Michael Meacher MP

Today’s revelation that the police in the UK, with the connivance of the Home Office, are planning to launch spy drones over Britain for covert surveillance from the sky is only the latest, but perhaps the most far-reaching, measure yet of the Government’s obsessive drive for all-round comprehensive spying on its citizens. According to its authors, Kent police and BAE, civilian UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) would “greatly extend” the Government’s surveillance and “revolutionise policing”. That must be the under-statement of the year. This is pure Orwell. We are told that these spies in the sky could operate from 20,000ft (two-thirds as high as Mt. Everest) and would thus be invisible from the ground, and be in continuous operation for 15 hours at a time. This is so all-embracing, like a permanent unsleeping eye watching you ceaselessly, that it can only be described as totalitarian in the untrammelled range of its application.

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The conviction yesterday of the 22 protesters who stopped a coal train in June 2008 carrying 42,000 tonnes of coal to the Drax power station in North Yorkshire and shovelled the coal on to the embankment throws a spotlight on the murky interface between environmental protest and the law. This is an area where the Establishment has been worsted several times in recent years and has been desperately anxious to turn the tables legally against green protesters. The authorities suffered their first setback in 2000 when Lord Melchett, a former Environment Minister, led a party into a GM field in Norfolk to trash the crop as a protest against the Government’s intention to introduce genetically modified food into Britain, only to find to their intense chagrin that the protesters were acquitted by the jury. Then in September last year the Kingsnorth 6 were acquitted by a Kent jury after they had managed to paint a message to Gordon Brown (and the media) on the chimney of the power station condemning the proposed new round of coal station building, since coal-burning is the most polluting of greenhouse gases. Then there were green protesters on the roof of the Palace of Westminster unfolding banners against the third runway at Heathrow and further action in another episode digging up part of the runway at Stansted Airport. Then on 2 April this year at the G20 meeting in London peaceful gatherings were violently attacked in a number of filmed incidents, as though environmental protesters were somehow the enemies of the State. So the Establishment was certainly keen to reverse their setbacks and score a legal victory in the Drax case, but the methods they deployed need examination.

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Today’s news that the Home Office intends to ram through by statutory instrument a major and highly contentious curtailment of civil liberty by retaining the DNA profiles of innocent persons for up to 12 years, contrary to to an ECHR ruling, is not acceptable. The police currently hold on their database the profiles of 850,000 persons who have been arrested, but not charged or found guilty. Many of them feel they are being branded as criminals when they are not, and that retaining the profiles in these circumstances will simply discourage people from giving blood samples in future because they may be stigmatised as a result. There is therefore considerable public misgiving about this proposal as it is, but now to find a ‘safe’ route to push it through the Commons via a statutory instrument committee and thus avoid a vote of the whole House is both devious and cowardly. The Home Secretary should think again, not least when public anger is already at boiling point over MPs’ expenses.

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Whilst nobody would deny that the retention of DNA information on a national DMA database has a legitimate role in the prevention of crime, it is a question of where the balance is drawn so as to minimize the loss of fundamental rights in protecting personal data, and once again the Government is found to be acting, not proportionately, but using ‘blanket and indiscriminate’ powers according to the ECHR. The decision announced today by the Home Office to retain for 6 years the DNA profiles of innocent people arrested but not convicted of minor offences is surely excessive and unreasonable. Equally, to retain for 12 years the DNA data of innocent people suspected of more serious violent or sexual crime, but not convicted, contrasts sharply with decisions taken in other EU countries, and in Scotland it is 5 years. The decision smells of overkill,

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The revelation today that DBERR officials supplied police intelligence data to the German energy company E.ON executives in order to thwart environmental protestors over Kingsnorth lays bare several truths about the nature of the State and the current regime. The idea that the civil service impartially holds the ring between conflicting forces in support of the public interest is blown away for the fanciful shibboleth it always was. It clarifies the mindset of the government that business-as-usual should routinely trump climate change concerns, even to the point of neutralising them altogether. It exposes the government machine as little more than an adjunct of business, using the State’s intelligence data to advance a highly controversial commercial interest. And it reveals the development of a highly authoritarian streak, which came through strongly in the policing of the G20 protests, that demonstrations are somehow illegitimate.

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Within the last week the nature of State power has once again been clearly exposed. We now know that at least two persons were assaulted by police at the G20 protests, Ian Tomlinson who died and a woman (so far not named), even though neither was acting violently or illegally. Then a few days later there wer mass arrests of 114 people alleged to be planning direct action at a coal-fired power station in Nottinghamshire, though 12 hours later no charges had been made. However, when it came to a construction industry-operated blacklist designed to prevent union activists from getting work on building sites, no action was taken at all though the blacklist had been known about for decades. Yet there is a consistent logic lying behind all three of these episodes.

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The death of Ian Tomlinson leaves several uncomfortable questions unanswered. The initial response of the police was that they had had no involvement with him before he collapsed, and that when he did collapse police medical officers tried to treat him despite a barrage of missiles which made their support and care for him more difficult. It was only the fortuitousness of the video taken, unbeknown to the police, by a City worker that caused this story of helpfulness to unravel. The video made it clear thata in fact he had been assaulted from behind at least once by a police officer (a member of the Territorial Support Group often deployed to deal with potentially violent situations) with a baton before being pushed over roughly to the ground. Even more telling, the video reveals that several other police officers witnessed the incident, but stood around offering no help. Nor could anyone recall missiles being thrown when Tomlinson collapsed. It therefore appears that the police constructed a false account of the event in order to put themselves in a good light, and only changed it when incontrovertible evidence came to light which indicated they had been lying or at least selective with the truth. The question then arises: was this a panic reaction in one unique incident, or is this a pattern which needs to be dealt with?

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One of the most unpleasant aspects of New Labour is their antipathy to civil liberties. It arises naturally from the determination of its founders (essentially Brown, Mandelson, Blair) to turn Labour into a dogmatically pro-business party where the values of business, and in particular Big Business, are made to prevail at every level of the economy and society. Those values centre round not only deregulation, privatisation, globalisation, and a business-friendly tax regime, but also the protection of business property and support wherever feasible to promote business profits. Values that may sometimes stand in the way – democracy, dissent, equal opportunity, personal freedom, tolerance of minority opinion, to name a few – are downplayed or ignored. A regular victim of this pro-corporate authoritarian civic order has been civil liberties. With the assault now being threatened against climate change protesters, it is now under attack again, this time even more extreme than before.

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Deep Packet Inspection may not mean much, but it ought to bring to a head the simmering tension over privacy between personal liberties and fighting terrorism which the Government has been dragging far too far in the direction of State control.
Deep Packet Inspection refers to equipment which the Home Office is planning to embed with internet and mobile phone providers (such as BT and Vodafone) so as to monitor and store the calls and emails of everyone in Britain all the time. This is a staggering project in every sense – cost, complexity, and unprecedented intrusiveness in ordinary people’s lives and their most intimate communications.
It goes even further than the Government’s other massive programmes of prying on citizens via identity cards, car number plate recognition, and increasingly universal CCTV. The scope of the new plan is mind-numbing. Last year there were 57bn text messages sent, mobile calls made totalling 99bn, and a trillion emails sent.
The ostensible purpose of this ultimate Big Brother surveillance programme is to fight crime and terrorism which it is said are aimed at destroying the values of our society. But there comes a point when the totalitarian methods deployed to root out crime and terrorism can insidiously undermine the fundamental values and principles of British society even more than the evil they seek to eradicate. With this latest Orwellian monstrosity, there can be no doubt we are well past that point.
Interception of calls and emails is already occurring on a far greater scale than is generally understood. Very few people realise that there are over 650 bodies which can already legally have their communications intercepted by the authorities, or that last year this was exercised in over half a million cases. I have put down PQs asking, for each of the last 10 years, how many of these calculated intercepts actually yielded information material to trapping terrorists and criminals. What is now proposed is a totally indiscriminate monitoring of the unimaginably vast database of all calls and emails by everyone everywhere all the time in this country, and the hit rate for gathering relevant information must decline to utterly infinitesimal proportions.
There are several reasons for stopping this latest venture in its tracks. The expected cost is £12bn, which on past experience of vast Government IT projects is all too likely to escalate dramatically. On the basis of the same evidence it is all too likely not to work. Nor, from several recent notorious episodes, can the authorities be trusted to keep all this personal data secure from being lost, stolen or even corruptly sold on. Nor again can we be sure that official snooping on this scale will not be used for quite other purposes than fighting crime and terrorism – like spying on companies or political opponents, or fishing expeditions to see what is turned up. It would transform Britain from a (relatively) free society into a Stasi-penetrated nightmare.