INDEX	June 29, 2022
Are you one in a million?
MI5 has opened files on a million people. Many of these are completely illegal since to comply with the Human Rights Act of 1998, MI5 must notify every person who has a file created before the Security Service Act of 1989. I am certain that my file dates back before then but I have never been notified, have you? The million figure comes from Annie Machon's book Spies, Lies & Whistleblowers. Machon, a former MI5 officer, was told it when she joined the organisation. MI5 publicly admitted it had files on 272,000 individuals in 2006, but this is probably the usual deception since it operates a traffic light system, so it probably only counts the live files. The sort of people MI5 keeps files on can be judged by this excerpt from a BBC Radio 4 programme. But it is not just communists, that MI5 has in its sights. If you attend three Socialist Worker Party meetings you are judged to be an SWP member and so you get a file. MI5 is obsessed with the SWP (or it was in Machon's day) and knows more about it than it does itself. I have attended far more than three SWP meetings. I would have gone to one this week but it was a Zoom meeting (online) and I don't like those. What makes me attend them is that they have very good and interesting speakers talking about politics and matters political. In fact I was attending SWP meetings when I was a member of the Labour Party! The SWP thoughtfully divides its meetings into two sessions so people like me who are not actively interested in destroying the capitalist state can leave before they get to the business of subversion. That, by the way, is a joke (just in case you can't tell). The secret police, which is what MI5 is, should be investigating banned organisations like National Action, but the problem with this is that National Action is fascist and pursuing the ultra right does not fit the agenda of the leadership of MI5, many of whom have extreme right wing politics themselves. The thing the communist party and SWP have in common is that they are both perfectly legal organisations and it is no crime to join them or to go to their meetings. When Machon worked for MI5 it had files on both Lenin and Trotsky but these were both kept secret, despite the fact that these men are (of course) long dead. Apparently this was because to publish them might reveal operational methods. Machon speculates that it might be the use of carrier pigeons...
INDEX Posted by Jonathan Brind.		June 29, 2022