EcoLogics

We asked the police what powers they wanted and gave them to them

–Tony Blair, during speech about law and order in July, 2004

Note: This is the third in a series of posts:

Labour’s Spiral of Terror (I): Introduction
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (II): The policing of ‘views’
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (III): RIPA 2000 and Blair’s Hobbesian Ideal
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (IV): Blunkett’s Law
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (V): the other 9/11

At first glance, Glasgow and Poole would appear to have little in common. One is far to the north of the British Isles, and represents itself as a modern, progressive, and multi-cultural city. The other is far to the south, and is happy to represent itself as a sandy tourist resort, the site of one of the world’s largest natural harbours. Where Glasgow is usually regarded as a bastion of ‘old’ Labour, Poole is so Conservative that it doesn’t even have a single New Labour councillor. Whatever the real similarities or differences, both places have recently witnessed events that reveal the social consequences of New Labour’s spiral of terror.

In April of 2008, Poole made national headlines when it emerged that its council was using what was widely (and mistakenly) regarded as anti-terror legislation to spy on a family who were wrongly accused of lying on a school application form.  The following extracts, taken from The Telegraph, tell the remarkable story:

‘A council [the Poole Council] has used powers intended for anti-terrorism surveillance to spy on a family who were wrongly accused of lying on a school application form. […] For two weeks the middle-class family was followed by council officials who wanted to establish whether they had given a false address within the catchment area of an oversubscribed school to secure a place for their three-year-old. […] The “spies” made copious notes on the movements of the mother and her three children, who they referred to as “targets” as they were trailed on school runs. The snoopers even watched the family home at night to establish where they were sleeping. […] Poole borough council disclosed that it had legitimately used the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) to spy on the family’. […] The mother, who wishes to remain anonymous, said: “I’m incensed that legislation designed to combat terrorism can be turned on a three-year-old”’(1).

Almost exactly one year later, it was Glasgow’s turn to make security headlines. In late April 2009, the Guardian published an article that revealed that two police officers from the Strathclyde Police Force (or men who identified themselves as such) had tried to infiltrate the anti-climate change group ‘Plane Stupid’. They had done so by threatening one of the group’s activists, Matilda Gifford, with a criminal record for her previous arrests, and by offering to bribe her in exchange for inside information. The activist recorded the conversations, and the following are excerpts of the exchange, as transcribed by the Guardian:

‘”Well let’s just say if you were prepared to meet us, and talk to us, we may be in a position to help you out financially,” said the assistant.

The DC continued: “Look at the big picture – we work with hundreds of people, believe me, ranging from terrorist organisations right through to whatever … We have people who give us information on environmentalism, leftwing extremism, rightwing – you name it, we have the whole spectrum of reporting.

“The point we’re making is: they come to us with the concerns, because within the organisations for which they have strong ideologies and beliefs they are happy to go along with that, but what they will not get involved in is maybe where it’s gonna impact someone else. That’s when they come to us and say ‘by the way, so and so – in my opinion – is maybe getting a wee bit too hotheaded’.”

Before ending the meeting, Gifford reportedly asked: “Are you Strathclyde police?” The DC paused, and replied: “We are.”’

When Gifford asked how much money would be involved, and said she was not interested in ’20 quid’ (the British term for 20 pounds sterling), one of the officers replied ‘”UK plc can afford more than 20 quid.”’(2)

Assuming that the two police officers were not themselves acting on behalf of ‘UK plc’, any questions regarding the legality of both sets of events—the Poole town council’s spying, and the attempted bribery by the Strathclyde Police—would have been covered by one same legislative act: the ‘Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, 2000’, better known as RIPA 2000. In RIPA 2000 we find a good symbol of the legislative dimension of New Labour’s spiral of terror, and so it is pertinent to describe some of its key aspects.

* * *

To begin with, it should be noted that the name Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act is rather cunning; in some respects, the act is arguably better described as a form of deregulation. The act established the new legal framework for what is known as ‘targeted surveillance’, i.e. spying on an individual or a group of individuals (as distinct from mass surveillance of the kind made possible by the fact that ISPs are now obliged to hold onto their users’ internet records for several years). However, its advocates within New Labour were as keen to provide a legal basis for targeted surveillance in the age of new media technologies—the official justification for the legislation—as they were to prevent the courts from making any spying public. RIPA allows the government to require an ISP to provide access to a customer’s communications in secret (or indeed to demand that an ISP fit equipment to facilitate surveillance). But it also stops courts from revealing the existence of interception warrants and any data collected with them. As the Act states, ‘Subject to section 18, no evidence shall be adduced, question asked, assertion or disclosure made or other thing done in, for the purposes of or in connection with any legal proceedings which (in any manner)—(a) discloses, in circumstances from which its origin in anything falling within subsection (2) may be inferred, any of the contents of an intercepted communication or any related communications data; or (b) tends (apart from any such disclosure) to suggest that anything falling within subsection (2) has or may have occurred or be going to occur.’(3)

This aspect of RIPA means that anyone who can use the legislation for targeted surveillance (more on that issue, below) can do so in the knowledge that the surveillance process is unlikely to be controlled by the courts. And yet, as the examples of the Poole town council and the Strathclyde Police reveal, there are good grounds to assume that RIPA 2000 not only can, but will be subject to abuse in the absence of strict oversight.

The second point worth highlighting involves the range of institutions that can use (or abuse) RIPA 2000. As the act’s original preamble makes clear, it was, from the beginning, a very wide-ranging act of legislation: ‘An Act to make provision for and about the interception of communications, the acquisition and disclosure of data relating to communications, the carrying out of surveillance, the use of covert human intelligence sources and the acquisition of the means by which electronic data protected by encryption or passwords may be decrypted or accessed; to provide for Commissioners and a tribunal with functions and jurisdiction in relation to those matters, to entries on and interferences with property or with wireless telegraphy and to the carrying out of their functions by the Security Service, the Secret Intelligence Service and the Government Communications Headquarters; and for connected purposes(3)’.

What is not always realised is that in 2003, David Blunkett dramatically extended the number of institutions that might use RIPA 2000. It would be serious enough if RIPA could be used (or again, abused) by the security services, alone. But as reported by the BBC’s Newsnight programme on April 14, 2008, by that date some 635 UK agencies had been authorised to use one or another of the powers instituted by RIPA 2000. The civil liberties non-government organisation Liberty, which was Newsnight’s source for the above statistic, suggested in its Privacy Report that amongst many other agencies, RIPA 2000 was enabling local authorities, food and fishing agencies, and even the Charity Commission to use targeted surveillance powers (4). What began as an act that was clearly written for the security services, ended up as what has rightly been described as a ’snooper’s charter’ for hundreds of councils and other national and local state agencies.

To put this practice into context, the Telegraph reported on April 12, 2008 that in 2007, councils and government departments across the UK made 12,494 applications for ‘directed surveillance’ to the police’s 19,000. In the same article, the paper suggested that an unidentified ‘local government body’ had admitted that councils and other government bodies ‘would soon carry out more surveillance than the police.’ According to the Telegraph, one council, the Gosport borough council, was even using the RIPA legislation for ‘an undercover investigation into dog fouling. Council officers equipped with digital cameras and binoculars are spying on dog walkers’(5).

The third point worth noting is that the RIPA legislation was introduced by New Labour in February 2000. Given the time that it takes to develop and introduce new legislation, this means that New Labour began work on the legislation years before September 11, 2001.  But also, and as noted earlier, the legislation was then dramatically extended, after 9/11, to a variety of forms and levels of everyday governance in 2003. The significance of both aspects of the timing cannot be overemphasized; to repeat the crucial point, the legislation was introduced before 9/11, but then dramatically extended beyond anti-terror operations after 9/11. On this ground alone, anyone who claims that the introduction of this legislation was no more than a response to terrorism is either mistaken, or being deceitful.

What RIPA 2000 makes clear is that a key aspect of the scaffolding that holds up New Labour’s spiral of terror involves a sweeping, and far-ranging legislative project which is by no means simply a result of any real or alleged ‘war on terror’. On the contrary, it illustrates the way in which the spiral of terror has involved what has become, in effect, a kind of ‘terrorisation’ of all forms of criminality, a U.S.-style zero-tolerance discourse that is premised on the notion that any and all measures must be taken to secure the safety of the nation. This ideal, which might be described as the idea of a ‘Securi-State’, has now gone so far that it is even possible to use the most draconian of measures to try to prevent people from leaving their dog’s shit on pavements and park grounds. But crucially, it has also been extended to any kind of protest or activism that is somehow deemed to be ’subversive’. The aforementioned Strathclyde policeman’s comment says it all:

“Look at the big picture – we work with hundreds of people, believe me, ranging from terrorist organisations right through to whatever … We have people who give us information on environmentalism, leftwing extremism, rightwing – you name it, we have the whole spectrum of reporting.”

Upon reading this comment, EcoLogics wonders if part of that ‘whole spectrum’ includes the civil rights group Liberty—note that police looking through Damian Green’s computer searched for emails to and from Shami Chakrabarti—or indeed 10 Downing Street itself: who passed on McBride’s infamous email to the Conservatives? Such issues to one side, the question must be raised: what has motivated this extraordinary slide towards a more and more authoritarian form of policing?

* * *

A first answer can be found in a remarkable speech that Tony Blair gave on the subject of ‘law and order’ in July 2004. The speech makes very clear, by Blair’s own account, that the real agenda behind legislation such as RIPA 2000 was years, if not decades in the making:

It was John Stuart Mill who articulated the modern concept that with freedom comes responsibility.

But in the 1960’s revolution, that didn’t always happen.

Law and order policy still focussed on the offender’s rights, protecting the innocent, understanding the social causes of their criminality.

All through the 1970s and 1980s, under Labour and Conservative Governments, a key theme of legislation was around the prevention of miscarriages of justice.

Meanwhile some took the freedom without the responsibility.

The worst criminals became better organised and more violent.

The petty criminals were no longer the bungling but wrong-headed villains of old; but drug pushers and drug-abusers, desperate and without any residual moral sense.

And a society of different lifestyles spawned a group of young people who were brought up without parental discipline, without proper role models and without any sense of responsibility to or for others.

All of this was then multiplied in effect, by the economic and social changes that altered the established pattern of community life in cities, towns and villages throughout Britain and throughout the developed world.

Here, now, today, people have had enough of this part of the 1960s consensus.‘(6)

EcoLogics will eventually post a detailed critique of this speech—a speech which may well come to be regarded as one of the historical markers of Britain’s drift towards an authoritarian society. Here it suffices to note that, while Blair invokes John Stuart Mill, his stance, as represented by this speech and by his government’s actions, is actually much closer to that of Thomas Hobbes (if indeed his position can be said to be closer to that of any philosopher). Hobbes was famously the advocate of a ’social contract’ between society and a sovereign (or sovereign authority) to whom all individuals must cede any natural rights for the sake of protection. Any abuses of power by this authority should be accepted as the price of peace. The extent of the drift towards this authoritarian discourse in the New Labour party is perhaps best symbolized by what is the most extraordinary statement in Blair’s speech: towards the end of the speech, Blair actually boasts that ‘We asked the police what powers they wanted and gave them to them’…

A first answer to the question posed earlier is thus that New Labour’s enthusiasm for the Securi-State is at least partly a matter of ideology, in the traditional sense of the word: a ‘world view’ such as was expressed by Tony Blair, and which has been enthusiastically echoed by many other leading members of New Labour: amongst others, David Blunkett, Charles Clarke, Peter Mandelson, Tony McNulty, Jacqui Smith, and of course, Gordon Brown himself.

In the aftermath of Ian Tomlinson’s death, the question that is faced by the country is what, if anything, can be done to put, in one former policing minister’s words, the genie back into the bottle. The last post in the series will revisit this question; in the next post, we will concern ourselves with a second, and arguably equally important motivation for New Labour’s efforts to transform Britain into a ‘Securi-State’.

Update May 7, 2009:

In the wake of the controversy surrounding New Labour’s efforts to circumvent the European Court of Human Rights on the DNA Database, the Bristol East MP has provided an excellent example of what this post described as Blair’s Hobbesian ideal–an ideal that, if this MP’s ideas are anything to go by, goes far beyond the New Labour jefatura:as the MP puts it, ‘Yes, Shami Chakrabati is right when she says the Government’s proposals could mean that ‘wholly innocent’ people could have their details stockpiled for years. That’s the cost of such a plan. But the benefit – protecting other wholly innocent people from being raped or worse, isn’t that worth the sacrifice? Are your ‘civil liberties’ really so precious that you’d be prepared to have these crimes on your conscience?’ (http://kerry-mccarthy.blogspot.com/2009/05/dna-database.html)

References

(1)‘Poole council spies on family over school claim’, in Telegraph, April 11, 2008, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/04/11/nspy111.xml, accessed April 14, 2008.

2) ‘UK plc can afford more than 20 quid,’ the officer said, in Guardian, April 25, 2009, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/25/police-informers-tape-recordings-gifford, accessed April 27, 2009.

3) See http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2000/ukpga_20000023_en_1#Legislation-Preamble, accessed April 14, 2008.

(4) G. Crossman et al. (2007) Overlooked: Surveillance and Personal Privacy in Modern Britain. London: Liberty, p. 16. Copy available at http://www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/issues/3-privacy/index.shtml, accessed April 14, 2008.

(5) Council spy cases hit 1,000 a month, in Telegraph, April 12, 2008, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/04/12/nspy112.xml, accessed April 14, 2008.

(6) Full text of speech transcribed at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3907651.stm, accessed April 27, 2009.