Amendment 5

Part of Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill - Report (1st Day) – in the House of Lords at 5:48 pm on 11 January 2021.

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Photo of Lord Hain Lord Hain Labour 5:48, 11 January 2021

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 16 in my name and those of my noble friend Lord Blunkett, a former Home Secretary, the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, and the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, to each of whom I am grateful. It is a very straightforward amendment that would add confidence to the deployment of state-employed undercover officers by ensuring that each had to be authorised by a Secretary of State in exactly the same way as existing legislation requires for surveillance operations.

My noble friend Lord Blunkett and I both signed hundreds of warrants for surveillance operations under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, which was updated by this Conservative Government in the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, at a time when the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, was a government Minister, even if not in her current role. In other words, she and her Conservative Government re-enacted legislation requiring Secretary of State authorisation for surveillance, and so it is a puzzle to me why Ministers have not accepted this amendment.

The amendment endorses the identical principle for CHIS or undercover officer deployment in a way that would add to public confidence, which has been badly damaged by evidence that led to the current inquiry on undercover officers established by Prime Minister Theresa May and chaired by Sir John Mitting, a former High Court judge. It was established because the Conservative Government—in which the noble Baroness was a Home Office Minister at the time—felt undercover policing had got out of control and needed to be made more accountable.

The abuses so far revealed in the inquiry’s proceedings fully justify the Conservative Government’s decision to launch it. I will mention only several. We have learned that the campaign by the noble Baroness, Lady Lawrence, and her family to discover the truth about her son Stephen’s brutal racist murder was outrageously infiltrated by undercover officers. Why were they not instead targeting the racist criminals responsible for Stephen’s murder? If that deployment had been subject to authorisation by the Home Secretary, would it have happened? I very much doubt it, because surely a question would have been asked of the operational police decision as to why the innocent victims of a vicious racist murder were being targeted and not the criminals responsible.

There are many other examples, including my own personal experience. As confirmed by evidence given to the Mitting inquiry, from 1969 to 1970, a British police or security service officer was at almost every anti-apartheid and anti-racist meeting that I attended, private or public, innocuous and routine, or serious and strategic, such as stopping all white apartheid sports tours and combatting pro-Nazi activity. Why were they not targeting Nazi groups responsible for attacks on black people, Jewish citizens and Muslims?

Why were they not targeting the criminal actions of the apartheid state responsible for, among other things, fire-bombing the London offices of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress in March 1982 and, in 1970, murdering South African journalist Keith Wallace, who had threatened to expose the apartheid security service operations in the UK? In June 1972, why did they show no interest whatever in discovering who in South Africa’s Bureau of State Security sent me a letter bomb capable of killing me, similar to those that had killed anti-apartheid leaders across the world?

A warrant procedure would force police chiefs to stop and ask serious questions before recommending authorisation from a Secretary of State, as this amendment requires, preventing policing from slipping from its primary task of preventing crimes into policing politics.

Such authorisation from a democratically accountable Cabinet Minister would surely also have stopped in its tracks the infiltration by an undercover officer, going under the name of Sandra, of the north London branch of the Women’s Liberation Front between 1971 and 1973. She explained to the Mitting inquiry that she had failed to discover any useful intelligence whatever. She said that some of the meetings were attended by just two activists. She told the inquiry on 18 November:

“I could have been doing much more worthwhile things with my time.”

That is exactly my point.

The purpose of our amendment is to ensure that policing is focused on what should be its real purpose: catching criminals and terrorists, not political activists pursuing causes like women’s rights, seen as outlandishly radical 40 years ago but now accepted as mainstream. It is striking that almost every example I could cite, and there are countless others, reveals the abuse of the role of covert human intelligence operatives.

To submit that these are all from history and that all is well today would be deeply complacent. Only last year, when the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, was in her present post, it was revealed that counterterrorism police had put non-violent Extinction Rebellion on their list of terrorist groups. That hardly inspires confidence that they know where the line is between legitimate and illegitimate undercover work. Whatever you may think of Extinction Rebellion’s climate change tactics—inconveniencing Parliament, for example—is any government Minister seriously suggesting that they are the acts of terrorists like the London 7/7 underground bombers? I trust not.

When I was Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and my noble friend Lord Blunkett was Home Secretary, we signed hundreds of warrants to place terrorists and hardcore criminals under surveillance. Sometimes, and this argument is occasionally used against my amendment, these were in real time. I can think of one occasion when I was happy to be woken up in the middle of the night to prevent Islamist terrorists, one of whom I learned had just shaved his hair in preparation to unleash a bomb on London. I underline that these were essential security and policing operations, yet they required ministerial authorisation, in that case for surveillance. Why? Because, ultimately, it brings ministerial responsibility and therefore accountability. The operational decision, quite properly, was for the police or the intelligence services, but the accountability was ultimately governmental and political.

I believe that the time has come to bring that principle into the sphere of undercover policing, because it has involved far too many abuses for decades. If there is not the same kind of accountability as for surveillance, there may well be even more abuses in future. I have direct experience of how undercover officers can perform vital functions to save lives and prevent crimes or terrorist attacks, but also of how their deployment can be terribly abused and can undermine vital civil liberties and constitutional rights.

The noble Baroness, Lady Williams, was kind enough to invite my noble friend Lord Blunkett and me to discuss our amendment with her last week, and I am grateful for that. It is a mystery that, unless she surprises me, she has not been able to persuade the Home Secretary to accept it, because it would add accountability and therefore—I stress this—legitimacy to CHIS work. Surely we should all share the common aim of deploying the limited resources of undercover police officers, who do dangerous jobs, to catch real criminals, such as drug traffickers, human traffickers, terrorists and criminal gangs, not political activists challenging the prevailing orthodoxy of the time, whether on anti-apartheid, racism, women’s rights or climate change. I will await the noble Baroness’s reply before I decide whether to beg leave to divide the House on my Amendment 16.