In this piece, Mike discusses the increasingly political use of the police to infiltrate and gather information on opposition and protest groups. This follows revelations in the Guardian that a policeman approached a student at Cambridge University and tried to get him to provide information on student activists at the university. He was asked for the names of those going on protests, their leaders, the vehicles they used when they went on demonstrations. Other groups targeted for police surveillance included UK Uncut, Unite Against Fascism, environmentalists and the campaigns against tax avoidance and government cuts. Mike points out this marks a return to the policies of Thatcher’s government, when the police were used, in the words of one chief constable, as ‘Thatcher’s army’ against the miners. The BBC also joined in their campaign by doctoring images of the battles between the police and miners so that the strikers appeared to be the instigators of the violence. He also states that these revelations have made the blog come full circle, as he was partly moved to set up this blog by the police ‘kettling’ students protesting against the imposition of tuition fees. Mike argues that the police are becoming Cameron’s Gestapo, and that their use as a secret police marks an assault on over a thousand years of hard-won political freedoms. This is certainly a real danger, but it has been going on for a very long time. The radical, parapolitical magazine Lobster was launched to examine and publicise the political use of the intelligence services – MI5 and MI6 – against left-wing opposition groups in the UK and abroad. Since the fall of Communism in the 1990s and the flood of information on the activities of the security services, it has changed its focus to examining the role of covert funding groups, think tanks and highly influential individuals in promoting Right-wing policies in the UK, including within the Labour party. One senior member of MI5, according to Lobster, once boasted in an interview with the BBC, that there wasn’t a Left-wing or opposition organisation in which their man either wasn’t in charge, or was in a position to send one of their members off and bring their man on. This was duly cut from the broadcast version of the interview. Lobster also considers that MI5 actively promoted the smears that Harold Wilson was a Soviet spy, and conspired against his administration in collusion with the Conservative party. The political infiltration and surveillance of protest groups has been going on for a very long time. The only difference it seems is that the police are joining the intelligence services. The information revolution means, however, that such operations may also become increasingly difficult. The student approached by the policeman, ‘Peter Smith’, turned the tables on him by secretly filming him with the camera in his phone. It’s one way in which the world of the internet and the mobile phone can be used to defend and promote freedom against the establishment forces of oppression. Unfortunately, as this article reveals, this may not be easy as police increasingly join the intelligence services as the secret police of Cameron’s Tory Britain.
So now not only are our students facing the prospect of a life in debt, paying off the cost of their education (thanks, Liberal Democrats!) but they know they can expect the police to be spying on them in case they do anything radical, student-ish and treasonous like joining UK Uncut and occupying a shop to publicise the corporate tax avoidance our Tory-led government encourages.
Rather than investigate and solve crimes, it seems the police are embracing their traditional role (under Conservative governments) as political weapons – targeting suspected dissenters against their right-wing government’s policies, trying to undermine their efforts and aiming to apprehend key figures.
They are behaving like secret police, in fact. Allow this to go much further and we will have our own Gestapo, here in Britain. Before anyone starts invoking Godwin’s Law, just take a look at the evidence; it is a justifiable comparison.
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