Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill

Lord Mann Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 11th November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mann (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I join the welcome and congratulations to the Lord Advocate for Scotland and the noble Lords, Lord McLoughlin and Lord Walney. I thank the noble Lord, Lord McLoughlin, for the way in which he gave me and others support when we were under pressure at the height of the issues of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. I acknowledge that what he said in private was far more significant than what he said in public. The noble Lord, Lord Walney, stood on the right side when he did not have to, and took a brave stance. He supported Jewish members of the Parliamentary Labour Party and Jewish Members of the Labour Party. That will not be forgotten, and I thank him.

There have been a number of changes since the 1970s and 1980s. We are no longer fighting countries and armies under rules of engagement in war. We have human rights legislation that we did not have before. Those are significant changes. Since 1997, the strongest trade union organisation in the country is at GCHQ. Being a trade unionist and being loyal to one’s country are not contradictions. The density of membership there is a sign of that. It is part of the checks and balances in the system that makes it work.

We are now in a digital era, which changes many things. In many of the issues that we are talking about today, we are missing the mundanity of the actions that will be required outside the law. Some of the models are rather old-fashioned in terms of approach to what is going on. The mundanity is important to the effectiveness of the powers required.

I particularly want to talk about what happens if we do not do this, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, eloquently pointed out. We go back to the grey area that existed in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s —the shadows, as it was described. What characterised that more than anything was the incompetence of the actions taking place. Nothing could illustrate that better than putting people inside the International Marxist Group or, as we used to call them, the sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie. The only revolutionary thing that that organisation ever did was when some of its members accepted a peerage to come into this place.

The incompetence of the grey area was not in the national interest. There is a worse example. The Economic League sums up the grey area, the shadows and the incompetence. I should know: I was on the Economic League blacklist. When I went to work for the Ciba-Geigy chemical company in Manchester, I got given a job that was then withdrawn because I was on the list. I managed to get hold of the list and found my name on it. That is what happens with a grey area.

The Bill does more than codify; it allows accountability. It does not mean that things will not go wrong and there will not be big issues—there could well be—but it gives us, the people and the victims, the power to do something about it. The grey area is not an option. I want to see the Bill go through.

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Duncan of Springbank) (Con)]

The noble Lord, Lord Green of Deddington, will not be speaking in the debate so we will move straight on to the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker.

Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill

Lord Mann Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 1st December 2020 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Haskel) (Lab)]

The noble Lord, Lord Cormack, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris of Aberavon, have withdrawn, so I now call the noble Lord, Lord Rooker.

As the noble Lord is not responding, I call the noble Lord, Lord Mann.

[Lord Mann (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I will speak to a number of these amendments simultaneously, using a different word to the thematics that have come through, but with the same purpose. The word that I refer to is “competence”: the competence of decision-making, and whether the legislation, in the view of the Minister as well as the Committee, is sufficiently precise in ensuring it. We have heard words such as corruption—that is very important—and concepts of reasonableness, which are also important.

I can recall when I and other trade union colleagues had suspicions about an individual who we thought was acting rather strangely over a period of time. He was observed selling Nazi memorabilia in London Bridge Station on a Saturday morning—not a normal activity for trade unionists, even in those days. We were suspicious, and he suddenly moved on. I had a sharp thought that I would handle his pension because it was an accrued pension entitlement that was to be transferred. Rather than leave it to the finance people, who would have handled it in a very financial way, I made the calls myself. I was fairly certain that he was not who he said he was, and that for some reason he decided to look into the heart of moderate trade unionism. The question that it begged to me, rather than being a question of principle, was what a waste of resources it was—what incompetence.

I found later that I was on the Economic League blacklist. I found out why by a fair amount of research. I looked into the case of the—I think it is fair to say—loud-mouthed communist, the very good actor Ricky Tomlinson, whom I got to know over the years. He was stitched up for being an industrial activist for no good democratic reason. He was a communist without any question and he was loud-mouthed, but he was participating in a perfectly normal way in our civil society, and yet he was stitched up.

Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill

Lord Mann Excerpts

Report stage & Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords & Report: 1st sitting & Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Monday 11th January 2021 Lords Chamber

There is one final thing I would like to knock on the head and that is the constant references to “any crime”. I do not understand this. With some of what has been said, I have wished we had ordinary rules of debate because I would like to have intervened. Some of the things I have seen written by noble Lords are absolutely outrageous. The fact is that the notification of the authorisation of a covert human intelligence source must comply, unqualified, with the European Convention on Human Rights. That is the reality. It rules out any crime. The Bill does not allow the legalisation of any crime. For Peers, who are legislators and opinion formers, to say this—frankly, I do not understand it. It is deliberately misleading the public and others. I think they should stop it and go back and read the reality of what we have been provided with.

[Lord Mann (Non-Afl) [V]]

My Lords, I very much agree with the detail and the general sentiment in the excellent contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Rooker. The word “practical”, which he used several times, is a vital word, to which I would add “mundane”, which I think he used once, referring to the mundanity of many of the orders, and the potential volume of those mundane orders. I speak not as any legal expert, but as someone who was on the receiving end of precisely this. I was on the Economic League blacklist, undoubtedly because of the infiltration of the anti-apartheid movement by an agent of the state.

My concern is about the competence of the state. A book was written at the time by an extremist, a Stalinist and supporter of the Soviet Union called Denver Walker. The book is called Quite Right, Mr Trotsky! and it was released in the same year that I was having those problems. In it, he starts by saying that this could be Special Branch or MI5 in terms of what he is doing. He exposes every Trotskyist organisation in the country, naming names, citing examples and explaining ideology in minute detail. At the same time all the organisations he named, bar two, were infiltrated. That is now on the public record. The state was spending resources and putting a priority on infiltrating irrelevant, tiny organisations. The Revolutionary Communist Group, one of the two not infiltrated, is described in the book as being presumed by everyone on the ultra-left to be run by Special Branch. That is actually in his book.

Competence is critical. If we are trying to intervene in, for example, terrorist organisations or organised crime, competence is absolute and fundamental. Yet we have this history, in the 1970s and 1980s, of the most appalling incompetence. We had the targeting of irrelevant people, creating consequences for people who were on the side of the state in precisely the terms on which the state was infiltrating these organisations. What conclusions would I draw from that?

I draw the conclusion that the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, whom I normally agree with, is fundamentally wrong to suggest that the judiciary has the wrong skill set for assessing and authorising such decisions in advance. I would say exactly the opposite. The judiciary has exactly the right skill set, not to know anything about extremist organisations or extremists but to hear and evaluate a coherent case—or an incoherent case, and turn that down if it is—when put forward by one of the agencies to or for which we are giving, clarifying or maintaining powers with the Bill.

If you are incapable, as intelligence services, the police or one of the other agencies, of putting a coherent case together for why you need authorisation, it would seem that the authorisation you need has a rather weak case. If that had happened in the 1970s and 1980s, a lot of that nonsense and wrong priorities would never have got past stage 1. They were based not even on a hunch, but on an irrelevance. If we are to have efficiency in getting into terrorist groups and organised crime, having a system that forces those who wish to do so to explain their rationale for what they plan to do, and why, and having someone able to assess whether that rationale is coherent, seems the right approach. The last people who should do it, therefore, are politicians.

The practicalities and mundanity are what we should be determining these decisions on. Of course there will be cases that are far from mundane in their application, but that does not mean that the same principles are not required in getting an agreement. It therefore seems to me that those amendments which push the Government in that direction should be welcomed by the Government, and those that do not should be rejected—not just by the Government, of course, but by the House.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB) [V]]

My Lords, the interesting lesson from the noble Lord, Lord Mann, on the history of the left—it is a pleasure to follow him—has shown exactly why the Government are right to make a root-and-branch reform, and introduce a structure based on statute for the handling of covert human intelligence sources. We have heard a lot about what happened in the past, but an awful lot has changed since the 1970s, the 1980s and the 1990s. The major changes in this kind of policing started after 9/11, which was like a massive electric shock to the whole system of detecting various serious crimes, because of the arrival of large-scale terrorism on the streets of Europe and in many other countries. An awful lot has happened, too, since 9/11. The methodology has been sophisticated quite enormously, hence the large amount of legislation since the events of 9/11.

I listened with particular interest, because I agreed with what they said, to my noble friends Lord Anderson and Lord Butler and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay. I am a great believer in the theory of Occam’s razor, that entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily or, as it is sometimes put, “Keep it as simple as you can”. To start with, this is an operational issue. In the decision to make someone a CHIS, there is usually a very long period of assessment, a decision by management in consultation with the proposed CHIS handler and sometimes, as I said in an earlier debate, some behavioural analysis. This is an operational matter.