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.

[David Guyatt]

I wondered if there was pressure from "over the pond" on May about the Chinese Hinckley Point C project? I mention this because if they're small minded enough to ban all the Russian paralympic team, imagine their paranoia over Chinese involvement in a Brit nuclear power station (on top of the AIIB)? It would be more than enough to rattle their empty heads and order the Marines to invade and secure it.

[Paul Rigby]

I wondered if there was pressure from "over the pond" on May about the Chinese Hinckley Point C project? I mention this because if they're small minded enough to ban all the Russian paralympic team, imagine their paranoia over Chinese involvement in a Brit nuclear power station (on top of the AIIB)? It would be more than enough to rattle their empty heads and order the Marines to invade and secure it.

No question about it. There is a simple and unfailingly successful formula for America pressure on British governments - do as we say or the intel co-operation gets it.

And off scamper the nation's wretched securocrats to do America's bidding.

[Paul Rigby]

A notorious Deep State mouthpiece writes:

Theresa May lied and lied again to become PM

Nick Cohen

The Observer, 30 October 2016

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...e-minister

Theresa May appeals to a stereotype that has a deep grip on the English psyche. Sober and commonsensical, she behaves with the moral seriousness we expect from a vicar's daughter. She may be a little clunky, but what a relief it is to have a straightforward leader from the heart of the country after the flash, poll-driven phonies of the past.

I am not saying her public image is all a pretence. No focus group told her to campaign against the modern slave trade when she was home secretary. There were few Tory votes in stopping the police targeting young black men, either. But the dominant side of Theresa May is more superficial than David Cameron and more dishonest than Tony Blair. It is a tribute to the power of cliches to stop us seeing what is in front of our noses, that so few have noticed that the only reason she's prime minister is that she put ambition before principle.

Last week, Downing Street spin doctors were trying and failing to downplay the importance of a secret speech she gave to Goldman Sachs on 26 May, which was leaked to Nick Hopkins and Rowena Mason of the Guardian. In private, May was unequivocal. "The economic arguments are clear," she told the bankers. Companies would leave the UK if the UK left the EU. In public, however, she made just one speech during the referendum campaign. You forgot it the moment you heard it. May never mentioned the danger of companies fleeing. Her economic case, such as it was, came down to a flaccid, pseudo-impartial argument that "there are risks in staying as well as leaving".

As an orator, May was hopeless. As a politician on the make, she was close to perfect. When Craig Oliver, Cameron's former chief of communications, wondered if she was secretly an "enemy agent" for the Leave side, he was being too Machiavellian. May was just making the smart move. She kept her views about the economic consequences of Brexit quiet, so that the Conservative right would accept her as leader if Cameron lost.

Failing to state your honest opinion on the most important decision Britain has taken in decades may seem cowardly enough. But the consequences of May's pretence do not stop with one referendum.

Her manoeuvres have forced her into a position where she must make arguments she cannot possibly believe, on behalf of causes she cannot possibly believe in. Her behaviour shows that, far from "taking back control", Brexit is depriving us of the ability to take decisions, giving privileges to the special interests the Leave campaign claimed it was fighting against, and imposing burdens on the taxpayer far greater than the mythical £350 million a week that Vote Leave said we sent to Brussels.

Example: May opposed a new runway for Heathrow. Maybe she was just thinking about her constituents whose peace will be wrecked. Maybe she was worried about cramming an expanded airport into a dangerously overcrowded corner of London. The point, post-Brexit, is surely that the environmental or logistical arguments no longer matter. As her government admitted, May had to approve Heathrow to prove to sceptical markets that she had a "commitment to keeping the UK open for business now and in the future".

Her objections to the Hinkley Point nuclear power station were just as reasonable. Chinese investment threatened handing control of a part of our energy supply to a potentially hostile foreign power. As pertinently, Hinkley's proposed reactor is fantastically expensive and next to impossible to build. (A forerunner in Finland is nine years behind schedule and €5.2bn over budget.)

When May called in the decision to go ahead with Hinkley, she looked like the proud prime minister of the newly independent nation that Vote Leave promised us. Until, that is, Xinhua, the official news agency of the Chinese Communist party, explained Britain's new place in the world. "A kingdom striving to pull itself out of the Brexit aftermath" could not afford to "deter possible investors from China", it warned. After a brief moment of defiance, the submissive May agreed.

Her defenders say that she is responding to the will of the British people. I won't go on about how a 52-48 vote was hardly the people speaking as one. Instead, you should understand her by looking at how, after abandoning her beliefs, May refused to level with the public and confront them with the hard choices ahead. Rather than speak plainly, she has embraced the Leave campaign's big lie that Brexit will be painless.

To maintain the illusion, her ministers scramble in secret meetings to cut deals with special interests. Whatever bribes they have offered Nissan will only be the start. Farmers, the City and corporations with muscle will all want taxpayers' money to compensate them for their losses. The bill will be picked up by small businesses, which cannot afford lobbyists and, of course, by the taxpayers, who will fund the right's illusion that we can have Brexit without pain.

As I said, May had the reputation as a reforming home secretary and some of that reputation was deserved. But as she presides over an upsurge in racial violence and the gobby resurgence of ignorant-and-proud-of-it nationalism, it's worth remembering another moment in her time at the Home Office, which shows how willing she is to live with lies.

You can trace the origins of today's yobfest to 2013, when the right manufactured a pseudo scandal about "health tourists" exploiting the dear old NHS. Pressed by the BBC to say how much money thieving foreigners were stealing from the health service, May could not give an honest reply, for the Royal College of GPs had already explained that the supposed "problem barely existed".

May did not care. The perception that there was a scandal mattered more to her than the reality that there was none. The electorate had the "feeling that people who are here illegally were accessing services", she said, so she must maintain the pretence.

Now she is a prime minister of pretences, running a government where feelings matter more than fact. She pretends that we should leave the EU, even though she knows we should remain a member of the single market. She offers us the illusion that we are taking back control, even as we lose our freedom to act. She cuts deals in secret, in the hope that the public will never realise that her land of make-believe is an expensive place to live.

[Paul Rigby]

I wondered if there was pressure from "over the pond" on May about the Chinese Hinckley Point C project? I mention this because if they're small minded enough to ban all the Russian paralympic team, imagine their paranoia over Chinese involvement in a Brit nuclear power station (on top of the AIIB)? It would be more than enough to rattle their empty heads and order the Marines to invade and secure it.

No question about it. There is a simple and unfailingly successful formula for America pressure on British governments - do as we say or the intel co-operation gets it.

And off scamper the nation's wretched securocrats to do America's bidding.

MI6 snub for Boris Johnson and David Davis: Intelligence services are 'wary' of giving information about Brexit to the Cabinet members

• Whitehall sources say information is being kept from Davis and Johnson
  
• It is the latest indication of splits in the Government over Brexit
  
• But spokesmen for Davis and Johnson denied the claims from Whitehall
  

By SIMON WALTERS, POLITICAL EDITOR FOR THE MAIL ON SUNDAY
PUBLISHED: 23:12, 29 October 2016 | UPDATED: 04:56, 30 October 2016

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-...mbers.html

They are two of the most outspoken Cabinet Ministers so perhaps it is not surprising that Britain's spooks are wary of Brexit Secretary David Davis and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson.

Senior Whitehall sources say information obtained by the intelligence services about the Brexit negotiation strategies being plotted by the French and German governments is being kept from Mr Davis and Mr Johnson in case they blurt it out or foreign intelligence services intercept their calls.

Instead, they claim, the details are being restricted to Prime Minister Theresa May, her No 10 officials and senior civil servants.

It is the latest indication of splits in the Government over the Brexit process and comes just days after it was revealed that Mr Davis had been warned by his permanent secretary, Oliver Robbins, that he should expect other EU member states to spy on his activities.