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Sleepwalking into a surveillance society?

The revelation that Scotland Yard bugged a senior Labour Party MP without government authorisation, apparently in breach of a 40-year-old practice against spying on MPs, has re-ignited the debate on the British government’s paranoia about security. Angry MPs are asking: Is Britain sleepwalking into a “surveillance society?” Has it come to this that even MPs are regarded as a potential threat? And if we are not safe any more, how vulner able should the ordinary Briton feel?

Tempers are running high in Westminster since The Sunday Times disclosed how the police covertly recorded a private conversation between the government whip Sadiq Khan and his constituent Babar Ahmed who is facing extradition to America on terror charges. It happened during Mr. Khan’s visits to the Woodhill prison (Buckinghamshire) in 2005 and 2006 to meet Mr. Ahmed in his capacity as his local MP. Mr. Khan, a former human rights lawyer, one-time chairman of Britain’s leading rights group Liberty, has been an outspoken critic of the government’s draconian anti-terror laws and was among a group of MPs who wrote an open letter to Tony Blair in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion blaming his foreign policy for the rise in Islamist extremism.

Who authorised the bugging remains a mystery. The police have refused to comment but Mark Kearney, the police officer who bugged the Khan-Ahmed conversation, has claimed that he came under “significant pressure” from the Scotland Yard to do so.

“This request was very difficult. The MP concerned was Sadiq Khan, the member for Tooting. Mr. Khan is a prominent human rights lawyer. This concerned me on the grounds that the recording may cross the barriers of legal privilege,” he has been reported saying.

The government has denied any knowledge or involvement, and ordered an inquiry. Meanwhile, several other cases of alleged unauthorised bugging have come to light, including one involving the Labour peer, Lord Ahmed, who claimed that he got to know that he was bugged after a Minister showed him a transcript of a conversation he had with a Pakistani journalist in 2001.

Under the 1966 “Wilson doctrine,” named after the former Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, there is a ban on tapping MPs’ telephones or bugging their conversations. The “doctrine” came about following an uproar over reports that intelligence agencies were spying on MPs for their suspected communist links. Mr. Wilson assured MPs that henceforth there would be “`no tapping of the telephones of Members of Parliament.” He also promised that in the event of any change in policy, the government would come before the House and make a statement.

“If there was any development of a kind which required a change in the general policy [against tapping MPs’ phones] I would, at such moment, as seemed compatible with the security of the country, on my own initiative make a statement to the House about it,” he declared.

Since then, successive governments have endorsed the “Wilson doctrine;” at least there were no reported cases of its breach until the Sadiq Khan incident. In 2006, the Blair government toyed with the idea of lifting the ban as part of its new anti-terror package on the recommendation of the then Interception of Communications Commissioner Sir Swinton Thomas who argued that in the new climate, MPs needed no special protection. His view was that if the threat to national security justified bugging MPs, it should be allowed while protecting their dealings with their constituents.

Sir Swinton questioned the Wilson doctrine on the ground that it effectively put one set of citizens “above the law” which was against the fundamental spirit of the Constitution. “The doctrine means that MPs and peers can engage in serious crime or terrorism without running the risk of being investigated in the same way as any other member of the public,” he pointed out.

But his argument was drowned in a chorus of self-righteous protests from MPs who claimed that lifting the ban would undermine their freedom and compromise the “bond of confidentiality” they shared with their constituents. They also feared that the information collected by intelligence agencies might be used by the government for its own political ends.

Echoing their view, the combative Liberal Democrat MP, Norman Baker, said it was “extremely important” that MPs were able to operate without the suspicion that what they said on the telephone was likely to be “collected by the security services and relayed to the government.”

After a show of cross-party consultations, Mr. Blair rejected Sir Swinton’s advice and decided to retain the Wilson doctrine. But, it seems, the police had their own ideas and, to be sure, they had law on their side thanks to the same MPs who are now protesting. In 2000, ignoring warnings from civil rights groups, they passed the Regulation Investigatory Powers Act giving the police powers to bug prisoners suspected of terrorism without having to seek government authorisation. It has been suggested that what happened at the Woodhill prison was consistent with this Act: the person who was bugged, it is argued, was not Mr. Khan but the terror suspect he was visiting.

Having themselves passed such a sweeping Act, it is “a bit late for the MPs to huff and puff about this,” the Independent columnist Dominic Lawson pointed out in an article. Critics have accused MPs of double standards in allowing bugging/surveillance of ordinary citizens while seeking exemption for themselves. Since the 9/11 attacks, there has been a massive expansion of the surveillance apparatus with nearly 800 agencies, including local councils, given the powers to intercept private communications, including phone records and emails, of ordinary people for a range of non-criminal (often imaginary) offences.

With more than four million CCTV cameras, Britain has the dubious distinction of leading the world in this form of surveillance. Add to this a national DNA database of one million people, with no criminal record, and schools which believe that it is a good idea to fingerprint even small children and you have all the trappings of a “police state,” as Simon Jenkins put it in The Guardian.

“When the council can bug you for fly-tipping, when prisons can record conversations with defence lawyers, when any potentially criminal act can justify electronic intrusion … warning bells should sound,” he wrote.

The level of surveillance has reached a point that the government’s own official Big Brother, the Surveillance Commissioner, Sir Christopher Rose, is worried. In a report , he highlighted that during 2006-2007, some 40,000 surveillance operations were carried out — and at least 67 were unauthorised. “The work of the Commissioner has changed and grown out of all recognition since I took up my post in 2000,” he said.

The very existence of offices like those of the Interception of Communications Commissioner and the Surveillance Commissioner has an Orwellian ring, lending credence to concerns about human rights. While it is acknowledged that surveillance is necessary in fighting terrorism and everyday crime, there is concern that the scale of it has gone out of control and taken on what one newspaper described as “a sinister momentum of its own.”

For MPs to point the finger at the government alone, as if they have had nothing to do with it, is simply disingenuous. Barring Liberal Democrats and some honourable exceptions on Labour backbenches, the vast majority of MPs have been voting again and again for tougher and still tougher measures in the name of countering terror despite warnings about their impact on people’s lives. Having abetted in the creation of a surveillance society, MPs are seen to be protesting too much now that one of their own colleagues has been bugged. By all accounts, there is little public sympathy for MPs in their bid to be treated as a special class and given exemption from laws that they lay down for others.

On the other hand, there is strong support for the Swinton view that nobody should be above the law and that MPs should be subject to the same rules that they make for the rest of the country. Communications between MPs and their constituents can be protected by putting proper safeguards in place as envisaged under the Swinton formula.

The fact is that the Wilson doctrine has no legal validity; and indeed there is a view that nor does it explicitly ban the bugging of MPs.

“In fact, it bans nothing at all since Wilson’s words were a masterpiece of civil service drafting which said, in effect, we won’t tap the phones of MPs ... unless we do ... then we’ll tell Parliament about it ... when and if it’s safe to do so,”’ according to BBC’s astute political editor Nick Robinson.

In other words, it was a fudge; and, many believe, the time has come to bury it.

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