While I am outraged at the latest disclosures about the snooping activities of Scotland Yard, sadly, I am not hugely surprised. State paranoia about the Labour movement has existed since its conception and the news that members of Special Branch surveilled sitting members of parliament is just the latest incident in a series of unwholesome revelations about the activities of the Special Demonstration Squad.
At its core, the news of the surveillance of me and my colleagues while engaged in perfectly legal activities during the 1990s paints an alarming picture about the health of our democracy. As publicly elected representatives, the news denotes a fundamental infringement on our role within our democracy. Not only does it undermine our own right to privacy, it breaches the confidentiality to which members of the public are entitled to expect of their members of parliament.
What is particularly galling about the timing of these revelations is that only a couple of weeks ago evidence surfaced of high-level collusion between the police and the security services to actually cover up allegations of serial child abuse involving the late MP Cyril Smith. While we cannot discount the importance of undercover police work in tackling serious organised crime and paedophilia, there is a stunning hypocrisy at the crux of these latest admissions.
During the time at which intelligence was being gathered on us, were my colleagues and I involved in anything illegal, subversive, or a threat to national security? The answer to this is an unqualified and categorical ‘No’. We were involved in movements that were fighting racism, promoting women’s rights, and the right to demonstrate – universal components of any modern democracy, battling to uphold the basic human rights that we cherish so dearly. In targeting sitting MPs in this way, not only was the Metropolitan Police involved in a shocking dereliction of duty to protect and uphold our society’s values, it was an abuse and utter waste of public resources.
The news, therefore, begs new and severe questions about a very current political topic – the nature of legal oversight of our security services. These questions must form part of a full public inquiry that should leave no stone unturned in the search for answers about the activities of the Special Demonstration Squad. This was a covert unit within the Met in which officers co-opted the identities of dead children and romantically exploited women to the extent of fathering children within proscribed groups deemed worthy of investigation, tactics that would not look out of place in a Stasi training manual.
In the United States, opponents of Richard Nixon used to say that if your name wasn’t found on his infamous ‘Enemies List’ then you needed to up your game. So while I take the news that I was worthy of surveillance with a pinch of satisfaction, these revelations have an incredibly serious and disquieting aspect to them. While my colleagues and I were privileged in our ability able to raise these questions on the floor of the House of Commons this week and demand a recourse to justice on this issue, there will be many victims of the SDS that have no such option. How many individuals over the years who have done nothing except fight for just and legal causes in the name of justice, equality, and democracy have been unknowingly exploited by the state? I eagerly await a public inquiry and will fight to ensure that that the findings get to the route of what is revealing itself as something rotten at the heart of our state.
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Diane Abbott is member of parliament for Hackney North and Stoke Newington. She tweets @HackneyAbbott
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