INDEX

Wednesday October 31, 2018

MI5 shows it lacks intelligence and memory

The official history of MI5 was published in a book called The Defence of the Realm. In it the spooks fess up to what was already well known when it was published in 2009, that it had been spying on trade union leaders like Jack Jones, peaceful protestors like the Greenham Common women and most extraordinary of all, former PM Harold Wilson. See Guardian report from the time. Roll forward to 2018 and the spooks are coming under increasing pressure for their failure to spot extreme right wing terrorists who hang out with paedophiles. A group called Hope Not Hate has made a speciality of infiltrating extreme right wing groups and there have been prosecutions (no thanks to MI5). Meanwhile the spooks have completely bungled a series of investigations of people who went on to commit Islamisist terrorist atrocities, so a distraction was needed. See Salman Abedi, Khuram Butt and Ahmed Hassan. It's pretty obvious that if the spooks have the freedom to target a Labour PM and a union leader they can also (if they want) go after real political terrorists if they have the inclination to do so. Yet in October 2018 both the Guardian and Independent ran stories suggesting the spooks were going 'to take the lead', whatever that means, in investigating the extreme right. How can this be a news story? The spooks should have been doing it anyway! The context of this is that National Action, the group infiltrated by Hope Not Hate, has been proscribed since 2016. It's banned by the government. Quite what the point of a domestic security service that didn't bother to investigate banned organisations, might be, isn't clear.

Posted by Jonathan Brind.

INDEX

Wednesday October 31, 2018