One wonders if Britain’s MI5 chief, Ken McCallum is a real person or some banal technical creation of the boffins of the UK’s home security service. His recent comments about the Taliban giving rogue winnable terrorists around the world a moral boost after the calamity of the U.S. withdrawal in Afghanistan not only smacks of ‘stating the bleeding obvious’ but also of paternal baloney nefariously designed to distract the UK’s public attention away from the real issues.

Is McCallum actually the real boss of MI5 or the nerdy, hapless fake chief who is there merely to generate fake news in the UK press?

Writing in the God-awful woke Guardian, he harps on about preventing over thirty UK terror attacks which he admits span over four years, but spectacularly fails to make his assertions stand up. His unsubstantiated article was really just a rant which probably only served his own interests rather than the country’s; it also neatly took a pot shot at Biden without naming the U.S. president which might give us all a hint about the so-called special relationship between the UK and the U.S. being really just a farce, or a cliché used by both sides on special occasions.

But in a period where people are reflecting about Afghanistan and trying to look for lessons learnt, the article was way off the mark for a intelligence chief and raised a number of red flags.

The Americans and the British who followed them got the intel really wrong in Afghanistan as indeed was the case in Iraq. So should we really expect anything from the security services in terms of looking back – and then looking forward? And is there a dark game being played here by the spooks in Britain, using a cavernous and inept media machine to create a smoke screen to the real issues?

How could anyone with any real intellect and understanding of international politics be so stupid? The oversimplification is stunning.

In reality, some pundits might speculate that such media stunts are all about guiding a gullible public away from the difficult-to-chew truth towards the easier-to-swallow perceived truth about U.S. interventionism and the link to homegrown terrorism.

America has failed spectacularly in its military ventures for decades, going back to Nicaragua, El Salvador, Korea and Vietnam. It has a short blip in the 90s with the NATO-led air strikes against Serbia and later some success in Kosovo; but a small cabal of foreign hacks have always pointed to the faked attacks on Muslims in Sarajevo which paved the way for NATO getting the green light for the campaign pushed by the odious Madeleine Albright. And in the same period, a U.S.-led UN mission in Somalia in 1993 led to the bungling of a raid supposed to bring a recalcitrant warlord in, but led to the catastrophe of ‘Black Hawk Down’ – which singularly led to Bill Clinton failing to intervene in the Rwandan genocide a year later.

In the 90s there was a false sense of righteousness brought about largely by the Russian withdrawal of Afghanistan. And this has prevailed leading to 2001 when George W Bush sent troops to Afghanistan – by far the biggest failure of U.S. military-led foreign policy ever leading to thousands of lost lives, trillions of dollars of debt and most European leaders scratching their heads in recent weeks wondering if Europe can ever be beguiled into blindly following the U.S. into an intervention ever again, regardless of how shocking the events are which preceded it.

America just can’t help itself in using its force to resolve the illogical outcomes of its befuddled policies. Madeleine Albright once commented in 1998 when she was Secretary of State that “If we have to use force, it is because we are America: we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us.”

And Britain can’t seem to help itself but to follow Washington wherever it goes. But what the UK spy chief failed, curiously, to point out in his link with the Taliban and UK terror attacks is that it is London which has supported the U.S. in its dirty wars in Syria and Libya which has overwhelmingly led to nearly all of the attacks he claims he is foiling. It was Britain after all who even assisted Libyans living there to get on planes and go to Libya to fight with Al Qaeda to overthrow Gaddafi, before returning only to be welcomed at Heathrow airport by spooks who gave them the nod and the wink. It was also Britain who stood side by side with the U.S. in its sponsoring of Al Qaeda affiliates in Syria who were hilariously called ‘moderates’ just to help British journalists who were camped in Beirut but who ventured into Northern Syria to ‘embed’ with them. There are no moderates anymore in Syria, in case you were wondering. The West has given up its obsession with Assad so the need to blur the lines is no longer necessary. Dirty wars though, which involve terrorists being paid hard cash by the U.S. and UK, will no doubt continue as long as a naïve public laps up all those terribly insightful articles in the Guardian and assumes them to be genuine. And how is it that the home security boss seems to be an expert on Afghanistan, to the point where he is almost preparing the British public for British soldiers to return there at some point?

The lifeblood of intelligence agencies is threat inflation: exaggerating the gravity of the dangers menacing the public, and calling for harsher laws to cope with them. MI5 director general Ken McCallum did his best to follow this tradition in his annual speech this week, in which he explained the security risks facing Britain.

He spoke of threats from states such as Russia, China and Iran; from far-right activists, Islamic terrorists, and the resurgence of violence in Northern Ireland. Alongside these were the more amorphous threats posed by encrypted messaging, online spying, and cyber attacks.

Many of these developments are less threatening than they look. Russia may engage in gangster-type assassinations, such as the poisoning of the Skripals in Salisbury, but the very crudity of its attacks on its critics underlines the limitations of Russian capabilities. President Putin may relish the fact that his country is treated like a superpower – albeit a demonic one – but it has nothing like the power of the Soviet Union. The idea, for instance, that the Kremlin determined the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election was always a myth. Hillary Clinton’s dire campaign is sufficient explanation for Donald Trump’s election.

Demonising the enemy – exaggerating its strengths and its evil intentions – was central to the propaganda directed against the Soviet Union during the first cold war. Much the same kind of threat inflation is happening in the second cold war, except that this time the primary target is China, whose every action is portrayed as part of a bid for world domination. Shady authoritarian allies like Narendra Modi’s India are promoted as allies of the west in “the struggle for democratic values”.

The threat posed by al-Qaeda and Islamic State terrorism is likewise given too much importance. Savage though their attacks have been in western Europe, they were in practice vicious publicity stunts aimed at dominating the news agenda. Politically, this sort of “terrorism” only really succeeds if it can provoke an exaggerated response, as 9/11 did when the US went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq in retaliation.

Britain does indeed face increased dangers, but they have little to do with those on the MI5 list. The greatest threats in a post-Brexit Britain stem from the country being a weaker power than it was five years ago, but pretending to be a stronger one. The gap between pretension and reality is masked by slogans, and by concocted culture wars geared to divert public attention from failings and unfulfilled promises.

The success of “Little Englandism” in the referendum of 2016 and the general election in 2019 had predictable results, at home and abroad. Britain outside the EU is inevitably even more dependent on the US than before. Many will ask what is new about our reliance on Washington. Has it not been Britain’s default position since the Suez crisis in 1956, if not the fall of France in 1940?

But this time around, British dependence on the US is even greater, and comes with an extra twist. It is happening at a moment when America is moving to confront China, and to a lesser degree Russia, in a new cold war in which Britain will be a participant but will have very little influence. Theatrical antics – like sending a British destroyer through Russian-controlled waters off Crimea, and dispatching the aircraft carrier Queen Elizabeth to the South China Sea – are gestures designed to persuade public opinion at home that Britain once again has a global role.

Most of the negative consequences of leaving the EU have long been obvious. The move undermined the compromise between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland represented by the Good Friday [Belfast] Agreement of 1998. The MI5 chief McCallum, who knows Northern Ireland well, hints at this, saying that “many of the powerful aspirations of the Belfast Agreement remain unfulfilled” while insisting hopefully that “the holding of multiple identities – British, Irish, Northern Irish – is a living reality for many people, in a way it was not in my youth”.

But a Northern Ireland half-in, half-out of the EU has shifted the balance of power between the communities in the province in a way that is likely to lead to a return to political violence. We have already had a taste of this with the rioting in late March and early April, which was the most serious for years. What we have not yet seen is sectarian killings, but they could start at any moment. If they do, then peace in Northern Ireland will swiftly evaporate.

Yet the greatest risk to Britain is that it is ruled by a government that has promised far more than it can deliver. This weakness is still masked by the development of the anti-Covid vaccine and the success of the vaccination campaign, but these were achievements of scientists and the NHS. As Dominic Cummings has made clear, Boris Johnson did little but spread chaos.

The problem facing all nationalist populist leaders in the world is that they promise bread and circuses for everybody, but seldom deliver them. This is true of Trump in the US and Modi in India, and is also the case for Johnson in Britain. This was made blatantly clear yesterday when the prime minister made one of his rare public speeches – the first for 10 months – which was supposed to spell out his “levelling up” agenda, the centrepiece of his populist appeal to former Labour voters.

Except that it turns out that there is no such agenda, and his speech consisted of the usual shallow boosterism. Cummings summed it up venomously but accurately as a “crap speech (same he’s given pointlessly umpteen times) supporting crap slogan”. As with foreign policy, there is no social or economic strategy to rescue Britain’s deprived population, despite all those radical pledges.

But there is a political strategy for diverting attention away from the fact that a central plank in Johnson’s platform is missing. The plan is to talk up culture wars, exacerbate divisions, and pretend that critics are unpatriotic or treacherous. Since culture and race go together, this means none-too-subtle dog-whistle appeals to racism. “If we ‘whistle’ and the ‘dog’ reacts we can’t be shocked if it barks and bites,” said Sayeeda Warsi, a Conservative peer and former party chair.

Populist governments play the “culture card” more vigorously in times of trouble. The smallest incidents are exaggerated as threats to national identity. A piece of graffiti scrawled on a statue of Winston Churchill becomes a sign that British culture as a whole is under assault.

Critics can be demonised as unpatriotic, but a surer way of silencing them is to deny them a voice, by putting pressure on independent commentary on the BBC or threatening to sell off Channel 4. The effectiveness of these methods in suppressing criticism and dominating public opinion should not be underestimated. Most of the nationalist populist regimes in the world have a disastrous record, but very few of them have lost power.

counterpunch.org

The Daily Mail led with “Damning Russia Dossier” while The Times heralded “MI5 to get more powers” and “Tough new laws will combat threat of Russian spies”. The Times also splashed its front page with a large photograph of Russian President Vladimir Putin seemingly lurking behind a curtain, which just goes to show how much British journalism has descended into cartoonish trivia.

There is sound reason why the British government delayed until this week publication of the so-called Russia Report by a cross-party parliamentary committee. That’s plainly because there is nothing in it that could in any way substantiate lurid claims of alleged Russian interference in British politics.

The 55-page document was neither “damning” nor “devastating” as The Daily Mail asserted. The groundless hype suggests that the headline writers simply were looking for something to sell to readers regardless of facts.

Boris Johnson, the prime minister, received a copy of the report 10 months ago, but decided to postpone its publication until after the general election that was held in December. That delay led to claims that his Conservative government was hiding something sinister. There were procedural hiccups from the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) being replaced with new members. However, now that the report is published any rationale reader can see that the real cause of the delay is down to the report being a dud, despite all the breathless speculation. It is an empty vessel, with no evidence or substantive detail. It consists of entirely prejudiced assertions that Russia is “a hostile state” and the UK “is clearly a target for Russia disinformation campaigns and political influence”.

The nine lawmakers on the committee and their nine predecessors acknowledge among their sources for the report the following individuals: Anne Applebaum, William Browder and Christopher Steele. All of them are zealously anti-Russia and are prodigious purveyors of “Russian interference” narratives to anyone who will listen to them. Steele is the notorious former MI6 spy who cooked up the ludicrous “Russia Dossier” for the Democrats to smear Trump with in the 2016 elections. That dossier fueled the bogus “Russiagate” scandal.

Of course, the main sources for the parliamentary committee are British intelligence agencies, MI6, MI5 and GCHQ. Candid admission of all those sources should underscore with redlines that the so-called report is nothing but a propaganda screed. Yet the British media treat it with deference and respect as if it is a credible, objective assessment.

What is rather laughable is the unrestrained prejudice of the authors who are, in reality, propagandists more suited to being frozen in Cold War mentality than offering any kind of “expertise”. They claim Russian politics is “paranoid” and “nihilistic” driven by “zero-sum calculation”. All those attributed defects are merely self-projection by the authors of this report and their sources.

It is rather telling that in place of anything resembling substance of alleged Russian interference, the parliamentarians refer to “open sources” of media influence by Russian state-owned RT and Sputnik. They accuse these media of “direct support of a pro-Russian narrative in relation to particular events”. Oh, how shocking! And the British state-owned BBC does not also do the same?

Again referring to “open sources” – meaning public media reports – the parliamentarians claim that the Kremlin interfered in the Scottish referendum on independence back in 2014. So just because Russian news media featured that subject in its coverage is supposed to be “evidence” of Kremlin interference. The absurd accusation is also a convenient way to smear Scottish pro-independence.

Oddly enough, the report says there was no manifest Russian interference in the 2016 Brexit referendum. Well that’s handy. The Tory government wouldn’t want to smear its ambitions of reviving the British empire, that’s for sure.

The ISC publication is a self-serving dud that is “not worth a penny”, as Russian lawmaker Aleksy Chepa put it.

It is loaded with complacent British self-regard and knee-jerk Russophobia.

The parliamentarians repeatedly rebuke the British government and state intelligence for not taking the “threat” of alleged Russian meddling seriously enough.

A more plausible explanation is because there is negligible Russian meddling in British politics, as Moscow has consistently stated. If the British government and its spooks fail to get excited – in private – about allegations of Russian malfeasance it’s because there is actually nothing to the allegations. Still, the parliamentarian anti-Russia ideologues assume to know better. They are convinced that Britain is a target for Kremlin hostility and they lambast the government and intelligence services for “not making it a priority issue”.

The Orwellian plot thickens when the authors of the boilerplate Russian Report then conclude by urging MI5 to be given more secretive powers to collaborate with social media networks in order to control information in the name of combating a “hostile state threat”. This is a sinister, anti-democratic call worthy of a dictatorship for censoring and blackballing any dissenting views under the guise of “defending democracy”.

One area where the ISC document begins to deal with reality – but only superficially and misleadingly – is on the subject of super-rich Russian expatriates living in London, which is dubbed “Londongrad”. Many of these oligarchs are beneficiaries of looting Russian state assets during the privatization-robbery frenzy under former President Boris Yeltsin. They are not “friends of Putin” as the British lawmakers make out. These shady oligarchs are often big donors to the Conservative party, not because they want to inject pro-Russian influence, but rather because they are typically opposed to the current Russian government and are seeking to destabilize it. If there is any Russian “influence” in British politics it is that which promotes illegal regime-change policies in opposition to the Russian state.

In every aspect the much-vaunted Russia Report is a worthless pile of propaganda. Even a glimmer resembling something real – the Russian oligarchs in Londongrad – turns out to be an inversion of reality. And yet, pathetically, the British media amplify the nonsense with reverence and gravitas.

First though, some background to the issue. British government policy holds implicitly that agents or informants operating for the state’s security service, MI5, are permitted to commit crimes without fear of prosecution if those crimes are committed in the line of duty to protect national security.

This is tantamount to the British state granting its agents and proxies a “license to kill”. The judges in the panel of the so-called Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) have formally recognized this hitherto secret government policy as “legal”. The panel voted by 3 to 2 in favor. The two dissenting judges expressed deep concern that the ruling was “opening the door to future abuses” of power by British state agents.

MI5 is the branch of state intelligence that deals specifically with internal security. The other branch, MI6, deals with overseas activities. The disturbing implication is that MI5 can act with impunity, including acts of murder, against British citizens in the name of national security. The powers granted to it are secret and beyond public scrutiny in the courts. That means Britain’s secret services are now officially untouchable and above the law. This is a description fitting for a police state, not a supposed democracy which proclaims to be under the rule of law.

Four British-Irish human rights groups challenged the policy of immunity but they were over-ruled last week by the five-judge panel. These groups are to further appeal the decision in the courts. One of them, the Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ), based in Belfast, has considerable expertise in investigating the abuse of state power during the armed conflict in Northern Ireland (1969-1998). CAJ has documented the extensive involvement of British military intelligence in waging a dirty war in Northern Ireland where its agents colluded with and directed paramilitary agents and informants to carry out assassinations. Hundreds of such extra-judicial killings remain “unsolved” and represent a painful legacy for citizens across Northern Ireland.

One of the most notorious killings was that of Belfast human rights lawyer Pat Finucane (39) in 1989. British agents smashed into his home while he was having dinner with his wife and three young children. The attackers shot him in the head 12 times as he lay prone on the floor in front of his family. The British government has previously acknowledged “shocking collusion” by its agents in Finucane’s murder. But the British authorities have pointedly refused to hold a full public inquiry, thereby blocking any prosecution.

Thirty years after the murder of Pat Finucane and hundreds of other Irish citizens by British counterinsurgency operations, Britain is now formally granting the same license to kill citizens anywhere in the United Kingdom – under the pretext of national security. The development has grave implications for human rights in Britain. It also casts a sinister cloud over what kind of Britain the new Conservative government under Boris Johnson is creating post-Brexit.

Strategic Culture Foundation conducted the following interview with Daniel Holder, the deputy director of the Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ), based in Belfast.

INTERVIEW

Question: Is CAJ concerned that the Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruling last week will lead to serious human rights abuses by British security services in the future?

Daniel Holder: We are very concerned that this ruling for now permits MI5 to continue to authorize informant or agent involvement in serious crime. This could include crimes that constitute human rights violations. There were such experiences during the Northern Ireland conflict of informant-based paramilitary collusion, with agents of the state involved in acts as serious as murder and torture. Far from the so-called “intelligence war” helping bring the conflict to an end we consider that such practices by covert units of the security forces as having prolonged and exacerbated the conflict.

Question: On Brexit impact, will leaving the EU and its human rights standards add to concerns of abuse of power by the British state?

Daniel Holder: Although the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is part of the Council of Europe system and not the EU, those advocating for Brexit often confuse the two and hostility to the EU also manifests itself in hostility to the ECHR and its court in Strasbourg. Being an EU member state, however, does mean ECHR membership is obligatory, and that will go with Brexit. Although the ECHR being incorporated into Northern Ireland law is also a key part of the 1998 peace deal known as the Good Friday Agreement it is deeply concerning that the new British government is already advocating breaching this commitment by stating it will change the domestic ECHR law (the Human Rights Act) so it does not apply to acts before the year 2000. They are quite open that the reason for doing this is to impede investigations into the security forces during the Northern Ireland conflict – and top of the list as to what the UK does not want a light shined on is precisely the issue of the crimes of agents of the state within paramilitary groups, practices often referred to as “collusion”.

Question: Are British government claims justified that undercover work by security services and their agents may require freedom for agents to participate in unlawful activities in order to protect national security?

Daniel Holder: All police and security services the world over use informants. They are a vital policing tool, but they have to be used lawfully, and the question always is: where do you draw the line as to what they are allowed to do? On occasions where absolutely necessary this may involve informants being involved in crimes like conspiracies with a view to thwarting them; but the bottom line is that informants can never lawfully be “authorized” to be involved in serious crimes that constitute human rights violations, such as kidnap, killings and false imprisonment, nor can they act as agent provocateurs. All of that is illegal.

Question: The narrow majority in the five-judge high court granting immunity to MI5 from prosecution for crimes suggests there is concern among state judges that the existing policy is dubious and treacherous. Do you perceive deep misgivings among the authorities?

Daniel Holder: Yes, but not just now, going back some of the archival documents and investigations that have taken place into the Northern Ireland conflict have revealed significant misgivings at that time, about just such a policy. Take the government-approved De Silva review published in 2012 into the murder of human rights lawyer Pat Finucane, where “shocking” levels of collusion were admitted. This report conceded that that officers were being asked to do things that could not be done lawfully, which is another way of saying the policy and practice was unlawful. We now have a secret policy, the limits of which are unknown, on the basis of a power that does not exist in law, that tries to continue to place agents of the state above the law. The concern is that the errors of our past could be repeated if the same circumstances arise again, here or elsewhere.

Question: The British judges’ ruling last week seems contradictory. On one hand the ruling claims MI5 agents are not immune from prosecution, but on the other hand it says they can act unlawfully if it is done in the public interest?

Daniel Holder: The system and policy are contradictory. The policy says that MI5 informants are in theory not immune from prosecution, but MI5 will know about their crimes – and indeed authorize them – but conceal this from police and prosecutors, despite legal duties that apply to everyone in Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom to promptly inform the police when you are aware someone is committing a crime. Again, this is the security service placing itself above the law.

Question: Is this the kind of policy that leads to rampant lawlessness seen elsewhere, for example in Brazil and The Philippines where police officers and state agents are killing thousands of people extrajudicially with impunity? Northern Ireland’s past conflict of rampant British state collusion in killings is surely a warning too?

Daniel Holder: The practices by covert elements of the security forces of tolerating, facilitating and even directing informants in paramilitary groups involvement in serious crime, including killings, and assisting their evasion from justice, in our view was one of the most serious patterns of human rights violations that prolonged and exacerbated the Northern Ireland conflict and has left a deeply poisoned legacy that we are still struggling to deal with today. There have been significant reforms to the Police Service in Northern Ireland since the peace process to prevent recurrence, but the UK security and intelligence agencies also need to bring their practices within the law, otherwise somewhere, history could repeat itself.

This article is part of a series we are publishing from the ‘State of Surveillance’ report written by BigBrotherWatch, the civil liberties organisation. Much of the mainstream media have completely ignored its findings. Regular readers of TruePublica know we have published many reports and articles over the last four years relating to state surveillance (database) as we regard it to be a crucial battleground of our civil liberty. Today, it is a very serious worry that our entire mechanism of democracy is being undermined by excessive and uncontrolled state surveillance. This disproportionate obsession by the government and its agencies inhibits the fundamental ability of democratic rights to be exercised and amply demonstrates the thin ground Britain’s democracy stands on.

Phil Chamberlain is the Head of Department of Film & Journalism at the University of the West of England where he is responsible for more than a dozen undergraduate and postgraduate programmes as well as the Digital Cultures Research Centre. He teaches investigative journalism and his research interests cover surveillance, corporate discourses and court reporting. Phil has 20 years’ experience as a freelance journalist with working for newspapers, magazines and NGOs providing investigative news and feature stories. He co-authored Blacklisted: the secret battle between big business and union activists and is the author of Drones and Journalism: how the media is making use of unmanned aerial vehicles. Here is his report on state surveillance, employer blacklisting and the consequences of a state often out of control.

In 1987, Conservative MP Ken Warren wrote to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher attaching a list of 270 names of alleged members of the left-wing organisation Militant. He demanded the security services investigate to ensure that none of those on the list were placed in sensitive positions in the civil service. Warren’s McCarthyite intervention piqued the interest of a secret Whitehall committee called Subversion in Public Life (SPL).

Made up of senior civil servants from different departments along with MI5 and Special Branch representatives, SPL analysed the supposedly subversive threat to the machinery of government. While Warren may have worried about 270 alleged Militant members, the committee noted that his list “added little to our present knowledge; indeed it contains a number of known inaccuracies.” A report from the committee the previous year had estimated there were 50,000 potential subversives in the country and identified 1,420 who worked in the civil service.

The majority of these were members of left-wing organisations but far-right supporters were also listed along with members of anarchist groups and “black and Asian racial extremists”. The Department of Health and Social Security recorded the biggest number of subversives within its ranks with 360 (including six fascists). The perceived infiltration of civil service unions by these groups was a constant source of concern.

Margaret Thatcher asked that the SPL also look into local government, education and the NHS which proved more problematic because of the devolved nature of those organisations. One solution was that education inspectors were asked to supply MI5 with details on teachers. The SPL was not merely a bureaucratic exercise but a blacklist. Departments were encouraged to not only record these individuals but ensure they were not put in sensitive roles or moved to posts where they could be isolated. There is no indication the individuals were ever informed about their status; indeed the chairman of the SPL warned of the intense embarrassment if its activities became public knowledge.

In 1985, the same year the SPL began its work, it had been revealed that the BBC was running a secret political vetting operation with MI5. Meanwhile, the Economic League, again with close links to the security services, was at the height of its powers even if its veil of secrecy was slipping. It was paid by corporations to keep files on hundreds of thousands of people deemed subversives and to ensure they could not get employment.

In 1985, the same year the SPL began its work, it had been revealed that the BBC was running a secret political vetting operation with MI5. Meanwhile, the Economic League, again with close links to the security services, was at the height of its powers even if its veil of secrecy was slipping. It was paid by corporations to keep files on hundreds of thousands of people deemed subversives and to ensure they could not get employment.

The SPL was apparently wound up in 1988 and the Cabinet Office has refused to comment further other than to say that it is an historical matter. But blacklisting is the employment habit the UK cannot seem to kick. Building firm boss Cullum McAlpine was keen not to let blacklisting resources go to waste. He paid £10,000 to the Economic League for several thousand personal files covering the construction sector and set up one of the league’s investigators and an admin assistant in a discrete office in the West Midlands.

Until it was exposed in 2009, his organisation the Consulting Association was taking thousands of pounds in fees from the country’s biggest building firms to run a secret blacklisting operation.

Engineer Dave Smith was one of the workers on the firm’s files and his experience is typical. What initiated his file was taking part in action to recover unpaid wages and becoming a safety representative – in other words, legitimate trade union activity. The file details what car he drove, his family members, as well as jobs he applied for. The result was immediate and catastrophic; work dried up and Dave was eventually forced to leave the industry. He never knew his file existed until the Information Commissioner raided the Consulting Association, seized some of its material and then made it available to the subjects. Dave’s story is repeated many times over but often with worse results. Marriages broke up under the strain of financial insecurity, people were forced to move abroad and their health was affected.

It appears that one feature of such operations is their tendency to expand. Just as the SPL was asked to look into local government and schools, the Economic League had considered keeping lists of football hooligans and people with HIV. The Consulting Association was not limited to the construction sector but had files on people working in local politics, academia, journalism, the railways and the offshore oil industry. The latter sector had a notorious policy called ‘Not Required Back’ which was stamped on the files of many a trade union member who had spoken out.

The Consulting Association also had files on several hundred environmental activists and here the overlap between the private sector and the state was most explicit. Along with anti-fascist activists, environmental activists were of particular interest to the security services. An officer in one of the police’s surveillance units even gave a presentation on its work targeting animal rights groups to the Association. The files, along with evidence from police whistleblower Peter Francis, have revealed that undercover police officers infiltrated trade unions, black justice campaigns and environmental groups among others.

Francis was a member of the Special Branch’s Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) set up in 1968 and which only folded after being exposed in 2008. Some SDS officers had sexual relations with activists and even children in the course of intruding on and manipulating activists’ lives. After reviewing evidence from the files and other sources, the Blacklist Support Group complained to the Metropolitan Police in 2012 with six specific allegations about collusion between the state and the private sector.

In 2018 the Metropolitan Police finally admitted, “Sections of the policing community throughout the UK had both overt and covert contact with external organisations, including the Economic League, for reasons stemming from crime reporting and the maintenance of public order and the prevention of terrorism.” This statement only acknowledged what had become incontestable. However, the Metropolitan Police rejected other complaints and specifically exonerated the Special Demonstration Squad from colluding with blacklisters.

The police’s statement deployed a well-worn defence for blacklisting operations – that they are about crime or terrorism.

The Cabinet Office files on the Subversion in Public Life committee explicitly separated out actions to counter terrorism from its remit and made no claim to tackle illegal behaviour. An analysis of the Consulting Association files shows that time and again, the first activity to trigger monitoring was an individual raising health and safety concerns. It was legitimate union activity that resulted in people being surveilled – criminal activity was mentioned in only a handful of the more than 3,000 files it held.  It is worth noting that the activities of the SDS, the Consulting Association and the Economic League only ended after public exposure. There is little sense of a culture that sees such operations as wrong; only in getting caught. It took seven years for blacklisted construction workers to win a financial settlement and only one person was ever punished by the courts for their role in the scandal.

The SDS’ activities are currently the subject of a judge-led inquiry which is into its third year but yet to even begin taking evidence. Without an effective inquiry that the people affected can trust, there is little chance of change or indeed justice. Meanwhile, the monitoring of workers, unionists and especially whistleblowers continues.

The SDS’ activities are currently the subject of a judge-led inquiry which is into its third year but yet to even begin taking evidence. Without an effective inquiry that the people affected can trust, there is little chance of change or indeed justice. Meanwhile, the monitoring of workers, unionists and especially whistleblowers continues.

In 2015, Sir Robert Francis QC produced “Freedom To Speak Up”, a report into whistleblowing in the NHS. Francis reported that many people spoke of fears that whistleblowing would have a detrimental effect on their career and that there was evidence of “vindictive treatment” of people who raised concerns.

Dr Minh Alexander worked for 14 years as a consultant psychiatrist and had raised concerns over certain medical practices. She was made redundant in 2013 and reached a settlement with her employer. Alexander is one of many NHS staff who fear their careers have been ended because their decision to raise concerns has been recorded and shared. “The suppression of staff who speak up is a very old problem and will not go away until decision-makers truly accept that it is better to run a service in which staff and patients have a voice,” Alexander said.

Similarly, Eileen Chubb was forced to quit her job as a care assistant after raising concerns about patient safety. She now runs Compassion in Care which campaigns for better care for the elderly.

Official figures for 2017/18 showed that more than 350 whistleblowers in the NHS experienced repercussions after coming forward, including negative effects on their careers. Meanwhile, the Care Quality Commission, which helps regulate the sector, has been accused of revealing the details of dozens of whistleblowers to employers – a claim it denies.

Far from an historic concern and one limited to particular trades, the monitoring and blacklisting of workers remains the dirty secret of UK labour relations.

In one of the final acts of the Brown government, blacklisting was made illegal in 2010. As with pretty much every other state attempt to deal with the issue, it was a failure. Employment expert Professor Keith Ewing from King’s College London set out at length why the regulations are full of holes.

A key flaw is that it is a civil rather than criminal offence with the onus on the victim to prove their case; and since the victim is often up against a corporation, the balance of power is firmly against them. Blacklisting is a stark reminder of that imbalance of power but also that there is often no line between state and private, corporate and civil. The undercover police officers manipulating female activists into relationships were often seeking to protect corporate interests rather than prevent criminal wrongdoing. Indeed, in some cases, it is alleged they acted as agent provocateurs to incite wrongdoing.

The undercover police officers manipulating female activists into relationships were often seeking to protect corporate interests rather than prevent criminal wrongdoing. Indeed, in some cases, it is alleged they acted as agent provocateurs to incite wrongdoing.

There are three areas that desperately need improvement in order to tackle this scandal. Firstly, we need a properly funded public inquiry that can tease apart the links between the various people involved in blacklisting. Too much of the information has had to be pieced together by a few journalists, lawyers, MPs and many campaigners. Theresa May launched the judge-led Undercover Policing inquiry following revelations about the Special Demonstration Squad broken first by The Guardian. It has been little more than a disaster with no evidence heard in its first three years and participants boycotting the process because of a lack of trust. It is not expected to report until 2023.

Secondly, organisations charged with protecting personal information need better resourcing. Without the Information Commissioner’s Office, the secret blacklist files would not have been made public. The ICO needs the toughest tools if it is going to take on the biggest state and corporate interests and their digital archives. Thirdly, we need to see the delivery of justice.

It is worth pointing out that only one person was ever convicted for their part in the scandal. The company directors, human resources managers, police officers, civil servants and regulators who authorised, ignored or participated received no sanction. A survey by Building magazine found that 78% of human resources officials named as complicit in blacklisting were still employed four years after their role was revealed. There is a culture of acceptance that secret political surveillance and the sharing of information has always been with us and always will. Changing that culture will require a change in how power is distributed in society. It sounds too ambitious an objective. However, in 2009 a few dozen people affected by the blacklist gathered in a room by Parliament and decided that they wanted to do something about it. Seven years later they forced a multi-million-pound settlement from transnational construction firms. Where do we want to be in the next seven years?

truepublica.org.uk

After two agonising years for the families of eight victims, June 28^th should have been a special day where a British judge would have settled that question and at least pointed the finger at Britain’s security services.

On 3 June 2017, three terrorists drove a rented van into pedestrians walking on London Bridge, immediately killing two people. They then charged around with 30cm knives in a stabbing rampage that killed six people.

The frenzied, brutal attack lasted 10 minutes and ended when armed police shot dead the terrorists with 46 rounds.

Yet that awful night which shocked a nation, shouldn’t in reality have come as a surprise to Mi5 chiefs who had placed the ringleader, Khuram Butt, 27, under surveillance since 2015 over fears he would stage such a terrorist incident.

Eventually, their fears came true as he struck alongside fellow east Londoners Rachid Redouane, 30, and Youssef Zaghba, 22. Yet how could security officers have not intercepted communications or assumed from his movements that he was about to carry off the attack?

And perhaps a more relevant question is how much responsibility should the government and security services in the UK take for failing for years to close down the extremist organisation Al-Muhajiroun, which was formed in the mid 80s by Bakri in Saudi Arabia before he arrived in the UK in 1986 and has carried on under a number of guises over the years run by Anjem Choudary from 1996 onwards.

Butt, the ringleader of the London Bridge attacks, was probably a member of the Al-Muhajiroun and it’s believed, based on what Butt told friends, that he knew Choudary – which begs the question why wasn’t Choudary arrested for the London attacks?

Police now are facing awkward questions about the link between Butt and Choudary which raises another broader question whether there has been a cover up about Butt’s relationship with both Choudary and Butt.

Choudary, for the best part of 20 years, has been linked to just about every terror attack in the UK and had been a key figure in recruiting British male Muslims for Al Qaeda and ISIL in Iraq and Syria.

The warning signs have been there for any vigilant citizen for years. Not only had The London Bridge attacker was believed to have had links to al-Muhajiroun but he even appeared on a Channel 4 documentary called The Jihadis Next Door in 2016, which centred around Choudary and his group of British extremists who appear to be deluded individuals who are addicted to media attention.

The leading British criminal court the ‘Old Bailey’ heard that Butt, a British citizen born in Pakistan, was once described as a “party animal” who liked reggae music and smoking cannabis – exactly like Choudary who didn’t get beyond a year at Medical school due to his vices.

But by 2013 there were hints of radicalisation and in September 2015 security services were actually tipped off about his radicalisation by a family member after he was shocked by Butt’s comments about ISIL burning to death a Jordanian pilot streamed on YouTube.

But if intelligence was not acted on, and we are witnessing a cover up now of just how much Mi5 knew about Butt, then the role of media, by contrast, is even more an efficacy of incompetence and ignorance. The British press and its nascent style of sloppy journalism which is born from a tail spin of employing 5^th rate journalists and editors who have corrupted the news room with their echo chamber of erroneous views and rank insecurity to even investigate stories which challenge their narrative, also has some blood on its hands.

Put bluntly, just how could we expect British journalists to even do their job and dig deeper into radicalised Muslims like Butt when they can’t even accurately report on Omar Bakri by using his correct name.

The echo chamber in the UK press room dictates that any errors already published have to be repeated for ever, out of respect for snowflake colleagues who might burst into tears if they were challenged. Omar Bakri is not Omar Bakri. His name has actually been created by sloppy journalism in the UK. His real name is Omar Mohamed Bakri Fustok and his life is largely a mystery or a pack of lies depending on your perspective invented entirely for sloppy British journalists who he knew were never going to check details.

Most of what we remember as journalism has died in the UK. Cash-strapped media has shipped in a new generation of cheaper, younger, less educated journalists who largely consider old school journalism – where hacks actually have sources in the security services for example – a sort of terminal virus that should be avoided. Freelancer who are investigative journalists also are to be considered as Ebola victims which you don’t even want to shake hands with.

It’s new media. And even the older journalists can indulge themselves with their own ego-driven agenda in the newsroom when they are sitting next to people whose chief supply of information is the internet itself – a bastion of feral, biased opinion which conveniently feeds into the bias of a select few who cherry pick it to substantiate their own views, dressed up as ‘reporting’. The British press has not only become a farce, when we talk about journalism, but has indulged itself in rebranding itself as even more of an elitist club made up of tabloid hacks, who can barely find the middle east on Google maps let alone even know where Beirut is, accompanied by their broadsheet peers who would literally murder a freelance correspondent rather than let his piece get in the edition – from the same country where the crusty old boy is based. I had to keep a straight face recently when one such aging half wit told of a British broadsheet told me in all serious “no, I don’t let….er, i mean we don’t, that is to say I don’t work with freelancers. Sorry [smiles awkwardly]…freelancers…no”.

Whereas before, the select group of journalists working on foreign desks represented something akin to elitism, but at least were good at their work, these days we’ve dumbed down to accommodate the truly useless and inept.

Really insecure, self centred older journalists who were just too arrogant to listen to journalists like myself in the field who warned them (as I did with BBC Panorama editors when the London Bridge Attacks happened) and preferred the echo chamber of their own ignorance didn’t do their jobs and dig. They didn’t ask the right questions to security officers. They didn’t even ask themselves the right questions and do the research. A conspiracy of scores of senior journalists in the BBC and the broadsheet media failed those families of the eight victims.

And let’s face it, you don’t have to be too bright to join up the dots between ‘Omar Bakri’, Anjem Choudary and their disgusting, cowardly, vile terror organisation which murdered British soldier Lee Rigby – which fed them with the sick notoriety they needed to replace their empty lives and influenced losers like Khuram Butt who had an almost religious devotion to both men. In 2017 I sternly argued the case to a BBC producer on Panorama that ‘Omar Bakri’ was the architect of the London Bridge attacks but was more or less told to shut up as the idea was “far fetched” or words to that effect.

The arrogance and ignorance of this new generation of editors in TV and print who are allowed to indulge themselves with their own ideas while shutting out real journalists and their work is part of what many in the UK now are talking about what is responsible for the collapse of many important elements of British society. It’s this parody of journalism, which has led to a total collapse of confidence by the British public and led to, for example, the mess of Brexit or the emergence of Boris Johnson as a leader, which can be held, in part, responsible for the London Bridge Attacks. It’s not only the intelligence community which fudged it. It’s also media. Put another way, could you blame Mi5 officers not worrying about any accountability for making such seismic mistakes when they had total confidence in the British press to carry on with their churno-lism which bypasses all journalistic disciplines? The BBC could have interviewed Bakri in a Lebanese prison in 2017 (which I could have arranged) and perhaps been a catalyst for Mi5 doing which was obvious to me then and should be obvious to the entire security service: strike a deal. Bakri’s computers, seized by the Lebanese police in May 2014, just weeks after I interviewed him in his Tripoli home, probably had all the names and details of devout followers, as Choudary was in contact with him until his arrest. Maybe even Bakri knew some of the hard core ones by name; there are too many possibilities to explore to finally destroy the wretched Al-Muhajiroun once and for all but the UK choosing not to extradite Bakri from a country which it hands hundreds of millions of dollars to just for its Syrian refugee program alone, is a colossal error of judgement – as is the British press obsession with blaming security services alone when a terror attack is carried out, without looking at its own failings.