Cutting the links with reality

It was a difficult one for the BBC, but they got through it. The problem was this: how to do the story on the chaos at the migrant centre in the former Manston airport which might result in the Home Secretary’s resignation without acknowledging that the root of the issue was a huge increase in asylum seekers? They were avid for the story because they could smell Suella Braverman’s blood on the wind. But it is, I think, contrary to BBC producer guidelines to suggest that Britain may have a problem with illegal immigration. How, then, to stick it to Braverman without implying there’s loads of Albanians flooding the country?

They got round it by interviewing, repeatedly, a SJW hobgoblin from a migrant-enabling charity to insist that even though it looked as though there were lots of illegal migrants, actually there weren’t really. This clown turned up on virtually every BBC radio news programme and even made an appearance on Newsnight in an opening package which seemed to say that all illegal migrants are absolutely bloody lovely people who only want a better life for themselves. By which dodge the corporation was a) able to castigate Braverman and the government for letting too many migrants in, while b) suggesting that there are not too many migrants coming in and that they should all be allowed to enter anyway. Generally, the BBC is curious about immigration and asylum seekers only if there’s a chance to hammer the government for being nasty to them. Credit, mind, to the World At One which allowed Nigel Farage to advance the proposition that Manston should once again become an airport, specialising in one-way flights to Tirana.

Another lack of curiosity about what seemed to me an interesting news story came with the severing of two undersea internet cables within the space of a week, one from Shetland to the Faroe Islands, the other from Shetland to the Scottish mainland. This latter ‘accident’ ensured that the islanders were effectively cut off from the world for a few days. The immediate response from the government – perhaps before they could possibly have known for sure – was that a fishing vessel had been responsible, and the press in general was content with this. There were fishing boats in the area at the time, but the arrival a little later of a Russian ‘research’ ship raised one or two eyebrows. Not long afterwards, a similar cable was severed in the Mediterranean, cutting internet links from Marseille to Lyon, Milan and Barcelona. The company responsible for the cable, Zscaler, described it as ‘an act of vandalism’ although still stopped short of using words like ‘Putin’. Or ‘Russkies’.

Of course, domestic trawlers have indeed severed various undersea cables – but much more in the past than of late. These days the boats are equipped with Kingfisher Bulletin technology which enables skippers to know what is lurking beneath their hulls and thus avoid inadvertent snagging. Bill McKenzie, chairman of the Fishing Vessel Agents and Owners Association (Scotland), was dubious about the notion that the cables had been cut by fishing boats. ‘I have been trying to think how many times trawlers have snagged a cable and I cannot think of one in the last ten to 15 years. That’s not to say it hasn’t happened, simply that I can’t remember it doing so,’ he told me.

So two such infractions in the space of a week is stretching credulity a little far, no? For sure, coincidences of this kind happen – that is the essence of statistics. But when you add in the severing of the French cable then the odds for such a coincidence begin to look infinitesimal. And that’s before we consider the weird blowing-up of the Nord Stream undersea gas pipelines, which the Kremlin and quite a few QAnon nutters insist was a joint enterprise carried out by London and Washington.

There must be at least a suspicion that the Russians are both metaphorically and literally testing the water – demonstrating the sort of chaos that could be very easily wreaked on western Europe and the UK in particular just by snipping a few cables. Even so, there seems to be no particular appetite for addressing the problem – which is itself curious because it is not as if this form of Russian mischief is entirely unknown, nor our vulnerability to it.

As Alexander Downer reported in last week’s Spectator, in 2017 Rishi Sunak wrote a report for Policy Exchange about our cable network. In it, he said the following: ‘A successful attack on the UK’s undersea cable infrastructure would be an existential threat to our security. Yet the exact locations of these cables are both isolated and publicly available – jugulars of the world economy which are a singularly attractive target for our enemies.’

Meanwhile, the Shetland fishermen complain long and loud about the increased clutter of infrastructure around their islands, whether it be internet cables or the cables which accompany the growing number of offshore windfarms. Shetland depends upon its fishing industry, but every increase in cabling makes that activity more and more hazardous and increases the likelihood of a boat snagging a cable.

The shadow defence secretary John Healey has been tabling parliamentary questions about the level of security afforded to our undersea cables, having been assured rather blithely in a previous question that the Shetland incidents were merely an unfortunate accident. Well, if so, we should expect many more such ‘accidents’, given that the majority of our most important cables are neither buried beneath the seabed nor even shoved in a trench. They are just lying there, wholly exposed to whoever would cause them mischief, inadvertently or otherwise.

Neither the Ministry of Defence nor the National Maritime and Coastguard Agency responded to my questions on the matter.