While the UK police are generally not that corrupt, Special Branch enjoy secrecy and closeness to power, which they interpret as a license to commit crimes against leftwing groups they consider anti-government. There's a long history of this from complicity in murders in Northern Ireland to present day highly intrusive surveillance against demonstrators.
> Evidence given to Parliament suggested that one undercover officer who infiltrated Mr Smith's union was Mark "Cassidy" Jenner, a member of Scotland Yard's now disbanded Special Demonstration Squad (SDS).
That's the Mark Jenner who also spent years having a relationship with the environmental activists he was spying on, the subject of a separate set of court cases and inquiries.
See also Hillsborough and the Miner's Strike.
(Oh, and disrupting the possibility of effective union action has been a priority of the government since the days of Thatcher)
It reminds me of a story about, after the 2015 terrorist attacks in France, a police group was created to infiltrate and spy on racists and anti-muslims hate groups. In one occasion, all the members were the cops...
Were those cops also undercover agents or genuine members?
No. This is an outrage and the British people will rightly be outraged. The effects of this will and should be felt in the next election and beyond. Your sophisticated world-weary cynicism is counterproductive.
It's been ""known"" for years that Special Branch helped murder people in Northern Ireland, and outside the republican community and the small subset of mainland "left" that pays attention, it makes no difference.
https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/news-analysis/how...
(Far too many of the "british people" read rightwing press outlets which will minimise this and some other issue, probably Brexit, to rile up their readers to demand more not less authoritarianism)
Almost nobody will give a shit.
Those that do won't remember come election time.
I object to the term 'cynicism'. Inductive reasoning, maybe. There's nothing inherent in the definition of a British person that necessarily includes apathy towards current affairs.
But most swans are white, there's nothing cynical about that, and similarly I say with no cynicism that most British people forgot about this five minutes after hearing/reading about it, if they heard or read about it at all.
Should? Yes. Will? No.
>Your sophisticated world-weary cynicism is counterproductive
Painfully naive idealism isn't any different. You have to work with reality, not deny it.
Yeah, but they operate in secret, which means there can't be any transparency, because that would reveal their operations and whatnot, and we wouldn't want that. Also, they're "just doing their jobs."
Literally what all short-sighted surveillance defenders always say in such cases.
Long before that, but Mags is a popular person from recent memory to demonize, like her counterpart across the pond, Ron.
I don't have any trade union axe to grind, but I'm pretty shocked both by the security services behaviour, and by the lack of coverage this is getting.
Whatever your opinion on trade unions, it's a pretty fundamental threat to democracy when the security services monitor legal behaviour and can destroy someone's livelihood for behaviour they disapprove of.
And .. why isn't this on the BBC News front page all day? I get most of my news there, and now I worry how many other democracy-shaking stories I might have missed.
Special Branch are the police arm of the UK domestic security services, not the kind of neighbourhood police implied by the name "Metropolitan Police"
Where 'neighbourhood' is the largest and capital city, and 'police' is the largest force in the country.
Nothing to imply the security services were involved or that there was a risk to our democracy, sounds more like they keep a list of people who do a bad job painting police stations.
I would go to the politics page if I wanted to follow the twists and turns of UK politics. I wouldn't expect to have to go there to find out something so serious.
I guess I'm going to have to look again at where I get my news. The Today programme is very good, but I can't scan it like I can a webpage, so I don't listen often.
I'd really encourage you to not stop there and discover for yourself, by your own words, the plethora of "democracy-shaking stories" you have indeed missed from the BBC.
Personally I use the British Brain-washing Corporation (and other news outlets) as a way of orientating what narratives are being spun to the public, and what narratives not to pay attention to.
I remember this clip of Trump boasting of oppressing someone[1] and wondered why the media didn't grab a stronger hold of it.
1-https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/07/513976112...
This is what I think the average person doesn't understand about pervasive surveillance. This is the kind of shit that it causes. When the government has to know who you're sleeping with, where or whether you pray, who you associate with, etc., it always ends up with this kind of shit. Usually worse.
Aren't almost all construction workers organized?
The blacklist is a legacy of different times when this wasn't so.
The perfect epitaph for Western Civilization.
