The UK defence, security and aerospace trade association ADS welcomed Prime Minister Theresa May’s speech to the Munich Security Conference on the UK’s intention to continue involvement in EU work on security. In Munich the PM stressed the need and the UK’s history and willingness to work in common against threats; ‘with hostile networks no longer only rooted in state-based aggression and weapons designed not just to be deployed on the battlefield but through cyberspace’.
ADS Chief Executive Paul Everitt said: “The UK and the EU share deep common interests in defence and security, and the Prime Minister today set out the mutual interests we have in continuing to work closely together after Brexit. We welcome the Prime Minister’s commitment to seek full participation by the UK’s defence, security and space industries in strategic defence programmes and collaborative research projects.
“It is in the interests of both our national security and our national prosperity that UK and EU negotiators reach a deal that delivers continued UK membership of the European Defence Agency, the European Defence Fund and important space programmes like Galileo. There is now relatively little time to agree a final deal on Brexit and industry needs to see pragmatic decisions taken that translate this vision of continued close partnership into a firm agreement.”
Mrs May (pictured during panel questions; courtesy of Munich Security Conference 2018) called for ‘a new security partnership’, pointing to the European Arrest Warrant and work on counter-terror; such as sharing of real-time data on wanted criminals, missing persons and suspected terrorists. She said: “The UK has also driven a pan-EU approach to processing passenger data, enabling the identification and tracking of criminals, victims of trafficking and those individuals vulnerable to radicalisation.
“In all these areas, people across Europe are safer because of this co-operation and the unique arrangements we have developed between the UK and EU institutions in recent years. So it is in all our interests to find ways to protect the capabilities which underpin this co-operation when the UK becomes a European country outside the EU but in a new partnership with it.”
Earlier she said: “Europe’s security is our security. And that is why I have said – and I say again today – that the United Kingdom is unconditionally committed to maintaining it. The challenge for all of us today is finding the way to work together, through a deep and special partnership between the UK and the EU, to retain the co-operation that we have built and go further in meeting the evolving threats we face together.”
On data protection, she called for ‘a bespoke arrangement to reflect the UK’s exceptionally high standards of data protection’.
For her Saturday, February 17 speech in full visit https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-speech-at-munich-security-conference-17-february-2018.
Meanwhile the UK official National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has assessed that the Russian military was almost certainly responsible for the ‘NotPetya’ cyber attack of June 2017.
