Labour provides cover for state spies

Labour’s shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, will say today that she is “appalled” by revelations about the Metropolitan Police’s use of undercover agents.

But to what extent are her calls for “scrutiny” a justification for continued snooping on huge numbers of people, as well as a cover for what happened in 13 years of New Labour rule?

High ranking police chiefs are involved in what is no so much a scandal as fairly routine practice. For example, retired deputy assistant commissioner John Grieve has admitted to authorising the bugging of Stephen Lawrence’s friend Duwayne Brooks.

Sir Norman Bettison, former West Yorkshire chief constable, already tarnished over Hillsborough disaster inquiry, is now said to have tried to influence the Lawrence inquiry.

The Met’s image is now so bad that ConDems policing minister Damien Green is calling for the “stables to be cleaned”. He says that recent disclosures are “hugely damaging”.

These “historic scandals”, as Green calls them, come on top of the continuing saga of US whistleblower Edward Snowden who revealed that Britain’s very own spy agency, GCHQ, works hand-in-glove with the American National Security Agency and its internet snooping programme, Prism.

Yesterday Snowden said that GCHQ was even worse than the NSA. It is the only body to operate what he terms a “full take” system of information. That means it  monitors all data crossing its path for a total of 30 days.

Cooper continues to praise parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC). So what should we make of her call for more “oversight and scrutiny”? Cooper became a member of the ISC after New Labour won the 1997 election and remained on it until 1999.

So she can’t be unaware that under the Blair governments, there was, according to a new book about undercover police agents, an “unprecedented increase in the undercover infiltration of political activists”.

Authors Rob Evans and Paul Lewis document how in 1999, a new squad of police spies was brought into existence – the National Public Order Intelligence Unit. Its funding was supplied by the Home Office, then under secretary of state Jack Straw.

As the unit expanded, it received more than £30 million of public money. A new definition of who they were to spy on was created: “domestic extremism”. The authors say that the definition went beyond those engaged in criminal actions.

More significantly, it applied to those who “wanted to prevent something from happening or to change legislation or domestic policy”, possibly “outside the normal democratic process”. Such a catch-all phrase covers virtually any form of protest. And funding under New Labour doubled, with animal rights’ surveillance taking the largest amount.

Corporate lobbying by Big Pharma and the banks who wanted the state to protect their nefarious activities led to more funding and a huge growth of surveillance, agent placing and deliberate entrapment. Money was not a problem for police spies like Mark Kennedy who received some £250,000 out of the state’s coffers.

No activist group or organisation – no matter how benign and peace-loving – was (or is) exempt. Climate Camp, anti-G8, anti-roadbuilding and anti-McDonalds’ campaigners, animal rights activists – you name them, they were all in the frame.

As some activists became concerned about individuals who for one reason or another became suspect, they began to uncover some deeply-placed spies, much to their horror. Women victims of undercover spying are being backed by Occupy London to take legal action against the police.

In the recent new round of spending cuts, the secret state bodies were the only agencies whose budget has not been cut, with MI5, MI6 and GCHQ receiving a 3% real terms increase in their annual budget of £2.6 billion.

Protecting citizens’ from criminals and terrorists is not the primary aim of these agencies or their spies in political movements. They are to defend the interests of corporate power, happily lining their own pockets in the process. It’s high time to open all the secret files and disband these spy agencies.

Just don’t expect Yvette Cooper to join such a campaign. She and Labour are part of the problem, not the solution.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Secret police show how rotten the state is

The revelation by former Met officer turned whistleblower Peter Francis that he was ordered to find dirt on the Stephen Lawrence family in the wake of their son’s murder is shocking in itself. But it’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the state within the state.

Behind the Special Branch which ran the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) of which Francis was a member, is the internal spy agency MI5 and its operatives who remain in the shadows. And there are undoubtedly other secret units we know nothing about whose job is to “defend the realm” – the ruling classes and their state institutions.

Politicians and senior policemen will disavow their more unsavoury activities, claiming they knew nothing about them, just as former Met commissioner Paul Condon did over the Francis allegations. The SDS made the Lawrence family a target when the regular police themselves were indifferent to catching his killers.

Former Labour home secretary Jack Straw protesteth too much about this particular incident. His regime oversaw secret “extraordinary rendition” – aka kidnapping – flights by way of UK airports, torture authorised by the external spy agency MI6, and a whole series of fabrications that suggested Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Francis revealed on Channel 4 Dispatches that he asked to find anything that could smear the Lawrence family to would weaken support for the family in the wider community. Ostensibly, the police wanted to prevent “public disorder” in the wake of the 1993 killing. In practice, as the Macpherson inquiry reported in 1999, the Met was institutionally racist and botched its investigation from the start. The SDS’s infamous smear attempt was kept away from the inquiry.

Police/MI5 infiltration is as old as the state itself. Before the SDS was created, Special Branch ran agents inside left-wing parties, trade unions, civil liberties groups and other campaigns like CND. Not only did they report their intelligence, they also acted as agents provocateurs.

This can involve suggesting actions that could be illegal, setting people against each other to encourage political division, subverting an organisation’s finances and much more. As recently as 2011, the trial of eco-activists who allegedly tried to break into Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station was abandoned when the role of secret policeman Mark Kennedy in the plans became known.

A number of women are taking action against the police for psychological damage caused by other members of the SDS who befriended them and had sexual relations. In one notorious case, an officer called Bob Lambert had a child with an activist before disappearing back to Special Branch. Another woman told Channel 4 she had been “raped by the state”.

In 2008, the work of the SDS was taken over by the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU) which is part of the Special Operations directorate of the Metropolitan Police. 

Meanwhile, joke of jokes, the police are investigating the activities of their own undercover agents! The chances of this establishing the truth are less than zero. Nor would a public inquiry demanded by Francis – who himself was psychologically wrecked by his experience – get closer to the truth.

The fact is that the state will do whatever it takes to – as Channel 4 was told – to “prevent change from happening in the world”. That’s the priority. Anyone who thinks the police and other institutions are there to serve the public should put the idea out of their minds.

With the authority and legitimacy of the state increasingly questioned by people all round the world, the lurch towards total surveillance is gathering momentum. In Britain, the government spy station GCHQ in Cheltenham is teamed up with the National Security Agency in the US to track and monitor internet traffic on a global basis.

Ultimately, it won’t do them any good. We, the people, have had enough. Whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and Peter Francis are coming out of the state’s woodwork. The edifice is rotten and every day more and more people realise that. So whoever’s reading this on behalf of the state, the game is up. You'd be better off becoming a whilstleblower!

Paul Feldman

Communications editor