LISTEN UP

“A secret overhearer might have followed, by these occasional exclamatory utterances, the course of a devouring trouble prowling up and down through his thought” Scribners Monthly July 1880, cited in the OED.

Britain is more burdened under the yoke of mass surveillance than any nation since the heyday of state Communism in the Soviet Union. Under successive Home Secretaries and Prime Ministers – and rather more of them of a Labour than a Tory stripe – citizens’ rights have been eroded and compromised at an alarming rate. To account Britain a police state would be to overstate the case. To protest that the powers arrogated daily by the state are excessive and inappropriate is a stance any thoughtful citizen can take with an easeful conscience.

This past weekend, some details of the electronic bugging of a constituent’s confidential conversation with his MP have come to light. That the constituent was being held in a jail awaiting possible extradition to the United States on suspicion of involvement in terrorist activities is neither here nor there. Oliver Wendell Holmes famously observed that “hard cases make bad law”. We have a government that has abandoned any pretence that there may be means not justified by the ends. If the extreme measures that are claimed necessary in order to “fight terrorism” are assimilated into the system without let or hindrance, those extreme measures will make state oppression, dictatorship and the suspension of the democratic process a relatively straightforward matter for any so-minded regime that takes power here in the future.

I once had described to me, by one of those involved, the early days of the setting up of premises in Derbyshire by the Workers Revolutionary Party in the 1970s. The WRP was one of the more prominent Trotskyite groupings at a time when left politics were much espoused by people in education, the media, the public services and the trades unions. The Red House – the name, I think, may have fortuitously predated its new owners – was to become infamous through a barrage of propagandist coverage by the right wing press but, before that happened, the WRP members set to work to make the building secure.

A member skilled in surveillance techniques soon turned up a system of routine bugging devices embedded in the walls of the house. The less experienced members applauded his initiative but he counselled patience. “These” he declared “are the bugs they want us to find”. It took many days of dedicated investigation before he finally turned up the devices he was not expected to locate. Given the press campaign that subsequently grew against The Red House, it remains always possible that a third level of surveillance devices, still less discernible even to an experienced sweeper, did indeed escape his attention.

Surveillance is permitted under licence in special circumstances. I wonder what is the legal status of anyone under such surveillance who discovers and disables the devices; or indeed of anyone who, suspecting surveillance, knowingly gives false intelligence in the form of overheard dialogue. There is something disturbing about the “special powers” allowed at the perimeters of intelligence-gathering. It is as if the rules of engagement have been relaxed in certain circumstances for one side. You feel as if that side would bitterly complain to the ref if its sanctioned special powers were discovered and neutralised by its quarry, as though the enemy had also relaxed the rules or, as they might say, “moved the goalposts”.

Strictly, the bugging of an MP is not against English law, always provided that the necessary licence has been acquired. But it does offend against the famous Wilson Doctrine, dating from the premiership of Harold Wilson, whereby MPs were considered off limits or “not fair game” for state surveillance. The MP whose confidential conversations were tapped in this case, Sadiq Khan, might think there is an interesting case here to be tested before the European Court of Human Rights or in some other forum of international law. This is a far more important matter than a backbencher remunerating his idle sons from the public purse.

For myself, having substantial reason to believe that I will have caught the attention of the intelligence services in the past, I maintain that the right of the citizen to consult certain professionals in terms of strictest confidence – his MP, his doctor, his lawyer, his accountant, his bank manager, his teacher, his spiritual advisor, his manager, his agent, his personal trainer, his dietician, his hygienist, his plastic surgeon – is sacrosanct and at least as worthy to be strictly upheld as his right to be protected from the – in reality, rather remote – threat of suicide bombers and urban terrorists.

Recent cases have shown government agencies to be remarkably cavalier with confidential data pertaining to vast numbers of the public. We have no basis for any assurance that surveillance records are any more secure in the hands of government agencies than are bank account, credit card, benefit and other kinds of record. I think I am entitled to expect that my file from the STD clinic that I frequently visited in my youth will not turn up to general merriment on YouTube. Similarly, an MP ought to be able to feel that she can speak openly in conditions of mutually assured confidentiality without being overheard by some bored jobsworth from MI6, in just the same way that she shouldn’t fear to have her private conversation transcribed in The News of the World or led on by Rory Bremner posing as her interlocutor.