Mrs May and MI5

[Paul Rigby]

Mrs May and MI5

MATTHEW JAMISON

25.08.2016

http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/20...d-mi5.html

With the surprise announcement from No.10 Downing Street that after all the ups and downs of the Hinkley Point C venture there now would be a further delay for the new administration of Theresa May to review the project, Mrs May has played up to all the worst aspects and stereotypes regarding the English political class and how they conduct their government and politics, peculiarly after the world witnessed one of the greatest collective national examples of this with the Brexit vote. The rudeness, the pig-headed arrogance, the stupidity and prejudice, the inefficiency and the two faced under hand lack of directness. This might be how the British Establishment does business. It is most certainly not how the Chinese conduct themselves.

At the heart of this story is Britain's so-called domestic security and supposed intelligence service MI5, of which Mrs May was ultimately responsible for as Home Secretary and developed a very close working relationship with the spooks of Thames House, even employing some active members of MI5 as «Special Advisors» on her own staff, and coming closely under the influence of the so-called spooky «security experts» who work in and inhabit the shadows. Indeed from reading over Mrs May's joint Chief of Staff Nick Timothy's ludicrous article during President Xi Jinping's State Visit last October one is left with the very strong impression that Mr Timothy is also a mouth piece for MI5. The Timothy article was a prime example of how MI5 operate next to no hard concrete evidence, wild and paranoid speculation, absurd and deeply offensive innuendo and smear. Mr Timothy's clear links with MI5 raise questions of democratic accountability. Who exactly is running the British Government? Elected politicians or unelected «security experts»?

The «official» purpose of MI5 is supposed to be an agency dedicated to ensuring the internal security of the UK, protecting its nationals from threats, whether real or imagined. However, in practice MI5 is more than a security service. In many respects it is a highly party politicised propaganda arm of the British State, not independent from political interference and more like a Gestapo, gathering up information for political and State purposes on unsuspecting, peaceful British citizens, violating the civil liberties and privacy rights of innocent British citizens and waging childish and immature psychological warfare games which embody all the worst and most base aspects of the British character. As the former Director-General of MI5, Stella Remington, herself acknowledged in her memoirs, MI5 during the Cold War was far too over enthusiastic and zealous in opening files on and placing British citizens under surveillance who were not a threat to national security. Indeed, during the 1980s Labour politicians opposed to the Conservative Government such as Peter Mandelson, Harriet Harman and Jack Straw were all placed under surveillance by MI5 and put under investigation.

Mrs Thatcher herself authorised the use of MI5 to infiltrate domestic trade unions during her Government's confrontations with the miners. It is not an independent panel of judges who sign off on surveillance warrants used to authorize the spying on people, and hence invasion of their human right to privacy, rather it is one party politician, the Home Secretary. True to form, before Mrs May became Prime Minister, she pushed through a thoroughly monstrous and ghastly anti-privacy «State Snooper» Bill euphemistically called «The Investigatory Powers Bill» which the UN's Special Rapporteur for Privacy rights has equated to the world of George Orwell's 1984 and described it as «nightmarish». MI5 will now among many other disturbing things more suited to internet trolls and busy bodies be able to access British citizens' medical records with very little judicial oversight and accountability thanks to Mrs May.

If anyone needs to familiarize themselves with just how low MI5 can go in its «activities» and how it can badly mess things up they should read the work of academics John Bew and Martyn Frampton in their book «Talking to Terrorists», an analysis of the performance of MI5 in Northern Ireland which details the dirty war' the British security state waged in Northern Ireland over the course of three decades. There are still serious questions MI5 need to answer and to be held to account for regarding their activities in Northern Ireland. A public inquiry has never been granted on the Omagh bomb of July 1998, the single deadliest terrorist attack in the history of the civil conflict in Northern Ireland despite repeated calls by the families of the victims. The need for such an inquiry is to clarify whether or not MI5 had advance intelligence that the attack was going to happened and if so why they failed to take action to prevent it. Calculated callousness or incompetence? Similar allegations have begun to swirl around the 1993 Shankill bombing and of course the role played by MI5 in the infamous amnesties granted to wanted suspected terrorists on the run and the use of Royal Pardons. Not only that, but it has been confirmed that MI5 is to be investigated as part of an inquiry into child sex abuse at a the Kincora boys home which occurred during the 1970s & 80s. The investigation will focus on whether MI5 knew what was happening at the Kincora boys home, did nothing about it and deliberately concealed the knowledge of child abuse to use as a means of blackmailing those involved in order to utilize the culprits for spying purposes rather than bringing them to justice.

Yet it is not just British intelligence's murky and counterproductive role in Northern Ireland which raises alarm bells over the veracity, intellect, tactics, morals and competence of MI5. The Chilcot Report is nothing less than one almighty damning indictment on the conduct and operation of British intelligence as a whole starting with the Joint Intelligence Committee, under the then leadership of John Scarlett, now Vice-Chairman of the Royal United Services Institute. The JIC as Chilcot makes quite clear did not do its job properly and allowed the most obscene and perverted document of falsified intelligence, the now infamous «dodgy dossier», to be presented as fact to the public when in reality it was a mixture of outright lies and Chinese whispers. Of course, as is the way in the British Establishment none of the architects of this needless war have been punished for this deliberate disaster and the thousands and thousands of lives lost. Indeed, Mr Scarlett after producing the September 2002 «dodgy dossier» was rewarded for failure with a promotion to Head of MI6, countless honours including a Knighthood and accolades such as Vice-Chairman of RUSI, as if the Iraq War and its consequences had never happened. In many ways Scarlett is the Fred Goodwin of the British intelligence world. I know from personal experience just how wrong British intelligence, particularly MI5, can get things and how repulsive and pathetic their behaviour can be. No institution of the State, no agency, no organisation or individual is above and beyond criticism in a so-called free liberal democracy. Not the Monarchy. Not the Government. Not Parliament. Not the police. Not the armed forces and not the so-called intelligence services.

Yet some in the British intelligence services cannot cope with criticism and believe they are above criticism and accountability. I have proof of this in writing. Last autumn I felt moved enough to write a critical article regarding Britain's intelligence services. The reason for this was I was deeply disturbed, appalled even, at what had been done to a good friend of mine. The person in question was a former colleague at the House of Commons who worked as a researcher for an MP. She had been having the most rotten time both personally and professionally having separated from her companion of ten years and being harassed by the MP she worked for. Eventually she had to file a grievance against the MP which after 8 months finally got settled with zero support and help from the House of Commons authorities. The whole horrible ordeal had sent her into a terrible depression which her doctor prescribed a course of anti-depressants to treat and signed her off work for several months. However, just before she went off sick from the House of Commons to try and get rid of her depression, she noticed something very strange which would reoccur with even greater sinister force further down the line.

She had been doing some fantastic investigative research into exposing ethical inconsistencies in British foreign policy under the Cameron Government. For simply doing her job in a democracy and holding the Government of the day to account the then Home Secretary Theresa May slapped a surveillance warrant on her. She immediately knew something was strange and that she was being watched and followed by MI5 field agents who are easy to detect from regular members of the public when one knows what one is looking for due to their weird and amateurish behaviour. She asked me to corroborate her analysis and utilizing my own ESP I accompanied her around London and indeed I myself could see and detect what was going on. It was not just that she was being watched constantly but also being mistreated deliberately under the disgusting practice known as HAZING. This woman was no threat to British national security.

She was a British citizen with no criminal record who had been cleared twice to work in the House of Commons. Furthermore, she had no access to classified material nor had she ever handled classified information thus she had never had to sign the Official Secrets Act. Eventually the swarm of amateur wannabe James Bonds faded away and the surveillance and bizarre goings on more suited to an episode of Monty Python stopped. However, I was very angry at what my friend had been subjected to especially when she was unwell and trying to get better. The callousness and nastiness of it all deeply disturbed me. It made me think long and hard about what our intelligence services are all about and how they conduct themselves, who they are accountable to, the power the State has to invade someone's privacy with no hard concrete evidence of wrong doing and the incompetence of it all. You would think British intelligence was all seeing, all knowing, all hearing and all powerful but in fact many of the field agents haven't got a clue what they are doing or why they are doing it. For £10 an hour they are quite happy to do whatever the Home Secretary tells them to do. So I wrote a highly critical article renaming the UK intelligence services the stupid services. I seemed to hit a raw nerve inside 5 & 6. They felt so strongly about what I had written because it hit the nail on the head that they complained to a former colleague in Whitehall who wrote to me in an email that he had received a complaint from the intelligence services about my article. I was both flattered and amazed. Amazed that they would bother themselves to take exception to what I had written and flattered that they felt so affronted because I was exposing the reality of Britain's so-called intelligence services. If what I had written was simply a load of rubbish they surely would have just ignored it. By reacting so strongly against intellectual freedom and free speech they confirmed to me that I was on to something. It never occurred to me that in a democracy there were certain institutions that were above criticism so I was grateful to my former colleague for putting this in writing. If they thought that warning was going to shut me up, then they misjudged me. As Stella Remington herself said: «I don't retreat at the whiff of gunshot». If British intelligence are that thin skinned one wonders how they reacted to the findings of the Chilcot report?

And now with Hinckley Point C they are once again demonstrating for so-called intelligence service there really is very little that is intelligent. It seems to have escaped the attention of Mr Timothy and his friends in MI5 that the Chinese are simply providing funding for Hinkley Point C, and are not involved in the designing and construction of the nuclear plant. So how on earth there can be any legitimate concerns about China sabotaging Hinkley Point C is beyond me. Furthermore, it is deeply offensive to suggest that a Chinese company involved in such sensitive matters as nuclear power would act in such a way. There is no track record or evidence of China sabotaging other countries key national infrastructure. Besides, what would be the motivate? China throughout its history, unlike Britain, has never been an aggressive and expansionist imperial power bent on world domination. Apart from within its territorial sphere of influence, China has never invaded other countries around the globe or colonized them and interfered with their political systems and national assets. But the British have. And if would be industrial and commercial suicide for China to sabotage other nations nuclear facilities. No one would ever trust them again. So the smears in the Timothy article and the whispers from British intelligence are just that, baseless smears with no evidence and no understanding of history and the Chinese way. It has been a shameful few months for Britain having voted to leave the EU due to nationalist xenophobia. Yet the May Government appears intent on continuing in this vein of provincial prejudice. One wonders at this rate how many friends and allies Britain will have left over the next few years.