably.

It’s hard to imagine nobody was aware the two aforementioned speeches were being given on the same day as the report was coming out. Though having worked for the British government, I wouldn’t rule it out entirely.

The ISC report is 76 page long and fairly dry. But the section on Threat Assessment lacks anything like the apocalyptic tone of Metreweli’s and Knighton’s speeches:

The authors worry over Chinese and Russian intelligence operations and the threats of various kinds of terrorism. Dissident Irish Republican terrorism gets several mentions. And, the authors claim:

Since the Westminster Bridge attack of 22 March 2017 and 31 March 2025, MI5 and police partners disrupted 43 terrorist attack plots in the UK.

The most persistent cyberthreats are “certainly cyber espionage” and ransomware, and:

Russia continues to act as a capable, motivated and irresponsible threat actor in cyberspace.

The government:

continues to take measures at home and to engage internationally in efforts to counter the proliferation of equipment and materials related to weapons of mass destruction.

And that is basically it. There is little sense in the ISC report that a hot war is about to break out with Russia. This begs several questions. For example, is the report wrong? Or are the heads of the military and MI6 inflating the Russian threat?

There’s no doubt Putin is bad enough. Russia harbours “aggressive, expansionist and revisionist” urges aplenty. But then (self-evidently) so do the US and UK. Nor is there much doubt that ‘sub-threshold’ covert and overt tactics are being deployed by rival states (including our own).

But ‘sacrifice your children’ in some sort of WW3 situation? Russian tanks on the South Downs? Really?

The Imperial Press gets excited

Nothing excites legacy media defence and foreign policy journalists more than a warmongering speech. This point was amply made by Declassified UK’s Mark Curtis on Monday:

What a surprise to see Deborah Haynes, the head of the UK military and the chief of MI6 all aligned. https://t.co/ku6Xjec6WN

— Mark Curtis (@markcurtis30) December 16, 2025

In fact, Haynes and other mainstream reporters were singled out for praise by Knighton in a move which should shame any journalist worthy of the title:

Plenty of commentators, particularly the defence correspondents here tonight are working hard to raise understanding and awareness. Deborah Haynes’s excellent wargame podcast series is a great example of that…

Ex-military officer turned Telegraph writer Hamish de Breton-Gordon proved himself still very much a company man. Because what would a fiery speech from a general or spy chief be without another desperate pitch for a massive massive funding hike?:

The heads of MI6 and the Forces could not be clearer. We must actually spend on Defence ⁦@RichardShirreff⁩ ⁦@HamishDBG⁩ ⁦@Telegraph⁩ https://t.co/mPhqbB0NfM

— Hamish DBG (@HamishDBG) December 15, 2025

Tom Newton-Dunn of the Times ignored the gaping holes in the official narrative to gush over the techy stuff:

The most powerful passage in today’s excellent speech by new @ChiefMI6 Blaise Metreweli. A less delicate way of putting it – how do we influence the tech bros, when their influence is now more powerful than countries?
(rest of it here, well worth a read; https://t.co/97vV3Lcnni) pic.twitter.com/wJAC3CICsM

— Tom Newton Dunn (@tnewtondunn) December 16, 2025

In case you’re not familiar with Newton-Dunn he once published as a news article a far-right originated conspiracy theory about a left-wing network which linked Novara Media, various journalists and Corbyn-era figures with:

the IRA, Hamas and the Colombian guerilla group Farc; “radical” members of the British Medical Association; and various anti-war, anti-racist and anarchist groups, many of whom don’t even get on with each other.

Highly credible stuff.

Larisa Brown offered the sort of shallow-dive, near-reaching critique the Murdoch press is renowned for:

MI6 must seek to “outplay” the likes of Russia by stepping up its shadow war against President Putin, the new head of the spy agency has suggested https://t.co/jzldH0OKeB

— Larisa Brown (@larisamlbrown) December 15, 2025

Admittedly, there was some coherent analysis on X. It just wasn’t from journalists:

The entire public realm is collapsing in front of our eyes, but rather than fix it, they’ve decided instead to fight Ivan to the death. Your death, that is, not theirs. These people are completely fucking insane. https://t.co/wqMNEiii7y

— Simon de Jever (@de_jever) December 16, 2025

And obviously, fallen giant Paul Mason was busy encouraging everyone to support the coming war from a Marxist perspective:

The Socialist Case for Rearmament – as UK military, spy and defence chiefs warn we’re in a zone between peace and war, why the left has to turn up… link in next post… pic.twitter.com/G5mJ7r7I5E

— Paul Mason (@paulmasonnews) December 16, 2025

Standard, really.

Actual existential threats

The two speeches are significant in other ways too. Especially in what they ignore. Neither Metreweli nor Knighton mustered one signal mention of climate change. These two heads of national security – covert and overt, respectively – charged with the safety of the country did not even utter the word ‘inequality’ in their first major speeches.

Poverty also went unmentioned. Only half a decade after Covid-19 hit the UK, the word pandemic doesn’t even appear. Racism and the rise of the global far-right… not a peep.

It’s almost like the priorities of the ruling class – communicated through figures like these two war chiefs – are quite different from the priorities of working people trying to make their way through life. Or maybe these competing needs are more than simply different. Maybe our priorities are entirely at odds.

Featured image via the Canary

By Joe Glenton

From Canary via This RSS Feed.