Britain to pass law targeting proxies for hostile states next month

Britain is preparing to give police and prosecutors a new weapon against people who carry out surveillance, sabotage or other hostile activity on behalf of foreign powers. The National Security (State Threats) Bill 2026 was introduced in the House of Commons on June 9 and is expected to come into force next month, as ministers try to close what they describe as a long-standing gap in the law.

The legislation is built around the problem that hostile states increasingly use cut-outs rather than diplomats or uniformed agents. Government factsheets say Jonathan Hall KC’s May 2025 review concluded that terrorism-style proscription powers do not work well against state bodies and recommended a new state-threats proscription-like power. Under the bill, ministers would be able to specify organisations linked to hostile states, and the law would then create offences for belonging to or supporting those groups. The government says convictions could carry sentences of up to 14 years in prison.

That design is meant to make the enforcement question sharper. Instead of waiting for a full espionage case or a violent attack to unfold, investigators would be able to move earlier against the local intermediaries, petty criminals or private operatives who allegedly do the work of foreign intelligence services. But the same framework raises evidentiary and civil-liberties questions: prosecutors will have to prove that a suspect was tied to a designated organisation and knowingly helped it, often in cases built on covert communications, indirect payments and compartmentalised networks.

The urgency is being driven by recent security scares. The government says the law follows a broader review of counter-state threats and comes alongside the Crime and Policing Act 2026, which received Royal Assent on April 29. It also comes after a string of antisemitic attacks in London and police inquiries into possible Iranian links to recent arson attacks on Jewish sites. In a statement, Prime Minister Keir Starmer said that when foreign states engage in activity that threatens lives or undermines democratic institutions, “their actions must have consequences.” He has also said the government would not distinguish between motives and would treat such crimes as crime.

MI5’s warnings underline the scale of the challenge. Sir Ken McCallum said state-threat activity rose 35% last year and that MI5 had tracked more than 20 potentially lethal Iran-backed plots in the year to its 2025 threat update. MI5 has separately said that since January 2022 it and police partners have responded to twenty Iran-backed plots that posed potentially lethal threats to British citizens and UK residents. The agency has also warned that Russian state actors are increasingly using proxies, including private intelligence operatives and criminals from the UK and third countries.

The bill is therefore more than a headline response to a single scare. If it is enforced aggressively and sustained in court, it could make recruitment of proxies riskier for Iran, Russia and other hostile powers. If the evidentiary bar proves too high, it may end up as a signal of resolve more than a durable deterrent.