One of the first tasks of Whitehall’s mandarins – the permanent government – is to indoctrinate a new prime minister in the need for official secrecy, especially around the intelligence agencies.
Andy Burnham should be more sceptical judging by his comments over many years and could prove to be a more difficult person to convince than his predecessors.
His accession to the premiership comes at a time of unprecedented public criticism of the agencies, of MI5 in particular.
Burnham was at the forefront of the campaign to get justice for the families of the 97 unlawfully killed at the 1989 Hillsborough football stadium disaster.
After years of obstruction by MI5 and MI6, the Public Office (Accountability) Bill) passed by the Commons in July and is expected to be voted through by the Lords in September.
The bill is sometimes referred to as the Hillsborough Law. It was triggered by persistent cover ups and misleading evidence by senior police officers.
The officer in charge at Hillsborough, David Duckenfield, was acquitted of gross negligence manslaughter after two trials.
A third trial of two officers and a solicitor accused of amending police statements, collapsed.
The bill imposes a statutory duty on all public authorities and public officials to act with “candour, transparency and frankness”.
It makes provision for the enforcement of that duty at official inquiries and investigations, and creates an offence for officials to mislead the public.
It was delayed after senior MI5 and MI6 officers insisted that the bill should not apply to them if, in their view, disclosures would damage “national security”.
A compromise was eventually agreed whereby an intelligence officer would be protected from revealing the truth if that would mean breaching the Official Secrets Act.
Part of a pattern
Disputes over what the intelligence agencies should disclose seem inevitable. But the fact that they are covered by the bill at all is the result of growing public distrust and unprecedented criticism, of MI5 in particular, by individual judges and the courts.
Families bereaved by the Manchester Arena terrorist attack in 2017 accused MI5 of failing them and insisted they should be covered by a Bill designed to stop cover-ups in public life .
An independent inquiry into the bombing concluded that MI5 had missed a significant chance to take action that may have prevented the attack.
The inquiry chairman Sir John Saunders concluded: “I do not consider that these statements [MI5 claims about their terrorist assessment] present an accurate picture.”
Last month, a former BBC journalist was awarded £20,000 in damages after MI5 and the Police Service of Northern Ireland unlawfully obtained data from his mobile phone.
The investigatory powers tribunal (IPT), which investigates complaints against the intelligence agencies, described MI5’s surveillance operations as disproportionate.
Also in July , MI5 was reprimanded for lying and misleading the courts over allegations that one of its informants had neo-Nazi sympathies and had exploited his role with the spy agency to violently threaten his girlfriend.
“What makes this case particularly grave is that… the courts were misled”, said the Investigatory Powers Commissioner’s Office, which reviews the use of covert powers by state agencies. “Failings of candour undermine the entire basis of oversight and accountability.”
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The task of scrutinising Britain’s spy agencies is the responsibility of the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) of MPs and peers.
Yet ever since it was set up in 1994, the intelligence agencies have obstructed the ISC by depriving it of adequate resources and refusing to provide it with the information it needs to carry out its job.
The ISC has suggested that successive governments had indulged in “a concerted effort” to undermine the democratic scrutiny of the UK Intelligence Community put in place by Parliament”.
The government seriously misled the ISC over Britain’s involvement in rendition operations – the transfer of terror suspects to the CIA and the Libyan dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, knowing they were in danger of being tortured.
When evidence of MI5 and MI6 collusion in the operations emerged in court, the government refused to allow intelligence officers directly involved to give evidence to the ISC.
As a result, Dominic Grieve, the former Tory attorney general, abandoned the investigation into MI5 and MI6 collusion when he was chairman of the ISC.
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He cited two other examples of the ISC’s weakness.
It was prevented from seeing key documents about how the threat posed by Reyaad Khan, a British citizen killed in a drone strike in 2015 in Syria was assessed, and the “collateral damage” deaths of two other men.
And an ISC report on Russian influence in Britain was submitted to the then prime minister, Boris Johnson, but was withheld, without obvious justification, until after the December 2019 general election.
Tyrie, who says the ISC lacks the teeth to do its job, has recently drawn up a report , “Watching the Watchers: The Intelligence and Security Committee: From Form to Substance” published by the University College of London’s Constitution Unit.
It says there should be no limit on which intelligence officials could give evidence to the ISC and that intelligence whistleblowers should get legal protection.
Furthermore, the ISC should get powers to scrutinise the activities of Britain’s special forces, who are now the subject of a judge-led inquiry in the wake of allegations SAS soldiers executed unarmed civilians in cold blood in Afghanistan.
Britain’s special forces are increasingly taking on the role of the military arm of the security and intelligence agencies.
How far Burnham can open up the most secret parts of government will be one of his greatest challenges and test whether he will truly succeed in shaking up Whitehall.
The post Can Andy Burnham make MI5 respect the Hillsborough Law? appeared first on Declassified UK .
Can Andy Burnham make MI5 respect the Hillsborough Law?
Aggregated summary from an independent source. Read the original at DeclassifiedUK.