Centrepiece
The right to snoop
Colin Welch
T don't know whether Mr Leon Brittan is 'passionately sincere in his efforts strictly to control all phone-tapping by our security forces. Some, like Mr Kaufman, strongly doubt it; others, like me, doubt the possi- bility of what is being attempted; others, like Sir Philip Goodhart, would regard success in this field as a disaster, making it easier for the KGB, the IRA and other enemies to tap our phones than for our own security services. The prospect of success seems remote. Devices for eaves- dropping are now cheap and sophisticated, available to all, advertised according to Mr Kaufman in Exchange and Mart's leisure section. Has MI5 an Access card? Mr Merlyn Rees confessed that as Home Secretary he never knew all that went on in the murky complex world of security. How could he have done? How can Mr Brittan? The latter's efforts to control what must be largely hidden from him look like a man doggedly tying up water in a parcel with brown paper and string.
Mr Brittan makes much of his safe- guards, of the strict criteria which must be met before tapping can be authorised. No one in CND or a trade union, for instance, he declared, need fear that he was the object of surveillance unless his own act- ions and 'intentions' brought him within the strict criteria set out in the definition of subversion. Ah, so? What about those who ring up subversives, or talk to them in bugged rooms? What about fellow mem- bers of legitimate organisations penetrated by subversives? Have they something to fear? I would say no, provided their contacts are innocent. They might not be reassured.
What are the strict criteria? They were set out in a White Paper of 1980. There must be a major subversive, terrorist or espionage activity. Normal methods of investigating this must have been tried and failed, or be obviously unlikely to succeed. Fine: but how can anyone be sure there is a major subversive activity till he has lis- tened to what's cooking? Normal investiga- tion, remember, has failed or is obviously useless. The tapper taps not because he knows, but because he wants to know. Mr Kaufman implied that time spent in 'spying on people like Joan Ruddock' (chairperson of CND) is wasted. How can he be so sure? Many people like Ms Ruddock may not be subversive. I would be astonished if none was. The strict criteria suggest that much tapping is illegitimate without the know- ledge which tapping alone can supply. Is this not absurd? And how can what is absurd be strictly enforced?
And what is subversive? Lord Harris of Greenwich, then a Labour Home Minister, defined it thus: subversive activities are `those which are intended to undermine the well-being of the State and . . . to undermine or overthrow parliamentary democracy by political, industrial or vio- lent means'. This definition is as long as a bit of string, narrow or broad as you interpret it. And your interpretation will depend on your politics. Some will see subversion here; others will see it there, or nowhere. This is not because we are looking at different things, but because we look at the same things through different political spectacles.
This is what renders equally absurd the famous Maxwell-Fyfe directive. This de- clared it 'essential that the Security Ser- vices should be kept absolutely free from any political bias or influence' (is it influ- ence from politics or on politics, incidental- ly, which is here anathematised?). Very strictly interpreted, this directive would rob the security services of their eyes, ears, memory and judgment. It would prevent them from defining politically the interest- ing areas. It would prevent them from suspecting this person or that organisation for political reasons, which are normally the most significant, suggestive, accurate and revealing, if not the only ones. It would prevent them from judging whether at any given time subversion from the Left or the Right is more likely or dangerous.
What the directive may have done, I suspect, is to encourage in the top brass of the security services a very British tend- ency to ignore the political opinions and affiliations of the staff they recruited. Politics is regarded in the British public service as a strictly private matter. I once casually asked a former civil servant which way he voted. He was as furious as if I'd asked an indelicate question about his sexual proclivities. Yet a sensible curiosity about candidates' political leanings might have spared MI5 and other parts of the public service much embarrassment by protecting them from recruiting nutters, weird ideologues and wrong 'uns, Phil- boids and Bettaniacs.
Miss Massiter herself expressed in her prolonged leak 'a lot of sympathy for CND'. No crime this, nor any particular qualification to investigate CND. Was it known about? If not, why not? She further declared that John Cox, the tapped CND Communist, was in her view more commit- ted to CND than to Communism. This odd remark implies either that she does not know what a Communist is or that John Cox is not really a Communist at all. Perhaps he isn't, just pretending: but, if he is, then any other allegiance he may have must be tributary to his Communism, subsumed in it. Like the Jesuits, Commun- ism demands the whole man.
National security is often regarded as bi-partisan, above politics. Perhaps it should be; certainly it isn't. The illusion that it is is fostered by the presence of former Home Secretaries on the Opposition ben- ches, especially by Mr Merlyn Rees who, the further he recedes from power or the prospect of it, the more shrewd, sturdy and witty he becomes. But no one like Mr Rees will ever be a Labour Home Secretary again. Nor will anyone from whose lips the words 'national security' fall naturally, except in some exotic leftist sense. Tories now on the whole see subversion roughly as and where it seems to me to be. They sympathise neither with its means or its ends. No occult affinities prevent them from dealing quite rudely with leftist sub- versives. Only respect for the rule of law discourages excesses. Labour by contrast seems reluctant to sed enemies on the Left. Some Labour people are percipient enough in private; but they rarely dare speak out openly against what is now a majority or an advancing and preponderant minority. Of this lot, all see less danger to our free institutions from leftist subversion than from 'fascist' counter-measures, all noisily denounced as threats to civil liberties. Some scoff at the threat from the Left; others regard it with not fear but favour. Their devotion to civil liberties is presum- ably strictly tactical, pro tem. The arbitrary powers they seek to deny to Mrs Thatcher we might expect them in power to use with abandon. Like the pre-war Tories who were tempted by Hitler, they have divided or perverse loyalties. Perhaps, again like most of the pre-war Tories, they would come up to snuff in a crisis. Who can tell? Most of them, to be fair, have already dumped Stalin, whose practices they liken to Mrs Thatcher's. Marxism here will be different, they promise and expect; mean- while they cannot resist the poisoned gifts it bears, its insights and hopes.
If there is any truth in my crude over- simplification, then every time we vote we inevitably express among many other things a view about national security, what threatens it and what counter-measures should be taken by whom. We support a party in part because we think it shares our views on these matters. In government we expect it to act accordingly. Ms Harriet Harman spoke of Mr Brittan's Bill as 'a licence for governments to snoop on peo- ple they disagree with'. True, in a sense: they snoop on behalf of their supporters on people their supporters disagree with. Common sense should restrict their snoop- ing to important disagreements, not about fluoridisation or dog licences but about the sanctity of our institutions. If common sense doesn't, no unworkable safeguards will. We must take a risk, the lesser of two, we hope.
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