The UK's head spymaster has given her first major public speech.

[https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/speech-by-blaise-metreweli-chief-of-sis-15-december-2025]

Today, I want to talk about human agency. We all have choices to make about how we deal with the undercurrents shaping our world. About how, in our new, faster, more dangerous and technology-mediated world, it will be our rediscovery of our shared humanity, our ability to listen, and our courage that will determine how our future unfolds. Conflict is not inevitable.

Unfortunately that's not true.

Conflict is inevitable if you continue to push other people's boundaries and ignore their security concerns. The Ukraine war proves this.

When the 2022 Istanbul peace talks were undermined by the West, continued - and as it turns out prolonged - conflict was inevitable and it was precisely human agency - in the form of Boris Johnson - that caused this and has since succeeded in killing hundreds of thousands of Russian and Ukrianians.

Human agency has a lot to answer for.

We are now operating in a space between peace and war.

The world has always operated, and probably always will operate, in a space between peace and war. History proves this. It is not unique to 'now'. 

The collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990's led the western liberal establishment to claim that history had 'ended', the USA had 'won' the Cold War and peace would reign under the benevolent gaze of US democratic values and the 'rules-based order'.

But this was liberal nonsense.

History never ends, it just moves on.

In reality, 'the end of history' meant the continuation of disastrous regime-change wars, led by the USA, that killed and blighted the lives of countless numbers of people in countries far-away from the USA.

Institutions which were designed in the ashes of the Second World War are being challenged. New blocs and identities forming and alliances reshaping. Multipolar competition in tension with multilateral cooperation.

The reason these institutions are being challenged is simply because they don't work for many people around the world who are the victims of colonial pasts, the our rules-your order 'rules-based order' or just blatant lies.

New blocs form because old blocs are not fit for purpose. This is called progress.

The UN was progress after WW2 but now it functions merely as a trans-national NGO talking shop that major players simply ignore whenever it suits them or support when it goes along with what they want.

And as states race for tech supremacy, or as some algorithms become as powerful as states, those hyper-personalised tools could become a new vector for conflict and control.

They are already a vector for control, especially in the UK where street-level CCTV and facial recognition, traffic and checkout cameras are already used to hyper-personalise control in the name of 'crime-prevention' even without really sophisticated AI. You don't have to be in MI6 to know this - citizens of the UK face it every day.

And at the same time, the foundations of trust in our societies are eroding. Information, once a unifying force, is increasingly weaponised. Falsehood spreads faster than fact, dividing communities and distorting reality. We live in an age of hyper-connection yet profound isolation. The algorithms flatter our biases and fracture our public squares. And as trust collapses, so does our shared sense of truth – one of the greatest losses a society can suffer.

The defining challenge of the twenty-first century is not simply who wields the most powerful technologies, but who guides them with the greatest wisdom. Our security, our prosperity, and our humanity depend on it.

This is a subject close to FNN's heart.

The defining challenge in the UK is the spreading of false narratives by the mainstream media, the manipulation of data by trusted institutions like the BBC, and the funding of disinformation and undue influence by oligarch-backed NGOs and social media platforms and foreign political lobbies that do not have the interests of UK citizens at heart, merely only their own selfish motives. 

I’m going to break with tradition and won’t give you a global threat tour, but will focus here on Putin’s Russia. We all continue to face the menace of an aggressive, expansionist and revisionist Russia, seeking to subjugate Ukraine and harass NATO. I find it harrowing that hundreds of thousands have died, with the toll mounting every day, because of Putin’s historical distortions and his compromised desire for respect. He is dragging out negotiations and shifting the cost of war onto his own population.

The Russian 'menace' is regional.

If you live in the Middle East, you are likely to care much more about the Israeli menace. If you live in Venezuela (or Iran or Canada or Greenland), you are more lilkely to care about the US menace. If you live in Taiwan or Tibet, you are more likely to care about the Chinese menace.

It's not clear why Russia is more of a threat to the UK than the UK is to Russia.

Except for the fact that Russia has more nuclear weapons but, unlike the USA, has never used them to actually kill people with.

The UK's primary strategic function as 'Airstrip One' for the USA is the main reason it remains a threat to Russia. Although it's true that this reason has diminished as the range of missiles increases and the likelihood of a Cold War style conventional war in western Europe, with the UK acting as a trip-wire to a Soviet invasion across Northern Germany, decreases.

That Russia is harassing NATO is simply laughable. 

When the Soviet Union disbanded the Warsaw pact, NATO steadily added those countries to its alliance with the clear intention of harassing whatever remained after the Soviet Union collapsed. This is all well-documented and was well-understood by major politicians and international relations thinkers at the time. They all warned that this kind of harassment by NATO would lead to trouble.

And they were right because Putin was not 'good 'ol Boris' who could be pushed around while the USA held all the strategic cards.

NATO continues to offensively add countries in pursuit of its crystal clear goal of encircling Russia to reduce or remove it as a strategic threat or to provoke regime change in Russia. But what other major power would accept such encirclement?

No-one has in the past and especially not England (by France or Spain via Scotland or Ireland) or the USA (with its clearly stated Monroe doctrine).

From a NATO perspective all this harassment makes perfect sense, since NATO was originally setup to 'contain' the Soviet Union after WW2 and simply transitioned to containing Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Without a threat to 'defend' against, NATO is redundant.

But why not be honest and admit to this harassment instead of maintaining the fiction that only Russia is guilty of harassment?

NATO has been stalking Russia for decades - not the other way around - and continues to do so.

This is none too clever of the 'fiercely intelligent' UK spymaster.

FNN also finds it harrowing that hundreds of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians have been killed following the undermining of the 2022 Istanbul peace talks by a West that seems determined to provision and prolong the war to the last Ukrainian.

If you want to stop the war, you recognize the underlying causes and take steps to address them.

You don't ignore them and continue to supply weapons and support for more killing. Morally, this is a war crime.

The reality is that the West made a gamble at that time (2022) that they could either bring Russia to its knees and/or force regime change. But so far that gamble has not paid off, in fact a lot of chips have been cashed in to support it and there is no end in sight.

Europe is playing roulette all right - Russian roulette.

Prolonging the war may simply end up breaking the bank of Monte Carlo and tears all round.

Shifting the cost of the war onto 'his own population' may or may not be happening but in reality it is western sanctions that deliberately intended (and failed) to shift the cost of the war onto ordinary Russians just as the same sanctions 'bludgeon' has been used on many other countries, including Iran and Venezuela more recently, in order to try to force them to toe the line.

Targeting civilians in this way is not new. The Allied naval blockade of Germany at the end of WW1, the sanctions of their day, starved ordinary Germans to help end the war.

The export of chaos is a feature not a bug in this Russian approach to international engagement; and we should be ready for this to continue until Putin is forced to change his calculus.

The export of chaos is not exclusively Russian - it has been a feature of US CIA policy for decades and the UK spymaster knows this.

But what is even more worrying is that a whole new range of malign actors are exporting chaos including over-bearing NGOs, over-influential lobbying groups and over-rich oligarchs.

It also means everyone in society really understanding the world we are in – a world where terrorists plot against us, where our enemies fearmonger, bully and manipulate, and the front line is everywhere. Online, on our streets, in our supply chains, in the minds and on the screens of our citizens.

We must all stand together against this. As we do today with our friends in Australia after the shocking antisemitic terrorist attack this weekend.

Nobody wants anyone to die from terrorist attacks but there is no mention of 'standing together' against much larger scale atrocities like Gaza or the killings in Sudan and Yemen.

In rising to meet these challenges we, in MI6, will remain anchored to our values: courage, creativity, respect and integrity.

Values that clearly ignore the destruction in Gaza and Sudan and Yemen, presumably because it is being done by 'allies' and not malign actors, are not values.

Values cannot be applied selectively otherwise they are not values at all they are just transactional priorities.

And when adversaries blur fact and falsehood, our task is to defend the space where truth can still stand.

As we step into the future, the tools at our disposal will evolve. But what will always matter most is the human element – the person who stands in the shadows and says: this is right, and that is wrong.

FNN couldn't agree more with this part of the speech.

The problem is that when people come out of the shadows in the UK to say 'this is right and that is wrong' - whether about Gaza, immigration or trans-rights for example - they are either villified or arrested.

This not right. 

However, the most disappointing thing about this maiden speech is the lack of mention of one word: Dialog.

Dialog with Russia, with China, with anyone really.

There's no point in having an 'ability to listen' if you are not listening to anyone.

The UK's spymaster should read some David Bohm - that would be a good start.

The whole speech has an acute sense of history - mainly because it is infused with 20th century Cold War adversarial logic.

Presumably this goes down well in the corridors of power. The UK's spymaster is after all, just a civil servant.

Especially given the urgent need to 'rearm' against the Russian threat in order to kick-start a moribund economy with the mass production of weapons of destruction.

Apparently MI6 really still lives in the world of Mr Somerset on the Stamboul train with his gold sovereigns and Beretta, fighting off SMERSH.

But to many people outside of the West, this 20th century adversarial attitude will just seem outdated and irrelevant to today's world - as they pursue new alliances, blocs and missions to reflect the fact that history has moved on while the UK is still hiding behind its rusty old iron curtain.