Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill — House of Lords, 2021-01-11
Topic: Law and Crime
John Mann (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I very much agree with the detail and the general sentiment in the excellent contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Rooker. The word "practical", which he used several times, is a vital word, to which I would add "mundane", which I think he used once, referring to the mundanity of many of the orders, and the potential volume of those mundane orders. I speak not as any legal expert, but as someone who was on the receiving end of precisely this. I was on the Economic League blacklist, undoubtedly because of the infiltration of the anti-apartheid movement by an agent of the state My concern is about the competence of the state. A book was written at the time by an extremist, a Stalinist and supporter of the Soviet Union called Denver Walker. The book is called Quite Right, Mr Trotsky! and it was released in the same year that I was having those problems. In it, he starts by saying that this could be Special Branch or MI5 in terms of what he is doing. He exposes every Trotskyist organisation in the country, naming names, citing examples and explaining ideology in minute detail. At the same time all the organisations he named, bar two, were infiltrated. That is now on the public record. The state was spending resources and putting a priority on infiltrating irrelevant, tiny organisations. The Revolutionary Communist Group, one of the two not infiltrated, is described in the book as being presumed by everyone on the ultra-left to be run by Special Branch. That is actually in his book Competence is critical. If we are trying to intervene in, for example, terrorist organisations or organised crime, competence is absolute and fundamental. Yet we have this history, in the 1970s and 1980s, of the most appalling incompetence. We had the targeting of irrelevant people, creating consequences for people who were on the side of the state in precisely the terms on which the state was infiltrating these organisations. What conclusions would I draw from that I draw the conclusion that the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, whom I normally agree with, is fundamentally wrong to suggest that the judiciary has the wrong skill set for assessing and authorising such decisions in advance. I would say exactly the opposite. The judiciary has exactly the right skill set, not to know anything about extremist organisations or extremists but to hear and evaluate a coherent case—or an incoherent case, and turn that down if it is—when put forward by one of the agencies to or for which we are giving, clarifying or maintaining powers with the Bill If you are incapable, as intelligence services, the police or one of the other agencies, of putting a coherent case together for why you need authorisation, it would seem that the authorisation you need has a rather weak case. If that had happened in the 1970s and 1980s, a lot of that nonsense and wrong priorities would never have got past stage 1. They were based not even on a hunch, but on an irrelevance. If we are to have efficiency in getting into terrorist groups and organised crime, having a system that forces those who wish to do so to explain their rationale for what they plan to do, and why, and having someone able to assess whether that rationale is coherent, seems the right approach. The last people who should do it, therefore, are politicians The practicalities and mundanity are what we should be determining these decisions on. Of course there will be cases that are far from mundane in their application, but that does not mean that the same principles are not required in getting an agreement. It therefore seems to me that those amendments which push the Government in that direction should be welcomed by the Government, and those that do not should be rejected—not just by the Government, of course, but by the House.