Signals Intelligence

Adam Ramsay writes:

There has been much debate in Britain in recent years about symbols of empire – pulling down statues, or returning museum artefacts. But we rarely talk about the fact that British foreign policy is still run by the same institutions which ran the empire. The Secretary of State for Business and Trade is still called ‘President of the Board of Trade’, referring to an institution involved in the triangular slave trade [oh, don’t give them an in like that, to change the name and then pretend that they had done something].

Perhaps the most obvious remnant of the empire is Britain’s outsized military bootprint. Most countries with foreign bases largely have them in neighbouring territories; only Britain, the US and France have genuinely global militaries. With at least 145 bases in forty-two countries, Britain likely has the second-biggest military footprint on earth. Many of these bases are in former or remaining colonies (i.e. British overseas territories). Many of the most important ones are in small authoritarian monarchies, with royal families we’ve helped prop up for decades, a direct relic of the empire. 

These bases are important outposts of the British state. And yet, there is almost no democratic scrutiny of how they are used. Indeed, many of them are officially secret, and remained so until the journalistic website Declassified revealed their existence. There may well be more. Look at how they are used, and we begin to see that this large swathe of British state power, left over from empire, is used – often violently – to prop up a global system not of British dominance, but of US hegemony and the corporate control which comes with it.

Projecting US power

Bases on British overseas territories – namely, Gibraltar; Ascension Island; Akrotiri and Dhekelia in Cyprus; and Diego Garcia – play particularly important roles in projecting US power. These bases are all vital nodes in the Pentagon’s global surveillance system. For example, there are four main ‘ground antennae’ in the Global Positioning System (GPS). Two of these are on US territory, in Florida and Hawaii, and two are on British territory, on Ascension Island and Diego Garcia, providing circumglobal spread.

Akrotiri and Dhekelia are a significant hub for UK/US surveillance efforts across the Middle East and North Africa, allowing GCHQ and the NSA to intercept phone calls, text messages and internet communications across the region. The US Air Force’s main intelligence squadron also has a base there, and throughout Israel’s genocide of Gaza, Britain sent surveillance flights over Gaza from these bases, likely spying for Israel.

Similarly, the bases have more direct military use. During the genocide, Cypriots reported a surge in flights from Akrotiri, and the government admitted many were heading to Israel. There was also a significant increase in the supply of arms coming into the bases. The US was almost certainly rearming Israel using British sovereign territory. Likewise, Diego Garcia is the major US military base from which its attacks on the Middle East and South Asia are conducted – including, for example, the initial bombing raids on Baghdad in 2003.

Beyond accountability

While the US has military bases on foreign soil across the planet, it needs to negotiate the domestic politics of most other states when it wishes to use them, and so becomes slightly accountable to global public opinion. British territories, on the other hand, offer a space beyond accountability. Cypriots might protest against the US seemingly using Britain’s military bases to re-arm Israel, but they can’t vote out the regime allowing it.

Unlike the other overseas territories, the Cyprus military bases are run through the Ministry of Defence rather than the Foreign Office, and have no democratic structures. An administrator, officially appointed by the British monarch on the recommendation of the MoD, is in practice always the head of UK armed forces there, governing over Akrotiri and Dhekelia. The 11,000 Cypriots who live on British sovereign land are subject to the old legal system imposed when Cyprus was a British colony, and effectively live under military dictatorship. Cyprus has repeatedly asked Britain to leave; Britain refuses.

For British voters, this is out of sight in some constitutional quirk. And when MPs do take an interest, the government can simply ignore them: in 2025, one frustrated MP told me, the government issued a block on MPs asking questions about the use of RAF flights to conduct surveillance in Israel and Gaza. It can do so, as my book Abolish Westminster explores in further detail, because it is operating under royal prerogative, not parliamentary authority.

Surveillance and shipping

Particularly significant is the role these territories play in signals intelligence, and the surveillance processes used by the US to project its global power and undermine self-determination and, sometimes, democracy around the world. In the 1950s, British intelligence services developed a vast network of interception stations across the globe, tapping phone lines of anti-imperialist leaders and the like. As colonies started to win freedom, there was a panicked reaction about how to maintain this surveillance infrastructure. GCHQ solved this problem by maintaining control over overseas territories and footholds in informally dependent regimes in strategically important places.

Nowadays, because the internet relies on fibre-optic cables across the planet, this network has become more important than ever, providing the UK and US with the capacity to tap phone and internet communications across a large portion of the planet – and particularly in former colonies. Similarly, these toeholds provide stopping points on many of the world’s most important shipping routes – such as Singapore and Bahrain – providing bases for the Royal Navy from which it can protect Britain’s oil industry, which is partly why Britain still hosts two of the world’s four biggest publicly listed oil companies. 

This network is then justified by turning some of these territories – particularly the Falklands and Gibraltar with their whiter populations – into trinkets for Britons to remember their past power, and so demand an oversized military. It’s often forgotten that the supposed justification for the onslaught on Iraq launched from one British overseas territory – and the disastrous war that followed – included a claimed threat to another British overseas territory: ‘the forty-five-minute claim’ screeched by The Sun, the Evening Standard and other establishment outriders was that, according to (they claimed) an intelligence dossier, Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction capable of deployment against British targets within forty-five minutes of an order to do so. What many might not have realised from the headlines is that the British targets of these (as it transpired) invented weapons weren’t London. They were, at least according to some of the lie’s iterations, Akrotiri and Dhekelia.

The impact on the people who live under the dictators Britain props up to maintain this power is immense, while British voters have almost no say in what’s going on, and rarely even know about it: the British foreign policy machine largely continues its work, unfettered by democracy. Oman and Bahrain, Singapore and Brunei – these aren’t formally British colonies, but their regimes are propped up by the British state, in ways that aren’t properly accountable either to the people of those countries, or those of the UK. While the MoD refuses to disclose figures, the cost of maintaining this bootprint is one of the reasons Britain has the world’s fifth-highest total military expenditure. Only Russia, China, India and the US spend more. Apart from the US, virtually the only democracies that spend more of their GDP on the military are those fighting wars within or on their borders. Britain spends more of its wealth on its military than any other Western European country.

This level of expenditure is partly accepted because of the impact of memories of empire on our national identity – a plurality of British people think we should ‘punch above our weight’. And it is partly self-perpetuating, in that it creates interests which then lobby for themselves. Imagine a defence secretary suggesting at a departmental meeting that Britain cut military spending to the same level as Japan – from 2.3% to 1.6% of GDP – including axing military bases outside sovereign territory. Would this be taken calmly? Or would there be leaks, denunciations from unnamed generals in the press, screams that our national security was at risk and rapid ministerial backpedalling? The spending’s primary purpose, though, is to protect a mix of US global dominance, and the interests of a handful of vast corporations which are – only sort of – British.