Risk of terrorism ‘rising’ says Home Secretary Suella Braverman as government launches review of counter terror

Published

2 years ago

July 18, 2023

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The risk from terrorism is “rising”, Home Secretary Suella Braverman has said.

The cabinet minister was speaking as the government published a review of its counter-terrorism strategy, CONTEST, which has been updated for the first time in five years.

Ms Braverman said: “We now face a domestic terrorist threat which is less predictable, harder to detect and investigate; a persistent and evolving threat from Islamist terrorist groups overseas; and an operating environment where technology continues to provide both opportunity and risk to our counter-terrorism efforts.

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“We therefore judge that the risk from terrorism is once again rising.”

In a speech announcing the report, Ms Braverman added that the rise was from a “lower base”, and the risk is “not as high as a few years ago”.

The CONTEST strategy has been around since 2003, and was last updated in 2018 following the five terror attacks in 2017.

Since then, there have been nine terror attacks, which killed six people and injured 20 people – and a further 39 attacks were disrupted, according to the Home Office.

This year’s review highlighted how the “primary domestic terrorist threat” comes from “Islamist terrorism”.

It makes up “approximately 67% of attacks since 2018, about three quarters of MI5 caseload and 64% of those in custody for terrorism-connected offences” as of March this year.

The next most serious threat is right-wing extremism; the Home Office reckons this makes up approximately 22% of attacks since 2018, a quarter of MI5’s caseload and 28% of those in custody for terrorism-connected offences.

When it comes to Islamist extremism, the review states that there is a “diminishing” link between malefactors and “explicit affiliation and fixed ideological alignment” with any one group.

This is due to the “relative decline” in al Qaeda and the Islamic State (IS), also known as Daesh.

A shrinking in the number of Islamist figureheads and an increasingly online world means there are a greater number of “issues and grievances from a wider range of sources becoming influences and drivers” of terrorists.

For right-wing extremists, there is less organisation when compared to Islamic terrorists, according to the new review.

Rather than formal groups with a leadership structure and plans to seize territory, extreme right-wing groups tend to consist of “informal online communities which facilitate international links”.

Distributed structures and online organisation were areas highlighted several times in the CONTEST update.

It stated the small rise in the number of investigations into and arrests of minors by counter-terrorism police was mostly linked to online behaviour.

But more than half of those under 18 convicted of terrorism in the past five years were charged with non-violent crimes, like collecting or sharing terrorist information.

Politics

Gensler separates Bitcoin from pack, calls most crypto ‘highly speculative’

Published

3 hours ago

December 3, 2025

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Gensler separates Bitcoin from pack, calls most crypto ‘highly speculative’

Former US Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler renewed his warning to investors about the risks of cryptocurrencies, calling most of the market “highly speculative” in a new Bloomberg interview on Tuesday.

He carved out Bitcoin (BTC) as comparatively closer to a commodity while stressing that most tokens don’t offer “a dividend” or “usual returns.”

Gensler framed the current market backdrop as a reckoning consistent with warnings he made while in office that the global public’s fascination with cryptocurrencies doesn’t equate to fundamentals.

“All the thousands of other tokens, not the stablecoins that are backed by US dollars, but all the thousands of other tokens, you have to ask yourself, what are the fundamentals? What’s underlying it… The investing public just needs to be aware of those risks,” he said.

Gensler’s record and industry backlash

Gensler led the SEC from April 17, 2021, to Jan. 20, 2025, overseeing an aggressive enforcement agenda that included lawsuits against major crypto intermediaries and the view that many tokens are unregistered securities.

The industry winced at high‑profile actions against exchanges and staking programs, as well as the posture that most token issuers fell afoul of registration rules.

*Gary Gensler labels crypto as “highly speculative.” Source:* *Bloomberg*

Under Gensler’s tenure, Coinbase was sued by the SEC for operating as an unregistered exchange, broker and clearing agency, and for offering an unregistered staking-as-a-service program. Kraken was also forced to shut its US staking program and pay a $30 million penalty.

The politicization of crypto

Pushed on the politicization of crypto, including references to the Trump family’s crypto involvement by the Bloomberg interviewer, the former chair rejected the framing.

“No, I don’t think so,” he said, arguing it’s more about capital markets fairness and “commonsense rules of the road,” than a “Democrat versus Republican thing.”

He added: “When you buy and sell a stock or a bond, you want to get various information,” and “the same treatment as the big investors.” That’s the fairness underpinning US capital markets.

ETFs and the drift to centralization

On ETFs, Gensler said finance “ever since antiquity… goes toward centralization,” so it’s unsurprising that an ecosystem born decentralized has become “more integrated and more centralized.”

He noted that investors can already express themselves in gold and silver through exchange‑traded funds, and that during his tenure, the first US Bitcoin futures ETFs were approved, tying parts of crypto’s plumbing more closely to traditional markets.

Gensler’s latest comments draw a familiar line: Bitcoin sits in a different bucket, while most other tokens remain, in his view, speculative and light on fundamentals.

Even out of office, his framing will echo through courts, compliance desks and allocation committees weighing BTC’s status against persistent regulatory caution of altcoins.

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