IN the wake of the French terror attacks PM Cameron has promised a ‘comprehensive piece of legislation’ to close the ‘safe spaces’ used by suspected terrorists to communicate online with each other.
Cameron wants the police and the secret police to have access to all and every electronic communication, as they see fit. Privacy is to be abolished! There are to be no secrets from an all-powerful state.
Every citizen of the UK is to be presumed guilty, and thus liable to be spied on 24-7, until the spooks consider that they are neither terrorists nor active trade unionists!
Cameron absurdly said that such secret police powers were appropriate in a ‘modern liberal democracy’. They were ‘very intrusive’ but he believed that they were justified to counter the growing threat to the UK.
The greatest threat to the liberty of the subject in the UK does not come from Islamist terrorists but from Her Majesty’s Government, desperate to prevent the people of the UK from overturning its draconian cuts programme at home and its war policy abroad.
Just to emphasise the point, Cameron went on to state that there should be no ‘means of communication’ which ‘we cannot read’.
Yesterday, the House of Lords was debating the government’s current counter-terrorism bill, which will also give vast new powers to the security services.
It will allow the Home Secretary to impose temporary exclusion orders on British subjects, who are ‘suspect,’ to keep them out of the UK, while universities and councils are to be required to take counter-radicalisation measures.
Changes to the TPIMs (Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures) will allow the state to intern suspects in another part of the country well away from their home area. ‘Internment’ is to be imposed based on an estimated ‘Balance of Probabilities’ concerning the conduct of the suspect.
‘Suspects’ are to have their passports seized at the border on the basis of this ‘balance of probabilities’. On the basis of this same balance Home Secretary May will be able to sign an order banning a suspect from the UK for up to two years.
The conduct of the secret police, using the powers that they have currently, are well known, and do not form a basis for presumed good conduct in the future. A number of allegations have been made since 2011, when it emerged that former PC Mark Kennedy, working under cover as a spy on environmental protesters, posing as Mark ‘Flash’ Stone, had at least one sexual relationship with an activist, and fathered her child, before deserting her and the child without any notice at the end of the operation!
It is claimed that five undercover officers engaged in spying on environmental campaign groups between the mid-1980s and 2010 had relationships with women, lasting from seven months to nine years.
When the Cambridge police sought to establish a secret operation at Cambridge University in 2013 to spy on the political activities of students, a covertly recorded film reveals an officer attempting to persuade an activist to become an informant for money.
A police officer wanted the activist to also identify leaders of protests and to search on Facebook for the latest information about protests being planned.
The activist was asked to target ‘student-union type stuff’ that would be of interest because ‘the things they discuss can have an impact on community issues’. Other surveillance targets proposed included campaign group UK Uncut, Unite Against Fascism, environmentalists and the group Cambridge Defend Education.
There is a tradition in the UK of struggle against ‘overmighty states’ and in the 1640’s there was a social revolution against one such state.
Cameron’s all powerful state will not be primarily concerned with foreign terrorists. It will be concerned at discovering just what workers are planning to defeat the massive cuts that he is to impose after the election, if elected, and to prepare the legal ground for a return to the days of the Combination Acts!
Cameron’s over-mighty state must be treated in the same way as was Charles I’s, with a social revolution of the working class and the youth.
